Wonderland (38 page)

There he is. There. Here you are, sitting here. Don’t let him get away
.

They had passed the car. Jesse’s heart beat with a heavy, sullen envy of their intimacy, that gray-haired man and his young wife, the two of them perfect together … ennobled.…

He mumbled something to Carla and got out of the car.

“Dr. Cady!” he called out. Cady and the woman turned. Jesse hurried up to them, blushing. His mind was in a whirl—what would he say?—but he was encouraged by Cady’s polite, alert smile. It was the public smile of the lectures, generous and impersonal but unthreatening. “I just wanted to say hello, Dr. Cady. I wanted to tell you how much I’ve liked—I’ve learned—I took your neurochemistry course this year—”

Cady smiled at him.

“It’s good of you to say so,” he said, extending his hand. “What is your name?”

“Jesse Vogel.…”

“Ah, Jesse Vogel, I think I remember that name.…” This was probably not true and he did not stress the point; he simply shook Jesse’s hand firmly and released it. He was a fairly short man, about five feet six. “Mr. Vogel, this is my daughter Helene; she’s been kind enough to stay with me for the past few weeks, taking care of me.”

Jesse and the young woman nodded shyly. Jesse saw that she was very young—obviously she could not have been Cady’s wife; obviously she was his daughter. The outfit she wore was not a maternity suit, just a suit that was a little too large for her. “Do you like Ann Arbor?” Jesse asked her. He looked her full in the face and gave no sign of his own nervousness. She replied, and Cady began to speak again, chatting about Ann Arbor, which was so much more leisurely than Cambridge, so much more pleasant in certain ways. He spoke of a chamber-music recital he and his daughter had heard the evening before and though Jesse knew nothing about it he nodded briskly, as though he too had attended. His smile was strained but ambitious, big enough for both Cady and his daughter. How easy it had been to shake Cady’s hand! Cady seemed to have no idea of his own importance. He spoke to Jesse as casually as if Jesse were a friend of his or an equal at the university. “Yes, we are both charmed by Ann Arbor, but I’m afraid we’re impatient to be back home.… Helene doesn’t know anyone here, of course.” Cady had a small man’s love of precision, his words were neat and clipped and self-conscious, as if to call attention to some subtlety in his meaning. Jesse felt a surge of emotion—affection—and recalled how readily, how cheerfully, Cady had shaken hands with him.
He had done it. He had done it
. Always, all year, he had admired this man, knowing enough to be able to assess Cady’s knowledge and his undramatic recitation of dramatic material, his patience, his ability to anticipate questions in the sleepy, shadowy heads of his students in that big amphitheater. He had always had the sense, too, that Cady was somehow aware of him.

Standing in front of Cady and his daughter, Jesse felt that his height was a burden—he was so much taller than either of them. Did he appear overgrown and clumsy in their eyes? And he was wearing old clothes—it was a Saturday morning—a frayed shirt with its sleeves rolled up, the collar not very clean, soiled cotton trousers, shoes without socks. He had not even shaved that morning.

Time for them all to part. Jesse thanked Cady for the course and
Cady accepted this graciously. “I’m sorry to bother you,” Jesse apologized, backing off. It had all gone well. Cady was obviously flattered, and the girl was proud of her father, casting a cool, demure sideways glance at him, a wifely glance. Jesse said good-by and turned to leave.

His heart was pounding.

He returned to the car just as Mrs. Spewak was leaving the store. What good luck that she had not come out while he had been talking with the Cadys.… “God, Jesse, it cost me twenty-five dollars in there. The stuff is just inside the door there, can you get it? It’s too heavy for me. God, I feel sick.” She was wearing lime-green slacks and a nylon sweater of pale peach, too tight for her small, sharp breasts.

“Sure, I’ll get it. I’ll get it,” Jesse said quickly.

He no longer saw Anne-Marie. They had argued over something—her accusation of his not loving her—and had decided to break their engagement. It had been unofficial anyway. Unofficial. It didn’t count, Anne-Marie had said bitterly. With Anne-Marie out of his life, Jesse found himself with Mrs. Spewak more and more. It happened. Inertia, a vague desire to please, a vague sense of guilt: her sighs, her headaches, her backaches, her continual amazement at the troubles a woman had to face. And that daughter! Carla was not really a child of superior intelligence, Jesse thought, but she had a quick, crippling mind, a premature cynicism that sometimes passed for intelligence. She was very thin in the chest, her arms and legs were so small that Jesse could easily have circled them with his thumb and forefinger. She had strange, undiagnosed allergies that Mrs. Spewak seemed to think would make her more interesting to Jesse because he was going to be a doctor—she was allergic to dust and pollen and food and fur and certain mixtures of sunlight and humidity; she was feverish, restless, she rarely smiled, she did a lot of kicking and hanging onto her mother or Jesse, clamoring for attention. But when she received attention she became quickly embarrassed and bored. She hated to be looked at. She would put her fingers over her eyes as if to hide.… When Mrs. Spewak went out, which was often, Jesse took care of Carla.

“Where is my mother? Where did she go?” Carla would demand.

When Jesse told her, she wouldn’t believe it.

Trick didn’t believe it either. He was probably right: Jesse’s landlady was just using him. Taking advantage of his kindness. She was an ignorant, lazy woman and there was something not quite clear about her
life, but she had not exactly hurt Jesse, she had not really interfered with his studies very much. Jesse was inclined to defend her. She had evidently been married at one time but her husband had left her or she had kicked him out; maybe she was officially divorced, maybe not; she spoke of herself as Catholic, though she did not often go to Mass. When she asked favors of Jesse she spoke in a swift, apologetic voice, staring fixedly at him so that Jesse did not have the heart to turn her down.

“She wants to eat you up, kid,” Trick laughed.

But the domestic squabbles, in which Jesse was forced to join, the routine of Saturday shopping and the putting away of groceries in the kitchen, his care of the garbage cans, his beating the rugs for her, quieted the racing of his brain that sometimes frightened him. He was so weak, really.… In spite of what people thought, he was so weak, he dared not be alone too much, dared not allow himself to think much, to remember much.… He was grateful for the duties of household life, even the dull, demanding voices of Mrs. Spewak and Carla.

“I don’t mind helping her out,” Jesse said to Trick.

“She just wants to use you.”

“What do you mean, use me? I don’t mind.”

“Does she offer to pay you?”

“She doesn’t have any money.”

“She could take it off your rent. She could do something for you.”

“She couldn’t afford that.”

“Jesse, Jesse!—you’re so eager to give yourself away!”

They were friends now, Jesse and Trick. Somehow they had become friends. Jesse did not know whether to resent Trick’s interest in him or to be grateful that someone seemed to care about him. He had the idea that other students envied him his friendship with Trick—Dr. Monk—and so he did not mind when Trick showed up half an hour early to have coffee with him, interrupting his work, or when he dropped in on Jesse at night, complaining that he was unable to sleep.

“We insomniacs share a certain mystique,” Trick said.

They never spoke of Anne-Marie.

Jesse would have liked to explain to Trick that he had fallen out of love with her entirely. It was over. It was nearly forgotten. He did not hate Trick. Trick really had nothing to do with it—Jesse had just stopped loving her, that was all. And if he had hated Trick, even a little,
it was forgotten along with his love for Anne-Marie.… Trick was like an older brother, a fretful older relative. He was critical about Jesse’s habits: “It’s a kind of mania, the way you force yourself to work. But as long as you function so well, that’s the only test, the only test of health.” He seemed to Jesse a superior man, an exceptional man. What had appeared to be dangerous in him was really only his frankness and his whimsy, which were foreign to Jesse.

Sometimes he goaded Jesse gently, with a curious bright look to his face. “How is your landlady this week? Is she still after you?”

“You exaggerate things,” Jesse said.

“She has a lecherous eye, I’m sure of it. She has a certain moist, downy look, even for her age … and she isn’t so old really. Are you sure you’re not her lover and you don’t want to tell me about it?”

“I’m not anyone’s lover,” Jesse said.

Trick smiled. “There was this friend of my grandfather’s in Minneapolis, a wealthy old man, who had his own zoo built for him—no, not a zoo, an animal sanctuary, a private jungle—and he appropriated also a number of wives in succession, the wives getting younger as he got older. One of the wives looked like your Mrs. Spewak, though better-looking. I think he acquired her along with some lions. She was a lady lion-tamer, or that was part of the stunt in the carnival she traveled with. She wore a riding outfit around the place, and boots that came up to her thighs, and she carried a little whip with a velvet handle. Ah, it was magnificent to see her striding around! The old man had a huge ugly house, like a warehouse made of brick. There were rooms in his house he had never seen. And this woman, though she stood to lose a few million dollars and to be tossed back into the carnival again, she would drive out through the jungle and let herself out the gate and drive along the highways—because there were highways, normal highways, this was an ordinary part of the world—to gas stations and country stores and pick up kids there, I mean kids in their twenties; she was a kind of legend in the county.… She never bothered me, though. She never even glanced at me. Maybe that was because there is nothing lionlike about me.”

“What happened to her?” Jesse asked, amazed.

“She ran away and he divorced her eventually. He married a twenty-year-old girl.”

“Did he really have lions there—in the United States?”

“He had lions, eagles, monkeys—lots of monkeys and chimpanzees and even some apes—and parrots and large hogs from the Everglades—and all these women, these wives.”

“You
have
known freakish people,” Jesse said slowly.

Later, he wondered if Trick’s stories were true: they always began innocently enough, always connected to Trick through a relative or friend, and then they branched out, blossomed out, to touch upon worlds Jesse did not understand. He wanted to believe in the ordinary, in the normal. His mind was slow to admit the bizarre.

“Yes, freakish people are drawn to me,” Trick said with a grin.

Close up, his face was mottled and inconsistent, though he was not an ugly man. But he had this uneven, rather coarse and large-pored complexion that looked as if stage make-up had been applied to it in layers that had begun to smudge and run. Out of this mixture of tones—lardy flesh, rosy flesh, sallow flesh—his small eyes peered with a cheerfulness that was exaggerated at times, out of proportion to its object, as if Trick saw through the ordinary to another dimension invisible to his listeners. There was something oversized and godly about him, a debased godliness, though, as if he were the son of a god and were failing at his inheritance. “I get a kick out of strange people. I would like to be a collector. Maybe I’ll become a county pathologist and do autopsies for some little town.… I would be more gentle with the dead than with the living because, of course, you don’t get any hypocrisy from the dead.…”

Jesse laughed uneasily. He wondered if he were one of the freaks who were drawn to Trick.

He was thinking now, almost constantly, about Dr. Cady and his daughter. But he said nothing to Trick about this. He felt a peculiar agitation, almost a sense of despair, to think that the year was coming to an end—his years as a medical student were coming to an end—and yet something was missing. Trick asked him what was wrong: why was he so quiet? But he said nothing; he could not have explained. He was graduating at the top of his class, and this was a completion of all his plans, his most feverish, improbable plans, and yet something was missing; something had been lost. It was not Anne-Marie. He had stopped loving her and now even the memory of his love, his anguish, was baffling to him. It did not seem believable that he had loved her so much. At times he could not even recall her face except to remember
its bright, impersonal healthy beauty that might have belonged to any girl. His loss was centered somehow upon Cady. He sat in the front row of the amphitheater staring at the man’s calm, intelligent face, wondering how it had been possible for a young man to grow into that particular man, to mature into Benjamin Cady. The school year was coming to an end, and its hectic melancholy was somehow focused upon Cady’s face.

How to become that man without debasing himself?

One afternoon he took Carla to a movie while Mrs. Spewak went to the dentist, “to the dentist,” she said, and Jesse chose to believe her, and during the movie Jesse was inspired by the energy of the screen—giant cowboys and cattle thundering back and forth—and decided he would not let the year end so weakly. He would not let the Cadys escape him. He looked for their name in the telephone book, couldn’t find it, and telephoned the medical school office to ask for Cady’s address. He was the son of a friend from Harvard, he said. Jesse, who never lied, lied now flamboyantly and happily, feeling himself safe in the telephone booth at the rear of the nearly deserted theater. There were operatic possibilities in life that came out of the darkness of a movie house—flashing out of the confused splotches of color and light that made up the screen’s images, like the underside of a dream forcing its way to the surface of the mind.

After the movie was over he took Carla for a walk. She liked to walk through the university campus. Jesse took her out Washtenaw for several blocks to the apartment building where Cady lived. Carla was in a good mood; she had enjoyed the movie. She looked so small, so docile, that she could have been Jesse’s own daughter. In spite of her thin, strained face he was proud of being with her: someone might mistake him for her father. A father of a child. A father.