The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [123]
He was a desultory student. Teachers labeled him “bright but unmotivated.” He blew off homework, preferring to lie on the couch and watch television. He watched The Tonight Show, the late movie, and the late-late movie. In the mornings he was exhausted. He fell asleep in class, reviving after school to screw around with his friends. Then he went back home, stayed up late again, watching TV, and the cycle repeated.
And still this wasn’t the Disease. Being depressed about the state of the world—air pollution, mass starvation, the invasion of East Timor—wasn’t the Disease. Going into the bathroom and staring at his face, noticing the ghoulish veins beneath his skin, checking out his nose pores until he was convinced that he was a hideous creature whom no girl could ever love—even this wasn’t the Disease. This was a characterological prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.
Leonard suffered his first real bout of depression in the fall of his sophomore year of high school. One Thursday night, Godfrey, who’d just gotten his license, came by in his parents’ Honda and picked Leonard up. They drove around with the stereo cranked. Godfrey had gone soft on him. He insisted on listening to Steely Dan.
“This is bullshit,” Leonard said.
“No, man, you’ve got to give it a chance.”
“Let’s listen to some Sabbath.”
“I’m not into that stuff anymore.”
Leonard regarded his friend. “What’s your deal?” he said, though he knew the answer already. Godfrey’s parents were religious (not Methodist, like Leonard’s family, but people who actually read the Bible). They’d sent Godfrey to a church camp over the summer and there, amid the trees and the woodpeckers, the ministers had done their work on him. He would still drink and smoke pot but he’d given up his Judas Priest and his Motordeath. Leonard didn’t mind that, so much. He was getting sick of that stuff himself. But that didn’t mean he was going to let Godfrey off the hook.
He gestured toward the eight-track player. “This stuff is fey.”
“The musicianship’s really good on this album,” Godfrey insisted. “Donald Fagen was classically trained.”
“Let me tell you something, God-frey, if we’re going to drive around, listening to this pussy shit, I might as well drop trou and let you blow me now.”
With that, Leonard searched the glove box for something more appealing, coming up with a Big Star album of which he was quite fond.
A little before midnight, Godfrey dropped him at his house and Leonard went inside and straight to bed. When he woke up the next morning, something was the matter with him. His body ached. His limbs felt encased in cement. He didn’t want to get up, but Rita came in, barking that he was going to be late. Somehow Leonard managed to climb out of bed and get dressed. Skipping breakfast, he left the house, forgetting his backpack, and walked to Cleveland High. A storm was moving in, the light crepuscular over the dingy shop fronts and overpasses. All day, as Leonard carted his body from class to class, ominous, bruise-colored clouds massed outside the windows. Teachers kept bitching at him for not having his books. He had to borrow paper and pens from other students. Twice, he shut himself into a bathroom stall and, for no discernible reason, began to weep. Godfrey, who’d had as much to drink as Leonard had, seemed just fine. They went to lunch together but Leonard had no appetite.
“What’s the matter with you, man? Are you stoned?”
“No. I think I’m getting sick.”
At three-thirty, instead of showing up for J.V. football practice, Leonard went straight home. A sense of impending doom, of universal malevolence, pursued him the entire way. Tree limbs gesticulated menacingly in his peripheral vision. Telephone lines sagged like pythons between the poles. When he looked up at