Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Someone was dying, was dead.

  Helene stirred. Jesse, wanting suddenly to embrace her, to talk with her, leaned up on one elbow. “Are you awake?” he whispered.

  She did not reply.

  “Helene?”

  She had had too much to drink last evening. Her father had been in and out of New York, too busy, too mysteriously busy, to take part in the conference. He had stayed around for a while that evening, dashing and yet pert, delivering his opinions on the assassination—the “assassination plot”—in the crowded hotel room, fixing himself and his daughter drinks, standing for a while behind Jesse to watch the television coverage, but gradually drifting away to join a circle of other people. Jesse was relieved that Dr. Cady hadn’t bothered much with him. He was relieved to have been spared Cady’s perpetual questions about his work and about Perrault and about his family life.… Cady was aging, but not shabbily. Not like Perrault at all. He seemed to be getting nervier, sharper. Neither Perrault nor Cady had finished his book, but Perrault kept on with his or gave the appearance of keeping on—Jesse did much of the research for him, the compiling of figures, he had a large file of correspondence with other doctors, in fact he was almost writing the book himself—while Cady only joked about his book. His work was a semiclassified project that had been funded over the past fifteen years by government agencies. “With all they’ve poured into me they could have financed a small war,” Cady joked. “They could certainly have financed an assassination done with more finesse, with more style.”

  He had shocked a few people by saying that. Jesse, annoyed, had pretended not to hear. “Now Robert Kennedy will be next, that is a prudent assumption,” Cady said. Helene had smiled a small, strained smile at this. But most of Cady’s conversation had been about a car he was having built for him. Jesse had tried not to listen to this, wanting to put his hands over his ears, staring at the television screen—but there was his father-in-law, the renowned Benjamin Cady, talking loudly about an automobile someone was building for him. On this day the President of the United States had been killed, but Dr. Cady insisted upon talking about an automobile.

  “It’s absolutely a custom job; there will be only one of its kind in the world,” Cady had explained. “The chassis, engine, and automatic transmission are being built by General Motors, then modified by hand by the Richler engineers. The final assembly, coachwork, instrumentation, and finishing will be done in Germany, of course. The leather interior will be done by Connolly Brothers—they supply Rolls, you know—it should be done shortly after the first of the year–”

  Jesse had not dared look at his wife’s face.

  Now they lay side by side in this hotel bed, the two of them in the darkness of a strange room. They seemed to be floating upon the darkness, separate. Whatever sorrow Helene felt about her father, Jesse did not know about it; whatever sorrow Jesse felt about Perrault, Helene did not know about it and would not have wanted to know. Other women had wept at the President’s death, but Helene had not wept. Jesse had felt tears of anger and frustration burn in his eyes, but Helene had remained calm because she hadn’t wanted to frighten the girls. “Jeanne is already too morbid. Shelley is feverish,” Helene had said. She was always assessing the girls, speaking of Jeanne and then of Shelley as if reporting on them to Jesse or to herself, making sure of them. “Too much is going to be made of this,” she had said of the assassination, “the country always makes too much of everything.… It will turn out vulgarized and clownish. I don’t want the girls to wallow in it.”

  The President had been killed. Now there was a new President. Before two o’clock it had all happened and had become history: the motorcade in Dallas fired at, the President struck in the head, the President pronounced dead. Jesse felt again and again the impact of those bullets in his own body; the head, the vulnerable head, the precious brain.… Why was it always this way, men dying, men dead? Why the exploded skull, the burst brain, why so many men in a procession that led to death? Dr. Vogel, sweating, could not understand it.

  He would think of Reva instead.

  No, not Reva. Not tonight.

  His senses stirred suddenly, painfully. Always Reva. Reva. But he would not think of her tonight. He would remain faithful to Helene.

  When he could not sleep he often thought of Reva, and a kind of storm would grow in him. But he must not think of her tonight, not when someone had just died. His mind raced, looking for something to attach itself to. Not Reva. Not the demands of his body. He often lay awake for hours at night, unable to sleep, and in his head there were people, patients, deaths, diagnoses, problems, recoveries, improvements, surprises. Dr. Perrault had just filed a suit against someone, and Jesse would be dragged into it. No way out. He must acquire an attorney of his own. Must protect himself. His mind filled up with Perrault’s words, Perrault’s grimaces, Perrault’s soul. He lay awake in a perpetual consciousness, a perpetual flow of words. He could never catch up with his own consciousness.

  What was consciousness, what was life? What was death?

  He thought he heard a sound in the adjoining room, where the girls were sleeping. One of the girls moaning in her sleep?

  He wondered if he should get up to check. But Helene was sleeping purely, flawlessly, and he did not want to disturb her. He listened and heard nothing more. Shelley had been so frightened, so wild.… He had not been able to say the right words to Shelley. He had not been able to console her. Holding her, embracing her, trying to comfort her, he had felt with a terrible certainty the failure of his words, his touch, even the fact of his fatherhood … what could he bring to this terrified eight-year-old, this pretty, feverish child? It was terrible, that he should love his daughter so much and yet be unable to help her.

  He listened but heard nothing. No sound from the other room. Only sounds from the street eight stories below, ordinary city noises, impersonal and out of his control. Helene slept beside him, turned from him. Jesse wondered bitterly if she was human, that woman. She was so virginal and impersonal in her half of the bed, the kind of woman who sometimes came to his office—refined, tense, very intelligent—carrying her flesh lightly, as if it belonged to someone else. He did not understand these women. Shelley was not going to be like that. These were women inhabiting bodies that did not belong to them and did not interest them. A man could not connect himself to a woman without a body. Just before flying to New York, Jesse had talked with a young female patient and had explained that her condition had been diagnosed as myasthenia; and before he could go on to assure her that this was treatable, she had interrupted and asked coolly, indifferently, “How long do I have to live, Doctor?”

  He had the idea that his diagnosis had disappointed her.

  The thought of Reva was still with him, not the thought of her exactly, but the sensation of her. He touched Helene’s shoulder, which was uncovered. Cool, smooth flesh. It was subordinate to him and yet separate from him. He wanted to make love to it—to his wife—but the strain would be too great, the need for conversation, the conflict between them that was never verbal, never exposed, her pretense at sleepiness and her reluctance and her final acquiescence. She would become affectionate when it was almost too late—when it was almost too late.

  He would never sleep if he thought about love.

  He would never sleep if he thought about the dead President, about the death of the President, the fact of death.

  Jesse lay unable to sleep. Occasionally, out in the hotel corridor, a voice lifted with faint perplexity or impatience, as if this long troubled day had kept people up too late, pushing them to the limits of their strength, their capacity for grief. Eventually you ran out of grief. He himself was only thirty-eight years old, he was only beginning his life, and yet he was unaccountably tired, his soul was tired, as if he had lived through several lifetimes already … as if, somehow, Dr. Perrault’s aging were his own, something he had already experienced and was experiencing now, through Perrault, and must someday experience once again in
Jesse Vogel.…

  Jesse Vogel: who was that?

  He heard a sound from the girls’ room. He sat up, startled.

  He got up, put on his bathrobe, and crossed over into the other room. His eyes darted at once to the twin beds, the covers that looked light, almost glowing, in the shadowy room, the girls’ slight bodies beneath the covers—his daughters. His. Both seemed to be asleep. He closed the door behind him and stood there, staring at them, his heart still pounding as if he had thought them in danger. He wanted them only to sleep like this—to be at peace, unharmed, unconscious.

  Yes, they were both asleep. No danger.

  When Jeanne had been born, Jesse had loved her so that it had frightened him. Fascinated by her smallness, her perfection, the fact of her existence.… And then Shelley had been born, Michele, an even lovelier child, and Jesse had felt, helplessly, the deepest current of his love flowing out to her, a truly hot, glowing, illuminating passion that was like an intense beam of light, out of his control. It was terrible, his love for her: he had felt her hysteria in that crowd as if it were an opening in the earth, and impossibility suddenly pushed upon him.

  He was going to lose her.

  He approached her bed: a child hunched beneath the covers, asleep. Mouth open. The sound of her breath. Jesse bent and pulled the covers up higher about her. She did not stir. In the other bed, Jeanne slept with the back of her head flat on the pillow. It startled Jesse to look from Shelley to Jeanne, unprepared for Jeanne’s being so much older. She was eleven years old now. Her dark hair had been cut short and it was curly, wavy, disordered. She seemed to push herself out tight against her skin, so that her forehead looked tense even in sleep. Shelley was softer, more vulnerable. She lay with her face turned to one side on the pillow, her full, rather plump cheeks absolutely still, her eyes lightly closed, as if she were not truly asleep but watching Jesse secretly. Her lips were parted; Jesse saw a gleam of moisture on her chin. He stared at her.

  He sat quietly in a chair near Shelley’s bed. A blower somewhere in the room circulated air, making a hollow, gusty, remote sound. Why are you crying? Stop crying! He felt a dull anger toward his daughter, mixed with confused emotions of fear, pity, love—had she struggled with him, trying to break free of him? She had stared up at him as if not recognizing him.

  She had a small, perfect face. Heartbreaking skin. It was uncanny, that child’s beauty—she was only a child, with a child’s face, and yet there was a womanish pertness to her features, an accidental and startling perfection about her small nose and mouth and her large, thickly-lashed eyes that seemed even now to be peering at him. He half-expected her to sit up in bed and laugh. It stung him to see Shelley’s soft, unconscious beauty; it was almost a painful, stinging sensation, to sit there by her bed—feeling himself better off here than in that other bed, lying sleepless in a half of a marriage.

  And suddenly a sense of panic overcame him.

  The President was dead: that was the beginning.

  It was the beginning of something.

  Jesse sat in that chair the rest of the night, thinking of the young, dead President, who was already a historical fact, a dead fact, and thinking of his own daughters, who slept so deeply and unconsciously. Tears gathered in his eyes and ran down onto his cheeks. His mind was clear, but he could not help those tears; something panicked and bitter drove them out, seemed to be pinching his nerves to the point of pain. He felt that he was sitting up like this, mourning the President, and yet mourning something else—but he did not know what.

  He marveled at his daughters’ sleep. They were so delicate and precarious, his daughters, they could be destroyed so easily, so easily smashed, it was a wonder they had lived to be as old as they were. It was a wonder. A marvel. He wanted only to protect their lives, to protect all that existed in his life, precisely as it existed at this moment.

  When he got back to Chicago he bought a gun, a pistol to be carried in his coat pocket; he got a permit to carry a concealed weapon. This was in 1963. He carried a pistol with him for the next seven and a half years.

  3

  October 1970

  Dear Father,

  Today we got a ride with four boys from New York in a broken-down car—wild kids! Hair long as Noel’s. He conned them about himself and me being from Alaska. Spoke of me as “the Fetish.” Drank beer and threw the cans out the window. Cans bouncing on the road behind us—bouncing in my head—gave me a headache.

  I am “the Fetish.”

  Noel dressed me up the other night for the beach. Painted red stripes and circles on me. All he had was red paint but he was very ornate. His touch is ornate, just to feel him touch you. Painted me up and down, curls and tendrils and complex interweaving lines. Decked me out with beads, five or six strands of beads, one made of sharks’ teeth, wound more beads around my thighs, my ankles, linked me to him with a long strand of glass beads, led me around the beach naked.

  Those old bastards from Iowa, from Michigan, the retired folks from Indiana couldn’t believe their eyes, kept staring at me. Couldn’t believe it! Noel, very politely, introduced me as “the Fetish.” He had painted big red eyes on my eyelids so when I closed my eyes other eyes appeared. I wish I could have seen that. But I couldn’t. Wound rows of beads tight around my forehead that left a mark afterward.

  Up where the cars were parked, some guy with a huge stomach approached Noel. Guess what he wanted. His eyes all bloodshot from the sun and the birds crashing down all the time and his belly heaving; Jesus, I wished that Noel had spat in his face instead of just answering politely that I belonged to him.

  Somebody called the police but we got out before they arrived.

  December 1970

  Dear Father,

  I am thinking of Christmas 1967, which is three years ago now but very close to me. I am thinking of the night you walked out on us.

  Noel teases it out of me, my dreams. I owe everything to him. You owe my letters to him, you should be grateful to him—or else I would have melted away by now, just thin wispy smoke going up into the sky!

  We are in a hot, hot sun here. In Chicago it is freezing but here the sun bakes us. I am very brown, dried out and brown. Noel is very brown but his hair is bleaching out. Saintly and blond, Noel. My red hair is shining from the sun. Noel washes it for me whenever we have soap. The salt water is sticky and the sand sticks like mud, very fine mud, like salt itself, everything very fine and invisible.

  Noel loves me and teases you out of me. He says he can feel the shape of you in my head. He never heard of you, never heard of the Vogel Clinic, never heard of Benjamin Cady or Roderick Perrault, but I told him that Dr. Perrault looked like one of the pelicans we see here, the same mean clever beak and squat body, the way they fly and suddenly dive down into the water for their prey. The pelicans are dying. Becoming extinct. Someone got excited about this in a bar somewhere but Noel argued that it didn’t matter. We are all becoming extinct, Noel explained.

  Noel is my lover, my lover, my lover. I know the shape of him in me when he is far from me, even when I don’t know where he is or when he is coming back or even if he will come back. But I know him. I feel him. I feel you. He teases me until I cry out to him, I scream out to him—not words but only sounds, noises—there is the mark of my fingernails on him and on my body the marks of his nails, the bruises, the crown wrapped tight around my forehead that stung and made little indentations like teeth.

  I am thinking of the marks you made around my head, neat little scars from incisions.

  Inventory for 1967: Winnetka, where you brought us. Near the lake. Formless little lanes that are not streets or roads, enormous elms and oaks and evergreens, and spiky thin evergreens arranged around houses to keep them from floating away. You brought us to an expensive house of old, age-softened brick, three stories high, with a garage that was a house of its own, turreted and neat as a gingerbread house. A big dipping lawn. Elms, oaks, evergreens, etc. You soared with us to this house and dipped us down
to it, landing us on the bright green lawn one spring day. You said, “Do you like it? It belongs to you.”

  When I was nine years old Grandfather Cady gave me a large illustrated copy of Alice in Wonderland and Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking-Glass. I sat with it up on the table before me, a big heavy book, reading the paragraphs one by one and trying not to fall into them and lose myself, trying not to feel terror, it’s only a book; staring at the drawings of this girl with the long, long neck and the straggly hair and the wild, enlarged eyes, the girl reduced to the size of a mouse, sailing through the air dragged by the Red Queen’s hand, sitting at the end of a banquet table while legs of mutton waddled down toward her to eat her. I would close my eyes in a panic and feel you dragging me through the air, feel my head coming loose with the exertions of the wind and all the noise of Winnetka that was not said out loud, screaming at the back of your head, the side of your face, that noble face. Noel asked me what my worst terror was and I told him, “A book falls down from a library shelf and comes open. It is a very large book with a heavy binding. It falls onto me, knocking me down, and then everything is very still—no one knows about it, the book is not alive and has no will, it means no evil against me—and I am lying there, paralyzed, I can’t make out what the book is about, only a few letters or parts of words close to my eyes—”

  I told Noel I was going crazy with the need to figure you out.

  Noel said there was no need on earth to figure anyone out.

  I said you were a book I had to read but I couldn’t read because my mind was going. The alphabet was all broken up. Letters could be put together in any way, to say anything, and then scrambled again to say anything else, but they all said the same thing, pressed too close to my face for me to read.