The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Phyllida’s sickroom visits were awkward, however. Phyllida and Leonard still barely knew each other. As soon as Leonard was “out of the woods,” she flew home to New Jersey to get the house ready for Madeleine and Leonard’s eventual arrival.

  Madeleine stayed on at the hotel. With nothing to do but watch French television on the two stations the TV set in her room received, and determined never to set foot in the casino again, Madeleine spent hours in the Musée Océanographique. It soothed her to sit in the underwater light, watching sea creatures glide across their tanks. At first she ate alone, in the dining room of the hotel, but her presence attracted too much male attention. So she stayed in her room, ordering room service and drinking more wine than she was used to.

  She felt as if she’d aged twenty years in two weeks. She was no longer a bride or even a young person.

  On a clear day in May, Leonard was discharged. Once again, as she had the year before, Madeleine waited outside a hospital while a nurse brought him down in a wheelchair. They took the train back to Paris, staying at a modest hotel on the Left Bank.

  On the day before they flew back to the States, Madeleine left Leonard in the room while she went out to buy him cigarettes. The summer weather was lovely, the colors of the flowers in the park so bright they hurt her eyes. Up ahead, she saw an amazing sight, a troop of schoolgirls being led by a nun. They were crossing the street, heading into the courtyard of their school. Smiling for the first time in weeks, Madeleine watched them proceed. Ludwig Bemelmans had written sequels to Madeline. In one, Madeline had joined a gypsy circus. In another, she’d been saved from drowning by a dog. But, despite all her adventures, Madeline had never gotten any older than eight. That was too bad. Madeleine could have used some helpful examples, further installments of the series. Madeline passing the baccalauréat. Madeline studying at the Sorbonne. (“And to writers like Camus, Madeline just said ‘Poo poo.’”) Madeline practicing free love, or joining a commune, or traveling to Afghanistan. Madeline taking part in the ’68 protests, throwing rocks at the police, or crying out, “Under the pavement, the beach.”

  Did Madeline marry Pepito, the Spanish ambassador’s son? Was her hair still red? Was she still the smallest and the bravest?

  Not exactly in two straight lines, but orderly enough, the girls disappeared through the doors of the convent school. Madeleine went back to the hotel, where Leonard, still bandaged up, a casualty of a different kind of war, was waiting.

  They smiled at the good

  and frowned at the bad

  and sometimes they were very sad.

  Down the track, the Northeast Corridor train appeared in a haze of soot and heat distortion. Madeleine stood on the platform, behind the yellow line, squinting through her crooked glasses. After two weeks of being lost, the glasses had turned up yesterday at the bottom of her laundry hamper. The prescription was too weak now, the lenses no less scratched and the frames no more in style than they’d been three years ago. She was going to have to break down and get a new pair before grad school began.

  As soon as she’d confirmed that the train was approaching, she took off the glasses and shoved them into her purse. She turned around to look for Leonard, who, already complaining about the humidity, had gone inside the meagerly air-conditioned waiting room.

  It was a little before five p.m. About two dozen other people were waiting for the train.

  Madeleine stuck her head into the waiting room door. Leonard was sitting on a bench, staring at the floor, his eyes dull. He was still wearing the black T-shirt and shorts but he’d tied his hair back into a ponytail. She called his name.

  Leonard looked up and slowly got to his feet. He’d taken forever to get out of the house and into the car and Madeleine had worried they might miss their train.

  The train doors had already opened before Leonard emerged onto the platform and followed Madeleine into the nearest car. They chose a two-person seat, so they wouldn’t have to sit with anyone. Madeleine took a well-thumbed copy of Daniel Deronda out of her bag and settled back.

  “Did you bring something to read?” she said.

  Leonard shook his head. “I’ll just stare out at the beautiful landscape of New Jersey.”

  “There are some nice parts of New Jersey,” Madeleine said.

  “Legend has it,” Leonard said, staring.

  The fifty-nine-minute train ride didn’t provide much support for this view. When they weren’t passing the backyards of subdivisions, they were rolling into another dying city, like Elizabeth, or Newark. The courtyard of a minimum-security prison backed up to the train tracks, the inmates wearing white uniforms like a convention of bakers. Near Secaucus, the pale green marshes began, surprisingly pretty if you didn’t raise your eyes to the surrounding smokestacks and loading docks.

  They reached Penn Station at rush hour. Madeleine led Leonard away from the packed escalators to a less trafficked stairwell, where they climbed up to the lobby. A few minutes later they stepped into the heat and light of Eighth Avenue. It was just after six.

  As they joined the taxi line, Leonard eyed the nearby buildings, as though worried they were going to topple on him.

  “‘New York,’” he said. “‘Just like I pictured it.’”

  It was his last little joke. When they got in a cab and were heading uptown, Leonard asked the driver if he could please turn on the air-conditioning. The driver said it was broken. Leonard rolled down the window, hanging his head out like a dog. For a moment, Madeleine regretted bringing him along.

  Her premonition in the Casino de Monte-Carlo had been more accurate than she even knew at the time. She’d already become the trembling wife, the ever-watchful custodian. She’d become “married to manic depression.” It wasn’t news to Madeleine that Leonard could kill himself while she was sleeping. It had already crossed her mind that the swimming pool might invite oblivion. Of the twenty-one signs on the list Wilkins had given her, Madeleine had marked a check next to ten of them: change in sleeping patterns; unwillingness to communicate; neglect of work; neglect of appearance; withdrawal from people/activities; perfectionism; restlessness; extreme boredom; depression; and change in personality. Among the warning signs Leonard didn’t exhibit were that he hadn’t attempted suicide before (though he’d thought about it), didn’t use drugs (at present), wasn’t accident prone, didn’t talk about wanting to die, and hadn’t been giving away his possessions. On the other hand, this morning, when Leonard had said that he no longer wanted to move to New York and referred to the apartment as “hers,” he’d sounded a lot like a person giving away his possessions. Leonard didn’t seem to care about the future anymore. He didn’t know what he was going to do. He didn’t want an office. He’d been wearing those black shorts for two weeks.

  Ten warning signs out of twenty-one. Not very reassuring. But when she pointed this out to Dr. Wilkins, he’d said, “If Leonard didn’t have any warning signs, you wouldn’t be here. Our job is to reduce the number, little by little, to three or four. Maybe one or two. Over time I’m confident we can do that.”

  “What about until then?” Madeleine asked.

  “Until then we have to proceed very carefully.”

  She was trying to proceed carefully, but it wasn’t easy. Madeleine had brought Leonard to New York to avoid the danger of leaving him home unsupervised. But now that he was in the city, there was the danger that he might have a panic attack. She’d had the choice between leaving him in Prettybrook, and worrying, and bringing him to New York with her, and worrying. In general, she worried less if she could keep an eye on him.

  She was the thing that stood between Leonard and death. That was how it felt to her. Because Madeleine now knew the warning signs, she was constantly alert to their appearance. Worse, she was alert to any change in Leonard’s mood that might be a precursor of one of the warning signs. She was alert to warnings of the warning signs. And this got confusing. For instance, she didn’t know if Leonard’s being up early constituted a new
change in his sleeping pattern, was part of the former change in his sleeping pattern, or indicated a beneficial development. She didn’t know if his perfectionism canceled out his loss of ambition, or if they were two sides of the same coin. When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep. When Leonard stayed up, watching late-night TV, Madeleine kept tabs on him from her bed. She could never really fall asleep until he came upstairs and climbed in beside her. She listened for the sounds he made downstairs. It was as if her own heart had been surgically removed from her body and was being kept at a remote location, still connected to her and pumping blood through her veins, but exposed to dangers she couldn’t see: her heart in a box somewhere, in the open air, unprotected.

  They came up Eighth Avenue, veering onto Broadway at Columbus Circle. Leonard pulled his head back inside the car as if to retest the temperature, then leaned out the window again.

  The driver made a left at Seventy-second Street. A few minutes later they were rolling up Riverside Drive. Kelly was waiting on the sidewalk outside the building.

  “Sorry!” Madeleine said, getting out of the taxi. “The train was late.”

  “You always say that,” Kelly said.

  “It’s always true.”

  They hugged, and Kelly asked, “So are you coming to the party?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “You have to! I can’t go alone.”

  All this time, the cab was idling at the curb. Finally Leonard climbed out. With heavy steps he made it out of the sunlight to the shade of the awning.

  Kelly, who was a pretty good actress, smiled at Leonard as though she hadn’t heard anything about his illness and he looked just fine. “Hi, Leonard. How you doing?”

  As usual, Leonard treated this like a real question. He sighed, and said, “I’m exhausted.”

  “You’re exhausted?” Kelly said. “Think about me! I’ve shown Maddy like fifteen apartments. This is it. If you guys don’t take this one, I’m firing you.”

  “You can’t fire us,” Madeleine said. “We’re your clients.”

  “Then I quit.” She led them into the cool, paneled lobby. “Seriously, Maddy. I’ve got one other listing, closer to Columbia, if you want to see it. But I doubt it’s as nice as this.”

  After signing in with the doorman, they took the elevator up to the twelfth floor. Outside the apartment, Kelly hunted in her bag for the right keys, which took a while, but finally she got the door open and ushered them in.

  Up until now, Kelly had shown Madeleine apartments that looked onto air shafts, or adjoined SROs, or were tiny and roach-infested, or smelled like cat pee. Even if Madeleine hadn’t been desperate to move out of her parents’ house, the one-bedroom she now walked into would have dazzled her. It was a classic, with freshly painted white walls, crown moldings, and parquet floors. The bedroom was big enough for a queen bed, the galley kitchen updated, the office usable, the living room under-size but graced by a nonworking fireplace. There was even a dining room. The chief selling point, however, was the views. In rapture, Madeleine opened the living room window and leaned out over the sill. The sun, still a couple of hours from setting, was spangling the chop in the river and turning the usually gray Palisades a light pink. To the north were the transparent peaks of the G. W. Bridge. Traffic noise rose from the West Side Highway. Madeleine looked down at the pavement in front of the building. It was a long way down. Suddenly she got scared.

  She pulled her head back in and called Leonard’s name. When he didn’t answer, she called again, already moving down the hall.

  Leonard was in the bedroom with Kelly. The window was closed.

  She hid her relief by examining the bedroom closet. “This closet’s mine,” she said. “I’ve got more clothes than you do. But you can have the office.”

  Leonard said nothing.

  “Did you see the office?”

  “I saw it,” he said.

  “And?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Not to pressure you or anything,” Kelly said, “but you guys need to decide in the next, say, half hour. The other agent in my office wants to start showing this place tonight.”

  “Tonight?” Madeleine said, unprepared for this. “I thought you said tomorrow?”

  “That’s what he said. But now he changed his mind. People are desperate for this place.”

  Madeleine looked at Leonard, trying to read his thoughts. Then she crossed her arms decisively. Absent moving to a prairie state, she was going to have to accept the inherent risks of living with him in Manhattan. “O.K., I want it,” she said. “It’s perfect. Leonard, we want it, right?”

  Leonard turned to Kelly. “Can we have a minute?” he said.

  “Sure! No problem. I’ll be in the living room.”

  When she was gone, Leonard went to the window. “How much is this place?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “I could never afford an apartment like this. I’m worried how it’s going to make me feel.”

  This was a reasonable conversation to have once or twice. But they’d had it about a hundred times. They’d had a version of it that morning. The sad truth was that any place that Leonard could afford would be a place that Madeleine would refuse to live in.

  “Sweetie,” she said. “Don’t worry about the rent. Pay as much as you can. I just want us to be happy.”

  “I’m saying I’m not sure I could be happy here.”

  “If I were the man, we wouldn’t even be talking about this. It would be normal for the husband to pay more rent.”

  “The fact that I feel like the wife here is sort of the problem.”

  “Why did you come to see it, then?” Madeleine said, growing frustrated. “What did you expect we were going to do? We can’t live with my parents forever. How does that make you feel? Living with my parents?”

  Leonard’s shoulders slumped. “I know,” he said, sounding truly sorrowful. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s just hard for me. Do you see how it could be hard for me?”

  It seemed best to nod yes.

  Leonard stared out the window for what seemed like a half minute. Finally, taking a breath, he said, “O.K. Let’s take it.”

  Madeleine wasted no time. She told Kelly they were taking the apartment and offered to write a check for the deposit. Kelly had a better idea, however. She suggested that they go ahead and sign the lease today, which would save them from making another trip to the city. “You can go have coffee while I draw up the lease. It’ll take me about fifteen minutes.”

  This plan made sense, and so the three of them took the elevator back down to the lobby and reentered the sweltering streets.

  As they made their way to Broadway, Kelly pointed out the local services, the dry cleaners, the locksmith, and the corner diner, which was air-conditioned.

  “You guys wait in there,” Kelly said, pointing at the diner. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Half hour tops.”

  Madeleine and Leonard took a booth by the front window. The diner had Hellenic murals and a twelve-page menu. “This’ll be our diner,” Madeleine said, looking around approvingly. “We can come here every morning.”

  The waiter walked over to take their order.

  “You know what you like, my friends?”

  “Two coffees, please,” Madeleine said, smiling. “And my husband would like some apple pie with a slice of cheddar cheese on top.”

  “You want it, you got it,” the waiter said, moving off.

  Madeleine expected Leonard to be amused. But to her surprise his eyes filled with tears.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He shook his head, looking away. “I forgot about that,” he said in a husky voice. “Seems like a long time ago.”

  Outside, shadows were lengthening along the pavement. Madeleine stared out at the Broadway traffic, trying to stave off a rising feeling of hopelessness. She didn’t know how to cheer Leonard up anymore. Everything she
tried brought the same result. She worried that Leonard would never be happy again, that he had lost the ability. Right now, when they should have been excited about the new apartment, or checking out their new neighborhood, they were sitting in a vinyl booth, avoiding each other’s eyes and not saying anything. Even worse, Madeleine knew that Leonard understood this. His suffering was sharpened by the knowledge that he was inflicting it on her. But he was unable to stop it. Meanwhile, beyond the plate-glass window, the summer evening was settling over the avenue. Men were coming home from work, their ties loosened, carrying their coats. Madeleine had lost track of the days, but from the relaxed looks on people’s faces and the happy-hour crowd spilling out of the bar on the opposite corner, she could tell it was Friday night. The sun would still be up for hours but the night—and the weekend—had officially begun.

  The waiter brought the apple pie, with two forks. But neither of them took a bite.

  After twenty minutes, Kelly returned, carrying papers. She’d made two amendments to the standard lease, one stipulating approval of subletters, the other prohibiting pets. At the top of the form she’d typed Madeleine’s and Leonard’s full names, and had filled in the rent and security deposit amounts. Sitting down in the booth, helping herself to pie, she instructed Madeleine to write checks covering the security deposit and the first month’s rent. Then she had Madeleine and Leonard sign their names.