The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [89]
“Can we not talk about this anymore?” Leonard said. “I’m getting depressed.”
This made Madeleine quiet.
Leonard took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled loudly. “Not depressed depressed,” he said, after a moment.
As dedicated as Madeleine was to nursing Leonard, as satisfying as it was to see him getting better, she sometimes needed to get out of the stifling studio. To escape the humidity, she went to the air-conditioned library. She played tennis with two guys from the Brown tennis team. Some days, not wanting to go back to the apartment, Madeleine walked around the empty campus, trying her best to think about herself for a few minutes. She stopped in to see Professor Saunders, only to be troubled at the sight of the elderly scholar wearing shorts and sandals. She browsed the stacks at College Hill Bookstore, virtuously selecting used copies of Little Dorrit and The Vicar of Bullhampton, which she fully intended to read. Now and then she treated herself to an ice cream cone and sat on the steps of Hospital Trust, watching other young couples going by, holding hands or kissing. She finished her ice cream and started back to the apartment, where Leonard was waiting.
All through July his condition remained delicate. By August, however, Leonard appeared to be turning the corner. Every now and then, he sounded like his old self. One morning, making toast, Leonard held up a package of Land O’Lakes butter. “I’ve got a question,” he said. “Who was the first person who noticed that the knees of the Land O’Lakes squaw look like breasts? Some guy in Terre Haute is having breakfast, and he looks at the butter package and thinks, ‘Check out those knees.’ But that’s only part of the story. After this insight, some other guy had to decide to cut out another pair of knees, from the back of the package, and to paste these behind the butter package the squaw’s holding in front of her chest, and then to cut around the edges of the butter package so that it flips up like she’s flashing her breasts. All this happened with no documentation whatsoever. The principals have been lost to history.”
They started leaving the apartment. One day they drove to Federal Hill to have pizza. Afterward, Leonard insisted that they go into a cheese shop. It was dark inside, the shades drawn. The smell was a presence in the room. Behind the counter, an old white-haired man was busy doing something they couldn’t see. “It’s eighty degrees out,” Leonard whispered, “and this guy won’t open the windows. That’s because he’s got a perfect bacterial mix in here and he doesn’t want to let it out. I read a paper where these chemists from Cornell identified two hundred different strains of bacteria in a tub of rennet. It’s an aerobic reaction, so whatever’s in the air affects the flavor. Italians know all that instinctively. This guy doesn’t even know what he knows.”
Leonard stepped up to the counter. “Vittorio, how are you?”
The old man turned and squinted. “Hello, my friend! Where you been? I haven’t seen you long time.”
“I was under the weather, Vittorio.”
“Nothing serious, I hope. Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know. I got problems of my own.”
“What do you recommend today?”
“What do you mean ‘recommend.’ Cheese! Same as always. The best. Who’s your girlfriend?”
“This is Madeleine.”
“You like cheese, young lady? Here, taste. Take some home with you. And get rid of this guy. He’s no good.”
Yet another revelation about Leonard: he was friends with the old Italian cheese maker on Federal Hill. Maybe that was where he’d been going when Madeleine used to see him waiting for the bus in the rain. To visit his friend Vittorio.
At the end of August, they packed up their things, putting boxes in storage and cramming the rest into the trunk and backseat of the Saab, and lit out for the Cape. It was hot, in the nineties, and they drove with the top down all the way out of Rhode Island. The wind made it difficult to talk or listen to the stereo, however, so they put the top up as they crossed into Massachusetts. Madeleine had a Pure Prairie League