Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Now she was here, with him. Unexaggerated. She put out one exploratory hand, not toward Jesse but toward the window, as if drawn by it. Something about the sunlight, the height, the vaporous horizon of the lake and the sky seemed to draw her. She was wearing a gold bracelet that looked primitive, barbaric, a huntress’s armband four or five inches wide. It must have been very heavy on her slight wrist. It was oddly out of proportion to her size.

  “That’s very beautiful,” Jesse said quickly. He had to use the word beautiful. He had to utter it. “Are you—are you back in Chicago permanently? I tried to call you at that number several times but—”

  “Oh, that’s over, you mean that place on the North Side? That’s over. I came back in the winter by myself and lived for a while in New York, and now I’m here for a while—in Chicago—and then I think I’ll be going up to northern Wisconsin.”

  “Northern Wisconsin? When?”

  “Oh, in a week,” she said lightly.

  Jesse stared at her. She was so bright a presence—the color of her dress so brilliant, so supernaturally intense—that he could not concentrate on what was being said. He did not know how important these words were. There were words he had rehearsed in silence: I am in love with you. But perhaps she already knew these words. I want nothing from you. But now that she was with him, in this room with him, the air between them was agitated and unserious, as if stirred by winds from outside the building, from the autumn sky, and he felt himself smiling slowly, unresisting, giving in, the way Reva was smiling at him.

  The intimacy of that smile: they had known each other long ago, perhaps. They were lovers who did not have to hurry about touching each other. They were brother and sister.

  “Take me out to lunch,” Reva said suddenly. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  Jesse had no time. He could not leave the office, really. But he said at once, “Yes, of course.…”

  “I want to walk around and talk to you. I’ve thought of you so much,” Reva said. “I feel like a sister to you. I feel that we’re in a plot together, you know, a story, after that strange way you looked me up—did you hire a detective to check on me? Did you? Oh, don’t look so worried! It doesn’t matter now. It doesn’t matter how we got to know each other; that belongs in the past. My life at that time belongs in the past, it’s better forgotten—that big, crazy car I took you for a ride in, remember, as if we were in a movie together and had to ride together for five or ten minutes, on film, using up film!—oh, it’s better forgotten, forget it all! I feel so warm toward you, Jesse, and I’m very happy about your success here—because I think you’re doing well in your life, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I’m doing well,” Jesse said weakly.

  He had approached her but he did not dare touch her. She didn’t seem to have given him permission to touch her. And he wore white: he was in costume as Dr. Vogel. He did not dare touch her without her permission. She seemed so lithe, so clever, constantly in motion as if to elude him and confuse his vision—now examining the photographs of his family on the desk—wouldn’t she slip out of his hands if he tried to embrace her?

  “Is this woman your wife?” Reva asked. She gave no sign of noticing Jesse’s agitation. “She looks very intelligent. Yes, very intelligent.” She frowned at the picture of Helene. It was a strange picture of Helene, having caught only the surface of her being. The eye glanced at it and off it, lightly pleased, unworried. But when Jesse stared at it he could hear the murmur in that woman’s brain, the constant stubborn flow of her consciousness, arguing silently with him. An argument he did not understand. “These are beautiful children,” Reva said softly. “This is the little girl I saw that day—I can’t remember her name—she didn’t seem to like me, remember? And is this another girl? Or a boy?”

  “A girl. Michele.”

  “Michele. That’s a lovely name. Is the other girl named Jeanne? Yes, I thought so. I remembered that,” Reva said, pleased with herself. She looked up at Jesse as if congratulating him for having fathered these children. The flow of her words, like her movements, was liquid and somehow elusive, hypnotic. “Are you happy with having a family, with being a father?” Reva asked.

  “There’s nothing that could mean more to me,” Jesse said slowly.

  “Yes, that’s true. That’s how it is with you,” Reva agreed.

  “But you … you look different. You’re very beautiful,” Jesse said, “but …”

  She turned away from him, arranging the photographs back in their original order. A neat row of faces: Helene and the two girls. A mother and her two daughters.

  “A mother and her two daughters,” Reva whispered.

  “Why did you come here, Reva?” Jesse asked.

  Her gaze wandered onto the walls, the floor. Perrault’s white, his taste for off-white, a sterility that did not quite blind the eye. Jesse wanted to explain to Reva that this was not his true setting, this office. Not this powerful white, this airiness, this extravagant tower overlooking the lake. She seemed suddenly nervous, evasive. He regretted having asked her that question.

  “I only want to be friends with you,” Reva said. “You met me at a time in my life when I was very happy, and I associate you with that time somehow, because between the two of us nothing has changed; we don’t know each other and we never knew each other.… But the rest of my life has changed completely. And you’re still here in Chicago, you still look the same, as if no time has gone by. But of course a great deal has happened in your life; you have another child, you’re here in this office … who is that man, Perrault? Is he your partner?”

  “I’m a junior partner,” Jesse said.

  “Is he an old man? Is he good?”

  “What do you mean—good? He’s an excellent surgeon,” Jesse said. He was discovering how unaccustomed he was, as Helene’s husband, to women who were not intelligent. “I’ve never known anyone like him; he’s an extraordinary man.…”

  “Do you like working with him?”

  “Well,” Jesse said with a sudden laugh, “well, no.…”

  Reva smiled strangely at him.

  “Yes, I like working with Dr. Perrault. He’s a very difficult person but I like working with him. He keeps me going at a pace I couldn’t maintain by myself … he forces me to be much better than I really am.”

  Reva nodded slowly. She stood with her hands clasped before her, in an attitude of attentive, meek, insincere submissiveness; if he didn’t look at her he was able to speak quite easily.

  “Dr. Perrault forces me to be a person I didn’t know I was,” Jesse said. “I’m learning constantly, I’m exhausted with all the things there are to learn in the world, because … because I thought I had come near to the end of them when I finished at the hospital. But … Dr. Perrault is writing a book and he has asked me to help him with it. He never rests, he never stops. He never stops thinking.”

  Jesse believed he could feel Dr. Perrault’s presence in the suite of offices—he sensed Reva’s awareness of Perrault also. She kept glancing at Jesse and behind him, over his shoulder at the closed door. Dr. Perrault was not in today, but Jesse felt him near just the same.

  “You look a little tired,” Reva said gently.

  “Do I?”

  “You look a little strained.”

  “I think it’s because of you.”

  “Me, because of me?” she asked, as if genuinely surprised. And then, pleased, catlike, she stood gazing toward him, not quite at him, as if contemplating herself. He could sense her lowered gaze taking in her feet, her legs, her slender hips, her body, passing up to her face, assessing and calculating and dismissing lightly. “Shouldn’t I have come to see you?”

  “Yes. I didn’t mean that. But you surprised me, I never expected …”

  “Oh, Rita Smith? That was just a name I made up. I don’t like my real name written down—you know—the nurse wanted my name, and I had to think quickly to make up a name, and—and really Reva Denk isn’t my name either; it’s a name I made u
p once when I had a while to think of a name. If I had fifteen minutes I could think of a better name than Rita Smith,” she laughed. Jesse was smiling, grinning. His mouth seemed to be twisting out of his control, into the shape of a thin, strained quarter moon. Reva said, in the same light, evasive tone, “It was at a racetrack. I was with someone and then I met someone else—I belonged to someone, but when I met this other person I sensed that I would pass over to him, I—I sensed it, the way you sense that something is not quite even, a tilted platform or a porch or something—do you know what I mean?” She put out her hand, palm up, and turned it lazily, inquisitively, as if testing the balance of this room. She glanced at Jesse slyly. “So I had time to make up a name; but, you know, you never really make up a name, so that person explained to me later—a certain name comes to your lips and that’s that, it fixes you. It tells you who you are much more than the name you were born with.… Oh, is this for headaches?” she said. She picked up a brochure from Jesse’s desk, an advertisement for a new drug. “Migraine headaches? Sometimes I get headaches myself. I never take anything for them though. Somebody told my mother—it was a nurse—not to take anything if she could help it, not even aspirin. So I don’t. I want to keep my system pure and natural. I want to be clean inside and out. The headaches don’t really give me much pain. I never feel much pain. I’m very strong. Today I feel especially strong,” she said with a smile at Jesse that made his blood grow suddenly heavy, and yet in the next instant her voice had become playful again. “Well, are you going to take me out? I want to show you something. There is something beautiful here in Chicago I want to show you. My mind fastened onto you—Dr. Jesse Vogel—I’ll tell you why later—and I looked you up at once and came here. Did I make a mistake?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have time now?”

  “I have time now, yes. Now. Later on this afternoon I have to go to the hospital, but now—I have time.”

  “That nurse out there didn’t seem to like me. She said you were busy,” Reva said.

  Jesse wondered if his agitation showed. He was afraid she would decide suddenly to leave, to walk out. She kept moving about his office, playfully and yet with a kind of intention, unsettling everything, stirring heaving blocks of air between them. Jesse would have to change his clothes and he was afraid she would be gone when he returned.… “I like you in that white outfit. You look very handsome, very official,” Reva said. “You look like a man who could have any name at all. I suppose a lot of women come to you, do they—and you examine them? That must be very strange. Do you like it?”

  Jesse, rattled, could not think of any answer.

  Reva’s heavy bracelet gleamed. It was a gleaming like her sure, slow, healthy white smile. He had a sudden vision of a man tearing at her, tearing at her clothes, burying his face against her belly, her loins.… It made him dizzy to see himself doing that and yet to realize that another man was doing it, leaving Jesse innocent.

  “I’ll wait for you outside in the corridor. Not in your waiting room but in the corridor,” Reva said.

  He changed his clothes quickly. Fast-moving, cold, damp fingers. His flushed face. He was so impregnable here in this large suite of offices—it was a maze, a clean expensive maze, and patients were led to him and Dr. Perrault only after a complicated system of examinations and referrals. Reva had come to him directly. Yet Reva was not sick: she was very healthy, very strong. It was obvious at a glance that she was very strong.

  On his way out, Jesse explained that he had to leave on a personal errand; he would be back as soon as possible; no, nothing serious, nothing to worry about. Perrault’s nurses were not young women, but mature technicians, devoted to him as if they were blood relatives of his, absolutely uncritical. His bad manners and his impatience did not upset them, not permanently. They loved him. Jesse was a kind of younger relative, a son or a nephew of Perrault, promising, hardworking, a good young man but not one to be taken too seriously, not yet. Even when Perrault was nowhere around, Jesse did not occupy the center of the place: Perrault occupied it.

  But Reva had come to him, and not to the old man!

  Hurrying to Reva, Jesse felt something graze against his face in the empty air: her hair, the idea of her hair, its softness, its gentle odor. What if she had left? But she was there, waiting. Waiting by the elevators. She turned to him and her face was amazing, so clean and soft and yet very strong, uncanny. Jesse wanted to seize her head, to stroke the bones of her cheeks, to stroke her large, restless eyes.…

  “Now you look different. Now you look in disguise,” Reva said. “You aren’t that first man I met so long ago—but you don’t remember, do you? Don’t remember the time we first met?”

  “No, not the first time. No, I don’t remember,” Jesse said. She smelled of something rich and burnished—perfume, sunlight? The odor of sunlight? Jesse let his hand fall upon her shoulder, as if by accident. He could not help himself.

  Reva stepped away gracefully.

  Embarrassed, nervously pleased, not looking at each other, they waited for the elevator to arrive. They watched the panel of numbers above the elevator. Jesse’s face was flushed. A heartbeat seemed to begin in his forehead. What to say to Reva, how to explain himself! With Helene he often felt the same need to explain himself, to confess, to put himself into words. Somewhere there were words for him, for Jesse, the exact words that would explain his life. But he did not know them. He used words shyly, crudely. It remained for someone else—a woman, perhaps—to draw these sacred words out of him, to justify him, redeem him as Jesse—he could not create them himself. Not alone.

  “No, I don’t remember … I don’t know what you mean.…” Jesse murmured.

  Beyond this Reva there was no one. No Reva. Nothing. An earlier, more mysterious Reva: he could not remember. If he tried to remember the first time he had actually seen her, his mind went blank. Blank as the chaste hard white walls of Perrault’s office. He found himself thinking of silence, of years of silence, but that had nothing to do with Reva. He was a married man and he had married a kind of silence. With Helene at night, night after night, he experienced a panicked, almost sweetly panicked certainty: men married silence. In expectation of hearing those private, sacred words that would redeem them they married; but they married silence. He lay beside his wife and thought of the words that must be uttered, but the exact words did not come to him. They did not allow themselves to be shaped because he was alone, he was really sleeping alone. A dark, indistinct, confusing muddle of words, unvoiced words, and then the gradual fading into sleep, into night. Once he was asleep he was independent of Helene and of all women, even of himself. No one could follow him into sleep. He slept beside his sleeping wife, all the wild unpredictable hours of the night, the two of them wandering in their separate dreams, their heads ringing with words and forms and acts that would never be brought to daylight … in disguise, they lay sleeping as husband and wife, their bodies untouching or accidentally touching, it did not matter. If they woke, if Jesse made love to his wife, he had to imagine this love performed upon a woman who was Reva … and yet he did love Helene when he thought of her. He loved her. His dreams sometimes focused sharply upon her: anguish that he might impregnate her one more time and kill her.

  After the birth of Michele, Helene had come home from the hospital with Dr. Blazack’s command: No more children. She had wept. She had become hysterical, hating herself, accusing herself: A failure as a woman.…

  “What’s wrong?” Reva said. “You look worried about something.”

  “I was thinking … about pregnancy, about a woman having a baby.…”

  Reva laughed, startled. “But how strange.… Why are you thinking of that?”

  They were alone in the elevator. Jesse wanted to shake his head to clear it of the sorrow of his marriage. He wanted to get rid of all thoughts of his marriage. “I’ve missed you,” he began nervously, “I’ve thought of you all the time, almost all the time.… I’m in love with you.…
No, don’t laugh, please, I’m very serious and … and I don’t want you to laugh at me.…”

  “You don’t love me. You don’t know me,” Reva said, embarrassed.

  He was staring down at her lowered head, at the part wavering like a vein across the delicate curve of her skull.

  “No, it isn’t possible,” she said.

  When the elevator stopped at the ground floor she seemed to dance away from him. He followed her out to the street. Down here the sunlight was not so sharp. The noise of the traffic confused Jesse. He had the idea that he should take hold of Reva in order to make sure of her.

  “I want to show you something,” she said.

  The noontime crowd surged upon them, around them. Reva looked so fragile—Jesse should take hold of her, protect her. But she kept moving away from him, leading him away. She seemed to have forgotten about lunch, and Jesse was grateful for this—how could he eat in Reva’s presence? Instead, she walked him very fast somewhere—she took quick, vigorous strides—she chattered as they walked, fluttering, unobservant, trusting, while Jesse glanced nervously around, on the lookout for people who might recognize him.

  Jesse and Reva, out together on the street.

  She was walking so naturally beside him, unaware of her beauty, that he began to think they might already be lovers. They looked like lovers. If anyone from the hospital saw them—if old Perrault saw them—it would be a public fact, their love. Jesse was proud of being with her. He was proud of her birdlike little gestures, the habit she had of lifting one palm flat up, to emphasize a point that to her was absolutely clear; she was so trivial, so charming! Jesse kept touching her by accident. Gravitating toward her, toward her, and Reva kept stepping to the side, unaware, cautious, rather modest.… Jesse wondered why he had lived so much of his life without love. He had never loved anyone.… But, yes, he had loved Helene, he loved her even now, but he kept forgetting her. She was not the kind of woman to stay in the mind. No, not Helene. He loved her but he was not in love with her. He did not love her with this fierce, sickening certainty.… Why had he wasted so many years of his life? Years of his life? He needed only to take this woman in his arms and bury himself in her, to forget himself in her, in the pit of her belly, in the most secret part of her being, to blot out his consciousness and to rise again inside her, transformed by the moist shadowed labyrinthine secrecy of her brain, resurrected there.…