Wonderland (44 page)

Jesse shoved Trick away.

“Oh, you want to fight! You want to fight me!” Trick said.

“Will you get the hell away from us?”

“Fight me then. Come on.”

“Get out of here!”

He rushed at Jesse. Jesse shoved him away again. Around them on the sidewalk people stood, gaping, and the manager of the restaurant had come out. Trick tried to grab Jesse, tried to embrace him, and this time Jesse shoved him away with his knee. His knee caught Trick in the belly. Trick grunted in surprise but came back at once—he threw himself at Jesse and the two of them stumbled and fell. Trick fell on top of Jesse. Jesse rolled away nimbly; he had not been hurt, he felt only an enormous exhilarating rage. What surprise, to feel this rage! To feel his blood coursing so strongly! He jumped up, strong in the legs, the very muscles of his legs long prepared for this, and the muscles of his torso and shoulders and arms long prepared, eager, to get hold of this man, to slam him in the face—Jesse’s fists felt hard and distant as rocks. Painless. Helene was calling his name and trying to pull him away. But it was distant, painless. His panting breath was painless.

Trick, on his feet again, stood bent over in agony, swaying. He gripped his stomach. Blood was flowing from his nose down onto his shirt, dripping onto the sidewalk. He swayed and shuddered and yet seemed to be gathering strength for another lunge at Jesse.

“Don’t do it! I’ll kill you!” Jesse whispered.

But he ran at Jesse again, hardly able to straighten himself. This time he managed to get his big arms around Jesse in a tight strangling hold, but Jesse pushed himself free—Trick’s strength suddenly gave out and he staggered backwards, his fist pressed against his chest. He cried out in pain.

His legs buckled. He fell heavily onto the sidewalk.

“I told you—I told you!” Jesse cried.

Waiting in the hospital, immense vapid hours: the smell of panic about Jesse’s body, his cold body. His head felt hollow and cold. Jesse sitting in a cheap chair of metal tubing, with foam-rubber cushion, waiting. Helene with him, holding his hand, lowering her head wearily until she pressed her forehead against his knuckles; he gave a little jump when he saw her so docile, so close to him. In public. He was very sleepy.…

The resident on the floor told Jesse to go home. But Jesse wanted to wait, he had to wait.
Was Trick going to live?

“It wasn’t your fault,” Helene whispered.

It wasn’t his fault, but Cady had called an attorney at once. The man was brisk and unconversational. This Sunday-evening emergency displeased him. He kept asking about the witnesses: yes, there were three witnesses apart from Helene, three men willing to testify. Good.
Jesse remembered that blow in the stomach—his knee rising hard right into Trick
—Did the young man, Dr. Monk, strike you first?
Yes
. Did he insist upon a fight?
Yes
. Had he been provoked in any way?
No
. Not in any way?
No
. Did you know about his heart condition?
No
. A rheumatic heart condition—he never mentioned it to you? Never?
No
.

Jesse jumping up, his blood coursing through him—rage bursting in him
—

You repeatedly told Dr. Monk to leave you alone …?

Yes
.

“He was the one who wanted to fight. He insisted upon fighting Jesse,” Helene said. She was fired with a strange energy, leaning forward from the hips to look intently at the attorney, declaring herself. A certain ferocity, an air of ownership, gave her tired face a keen, girlish look.

To Jesse she said, “He wanted you to fight him so that you would kill him. I understand it now. He wanted you to kill him.”

Jesse rubbed his eyes as if to get this clear. But he could not understand.

“Yes, it’s true. I understand. I understand it now,” Helene said.

She waited in the hospital with him, holding his hand. She would marry him at once; they would get married at once. Why should they wait until Jesse’s intern year was over? Why? She knew what it would
be like to be an intern’s wife, it would be no surprise to her, the daughter and granddaughter of doctors—Yes, they must get married soon, in a week or two. She would never leave him.
Those first running steps of Trick’s … the clumsy wrestling embrace … Jesse’s knee brought up into his belly
.… She comforted him. He wanted to weep, she was so close to him and so public, so loving, so angry for him. She would never leave him.

“Why would he want to die?” Jesse asked her.

“He wanted you to kill him.”

“But why? Why?”

He stared at Helene.

“Why would he want me to kill him?”

It was the same question the attorney had asked.
Why would this young man want you to hurt him? Why would he deliberately provoke you when he had a weak heart?

Jesse’s face was turning into a muscle that yearned to show pain, intense pain. He wanted to cry. But he did not allow himself to cry.
Trick was dying, who would cry for Trick?
Sparkling protoplasm: Trick. Drowning. We are drowning, Trick had said. Jesse had not understood the poem and now he could not remember it. The words were jumbled.
Protoplasm … lovers … lovers pressed together in daylight
.…

No, he did not understand.

A balloon, flimsy and transparent. There is something terrifying about it. It floats upon a background of darkness, a universe of darkness, pinpricked by tiny dots of light. They are like stars. They are hardly more than suggestions of light. The balloon does not move but looks as if it might move, suddenly—if you were to lean down and breathe upon it, surely it would float away?

No, it does not float away
.

Pass your fingers near it lightly, not touching it. What are those grainy lines? They are like pencil lines. Like hairs. They seem about to lift themselves, to rise to the warmth of your fingers. But they do not move. The balloon itself is motionless, as if dormant for centuries. You can see through it, yet there is nothing behind it. Along its edges there are long thin lesions, as if someone had torn into the flesh of
this thing with a knife. You can run your fingernail along the edge of the balloon and destroy it, and your fingernail springs into the microscope’s lens like a planet
.…

Helene was staring through Jesse’s microscope. It was an enormous, costly instrument that her father had given him. She was alone in the apartment; it was five-thirty in the morning and Jesse was on duty at the hospital for the second night. Unable to sleep, uninterested in sleep, Helene had wandered through the apartment with her robe tied tightly around her.

She had turned on the light in Jesse’s study and was leaning over the microscope, her arms folded. She did not adjust the lens because that would mean she had been looking through the microscope, that she had been in Jesse’s study—a small back room hardly large enough for a child’s room. She did not want him to know she’d been in here. He would come home exhausted, glance in at his things, and sense that she had been here.… She wanted to keep herself separate from him; she felt a strange, almost angry fascination with the need to be separate from her husband. She loved him and understood that he loved her, yet she must retain this separateness.…

How strange it was, this thing beneath the microscope’s lens!—a filmy balloon, transparent cellulose, an enormous sun, an ocean of light, a face without features
—

Helene looked through the stack of papers Jesse had left on his desk—notes on patients, magazines, journals, a glossy offprint of an article by her father, originally published in a neurological journal. Jesse’s things were kept in careful piles, in order, papers clipped together and staggered along the edge of his desk so that he could see in an instant what was what. Helene felt a peculiar, heady excitement at the possibility of destroying this order—but she put everything back in place again.

It was early September. Jesse had been on the intern staff at LaSalle for two months now. His first assignment was in Medicine and he had one more month to go; he worked as Helene had known he would have to work, returning home stunned with fatigue, hollow-eyed, twitching and murmuring in his sleep. There he relived his first failures. Helene lay awake and tried to comfort him as he slept, knowing that her calm would have to serve for both of them. Loving him, pitying him, she stroked his damp forehead, brushing the hair back, studying him. His
facial muscles gathered themselves up into an expression of anguish; it was so brutal and so useless, whatever frightened him. What good did it do? What was he reliving?

She imagined him hurrying through the corridors of the hospital, being paged as
Dr. Vogel, Dr. Vogel
, a man in a dream. She imagined that half second of utter blackness as he picked up a telephone receiver to answer the call: lifting the receiver like that was like stepping into space.

He brought home news of the bad cases, the nasty surprises. Other news—patients who did well, were released, vanished back into the city—had no interest for him. He kept talking to her of his mistakes, his near-mistakes, his failures. He had Emergency Room duties every two weeks, when he was on twenty-four-hour call and had to stay at the hospital. Anything could happen then. It must have been the gelatinous air of late summer in Chicago, the murky humid nights, the teasing air of the streets, the itching in brains that led to such bizarre accidents—mangled automobiles wrapped together, workmen falling through the air, skulls split by playful gestures. Jesse’s hands could not work fast enough, his mind could not take in all these people. Once he came home and asked Helene to lie down with him, to hold him. He wept. He told her about a child brought into Emergency: a two-year-old with a wreck of a body, bruises and welts everywhere, one eye hammered shut and probably destroyed by tiny hemorrhages, ribs cracked, several fingers broken. Jesse shut his eyes tight and rubbed his face against Helene, weeping, surrendering his consciousness to hers, as if trying to impregnate her with his horror so that he could sleep.

She had tried to comfort him but had no words to use.

Now, in his place, she found it difficult to sleep. Jesse stayed at the hospital two nights every week, in a stifling room in the interns’ quarters. At home, Helene thought of him constantly. She tried to read; she glanced through the things on his desk as if to evoke another, more studious Jesse, a man not harassed and overcome with disaster; she stared out the window, she wandered listlessly about the empty apartment. She could sleep only a few hours every night. Jesse could sleep anywhere now. He could sleep in the hospital cafeteria, putting his head down on his arms for a five-minute nap. When he woke he would be as refreshed, he claimed, as if he’d slept an hour. He could doze leaning against a wall. He could sleep in a telephone booth while he
was calling Helene, waiting for her to pick up the phone; dozing off suddenly, completely, so that when she answered the call, she was connected to nothing, latched onto nothing. “Is that you, Jesse?” she would cry, her voice rising in alarm.

But she never spoke of her loneliness or her bitterness. The other interns’ wives complained constantly, angrily surprised by what they had contracted for, but Helene knew enough to remain silent. She never said aloud what seemed so clear: that it had been a mistake for them to marry so soon. Her father had tried to talk them out of it, and in private he had told Helene what she would have to endure. But she had insisted.
She had to marry him, must marry him
. Trick’s collapse had terrified him. He had needed her, he had been mute with fear, needing her … she had had to marry him, to comfort him.… And Trick had not died. So in the end her father had agreed with her reluctantly, and then sternly, possessively, gave her money and commanded her to use it.
Never mind telling Jesse about it
, her father had said.
Jesse’s life is too complicated at this time for him to be worried about money
. As an intern, Jesse received little salary. Helene worked part-time in the chemistry department at the University of Chicago, and she exaggerated the amount of her pay so that Jesse need not know about her father’s checks. The checks came every two weeks. Sometimes there was a brief letter with them, hardly more than a commandment—
Telephone me collect on Sunday, please
—sometimes nothing.

She floated between them, her father and her husband. They seemed to have no real consciousness of her except as a point of contact, an object, a beloved object. She would telephone her father obediently and sense her soul straining out to him across the distance, as if she wanted nothing more than to leap back into his life … the study with the watermarked ceiling, the antiques, the heavy-framed paintings, the Victorian home in Cambridge where she had spent most of her life. But did she really want that? Her head swam. No, she wanted Jesse, her husband. She wanted him to lie in her arms and speak gently to her of love, she wanted to feel herself separate from him and yet linked to him by the careful articulation of his love, not his nullity of fear and passion.

He would make love to her in the dark, as if secretly, hastily, before falling asleep. It was one act among many he had to perform. He was responsible for so much, he had to act swiftly, skillfully, and then he
had to fall heavily asleep so that he could wake up again strong enough to get through another day. It was heavy, the burden of his love! It was stifling, unnatural. Helene felt his anguish passing over into her, into the pit of her belly, where she was vulnerable to him, open and unresisting. There was always some spare horror he left her with:
In the baby’s excrement there were all these worms
.… So he slept while she lay awake, stunned. Her skin prickled with his sorrow. It was a presence in bed with them that she must keep at a distance, Helene alone, protecting Jesse while he slept.

 … She checked the microscope again. That balloon. It was like a mouth, a mouth without a body. Pure mouth. Flimsy and transparent and eternally hungry. Was it dead or living? Were any of these cells really dead? She swayed above Jesse’s desk, lightheaded at the thought of the crowd of cells that surrounded her and were inside her, which could never really die and which were invisible. Invisible energy. She herself, Helene herself, was made up of such cells and nothing else.… If she had the baby Jesse so strangely, desperately wanted, she would erupt into a cluster of new cells leaping out of hers, newer, richer, brighter energy pushing out of the nullity of her womb.…