Wonderland (42 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Silence, during which questions rose like bubbles in Cady’s head: Jesse imagined he could see them.
What, what did you say exactly? Your family is scattered or dead? Your parents are dead? How exactly did they die?
Jesse sat facing this man, an inheritor, a hopeful son-in-law, a kind of thief. He wanted to explain to Cady that those deaths were long ago, long ago. They did not matter now. How could they matter now? He wanted to erase all thought of those deaths from Cady’s mind, he wanted to seize hold of the man by his frail noble shoulders and shake him.…
Dead? All dead? Where are they buried? Where do the dead go? Where are the dead at this moment, Jesse?
After a few moments Cady began to speak gently. He told Jesse about his wife’s death many years ago. Helene had been twelve at the time. Years, years had passed, and yet the death was somehow fresh, permanently fresh in their lives. Jesse stared at Cady’s hands; at his small, perfect, oval fingernails, which were well-tended. Those hands had outlived his wife’s hands. What did that mean?
Where are the dead at this moment?
Jesse began to feel lightheaded. Panicky. A copy of
Time
Magazine lay on a nearby table and Jesse could see the picture of Harry Truman on the cover. It lay at a slant toward him, the face distorted, shortened, the eyes hardly more than slits. A father’s face. Alive or dead?
Jesse sat with his knees pressed together, suddenly afraid he might say something wrong. Make a mistake. He might ask Cady where the
dead went, and where they were all these years—he could almost hear his voice breaking into Cady’s voice, demanding to be told the truth—
An automobile accident. Christmastime. Long ago
.
And you have no more relatives, Jesse?
No. Yes. They’re scattered. I can’t find them. Couldn’t find them
.
Have you tried to find them?
No
.
Why not?
They’re in the cemetery, waiting
.
Do you go to visit them?
No, no!
Why not, Jesse?
“… so we were fortunate enough to have two sets of grandparents, very loving grandparents, for Helene.…” Cady was saying.
Jesse nodded gravely, sympathetically. What was this man talking about? It was hard for Jesse to follow. When he sat in Cady’s lecture he could follow everything the man said, no matter how complex it was; here, so close to him, as they talked of these soft-spoken matters, Jesse’s mind seemed to jump all over.
“… you said you lived with your grandfather, Jesse?”
“Yes.”
“How long was that?”
“A few years, until I went away to school … a few years … I don’t remember exactly.…”
My God, Jesse thought, how many questions can he ask! What does he want from me?… Benjamin Cady had won the Nobel Prize for his work in cerebellar physiology and always, always he was asking questions, staring at faces. Jesse felt an awe that verged on dread in his presence. He was always thinking. Thinking. Jesse wished that Helene would join them—a third person would help, would tilt the conversation in another direction, would save him.
And is your grandfather dead too? What, they’re all dead? Everybody is dead? Don’t you think that’s strange?
“… and your grandfather …?”
“He died a few years ago.”
Cady nodded. His face was grave as Jesse’s, but still he fixed Jesse with a certain clear-eyed look, as if assessing him.
Where was Helene? She was chaste and comradely, his Helene. He loved her.
He loved her
. With her he forgot about the past; or, if he had to
talk about it, he lied without fear. He always lied. He lied automatically, without fear, but when Cady questioned him like this he lied miserably—he could not keep his shame down. Helene was in the rear of the apartment and Jesse waited anxiously to hear her footstep—if he just heard her coming, or could pretend to hear her, he could get to his feet and bring this conversation to a halt.
He glanced up, imagining that he heard her. Cady noted his attentiveness and seemed pleased. “My daughter is a very serious, very steady young woman … a very special young woman, I think,” Cady said. “You’ve made her very happy already. I am grateful to you for that. Yes, very grateful. I hope you will love Helene and respect her always, all your life,” Cady said, his voice dimming suddenly as if he were about to weep.
“Yes, I will,” Jesse said, startled and a little ashamed. “I will always love and respect your daughter, yes.…”
He seemed to be making a vow.
He hurried up the steps of the apartment house with the piece of paper folded in his pocket, crumpled first in anger and then folded in two. She was waiting for him nervously, wearing the same yellow dress she had worn that day at the experimental farm. Was she wearing it on purpose? Her face was hectic and tender. Jesse wondered if Trick had already telephoned her. How much did she know? What was going on?
“You sounded so troubled over the phone.…” Jesse said.
He squinted at her bright, confused face. It was not like Helene to be so nervous.
“I don’t think it’s important, Jesse. It’s just—something that came in the mail—I thought I should show it to you,” she said.
Jesse took the paper from her, saw that it was the same dull, heavy white stationery that Trick had used for Jesse’s letter. No surprise. Grimly, his face set for disapproval, Jesse read Trick’s letter to Helene:
Dearest Helene:
I have always been of the conviction that love, because it is based upon the sexual drive, is an illusion, just as the sexual drive is to some extent an illusion, dependent solely upon ideal biological and environmental
conditions. Sexual desire is a superficial “instinct” that vanishes at the first sign of danger, as you know, and therefore any emotion based upon it is fantastic and wasteful. But you know all this! What you also know, and what I have learned, is that love can exist truly, apart from accidents of the body and the environment. For some time now I have been in love. But I hesitated to tell you because of the embarrassment and awkwardness it might cause you. I know that you are going to marry Jesse and that there is no chance of my changing your mind. How could I change your mind? He is an exceptional young man, far superior to me. Everyone admires his ambition, even if they do not always appreciate Jesse himself. When I first became aware of him, I was struck by his seriousness, his dedication to his work, a strange inner
certainty
of his that the rest of us lack. At times he has such a strange look! Am I exaggerating if I say that he is a dangerous man?—or would be dangerous if he hadn’t your love and his work to confine him?
Yours always, sadly,
Trick
Helene was watching Jesse’s face. “Are you very angry with him?” she said.
Jesse shrugged his shoulders irritably.
“I … I was so surprised.… I never thought.… Please don’t be angry with him, Jesse.”
“I’m not angry. I don’t get angry,” Jesse said. He had an impulse to crumple this piece of paper too. He was certain that Helene had enjoyed reading it and having him read it. She was very warm, agitated, excited. How womanly she was in her excitement! Turning from her, disturbed by her, Jesse read the letter through again, more slowly. He could recognize Trick’s glinting smile behind it, that cautious skeptical leer of his.
A dangerous man
.…
“He didn’t say I shouldn’t show the letter to you,” Helene said. “I feel very sorry for him … and we won’t be seeing him again, Jesse, after next week.…”
“No, we won’t be seeing him again.”
He took his own letter out to show her. It was not typed, as Helene’s was, but scrawled in Trick’s slanting handwriting, falling ignobly and clownishly down the page.
“Here. Read this,” Jesse said.
Dear Jesse:
She has received a letter from me today. Will she show it to you? Or will she keep it a secret? If she loves you she’ll show it to you.
Will you forgive me, Jesse?
I mailed a declaration of love to her this morning. All day long I have been sick with shame, I want to die, believe me when I say that my life disgusts me, that I am disgusted with my work and my jokes, disgusted to the point of death. Jesse, there is such a gift in you! There is nothing in me. Your soul is as tough as the muscles of your body but my soul is flabby and drained and mealy from disuse. I am always examining myself in the mirror, hoping for a change. You don’t know what my room is like because you’ve never come up here. You’ve never seen the mirror in my bathroom. You can’t imagine how ugly a face looks in that mirror, especially my face. I am always staring at myself. I am always pulling my cheeks to show my eyes edged with red and crazy. I look like an ape. I joke with myself in the mirror. You are a man who does not even bother looking at himself in the mirror, because he knows just what he looks like. Always.
I was wrong to send her that letter. Forgive me. After next week I will never see the two of you again. I will never bother you. Can I retreat from your lives with your good will, can I see you just once more? I will telephone Helene and ask if you will forgive me. I beg you to forgive me. May I take you out to dinner? And then I will vanish from your lives forever. I have been working on some poems. I think I will call them “Poems Without People.” I am the speaker in all of them but I don’t count myself as a human being, because I am drained out and soulless. Here is a poem I wrote this morning:
SONG OF MYSELF
I am a vile jelly
that grew wings
and a bumpy facial structure
beneath your bare feet
I would subside again
to jelly
to joy
Yours always,
Trick
Helene read the letter through twice, carefully. “I don’t understand that poem,” she said.
“The hell with it,” Jesse said.
“What is he trying to say …?”
Jesse took the letter from her and crumpled it in his fist.
“Jesse, you shouldn’t do that. Please, Jesse. It’s like striking him … it’s … He loves us both very much.…”
“The hell with his love.”
“But he is a good person. He is a good person,” Helene said slowly.
“He’s crazy.”
He took Helene’s letter and angrily crumpled it too.
“He asks us to forgive him.…”
The telephone rang.
Helene hesitated. Jesse waved her away, his heart pounding. “All right, answer it. Go ahead. Let him take us out. And that’s all, that’s the end of it, we’ll never see him again. Tell him that.”
She went to answer the telephone, relieved. Yes, it was Trick. Jesse stood by the window and covertly watched her, jealous of the rosiness of her skin, the delicate energy of her face. She was a handsome young woman, yes, and this rivalry made her more attractive. He understood. He told himself that it was natural, he should not be so angry with her; he must control himself. Once they were married there would be no rival for her love. No Trick preening and weeping over himself … in fact, Jesse thought suddenly, she would not meet very many men at all, she would not meet his colleagues, she would be his wife and the mother of his children and she would belong to him entirely. She would belong to him. His heart pounded with the hot urgency of this fact, his need to make it come true, while Helene stood a few yards away, listening to Trick. Jesse could make out Trick’s voice—how could he talk so much! How did he dare to call! Helene was saying softly, “No.… Oh, no. Not at all, Trick. No. He isn’t angry, no. Please don’t talk like that.… Yes.…” After a moment she put her hand over the receiver and said, “He wants to talk to you, Jesse. He wants to arrange a time to take us out to dinner.”
“I don’t want to talk to him.”
“Jesse …?”
“Make the plans yourself.”
So she made the plans.
Trick was to pick them up on Sunday, at seven o’clock; but for some reason he arrived an hour early. Jesse was already there. He remembered the several times Trick had come early to have coffee with him,
always insisting that he was on time and that Jesse was mistaken; now, rather gaily, he insisted that he was to arrive at six o’clock, that Helene must have made a mistake, he even accused her of being “charmingly feeble-minded.…” He had bought a new outfit for the occasion: a jacket of white and powder-blue stripes, a dark checked tie that did not quite match the jacket but looked very smart, and pale-blue trousers that were tight at the waist, so that Trick’s stomach protruded painfully. His hair had been cut. Jesse saw, involuntarily, that Trick’s skull looked pinkish and weak at its crown.
“Yes, we agreed on six o’clock—don’t you remember?” Trick said to Helene.
“I must have forgotten,” Helene said slowly.
“Six o’clock. Absolutely.”
He drove them downtown to a large steak house. Trick and Helene did most of the talking. They were nimble and abstract with each other, their remarks scuttling across Jesse without quite touching upon him, as if they were both afraid of Jesse. Jesse himself felt unaccountably nervous. It was difficult for him to look Trick in the face. Trick chattered rapidly about any number of things, always circling back to the topic of the letters and the poem. “I shouldn’t have burdened you with my troubles,” he said. “Bad poetry should always be kept secret. It’s as boring as dreams—as private and as boring as dreams—”