The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [64]
As soon as Madeleine stepped in, the light made her wince. The brightness of the dayroom seemed itself a therapy against depression. No shadows were allowed. Madeleine squinted, looking around at the Formica tables where robed and slippered patients sat alone or in the company of shoe-wearing visitors. A TV was bolted to an elevated rack in one corner, the volume loud. Evenly spaced windows gave views of city roofs jutting and dropping toward the bay.
Leonard was sitting in a chair fifteen feet away. A guy with glasses was leaning forward, speaking to him.
“So, Leonard,” the guy with the glasses was saying. “You manufactured a little mental illness to get in here and get some help. And now you’re in and you’ve got some help, and you realize maybe you’re not so bad off as you thought.”
Leonard appeared to be listening intently to what the guy was saying. He wasn’t wearing a hospital robe, as Madeleine expected, but his normal clothes—work shirt, carpenter’s pants, blue bandanna on his head. All that was missing were his Timberlands. Leonard had on open-toed hospital slippers, with socks. His stubble was longer than usual.
“You had some issues that weren’t being addressed by your therapy,” the guy with the glasses said, “and so you had to exaggerate them in order to bring them into a bigger arena and have them dealt with.” Whoever the guy was, he seemed tremendously satisfied by his interpretation. He sat back, looking at Leonard as if expecting applause.
Madeleine took this opportunity to come forward.
Seeing her, Leonard rose from his chair.
“Madeleine. Hey,” he said softly. “Thanks for coming.”
And so it was established: the gravity of Leonard’s predicament outweighed the fact that they’d broken up. Nullified it. Which meant that she could hug him, if she wanted.
She didn’t, however. She was worried that physical contact might be against the rules.
“Do you know Henry?” Leonard said, keeping up the formalities. “Madeleine, Henry. Henry, Madeleine.”
“Welcome to visiting hours,” Henry said. He had a deep voice, the voice of authority. He was wearing a Madras jacket that pinched under the arms and a white shirt.
The terrible brightness of the room had the effect of making the floor-to-ceiling windows reflective, even though it was daylight outside. Madeleine saw the ghost image of herself looking at an equally ghostly Leonard. One young woman who had no visitors—and who was in a bathrobe, with wild, uncombed hair—was circling the room, muttering to herself.
“Nice place, huh?” Leonard said.
“It seems O.K.”
“It’s a state hospital. This is where people go if they don’t have the money to go to somewhere like Silverlake.”
“Leonard is a little disappointed,” Henry explained, “not to be in the company of first-class depressives.”
Madeleine didn’t know who Henry was or why he was here. His jocularity seemed, at the least, insensitive, if not downright malicious. But Leonard didn’t seem bothered. He took in everything Henry said with a disciple-like neediness. This, and the way he occasionally sucked on his upper lip, were the only things that seemed off about him.
“The flip side of self-loathing is grandiosity,” Leonard observed.
“Right,” Henry said. “So if you’re going to crack up, you want to crack up like Robert Lowell.”
The choice of the phrase crack up struck Madeleine as less than ideal as well. She resented Henry for it. At the same time, the fact that Henry was belittling Leonard’s illness suggested that maybe it wasn’t so serious.
Maybe Henry was handling this the right way. She was eager for any pointers. But levity was beyond her. She felt painfully awkward and tongue-tied.
Madeleine had never been close to anyone with a verifiable mental illness. She instinctively avoided unstable people. As uncharitable as this attitude was, it was part and parcel of being a Hanna, of being a positive, privileged, sheltered, exemplary person. If there was one thing Madeleine Hanna was not, it was mentally unstable. That