The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [142]
He counted the minutes until he could leave each day. The first thing he did, on returning home every night, was to jump into the shower and brush his teeth. After that, momentarily feeling clean, with no bad taste in his mouth, he hazarded to lie down next to Madeleine on the bed or the sofa and to put his big sodden head in her lap. It was Leonard’s favorite time of the day. Sometimes Madeleine read aloud from the novel she was reading. If she had a skirt on he rested his cheek on her super-smooth thighs. Every night, when it came time for dinner, Leonard said, “Let’s just stay here.” But every night Madeleine made him get dressed, and they went to the dining hall, where Leonard tried not to betray his nausea or to knock over his water glass.
In late September, when Madeleine went off to her Victorian conference in Boston, Leonard nearly fell apart. For the entire three days she was gone he missed her acutely. He kept calling her room at the Hyatt, getting no answer. When Madeleine called she was usually in a rush to get to a dinner or a lecture. Sometimes he could hear other people in the room, happy, functioning people. Leonard tried to keep Madeleine on the phone as long as he could, and as soon as she hung up he counted the hours until it was allowable for him to call her again. When dinnertime rolled around, he showered, put on clean clothes, and set off along the boardwalk to the dining hall, but the prospect of sparring with Beller and Jaitly on some technical subject persuaded him to buy a frozen pizza at the twenty-four-hour minimart in the dining hall’s basement instead. He heated it up in his apartment and watched Hill Street Blues. On Sunday, with his anxiety increasing, he called Dr. Perlmann to explain how he was feeling. Perlmann phoned in a prescription for Ativan to the pharmacy in P-town, and Leonard borrowed Jaitly’s Honda to pick it up, saying he was getting allergy medicine.
And so there he was, three and a half weeks into his fellowship, taking his lithium and Ativan, spreading a dollop of Preparation H between his buttocks every morning and night, drinking a glass of Metamucil with his morning O.J., swallowing, as needed, an antinausea pill he forgot the name of. All alone in his splendid apartment, among the geniuses and would-be geniuses, at the end of the spiraling land.
On Monday afternoon Madeleine came back from the conference shining with enthusiasm. She told him about the new friends she’d made, Anne and Meg. She said she wanted to specialize in the Victorians, even though Austen was Regency, technically, and wouldn’t qualify. She gushed about meeting Terry Castle, and how brilliant Terry Castle was, and Leonard was relieved to discover that Terry Castle was a woman (and then less relieved to discover that she liked girls). Madeleine’s excitement about the future seemed all the more vibrant against Leonard’s sudden lack of it. He was more or less sane now, more or less healthy, but he felt none of his usual energy or curiosity, none of his old animal spirits. They went walking on the beach, at sunset. Being manic-depressive didn’t make Leonard any less tall. Madeleine still fit perfectly in his arm. But even nature was messed up for him now.
“Does it smell out here to you?” he asked.
“It smells like the ocean.”
“I don’t smell anything.”
Sometimes they drove into Provincetown for lunch or dinner. Leonard tried, as best he could, to take things one day at a time. He did his work at the lab and soldiered through the evenings. He tried to keep his stress levels to a minimum. But a week after MacGregor’s Nobel was announced, Madeleine told Leonard, during their evening walk, that her sister, Alwyn, was having “a marriage crisis” and that her mother was bringing her to the Cape to talk things over.
Leonard always dreaded meeting the parents of a girl he was dating. If there had been a blessing to Madeleine’s breaking up with him last spring and his ensuing breakdown, it had been the removal