The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [57]
Leonard’s dark moods had always been part of his appeal. It was a relief to hear him enumerate his frailties, his misgivings about the American formula for success. So many people at college were jacked up on ambition, possessors of steroidal egos, clever but cutthroat, diligent but insensitive, shiny but dull, that everyone felt compelled to be upbeat, down with the program, all systems firing, when everyone knew, in his or her heart, that this wasn’t how they really felt. People doubted themselves and feared the future. They were intimidated, scared, and so talking to Leonard, who was all these things times ten, made people feel less bad about themselves, and less alone. Leonard’s calls were like telephone therapy. Plus, he was way worse off than everybody else! He was Dr. Freud and Dr. Doom, father confessor and humble penitent, shrink and shrunk. He put on no show. He wasn’t a fake. He spoke honestly and listened with compassion. At their best, Leonard’s phone conversations were a kind of art and a form of ministry.
And yet, Auerbach said, there was a change to Leonard’s pessimism about this time. It deepened; it purified. It lost its previous comedic habiliments, its air of shtick, and became unadulterated, lethal, pure despair. Whatever Leonard, who’d always been “depressed,” had had before, it wasn’t depression. This was depression. This monotone monologue delivered by an unbathed guy lying on his back in the middle of the floor. This unmodulated recitation of his young life’s failures, failures that in Leonard’s mind already foredoomed him to a life of ever-diminishing returns. “Where’s Leonard?” he kept asking, on the phone. Where was the guy who could write a twenty-page paper on Spinoza with his left hand while playing chess with his right? Where was the professorial Leonard, purveyor of obscure information on the history of type in Flanders versus Wallonia, deliverer of disquisitions on the literary merits of sixteen Ghanaian, Kenyan, and Ivory Coast novelists, all of whom had been published in a sixties-era paperback series called “Out of Africa” that Leonard had once found at the Strand and purchased for fifty cents apiece and read every volume of? “Where’s Leonard?” Leonard asked. Leonard didn’t know.
Slowly it began to dawn on Leonard’s friends that it didn’t matter whom Leonard called on the phone. He forgot who was on the other end and, whenever one person managed to hang up, Leonard called somebody else and picked up right where he’d left off. And people were busy. They had other things to do. So gradually his friends began to make up excuses when Leonard called. They said they had a class or a meeting with a professor. They minimized talking time and, after a while, stopped answering the phone altogether. Auerbach himself had done this. He felt guilty about it now, which was why he had called Madeleine. “We knew Leonard was in bad shape,” he said, “but we didn’t know he was in that bad a shape.”
All this led up to the day Auerbach’s phone rang around five in the afternoon. Suspecting that it was Leonard, he didn’t pick up. But the phone kept ringing and ringing and finally Auerbach couldn’t stand it anymore and answered.
“Ken?” Leonard said in a quavering tone. “They’re giving me an incomplete, Ken. I’m not going to graduate.”
“Who says?”
“Prof. Nalbandian just called. He says there’s no time for me to make up the work I’ve missed. So he’s giving me an incomplete.”
This didn’t come as a surprise to Auerbach. But the vulnerability of Leonard’s voice, the child-lost-in-the-woods cry of it, made Auerbach want to say something soothing. “That’s not so bad. He’s not flunking you.”
“That’s not the point, Ken,” Leonard said, aggrieved.