Wonderland

  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.

  A perfect tomb.

  Kennilworth Drive: the concluding lane of a maze of lanes. No stranger could find us.

  Close your eyes, Shell, says Noel, and wander barefoot through that house. Do you see anyone there? Your father or your mother? Maybe little Shelley herself …? Yes, I see her. A honey-faced girl with long curly red hair. Soft cheeks always a little flushed, as if from exercise or embarrassment or excitement. Sitting at the table on the sun porch, making a mess with water colors, drawing flowers and cats on their hind legs stalking one another with furry smiling faces and curly whiskers, women flying through the air with their legs dwindling off into tangled skirts, like smoke, everyone smiling and mysterious. I couldn’t draw men. No men in my pictures.

  At school the art teacher hung my paintings all around the room. It was meant to be a story, a little book. A cat that turns into a girl, lots of bright yellow and orange and green, my favorite colors, and then turns back into a cat again. Happier being a cat. Mother didn’t know what to make of this and you didn’t either. You stared at the paintings. I felt you staring at them and at me. In your sight it was like a hive of bees, trying to breathe in the hive, your mind buzzed about us and would not leave us alone.

  I see Jeanne’s face stung by you, your love for me. For me. I see Jeanne hating me. I see her narrow eyes edging onto me, onto pretty little Shelley, hating hating little Shelley, I see you staring at me late one summer afternoon when I rode my bicycle up the drive, I hear your strange, anxious questions: Where were you? Who were you with? Your face is flushed, you must have been riding that bicycle too fast.… You were never home, but when you came home you wanted us there. Before you. Humbled before you. I did not dare stand straight, did not dare let you see how my body was growing. I did not dare risk your eyes on me. Your nervousness. Love lapping onto me like waves, like the warm waves of the pool you built for me. Then, after the pool was built, Mother said, “Your father wants you to use it every day, he doesn’t want you wandering around. Don’t make him angry.” You were never home but when you came home you would sit at the edge of the pool and watch me swim—oh I burned in the sunshine in the glare of your watching me; walking naked in front of any men now is no task, no risk for me, not after you—If you came home and I wasn’t there, if I was late coming back from school, I could never think of the right words to explain, I had to explain but I couldn’t, I saw the anger and the fear and the worry in your face, I cringed at your voice: What? What are you saying? Don’t speak that way, Shelley. Speak only in complete sentences. Give us your complete thoughts.

  What is a complete thought?

  I am not a complete thought. Not in my head or anyone else’s. Passing close to men, to tease them, I feel the brush of their thought but it is never complete. It is never complete because it is about the Fetish and not me.

  Why did you walk out on us that night?

  To be a complete thought you have to come to the end of yourself, you have to see your own birth and your own death, summed up. Maybe into a book. Beginnings and endings. I didn’t want to know about death but you kept bringing it home to us—the smell of it on your clothes, on your hands, no matter how often you washed them. Certain smells can’t be washed away. They are embedded in those serious, fine, almost-invisible lines on your face, the lines that are beginning to ruin your handsome face. Your father could operate on me any day, one of my girl friends joked.

  Father, here is Noel sleeping. The length of him heavy on the sand, his face turned to the sun, blind and complete. You can never sleep through a night, but Noel sleeps deeply, soundly, like a child. He can fall asleep anywhere. His sleep is like an angel’s sleep. He is tall—over six feet tall—not as tall as you—but very thin, his waist and hips are thin—his cheeks are narrow and hollow. Sleeping. I lie here beside him, fearful of his melting into the sunshine and my melting with him.… Noel says I am vain. Because of my face, my body. He says that beautiful girls are damned unless they humiliate their beauty. Father, I am drowning in the heat here, in the sunlight that is so steady and relentless. I am used to the sooty sky of Chicago and this world is too silent and clear. Lying here, I can stare up into the sky and I might fall into it forever, forever.… I must be humiliated, my face must be ground into the earth or I will be damned.…

  I think I am going to have a baby.

  Mother always wanted another baby—a baby boy—why didn’t she have one? For you. I would have had another baby. I would have. We needed boys in our family—you needed sons—so that Jeanne and I could be left alone.

  Too late now.

  It is nearing Christmas and the decorations are ugly, bright fizzy red and green cellophane, tinsel, red-cheeked Santa Claus faces made out of cardboard—and the world is summer, the palm trees are summer, a perpetual, hot glittering summer. I don’t want to think about Christmas. I don’t want to remember.

  Christmas, 1967.

  On that day a story was published about you and the Clinic in the Chicago Sun-Times. Then you were photographed in your white clinic coat, your face serious and saintly, there you were described in print, in public, so that I knew you must be real. I bought six copies of the paper. Waiting for you to come home, I read the story out loud to Mother. Waiting for you to come home. I read out loud those words that were about you, my father, and each of the words was a puzzle to me: His colleagues speak of him as elusive, ambitious, hard-working, brilliant.… I read over and over the description of the Clinic, which was like a kingdom I couldn’t enter with its own laboratory, its own X-ray and diagnostic facilities, departments of radiology, pathology, anesthesia.… There was some secret here that I couldn’t understand.

  When you finally came home, you said nothing to us. Went to your study, your face closed from us, turned
away; you tried to shut the door but I called out to you.… You looked at me. Not seeing me. Your eyes hard and bright with that fear in them, that fear.…

  You shut the door.

  I cried out to Mother, “Why is he hiding from us?”

  Mother said, “Don’t bother him. Leave him alone.”

  She was sitting alone in the big living room, which no one ever used. She had decorated it in grays and golds and whites, but no one ever used it or looked at it. Now there was a small fir tree in one corner, decorated with gold ornaments. Mother sat with her perfect stillness in that room, her eyes like wounds. Why did you hide from us? Small strain marks at the corners of her mouth. She sat there until it got dark and I turned on the lights.

  “Why is he hiding? What’s wrong?” I asked her angrily.

  No answer.

  “Why are you sitting in here?”

  You held down your silences, you and she. In different parts of the house.

  I didn’t love her and so I could look directly at her. Her cool, tired, perfect face, the eyes finely lashed, tender, with that softness that belongs to someone who can no longer be hurt. Hair dark, combed back flat on her head, not flattering, a few tendrils at her temples and before her ears. Almost a beautiful woman, except for the strain of her tight skin. I think she became a beautiful woman as she grew free of you.

  “Is it because of the newspaper story? What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Leave him alone,” Mother said.

  I started to cry. I started to cry and I remembered what you used to tell me when I cried, when I was still a child—Living begins when crying leaves off—and I could hear your voice saying these words—

  “Does he hate us? All of us?” I asked Mother.

  Close your eyes, Noel instructs me, and let your fingers run over his face. Caress him back into nothing.

  Finally you came out of that room. Your face haggard. Closed-in, strange. You stared at me as if you didn’t recognize me. I saw again that fear, that fear, as if you didn’t recognize me, didn’t know where you were. “Are you mad about the newspaper story?” I asked, afraid of you. “Are you mad at me?” You stared at me. Your forehead looked pinched. Your hair straggly, damp with perspiration, uncombed. Not like you, to look like this, a man walking in a dream, stiff-legged, dangerous. Mother came to the doorway of the living room, as if to greet you. But the two of you were silent. Jeanne, who had come downstairs, stood pressing her thumb anxiously against her front teeth, silent. Only I kept whimpering, asking what was wrong, what was wrong …?

  I could smell the fear in you.

  You walked past me to the front door. You got your coat and opened the door and went outside.

  “I hate him,” I whispered.

  Mother turned to me. “Don’t say that,” she said.

  “I hate him, I hate him!” I shouted.

  And now my hatred floats up in me like a bubble: how to prick it, that poisonous little bubble? Too many bubbles float along the passages to the heart and wear it out. I want to prick that bubble. I want darkness, the flow of blood without bubbles of oxygen or memory, I want to be free of you, I want to be free.

  You walked out on us that night, Christmas night. You were gone all night. I don’t want to think about where you walked, or why you left us like that, or why I sat at the top of the stairs waiting for you to come back, in secret, in the dark, afraid to go to bed.

  I want to be free.

  Love,

  Shelley

  4

  Early morning.

  May 1968.

  The bed in which she lay was long and warm, unhealthily warm. It felt to her like a boat: a slight rocking, rocking to it, the ebbing of invisible tides in this room. The pulsation of blood.

  Open your eyes: there the familiar windows, the four high narrow windows, the sky not yet ready to be seen. Like the underside of an eye.

  Helene’s senses, waking, seemed to flow downward, suddenly downward to the pit of her stomach, her loins. She lay for a moment, baffled. Then she realized that Jesse was not in bed. He must not have come to bed at all.

  It was five o’clock in the morning, she was alone in bed on a cold May morning, baffled, her body pulsing with a strange heavy despair. From all the parts of her body, all its remote sterile surface parts, this flowing moved to the center of her, turgid and bulging; she could almost feel the veins bulging with the increased flow of blood.

  Jesse.…

  She sat up. At the back of her skull a darkness like the darkness of the room had shaped itself. She pressed her hand against the back of her head. He had been up all night again, working all night again, or sitting down there in his study staring at the window, at his own reflection in the window. Or he had been walking quietly through the rooms downstairs, quietly, thinking.

  What did he think about?

  She got out of bed. The dim, chilly room was very empty. She turned on the light and saw with a bitter approval the handsome, formal room she had created—the bed overlarge, as in a photograph, with linen sheets and a light blue blanket and a bedspread neatly pulled back and flowing to the floor, a very light yellow, silky and elegant, looking new, though she had bought it years ago. A deep buff carpet, wallpaper of dark gold streaked with lighter gold, like sunlight. A long, low bureau with a large mirror in which her face was reflected, itself oddly formal. The room looked unlived in, as if planned for a marriage yet to be consummated.

  She put on a robe, trying not to look at herself in the mirror. Moving deftly, hastily. She did not need a mirror to pose before; she hated mirrors. She hated that moment just before the mirror self is recognized and acknowledged. All her life she had been posing, moving, speaking in front of other people who watched her closely, and so she did not need mirrors. Other people were always present, watching and assessing. These people crowded the bedroom now, invisible. Helene pressed her hand against the back of her head again, as if the crowd of people were somehow inside her head.

  Her body ached.

  She thought of her husband in another part of the house: his mind turned brightly, feverishly onto his work, like a beacon turned out into the dark, intense and narrow. Her body ached for him or for a man who might come to her in the form of her husband.

  When Jesse did come to bed it was always after she had lain there for a while, waiting—he was like a sleepwalker returning to bed, stumbling upon the bed as if by accident, exhausted, seeing nothing, noticing nothing. And, once he lay stiffly beside her, she could feel the urgency of his hope for sleep. He was superstitious about sleep. Sometimes he slept for a while, off and on, but often he had no luck; he was edgy and excited, ready to begin the next day’s work.

  Her sleep, beside him, was thin and puzzling. She thought of their marriage. Their love. What was love: Was it the contact between people? The touching of people? She did not understand. Why this pushing, this plunging, this falling into an abyss, a sacred abyss? She could not push herself into it, she had always drawn back weakly, fearfully. She feared Jesse. But at the same time she loved him, she wanted him.… He had abandoned her years ago, before their first child was born, really. Sixteen years before. She knew this. She knew it with an angry, wise ripeness, though she could not have explained it to herself. She had loved him and had opened herself to him, had allowed him to plunge into her, drown into her, reshaping himself inside her. Then he had withdrawn; the fleshly part of him withdrew from her, used up, sweetly spent, indifferent. She had given him two daughters. But what is love, she wanted to demand of someone, that it must be the contact between two people?

  Her body ached for Jesse. It ached for a man who might come to her in the form of Jesse. Yet she understood that he would not come to her; it would always return to this, back to this, her basic loneliness and resentment. Her eyes seemed to fall downward, in their stark, heavy, sleep-befuddled gaze, toward the center of herself: Helene, a woman in despair. You are a beautiful woman, a man had said quietly to her not long ago—an associate of Jess
e’s at the Clinic, a small, ugly, pinch-faced doctor, himself unloved and untouched. She had turned away from him, disturbed. Yet her senses had been stirred by him, by the warmth of his words, which seemed to have been uttered against his will.

  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.