The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  It hasn’t been easy for our boys, Terry and Mike, to grow up with a dad who might be cheering them from the sidelines at their baseball games one day, and the next, talking nonstop nonsense and acting inappropriately to strangers, or shutting himself up in our bedroom and refusing to come out for days.

  I know that the divorce rate for people married to manic-depressives is very high. There have been many times when I thought I would become just another statistic. But my family and my faith in God always told me to hold on for a day longer, and then a day after that. I have to remember that Bill has a disease, and that the person who does these crazy things is not really him but his disease taking control.

  Bill didn’t tell me about his condition before we were married. Previous relationships of his had broken up when his girlfriends (and in one case, his fiancée) learned about his illness. Bill says that he didn’t want to lose me the same way. No one in his family told me, either, even though I became quite close to Bill’s sister. But this was in 1959 and the subject of mental illness was pretty much taboo.

  In all honesty, I’m not sure that it would have mattered. We were so young when we met and so in love that I think I may have looked the other way, even if Bill had told me about his manic depression on our first date (to the Ohio State Fair, if you’d like to know). Of course, I didn’t know then what I know now about this terrible disease, or the strain it can put on children and families. Still, I think I would have married Bill anyway, knowing everything—because he was “the one” for me.

  But, as I joked with Bill at our wedding, “From now on, you better not keep any secrets from me!”

  The article continued, but Madeleine read no further. In fact, she crumpled it into a ball. To ensure that Leonard wouldn’t find it, she stuffed the crumpled pages into an empty milk carton and buried the carton at the bottom of the trash can.

  Part of her anger had to do with Phyllida’s closed-mindedness. Another part had to do with the fear that she might be right. A long, hot summer with Leonard in his un-air-conditioned apartment, followed by two months in their unit at Pilgrim Lake, had given Madeleine a good idea of what it would be like to be “married to manic depression.” At first, the drama of their reconciliation had overshadowed any difficulties. It was a rush to be needed the way Leonard needed her. As the summer wore on, however, and Leonard didn’t noticeably improve—and especially after they moved to Cape Cod and he seemed, if anything, worse—Madeleine began to feel suffocated. It was as if Leonard had brought his hot, stuffy little studio apartment with him, as though that was where he lived, emotionally, and anyone who wanted to be with him had to squeeze into that hot psychic space too. It was as if, in order to love Leonard fully, Madeleine had to wander into the same dark forest where he was lost.

  There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home. The further Leonard receded from other people, the more he relied on Madeleine, and the more he relied on her, the deeper she was willing to follow. She stopped playing tennis with Greta Malkiel. She didn’t even make a pretense of having drinks with the other bedfellows. In order to punish Phyllida, Madeleine turned down her invitation to come home for Thanksgiving dinner. Instead, she and Leonard celebrated at Pilgrim Lake, eating in the dining hall with the skeleton crew of people who stayed around. The rest of the holiday weekend, Leonard didn’t want to leave the apartment. Madeleine suggested driving to Boston, but he wouldn’t budge.

  The long winter months stacked up ahead of Madeleine like the frozen dunes above Pilgrim Lake. Day after day, she sat in her desk chair, trying to work. She ate cookies or corn chips, hoping this would give her the energy to write, but the junk food made her lethargic, and she ended up napping. Then came days when she didn’t think she could stand it anymore, when she lay on the bed deciding that she wasn’t such a good person, that she was too selfish to devote her life to taking care of someone else. She fantasized about breaking up with Leonard, moving to New York, about getting an athletic boyfriend who was simple and happy.

  Finally, when things got very grim, Madeleine broke down and told her troubles to her mother. Phyllida listened without much comment. She knew that Madeleine’s call indicated a significant shift in policy, and so she just murmured on the other end of the line, happy with the territory won. When Madeleine spoke about her plans for the future, the grad schools she was applying to, Phyllida discussed the various options without referring to Leonard. She didn’t ask what Leonard might do or whether he would like moving to Chicago or New York. She just didn’t mention him. And Madeleine mentioned him less and less, trying to see what it might feel like if he were no longer in her life. Sometimes this seemed like a betrayal of him, but it was just words, so far.

  And then, at the beginning of December, with a magic that resembled their first days together, things began to change. The first sign that Leonard’s side effects were lessening was that his hands stopped shaking. During the day, he was no longer running to the bathroom every ten minutes, or drinking water constantly. His ankles looked less swollen, and his breath sweetened.

  The next thing she knew, Leonard was working out. He began using the gym, lifting weights and riding a stationary bicycle. His disposition became more cheerful. He started smiling and making jokes. He even moved more quickly, as if his limbs no longer felt so heavy.

  The experience of watching Leonard get better was like reading certain difficult books. It was like plowing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina, until you suddenly got to a good part again, which kept on getting better and better until you were so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure. All of a sudden, Leonard was his old self again, extroverted, energetic, charismatic, and spontaneous. One Friday evening, he told Madeleine to put on her worst clothes and some rubber boots. He led her out to the beach, carrying a bushel basket and two garden trowels. The tide was out, the exposed seabed glistening in the moonlight.

  “Where are you taking me?” she said.

  “This is kind of a Moses deal,” Leonard said. “This is kind of a Red Sea deal.”

  They walked far out in the muck, their boots sinking. The smell was strong, fishy, clammy, half rotten: the smell of the primordial ooze. They bent their faces close to the seabed, digging and sliding around. When Madeleine looked back at the beach, she was frightened to see how far out they were. In less than a half hour they’d filled the bushel.

  “Since when do you know about digging for oysters?” Madeleine asked.

  “I used to do this in Oregon,” Leonard said. “Excellent oyster country where I come from.”

  “I thought all you did growing up was smoke pot and sit in your bedroom.”

  “I got out into nature once or twice.”

  After they’d lugged the now-heavy bushel back to shore, Leonard declared his intention of throwing an oyster-eating party. He knocked on people’s doors, inviting them over, and soon he was at the kitchen sink, cleaning and shucking oysters, as the apartment filled up. It didn’t matter if he made a mess; the rough floorboards of the barn had seen worse. All night, plates of oysters flowed from the kitchen. People slurped the jiggling, opalescent blobs straight from the shells, drinking beer. Around midnight, when the party began to thin, Leonard started talking about this Indian casino at Sagamore Beach. Did anybody feel like gambling? Playing a little blackjack? It wasn’t that late yet. It was Friday night! A group of people piled into Madeleine’s Saab, the girls sitting on the guys’ laps. While Madeleine drove out Highway 6, Leonard rolled a joint on the door of the glove box and explained the intricacies of counting cards. “The dealers at a place like this’ll probably only use one deck. It’s easy.” The two guys, being Poindexters, got caught up in the mathematical details. By the time they arrived at the casino, they were fired up to give it a try, and headed off to different tables.

  Madeleine had never been to a casino before. She was s
lightly horrified by the clientele, liver-spotted white men in baseball caps and hefty women, in track suits, parked in front of slot machines. Not a Native American in sight. Madeleine followed the other two bedfellows into the bar, where at least the drinks were cheap. Around three o’clock, the two guys came back, both telling the same story. They’d been up a few hundred dollars when the dealer changed decks, messing up their count, and they lost it all. Leonard appeared sometime after that, looking equally glum, before smiling and pulling fifteen hundred dollars out of his pocket.

  He claimed he could have won more if the dealer hadn’t got suspicious. The dealer called the pit boss over, who watched Leonard win a few more times before suggesting that he might want to quit while he was ahead. Leonard took the hint, but he wasn’t done for the night. Out in the parking lot, he had a new idea. “It’s too late to drive back to Pilgrim Lake now. We’re too wasted. Come on, we’ve got the whole weekend!” The next thing Madeleine knew, they were checking into a hotel in Boston. Leonard bought each couple a double room with his winnings. The next afternoon, they reconvened in the hotel bar, and the party continued. They went to dinner in Back Bay and bar-hopping afterward. Leonard kept peeling bills from his diminishing wad, giving tips, buying food and drinks.

  When Madeleine asked if he knew what he was doing, Leonard said, “This is play money. How many times are we going to be able to do something like this in our lives? I say, ‘Go for it.’”

  The weekend was already becoming legendary. The guys kept chanting, “Leonard! Leonard!” and slapping each other’s hands. The hotel rooms had Jacuzzis, minibars, twenty-four-hour room service, and really big beds. By Sunday morning the girls were mock-complaining about being too sore to walk.

  Madeleine wasn’t walking so well by then, either. Their first night at the hotel, Leonard had come out of the bathroom, naked and grinning.

  “Look at this thing,” he said, staring down at himself. “You could hang a coat on it.”

  Indeed you could. If they needed a sure sign that Leonard was feeling better, there was none more obvious. Leonard was back in action. “I’m making up for lost time,” he said, after the third time they had sex. As good as it felt, as wonderful as it was to be properly serviced after months of going without, Madeleine noted that the clock now read 10:08 a.m. It was broad daylight outside. She kissed Leonard and begged him to please let her go to sleep.

  He did, but as soon as she woke up he wanted her again. He kept telling her how beautiful her body was. He couldn’t get enough of her, not that weekend and not in the weeks that followed. Madeleine had always thought that she and Leonard had great sex, but to her amazement it got better, deepened, became both more physical and more emotional. And noisier. They said things to each other now. They kept their eyes open and left the lights on. Leonard asked Madeleine what she wanted him to do and, for the first time in her life, she wasn’t too inhibited to answer.

  One night in their unit Leonard asked, “What’s your most secret sexual fantasy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on. Tell.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Do you want to know mine?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me yours, then.”

  To placate him, Madeleine thought for a moment. “This’ll sound weird, but I guess it would be to be pampered.”

  “Pampered?”

  “Like to be really pampered, at the hairdresser’s, getting your hair washed, getting a facial, a pedicure, a massage, and then, you know, little by little …”

  “That would never have occurred to me as a fantasy,” Leonard said.

  “I told you it was stupid.”

  “Hey, it’s your fantasy. Stupid doesn’t apply.”

  And for the next hour or so, Leonard went about fulfilling it. While Madeleine protested, he carried one of the chairs from the living room into the bedroom. He ran the bath. Under the kitchen sink he found two utility candles, brought them into the bathroom, and lit them. Tying his hair back and rolling up his sleeves, he came over as though waiting on her. In what was presumably his idea of a hairdresser’s voice—a straight hairdresser—he said, “Miss? Your bath is ready.”

  Madeleine wanted to laugh. But Leonard remained serious. He led her into the candlelit bathroom. He turned his back, with professional courtesy, while she took off her clothes and got into the warm scented water. Leonard knelt beside the tub and, using a cup, began to wet her hair. By this point Madeleine was going along with it. She imagined that Leonard’s hands belonged to a handsome stranger. Exactly twice, his hands strayed to the sides of her breasts, as if testing boundaries. Madeleine thought Leonard might go further. She thought Leonard might end up in the bath, but he disappeared, returning with her terry-cloth robe. Wrapping her in it, leading her to the chair and putting her feet up, he placed a warm towel over her face and, for what seemed like the next hour (but was probably twenty minutes), he gave her a massage. He started with her shoulders, moved to her feet and calves, came up her thighs, stopping just short of her you-know-what, and started on her arms. Finally, opening her robe, and pressing harder now, as if taking charge, he rubbed moisturizer into her stomach and chest.

  The towel was still over her eyes as Leonard lifted her out of the chair and onto the bed. By this point, Madeleine felt totally clean, totally desirable. The moisturizer smelled like apricots. When Leonard, naked now himself, undid the belt of her robe and opened it, when he pushed into her slowly, he was himself and not himself. He was a strange man taking possession of her and her familiar safey-safe boyfriend, all in one.

  She was frightened to ask Leonard what his secret fantasy was. But in a spirit of reciprocity, a day or so later, she did ask. Leonard’s fantasy was the inverse of hers. He wanted a sleeping girl, a sleeping beauty. He wanted her to pretend to be asleep when he snuck in her room and climbed into bed. He wanted her to be limp and bed-warmed while he pulled off her nightclothes and to not even fully come to consciousness until he was inside her, at which point he was so excited he didn’t seem to care what she did.

  “Well, that was easy,” she said afterward.

  “You got off lucky. It could have been a slave-master sort of deal.”

  “Right.”

  “It could have involved enemas.”

  “Enough!”

  The spirit of exploration that now dominated their bedroom had a strong effect on Madeleine. It led her, a little while later, to confess to Leonard one night, when he wanted to repeat the hairdresser scenario, that being pampered wasn’t really her secret fantasy. Her secret secret fantasy was something she’d never told anyone and could barely admit to herself. It was this: whenever Madeleine masturbated (this was hard in itself to confess to) she pictured herself as a little girl, being spanked. She didn’t know why she did this. She had no memory of being spanked as a girl. Her parents hadn’t believed in spanking. And it wasn’t really a fantasy of hers; that is, she didn’t want Leonard to spank her. But, for some reason, thinking about herself as a little girl being spanked had always helped her to have an orgasm when she was touching herself.

  Well, there it was: the most embarrassing thing she could tell another person. A weird thing about herself that upset her if she thought about it much, which was why she didn’t. She had no control over it, but felt guilty about it nonetheless.

  Leonard didn’t see it that way. He knew what to do with this information. First, he went to the kitchen and poured Madeleine a big glass of wine. He made her drink it. Next he pulled off her clothes, turned her over on her stomach, and started having sex with her. While he did this, he spanked her, and she hated it. She kept telling him to stop. She said she didn’t like it. It was just something she thought about sometimes; she didn’t really want it to happen. Stop it! Now! But Leonard didn’t. He kept it up. He held Madeleine down, and spanked her again. He put his fingers in her and spanked her some more. She was furious with him now. She struggled to get up. And right then it happened.
Something broke open inside her. Madeleine forgot who she was, and what was nice. She just started moaning, her face pressed into the pillow, and when she finally came she came harder than she’d ever come before, and cried out, spasms still running through her for minutes after.

  She wouldn’t let him do it again. It didn’t become a habit. Whenever she thought about it later, she was scalded with shame. But the potential of doing it again was always there now. The expectation that Leonard would take over like that, and not listen to her, and do what he wanted, forcing her to admit what she really wanted—that was there now between them.

  After that, they went back to regular sex, and it was even better for their time away. They did it multiple times a day, in every room of the apartment (the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen). They did it in the Saab while the engine idled. Good old straight no-frills sex, as the Creator intended. The pounds were melting off Leonard, leaving him lean again. He had so much energy, he worked out two hours at the gym at a time. Madeleine liked his new muscles. And that wasn’t all. One night, she pressed her lips to Leonard’s ear and said, as if it were news, “You are so big!” And it was true. Mr. Gumby was long gone. Leonard’s girth filled Madeleine up in a way that felt not only satisfying, but breathtaking. Every millimeter of movement, in or out, was perceptible along her inner sheath. She wanted him all the time. She’d never thought much about other boys’ penises, or noticed much about them, really. But Leonard’s was highly particular to her, almost a third presence in the bed. She found herself sometimes judiciously weighing it in her hand. Did it all come down to the physical, in the end? Is that what love was? Life was so unfair. Madeleine felt sorry for all the men who weren’t Leonard.

  All in all, the rapid improvement, on just about every level, in Madeleine’s relationship would have been enough to explain why she accepted Leonard’s sudden proposal that December. But it was a convergence of factors that finally pushed her over the edge. The first was how helpful Leonard had been with her grad school applications. Having decided to reapply, Madeleine faced the option of retaking the GRE as well. Leonard encouraged her to do so, tutoring her in math and logic. He read over Madeleine’s writing sample (the new essay she was sending to The Janeite Review), flagging sections where her argument was weak. The night before the applications were due, he typed up the biographical information and addressed the envelopes. And the next day, after they dropped the applications at the Provincetown post office, Leonard threw Madeleine down on the bed, pulled off her pants, and proceeded to go down on her, despite her protestations that she needed to shower. She kept trying to wriggle free but he held her tight, saying how great she tasted, until she finally believed him. She relaxed in a profound way that wasn’t sexual so much as existential. So it was finally true: Leonard equaled maximum relaxation.