The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [87]
A few leaves on the ficus tree were beginning to turn brown. Feeling the soil, Madeleine found it dry. She mentioned this to Leonard during visiting hours one day.
“You can water my tree,” he said.
“No way. The last time you gave me so much grief.”
“You have permission to water my tree.”
“That doesn’t sound like a request, though.”
“Will you please water my ficus tree for me?”
She watered the tree. In the afternoons, when the sun came through the front window, she pulled it into the light and misted the leaves.
Every afternoon, she went down to the hospital to see Leonard.
The doctor had adjusted Leonard’s medication, eliminating his facial tic, and this alone made him seem much improved. He talked mainly about all the drugs he was on, their uses and contraindications. Saying their names seemed to calm him, as though he were uttering incantations: lorazepam, diazepam, chlorpromazine, chlordiazepoxide, haloperidol. Madeleine couldn’t keep them straight. She wasn’t sure if Leonard was taking these drugs or other people in the unit were. By this time he was well versed in the clinical histories of most of his fellow patients. They treated him like an intern, discussing their cases with him, asking for information about the drugs they were taking. Leonard operated in the hospital the same way he did at school. He was a font of information: the answer man. Every now and then, he had a bad day. Madeleine would enter the dayroom to find him sullen, full of despair about not having graduated and concerned about his ability to handle his duties at Pilgrim Lake: the usual list of complaints. He repeated them over and over.
Leonard hoped to stay in the hospital only a couple of weeks. But in the end he was there for twenty-two days. On the day of his release, in late June, Madeleine drove downtown to pick him up in her new car, a Saab convertible with twelve thousand miles on it. The car was a graduation present from her parents. “Even though we didn’t get to see you graduate,” Alton joked, discussing Madeleine’s disappearance that day. Among the throng of parents outside the Van Wickle gates, Alton and Phyllida had waited for Madeleine to march by; when she hadn’t, they thought they’d somehow missed her. After having searched for her on College Street, they’d tried calling her apartment, but got no answer. Finally, they stopped by and left a note for her, saying that they were worried and had decided not to go back to Prettybrook “as planned.” Instead, they were going to wait for her in the lobby of the Biltmore, which was where Madeleine found them that afternoon. She told them that she’d missed the march because Kelly Traub, with whom she’d been walking, had fallen and sprained her ankle, and she’d had to help her get to Health Services. Madeleine wasn’t sure if her parents believed her, but, relieved that she was all right, they hadn’t pressed her about it. Instead, Alton had called a few days later to instruct Madeleine to go out and buy herself a car. “Used,” he stipulated. “One or two years old. That way you escape a lot of the depreciation.” Madeleine had done as instructed, finding the convertible in the Pro-Jo classifieds. It was white, with fawn-colored bucket seats, and as she waited outside the hospital entrance, Madeleine put the top down so that Leonard could see her as the nurse brought him down in a wheelchair.
“Nice ride,” he said, getting in.
They hugged for a long time, Madeleine sniffling, until Leonard pulled away.
“Let’s get out of here. I’ve had enough of this place.”
For the rest of the summer Leonard was touchingly fragile. He spoke in the softest of tones. He watched baseball on TV, holding Madeleine’s hand.
“You know what paradise means?” he asked.
“It doesn’t mean ‘paradise’?”
“It means ‘walled garden.’ From the Arabic. That’s what a baseball stadium