The Marriage Plot (40 page)

It didn’t surprise Leonard that Darlene was religious. People without hope often were. But Darlene didn’t seem weak, credulous, or stupid. Though she often referred to her “Higher Power,” and sometimes to “my Higher Power that I choose to call God,” she seemed remarkably rational, intelligent, and nonjudgmental. When Leonard was speaking to the group, unfurling the long, tangled loop of his bullshit, he often glanced up to see Darlene listening encouragingly, as though what he was saying wasn’t bullshit, or as though, even if it was, Darlene understood his need to say it, to get it out of his system so that he could discover something true and meaningful about himself. Most of the patients with substance abuse problems had picked up the religious inclination of 12-step programs. Wendy Neuman looked like a secular humanist if Leonard ever saw one, but she never tipped her hand one way or another, as was surely right. It was clear that everybody on the unit was barely hanging on. No one wanted to say or do anything that might hinder someone’s recovery. In this way the unit was very unlike the world outside, and morally superior to it.

To believe in God wasn’t in Leonard’s power, however. The irrationality of religious faith had been obvious to him long before reading Nietzsche had confirmed his suppositions. The only religious studies he’d taken was an oversubscribed survey course called Introduction to Eastern Religion. Leonard couldn’t remember why he’d signed up. It was the fall semester following his diagnosis the previous spring and he was taking things slow. He sat in the back of the packed lecture hall, did at least half of the reading, and showed up for section but never said anything. What he mainly remembered about the class was this guy who used to show up wearing baggy secondhand suits and beat-up shoes, sort of a drunken preacher or Tom Waits look. He carried a black briefcase with metal edges, the kind of thing that might have contained fifty thousand in cold cash instead of a paperback volume of the Upanishads edited by Mircea Eliade and a half-eaten blondie wrapped in a paper napkin. What Leonard liked about this guy was his manner of gently correcting the untutored opinions offered around the seminar table. The entire class was full of co-op types, vegetarians in overalls and tie-dyed T-shirts. The bias of these kids was that Western religion was responsible for everything bad in the world, the rape of the earth, slaughter houses, animal testing, whereas Eastern religion was ecological and pacific. Leonard had neither the desire nor the energy to argue these points, but he liked it when Young Tom Waits did. For instance, when they were discussing the concept of ahimsa, Young Waits offered the observation that the Sermon on the Mount made roughly the same point. He impressed Leonard by mentioning that Schopenhauer had tried to interest the European world in Vedantic thought back in 1814, and that the two cultures had been mixing for a long time. His point, again and again, was that truth wasn’t the property of any one faith and that, if you looked closely, you found a ground where they all converged.

On another day, they’d gotten off topic. Somebody brought up Gandhi and how his belief in nonviolence had inspired Martin Luther King, which had led to the Civil Rights Act. The speaker’s point was that it had actually been a Hindu who had made America, a so-called Christian nation, a more just and democratic place.

At which point Young Waits spoke up. “Gandhi was influenced by Tolstoy,” he said.

“What?”

“Gandhi got his philosophy of nonviolence from Tolstoy. They corresponded.”

“Um, didn’t Tolstoy live in like the nineteenth century?”

“He died in 1912. Gandhi used to write him fan letters. He called Tolstoy his ‘great teacher.’ So you’re right. Martin Luther King got nonviolence from Gandhi. But Gandhi got it from Tolstoy, who got it from Christianity. So Gandhian philosophy really isn’t any different from Christian pacifism.”

“Are you saying Gandhi was a Christian?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“Well, that’s wrong. Christian missionaries were always trying to convert Gandhi. But it never worked. He couldn’t accept stuff like the resurrection and the Immaculate Conception.”

“That’s not Christianity.”

“Yes, it is!”

“Those are just myths that grew up around the core ideas.”

“But Christianity is
full
of myths. That’s what’s so much better about Buddhism. It doesn’t force you to believe anything. You don’t even have to believe in a god.”

Young Waits tapped his fingers on his briefcase before replying. “When the Dalai Lama dies, Tibetan Buddhists believe his spirit gets reincarnated into another baby. The monks go all over the countryside, examining all the newborns to see which one it is. They bring personal effects of the deceased Dalai Lama to dangle over the babies’ faces. Depending on how the babies react, by a secret process—which they can’t explain to anyone—they choose the new Dalai Lama. And isn’t it amazing that the right baby’s always born in Tibet, where the monks can find him, instead of, say, in San Jose? And that it’s always a boy baby?”

At the time, infatuated with Nietzsche (and half asleep), Leonard didn’t want to get into this argument, the truth of which wasn’t that all religions were equally valid but that they were equally nonsensical. When the semester ended he forgot about Young Waits. He didn’t think about him again until two years later, after he started going out with Madeleine, when, looking through a packet of snapshots Madeleine kept in her desk, Leonard came across quite a few where Young Waits appeared. A disturbing number, in fact.

“Who
is
this guy?” Leonard asked.

“That’s Mitchell,” she said.

“Mitchell what?”

“Grammaticus.”

“Yeah, Grammaticus. I was in a religious studies class with him.”

“That figures.”

“Did you used to go out with him?”

“No!” Madeleine objected.

“You look awfully cozy.” He held up a photograph where Grammaticus was lying with his curly head in her lap.

Madeleine took the photograph, frowning, and put it back in the desk. She explained that she’d known Grammaticus since freshman year but that they’d had a fight. When Leonard asked her what the fight had been about, she looked evasive and said that it was complicated. When Leonard asked her what was complicated about it, Madeleine admitted that she and Grammaticus had always had a Platonic friendship, at least Platonic on her end, but that more recently he’d been “sort of in love” with her and that his feelings had been hurt because she hadn’t returned them.

This information hadn’t bothered Leonard at the time. He had sized Grammaticus up according to an animal scale—antler size to antler size—and given himself the clear advantage. In the hospital, however, with plenty of time on his hands, Leonard began to wonder if there was more to the story. He pictured Grammaticus’s satyr-like form clambering on top of Madeleine from behind. The image of Grammaticus screwing Madeleine, or of Madeleine going down on him, contained the right mix of pain and arousal to stir Leonard from his deadened sexual state. For reasons Leonard couldn’t fathom—but that probably had to do with a need for self-abasement—the idea of Madeleine wantonly betraying him with Grammaticus turned Leonard on. To break the tedium of the hospital, he tortured himself with this twisted fantasy, jerking off in the bathroom stall while holding the lockless door closed with his free hand.

Even after he and Madeleine got back together, Leonard kept tormenting himself in this way. On the day he was discharged, a nurse brought him outside and he got into Madeleine’s new car. Belted into the front passenger seat, he felt like a newborn that Madeleine was bringing home for the first time. The city had greened up considerably while Leonard was inside. It looked lovely and lazy. The students were gone and College Hill was deserted and peaceful. They drove back to Leonard’s apartment. They began living together. And because Leonard wasn’t a baby, because he was a full-grown sick fuck, he spent Madeleine’s every absence imagining her blowing her tennis partner in the locker room, or being bent over in the stacks of the library. One day, a week after Leonard’s return, Madeleine mentioned that she’d run into Grammaticus on the morning of graduation and that they’d made up. Grammaticus had gone back home to live with his parents but Madeleine had been talking on the phone a lot while Leonard had been in the hospital. She said she would pay for all her long-distance calls and now Leonard found himself checking the New England Bell bills for any calls made to midwestern area codes. Recently, alarmingly, she’d taken the phone into the bathroom and talked with the door closed, explaining afterward that she hadn’t wanted to disturb him. (Disturb him from what? From lying in bed, putting on weight like a calf in a veal crate? From reading the same paragraph of
The Anti-Christ
he’d already read three times?)

At the end of August, Madeleine drove down to Prettybrook to see her parents and get some things from home. A few days after returning, she mentioned offhandedly that she’d seen Grammaticus, in New York, on his way to Paris.

“You just ran into him?” Leonard asked from the mattress.

“Yeah, with Kelly. In some bar she took me to.”

“Did you fuck him?”

“What?!”

“Maybe you fucked him. Maybe you want a guy who’s not taking massive amounts of lithium.”

“Oh, God, Leonard, I told you already. I don’t care about that. The doctor says that’s not even because of the lithium, right?”

“The doctor says a lot of things.”

“Well, do me a favor. Don’t talk that way to me. I don’t like it. O.K.? And it sounds really awful.”

“Sorry.”

“Are you getting depressed? You sound depressed.”

“I’m not. I’m nothing.”

Madeleine lay down on the bed, wrapping herself around him. “You’re nothing? You don’t feel this?” She put her hand on the fly of his pants. “How does this feel?”

“Nice.”

For a little while, it worked, but not long. If, instead of being touched by Madeleine, Leonard had been imagining Madeleine touching Grammaticus, he might have gotten off. But reality wasn’t enough for him anymore. And this was a problem larger and deeper than even his illness, a problem he couldn’t begin to deal with. And so he closed his eyes and hugged Madeleine tightly.

“Sorry,” he said again. “Sorry, sorry.”

Leonard felt better around people who were struggling as much as he was. Over the summer he kept in touch with a few patients he’d met in the hospital. Darlene had moved into a friend’s apartment in East Providence, and Leonard had gone out to see her a couple of times. She seemed hyperactive. She couldn’t sit still and talked nonstop without making much sense. She kept asking, “So, Leonard, you good?” without waiting for an answer. A few weeks later, at the end of July, Darlene’s sister, Kimberly, called Leonard, saying that Darlene hadn’t been answering her phone. They went out to Darlene’s apartment together, where they found Darlene in the midst of a psychotic break. She was under the impression that her neighbors were conspiring to get her kicked out of the building. They were spreading rumors about her to the landlord. She was frightened to go outside, even to take out the trash. The apartment smelled of spoiled food, and Darlene had started drinking again. Leonard had to call Dr. Shieu and explain the situation, while Kimberly persuaded Darlene to take a shower and change her clothes. Somehow they coaxed Darlene, wide-eyed with panic, into the car, and took her to the hospital, where Dr. Shieu was readying her readmission papers. Every day for the next week Leonard went to visiting hours. Darlene was out of it most of the time, but he found it comforting to visit her. He forgot about himself while he was there.

The only thing that got Leonard through the rest of the summer was the prospect of leaving for Pilgrim Lake. At the beginning of August, an envelope from the laboratory arrived. Inside, on beautifully printed pages, each embossed with a letterhead so prominent as to be virtually topographical, were orientation materials. There was a letter addressed to “Mr. Leonard Bankhead, Research Fellow” and personally signed by David Malkiel. The packet put to rest Leonard’s fears that the authorities might learn about his hospitalization and rescind his fellowship. He read the list of research fellows and the colleges they’d gone to, and found his name right where it was supposed to be. Along with information about the housing units and other facilities, the envelope contained a form for Leonard to list his “field-of-research preferences.” The four research areas at Pilgrim Lake were: Cancer, Plant Biology, Quantitative Biology, and Genomics and Bioinformatics. Leonard put a “1” by Cancer, a “2” by Plant Biology, a “3” by Quantitative Biology, and a “4” by Genomics and Bioinformatics. It wasn’t much, but filling out the form and returning it to the lab signified Leonard’s first accomplishment that summer, the only tangible sign that he had a postgraduate future.

Once they arrived at Pilgrim Lake the last weekend in August, the signs proliferated. They were given a key to an ample-size apartment. The kitchen cabinets were stocked with brand-new dishes and almost-new pots and pans. The living room had a sofa, two chairs, a dining table, and a desk. The bed was queen-size and all the lights and plumbing functioned. Sharing Leonard’s underfurnished studio all summer had felt more like squatting than living together. But there was a newlywed excitement to crossing the threshold of their new waterfront abode. Leonard immediately stopped feeling like an invalid Madeleine was taking care of and began feeling more like himself.

His renewed confidence lasted until the welcoming dinner on Sunday night. At Madeleine’s urging, Leonard had worn a tie and jacket. He expected to be overdressed, but when they arrived in the bar adjacent to the dining hall, nearly all the men were wearing coats and ties, and Leonard was left admiring Madeleine’s ability to intuit such things. They picked up their name tags and seating assignment and joined the stiff cocktail reception. They’d mingled for no more than ten minutes before the other two guys assigned to Leonard’s team came up to introduce themselves. Carl Beller and Vikram Jaitly already knew each other from MIT. Though they hadn’t been at Pilgrim Lake any longer than Leonard (that is, two days), they radiated a sense of all-knowingness about the lab and its operations.