The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [143]
The day started off memorably, if a little too early, with the sound of Jaitly and Alicia going at it in the upstairs apartment. The building they lived in, Starbuck, was a refurbished barn and had absolutely no sound-proofing. It didn’t just sound as if Jaitly and Alicia were in the same room with them. It sounded as if they were in the same bed, scrumping right between Madeleine and Leonard, showing them how it was done.
When things quieted down, Leonard got up to take a piss. He swallowed three lithium tablets with his morning coffee, watching dawn spread across the bay. He felt pretty decent, actually. He thought it was going to be one of his good days. He dressed a little better than usual, in khakis and a white button-down shirt. At the lab, he fired up some Violent Femmes on the boom box and started preparing some samples. When Jaitly came in, Leonard kept smiling at him.
“How did you sleep, Vikram?”
“Fine.”
“Any mattress burns?”
“What, were you like—you asshole!”
“Don’t blame me. I was just lying in bed, minding my own business.”
“Yeah, well, Alicia only comes up on the weekends. You’ve got Madeleine here all the time.”
“That I do, Vikram. That I do.”
“Could you really hear us?”
“Nah. I’m just giving you shit.”
“Don’t say anything to Alicia. She’d be so embarrassed! Promise?”
“Your operatic secret is safe with me,” Leonard said.
By ten o’clock, however, the mental fog began to move in. Leonard got a headache. His ankles were so swollen from water retention that he felt like Godzilla stomping back and forth from the 30-degrees room. Later, taking a well comb out of a tray, Leonard’s hand trembled, creating bubbles in the gel, and he had to throw the tray out and start all over.
He was having GI troubles, too. Taking his pills with coffee on an empty stomach had been a bad idea. Not wanting to stink up the lab bathroom, Leonard went back to his apartment at lunchtime, relieved to find that Madeleine had already left to pick up her mother and sister. He shut himself in the john with The Atrocity Exhibition, hoping to be quick, but the propulsive session made him feel so befouled that he stripped down and took a shower. Afterward, instead of redonning his nice clothes, he put on shorts and a T-shirt and tied a bandanna around his head. He was facing more time in the 30-degrees room and he wanted to be comfortable. He stuck a can of Skoal into one tube sock and heavy-footed it back to the lab.
Madeleine brought her mom and sister by in the afternoon. Phyllida was both more formal and less intimidating than he expected. Her Brahmin accent, the likes of which Leonard hadn’t heard outside a 1930s newsreel, was truly astonishing. For the first ten minutes, as he was showing her around the lab, he kept thinking that she was putting it on. The entire experience was like receiving a visit from Her Majesty. Phyllida was all hairdo and handbag, full of high-pitched interrogatives, and eager to put her eye to a microscope and be informed of her subject’s latest scientific work. Leonard was pleased to discover that Phyllida was smart, and even had a sense of humor. He went into geek mode, explaining the particularities of yeast, and, for a moment, he felt like a real biologist.
The difficult part of the meeting was with the sister. Despite Madeleine’s insistence that her family was “normal” and “happy,” the vibe Leonard got from Alwyn suggested otherwise. The hostility coming off her was as easy to see as bromophenol blue dye. Her puffy freckled face had the same ingredients as Madeleine’s, only mixed in the wrong proportions. She’d clearly suffered from being the less pretty sister all her life. She looked bored by everything he said, and in physical discomfort. Leonard was relieved when Madeleine took Alwyn and Phyllida away.
Overall, he thought that the visit had gone