Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “He got killed?”

  “Yes, I told you. On the way to Detroit. After that I spent a few months alone, not wanting to see anyone. I finally got over it. I managed to get over it, and now my life has changed again.… You know,” she said suddenly, “I remember now where I met you.”

  “Where?”

  “But you don’t remember …?”

  “Where was it? When?”

  She smiled slyly, broadly. Jesse was excited by that smile, which seemed to him both delicate and barbaric—the dazzling white teeth, the moistened lips, the flawless, elastic skin! Her beauty was preposterous. Like this big, silent, handsome automobile; like the silver-haired chauffeur behind the glass partition. Preposterous. Yet he wanted only to get closer to her, to feel her fingers again on his arm, so lightly and mockingly. He wanted to take hold of her shoulders and look her full in the face. His body prickled with an excitement that was generalized, many-branched, a push of great animal impatience behind his skin.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me?” Jesse said in anguish.

  “You’ll remember.”

  “Why won’t you tell me?”

  “You’ll remember in a while. After you leave me.”

  “But how much time do I have? Are you in a hurry? I know you’re in a hurry, yes, and I shouldn’t be bothering you, but … When are you going away?”

  “In a few days.”

  “I won’t be able to see you again before you leave …?”

  “No.”

  “When exactly are you leaving?”

  She made a short, negative gesture with her hand, putting him off. He had said too much. He was too eager. Her dismissal hurt him, but he only smiled and said at once, “The driver can leave me off anywhere he wants. This corner is fine.”

  “It’s because my life is too crowded right now,” Reva said vaguely.

  Jesse shook his head as if to clear it. If she only understood.… But she would have recoiled from him, from his desire. It was loaded with blood.

  “Yes, he can let me off, anywhere is fine. Someone is dying back there. I shouldn’t have left,” Jesse said.

  “Dying? Where?”

  “At LaSalle.”

  She looked at him doubtfully. “Someone you operated on?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid he won’t make it. His wife is hysterical but I don’t have time for it,” Jesse said, “I don’t have time for anyone’s hysteria.… People have to die, it’s like a door they must take, but they have so much trouble choosing the door and getting it open and walking through the doorway. Yes, you say my work frightens you, I know that, it frightens me too … I understand that.… And another thing, another patient, I’m thinking of another patient I had got to know.…”

  “Who was that?”

  “A boy, seventeen years old.”

  “Is he going to die too?”

  He saw that she was suspended in a kind of breathlessness, a counterfeit fear. Or was it real? A woman’s natural reaction to such words, as mechanical a reaction as Jesse’s desire to seize her. She had been turning one of her thick rings around her finger and it almost came off—slid to the end of her finger—and Jesse reached out to catch it from falling, feeling her sudden alarm in all of his body. But the ring did not fall. She pushed it quickly back onto her finger and it was safe.

  “He’s only seventeen and he’s sick …?” she asked.

  “No, he’s well again. He had a hard time but he survived. A very strange disorder, complicated by a tumor … a benign tumor … but it did him in anyway.… I got to like him. I liked him.”

  “What happened?”

  “He’s become schizophrenic.”

  “Oh—what?”

  “Schizophrenic. Insane.”

  “But that had nothing to do with you, did it …?”

  “No, nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with us,” Jesse said. He sighed. “All the tests, the operation, lying in bed for so long … he gave up and we couldn’t argue him out of it.… Still, the treatment was a success. We were all pleased with it.”

  She frowned, as if his mood displeased her. Jesse tried to smile, gallantly, mockingly, because he felt now that he had made this woman hate him and there was nothing for him to lose.

  “Thank you for talking with me,” he said.

  “But was it worth it? Did you get out of this what you wanted?”

  She seemed sincere. Her brown eyes were fixed upon him frankly. He wanted to take her head in his hands, cradle it in his hands.

  “No,” he said.

  When he got back to the hospital it was after two. He arrived at Dahl’s room just in time to pronounce him dead.

  11

  “But why do such a thing?”

  “That’s a strange question.”

  “To preserve life at such a cost.… And what kind of life would it be? Your services go to the highest bidder, don’t they?”

  “But the highest bidder would be the United States government,” Perrault said.

  He looked around the table, elfin and cheerful. He hadn’t eaten much, hadn’t touched his wine. His gaze kept moving onto Jesse as if teasing him, taunting him, and Jesse himself had had no appetite.

  What did Perrault want from him?

  Cady said, “Absolutely true.”

  Jesse and Helene and Helene’s father had been invited to the Perraults’ home for the evening. So far as Jesse knew, no one from the hospital had ever been invited there before. No one had seen Perrault’s wife for years. Jesse had happened to mention to Perrault that his father-in-law was going to be in Chicago, and Perrault’s secretary had telephoned Helene the next day. It had been arranged in such a roundabout, formal way that the strange open casualness of the Perrault household was a surprise to Jesse.

  “A great mind doesn’t belong simply to the body it happens to have been born in,” Perrault was saying argumentatively. Everyone listened uneasily. There was a peculiar edginess to the evening, a puritanical vigor to Perrault’s raspy voice that forbade intimacy, though they were all crowded around this rather small table. Jesse did not dare to glance at Helene, fearful of seeing that sallow sickliness in her face—that stubborn, held-back disapproval. What was Perrault talking about? Why did he smile in that small, shrewd way?

  This household was plain, homely, even slovenly. Obviously he was a wealthy man—Jesse knew how much he charged certain of his patients—and yet he lived in an ordinary brick home in Wilmette, surrounded by decent, ordinary homes, as if the old man’s imagination had never turned itself upon the place in which he would live out his life. Mrs. Perrault was large, clumsy, good-natured, fussily maternal to Helene and concerned for her condition—Helene, pregnant, was reluctant to come here this evening but had been comforted a little by the untidiness of the Perrault living room, a kind of museum of odds and ends of travel, mostly from the Southwest and Mexico: shawls, blankets, woven items, icons of copper and brass. A strange place. Jesse could not detect Perrault’s touch anywhere. Perrault’s private office in downtown Chicago had been professionally decorated and was entirely in white—walls, ceiling, even the floor tile; he peered out of that sinister whiteness as if out of a cave flooded with light. Here at home he seemed content to sit like a cunning old man, a grandfather, at the head of this rickety dining room table or in a rocking chair with a footstool in front of it and a garish red rug beneath the stool, a hand-woven rug that matched another larger rug beneath the mahogany coffee table. On the walls were sunbursts of copper, and lithographs of many nervous lines and slashes, a mystery to Jesse; dried flowers and weeds had been stuffed into several oversized clay vases. The living room sofa was bright green, scratchy to the touch. Dr. Cady, entering this room, had glanced around in bewilderment, as if he had wandered into the wrong place.

  “Come in, come in,” Perrault had ordered.

  He pressed drinks upon them, though he himself would not drink. Something might come up at the hospital, who could tell? His wife said with a laugh, “Do you hear that? Hi
s mind is always half there and half here. Half here, half there. Forty years of this.…”

  They were not certain of her attitude, so they smiled. Cady laughed. Helene, who had been ill earlier that day, looked better now and seemed to be taking a great interest in the Perraults’ family photographs. She handled herself tenderly and self-consciously and a little bitterly, hugely pregnant again. She had had a miscarriage the year before and dreaded having another one. Jesse worried about her too, thinking of the violent irrevocable expulsion of blood and pulp.… He was careful of Helene, he never argued with her. Dr. Cady, whom he hadn’t seen for some time, surprised him by looking so sleek and well. He must have gained twenty, twenty-five pounds in the past year. He had bought new glasses with thick black frames, knobby and fashionable. His suit was expensive, as always, but of a much more stylish cut than those Jesse remembered from Ann Arbor. By contrast, Perrault, who was about Cady’s height, appeared thin and insubstantial and myopic this evening, as if all this preliminary visiting, this exchange of greetings and stray superficial commentary on his house and souvenirs bored him. A genius, Jesse thought, holding himself apart from Perrault and Perrault’s busy bustling wife, a genius who can’t handle anything outside the field of his work.…

  Cady talked fluently and cheerfully, as if he and Perrault were old friends. They were no more than acquaintances and would not have recognized each other, and Jesse sensed a certain guardedness about them in the first several minutes. Cady had flown to Chicago only that morning, explaining that he was sentimental about his little granddaughter, whom he hadn’t seen for some time, and worried about his daughter—not seriously worried, but concerned. He had sat on the bright green sofa and chatted with Perrault about men they knew, associates and acquaintances, successes and failures and mysteries who had disappeared into America. Jesse smiled uneasily, listening to this talk. He felt like a son-in-law with two fathers.

  Mrs. Perrault was asking Helene about something, in a rough, hearty singsong voice. Jesse overheard her saying something about forty years again.

  “Helene—your name is Helene—a very pretty name—Helene, you see what your life will be like, their minds are half with you and half there, and when they fall asleep at night—who can tell what they’re doing? Better to let them do it in their sleep!”

  This awkward period had lasted about half an hour.

  Then Mrs. Perrault served dinner. She interrupted a conversation between her husband and Cady, telling them that the food was ready, it would be getting cold. They rose and went a few yards into the dining room, which opened onto the living room. The table was already set. “Anywhere, please sit anywhere,” she said. Her pleasant, plain face gleamed with enthusiasm. Jesse ended up sitting next to her and was called upon to help her dish out food, plate after plate, loaded with beef and potatoes and string beans and creamed onions. He didn’t know whether to be irritated by this or grateful for something to do. What about his wife? How was his wife? Sometimes the odor of food nauseated her. But she seemed all right. Dr. Cady ate everything that was given to him with a show of pleasure, though this food must have disappointed him. Dr. Perrault, at one end of the table, spent much of the meal staring down at his plate with a small, fuzzy smile, as if wondering why he had invited these people. Maybe he had had some reason and now he had forgotten it …?

  Jesse glanced at his watch.

  Overhead, an old-fashioned chandelier burned too brightly. The light bulbs were imitation flames that stuck out of dusty cardboard cylinders meant to represent candles. Yes, the lights were far too bright. The ordeal reminded Jesse of an operation; but the room was too warm.… To get through it, he thought of Reva. Reva’s face. That perfect, flawless face.… The mouth with its perfect smile.…

  Though he had not seen her for many months, he had fallen in love with her. He could remember only fragments of their dissatisfying conversation. Did you get out of this what you wanted? she had asked.

  What had he wanted?

  He had wanted her, but then what? What would come next?

  But his imagination went blank when he thought of what might have come next. It was not possible to think of anything coming next. Reva’s face, Reva’s body, and then.… Jesse picked at his food, lovesick for Reva. He felt at such times an almost physical distress, a cramping of the belly. But he had to eat because he was a guest at Dr. Perrault’s home, an enviable guest. After a ten-day period of enduring more insults than usual from the old man he had been invited over for dinner, so he had to eat, had to keep passing dishes of food around the table in a cheerful never-ending circle. It was like belonging to a family … like belonging to a family … and yet he kept thinking of Reva, who was so solitary and inaccessible to him. He could not imagine her captured and subdued like Helene, weighed down by pregnancy, sitting beside her father and across the table from her husband.

  Still, he loved Helene. He would have died for her.

  Thick slabs of roast beef, oozing watery blood. They ate. Perrault would not touch his wine, though his wife teased him; he snapped at her, he smiled an angry apology, something about wanting to remain clear-headed in case anything happened at the hospital.… Mrs. Perrault glanced meaningfully over at Helene. Forty years of this! her mild self-pitying glance said.

  Now the talk drifted onto Dr. Cady’s experimentation at Harvard—work in the histochemistry of motor neurons and interneurons in cat spinal cords; just the sound of it made Mrs. Perrault shake her head. She abandoned them to their subject, going out to the kitchen for more food. Jesse could not decide if he liked the woman or if she made him uneasy. He felt relieved when she left his side. Through the archway of the old-fashioned dining room he could see a row of photographs arranged above Dr. Perrault’s harpsichord, graduation pictures of two boys and a girl, the Perrault children. Jesse gathered that the boys had gone to Harvard Medical School like their father, and were now somewhere in the East. Maybe he spent his money on them, setting them up in practices …? Still, he would have a lot of money left over. Perrault’s staff physicians liked to speculate about the old man’s fortune. It was hard to think of him as a father who would lavish money upon his children, and Jesse felt a pang of envy for those young men.…

  Mrs. Perrault came back with some food. She walked firmly, like a peasant, coming straight to him. Eat, Eat. Don’t listen to them talking, just eat. There was hardly room on the table for another bowl. A big red ceramic bowl of mashed potatoes. Jesse saw that Helene was smiling vaguely at Mrs. Perrault, and he wondered at her look of happiness. In their own apartment she was rarely happy. Her smiles were thin and forced. Even when she fussed over Jeanne, when she dressed Jeanne or played with her, Helene’s smile was strained and unconvincing. Tonight, the deep pink material of her dress cast up a frail, rose light onto her face.

  “You’ll have some more, won’t you, Helene? Just a little more?” Mrs. Perrault said. She was gently bullying.

  Helene acquiesced. She glanced at Jesse, smiling. He tried to smile back. But he distrusted her, he was puzzled by her … what was there about this crowded table with its ornate, chipped china and its mismatched wine glasses and water goblets and its old-fashioned, heavy, slightly tarnished silverware that pleased her?

  “Good. Good. You need to nourish yourself,” Mrs. Perrault muttered.

  Dr. Cady was talking about his work. “… yes, but it isn’t satisfying, working with animals. Yes, it’s pure and open-ended, but there are no personalities involved.”

  Helene turned to him, surprised. “Personalities …?”

  “You would want personalities?” Perrault asked carefully.

  “I think so, yes.”

  “No, really, that element is distressing,” Perrault said. He crossed his knife and fork neatly on his plate to indicate that he was finished with this meal. He cleared his throat as if trying to clear his hoarseness. “Because the personality is not permanent. It’s absolutely unstable. Therefore you find yourself working with—you might say experimenting
with—a substance you naively believe to be stable, when in reality it is ephemeral. An animal has as much personality as a man.”

  Mrs. Perrault laughed quietly.

  “Listen to that! I don’t believe that,” she said.

  Perrault ignored her. He addressed the others as if they had questioned him. “What is a personality?” he said politely. “I will tell you, it is a conscious system of language. And when the language deteriorates, as it must, the personality vanishes and we have only the brute matter left—the brain and its electric impulses. Benjamin, do you agree?”

  “But still there’s an unconscious layer of personality. The mind is in the brain, though it’s invisible,” Cady said at once. “And up to a certain point it can communicate with you; it can tell you about the process of its own deterioration.”

  “It isn’t reliable,” Perrault said.

  “But of course it’s reliable, as reliable as anything else. When a person tells you that he has felt a small explosion in his head, and he dies an hour later, you can assume before an examination that he has suffered a hemorrhage, that something blew out—”

  Perrault glanced at Jesse as if urging him to speak. Jesse said, wondering at this odd conversation, “They don’t need to tell you that.…”

  Perrault interrupted impatiently. “No, of course, they don’t need to tell us anything. We tell them. Or we don’t bother telling them at all, we simply make a record of it for our own information. No, the personality is an illusion, and there is no one of us sitting around this table who truly possesses any personality, any permanent system of conscious or unconscious language. It is just a tradition. Personality is just a tradition that dies hard.”