Wonderland (55 page)

“Why shouldn’t I tell you?”

“You talk like a doctor, you’re so honest and sincere. Would you tell me if I had cancer?”

Cancer …?

She was so guarded and beautiful that he could not really see her. He kept staring at her but somehow he did not see her. Her beauty was
extraordinary. The white outfit, the hair wound up around her head in a long heavy braid, as if she were wearing a crown, hair brushed down thick on her forehead, so low that her eyebrows were nearly covered … a gold necklace, or necklaces, a confusion of golden chains dotted with small pearls.… She looked foreign. Barbaric. Her skin, which Jesse had remembered being pale, was now healthy, girlish. She moved her arm and something rattled—small gold bracelets. And her fingers, which she extended to him in a teasing little gesture, patting his arm in mock consolation, were covered with rings today—four rings—solid gold and silver bands studded with small pearls and diamonds. The back of Jesse’s head crawled. He could only stare at her. While she chattered he could not even listen to her.… How to stop from dissolving in the back seat of this limousine? How to keep up the mask of his face?

“Don’t stare at me. Please,” Reva said.

“But … what is all this? This car? Who does it belong to?” Jesse asked weakly. “Who are you going to Italy with?”

“A friend of mine.”

“Who?”

“I’m in love,” Reva said shyly.

“In love …?”

Jesse forced himself to think clearly: she is not a possibility. She is already in love.

“Yes, in love, is that so strange? You’re married, aren’t you?”

Jesse nodded vaguely. So she was not free, she belonged to someone else. He wondered why he had arranged to meet her and why he was being driven around downtown in the back seat of this great ludicrous car, a hearse-like car, when he had so much to do at the hospital.

“What is your marriage like?” Reva asked.

“An ordinary marriage. A good marriage,” Jesse said.

“Your wife is going to have another baby?”

“Yes, a baby, another baby, a second baby. Yes, in three months. I’m permanently married,” he said slowly. He heard his voice but could not have predicted what it might say. “You don’t think you’ll be back until fall?”

“I don’t know. Are you a doctor now or just in training?”

“I’m finishing my residency. In surgery.”

“Surgery …?”

The heavy crown of hair seemed too much for her fragile head and neck. But her posture was perfect, even a little exaggerated, as if she, like Jesse, were very excited and self-conscious. She had begun to remind him of a typical woman patient, a young woman aware of him as a man, too aware, too intense.

“What I would like to have happen to me,” Jesse said, talking freely and helplessly, “is to be invited to stay on with the man I’m assisting … to join him in his private practice.… But I’m very much in debt, I owe my father-in-law a lot of money, I …”

Reva, stared at him in silence. He wondered what he had just said: something about money? Why had he mentioned that?

“You’re going to be a surgeon?” Reva said.

“A neurosurgeon.”

“Ah,” she said, as if she had guessed this. She stared at him doubtfully.

“Of course,” Jesse said quickly, “if I had enough money maybe I’d forget about all that and take you to Italy myself … I’ve never seen Italy … in fact, I’ve never seen anything, I don’t know anything except medicine and surgery.… I don’t know anything at all.”

Reva shook her head. He wondered if she suddenly thought him a bad risk.

“The last man I was with,” she said slowly, “was always going to the doctor, but it didn’t help too much. He was always imagining he was sick. Then when he drove to Detroit to see his mother one day he had an accident, he collided with a trailer-truck and was killed.…”

“Who? Who was this?” Jesse asked in distress.

“Oh, someone. A man.” Reva frowned. “I want to tell you about myself so you’ll know that I’m not interested in you. I’m being very honest. It isn’t because I’m in love and my life is taken care of now, really there couldn’t be anything between us because … because what you do frightens me, the idea of surgery frightens me.… The way you look at me is frightening too. That man, the one who got killed in the accident, was just an ordinary man and didn’t even have much of an education, but I loved him.”

“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.

“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? His 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.