Mazes and Monsters

by Rona Jaffe

  Marriage to an ambitious, successful man was not what she had expected. All of that energy he had was for other things, other people. When she went to parties with him she saw the Hall Wheeling she had fallen in love with; but now he was enchanting people from his business world. At home he was tired, quiet, busy with work he had brought home from the office. He wanted “to unwind.” She realized that without either of them ever knowing it he had won her the way he would win a contract. She had been the challenge, the project. Now she and their baby, Hall junior, were like a building he had designed: completed, strong, perfect, built to last forever, and he was off to the next assignment. She looked at the other wives, busy in their own little worlds of home and children, and she realized this was what marriage was. She was doing just what a woman was supposed to do. But she felt betrayed.

  They had Robbie. She hardly ever played the piano anymore. The only free time she had was when the babies were napping, and then she couldn’t make noise. The rest of the time she was doing all the things you had to do for a helpless infant, or chasing after an active toddler, and it was so far from her dreams of the aesthetic gentlewoman’s life that she could not believe she had ever been so naive. She had never known what having children entailed. No one had ever told her. Perhaps she was selfish … She was afraid to tell anyone how she felt, for fear they would tell her there was something wrong with her.

  She needed her music: she felt it and heard it in her head, straining along the tendons of her arms and fingers like electricity. When she did have a chance to play the piano she realized she had lost valuable time she might never get back. She wasn’t as good as she had been. And now, at five o’clock each evening, she had begun to drink, “to relax,” and the drinking had become as seductive as the music. She tried to teach the boys to play the piano but they were not interested. They had no talent at all. She began to think that she had deluded herself; that she had no talent either. She loved and needed her music, she missed it, and finding it out of reach she began to will it further away. She would go back to it when the boys were grown. That was what other mothers did. Now she could drink, and forget.

  But the truth was she drank to remember. On the outside she had never changed from the quiet, sweet, cool girl who inspired poetry. Inside she was furious. The woman who tried to please everyone, to run a lovely home, to make her husband praise her; the woman whose generosity of spirit saw only good in everyone; that woman was burning inside, seething with anger. All the time she was growing up people had lied to her about life. Her parents had lied, her teachers had lied, her friends had lied, the world had lied; and even her husband, the one who was supposed to love her more than anyone else, had lied. When she got drunk she dared to say what she thought, and then it made other people angry. She had to make an impossible choice: turn her rage against herself and suffer, or vent it on the world and lose everyone. Not knowing which to do she did both.

  When Hall was fourteen she found out he was taking drugs. How could his school allow people to sell pills and marijuana to a little boy? How could this happen? She and her husband had moved to the suburbs so their children would be safe. Where were the police? Where was safety, sanity? Hall wouldn’t tell her where he’d gotten the stuff. When she searched his room he screamed at her. When she cut off his allowance he sold drugs to other children so he could get some for himself. Then she found out he’d been going in to New York.

  She couldn’t control him. He was almost as tall as she was, and he had become a stranger. He had an addiction, but so did she, and how could she do anything but argue with him and pray for him and cry? When he was fifteen years old he ran away.

  His father called the police. He told her that young boys who ran away became male prostitutes, got kidnapped, raped, beaten, killed. The police found Hall and brought him back like a prisoner—the prisoner of his parents. He was desperate and devious and he fooled them both. They thought he had learned how dangerous the world was out there and would stay home and be their son again. They gave him a birthday party to celebrate the fresh, new start they would all have together, all forgiven in love and hope for the future.

  He ran away and never came back.

  The pain of her failure would stay with her as long as she lived. There was not a morning she woke up without the sense that something hideous had happened, and then there was always that moment when she remembered what it was. She could tell herself that society had betrayed her son, or that he had done it to himself, but she could never really believe it wasn’t her fault, and his father’s, for things they had neglected to do. No one had told her what to do. Life had lied to her again. She wondered what she had done right with Robbie that she had done wrong with Hall, but she would never know.

  CHAPTER 9

  It was New Year’s Eve, 1980—the start of a new decade. That made it even more exciting, and although all of them pretended New Year’s Eve was silly, it meant a lot to them. Kate was going to her friend Janny’s New Year’s Eve party. The three of them had planned it together; she and Janny and Liz, but it was at Janny’s house. When they made the guest list they discovered they had seven men for every woman, which was awful, so they told people to bring dates. Then they worried that only the women would bring dates.

  “The guys will get mad and leave,” Janny said.

  “No they won’t,” Liz said. “They get free food and liquor and a nice warm place to hang around in—they’ll stay.”

  They had recruited three friends to act as disc jockeys. At midnight they planned to set off firecrackers in the backyard. They wished they could have been able to afford real fireworks, but this would have to do. If people didn’t crash, and if nobody got too drunk or stoned, and if the neighbors didn’t complain about the noise, it would be a terrific party. Kate was only sorry that Robbie couldn’t be there. It was sad to be by yourself on a sentimental night like this, especially when there was a man you cared about.

  Cared about … why hadn’t she thought: a man you loved? She really did care about Robbie a lot; she wanted to protect him and cuddle with him and be with him, but was that real love? Love should be your heart turning over when you saw him, a melting feeling when you had sex, being willing to die for him if you had to. Being away from Robbie this Christmas vacation hadn’t been a lonely terrible time. She was happy with her old friends, and she felt warm and comforted every day when he called, but she hadn’t been counting the days until she could be with him again. She knew she’d be with him. Was this why romances at Grant broke up so fast: being too sure of somebody, wondering why there wasn’t more excitement? It made her feel guilty. She knew she hadn’t closed herself off from love this time, because she trusted Robbie completely. Yet, there was something missing in him, spaces she couldn’t figure out. Maybe he didn’t even know what they were.

  She didn’t have anybody to talk to about it. Her mother was more naive about love than she was. Liz and Janny didn’t know him, and they didn’t expect anything to last anyway. They would roll their eyes and laugh and chorus, “Next!”

  Poor Robbie … But at midnight on New Year’s Eve, when he called as he had promised to, she started to cry. She cried because he was so good and faithful and kind and she didn’t deserve him, and she also cried because the firecrackers were going off in the backyard and she was missing them, and it made her feel like a perfidious rat to care.

  When Robbie heard Kate cry on the phone he was so moved he almost started to cry himself. He was at his friend Nick’s party, and there was so much noise he had to hold his hand over the other ear. It was a total free-for-all because they knew it was the last real party before they had to go back to school. Everyone had gotten very dressed up, and they had bought champagne to serve at midnight. The television set in the living room was on, and they had watched it, counting in unison, all excited, as the ball fell down the tower in Times Square. Then they blew horns and yelled, “Happy New Year!” and kissed each other. When it was midnight in California the long-
distance circuits were still busy, and Robbie had been panicked that he wouldn’t be able to get the call through to Kate at exactly twelve o’clock her time, and then it wouldn’t count. He liked the ritual of it; it made him feel secure. If he could be the first person to speak to her on the first minute of the first day of her new decade, it would bring them both luck.

  “Don’t cry,” he told her gently. “I’ll be with you soon. Just ten more days.”

  “I know,” she said tearfully.

  “I send you a kiss,” he said. “This is a real kiss, okay? I mean, I’m kissing you, it’s coming right through the telephone wires to land on your face.” He kissed into the phone. “Got it?”

  “I got it.” She sent one back to him. “That was yours.”

  “It felt great,” he said.

  “I have to go now,” she said.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” she said. “Talk to you tomorrow?”

  “Of course.”

  After they hung up he stayed there for a while by the phone, feeling peaceful, until a girl he hardly knew came over and gave him a kiss. Robbie wished she hadn’t done that. He didn’t want to kiss anybody but Kate; it was necessary to be undefiled.

  At midnight on New Year’s Eve Daniel was in bed with a girl named Sharon whom he’d seen a couple of times during the holidays. She was an economics major at B.U., a Junior, and she had her own apartment, which she shared with two other women who were away. She was enthusiastic and outgoing and very sexy, and she liked to be with him alone more than she liked to be with him at a party, so she had dragged him home from the party at ten o’clock. After nearly two hours in bed they were both quite tired, and they were sipping champagne and eating cookies.

  She ran her hand through his thick hair. “Happy New Year,” she said.

  “Happy New Year.”

  “You’re the only man I know who’s prettier than I am.”

  “I’m not pretty, Sharon, come on!” Daniel said, annoyed. She always made him feel like an object.

  She grinned. “You’re gorgeous, how’s that?”

  “Okay.”

  “And bright. And a nice guy. And a terrific lover.”

  “Thank you.”

  “These cookies are stale,” she said. She got up and went into the bathroom. She had a beautiful body, very firm and smooth and curvy. He poured a little more champagne and turned on the small black and white television set she had on the floor next to the bed. The reception was terrible; he couldn’t tell if it was snowing in Times Square or the snow was on the screen, or even if it was Times Square. He supposed she hardly ever had time to watch TV anyway.

  He felt depressed. The sex had been great, and she was a nice person, but he didn’t care about her and he knew she didn’t really care about him either. He never knew what she was thinking, and when he tried to ask, it always turned out that what she was thinking had very little to do with him. That was just as well—it would be unfair if she had more feelings for him than he did for her. This was just right the way it was. He should be pleased.

  But New Year’s Eve was a special time, and he wished he were in bed with a girl he loved, not here with someone who was almost a stranger.

  The stranger, with whom he had just engaged in all sorts of erotic, pleasant, and intimate acts, came back and got into bed.

  “Can you stay all night?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Good. Where do your parents think you are?”

  “All-night party. That’s where I was.”

  She laughed. “I got my own apartment so I could stop lying to my parents. They do control the money, after all. They’re sending me to school, so I like them to be happy. Commuting was the pits. I lived in the dorm for a year, but when I had to go home for holidays my parents acted as if I was still their little girl. This way they can tell themselves what they want to hear.”

  “True.”

  “My roommates and I are going to London this summer,” she said. “If you want to sublet this apartment, you can.”

  “What’s the rent?”

  “Four hundred a month, but it has two bedrooms, so you can share.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll think about it.”

  “You get it all furnished, of course,” she said. “It’s a steal.”

  He thought how his friends at school would probably think he had spent a sophisticated, romantic, sexy New Year’s Eve—a typical Daniel’s New Year’s Eve—practically attacked by this luscious creature, now in bed sipping champagne together.

  A typical Daniel’s New Year’s Eve, he thought sadly, was lying here casually discussing a real estate deal.

  Jay Jay spent the same New Year’s Eve he had spent for as long as he could remember: alone while the rest of the world was at a party. His mother had gone out in a long white evening gown, trailing a cloud of Opium and two dates, both of them gay. Jay Jay had prepared a little supper of champagne, Scotch salmon, Brie, and grapes, and was lying on his bed watching television. Merlin was his date. For a special holiday treat Merlin got some grapes too. When all the midnight nonsense was over, Jay Jay switched channels until he found an old movie. He had called Kate, Daniel, and Robbie earlier, but they were all out at parties, like normal people. He’d spoken to Kate’s mother, who seemed very nice and was entertaining a few friends; there was no one at all home at Daniel’s house; and Robbie’s mother was completely drunk but friendly. Jay Jay had the feeling she was lonely and glad to have someone to talk to, even if it was just a kid who was a school friend of her son’s. She talked to him for fifteen minutes. He didn’t mind; in fact he liked it.

  So the old year was over and good riddance. The new one was going to be much better. He turned off the TV so he could concentrate and got out the pile of new Mazes and Monsters Challenge Modules he’d bought at the hobby shop. He’d already gone over them several times, checking off perils that could be reenacted with real props in a real setting like the caverns. He pictured the mazes he would invent in the caverns as a sort of deadly and terrifying fun house, with masks and eerie lighting waiting around corners, a coffin, real bones, a sword in a pile of stones, lumpy misshapen creatures made of rags and stuffing, coins, fake jewels, the robe with the mysterious potion in its pocket, and a pile of the Perilous Sand. But best of all would be the real bottomless pools, the pitch-dark uncharted labyrinth; the shivery feeling that no magic scroll could ever help you if you got lost. He, of course, would have a compass and a map.

  He would need all the time he could get to prepare the game he had in mind. While the others were studying for stupid Winter Finals he could be working out the game, because he never needed to study. But it was really going to be complicated to get all that stuff, like a kind of scavenger hunt. The more Jay Jay thought about his plans for his new game the more excited he got. He knew that tonight he wouldn’t be able to sleep at all. It was pointless to hang around New York anymore now that the important holidays were over. He could split tomorrow, go back to school early. His mother wouldn’t care.

  That would give him ten days, all by himself, to get started.

  PART THREE:

  RAISING THE DEAD

  CHAPTER 1

  Back in the dismal winter landscape of the deserted university, Jay Jay made it vibrant with the colorful creatures of his imagination. The school authorities had turned down the heat to save energy, but Merlin’s heater kept their room nice and warm. Once, he ran into the security guard, who asked for identification—not because Jay Jay looked like a local vandal, but because he seemed too young to be there at all—and for some reason, after he had ascertained that Jay Jay was in the dorm legally, the security guard seemed sorry for him. Jay Jay couldn’t understand why, since he was having the time of his life.

  He went methodically down his list of necessary props, checking off each one as he found or bought it. He hadn’t yet decided what the treasure should be, but there was plenty of time for that. Smaller treasures,
to keep the adventurers going, were easier. But he had the feeling that the monsters in the caverns would be the real treasure.

  By the time the rest of the students had come back to the dorm, Jay Jay had everything he needed, neatly hidden away in one of the rooms of his caverns. He had now begun to think of them as his caverns, not the caverns, just as this production now was his game. Good-bye to Freelik the Frenetic of Glossamir, who had only been a player. Now he was the Maze Controller: the director, the scriptwriter, the set decorater, even the producer. He had begun to map his maze from the labyrinth of his caverns, and he kept the map hidden in his room where no one could find it. This was the most creative project he had ever done in his life, and it fulfilled him almost completely. The only thing he still needed were his actors, and they were sequestered with their noses in their books, cramming for Winter Finals.

  He also needed human bones; his special scary present for Kate. For these he went to his friend Perry, who was in pre-med.

  Perry was a simian-looking person with a gnomelike mind. “What do you need human bones for?”

  “I just need them,” Jay Jay said. “I’ll trade you the use of my motorbike for two weeks in return for two days use of the bones.”

  “If I let you have them, it would have to be on a weekend. I’d have to steal them out of the anatomy lab and that’s the only time no one will know.”

  “A weekend is just when I want them. Friday night till late Sunday night.”

  Perry squinted his eyes like the mad scientist. “I have to know why you need them, though.”

  “You don’t have to know,” Jay Jay said. “You want to know.”

  “Same thing. I can get them and you can’t.”

  “Okay, but don’t tell anybody. I don’t want anybody else to get the idea of invading my territory. I thought of it first and it’s my thing. Okay?”