The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [63]
“No, not me,” Madeleine answered nearly inaudibly, looking out the window. The driver took the message and was silent the rest of the way.
As the cab crossed the river, Madeleine took off her cap and gown. The interior of the car smelled of air freshener, something noninterventionist, like vanilla. Madeleine had always liked air fresheners. She’d never thought anything about it until Leonard had told her that it indicated a willingness, on her part, to avoid unpleasant realities. “It isn’t like the room doesn’t smell bad,” he’d said. “It’s just that you can’t smell it.” She’d thought she’d caught him in a logical inconsistency, and had cried out, “How can a room smell bad if it smells nice?” And Leonard had replied, “Oh, it still smells bad all right. You’re mistaking properties with substance.”
These were the kinds of conversations she had with Leonard. They were part of why she liked him so much. You could be going anywhere, doing anything, and an air freshener would lead to a little symposium.
She wondered now, though, if his many-branching thoughts had in fact led straight to where he was now.
The taxi pulled up to a hospital that called to mind a badly aging Holiday Inn. Eight stories tall, glass-fronted, the white building looked soiled, as though it had absorbed the filth from the adjoining streets. The concrete urns flanking the entrance contained no flowers, only cigarette butts. A spidery figure suggestive of blue-collar hard luck and work-related illness was propelling himself with a walker through the perfectly functioning automatic doors.
In the atrium-like lobby, Madeleine made two wrong turns before finding the front desk. The receptionist took one look at her before asking, “You here for Bankhead?”
Madeleine was taken aback. Then she glanced around the waiting room and saw that she was the only white person there.
“Yes.”
“Can’t let you go up yet. Too many people up there already. Soon as someone comes down, I’ll let you up.”
This was another surprise. Leonard’s emotional collapse, indeed his entire self-presentation as a nonperforming adult, wasn’t consistent with a surplus of sickroom visitors. Madeleine was jealous of the unknown company.
She signed in and took a seat facing the elevators. The carpet bore a mood-elevating design of blue squares, each framing a child’s crayon drawing: a rainbow, a unicorn, a happy family. People had brought in take-out food to eat while they waited, foam containers of jerk chicken and barbecued brisket. In the chair opposite her, a toddler was napping.
Madeleine gazed at the carpet without benefit.
After twenty long minutes, the elevator doors opened and two young white guys got off. Reassuringly, both were male. One guy was tall with B-52 hair, the other short, wearing a T-shirt with the famous photograph of Einstein sticking out his tongue.
“He seemed good to me,” the first guy said. “He seemed better.”
“That was better? Jesus, I need a cigarette.”
They passed by without noticing Madeleine.
As soon as they were gone, she went up to the receptionist.
“Fourth floor,” the woman said, handing her a pass.
The large-capacity elevator, built to accommodate stretchers and medical equipment, rose slowly, with Madeleine its single occupant. Up past Obstetrics and Rheumatology, past Osteology and Oncology, beyond all the ills that could happen to the human body, none of which had happened to Leonard, the elevator carried her to the Psychiatric Unit, where what happened to people happened in the head. She’d been prepared, by the movies, for a site of harsh incarceration. But except for a red button that opened the double doors from the outside (a button that had no corresponding release inside), there was little sign of confinement. The corridor was pale green, the linoleum highly polished, squeaky underfoot. A food cart stood against a wall. The few patients visible in their rooms—mental patients, Madeleine couldn’t help thinking—were passing time as all convalescents would, reading, dozing, staring out the window.
At the nursing