The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [86]
The memory of the Bachelorette’s Survival Kit came back to Madeleine now, in October, as she stood at the small airport in Provincetown, waiting for Phyllida and Alwyn to arrive from Boston. The night before, unexpectedly, Phyllida had telephoned with the news that Alwyn had left her husband, Blake, and that she, Phyllida, had flown up to Boston to try to intervene. She’d found Alwyn staying at the Ritz Hotel, maxing out her joint AmEx card and messengering bottles of mother’s milk to the house in Beverly where she’d left her six-month-old, Richard, in the care of his father. Having failed to persuade Alwyn to return home, Phyllida had decided to bring her to Cape Cod in the hope that Madeleine could talk some sense into her. “Ally only agreed to come for the day,” Phyllida said. “She doesn’t want us ganging up on her. We’re coming in the morning and leaving in the afternoon.”
“What am I supposed to tell her?” Madeleine had said.
“Tell her what you think. She listens to you.”
“Why doesn’t Daddy talk to her?”
“He has. It ended in a shouting match. I’m at my wit’s end, Maddy. You don’t have to do anything. Just be your sensible, reasonable self.”
Hearing that, Madeleine almost wanted to laugh. She was desperately in love with a boy who’d been hospitalized, twice, for manic depression. For the last four months, instead of focusing on her “career,” she’d been nursing Leonard back to health, cooking his meals and cleaning his clothes, calming his anxieties and cheering him out of his frequent low moods. She’d been putting up with the serious side effects brought on by his new, higher dosage of lithium. No doubt largely due to all this, Madeleine had found herself, one night at the end of August, kissing Mitchell Grammaticus outside Chumley’s on Bedford Street, kissing him and enjoying it, before fleeing back to Providence and Leonard’s sickbed. The last thing she felt herself to be was sensible or reasonable. She had just started living like a grown-up and she’d never felt more vulnerable, frightened, or confused in her life.
After she moved out of her apartment on Benefit Street, in June, Madeleine had stayed at Leonard’s place, alone, until he got out of the hospital. She felt excited to be entrusted with his things. She played his Arvo Pärt records on the stereo, lying on the couch and listening with closed eyes exactly the way Leonard did. She flipped through his books, reading his marginalia. Next to dense passages by Nietzsche or Hegel, Leonard drew faces, either smiling or frowning, or just put an “!” At night she slept in one of Leonard’s shirts. Everything in the apartment had been left exactly as it was when Leonard was taken to the hospital. There was an open notebook on the floor, in which it appeared that Leonard had been trying to figure out how long his money would hold out. The bathtub was full of newspapers. Sometimes, the emptiness of the apartment made Madeleine want to cry for all it suggested about Leonard’s aloneness in the world. Not a picture of his parents or sister anywhere. Then one morning, moving a book, she found a photograph lying underneath. It was one he’d taken of her on their first trip to the Cape, showing her lying on a motel bed, reading and eating a Klondike bar.
After three days, unable to bear the filth a minute longer, she broke down and began cleaning. At Star Market, she bought a mop, a mop bucket, a pair of rubber gloves, and an assortment of cleansers. She knew she was setting a bad precedent even while she was doing it. She mopped the floor, dumping buckets of black water down the toilet. She went through seven rolls of paper towels, wiping crud off the bathroom floor. She threw out the mildewed shower curtain and bought a new one, bright pink for revenge. She tossed everything from the refrigerator and scrubbed the shelves. After stripping Leonard’s mattress, she balled up the sheets,