The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  A few days later, Leonard proposed to her, and Madeleine said yes.

  She kept waiting for it to seem like a bad idea. For the next month they didn’t tell anybody. At Christmas, she took Leonard home to Prettybrook, daring her parents not to like him. Christmas was always a big deal at the Hannas. They had no fewer than three trees, decorated in different themes, and gave an annual Christmas party for a hundred and fifty guests. Leonard handled these festivities with aplomb, chatting with Alton and Phyllida’s friends, joining in on the caroling, and making a good impression all around. In the following days, he proved capable of watching bowl games with Alton and, as the son of an antiques dealer, of saying intelligent things about the Thomas Fairland lithographs in the library. Snow fell the day after Christmas, and Leonard was out early, wearing his slightly absurd hunting cap, shoveling the front walks and sidewalk. Whenever Phyllida took Leonard aside, Madeleine got nervous, but nothing seemed to go amiss. That he was twenty pounds lighter than he’d been in October, and unimpeachably handsome, couldn’t fail to register on Phyllida. Madeleine kept the visit short, however, not wanting to push her luck, and they left after three days, spending New Year’s in New York before returning to Pilgrim Lake.

  Two weeks later, Madeleine called to break the news of her engagement.

  Clearly taken off guard, Alton and Phyllida didn’t know how to respond. They sounded profoundly surprised, and got off the phone quickly. A few days later, the letter campaign began. Separate handwritten messages arrived from Alton and Phyllida, questioning the wisdom of getting “tied down” so early. Madeleine replied to these missives, which invited further responses. In her second letter, Phyllida got more specific, repeating her warnings against marrying a manic-depressive. Alton repeated what he’d said in his first letter, while making a case for a prenuptial contract to protect Madeleine’s “future interests.” Madeleine didn’t respond, and, a few days later, a third letter from Alton arrived, in which he restated his position in less legalistic language. The only thing the letters accomplished was to reveal how powerless her parents were, like an isolated dictatorship engaged in saber rattling that couldn’t follow through on its threats.

  Their final move was to engage an intermediary. Alwyn called from Beverly.

  “So I hear you’re engaged,” she said.

  “Are you calling to congratulate me?”

  “Congratulations. Mummy is so pissed.”

  “Thanks to you,” Madeleine said.

  “She had to find out sooner or later.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “Well, now she knows.” In the acoustical spillover from the earpiece, Madeleine could hear Richard crying. “She keeps calling and asking me to ‘talk some sense’ into you.”

  “Is that why you’re calling?”

  “No,” Alwyn said. “I told her if you want to marry him, it’s your business.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Are you still mad at me about the pills?” Alwyn said.

  “Yes,” Madeleine said. “But I’ll get over it.”

  “Are you sure you want to marry him?”

  “Also yes.”

  “O.K., then. It’s your funeral.”

  “Hey, that’s mean!”

  “I’m joking.”

  Her parents’ official surrender, in February, only brought further conflict. Once Alton and Madeleine stopped arguing about the prenuptial agreement, and whether such a document, by its very nature, invalidated the trust any marriage needed to survive, once the document had been drawn up by Roger Pyle, Alton’s lawyer in town, and signed by both parties, Phyllida and Madeleine started arguing about the wedding itself. Madeleine wanted something small and intimate. Phyllida, aware of appearances, wanted to throw the kind of grand wedding she would have thrown had Madeleine been marrying somebody more suitable. She proposed holding a traditional wedding ceremony at their local parish, Trinity Episcopal, followed by a reception at the house. Madeleine said no. Alton then suggested an informal ceremony at the Century Club, in New York. Madeleine tentatively agreed to this. A week before the invitations were to go out, however, she and Leonard chanced upon an old mariner’s church on the outskirts of Provincetown. And it was there, in a stark, lonely space at the end of a deserted peninsula, a landscape befitting a Bergman film, that Madeleine and Leonard were married. Phyllida and Alton’s most loyal friends made the trek from Prettybrook to the Cape. Madeleine’s uncles, aunts, and cousins were there, as well as Alwyn, Blake, and Richard. Leonard’s family came, his father, and his mother and sister, all of whom seemed a lot nicer than Leonard’s descriptions. The majority of the forty-six guests were Madeleine’s and Leonard’s friends from college, who treated the ceremony less as a religious rite than as an occasion to cheer and hoot.

  At the rehearsal dinner Leonard played a Latvian love song on the kokle, while Kelly Traub, whose grandparents were from Riga, sang along. He made a simple toast at the wedding banquet, alluding to his breakdown so tactfully that only those in the know got the reference, and thanking Madeleine for being his “ministering Victorian angel.” At midnight, after changing into their traveling clothes, they took a limousine to the Four Seasons in Boston, where they immediately fell asleep. The next afternoon, they left for Europe.

  Looking back, Madeleine thought that she might have picked up the warning signs more quickly if she hadn’t been on her honeymoon. She was so excited to be in Paris, at the height of spring, that for the first week everything seemed perfect. They stayed at the same hotel where Phyllida and Alton had spent their honeymoon, a three-star place now well past its prime, staffed by white-haired waiters who carried trays at precarious angles. The hotel was thoroughly French, however. (Leonard said he saw a mouse wearing a beret.) There were no other Americans there, and it looked out on the Jardin des Plantes. Leonard had never been to Europe before. It made Madeleine happy to show Leonard around, to be more knowledgeable about something than he was.

  The restaurants made him nervous. “We have four different waiters serving our table,” he said on their third night in the city, as they dined in a restaurant overlooking the Seine. “Four. I counted. One guy’s just for sweeping up bread crumbs.”

  In passable Lawrenceville French, Madeleine did the ordering for both of them. The first course was vichyssoise.

  After tasting it, Leonard said, “I’m guessing this is supposed to be cold.”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “Cold soup. New concept.”

  The dinner was everything she wanted her honeymoon to be. Leonard looked so handsome, dressed in his wedding suit. Madeleine felt beautiful herself, bare-armed and bare-shouldered, her hair thick on the nape of her neck. They were both as physically perfect as they were ever going to be. They had their whole life together before them, stretching out like the lights along the river. Madeleine could already imagine telling this story to their children, the story of “The First Time Daddy Ate Cold Soup.” The wine had gone to her head. She almost said this out loud. She wasn’t ready for children! And yet here she was, already thinking about them.

  They spent the next days sightseeing. To Madeleine’s surprise, Leonard was less interested in museums and churches than in the merchandise in the shop windows. He kept stopping along the Champs-Élysées to admire things he’d never shown interest in before—suits, shirts, cuff links, Hermès neckties. Wandering the narrow streets of the Marais, he stopped outside a tailor shop. In the slightly dusty window was a headless mannequin and on the mannequin was a black opera cloak. Leonard went inside to look at it.

  “This is really nice,” he said, examining the satin lining.

  “It’s a cape,” Madeleine said.

  “You’d never find anything like this in the States,” Leonard said.

  And he bought it, spending way too much (in her opinion) of his last monthly stipend from Pilgrim Lake. The tailor wrapped the garment up and put it in a box, and soon Leonard was carrying it out the door. The cape was an odd thing to wan
t, no question, but it wasn’t the first strange souvenir someone had bought in Paris. Madeleine quickly forgot about it.

  That night, a rainstorm swept over the city. Around two in the morning, they were awakened by water dripping from the ceiling above the bed. A call to the front desk produced a bellman with a bucket, no apology, and a vague promise about an “ingénieur” coming in the morning. By positioning the bucket just so, and lying head to toe, Madeleine and Leonard managed to find a position in which to stay dry, though the dripping kept them awake.

  “This is our first marital mishap,” Leonard said softly, in the dark. “We’re handling it. We’re dealing with it.”

  It wasn’t until they left Paris that anything seemed the matter. From the Gare de Lyon they took an overnight train to Marseille, occupying a romantic sleeper cabin that made romance impossible. With its disorder, sense of danger, and mixed population, Marseille seemed like an American city, or merely less French. A Mediterranean-Arabic atmosphere prevailed; the air smelled of fish, motor oil, and verbena. Women in head-scarves called to broods of brown-skinned children. At a zinc bar on their first night, sometime past two a.m., Leonard became instant friends with a group of Moroccans in soccer jerseys and flea market jeans. Madeleine was exhausted; she wanted to go back to the hotel, but Leonard insisted that they had to have café cognac. He’d been picking up words along the way, deploying them every so often as though this meant that he actually spoke French. When he learned a slang term (the word branché, for instance, when applied to persons, meant that they were “plugged in”), Leonard told it to Madeleine as if he were the fluent speaker. He corrected her pronunciation. At first, she thought he must be joking, but this didn’t seem to be the case.

  From Marseille they traveled east along the coast. When a dining-car waiter came to take their order, Leonard insisted on ordering in French. He got the words out, but his pronunciation was atrocious. Madeleine repeated Leonard’s request. When she finished, Leonard was glaring at her.

  “What?”

  “Why did you order for me?”

  “Because the waiter didn’t understand you.”

  “He understood me fine,” Leonard insisted.

  It was evening by the time they reached Nice. After checking into their hotel, they went out to a small restaurant down the street. Throughout dinner, Leonard was conscientiously distant. He drank a lot of house wine. His eyes glittered whenever the young waitress came over to their table. For nearly the entire meal Madeleine and Leonard sat without speaking, like a couple married for twenty years. Returning to their hotel, Madeleine used the bad-smelling communal WC. While she was peeing, she read the sign in French that cautioned against throwing paper of any kind into the toilet. Turning her head, she located the source of the stench: the wastebasket was overflowing with soiled toilet paper.

  Gagging, she fled back to their room. “Oh my God!” she said. “That bathroom is so gross!”

  “You’re just a princess.”

  “Go in there! You’ll see.”

  Leonard calmly took his toothbrush into the WC and returned, unruffled.

  “We have to change hotels,” Madeleine said.

  Leonard smirked. Glassy-eyed, he said in a prim voice, “The princess from Prettybrook is appalled!”

  As soon as they went to bed, Leonard grabbed her by the hips and turned her onto her stomach. She knew that she shouldn’t let Leonard have sex with her after the way he’d treated her all evening. At the same time, she felt so sad and unwanted that it came as a huge relief to be touched. She was making some awful pact, one that might have consequences for her entire married life. But she couldn’t say no. She let Leonard turn her over and take her, not lovingly, from behind. She wasn’t ready and it hurt at first. Leonard paid no attention, blindly thrusting. She could have been anyone. When it was over Madeleine began to cry, at first quietly, then less quietly. She wanted Leonard to hear. But he was asleep, or pretended to be.

  When she woke up the next morning, Leonard wasn’t in the room. Madeleine wanted to call her mother, but it was the middle of the night on the East Coast. And it was dangerous to go on record about Leonard’s behavior. She would never be able to take it back. Instead, she got up and searched his toiletry case for his pill bottles. One was half empty. Leonard had refilled the other one before the wedding, so that he wouldn’t run out while they were in Europe.

  Reassured that he was taking his medicine, Madeleine sat on the edge of the bed and tried to figure out how to handle the situation.

  The door opened and Leonard burst in. He was beaming, acting as if nothing had happened.

  “I just found us a new hotel,” he said. “Much nicer. You’ll like it.”

  The temptation to ignore the previous night was great. But Madeleine didn’t want to set a bad precedent. The weight of marriage pressed down on her for the first time. She couldn’t just throw a book at Leonard and leave, as she’d done in the past.

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  “O.K.,” Leonard said. “How about over breakfast?”

  “No. Now.”

  “O.K.,” he said again, somewhat softer. He looked around the room for a place to sit, but there was none, so he remained standing.

  “You were so mean to me yesterday,” Madeleine said. “First you got mad when I ordered for you. Then you acted like I wasn’t even there at dinner. You kept flirting with the waitress—”

  “I wasn’t flirting with the waitress.”

  “Yes, you were! You were flirting with her. And then, we came back here and you—you—you just used me like I was a piece of meat!” Saying this made her burst into tears again. Her voice had gone all squeaky and girly in a way she hated but couldn’t help. “You acted like you were … with that waitress!”

  “I don’t want to be with the waitress, Madeleine. I want to be with you. I love you. I love you so much.”

  These were exactly the words Madeleine wanted to hear. Her intelligence told her to distrust them, but another, weaker part of her responded with happiness.

  “You can never treat me that way again,” she said, still hiccuping with sobs.

  “I won’t. I never will.”

  “If you ever do, that’s the end.”

  He put his arms around her, pressing his face into her hair. “It’s never going to happen again,” he whispered. “I love you. I’m sorry.”

  They went to a café for breakfast. Leonard was on his best behavior, pulling out her chair, buying her a Paris Match from the newsstand, offering her a brioche from the basket.

  The next two days went well. The weather in Nice was cloudy, the beaches full of pebbles. Hoping to take full advantage of her prewedding diet, Madeleine had brought along a two-piece swimsuit, modest by the standards of the Côte d’Azur but daring for her. But it was a little too cold to swim. They used the lounge chairs reserved for them by their hotel only once, for a couple of hours, before rain clouds chased them back inside.

  Leonard remained attentive, and sweet, and Madeleine hoped that their fighting was over.

  The plan was to spend their last two days in Monaco, before taking the train back to Paris for their return flight. On a cloudless late afternoon, the first truly warm, sunny day of their trip, they boarded the train for the twenty-minute ride. One minute they were passing cypresses and glittering coves, the next they were arriving in the overbuilt, overpriced precincts of Monte Carlo.

  A Mercedes taxi took them up a corniche to their hotel high above the town and harbor.

  The front desk clerk, who wore an ascot, said they were lucky to have come when they did. The Grand Prix was starting the next week and the hotel was completely booked. Now, however, it was relatively peaceful, perfect for a couple on their honeymoon.

  “Is Grace Kelly around?” Leonard asked, out of the blue.

  Madeleine turned to look at him. He had a big smile, his eyes glassy again.

  “The princess passed away last year, monsieur,” the desk clerk replied. />
  “I forgot about that,” Leonard said. “My sincere condolences to you and your countrymen.”

  “Thank you, monsieur.”

  “This isn’t a real country, though, right?”

  “Excuse me, monsieur?”

  “It’s not a kingdom. It’s just a principality.”

  “We are an independent nation, monsieur,” the clerk said, stiffening.

  “Because I was wondering how much Grace Kelly knew about Monaco when she married Prince Rainier. I mean, she probably figured he was the ruler of a real country.”

  The clerk’s expression was now impassive. He produced their room key. “Madame, monsieur, I hope you enjoy your stay.”

  As soon as they were in the elevator, Madeleine said, “What’s the matter with you?”

  “What?”

  “That was so rude!”

  “I was just playing with him,” Leonard said with his antic smile. “Have you ever seen the movies of Grace Kelly’s wedding? Prince Rainier’s in a military uniform, like he has some great realm to defend. Then you get here and you realize the whole country could fit inside the Superdome. It’s a stage set. No wonder he married an actress.”