The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [149]
He sat on the couch. Through the window he could see the night surf, the crests of waves catching the moonlight. The black water was telling him things. It was telling him that he had come from nothing and would return to nothing. He wasn’t as smart as he’d thought. He was going to fail at Pilgrim Lake. Even if he managed to hold on to his fellowship until May, he wasn’t going to be asked back. He didn’t have money for grad school, or even to rent an apartment. He didn’t know what else to do with his life. The fear he’d grown up with, the fear of not having enough money, which no amount of winning scholarships and fellowships had taken away, returned with undiminished force. Madeleine’s immunity from want, he realized now, had always been part of her attraction for him. He’d thought he didn’t care about her money until this moment, when he realized that, if she left, her money would leave with her. Leonard didn’t believe for a minute that Madeleine’s mother’s objection to him had only to do with his manic depression. The manic depression was just the more allowable of her prejudices. She couldn’t have been thrilled that, instead of being Old Money, he was just Old Portland, or that he looked to her like someone in a motorcycle gang, or that he smelled of cheap gas station cigars.
He didn’t go after Madeleine. He had acted sufficiently weak and desperate already. It was time now, to the extent possible, to show some backbone and power up. This he achieved by collapsing slowly sideways until he was curled fetally across the sofa.
Leonard wasn’t thinking about Madeleine, or Phyllida, or Kilimnik. As he lay on the couch, he thought of his parents, those two planet-size beings who orbited his entire existence. And then he was off, back into the eternally recurring past. If you grew up in a house where you weren’t loved, you didn’t know there was an alternative. If you grew up with emotionally stunted parents, who were unhappy in their marriage and prone to visit that unhappiness on their children, you didn’t know they were doing this. It was just your life. If you had an accident, at the age of four, when you were supposed to be a big boy, and were later served a plate of feces at the dinner table—if you were told to eat it because you liked it, didn’t you, you must like it or you wouldn’t have so many accidents—you didn’t know that this wasn’t happening in the other houses in your neighborhood. If your father left your family, and disappeared, never to return, and your mother seemed to resent you, as you grew older, for being the same sex as your father, you had no one to turn to. In all these cases, the damage was done before you knew you were damaged. The worst part was that, as the years passed, these memories became, in the way you kept them in a secret box in your head, taking them out every so often to turn them over and over, something like dear possessions. They were the key to your unhappiness. They were the evidence that life wasn’t fair. If you weren’t a lucky child, you didn’t know you weren’t lucky until you got older. And then it was all you ever thought about.
Hard to say how much time passed as Leonard sat on the couch. But after a long while, a light came into his eyes, and he suddenly sat up. Apparently his brain was not completely useless, because he’d just had a brilliant idea. An idea of how to keep Madeleine, defeat Phyllida, and outwit Kilimnik all at once. He jumped up from the sofa. As he made his way to the bathroom he already felt five pounds lighter. It was late. It was time to take his lithium. He opened the bottle and shook out four 300-milligram pills. He was supposed to take three of them. But he took only two. He took 600 milligrams instead of his usual 900, and then he put the rest of the pills back into the bottle and replaced the lid …
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