The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [193]
It was a little before five p.m. About two dozen other people were waiting for the train.
Madeleine stuck her head into the waiting room door. Leonard was sitting on a bench, staring at the floor, his eyes dull. He was still wearing the black T-shirt and shorts but he’d tied his hair back into a ponytail. She called his name.
Leonard looked up and slowly got to his feet. He’d taken forever to get out of the house and into the car and Madeleine had worried they might miss their train.
The train doors had already opened before Leonard emerged onto the platform and followed Madeleine into the nearest car. They chose a two-person seat, so they wouldn’t have to sit with anyone. Madeleine took a well-thumbed copy of Daniel Deronda out of her bag and settled back.
“Did you bring something to read?” she said.
Leonard shook his head. “I’ll just stare out at the beautiful landscape of New Jersey.”
“There are some nice parts of New Jersey,” Madeleine said.
“Legend has it,” Leonard said, staring.
The fifty-nine-minute train ride didn’t provide much support for this view. When they weren’t passing the backyards of subdivisions, they were rolling into another dying city, like Elizabeth, or Newark. The courtyard of a minimum-security prison backed up to the train tracks, the inmates wearing white uniforms like a convention of bakers. Near Secaucus, the pale green marshes began, surprisingly pretty if you didn’t raise your eyes to the surrounding smokestacks and loading docks.
They reached Penn Station at rush hour. Madeleine led Leonard away from the packed escalators to a less trafficked stairwell, where they climbed up to the lobby. A few minutes later they stepped into the heat and light of Eighth Avenue. It was just after six.
As they joined the taxi line, Leonard eyed the nearby buildings, as though worried they were going to topple on him.
“‘New York,’” he said. “‘Just like I pictured it.’”
It was his last little joke. When they got in a cab and were heading uptown, Leonard asked the driver if he could please turn on the air-conditioning. The driver said it was broken. Leonard rolled down the window, hanging his head out like a dog. For a moment, Madeleine regretted bringing him along.
Her premonition in the Casino de Monte-Carlo had been more accurate than she even knew at the time. She’d already become the trembling wife, the ever-watchful custodian. She’d become “married to manic depression.” It wasn’t news to Madeleine that Leonard could kill himself while she was sleeping. It had already crossed her mind that the swimming pool might invite oblivion. Of the twenty-one signs on the list Wilkins had given her, Madeleine had marked a check next to ten of them: change in sleeping patterns; unwillingness to communicate; neglect of work; neglect of appearance; withdrawal from people/activities; perfectionism; restlessness; extreme boredom; depression; and change in personality. Among the warning signs Leonard didn’t exhibit were that he hadn’t attempted suicide before (though he’d thought about it), didn’t use drugs (at present), wasn’t accident prone, didn’t talk about wanting to die, and hadn’t been giving away his possessions. On the other hand, this morning, when Leonard had said that he no longer wanted to move to New York and referred to the apartment as “hers,” he’d sounded a lot like a person giving away his possessions. Leonard didn’t seem to care about the future anymore. He didn’t know what he was going to do. He didn’t want an office. He’d been wearing those black shorts for two weeks.
Ten warning signs out of twenty-one. Not very reassuring. But when she pointed this out to Dr. Wilkins, he’d said, “If Leonard didn’t have any warning signs, you wouldn’t be here. Our job is to reduce the number, little by little, to three or four. Maybe one or two. Over time I’m confident we can do that.”
“What about until then?” Madeleine asked.
“Until then we have