Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Nobody should run up those stairs,” Jesse said.

  “I didn’t run. I came up carefully, one step at a time,” Trick laughed.

  Jesse watched him, concerned. But Trick waved him aside. He had a habit of dismissing personal questions or comments as if to show that he was not at anyone’s service, he was not available to anyone’s curiosity or sympathy. “Let me look at your work,” he said. He adjusted the eyepiece of the microscope. “Ah, very pretty! Lovely little cobwebs you’ve been growing. Don’t tell me what they are, that would spoil it. I like to think that such lovely things are cancer, maybe … people are so cruel about cancer, they are so grimly determined to wipe it out.…” He smiled at Jesse. “Cancerous cells have as much divinity in them as so-called normal cells. There’s too much prejudice against them. Did I ever tell you, Jesse, about my secret hopes for a career? It’s a little late now, but I’m thinking of switching to OB work; I’d like to be a great gynecologist; I’d like to take loving, gentle smears from the bodies of women, and examine them like this, in the solitude of a laboratory. I would be the most devoted and discreet of lovers and I would keep every secret.”

  Jesse recoiled from him a little. He forced himself to smile.

  Trick must have misunderstood the smile, for he stretched his narrow, dry lips in an instantaneous grin, as if a certain shock of sympathy had run between them. “If I could, I would impregnate them all—with my fingertips—I would be very gentle, I would be invisible. A certain young student, on his way to a brilliant career, told me once that he would like to be invisible and I understood that desire at once; I too would like to be invisible in this race of men, an instrument, a metallic model of an organ—for the real thing, the real organ, is apt to be disappointing, eh? Disappointing to a woman? Women are very demanding and very easily disappointed.”

  A winning smile, a flash of hectic joy—Trick seemed about to wink.

  Jesse’s face froze.

  “I could love them with my rubber-gloved fingers but with nothing else. Women are so impatient. Did I tell you I’ve begun to write poems? I’ll write one for you and Anne-Marie on the occasion of your wedding.”

  Jesse forced himself to laugh. “What, you’re writing poetry?”

  “Talent is suffused in me, like mercury on a tabletop. Little beads and stems. Anyway, Jesse, one kind of elimination is as good as another. Don’t be a snob because you’re in love. Discharging in your beloved’s body, discharging in her brain with a few delicate words—which is more rewarding, after all? I have a horror of germs.” Trick seemed better now; he was breathing more normally. Boyish and cheerful, he tapped Jesse’s shoulder as if in farewell. “I won’t take up any more of your time. I know how hard you work. What I came up here to tell you is that my parents will be in town this Saturday and they want to take me out to dinner. They would like to meet you; I’ve mentioned you to them—they take all my friendships very seriously, they want to see what kind of people I know—Maybe they’re afraid to be alone with me and want someone else to talk to—?”

  “This Saturday? I can’t make it,” Jesse said quickly.

  “Just for dinner and part of the evening—”

  “I can’t make it.”

  “Oh, yes. Anne-Marie,” Trick said flatly.

  “I said I’d take her somewhere … to see her family.…” Jesse said, lying without skill. “Her sister …”

  “All right.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jesse said. “I’d like to meet your parents.”

  “It’s all right,” Trick said. “I understand.”

  He turned to leave, then hesitated. His gaze scanned the laboratory tabletop thoughtfully. He was much heavier than Jesse, more than two hundred pounds, but they were nearly the same height. Unlike Trick, Jesse was muscular in the shoulders and arms; once he had lost the excess weight he had gained, his body had grown hard, the muscles of his chest and stomach were trim, tense, the calves of his legs poised as if to spring him forward. He would grip Trick by the throat, squeeze that fat neck and its chattering bones between his fingers.… But he only said carefully, “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  Trick shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “You said you had known Anne-Marie but she denies it. She’s never heard of you.”

  They did not look at each other. At the far end of the lab a student was working, hunched over. He did not seem to be listening. His solitary, drab figure drew both Jesse’s and Trick’s attention.

  “You said you had known her. How well?”

  Trick drew in his breath slowly.

  “Did you love her?” Jesse asked.

  Trick said nothing.

  “She said she doesn’t know you. She has never even heard of your name. She says—But what was it? Did you love her?”

  Trick made a motion to leave.

  “No, wait. Damn you,” Jesse said sharply.

  “What do you want to hear?” Trick said, turning to face him. “You people in love!”

  “Just answer my question. Please.”

  “You people in love always insist upon intrigue.… It makes me sick.”

  “Makes you sick, what do you mean?” Jesse took a step forward. At the other end of the room that face turned toward them, startled by something in Jesse’s voice. Jesse felt his soul ache to flee into that other neutral, strange face, to be so distant and so uncomplicated.… “You were hinting something about her that night, something about Anne-Marie. I want to hear it, goddamn you, I want this straightened out. Were you in love with her? What happened between you?”

  Trick smiled ironically. “You don’t want to hear.”

  “Were you in love with her?”

  Trick, at the door, screwed his face up and made a sudden, almost convulsive spitting gesture. “Love! What the hell is love?” he said.

  Jesse stared.

  “Good-by! Good night!” Trick cried. He waved good-by. Escaped.

  For a few minutes Jesse stood without moving, staring at the doorway where Trick had stood—he could see again that screwing-up of the man’s face, the puckering of the lips. His heart pounded viciously. He kept seeing that face, that ugly face; it was as if this spectacle had been predictable and yet he had insisted upon it, upon drawing it out—

  What the hell is love?

  That wrinkling of the face, the deepening lines about the mouth, the creases in the flesh.… Had he actually spat? Jesse stared at the floor and saw nothing. No spittle. Yet he seemed to remember Trick actually spitting; dizzily he seemed to remember saliva spraying thinly about his lips.…

  He cleaned up and went back to his rooming house.

  Shameful, it was shameful to be so weak. So agitated. He hurried back to the rooming house as if to hide.

  It was a three-story frame house, simply a rectangular box, with drab red-black siding that was supposed to look like brick. Jesse had lived there since September of 1949. He had had to move out of his basement room—which was so damp he was always catching colds anyway—because his landlady had decided to rent it to two students, in that way doubling the rent. Jesse had found this room after days of searching, had moved all his things over in an angry, desperate burst of energy, without any help, up to a cramped room on the top floor with a ceiling that peaked in the middle and sloped cruelly on the sides so that he could really stand up straight only in the middle of the room. But what did it matter, Jesse had thought, taking heart from the fact that he would now be on the top floor of a decent house and not in a damp basement.

  In spite of the noisiness of the house, he had been very happy up in that room.

  His landlady, Mrs. Spewak, was in her late thirties, querulous and attractive in a thin, restless way, her eyebrows plucked too severely, as if she had copied them on faith from a movie magazine. Her clothes were never quite right—she wore low-cut silky blouses with ordinary cotton skirts or slacks and very tight synthetic sweaters, sleeveless, tucked into the wide plastic belts that emphasized her narrow waist; her s
kirts were apt to be flowery and buoyant, with petticoats underneath them in the style of the day, or they were too tight, showing the ridges of her underwear and the ends of her tucked-in blouses strained against her flesh. She had a busy, gypsy-like manner that Jesse liked. He did like her, in spite of her chatter and complaints and the demands she placed upon him. She was always calling out his name as he hurried upstairs, or rapping on his door, wanting to enlist him on her side against the other tenants, who, Jesse had to admit, were pigs. Most of them were pigs. Mrs. Spewak and her daughter lived in the rear, lower part of the house. Jesse caught glimpses of their quarters sometimes from the kitchen. The living room was not really a personalized family room, but rather a dingy, sooty space, furnished with a single leather couch that showed hundreds of cracks and some chairs and tables that might have been bought at a rummage sale, all mismatched and ungainly. A single braided rug had been placed in the middle of the floor, but it was far too small for the size of the room. The other students joked about this place, especially about the new wallpaper Mrs. Spewak was so proud of—all towers and castles and spires of silver, outlined sharply in black like cartoon drawings, looking European and medieval. Jesse was depressed by this room, which should have been homely and domestic; he rarely entered it.

  The second and third floors of the house had been divided into six rooms on the second floor and three on the third, and though Jesse lived so far up he was never confident that he would be left alone. The other students wandered around, lazily anxious for conversation, for distractions, hopeful of borrowing cigarettes or money, sometimes sitting on the edge of Jesse’s bed though he had nothing to say to them and was clearly working. They were all younger than he. They came in late, drunk, and made a lot of noise on the stairs and in the bathroom. Even the landlady’s daughter wandered around during the day, though this part of the house was forbidden to her. She sometimes turned up in Jesse’s room when he returned unexpected, snooping around.… Jesse suspected her mother of snooping too, though no one had actually caught her.

  When he came home from the laboratory that day Mrs. Spewak was on the second-floor landing. Her face was bony and witch-like and appealing beneath a yellow kerchief. She carried a mop and pail and looked very pleased, Jesse thought, at being discovered so hard at work.

  “Hey, you knocking off work early today?” she said.

  “Something came up,” Jesse muttered.

  “If you’d come five minutes ago I could of showed you something. Real nice surprise in the john up on your floor. It’s that Simon Brodsky, I bet—”

  Jesse tried to brush by her politely.

  “Eh, you wouldn’t believe the pigs that live here. Did their mothers bring them up to be pigs?”

  Jesse hurried up to his room, closed the door, stood for a few moments with his back against the door and his heart pounding. Pigs.… Yes, they were pigs. His skin crawled with the realization of the foulness that was everywhere around him, the deceit, the shame, the hopeless wasting-away of flesh.… He wanted to be sick to his stomach. But there was no time for that now. No time. If he made retching noises in the bathroom Mrs. Spewak would come up, hearing everything, sniffing out everything, and she would rap on the door to ask what was wrong. I am going to lose Anne-Marie, Jesse thought in a panic. For an instant he seemed to confuse Mrs. Spewak and Anne-Marie. Both, women: a certain kind of woman. They knew all his needs simply by looking at him. Good at guessing, at hunches, kindly and secretive behind their pretty faces.… Jesse went to the bathroom after all and latched the door behind him. Today was cleaning day and the room smelled of harsh soap. A woman had been in here cleaning. Scouring. The mop, the red plastic pail of soapy, dirty water, the droplets of water—softened scum falling from the mop.… Jesse felt the vague desire to be sick. To be sick and get it over with. Discharging.… He stood shakily at the small sink, staring at his face. A face filled with color, as if the smaller veins and capillaries were throbbing with a knowledge that was not Jesse’s own knowledge, but the knowledge of his flesh, his species. Why couldn’t he trust it? I am going to lose her and lose everything, he thought. Weakly, he closed his eyes upon his own familiar face—which he always did his best to assess generously, because he had nothing else, no other face to rely upon—and he summoned up Anne-Marie’s womanly, pretty face and the sweet warm mass of her body. Surges of power—the center of her being, a socket of pure power that would suck him into it and charge him with its strength—asking nothing of him but the surrender and collapse of all his bones, the blacking-out of his consciousness. Yes, he would come to her. He was wild with desire for her. He remembered how she had looked that morning in the hospital, coming through the swinging doors from the stairway, staring at him, surprised.…

  He was not going to lose her.

  A knock at the door. “Jesse?” It was Mrs. Spewak. He thought wildly of opening the door and telling her to leave him alone. Leave me alone! He would grab her arm and pull her into the bathroom, pull the scarf from her head so that he could finger the tight, ugly little pincurls, the hairpins and the small wire-like curls fastened flat to her head; he would pull her dress open, yank it down from her shoulders.… “Hey, Jesse, you all right?”

  “I’m all right,” he said, his eyes closed.

  “You sure? Not sick, are you?”

  “No.”

  She waited a few seconds, her hand still on the doorknob. Jesse was alarmed at the desire he felt, which was angry and abstract, ripe as something teased beyond its natural growth. He cleared his throat. “I’m all right, Mrs. Spewak. Everything is all right.”

  “You looked pretty pale just now. Hey, come on downstairs and I’ll give you some stew. It’ll fix you up fine.”

  Jesse opened the door. He brushed his hair back from his forehead with both hands in a flicking gesture, as if to suggest to her that he had only been combing his hair in here.… “Everything is fine,” he said, brushing past her. If only she wouldn’t touch him! But the hall was narrow and he could not avoid brushing against her. She followed after him. Talking about stew, beef stew, why didn’t he come downstairs and let her heat it up for him? why didn’t he relax? It was no wonder he’d caught cold that winter, the way he was always running up and down the stairs … not eating right.…

  Jesse escaped and telephoned Anne-Marie from the drugstore. The phone rang five, six, seven times; then her mother answered. Jesse hung up. He was going to see her at seven that evening but he could not wait. He felt wild, frantic, precarious. If someone bumped into him in this store, if a woman bumped into him, he felt that he would go crazy, he might do something crazy.… He wandered through the drugstore, not really looking at anything, and a few minutes later dialed Anne-Marie’s number again. Again her mother answered, suspiciously, and again he hung up.

  He knew she was not home and yet he thought frantically that somehow she might answer, she might answer the telephone.…

  He walked across town to her house. He must have looked anxious or in a hurry, because people glanced at him as he passed. He felt himself careening across the miles of pavement, a tall body, a young man with a precise destination, a precise fate, his eyes a little glassy with the certainty of this fate—where was she, Anne-Marie, that young woman he did not exactly trust? Where was she at this moment, why wasn’t she available to him? He could not stand it, he simply could not stand it, his separation from her. She was looking at people who were strangers to him, at this moment. She was smiling. Speaking. She maneuvered herself quite intimately and ordinarily with people Jesse did not know. It was awful, it would drive him crazy.… He loved her and it seemed to him that his love, which was so miserable, should be repaid at once. Anne-Marie should be with him right now. After they were married she would always be with him, or available to him instantly; no separation; no mystery. He would know everything she did, everyone she spoke with; she would lie sweetly in his arms every night; and the two of them, husband and wife, would press their faces together, their mouths and che
eks, loving, sleepbound, their energies flowing freely like warm water back and forth as if through the same veins.…

  He was two hours early when he got to her house, and he did not want to talk to her mother. So he waited nervously down the street. He felt a little faint. He could not stand still, his body craved Anne-Marie so angrily; he began to walk, not paying much attention to what he was doing, into the gray warm sluttish air of the street. How to wait out those two hours! Now and then he felt a wave of faintness. Maybe he had forgotten to eat. Maybe he should eat. But his stomach cringed at the thought.… Look at that man on the sidewalk ahead, strained and heaving with fat! Jesse stared. Fat, fat, a fat man, a fat face and body, even the feet big, swollen, a human being bursting with fat creamy flesh. Jesse could barely keep the disgust from showing on his face. But this man was sick. Fat people were sick. When he was a doctor he would have to understand: the sick needed help in their sickness, not hatred and not affection. You didn’t love them in their sickness, but you didn’t hate them either. You were swift and clean and detached.… The fat man was gone and Jesse found himself thinking of Anne-Marie in the man’s place: his own anger, worry, disapproval focused upon her. Sick in the hospital, Jesse had understood the isolation of the patients, their exclusion from the bustle and chatter and the nurses’ perpetual giggling out in the corridors, especially late at night, the banging of mysterious metal things and the squeaking wheels of carts, and those girls, those girls with their whispers and muted laughter.… One of them had turned out to be Anne-Marie. A fresh, stunning face, hair in loose rich waves, girlish and breathless: Anne-Marie. He had fallen in love with her despite his general nervous irritation with nurses. Why were they always making so much noise? But he had fallen in love with her. She was melodic, her voice had a lilting musical insincerity about it that charmed him; yet she turned out to be very firm with him, almost sisterly.

  Listening to him, her face would go soft, as if his words entered her hearing and transformed her, as if his nearness had the magical power of transforming her into the woman he wanted, a wife who would be a match for him. She nodded slowly. Slowly. She was always agreeing with him. But then she would reply with an odd question that showed she hadn’t quite understood or hadn’t been listening closely; or she would smile archly and switch to another subject, as she had after they had attended a symposium on community health in Detroit—having been subjected to three hours of speeches, harangues, statistics, graphs, charts, diagrams, blueprints, slides, all of them pointing to the impoverished condition of public health resources for the poor; having seen a film of crowded wards and aged, vacuous faces, the senile and the mad and the desperately sick; having heard the speakers’ flat pessimistic predictions for the future—having sat next to Jesse through all that horror, Anne-Marie had been able to switch it out of her mind at once, whispering into his ear: “Are you hungry, Jesse? You must be starving after all this!”