The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [146]
“How did it go?” Madeleine asked, leaning in for a kiss.
Leonard buckled his seat belt, pretending not to notice. “I was at therapy, Madeleine,” he answered coldly. “Therapy doesn’t ‘go.’”
“I was just asking.”
“No, you weren’t. You want a progress report. ‘Are you getting any better, Leonard? Will you stop being a zombie now, Leonard?’”
A moment passed while Madeleine absorbed this. “I can see how you might take it that way, but that’s not how I meant it. Really.”
“Just get me out of here,” Leonard said. “I hate Boston. I’ve always hated Boston. Every time I’ve ever been in Boston something bad has happened to me.”
Neither of them spoke for a while. After leaving the hospital, Madeleine got onto Storrow Drive, passing along the Charles. It was the long way around, but Leonard didn’t feel like telling her.
“Am I not supposed to care how you’re doing?” she said.
“You can care how I’m doing,” Leonard replied in a quieter voice.
“So?”
“So Perlmann’s not lowering my dosage. We’re still waiting for my system to acclimate.”
“Well, I learned something interesting today,” Madeleine said brightly. “I was in a bookstore and I found this article on manic depression and possible cures they’re working on.” She turned to smile at him. “So I bought it. It’s in the backseat.”
Leonard made no move to get it. “Cures,” he said.
“Cures and new treatments. I didn’t read the whole thing yet.”
Leonard lay his head back, sighing. “They don’t even understand the mechanism of manic depression yet. Our knowledge about the brain is vanishingly tiny.”
“They say that in the article,” Madeleine said. “But they’re starting to understand a lot more. The article’s about the latest research.”
“Are you listening to me? There’s no way, without knowing the cause of an illness, that you can come up with a cure.”
Madeleine was fighting her way across two crowded lanes of traffic, trying to reach the expressway entrance. In a determinedly cheerful voice, she said, “I’m sorry, sweetie, but part of being manic-depressive means you’re, you know, a little depressive. Sometimes you get down on things before you know anything about them.”
“Whereas you’re an optimist who never heard of a cure you didn’t believe in.”
“Just read the article,” Madeleine said.
After the intersection with Route 3, they stopped for gas. On the hunch that Madeleine, not wanting to cause more friction, would be lenient with him for smoking in the car, Leonard bought a pack of Backwoods. When they were cruising again, he lit one up, cracking the window. It was the one good thing that had happened all day.
By the time they reached the Cape, his mood had improved somewhat. Trying to be nicer, he reached into the backseat and got the magazine, squinting at it in the light from the dashboard. But then he cried out:
“Scientific American! Are you kidding me?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“This isn’t science. It’s journalism. It’s not even peer-reviewed!”
“I don’t see how that matters.”
“You wouldn’t. Because you don’t know anything about science.”
“I was just trying to help.”
“You know how you can help? Drive,” Leonard said angrily. He opened the window and tossed the magazine out.
“Leonard!”
“Drive!”
They didn’t speak the rest of the way back to Pilgrim Lake. When they got out of the car, in front of their building, Leonard tried to put his arm around Madeleine, but she shook it off and went up to the apartment alone.
He didn’t follow her. After his absence, he was due back at the laboratory, and it was best if they were apart for a while.
He mounted the boardwalk that led through the dunes, past the sculpture garden, to the genetics lab. It was dark out now, the compound’s conglomeration of buildings silvered under a half-moon. There was a chill in the air. The wind brought with it the mouse-cage smell of the Animal House off to his right.