Wonderland (78 page)

“Shelley—?” he said.

“She needs something to clean out her system,” Wolcott said anxiously.

She stared up at Jesse. Slowly, laboriously, she sat up and stared.

“Who are you?” she asked blankly.

Was this Shelley?

She muttered something and crawled away, across the mattress. She was wearing jeans and a boy’s undershirt that hung loose on her. It was incredible how thin her body was—she looked like a child of nine or ten.

Jesse reached for her. “Shelley—”

“No! No!” she cried.

She scrambled to her feet and ran to the window. “Don’t you come near me or I’ll jump out! I know who you are! I heard your voice! I know who you are, you want to kill me—”

She shook her head slowly, to clear it. Her voice was thick and hoarse, each word she spoke seemed deliberately chosen. Jesse looked around, dazed. This man with the silvery-blond hair—Noel—the Noel of all the letters, now wild-eyed and anxious himself—he stood ready to run, the ringlets of his hair damp and frizzy. The stubble on his face was like part of a mask.

“So you’re—you’re the father, huh?” Noel said. “Dr. Vogel, huh?” But then, as if recovering himself, he laughed and waved Jesse away. “Oh hell, you don’t expect us to believe that! That’s a hot one! You just come in here off the street and … and you expect us to believe you, like God himself has to be believed—Our little Angel has nothing to do with you, she is our girl, our baby. We take care of her. She is our little sister and our wife and our little madonna, just wait a few days and we’ll sweat the yellow out of her. She’ll be magnificent again. And who are you, mister,
you,”
he said wildly, his teeth chattering, “to barge in here and try to wreck our family? You came under false pretenses! I thought you had something to deal me! All this talk about Noel, how do you dare mention his name, Noel is beyond all your C.I.A. plots and spying and betrayals.…”

“Noel don’t—don’t let him come near me—” Shelley whispered. She was staring at Jesse through her fingers. Her lips moved thickly. “If he comes to touch me I will have to die—”

“She already jumped out a window once,” Noel said to Jesse angrily, as if this were Jesse’s fault, “and this time it’s the third floor! You better leave us all in peace, get the hell out of here and leave us all in peace!”

“Shelley, please,” Jesse said. He could not believe this: her wasted body, her thin, puckered, pinched little face.… He took a few steps forward and she pressed herself against the window, her arms outspread. Someone had snipped her hair close against the skull; it was growing in unevenly, in patches of dark, greasy red. Was this Shelley? Was that her face? He would not have recognized her on the street. She had a boy’s face now, a sexless face, the cheeks thin and the eyes sunk back into her head, darkly shadowed as if bruised. Her skin was a sharp sickly hue of yellow.

“I don’t know who you are. I didn’t mean for you to come here. I didn’t know what it meant,” Shelley babbled. “I live here and this is my family here. Everything comes from them. Noel is my husband here—not you—never you—when I have a baby it will be for all of them here, and not you—Why did you come after me? I can’t go back. I’m all dried out. I’m dried out. Look—” And she lifted the undershirt to show her chest—her shriveled little breasts, her ribs, the shock of her yellow skin. “I’m all shut off, there is a curse on me to shut me off, my body, I don’t know what happened—there is no blood and no baby either—the police have a radar machine that dries us all up—”

“You’re making her very excited,” Noel said. “You’d better leave.”

“Get away from me,” Jesse said.

He approached his daughter. She flattened herself back against the window and gaped at him. Jesse calculated the distance between them—he would be able to grab her if she tried to throw herself out the window—

“I am not here. There’s nobody here,” Shelley whispered.

“Shelley, please—” Jesse said.

“No. Nobody is here. You can’t get me. I don’t exist and you can’t get me.”

“Shelley, you’re not well. You know that. You’ve got to let me help you,” Jesse said carefully.

“I’m dried out and nothing works,” Shelley said, staring at him. “I don’t hate you for that. I don’t hate Noel. Inside me everything is dried up. You were looking for Shelley, with that face Shelley had back home; well, Shelley is dead and there isn’t anybody in her place. I don’t have a passport. We wanted to go to Cuba for the sugar harvest. Noel was going to take us all. I don’t have a birth certificate either. I wrote to
you from California to destroy all the evidence. You can have another baby to take my place—you can adopt a baby—”

Only Noel and Jesse remained now; the other boys had fled. Noel drew his forefinger across his nose, sniffing in a kind of panic. He was barefoot, his toes long, angular, very dirty. He wore ordinary work trousers and a soiled white undershirt. “Hey look,” he said gently to Jesse, “she started crashing last night. She was high for seven, eight days. Now you got her scared to death. You smell it? How afraid she is? She thinks you’re going to kill her.”

“I’m not going to leave her here.”

“She isn’t well,” Noel said angrily, miserably, “she needs her head cleaned out! She doesn’t need you!”

“Noel can take care of me,” Shelley insisted. “I don’t need anybody else. I’m sorry I wrote to you. Noel made me pure, like a madonna, like an angel.… He brought so many men to me to make me pure again, to make me into nothing. He made me free, you don’t understand, he made my body float free of everything.… But you,
you,”
she said, confused, “you’re standing right there so that I have to look at you, and you know my name and … you understand that I am the wife of all of them here and not of you.…”

“Leave her alone,” Noel said.

“Shelley, you’re not well. Let me take you home,” Jesse said.

“She isn’t sick, it’s just the flu.…”

“She’s very sick.”

“The flu! Everybody up here has the flu, it’s nothing serious!” Noel muttered.

“She’s got jaundice. She might have hepatitis. She’s going to die, she’s going to die of liver failure.…” Jesse said in a slow, dream-like voice. He kept staring at her—was this Shelley, this child? This emaciated child?

He blundered into something on the floor, stumbled. Shelley cried out. Jesse said in that same thick, slow, dream-like voice, as if each word of his were rising with difficulty through a thick element, an air made gaseous and vile, “You want to come with me, Shelley. This is all over. You know you want to come with me. Come home.”

Shelley pressed her hands against her ears. “Don’t let him talk to me, Noel—he’ll get inside my head again—”

Noel was breathing heavily. He inched alongside Jesse, his hands moving nervously, wildly, as if he wanted to take hold of Jesse but did not dare touch him. “You can’t just break us up like this!” he cried. “That girl is my property, she willed herself to me—we have been married in a solemn ceremony—she told me how you tried to kill her all her life! Enough is enough! Last night she started crashing and it took two of us to hold her down, and tonight you show up in our kitchen, it’s too goddam much for my head, doctor, you want me to crack up? I can’t take all these agitations! I don’t trust you, you could be with the C.I.A., you could be evil! Evil!” And Noel, so grim and rational at first, began to shriek wildly. He tried to wrestle Jesse backwards, toward the door. Jesse broke loose. Jesse shoved Noel aside and was surprised at how weak Noel was. Nothing to him after all! The Noel of all the letters!

“Shelley,” Noel cried, “he’s the devil himself, the devil! Jump out the window and save yourself!”

Jesse ran and grabbed her before she could move. Her arm was like a matchstick. “Don’t hurt me, don’t kill me.…” she whispered.

“He himself is the devil,” Noel said from across the room. He was flailing his arms around. He seemed to be addressing other people in the room, an audience of sympathetic observers. “He’s here to take her back into bondage. She was free here, the Angel, I made her nothing at all, I ground her down to nothing and freed her! She didn’t even know her name, when I was through! I set her free and now he’s got her again, she’s giving in to him like a bitch of a woman, she’s ready to lie down and open her knees for him, little bitch—pus-stinking whore—after I freed her and made her my own wife—”

Jesse felt a surge of joy. He had won.

“—all you need is a bath in Laverne’s tub, I suppose! Get yourself ready for it, I suppose!” Noel said mockingly.

Jesse held Shelley with one hand and with the other reached for the pistol. He was utterly calm, triumphant. He had won. Hatred rose warmly in him and swelled the cords of his neck, all the vessels of his proud manly body—just to pull the trigger, to shoot that man in the face! What joy, to shoot him in the face! But Shelley leaned against him so passively, like the child she had been years ago, and Noel himself now looked so defeated, his lips damp with saliva; that Jesse paused out
of pity.… If he shot this man, this stranger, what then? A corpse. What then? A pool of blood draining out from the smashed face. What then? What then?

Noel was staring at him.

“You’re going to kill us both,” he said.

Jesse held his daughter tight. No getting away from him, no leaping out the window to escape.… He put his hand into his pocket, he felt the pistol. And, in that instant, he seemed to see Noel’s mocking, terrified face blasted: the life blasted out of it, the defeat and the terror themselves blasted, gone.

But he did not move.

Noel’s head began to nod in a series of slow, terrified movements. “You’re going to … going to … You have a gun, don’t you? You came here to kill us …? You.…”

For a long moment they stared at each other.

Then Jesse said, “Get out.”

Noel was still nodding. And he began to back to the door carefully, carefully.

“You … you won’t.… You won’t.…” Noel said.

“Get out.”

At the door he hesitated. He licked his lips. “If I open the door … you’re not going to … Do you have a gun with you? Do you … you … you’re not …?”

Jesse saw again, as if in a flash of memory, Noel’s face pouring blood. And his own blood warmed, leaped at the thought. But he did not move.

“No. Please. Get out,” he said.

Nobody is going to die tonight. No dying tonight
.

Not on my hands
.

Noel made a sudden leap to the door, jerked it open, and in that instant Jesse gripped the pistol.

But he did not pull it out of his pocket.

“Nobody is going to die tonight,” he said aloud. He listened to Noel outside, Noel running away, escaping.… The blood still surged in him, powerfully, frustrated. When Shelley pushed against him he shook her still and felt the enormous power of his muscles, his blood, his brain, the power to hold her here and to keep her from dying.

“Did he leave …? Where is he, Noel, did he leave …?” Shelley cried.

Jesse waited for his heart to calm again. He waited for the beating to subside, for his brain to come back into control of itself: how he loved this control, this certainty!

“He’s gone and the hell with him,” Jesse said shakily.

“No. I don’t believe he—he—”

He began to walk her to the door.

She balked, she pushed against him. Wildly she looked around and Jesse was surprised at the strength in her body—it was a kind of fury, almost, a frenzy set against him.

“Noel is—Wait—Noel is still with me, he—”

“No.”

“Noel is—”

“Noel is gone and the hell with Noel,” Jesse said.

Shelley looked around the room, her head turning slowly from side to side. She was like a child, and yet her body had that curious, stubborn, almost demonic strength.

“He’s gone,” Jesse said.

After a moment she gave in: he felt the tension ebb.

“Nobody is going to die tonight,” he said again.

She walked with him to the door. To the corridor, the landing. When she paused, swaying, he supported her and whispered angrily: “No, nobody is going to die. Not Noel. Not you.”

“But you are still the devil,” Shelley said faintly. She pressed her hands against her face. “He said … he said you were the devil and I believe him … I …”

“No, you don’t believe him.”

“I believe him … I … I love him and I believe him.…”

“No.”

“… he said you were the devil and I … I think you are the devil … come to get me to bring me home.…”

“Am I?” Jesse said.

We are led to value highest that which has cost us the most. Of my early novels,
Wonderland
, the fifth to be published, obviously the most bizarre and obsessive, stands out in my memory as having been the most painful to write. The most painful in conception and in execution. The most painful even in retrospect. For it was evidently so mesmerizing, so haunting, so exhausting an effort, I must have willed it to be completed before, in that regulatory limbo of the unconscious to which we have no direct access, it was ready to be completed. As Graham Greene so eloquently says, we remember the details of our story, we do not invent them. When I reread
Wonderland
after its hardcover publication I knew that the ending I’d written was not the true ending; in the months between finishing the manuscript, and seeing it published, I had continued to be haunted by it, “dreaming” its truer trajectory. I knew then that I had to recast the ending, at least for the paperback edition and subsequent reprints. The original ending, and a brief hallucinatory prologue that framed the thirty years of the novel, were jettisoned, and the “true” ending supplied.
Wonderland
could not end with a small boat drifting out helplessly to sea (specifically, Lake Ontario); it had to end with a gesture of demonic-paternal control. This was the tragedy of America in the 1960s, the story of a man who becomes the very figure he has been fleeing since boyhood: a son of the devouring Cronus who, unknowingly, becomes Cronus himself.