The Marriage Plot (38 page)

Like a drunk on a bender, Leonard had a blackout afterward. He woke up next to Lola Lopez in a state of utter collapse. Lola managed to get him up, however. She led him by the arm to Health Services, telling him not to worry, to hold on to her and that he’d be all right.

It seemed especially cruel, then, three days later, in the hospital, when the doctor came into the room to tell Leonard that he suffered from something that would never go away, something that could only be “managed,” as if managing, for an eighteen-year-old looking out on life, could be any life at all.

In September, when Madeleine and Leonard were newly arrived at Pilgrim Lake, the dune grass was a lovely shade of light green. It waved and bent as if the landscape were a painted Japanese screen. Saltwater rivulets trickled through the marshes, and scrub pines clustered together in discreet groves. The world reduced itself, here, to basic constituents—sand, sea, sky—keeping trees and flower species to a minimum.

As the summer people left and the weather turned colder, the purity of the landscape only increased. The dunes turned a shade of gray that matched the sky. The days grew noticeably shorter. It was the perfect environment for depression. It was dark when Leonard got up in the morning and dark when he returned from the lab. His neck was so fat he couldn’t button his shirt collars. The proof that lithium stabilized one’s mood was confirmed every time Leonard saw himself naked in the mirror and didn’t kill himself. He wanted to. He thought he had every right. But he couldn’t work up the requisite self-loathing.

This should have made him feel good, but feeling “good” was also out of reach. Both his highs and his lows were evened out, leaving him feeling as though he lived in two dimensions. He was on an increased daily dose of lithium, 1,800 milligrams, with correspondingly severe complications. When he complained to Dr. Perlmann at his weekly appointment at Mass General, an hour and a half away, the natty, shiny-headed psychiatrist always said the same thing: “Be patient.” Perlmann seemed more interested in Leonard’s life at Pilgrim Lake Lab than in the fact that his signature now looked like that of a ninety-year-old. Perlmann wanted to know what Dr. Malkiel was like. He wanted to hear gossip. If Leonard had stayed in Providence, under the care of Dr. Shieu, he would have already been on a lower dose, but now he was back to square one.

In the library at Pilgrim Lake, Leonard tried to learn more about the drug he was on. Reading at the pace of a second-grader, effectively moving his lips, Leonard learned that lithium salts had been used for mood disorders as far back as the nineteenth century. Then, largely because people couldn’t patent it to make money, the therapy had fallen out of favor. Lithium had been used to treat gout, hypertension, and heart disease. It had been the key ingredient in 7 Up (originally named Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda) until the 1950s. At the moment, clinical trials were under way to test lithium’s efficacy in treating Huntington’s chorea, Tourette’s syndrome, migraine and cluster headache, Ménière’s disease, and hypokalemic periodic paralysis. The drug companies had it the wrong way around. Instead of starting with an illness and developing a drug to treat it, they developed drugs and then tried to figure out what they were good for.

What Leonard knew about lithium without reading was that it made him torpid and fuzzy-brained. His mouth was always dry, no matter how much he drank, and tasted as if he were sucking on a steel screw. One of the reasons he chewed tobacco was to cover the metallic taste. Due to the tremors in his hands, he had no coordination (he couldn’t play Ping-Pong, anymore, or even catch a ball). And, though all his doctors insisted that the lithium wasn’t at fault, Leonard’s sex drive was much reduced. He wasn’t impotent or unable to perform; he just didn’t have a lot of interest. Probably this had to do with how unattractive and prematurely old the drug made him feel. At the Provincetown pharmacy, Leonard went shopping not only for razor blades but also for Mylanta and Preparation H. He was always coming out of the drugstore clutching a little plastic bag, scared the bag’s transparency would reveal the embarrassing product inside, and so holding it even tighter against his little titties in the Cape Cod wind. Leonard patronized the P-town pharmacy in order to avoid the convenience store at the lab, where he ran the risk of running into someone he knew. To keep Madeleine from going with him, he had to come up with an excuse, the most unassailable of which, of course, was his manic depression. He didn’t invoke it outright. He just mumbled that he
wanted to be alone
, and Madeleine backed off.

As a consequence of his physical and mental malfunctioning, there was another problem he was dealing with: the power had shifted in his relationship with Madeleine. Early on,
Madeleine
had been the needy one. She got jealous when Leonard talked to other girls at parties. She flashed warning signs of insecurity. Finally, she’d thrown in the towel completely and told him, “I love you.” In response, Leonard had acted cool and cerebral, figuring that by keeping Madeleine in doubt he could bind her to him more closely. But Madeleine surprised him. She broke up with him on the spot. Once Madeleine was gone, Leonard regretted the Roland Barthes incident. He castigated himself for being such a douche. He spent multiple sessions with Bryce examining his motivations. And though Bryce’s analysis of the situation—that Leonard was frightened of intimacy and so had self-protectively made fun of Madeleine’s avowal—was pretty much on the mark, that didn’t bring Madeleine back. Leonard missed her. He got depressed. Stupidly, he stopped taking his lithium, hoping to feel better. But all he felt was anxious. Anxious and depressed. He wore out the ear of every friend he had, talking incessantly about how much he missed Madeleine, how he wanted her back, and how he’d messed up the best relationship he’d ever had. Knowing that his friends were getting tired of hearing this, Leonard modulated his monologues, partly out of a storyteller’s instinct to vary a narrative and partly because, by then, his anxieties were multiplying. So he told his friends about his money worries and his health worries until he finally lost track of what he was saying and to whom he was saying it. Around this time Ken Auerbach had shown up, with two guys from security, and taken him to Health Services. And the really crazy thing was that, when he was transferred to the hospital the next day, Leonard was
pissed
. He was pissed at being admitted to the psych ward without enjoying the prior benefit of a total manic blowout. He should have been up for three nights running. He should have fucked eight chicks and snorted blow and done jelly shots off the stomach of a stripper named Moonstar. Instead, all Leonard had done was sit in his apartment, abusing his Rolodex, wearing out his telephonic welcome, and spiraling down until he ended in medical lockup with the other head cases.

By the time he got out, three weeks later, the power dynamics had completely reversed. Now
he
was the needy one. True, he had Madeleine back, which was a wonderful thing. But Leonard’s happiness was compromised by the constant fear of losing her again. His unsightliness threw Madeleine’s beauty into relief. Next to her in bed, he felt like a pudgy eunuch. Every hair on his thighs sprouted from an inflamed follicle. Sometimes, when Madeleine was asleep, Leonard would gently pull the covers off her to stare at her glowing, rosy skin. What was interesting about being the needy one was how much in love you felt. It was almost worth it. This dependency was what Leonard had guarded himself against feeling all his life, but he couldn’t do it anymore. He’d lost the ability to be an asshole. Now he was smitten, and it felt both tremendous and scary.

Madeleine had tried to brighten up his studio while he was in the hospital. She’d put new sheets on the bed and had hung curtains in the windows and a pink shower curtain. She’d scrubbed the floors and counters. She professed to be glad to be living with him and to be rid of Olivia and Abby. But during the long, hot summer, Leonard began to see why Madeleine might eventually tire of slumming it with her nearly penniless boyfriend. Whenever a roach scurried out of the toaster, she looked as though she was going to be sick. She wore sandals in the shower to protect herself from the mildew. The first week after Leonard was back, Madeleine stayed with him every day. But the week after that she began going out to the library or to see her old thesis advisor. Leonard didn’t like Madeleine to leave the apartment. He suspected the reason she went out wasn’t because she loved Jane Austen or Professor Saunders, but to get away from him. In addition to going to the library, Madeleine played tennis two or three times a week. One day, trying to convince her not to go, Leonard said that it was too hot out to play tennis. He suggested she go to an air-conditioned movie with him instead.

“I need some exercise,” Madeleine said.

“I’ll give you some exercise,” he boasted emptily.

“Not that kind.”

“How come you always play with guys?”

“Because guys can beat me. I need some competition.”

“If I said that, you’d call me sexist.”

“Look, if Chrissie Evert lived in Providence, I’d play
her
. But all the girls I know here stink.”

Leonard knew what he sounded like. He sounded like every drag of a girlfriend he’d ever had. In order to stop sounding that way, he pouted, and, in the following silence, Madeleine gathered her racquet and can of balls and left.

As soon as Madeleine was gone he leapt up and ran to the window. He watched her leave the building in her tennis whites, her hair tied back, a sweatband around the wrist of her serving arm.

There was something about tennis—its aristocratic rituals, the prim silence it enforced on its spectators, the pretentious insistence on saying “love” for zero and “deuce” for tied, the exclusivity of the court itself, where only two people were allowed to move freely, the palace-guard rigidity of the linesmen, and the slavish scurrying of the ball boys—that made it clearly a reproachable pastime. That Leonard couldn’t say this to Madeleine without making her angry suggested the depth of the social chasm between them. There was a public tennis court near his house in Portland, old and cracked, half-flooded most of the time. He and Godfrey used to go out there to smoke weed. That was as close as Leonard got to playing tennis. By contrast, for two solid weeks in June and July, Madeleine got up every morning to watch
Breakfast at Wimbledon
on her portable Trinitron, which she’d installed in Leonard’s apartment. From the mattress, Leonard groggily watched her nibble English muffins while she watched the matches. That was where Madeleine belonged: at Wimbledon, on Centre Court, curtseying for the queen.

He watched her watching Wimbledon. It made him happy to see her there. He didn’t want her to leave. If Madeleine left, he would be alone again, as he’d been growing up in a house with his family, as he was in his head and often in his dreams, and as he’d been in his room at the psych ward.

He barely remembered his first days at the hospital. They put him on Thorazine, an antipsychotic that knocked him out. He slept for fourteen hours. Before he was admitted, the head nurse had taken Leonard’s sharps from his overnight bag (his razor, his toenail clippers). She took away his belt. She asked him if he had any valuables, and Leonard handed over his wallet, containing six dollars.

He awoke in a small room, a single, without a phone or a TV. At first, it looked like a normal hospital room, but then he began to notice little differences. The bed frame and the hinges of the bedside tray were welded together, without screws or bolts that a patient might take apart and cut himself with. The hook on the door wasn’t fixed in place but attached to a bungee cord that stretched under excess weight, to prevent someone hanging himself on it. Leonard wasn’t allowed to close the door. There was no lock on the door, or on any doors in the unit, including the bathroom stalls. Surveillance was a central feature of the psych ward: he was constantly aware of being watched. Oddly, this was reassuring. The nurses weren’t surprised by the state he was in. They didn’t think he was to blame. They treated Leonard as if he’d injured himself in a fall or a car accident. Their half-bored ministrations probably did more than anything—even the drugs—to get Leonard through those first dark days.

Leonard was a “self-admit,” meaning that he could leave anytime he wanted. He’d signed a consent form, however, agreeing to give the hospital twenty-four-hour notice before doing so. He consented to be given medications, to abide by the rules of the unit, to uphold standards of cleanliness and hygiene. He signed whatever they put in front of him. Once a week, he was allowed to shave. A nurse’s aid brought him a disposable razor, standing by while he used it, and then took it back. They kept him on a strict schedule, getting him up at six a.m. for breakfast and ushering him through a series of daily activities, therapy, group therapy, crafts class, more group therapy, gym, before visiting hours in the afternoon. Lights were out at nine p.m.

Every day, Dr. Shieu stopped by to talk. Shieu was a small woman with papery skin and an alert demeanor. She seemed interested mainly in one thing: whether Leonard was suicidal or not.

“Good morning, Leonard, how are you feeling today?”

“Exhausted. Depressed.”

“Are you feeling suicidal?”

“Not actively.”

“Is that a joke?”

“No.”

“Any plans?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are you planning to harm yourself? Fantasizing about it? Going over scenarios in your head?”

“No.”

Manic-depressives, it turned out, were at a higher risk for suicide than depressives. Dr. Shieu’s number one priority was to keep her patients alive. Her second priority was to get them well enough to leave the hospital before their insurance benefits ran out in thirty days. Her pursuit of these objectives (which ironically mimicked the tunnel vision of mania itself) led to a strong reliance on drug therapy. She automatically placed schizophrenic patients on Thorazine, a drug people likened to a “chemical lobotomy.” Everyone else received sedatives and mood stabilizers. Leonard spent his morning therapy sessions with the psychiatric resident discussing all the stuff he, Leonard, was on. How was he “tolerating” the valium? Was it making him nauseated? Constipated? Yes. Thorazine could cause tardive dyskinesia (repetitive motions, often involving the mouth and lips), but this was often temporary. The resident prescribed additional medications to counteract Leonard’s side effects and, without asking him how he was
feeling
, sent him on his way.