The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [174]
The secretary at Kelly’s office said that “Ms. Traub” was on the other line and asked if Madeleine wanted to be put on hold. Madeleine said she’d wait.
In the year since graduation, while Madeleine had been on the Cape, Kelly had been pursuing an acting career with limited success. She’d had a small part in an original one-act, staged over a single weekend in a church basement in Hell’s Kitchen, and had also appeared in an outdoor performance piece by a Norwegian artist that involved semi-nudity and paid nothing. In order to support herself, Kelly had gone to work at her father’s real estate company on the Upper West Side. The job was flexible, paid reasonably well, and allowed her plenty of time to get to auditions. It also made her the perfect person to call if you needed an apartment near Columbia.
After another minute, Kelly’s voice came on the line.
“It’s me,” Madeleine said.
“Maddy, hi! I’m glad you called.”
“I call every day.”
“Yeah, but today I’ve got the perfect place for you. Are you ready? ‘Riverside Drive. Prewar one-bedroom. Hudson River view. Office possible second bedroom. Available August first.’ You have to come see it today or it’ll be gone.”
“Today?” Madeleine said doubtfully.
“It’s not my listing. I made the agent promise not to show it until tomorrow.”
Madeleine wasn’t sure she could do it. She’d gone apartment-hunting in the city three times in the past week already. Since it wasn’t a good idea to leave Leonard alone, she’d had to ask Phyllida to stay with him each time. Phyllida claimed she didn’t mind this, but Madeleine knew that it made her mother nervous.
On the other hand, the apartment sounded ideal. “What’s the cross street?” she asked.
“Seventy-seventh,” Kelly said. “You’re five blocks from Central Park. Five stops to Columbia. Easy to get to Penn Station, too, which you said you wanted.”
“That’s perfect.”
“Plus, if you come up today, I’ll take you to a party.”
“A party?” Madeleine said. “I remember parties.”
“It’s at Dan Schneider’s. Right by my office. There’ll be a ton of Brown people, so you can reconnect.”
“First let’s see if I can even come up.”
The potential obstacle was no mystery to either of them. After a moment Kelly asked in a quieter voice, “How’s Leonard?”
This was difficult to answer. Madeleine sat in Alton’s desk chair, casting her eyes to the white pines at the end of the yard. According to Leonard’s latest doctor—not the French psychiatrist, Dr. Lamartine, who’d taken care of him in Monaco, but the new specialist at Penn, Dr. Wilkins—Leonard didn’t have a “pronounced risk of suicidality.” This didn’t mean that he wasn’t suicidal, only that his risk was relatively low. Low enough, anyway, not to warrant his being hospitalized (though this was subject to change). The previous week, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, Alton and Madeleine had driven down to Philadelphia to meet with Wilkins alone, in his office at the Penn Medical Center. Madeleine had come away from the experience feeling that Wilkins was like any other knowledgeable, well-intentioned expert, an economist, for example, who made predictions based on available data, but whose conclusions were by no means definitive. She’d asked every question she could think of about possible warning signs and preventative measures. She’d listened to Wilkins’s judicious but unsatisfactory answers. And then she’d driven back to Prettybrook and resumed living and sleeping with her new husband, wondering every time he left the room if he was going to do violence to himself.
“Leonard’s the same,” she said finally.
“Well, you should come up and see this apartment,” Kelly said. “Come at six and then we can go to this party. Just come for an hour. It’ll cheer you up.”
“I’ll see. I’ll call you later.”
In the bathroom, a fresh-mown-grass smell drifted