Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Are you deliberately stupid?” Jesse asked.

  This caught Monk by surprise: he stared at Jesse. Then he smiled coldly.

  “Yes, deliberately. It’s part of my style,” he said. He got to his feet. He was wearing mismatched clothes—an old brown sweater and gray corduroy trousers shiny at the knees. It was rumored that he had money but that he never spent it on himself. “I’m sorry I offended you, Jesse. I know you’re devoted to medicine. You’ve consecrated yourself. But I have a flabby soul; it’s like air leaking out of a balloon.… You can hear it escaping if you listen. Yes, I’m leaving. I’ll leave. You didn’t go to see her tonight, eh?”

  Jesse stood. “Why do you talk about her like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “In that way—that voice—What do you want?”

  Monk spread his hands. “Absolutely nothing. I don’t understand you. I came only to congratulate you on the success of your work—I’m very jealous of you, your youth and your energy. And your pretty little girl.”

  “We’re going to be married,” Jesse said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Married.”

  They stared at each other. Monk lingered in the doorway, filling it with his slightly rounded shoulders. He smiled. “I don’t think you’re going to get married,” he said finally.

  “Get the hell out of here!”

  Monk waved good-by and left.

  Jesse stood in the doorway of his room. His face twitched, he felt like running after Monk and grabbing hold of him.… Instead, he went to the window and looked down to the street. A lonely street. A feeble light. In a minute or so Monk’s figure appeared, large and grave, the shoulders bent forward a little. His walk was odd, as if premeditated, each step planned with care: now I will cross the street, now I will step up onto the curb, now I will glance over my shoulder to see if Jesse is watching me.…

  Jesse drew back from the window. His heart pounded with a dull, puzzled anger.

  “Bastard,” he said aloud.

  He did not intend to sleep, so he lay down on top of his bedspread, pushing a few books aside. He thought about Monk. He thought about Anne-Marie. Something surged in his blood, a heady chemical released by such thoughts, an anger close to elation.… Then his mouth was dry. He must have slept and jerked awake suddenly. He sat up, checked the time—quarter after five. He went to his worktable and sat down. A pile of books. Papers, lab reports. It took him a while to remember that Dr. Monk, “Trick” Monk, had been sitting here talking to him hours before. I came only to congratulate you, Monk had said. Why was his mouth so dry now? He must have slept unexpectedly and breathed through his mouth. He had not intended to sleep. Everything was slowed down in him now, at five in the morning, and he could not quite remember what Monk had said that had angered him. Maybe he’d imagined it. Monk was always joking, he had the reputation of being a good person, generous and wise.…

  Jesse worked until quarter to eight, when he ran downstairs and over to the hospital where Anne-Marie was on duty. He got to the hospital five minutes before the shift changed, so he went down to the Outpatients’ Clinic, where a row of people were already sitting beneath a big clock. Anne-Marie would take this way out. The hospital smelled good to him. A yellowed old woman, sitting near the door to the Outpatients’ Clinic, tugged at his arm. “You have to take a number and wait your turn,” she said importantly. All the patients were holding large plastic cards with numbers on them, the kind used in meat markets.

  “Thank you,” Jesse said politely. “But I’m not waiting for the clinic.”

  The activity of the corridor distracted him. Nurses coming in, wearing light spring coats over their uniforms; nurses preparing to go off duty, yawning. Their movements—the rapid soft-soled motion of their feet—pleased Jesse. There were no men around, no men on duty. The doors to the x-ray rooms and the Pathology Lab were still locked. There were only the nurses, most of them firm-bodied young women, brisk in their white uniforms and pale transparent stockings.

  The door to the stairway opened a short distance away and Anne-Marie suddenly came through. Jesse sucked in his breath at the sight of her.

  A beautiful copper-haired girl. A stranger.

  She saw him and faltered. One hand rose as if in defense. But then she smiled broadly and they hurried to meet each other. Jesse wondered if his face showed that strange, evil elation of the night before.

  “Is anything wrong?” Anne-Marie whispered.

  “No. Nothing. I just wanted to see you,” Jesse said.

  He had taken her hand. His eyes seemed to grab at her.

  “Couldn’t you sleep last night? You look so tired.…” she said nervously.

  “I just wanted to see you.”

  They walked toward the exit. Jesse was aware of the outpatients watching them, sitting obediently along the wall with their plastic cards in hand. But he could not release Anne-Marie’s hand and he could not stop staring at her. He felt the tension in his face, in the muscles of his jaws.

  “It was a bad night, everyone waking up and wanting sleeping pills and running us to death.… Oh, I must look awful,” Anne-Marie said.

  “You look very beautiful,” Jesse said.

  She lifted her face to him as if offering herself. Her eyes were large with weariness—dark brown eyes, almost black, fascinating. Yes, now that he was with her he remembered her exactly.

  “I was thinking about you all last night,” Jesse said.

  Anne-Marie smiled uneasily.

  “You couldn’t sleep again …?”

  “I slept for a while. I feel fine,” Jesse said.

  “You’re sure that nothing is wrong?”

  “I felt that I wanted to see you,” he said quickly. “I was thinking about you … I was talking about you.…”

  “Oh, with who? You were talking about me?”

  “No one you know, a man named Monk. He’s an instructor in neurochemistry.”

  Anne-Marie smiled faintly.

  “You don’t know him?” Jesse said.

  “Who? What is his name?”

  “Monk.”

  “That’s a strange name.”

  “They call him Trick. I don’t know his real name—Talbot, maybe—Talbot Monk. Do you know him?”

  She shook her head. Jesse squeezed her hand, as if to reassure her that he believed her. He took her gently by the arm and walked her out to the parking lot. “He’s about thirty, he has blond hair, he’s big, tall, going to fat a little … there’s something strange about him … everyone likes him, he’s very friendly, very popular.… You don’t remember him?”

  “No. Why should I remember him? I don’t know him.”

  “He seemed to know you.”

  Anne-Marie stared at him, smiling. Again she shook her head. She had lovely fair skin, a small strong nose, perfect teeth. Jesse’s head pounded with blood. He loved her, he was weak with love for her.…

  “It must have been a misunderstanding then,” he said.

  “But why are you so … strange?”

  “Do I look strange?”

  “Yes, you look as if you’re angry with me.”

  “No, no. I’m not angry, no,” Jesse said, confused. He realized that he had tightened his grip on her arm and that he was frightening her. He forced himself to relax. Relax. A few slow, deep breaths. He would be all right.

  “Who is this man again?” Anne-Marie asked.

  “No one, nothing. It must have been a misunderstanding.”

  “He isn’t a friend of yours, is he?”

  “I don’t have any friends,” Jesse said. “Except you.”

  “What did he want with you?”

  She kept looking at him, forcing him to look at her. He was weak with desire for her … or maybe he was weak with hunger … everything was confused, jumbled in his head. I came only to congratulate you, Monk had said. Why didn’t he believe that, why didn’t he accept it? A kind of wild elated anger kept tensing up his face, making his eyes narrow. He was
frightening this girl. Obviously she did not know Monk.

  “I wanted to see you this morning. I had to see you,” Jesse said. “You’re so beautiful.… You do love me?”

  “You looked so angry for a minute,” Anne-Marie said.

  “You love me …?”

  He stared into her face: he might have been staring over a precipice. There was that instant of danger, of terrible weightlessness.

  “Of course I love you,” she whispered.

  It was so easily said that he did not believe her. How could she love him? Forgive him?… But then he relented and believed her. In a part of his mind she was already his wife.

  2

  A few days later Trick gave Jesse a book of essays on biochemistry—he explained that the publishers had sent him two copies and he had thought Jesse might like one. The book was selling for fifteen dollars. Jesse was tempted to refuse, but Trick was so sunny and unpushing that Jesse gave in; maybe he had been mistaken about Trick. Now it seemed he was seeing Trick everywhere, at a distance, in the corridor of one building or another, and that Trick was friendly but not eager—content to wave at Jesse as he hurried along, having other people to talk to. Jesse saw him sometimes with Dr. Cady on the sidewalks around the Medical Center.

  Trick was often the center of a group, some boisterous gang a little loud from overwork, their laughter sounding hysterical; he was taller than most of his friends, his fair hair a neutral, pallid gleam, his laughter cutting through theirs with that sudden, violent, lordly corrosive-ness, as if he were at once both a young king and a court jester, a clown with license to say anything. And he did say anything in the company of students. Jesse overheard him joking about members of the medical school staff, about tumors, guts, brains, his own ingrown toenails, even about the medical experiments performed by Nazi doctors on human victims, the subject of a recent story in Life Magazine: “What I wouldn’t give for such an opportunity!” Trick would say, winking. “Imagine extra-large cats, cats with handles a man could actually grab hold of, not those cold furry little sons of bitches we have to work with in American labs! You must admit that Hitler had a certain style, a certain flair lacking in our bourgeois medical men.”

  And he would stretch his face, clowning and melancholy, daring them to take him seriously.

  One day he caught up with Jesse on the street and, out of nowhere, patted his slack stomach, which had begun to protrude in a small, soft, wavelike roll. “This life is decadent, we aren’t really worked hard enough,” he sighed merrily. “I miss the drama of the war. I wish it would return. Those concluding days did something to me, gave me a permanent taste for cheap suspense—this peacetime living is decadent, fattening. Even you could be worked harder, Jesse.” If he offended people, they gave no sign. Perhaps, like Jesse, they were puzzled by Trick and reluctant to judge him. When Trick was in the lecture hall or in the laboratory, he was usually serious; the rest of the time, rarely. Was everything a joke, to be joked about? Maybe. Trick’s large, genial face, his yodel of welcome and his stiff, rather formal handshake, even the deadpan remarks he made when passing out examination booklets made him extremely popular; Jesse noticed other students imitating Trick.

  He wondered why he had always disliked the man.

  One morning Trick took over a lecture for Dr. Cady, who was out of town. He explained at great length the procedures and tentative results of the research project he was heading, under Cady’s general supervision. He wore a suit and a tie, he spoke clearly, precisely, his forehead furrowed with the need to be absolutely correct. All around Jesse students sat hunched forward, taking rapid notes; their desks creaked under the strain. Trick did not drift off into quaint metaphysical speculation, as Cady sometimes did, so the students had no rest, but were forced to write continually. Jesse was fascinated with what Trick had to say. He could hardly recognize Trick in that dignified young man who stood at the lectern—how serious he was after all, how impressive a scientist! Yes, Jesse thought, he was a man of exceptional quality.

  Half the amphitheater burst into spontaneous applause at the end of the lecture. Jesse and a few other students hurried down front to congratulate Trick.

  Afterward, still nervous and a little formal, Trick said to Jesse: “I’m glad you could appreciate what I had to say. I think it went over most of their heads.”

  They went out for coffee to a restaurant on State Street, and there Trick talked more about his research and his plans. Jesse, who was interested in clinical medicine, began to wonder if maybe research might be more exciting. He asked Trick questions and Trick replied seriously, respectfully. Yes, he did seem like another person. The formal clothing restrained him. After a while he relaxed and began to speak of the years he had put in himself, as a student, then an intern, then a resident. “People in my family have no idea what I am now. They think maybe I’ve gone backwards. It seems to them I should have a practice of fifty thousand a year by now instead of grubbing along as I am.” Of his family he said little: his father was an “ordinary businessman in St. Paul,” his mother an “ordinary housewife in St. Paul.” Where did his genius come from then? he asked ironically. Well, a distant cousin of his was also gifted with a photographic memory and total recall. The cousin was a boy seventeen years old, but not mature enough to be trusted at a university; Trick had the idea, though no one in the family exactly said this, that the boy was a little crazy.… Everyone else in his family seemed normal. His mother baked him brownies and mailed them every two or three weeks; they arrived stale and broken, sometimes no more than crumbs, but he wrote back dutifully to thank her. Certain myths cannot be broken. He loved his parents because they were so decent, so normal. “We are all very Midwestern in my family, which means that we are decent, silent people. For all my talk, Jesse, you must understand that I am essentially a silent person.” But there was no danger of his perpetuating his family’s ordinary genes, he said, because he would never marry. He did not believe in the divinity of Christ, but he believed in Christ’s purity. He seemed to be serious. He affected a horror of the body that was lyric and heavy, whimsical and grave: “We in medicine should go after the ultimate cure—the separation of the spirit from the flesh. Everything else is unsanitary nonsense.”

  Jesse laughed at this, bewildered.

  Yet at other times, when they talked of their work, Trick confessed to a sentimental weakness for fixing up things, making the parts work together perfectly, “especially in children—I could never work up a healthy hatred of any child. Which makes me think I’ll subside into being a country G.P. someday.”

  “Someone has to do that kind of work,” Jesse said. He was cautious with Trick because Trick so often joked; but he did not seem to be joking now. So Jesse said, warming to the subject, “I know what you mean. I want to fix things up too. I have this dream, this bad dream, of my crossing a room to a patient who turns out to be dead … and everything is awful, everything dissolves, because the patient is dead and beyond my ability to help him.… I wake up sweating. I wake up in a real terror. Because if they die, if they die … then they have escaped to someplace where you can’t follow them; it’s as if they’ve carried away with them to another dimension the secret of their disorder and can’t be reached. Slicing the body open, pulling out the brains, won’t really tell you why they died.”

  “No, that won’t. That won’t really tell you why they died,” Trick said.

  “I want to fix people up. Children and everyone. I’d like to run a clinic, you know, a kind of welfare clinic but with good equipment, not a slum.… I want to save them all.”

  Trick listened closely. In spite of his habitual scowl of derision, he was really sympathetic; Jesse sensed that.

  “I suppose I want to perform miracles,” Jesse said warmly, “but I want the miracles ordinary—I want to make miraculous things ordinary again. And I would like to do this impersonally. Out of sight. I don’t especially want to be Dr. Vogel, Dr. Vogel, I don’t want people grateful to me. I’d like to be a pre
sence that is invisible, impersonal. I don’t want any personality involved—where there’s personality everything is confused—”

  Trick stared at him, smiling oddly.

  “I imagine myself this way,” Jesse said. “There will be my own family, my wife and children—”

  “Wife and children? How many children?”

  “Four or five. This family and me—together. We will understand one another. But the work I do, the patients I see, will be impersonal and without private history, just this abstract love for them—they will be a kind of family to me also, but abstract and impersonal—” And he was giddy with a sudden knowledge that this would happen somehow. “I want—I want to do good—”

  Trick was looking at him blankly.

  “You don’t think it’s possible?” Jesse asked.

  “My opinion will have nothing to do with your future,” Trick said slowly.

  “Well, I want to do good,” Jesse said. “Otherwise it isn’t worth it.”

  Trick colored slightly, as if these words were too intimate for him.

  Jesse waited for Trick to ask about Anne-Marie, but he never mentioned her. He began to wonder if he had imagined Trick’s remarks about her. There were weeks of Trick’s joking, his silence, his melancholy, his gossip, his comic complaints—and still Jesse waited uneasily for him to mention Anne-Marie. Had Trick forgotten her? One day, out walking with her, he believed he saw Trick in a crowd in front of the diagonal before the main library, and he was about to point Trick out to her when he thought better of it.… He did not want them to meet.

  Late one afternoon Jesse was working in a third-floor laboratory when Trick dropped by to see him. He must have climbed the stairs in a hurry, because he was struggling to get his breath. “Jesse, hello! I haven’t seen you all week,” he said.

  His face was pale and strained from the stairs.

  “I’ve been working hard,” Jesse said. “How about you?”

  “Oh, the same as always, the same.” He belled out his cheeks as if to make fun of his own breathlessness. He was really out of breath; he was almost panting. “I’m in perfect condition, as you can see.”