Wonderland (37 page)

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 cheeks, 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!”

But though he recalled this now, he felt all the more desperate to see her. So many little vexations. Little disappointments. He had to get hold of her, he had to make certain of her. He would frame her face in his hands, he would press his mouth against hers, he would embrace her wildly.… Up ahead he saw a couple approaching and for a moment, shocked, he thought the girl was Anne-Marie. But no, it was a stranger, a girl dressed in white—a white dress that was not a uniform. Shakily, Jesse went back to Anne-Marie’s street and waited.

When she finally came, getting off a bus at the corner, he again saw the surprise and the faint fear in her when she noticed him. “Jesse …?” she said, wondering. He hurried to her and took her hand. He tried to smile. They greeted each other, smiling. Jesse saw that her face was not quite ready for him—there was a coarse, greasy cast to her forehead and her hair was wind-blown. But she was still very beautiful.

“Don’t bother going in the house. Let’s leave here. Let’s go for a walk,” Jesse said.

“I—I want to change my clothes—”

“No, don’t bother, you look beautiful. You look lovely,” Jesse said.

She seemed evasive beneath her smiling surprise. He could sense her thinking rapidly. Maybe she did not love him, he thought angrily, maybe she wanted to marry him only because he was going to be a doctor. All these nurses, these clever little girls, hoped to marry doctors.… But why was he thinking such things? He loved her. He loved her very much. He liked her being a nurse, he felt the rightness of their marriage. Everything was right. It would work out.

They walked out along Geddes Street, to the arboretum. It was one of their frequent walks. Jesse could not pay attention to Anne-Marie’s chatter; he thought only of embracing her, of making love to her. When they were in the arboretum, on one of the deserted paths, he embraced her and she slid her arms about him tightly. She was so sweet, so light in his arms.… His desire for her was painful.

Then she squirmed away. She took his hand and walked beside him, and he could sense her separateness, her isolation from him. What was she thinking? Jesse led her down a slope, so steep that they had to dig their heels into the earth. They were alone now. Jesse put his arms around her again. He could not stop mauling her, pressing himself against her. Everything about her seemed to him vital and mysterious, filmy with the gauze-like confusion of his closed eyes, the rubbing of their faces together, the warm flesh of her back through the uniform she wore, the tight straps his hands brushed against, the sense of her tight, compressed little body.… He was whispering something to her. He loved her. Loved her. He needed her. An image flashed into his mind: that girl on the street in the white dress, whom he had mistaken for Anne-Marie. A girl he might make love to, like this. Another image: Mrs. Spewak on the other side of the bathroom door, calling him. Taunting him. She was an attractive woman; she threw herself around the house half-dressed sometimes; she knew exactly what she was doing … and why was she always brushing against him or tugging at his arm, teasing him? He remembered. Trick in the laboratory doorway. Trick backing away. That look on his face. The bitter drawing-up of his lips, the contemptuous scowl.
Love! What the hell is love?
And Mrs. Spewak had made a bitter face too, though her skin was exhilarated with the energy of her anger:
Pigs
.

Jesse felt like sobbing. He was mad with love for Anne-Marie. He could not control himself. She was whispering, “Jesse? Jesse?” They lay
down. Anne-Marie said, “Jesse, I love you, I love you, but I can’t get used to you … all this emotion.… You’re happy with me and then, when we meet again, you’re angry.… I don’t understand you.” He kissed her wildly, happily. “I’m not angry with you. I’m not angry,” he said. She had such a pretty face—why couldn’t he trust it? Maybe he did not trust prettiness. Her skin was fair and smooth, her hair gleaming, always clean, lovingly tended … she was always tending herself, checking herself in mirrors.… “I’m afraid of you,” she whispered. “Jesse, please don’t hurt me.…”

He could no longer remember where they were. Often they had lain in each other’s arms out here, far from the wide paths and from other people, and Jesse had felt at those times a small prickling sensation of being spied upon, though no one ever watched anyone else out here … and now he experienced the same sensation but it seemed to provoke him further, to increase his desire … the certainty that someone must be watching, that Trick himself was somehow staring sardonically at the two of them, his lips prepared to utter a contemptuous word:
Pigs
.… It was possible that Trick had been Anne-Marie’s lover, that he had known her when she was a nursing student years ago. It was possible that she had lied about that and about other things. He could not believe her. “Don’t be afraid, I love you, I love you,” Jesse said in anguish as the poison built up in him, a sharp rhythmic pain. They had made love only a few times before, gently and guiltily; but today Jesse pressed himself against her, into her, with a sudden violence that made her cry out. Jesse’s mind seemed to bounce everywhere, from one part of the hill to another, stricken with the blind agitation of this moment—

She wept in surprise, clinging to him.

“I love you.…” he said, as if this explained everything. But now, with his face pressed against her hair, his eyeballs numb, as if scorched, he felt the beginning of a long wavering sigh of despair. And he knew that he did not love her, not any longer. He did not believe that Trick had been her lover, and yet it was as if it had happened—as if he had witnessed it. Trick, curious and cynical in this beautiful girl’s arms, in the silence of this place, in the damp grass. Trick screwing up his face and spitting. Pronouncing judgment upon her. Trick’s wise, monkish face.…

No, he could not love her after this, though he would still marry her. He would marry her. It was not possible for him to love her but he would marry her as he had promised.

One day in late May, Jesse was behind the wheel of his landlady’s car, parked in front of a grocery store in which Mrs. Spewak was shopping. The car was an old Ford with a splotched windshield and soiled, frayed seat covers. A small St. Christopher medal, of a yellowish plastic meant to look like ivory, was attached by a suction cup to the dashboard; in the back seat, the eight-year-old Carla sat, jarring Jesse’s seat with her knees, chattering at him in her high-pitched, exasperated voice. Something about her mother—her mother’s injustice to her. Carla had the frank, wistful, tortured expression of a dwarfed adult but the relentlessness of a child, continually circling the same topic: “I hate her. I
hate
her.”

“No, you don’t hate her,” Jesse said sternly.

But he had his eye on a couple approaching the car, walking along the sidewalk.

The man was familiar but somehow out of place here—unexpected here—that careful, fastidious walk, the way he moved his hands in slow, artificial, restrained gestures—as if explaining something that must be visualized precisely. Jesse recognized Professor Cady. It was Cady. And the woman was probably his wife: she wore a dark green suit, the jacket a little mannish, plain, loose as a maternity outfit, giving her a sturdy, shapeless appearance. Jesse saw that her legs were quite slender, though, and probably inside that unflattering suit she was slender, lithe, appealing. Cady had evidently married a woman many years younger than himself. Jesse did not know if he approved of this or not. He stared at them, hoping they would not notice him—Cady was no taller than the woman, his near-white hair clipped short and clean about his handsome skull, his coat a dark khaki, plain and correct as a uniform. He looked British. Jesse had always supposed that his clothes were expensive; they were so understated, muted. Only the man’s voice, by a certain trick, called attention to itself—the lifting of
words at the conclusion of a sentence, a subtle accenting of the next-to-last words, so that he seemed about to call his listeners to account. They were alerted, a little intimidated by him. His expression was usually neutral and undramatic. His eyes were shrewd but rather small and closely set. Were they gray, some near-neutral color? Jesse wondered if the man’s small, excellent white teeth could really be his own.

Jesse drew in his breath as he watched Cady and the woman approach, the two of them so obviously together, united. They were talking earnestly about something that united them. Cady’s graceful hands, describing odd little circles and boxes in the air, united them with their seriousness and their precision. What were they saying? Cady had married an attractive young woman. Jesse stared critically at her and saw that her face was serious and intelligent, the pale lips curved to a tentative smile as Cady explained something to her. She nodded uncertainly. He smiled. Jesse wondered what they were talking about. What did married people talk about? Suddenly he wondered what it might be like to be that man, that distinguished man—Cady had been a colleague of Walter Cannon’s at Harvard, years ago, he had been awarded a Nobel Prize along with two other men and certainly at Michigan he was highly respected, almost idolized by certain students—Jesse’s mind raced with the thought of meeting Cady now, face to face on the sidewalk. Why not?