The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [88]
“Maybe you should watch golf,” Madeleine said.
“Even greener.”
The lithium made him thirsty all the time, and sporadically nauseated. He developed a mild tremor in his right hand. During his weeks in the hospital, Leonard had gained almost fifteen pounds, and he continued putting on weight all through July and August. His face and body looked puffy and there was a roll of fat, like a buffalo’s hump, on the back of his neck. Along with his thirst, Leonard had to pee constantly. He had stomachaches and suffered bouts of diarrhea. Worst of all, the lithium made his mind feel sluggish. Leonard claimed that there was an “upper register” that he couldn’t reach anymore, intellectually. To counteract this, he chewed even more tobacco, and started smoking cigarettes as well as smelly little cigars for which he’d developed a fondness in the hospital. His clothes reeked of smoke. His mouth tasted like an ashtray and of something else, too, a metallic chemical taste. Madeleine didn’t like it.
As a result of all this, a side effect of the side effects, Leonard’s libido decreased. After making love twice or three times a day from the excitement of being reunited, they slowed down, and then nearly ceased having sex altogether. Madeleine wasn’t sure what to do. Should she pay more attention to Leonard’s problem, or less? She’d never been particularly hands-on, in bed. Life hadn’t required it. Guys hadn’t seemed to care, or to notice, being so hands-on themselves. One night, she attacked the problem as she might a drop shot on the tennis court: she ran full out, getting there seemingly in time, then bent low and flicked her return—which hit the tape and fell back, dead, on her side of the court.
She didn’t try again after that. She stayed back, playing her usual baseline game.
All of this might have bothered Madeleine more if Leonard’s neediness hadn’t appealed to her so much. There was something pleasing about having her big Saint Bernard all to herself. He didn’t want to go out even to a movie anymore. Now he was interested only in his doggy bed, his doggy bowl, and his mistress. He laid his head on her lap, wanted to be petted. He wagged his tail whenever she came in. Always so demonstrably there, her big fuzz buddy, her big old slobbery fuzzeroo.
Neither of them had a job. The long summer days passed slowly. With the student population gone, College Hill was somnolent and green. Leonard kept his medications in his Dopp kit under the bathroom sink. He always closed the door when taking them. Twice a week, he went to see his shrink, Bryce Ellis, and returned from these appointments emotionally abraded and exhausted. He flopped onto the mattress for another hour or two, and finally got up to put on a record.
“You know how old Einstein was when he proposed the special theory of relativity?” he asked Madeleine one day.
“How old?”
“Twenty-six.”
“So?”
“Most scientists do their best work in their early twenties. I’m twenty-two, almost twenty-three. I’m in my intellectual prime right now. Except that I have to take a drug every morning and every night that makes me stupid.”
“It doesn’t make you stupid, Leonard.”
“Yes, it does.”
“It doesn’t seem very scientific to me,” she said, “to decide you’ll never be a great scientist just because you haven’t discovered anything by the time you’re twenty-two.”
“Those are the facts,” Leonard said. “Forget the drug. Even normal, I’m not remotely on a trajectory to make a scientific breakthrough.”
“Say you don’t make a breakthrough,” Madeleine said. “How do you know you won’t come up with some tiny breakthrough that ends up benefiting people? I mean, maybe you won’t figure out that space is curved. Maybe you’ll find a way to make cars run on water so there won’t be any pollution.”
“Inventing a hydrogen engine would constitute a major breakthrough,” Leonard said gloomily, lighting a cigarette.
“O.K., but not every scientist was young. What about Galileo? How old was he? What