Wonderland (66 page)

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.

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.

Noel said that human beings had no need to learn how to read. Reading was dead. The alphabet was dead.

I said how would you know history then, if you couldn’t read?

Noel said history was dead.

I said how would you know the shape of your own body then, if you couldn’t read about other bodies?

Noel said it wasn’t only history that was dead but anatomy too.

I covered my face with my hands because I couldn’t understand him and he scared me.

Noel said, “History is dead and anatomy is dead. Passion is the only destiny.”

Noel is not from Alaska but when I first saw him he was so pale, his eyes so big and dark and burning in his pale, curdled skin, his beard grown out so ragged and crazy, that I knew he was from a place where the language is different and you can’t understand what people mean.

Noel made me love his body, all the parts of his body, with my fingers and my mouth and my eyes, so that I would never hold myself apart from him. “The Fetish must be humiliated,” Noel told me.

I told Noel I wanted to crawl out from under that book and see what it said. Noel told me it was a book I wrote myself. He told me I could forget you by dreaming back over you and writing it down for you to read, up there in Chicago in the Vogel Clinic; books are dead, says Noel, the hell with books and reading, the hell with your father, the hell with language, the hell with America, the hell with the Fetish, all that must be humiliated and forgotten. “Drive your cart over the bones of the dead,” Noel says with a wink.

I told him about the Vogel Clinic. The plate glass, the aluminum, the marble; the beds of evergreen and white, bulky stone.
Oh I loved you
there
. Where you were Dr. Vogel and invisible. Where you were Dr. Vogel, my father. I told Noel about counting the windows in our house—forty-eight windows, some of them very high and narrow and complicated. I think Mother counted them too, one by one, each window a place to stare out. I told Noel about our slate roof, rising in graduated ranks, heavy as a cloud, thunderous and beautiful. I told Noel about your insomnia, how we would hear you walking through the house, the rooms of the mansion you bought for us, maybe thinking about the tons of slate over your head and wondering if they would collapse on you.