Wonderland (68 page)

Isn’t my wife a beautiful woman?
her father had asked, bringing them his new bride proudly, jauntily.

A beautiful woman. A woman
.

Her father’s new wife was nearly as young as Helene herself. She did not want to think about her.

Downstairs, Jesse sat at his cluttered desk. His face a sleeper’s face, perplexed and drained. He was losing the robust high color of his youth, Helene thought. He turned to her, startled, and Helene saw that
his beard had grown out to a light red-blond stubble: some of the tiny hairs were gray.

“Have I … have I been up all night?” Jesse asked.

“It’s five o’clock.”

Jesse rubbed his hands over his face. “Five o’clock. I might as well change my clothes and go down to the Clinic.…”

Helene stared at the papers on his desk. It had been years since she had understood Jesse’s work. He was too far ahead of her, why bother to try? Somewhere a pile of magazines lay, marked for her to read, and though she had requested these assignments she had never really tried to read them. She could not understand the neurological terms.

“What have you been doing?” she asked gently.

“The preface for Perrault’s book,” Jesse said.

Again he rubbed his hands over his face. Perrault had died earlier this year and Jesse, his “literary executor,” was preparing his book for publication. For years he had been helping Perrault with it, and now he would be completing it, alone.

“God, I’m tired of this … all of this.…” Jesse said.

“Why don’t you come to bed and try to sleep?”

“No. I can’t.”

He had spoken impatiently. She wanted to touch him, to soothe him, but she was afraid he might recoil from her. He seemed to be living tight against his skin these days, pushing himself, urging himself forward, the muscles of his shoulders always tensing, his fingers always moving restlessly, restlessly. As his public life had become more successful, his private, inner, secret life had become more unfathomable to her. He was a dark puzzle. She remembered him as a young man, calling out her father’s name so eagerly—she remembered that face, that man—and she felt a heavy, erotic dizziness rise in her, the excitement a woman can feel only for a stranger.

“I keep thinking of the old man. How he died,” Jesse said.

“What do you mean?”

“Losing his temper over something an intern did, dying so fast, right in the intern’s arms.… I keep thinking of it. Imagining it. Nobody ever could figure out what Perrault was doing at the hospital so late at night, why he was wandering around … evidently he got mixed up and thought someone had changed the orders on a patient of his. He was actually going to yank the tube out of someone’s nostril
when the intern stopped him. I keep imagining myself in the intern’s place, wrestling with Perrault, holding him at the instant he died.…”

“Why do you keep thinking about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You bring it up so often.…”

“I can understand death scientifically,” Jesse said slowly. “It’s no longer mysterious or frightening to me. It’s these deaths … certain deaths.… The deaths of certain people. These deaths fascinate me.”

He was blank to her, like a wall or the side of a rocky hill. Everything was tense at the surface of his body, his skin impenetrable and luminous with a fine gleaming white, like ivory. Yes, he was mineral, elemental in his opposition to her: but it was an opposition that had no awareness of itself.

He was not a man; he was Dr. Vogel. He was no longer Jesse. He was not available to her. Nightly he held himself from her without any awareness of what he did. Every night. His mind raced feverishly and would not let him sleep, racing with the image of
Dr. Vogel, Dr. Vogel
. He was no longer Jesse, the young man who had called out her father’s name and stridden into her life. He only appeared to be in this room with her, speaking to her as a husband to his wife; really he was elsewhere. His presence here was a lie. If his mind cast itself about in this house, exploring his possessions, it would only assure itself of their existing, bluntly and coarsely, without spirit: a wife, a daughter, another daughter.

“I wish you would try to sleep,” Helene said helplessly.

Jesse stood. His height always surprised her. She was the daughter of a short man—a man her own height—and Jesse’s size seemed a kind of threat.

“I’m not tired now,” he said.

“Don’t think about Dr. Perrault, please.…”

Jesse stared at her. “But why shouldn’t I think about him? I can’t turn my mind off after thirteen years. Who else will remember him? Even his wife doesn’t remember him correctly.… She’s always calling me at the Clinic, you know. Wants to have us over for dinner, even the little girls, as she calls them.… But she can’t really remember him, she didn’t understand his work; he was a great man and he needs someone who can appreciate him.… Do you see what I mean?”

Helene said faintly, “Dr. Perrault is dead.”

“What? Dead …? Yes, he’s dead, I know that, I knew that,” Jesse said. “But I keep seeing him in my imagination. I keep having conversations with him. After thirteen years I can’t forget. People work themselves into the lives of others, into their brains. He exists in me, in my brain. In certain cells in my brain. Helene,” he said suddenly, “where do they go when they die? These people? They seem to be backing off from me, leaving me, I can’t keep hold of them … there is always something unfinished about them, about them and me.… I want to ask Dr. Perrault certain questions, I want that man to answer me truthfully, for once, not to be sly and sardonic but to tell me truthfully the secret of his life and of his death. It’s as if he still exists somewhere, but he’s mocking me, he won’t come back to me.… I need these people. I love them and I need them.… I keep imagining myself there at his death, instead of that intern. I see myself boring little holes into his skull and opening it up and draining the blood out, fixing him up somehow, saving him.…” Jesse said, holding out his hands for Helene to see. His fingers twitched as if with a desire to act, to grab hold of something.

Helene could not speak. She was afraid of him.

“I’m very tired. But I can’t sleep. Forget what I’ve just said.”

He went upstairs and Helene remained behind, watching his back, her husband’s back, wondering at him. She did not know if she loved him for his strangeness, if she desired him as always, or if she feared him.… She remembered the way he had walked out of the house on Christmas evening, the way he had frightened the girls. But he had not frightened her: his walking out like that, so quickly and so strangely, had been a kind of relief to her.

He was taking a shower upstairs. She lingered in his study, looking through the things on his desk. Typewritten pages, notes, offprints of articles.… Everything was scattered, and it was hopeless, the attempt to put the parts together. They would not add up to Jesse Vogel. She had married him but she did not know him. She had thought that marriage would be the beginning of her life; she had had a long life as a daughter, a famous man’s daughter, and she had been eager to begin her real life. She would be a woman, womanly and fulfilled. A wife. But this had not come about.… And then, puzzled, she had believed that the birth of her first child would fulfill her. So much apprehension and pain and joy … But the birth had left her exhausted and at a distance
from herself, from her own body. Her baby had overwhelmed her. She was ashamed of herself and it occurred to her that she must have another baby, another baby to make her normal, a real woman. But after the second baby nothing was different. She felt a final, terrible certainty about her strangeness: she would never become a real woman.

She was being destroyed by her husband, she thought, annihilated by him. He could not imagine her, had not the time to imagine her existence, and so he was destroying her.

She picked up a sheet of paper. It seemed to be what Jesse had been working on when she had interrupted him. The paper was covered with his large, fine handwriting, looping letters and strong slashes that crossed
t’s
as if with impatience, dots over
i’s
that were like small pricks in the paper itself.

The last sentence trailed away.

Helene read the paragraph again.

She put the paper down where she had found it. She folded her arms quickly, bringing her hands firmly against her ribs, tucked under her arms as if she were cold. After a moment she picked up a copy of a magazine that lay on top of some books—
Studies in Neuropsychiatry
—and saw from the table of contents that Jesse had an article in it. “Oddities of Retrograde Amnesia.” Helene skimmed the case histories of Jesse’s patients—a fifty-year-old man who believed himself ten years old, who kept asking the same question about the weather again and
again, unable to remember any answer given him; another man who listened to the same record again and again, unable to remember having heard it before; a woman who remembered details of her childhood forty years before but who had forgotten everything that belonged to her adult life. She read:

She closed the magazine and put it back on top of the stack of books. The voice of Dr. Vogel, his presence, his hard, radiant, luminous mind.… She opened a drawer: notecards held together loosely by rubber bands. Notes taken in red, green, and blue ink. She opened another drawer: newsclippings. Strange. She picked up one of them—it was a brief article about a suspected murderer who remembered his victim’s name but not his own name, knew everything about his victim’s life but nothing about his own life. He had evidently murdered a young woman in Tampa, Florida, had stolen a small powerboat, and gone out into the Gulf of Mexico, where he had been picked up by the Coast Guard. Another news item was about a derelict who was hospitalized in Bellevue and who began gradually to recall that he was a doctor himself, or had been a doctor; the story had a happy ending, with the derelict restored to his family in Yonkers, New York, whom he had left eight years before. Another clipping told of a coal miner of twenty-nine in Hazard, Kentucky, who had shot to death his wife, his
infant son, and his own mother, evidently on Christmas Day, leaving them dead in the living room of his home and going out to the barn to shoot himself.

How do these things come together?
Helene wondered.

Jesse was out of the house by six-thirty. The girls were up by eight and Helene made breakfast for them. She was still nervous from the encounter with Jesse. There was some tension between the girls, some irritation, but she did not want to inquire about it.

Jeanne and Shelley were totally different—no possibility of their being friends, only sisters. Jeanne was fairly tall, about five feet eight, much too thin, too serious. She was always staring critically, contemplating. She was sixteen years old and, like Jesse, paid scrupulous, courteous attention to all the details of her work—she was going to study biology when she entered college, hopefully at Radcliffe. But ordinary life seemed to baffle her.

Shelley, with her sloppy posture, her noisy eating habits—she ate her toast quickly, dropping the crusts on her plate—was inattentive, dreamy, very pretty. She appeared older than her thirteen years. Her red-blond hair was brushed down to her shoulders; her cheeks were pink, even ruddy. She was a few pounds overweight and very healthy. Jeanne was always catching colds, always complaining of headaches, but Shelley ran out in the rain and returned in the cold from swimming practice with her hair wet and never got sick. Her only troubles were nicks and scratches and bruises. She was always slouching as if embarrassed by her figure; she twisted strands of hair around her fingers and sucked at them, she was surging, pushing forward, yet oddly lazy, exasperating, nervy. This morning she was sitting with her eyes downcast, that pure, pale, light green of her gaze turned down to her plate and the crusts of toast, as if she were afraid to look up.