The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  At the end of August, Madeleine drove down to Prettybrook to see her parents and get some things from home. A few days after returning, she mentioned offhandedly that she’d seen Grammaticus, in New York, on his way to Paris.

  “You just ran into him?” Leonard asked from the mattress.

  “Yeah, with Kelly. In some bar she took me to.”

  “Did you fuck him?”

  “What?!”

  “Maybe you fucked him. Maybe you want a guy who’s not taking massive amounts of lithium.”

  “Oh, God, Leonard, I told you already. I don’t care about that. The doctor says that’s not even because of the lithium, right?”

  “The doctor says a lot of things.”

  “Well, do me a favor. Don’t talk that way to me. I don’t like it. O.K.? And it sounds really awful.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Are you getting depressed? You sound depressed.”

  “I’m not. I’m nothing.”

  Madeleine lay down on the bed, wrapping herself around him. “You’re nothing? You don’t feel this?” She put her hand on the fly of his pants. “How does this feel?”

  “Nice.”

  For a little while, it worked, but not long. If, instead of being touched by Madeleine, Leonard had been imagining Madeleine touching Grammaticus, he might have gotten off. But reality wasn’t enough for him anymore. And this was a problem larger and deeper than even his illness, a problem he couldn’t begin to deal with. And so he closed his eyes and hugged Madeleine tightly.

  “Sorry,” he said again. “Sorry, sorry.”

  Leonard felt better around people who were struggling as much as he was. Over the summer he kept in touch with a few patients he’d met in the hospital. Darlene had moved into a friend’s apartment in East Providence, and Leonard had gone out to see her a couple of times. She seemed hyperactive. She couldn’t sit still and talked nonstop without making much sense. She kept asking, “So, Leonard, you good?” without waiting for an answer. A few weeks later, at the end of July, Darlene’s sister, Kimberly, called Leonard, saying that Darlene hadn’t been answering her phone. They went out to Darlene’s apartment together, where they found Darlene in the midst of a psychotic break. She was under the impression that her neighbors were conspiring to get her kicked out of the building. They were spreading rumors about her to the landlord. She was frightened to go outside, even to take out the trash. The apartment smelled of spoiled food, and Darlene had started drinking again. Leonard had to call Dr. Shieu and explain the situation, while Kimberly persuaded Darlene to take a shower and change her clothes. Somehow they coaxed Darlene, wide-eyed with panic, into the car, and took her to the hospital, where Dr. Shieu was readying her readmission papers. Every day for the next week Leonard went to visiting hours. Darlene was out of it most of the time, but he found it comforting to visit her. He forgot about himself while he was there.

  The only thing that got Leonard through the rest of the summer was the prospect of leaving for Pilgrim Lake. At the beginning of August, an envelope from the laboratory arrived. Inside, on beautifully printed pages, each embossed with a letterhead so prominent as to be virtually topographical, were orientation materials. There was a letter addressed to “Mr. Leonard Bankhead, Research Fellow” and personally signed by David Malkiel. The packet put to rest Leonard’s fears that the authorities might learn about his hospitalization and rescind his fellowship. He read the list of research fellows and the colleges they’d gone to, and found his name right where it was supposed to be. Along with information about the housing units and other facilities, the envelope contained a form for Leonard to list his “field-of-research preferences.” The four research areas at Pilgrim Lake were: Cancer, Plant Biology, Quantitative Biology, and Genomics and Bioinformatics. Leonard put a “1” by Cancer, a “2” by Plant Biology, a “3” by Quantitative Biology, and a “4” by Genomics and Bioinformatics. It wasn’t much, but filling out the form and returning it to the lab signified Leonard’s first accomplishment that summer, the only tangible sign that he had a postgraduate future.

  Once they arrived at Pilgrim Lake the last weekend in August, the signs proliferated. They were given a key to an ample-size apartment. The kitchen cabinets were stocked with brand-new dishes and almost-new pots and pans. The living room had a sofa, two chairs, a dining table, and a desk. The bed was queen-size and all the lights and plumbing functioned. Sharing Leonard’s underfurnished studio all summer had felt more like squatting than living together. But there was a newlywed excitement to crossing the threshold of their new waterfront abode. Leonard immediately stopped feeling like an invalid Madeleine was taking care of and began feeling more like himself.

  His renewed confidence lasted until the welcoming dinner on Sunday night. At Madeleine’s urging, Leonard had worn a tie and jacket. He expected to be overdressed, but when they arrived in the bar adjacent to the dining hall, nearly all the men were wearing coats and ties, and Leonard was left admiring Madeleine’s ability to intuit such things. They picked up their name tags and seating assignment and joined the stiff cocktail reception. They’d mingled for no more than ten minutes before the other two guys assigned to Leonard’s team came up to introduce themselves. Carl Beller and Vikram Jaitly already knew each other from MIT. Though they hadn’t been at Pilgrim Lake any longer than Leonard (that is, two days), they radiated a sense of all-knowingness about the lab and its operations.

  “So,” Beller asked, “what did you mark for research preference? First choice.”

  “Cancer,” Leonard said.

  Beller and Jaitly seemed amused by this.

  “That’s what everyone marked,” Jaitly said. “Like ninety percent.”

  “So what happened was,” Beller explained, “Cancer was so oversubscribed they ended up giving a lot of people their second or third choice.”

  “What are we?”

  “We’re Genomics and Bioinformatics,” Beller said.

  “I put that last,” Leonard said.

  “Really?” Jaitly said, sounding surprised. “Most people put Quantitative last.”

  “How do you feel about yeast labs?” Beller asked.

  “Sort of partial to Drosophila, myself,” Leonard said.

  “Too bad. Yeast are going to be our world for the next nine months.”

  “I’m just happy I’m here,” Leonard said, with genuine sincerity.

  “Sure, it’ll look great on our résumés,” Jaitly said, snatching an appetizer from a passing tray. “And the creature comforts are seriously large. But even at a place like this you can get stuck in a research backwater.”

  Like all of the other RFs, Leonard had been hoping to get assigned to the team of a well-known biologist, maybe even Dr. Malkiel himself. A few minutes later, however, when their team leader appeared, Leonard squinted at his nametag without recognition. Bob Kilimnik was a man in his forties with a loud voice and a disinterest in maintaining eye contact. The tweed coat he was wearing looked too hot for the weather.

  “So, the gang’s all here,” Kilimnik said. “Welcome to Pilgrim Lake Lab.” He waved one arm, indicating the lavish dining hall, the white-coated waiters, and the rows of tables set with bunches of wildflowers. “Don’t get used to it. This isn’t what research is usually like. Usually it’s take-out pizza and instant coffee.”

  Administrative assistants began herding everyone in to dinner. After they sat down, the waiter informed them that it was lobster night. In addition to Madeleine, Beller’s wife, Christine, and Jaitly’s girlfriend, Alicia, were at the table. Leonard was gratified to see that Madeleine was better-looking than both of them. Alicia lived in New York, and complained that she had to drive back right after dinner. Christine wanted to know if anybody else had a bidet in their unit, and what was the deal with that. While the appetizers were served and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé made the rounds, Kilimnik asked Beller and Jaitly about various biology professors at MIT, all of whom he seemed to know personally. When the main course arrived, he start
ed explaining the details of his yeast research.

  There were a lot of possible reasons for Leonard’s inability to follow a good bit of what Kilimnik said. For one thing, Leonard was a little starstruck by the presence of Dr. Malkiel, who, as Kilimnik was talking, appeared at the end of the room. Elegant, his gray hair swept back from his high forehead, Malkiel escorted his wife to the private dining room already full of senior scientists and biomedical executives. In addition, Leonard was distracted by the elaborate table settings, and by the difficulty of eating lobster with his tremor. With his plastic bib tied around his neck, he tried to crack the claws, but they kept slipping onto his plate. He was scared to use the tiny fork to pull out the lobster tail, and finally asked Madeleine to do it for him, making the excuse that, as a West Coaster, he was used to eating crab. Despite all this, at first Leonard kept up with the conversation. The benefits of working with yeast were obvious. Yeasts were simple eukaryotic organisms. They had a short generation time (from one and a half to two hours). Yeast cells could be easily transformed, either by inserting new genes into them or through homologous recombination. Yeasts were genetically uncomplicated organisms, especially compared with plants or animals, and marred by relatively few junk sequences. All this he understood. But as Leonard put a piece of lobster in his mouth, only to feel sick to his stomach, Kilimnik started talking about the “developmental asymmetry between daughter cells.” He mentioned “homothallic” and “heterothallic” strains of yeast, and discussed two apparently well-known studies, the first by “Oshima and Takano” and the second by “Hicks and Herskowitz,” as though these names should have meant something to Leonard. Beller and Jaitly were nodding.

  “Cleaved DNA molecules introduced into yeast promote efficient homologous recombination at the cleaved ends,” Kilimnik said. “Going by that, we should be able to put our constructs near CDC36 in the chromosome.”

  Leonard had stopped eating by this point, and just sipped his water. His brain felt as if it was turning to mush, seeping out of his ears like the green lobster guts on his plate. When Kilimnik went on to say, “In a nutshell, what we’re going to do is put an inverted HO gene into daughter cells to see if this affects their ability to switch sex and mate,” the only words Leonard understood were sex and mate. He didn’t know what an HO gene was. He was having trouble remembering the difference between Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Schizosaccharomyces pombe. Fortunately, Kilimnik didn’t ask any questions. He told them that anything they didn’t know they would learn in the Yeast Class, which he himself would be teaching.

  After that dinner Leonard did his best to get up to speed. He read the relevant articles, the Oshima, the Hicks. The material wasn’t that difficult, at least not in outline. But Leonard could barely finish a sentence without drifting off. The same thing happened in the Yeast Class. Despite the stimulating effects of a plug of chaw in his cheek, Leonard felt his mind glaze over for ten minutes at a time while Kilimnik lectured at the blackboard. His armpits grew fiery from the fear that he might be called on at any minute and make a fool of himself.

  When the Yeast Class ended, Leonard’s anxiety quickly turned to boredom. His job was to prepare DNA, cut it with restriction enzymes, and ligate the pieces together. This was time-consuming, but not all that hard. He might have enjoyed the work more if Kilimnik had said an encouraging word or asked his input on anything. But the team leader barely came into the lab. He spent most of the day in his office, analyzing the samples, barely looking up when Leonard came into the room. Leonard felt like a secretary dropping off correspondence to be signed. When he passed Kilimnik on the lab grounds or in the dining hall, Kilimnik often failed to acknowledge him.

  Beller and Jaitly got somewhat better treatment, but not much. They began muttering about transferring to another team. The guys next door were working with genetically altered fruit flies, trying to find the cause of Lou Gehrig’s disease. As for Leonard, he used Kilimnik’s absence to take frequent breaks, going out behind the lab for a smoke in the cool sea breeze.

  His main goal in the lab was to conceal his disease. Once he’d prepared the DNA, Leonard had to put it through electrophoresis, which meant dealing with the gel casting trays. He always had to wait until Jaitly and Beller had their backs turned before he tried to pull the well combs out of the agarose, because he never knew, from moment to moment, how bad his tremor might be. After he managed to load the gels and to run them for an hour or so, he then had to stain the samples with ethidium bromide and visualize the DNA under ultraviolet. And when he was done with all that, he had to start over with the next sample.

  That was the hardest task of all: keeping the samples straight. Preparing strand after strand of DNA, and sorting, labeling, and storing each one, despite his flickering attention and mental brownouts.

  He counted the minutes until he could leave each day. The first thing he did, on returning home every night, was to jump into the shower and brush his teeth. After that, momentarily feeling clean, with no bad taste in his mouth, he hazarded to lie down next to Madeleine on the bed or the sofa and to put his big sodden head in her lap. It was Leonard’s favorite time of the day. Sometimes Madeleine read aloud from the novel she was reading. If she had a skirt on he rested his cheek on her super-smooth thighs. Every night, when it came time for dinner, Leonard said, “Let’s just stay here.” But every night Madeleine made him get dressed, and they went to the dining hall, where Leonard tried not to betray his nausea or to knock over his water glass.

  In late September, when Madeleine went off to her Victorian conference in Boston, Leonard nearly fell apart. For the entire three days she was gone he missed her acutely. He kept calling her room at the Hyatt, getting no answer. When Madeleine called she was usually in a rush to get to a dinner or a lecture. Sometimes he could hear other people in the room, happy, functioning people. Leonard tried to keep Madeleine on the phone as long as he could, and as soon as she hung up he counted the hours until it was allowable for him to call her again. When dinnertime rolled around, he showered, put on clean clothes, and set off along the boardwalk to the dining hall, but the prospect of sparring with Beller and Jaitly on some technical subject persuaded him to buy a frozen pizza at the twenty-four-hour minimart in the dining hall’s basement instead. He heated it up in his apartment and watched Hill Street Blues. On Sunday, with his anxiety increasing, he called Dr. Perlmann to explain how he was feeling. Perlmann phoned in a prescription for Ativan to the pharmacy in P-town, and Leonard borrowed Jaitly’s Honda to pick it up, saying he was getting allergy medicine.

  And so there he was, three and a half weeks into his fellowship, taking his lithium and Ativan, spreading a dollop of Preparation H between his buttocks every morning and night, drinking a glass of Metamucil with his morning O.J., swallowing, as needed, an antinausea pill he forgot the name of. All alone in his splendid apartment, among the geniuses and would-be geniuses, at the end of the spiraling land.

  On Monday afternoon Madeleine came back from the conference shining with enthusiasm. She told him about the new friends she’d made, Anne and Meg. She said she wanted to specialize in the Victorians, even though Austen was Regency, technically, and wouldn’t qualify. She gushed about meeting Terry Castle, and how brilliant Terry Castle was, and Leonard was relieved to discover that Terry Castle was a woman (and then less relieved to discover that she liked girls). Madeleine’s excitement about the future seemed all the more vibrant against Leonard’s sudden lack of it. He was more or less sane now, more or less healthy, but he felt none of his usual energy or curiosity, none of his old animal spirits. They went walking on the beach, at sunset. Being manic-depressive didn’t make Leonard any less tall. Madeleine still fit perfectly in his arm. But even nature was messed up for him now.

  “Does it smell out here to you?” he asked.

  “It smells like the ocean.”

  “I don’t smell anything.”

  Sometimes they drove into Provincetown for lunch or dinner. Leonard tried, as best
he could, to take things one day at a time. He did his work at the lab and soldiered through the evenings. He tried to keep his stress levels to a minimum. But a week after MacGregor’s Nobel was announced, Madeleine told Leonard, during their evening walk, that her sister, Alwyn, was having “a marriage crisis” and that her mother was bringing her to the Cape to talk things over.

  Leonard always dreaded meeting the parents of a girl he was dating. If there had been a blessing to Madeleine’s breaking up with him last spring and his ensuing breakdown, it had been the removal of the obligation to meet Mr. and Mrs. Hanna on graduation day. Over the summer, none too eager to be seen in his bloated, shaky state, Leonard had managed to put off the meeting by hiding out in Providence. But he couldn’t put it off any longer.

  The day started off memorably, if a little too early, with the sound of Jaitly and Alicia going at it in the upstairs apartment. The building they lived in, Starbuck, was a refurbished barn and had absolutely no sound-proofing. It didn’t just sound as if Jaitly and Alicia were in the same room with them. It sounded as if they were in the same bed, scrumping right between Madeleine and Leonard, showing them how it was done.