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A good education, a good job, and a partner of good genetic stock. This is the goal, this is what you want in life. “Good” genetic stock was questionable on the Hofstadter side of the family, but otherwise he was doing well enough following in the footsteps of his older sister, and younger brother, his parents before him, and even his grandparents before that. Princeton at 15, PhD by 24. Federal grants to support his research. A 401K. Maybe a house in the not-too-distant future. A kid, maybe two (though he knows he won’t run any psychological experiments on them, and swears to himself that he won’t train them to give him money on his birthday).
He loves Penny. It’s a magnetic feeling: he can’t explain it and can’t understand it. Everyone said it was pure lust: it would fade, but quite the opposite, it’s a slow burn, like building a fire (he thinks, if he’d ever successfully built a fire). It goes against everything he’s been told he should want in his whole life: she’s not book smart, she’s not an overachieving wunderkind, she doesn’t save for rainy days, she’s independent from her family, she throws caution to the wind and hopes for the best.
It all finally comes to head one day, months after Penny’s admission that she doesn’t want to do pharmaceutical sales anymore. He does his best to support her, like a good husband should. The concept of “housewife” has always been met with derision in his family, but he wonders if it’s really so bad, living on one income. But she goes on a casting call for a small independent film, and against all odds, she gets the part. It may not be the main part, but it’s not an uncredited extra, and they celebrate with too much champagne, and stumble back to Penny’s apartment where they can be as loud as they want.
The shock comes the next morning when Penny starts talking about the University of New Mexico.
“What do you mean, University of New Mexico? Are you going to take classes to help you develop the character?” He traces his fingertips up and down her arm.
“No, for you silly,” she pokes him in the shoulder. “I … I would miss you, if you stayed here, and I just thought … the film schedule is upwards of a year because of the director’s whole concept, but he said that the TV industry is really picking up, but the pool of actors is smaller, so it’s easier to get parts as an extra, and so maybe I’d have an easier chance getting my foot in the door, you know?”
“But my job, it’s here.” He withdraws his hand and fidgets with the edge of the pillow case. “Couldn’t you just fly back on the weekends?”
“But you’ve been complaining that you feel stuck with no advancement, ever since that tenure position went to Leslie Winkle. And your gyroscopic … thingee, Howard’s the one really building it, couldn’t you just send the equations and stuff,” she waves her hand for good measure, “by skype or something?”
“Maybe, I guess, but I don’t know, I’ve been at CalTech for years, they just bumped up the matching-percentage for my 401K.” She looks a little lost.
“There’s that thing, Bernadette was talking about it, that professors can do when they want a vacation. A sabbath!”
He stared at her forehead for a minute, before it clicked, “A sabbatical?”
“That’s it! Where you get to take time off and work somewhere else, but they hold your job for you.”
“I don’t know, I’d have to talk to the chair of the department, and probably the dean…” he trails off, again. She makes a lot of good points, and he doesn’t know why he’s resisting. Who knows when another tenure-track position will be available.
“I know. I was, was just hoping you’d come with me. We’re married now, you know. Aren’t we supposed to want to be together?”
It all makes a lot of sense. Like everything he’s supposed to want: a chance for advancement, living alone with his wife, drier air that won’t aggravate his allergies so much.
But in the back of his mind, he wonders “What about Sheldon?”
They announce Penny’s new role to their friends over dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. Amy casts him a wary look every few minutes, no doubt recalling the summer that Sheldon ran away on a train. He thinks it will be better this time, now that Sheldon and Amy are closer than they were before. Maybe Amy will take the opportunity to pounce, and convince Sheldon they should move in together.
That night while Penny takes a shower, Leonard is left to break the rest of the news to Sheldon. He’s got the perfect start, when Sheldon asks if she’ll be giving up her apartment lease, and if they’re going to have to get used to a new neighbor.
“Actually, buddy, about that…” Leonard starts, before trailing off hesitantly. Sheldon looks at him expectantly.
“Yeah, she is going to give up the lease, it just doesn’t make sense to pay rent in two places, since the filming schedule is so long.”
“Oh, this is dreadful, Leonard. What if the new people are loud? Or also try to use our wifi? Or cook Greek food? Or play the viola? Or …”
All Leonard can do is shake his head as he heads to bed. Maybe he’ll take Sheldon to the “good” train store, and break the news then.
He’d met with the chair of the physics department, and the interview was all but a formality for a one-year visiting professor term. He’d managed not to spill a drink during the demonstration lecture, and one of the post-docs in the optics lab was a fellow Princeton alum. On Saturday afternoon they signed the lease on a two-bedroom townhouse that fell halfway between the university and the film studio, for less than half of price Leonard and Sheldon’s apartment.
“Why does anyone live in Pasadena?” they both said simultaneously when sitting back in the car.
“Right?!” Leonard said, wondering why he’d ever questioned this. He hadn’t needed nasal spray for the entire weekend, the traffic was nonexistent, and contrary to Sheldon’s warnings (verbal, email, and tweet) they hadn’t encountered any poisonous or venomous fauna.
He can’t help but feel something’s missing, though. But he can’t place his finger on what it is. Presque vu, thinks, and hears Sheldon’s voice droning on about the different kinds of aphasias after Leonard’s grandmother had a stroke.
He hopes the sting lessens with time, and reminds himself that it’s just one year, and they’ll re-evaluate. It’s like … four trips to the North Pole, when he didn’t get to see Penny. Or the North Pole, and the trip on Stephen Hawking’s research boat, twice over.
Penny, of course, is a natural at new situations, and he reminds himself that it’s one of the things he loves the most about her: she’s outgoing, and personable, and can make friends anywhere. She gets a minor but recurring part on the newest incarnation of a procedural crime drama, in between filming for the movie.
He asks her quietly one night, while they sit in their back yard and watch the stars, “Don’t you miss everyone back home?”
“Back in Nebraska? Hardly.” she says absent-mindedly.
“No,” he says, quietly. “Back in Pasadena.”
“Right, of course. Pasadena.” He can tell she flushes a little, that after almost ten years she never considered California home. “I mean, I Skype with Amy and Bernadette. But, with the baby we probably wouldn’t see them all that often even if we were still there. She says that as soon as the baby goes to sleep, they pass out, too. What about you? Do you miss comic book night and scheduled TV watching?”
“No!” Leonard scoffs, more than is really necessary. “I mean, maybe a little. Not like the crazy stuff, like the shower schedule, or the roommate meetings about switching cereal brands for food I don’t eat. But like, you have to admit he had a knack for combing through all the online reviews to find the best places to eat.”
“Awww, you miss your little buddy,” Penny says with a smile, and a light poke to his nose. “You know, I’ve got a break in filming for the show coming up, maybe we should schedule a long weekend back in Pasadena, catch up with everyone?”
Leonard is sure a week back in California would be enough to remind him of all the things he found irritating about Sheldon, but it really does the opposite. He and Penny stay a few blocks away in a hotel (Amy has, predictably, moved in, but they maintain separate bedrooms), and it turns out that with a small buffer, he doesn’t find any of Sheldon’s “quicks” irritating. They go to the good train store, and Sheldon babbles on about the rise and fall of the steam engine, and current developments in high-speed rail. They go to Schezwan Palace, and he finds himself smiling through a flow chart of the difference between a tangerine and an orange. He’s even willing to road trip to Lego Land, and happily listens to the fun facts programmed into the GPS.
The landlord drops off the paperwork to renew their lease with three months left in the one-year contract. Leonard finds the paperwork with Penny’s signature waiting for him on the kitchen table.
“I thought … I thought we said we’d re-evaluate, after a year? Besides, won’t your film finish filming next month” he asked, aggressively scrambling the eggs.
“Yeah, but … the show got renewed for another season. And I thought you liked UNM? You always say how you’re so surprised that you like teaching undergraduates.”
“Yeah, but my sabbatical is only one year. If I don’t go back, I’m effectively quitting, and I’d have to go through the whole re-hire process. And UNM doesn’t have any tenure-track positions open right now.”
“But there are other universities in New Mexico,” she says.
“There are other TV shows that film in California,” he counters.
“Yeah, ones that didn’t hire me for the ten years I was going to auditions,” she spits back. “I have a table read in a half an hour, we’ll talk about this tonight.”
He apologizes with a bottle of wine and take out from one of the few places near their house that doesn’t lace all the food with chili peppers. He’s got a twinge in his stomach that he shouldn’t have to be the one apologizing, that somehow they share the fault in whatever argument this is, but he sucks it up and signs the lease, and takes a position at the Central New Mexico Community College (his mother immediately calls to ask if he’s suffered some sort of traumatic brain injury. He reiterates that he loves Penny, and he’s happy that she’s found success. Marriage is a partnership, Mother, he says more forcefully than he intends. Nonsense, marriage is a business contract, she responds, before curtly cutting off the conversation to attend a thesis of defense. Someone who has the prospect of putting their Princeton degree to good use, she tosses in).
He lasts until spring break of the following year. He really has made an effort to meet new people, and stop thinking about what he would be doing, if they were back home. Back in Pasadena. He joins a gaming group at a comic book store, and he tries to have lunch with his colleagues, at least once a week. He goes to parties with Penny for industry events, and tries to pal around with the other significant others from the cast. But he can’t shake the feeling that he’s doing something wrong. He has the same twist in his stomach that he had when he kissed Mandy on the ship. He brushes it off, and tells himself he’s being ridiculous. You can’t cheat on your friends.
They’re back in LA, for a press event for Penny’s show. He makes it a point to call Sheldon and they have lunch back at the CalTech cafeteria, and the entire time, Sheldon has a little smile, like he’s got a secret. Walking Sheldon back to his office, he sees that some of the names on doors have changed, but some stay the same. Leslie’s moved to the big office in the corner, Raj has moved back to the astrophysics department. Even Kripke has finally been upgraded to an office with a window. Some new post-doc has taken over his lab space.
Sheldon waves him off in typical fashion, as if to say “This conversation is done now, you’re dismissed.” And Leonard wanders the halls a little more, until an undergraduate asks if he’s lost.
He knows the conversation he has to have with Penny.
They promise that distance is going to work. That they’ll fly back and forth, that they’ll have enough airline miles to take a really nice trip at the end of the season. Penny knows about Leonard’s past infidelities – with her, with Priya before – and he swears that he’s changed, that it’s different now. He’s committed to this relationship, with her. She heaves a sigh, and he knows she’s right: it’s hard to claim commitment when you’re putting 800 miles between you.
“Surprise!” he says, with a triple knock on the door to 4B. Sheldon is bewildered when he answers the door.
“I got a job at Pasadena City College, they needed a physics instructor for the summer session,” Leonard says brightly, “and it turns out that there was a one-bedroom for rent right here in the building! Isn’t that great, it’s going to be just like old times!”
“But what about Penny?” Sheldon asks, like he’s trying to piece a puzzle together.
“She’s still in Albuquerque, we’re going to fly back and forth, I just …” Leonard paused. He hadn’t considered how it would sound to say “I couldn’t make friends. I missed you. I need your rules and routines and quirks.”
Amy staggers out of the bathroom looking a little flushed as Leonard tried to collect his thoughts.
“Leonard moved back into the building,” Sheldon said plainly.
“Hi neighbor!” he gave a wave.
“Oh, didn’t Sheldon tell you?” she says, taking water from the fridge, and easing onto one of the bar stools.
“What?” The trepidation washed over Leonard again.
“Do you remember how Amy and I were going to combine our DNA and create a batch of super embryos, back when we first met?”
“Yeah…”
“Well, we decided that those eggs,” he points at Amy while she rolls her eyes, and Leonard knows where this is going. “They’re getting closer and closer to the freshest-by date…”
At some point in the previous two years Leonard had found himself missing Sheldon’s recitation of statistics, probability curves, and trivia. But he found himself only picking up every few words this time: babysitting for Howard and Bernadette, the statistical odds of highly gifted children as a function of maternal age, escrow on a condo closer to UCLA for Amy, the shiny new holder for his metro pass that Amy had bought him. Leonard makes sure to keep the vacant smile plastered on his face, and nods and makes affirmative noises at all the right places (he hopes), and brightly offers to help carry boxes when moving day rolls around.
When he’s retreated back to his own apartment, he feels like he’s been sucker punched. He reminds himself, again, that it’s ridiculous to think that lives don’t move forward. Everyone has moved forward, including him: he got married, he got a new job (several!). It was silly to think that no matter how rigid or steadfast in his thinking that nothing would change with Sheldon.
He skypes with Penny, and they fly back and forth constantly (to the detriment of their bank account). He’s hopeful that when her show wraps its fourth and final season that she’ll come back to Pasadena. She’s got actual credentials now, and he starts to say that maybe the LA based shows will see her differently. Instead, she tells him that she’s got a new part lined up – a larger part – but it films in Toronto. She asks again for him to come with, but he already knows how it’s going to end. His mother gives him a tsk when he idly shares the news with her, reminding him that he’s been taking a step down in his career path with every new job, that he’s not building up any equity, and that with 2,500 miles between him and his wife, he’s not getting any closer to producing offspring to settle his estate when he dies.
But he can’t bring himself to care about what he should be doing. In the same way that he could never fully explain string that pulled him to Penny, he can’t explain the pull to Sheldon. But once a week he picks Sheldon up at CalTech, and they sit in traffic on the 110, and Sheldon questions the latest “pseudoscientific” study trending on Facebook, or what the resulting superpower of a hybrid Ant-Man and Batman would be, or why there aren’t more trains in Los Angeles.
And it’s exactly where Leonard wants to be.