The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [138]
“That figures.”
“Did you used to go out with him?”
“No!” Madeleine objected.
“You look awfully cozy.” He held up a photograph where Grammaticus was lying with his curly head in her lap.
Madeleine took the photograph, frowning, and put it back in the desk. She explained that she’d known Grammaticus since freshman year but that they’d had a fight. When Leonard asked her what the fight had been about, she looked evasive and said that it was complicated. When Leonard asked her what was complicated about it, Madeleine admitted that she and Grammaticus had always had a Platonic friendship, at least Platonic on her end, but that more recently he’d been “sort of in love” with her and that his feelings had been hurt because she hadn’t returned them.
This information hadn’t bothered Leonard at the time. He had sized Grammaticus up according to an animal scale—antler size to antler size—and given himself the clear advantage. In the hospital, however, with plenty of time on his hands, Leonard began to wonder if there was more to the story. He pictured Grammaticus’s satyr-like form clambering on top of Madeleine from behind. The image of Grammaticus screwing Madeleine, or of Madeleine going down on him, contained the right mix of pain and arousal to stir Leonard from his deadened sexual state. For reasons Leonard couldn’t fathom—but that probably had to do with a need for self-abasement—the idea of Madeleine wantonly betraying him with Grammaticus turned Leonard on. To break the tedium of the hospital, he tortured himself with this twisted fantasy, jerking off in the bathroom stall while holding the lockless door closed with his free hand.
Even after he and Madeleine got back together, Leonard kept tormenting himself in this way. On the day he was discharged, a nurse brought him outside and he got into Madeleine’s new car. Belted into the front passenger seat, he felt like a newborn that Madeleine was bringing home for the first time. The city had greened up considerably while Leonard was inside. It looked lovely and lazy. The students were gone and College Hill was deserted and peaceful. They drove back to Leonard’s apartment. They began living together. And because Leonard wasn’t a baby, because he was a full-grown sick fuck, he spent Madeleine’s every absence imagining her blowing her tennis partner in the locker room, or being bent over in the stacks of the library. One day, a week after Leonard’s return, Madeleine mentioned that she’d run into Grammaticus on the morning of graduation and that they’d made up. Grammaticus had gone back home to live with his parents but Madeleine had been talking on the phone a lot while Leonard had been in the hospital. She said she would pay for all her long-distance calls and now Leonard found himself checking the New England Bell bills for any calls made to midwestern area codes. Recently, alarmingly, she’d taken the phone into the bathroom and talked with the door closed, explaining afterward that she hadn’t wanted to disturb him. (Disturb him from what? From lying in bed, putting on weight like a calf in a veal crate? From reading the same paragraph of The Anti-Christ he’d already read three times?)
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