Wonderland ~ a novel
Chapter 1
Wouldn’t it be nice to push pause on life?
If I could be endowed with one superpower, that would be the one I’d choose. Imagine being able to pause the whole world so you can go about your business without disruptions. Or better yet, pause yourself. Rest in suspended animation while the frantic world ticked by. Today would definitely be one of those days for me, and I wouldn't hit play again until I’d lived through birthday thirty-six.
Maybe I had this power, maybe that’s why I can’t remember. But no I’ve seen pictures, I was moving around. In many ways I hate those pictures because they created false memories to replace the missing ones. But they aren’t mine. They’re too flat—two dimensional. What came before and after the moment caught by the lens is blank. Real memories are like movies in your head. They fade in and out—no sharp edges. Those don’t begin until I turned sixteen.
Today I’m wishing for the first kind of pause because I can’t remember when I last ate and I have a motion and brief due tomorrow before my flight leaves at noon. To make matters worse I can’t help but think I’m forgetting something. And I hate forgetting things.
Shit.
Ulla.
I push speed dial and when she answers I begin apologizing.
“I’m so sorry. I won’t be a minute. Are you at my place already?”
“Of course not, I know better. But I can head over anytime you’re ready. And hey, I’ve been trying to call you for a week. I need a favor. Not a big one—well, not for you.”
“How can I help?” But when she starts to ramble I get distracted by the work on the screen in front of me. I hear the word but it doesn’t register. I’m too annoyed to find a hole in my argument. I know the case I need but I can’t recall the cite. When I move to type, I find the phone in my hand is still talking.
“... I said I would go back and finish. So Sawyer, what do you say? Will you do Wonderland with me?”
There it is again.
“Like Alice?” I push speaker and lay the phone on the desk to type the search query—marriage + voidable + impotence. I still can’t believe my client is willing to be publicly unmanned just to get out of his most recent mess. It probably won’t work. It’s a novel argument for a man—a legal remnant really—so a woman could disentangle herself from a marriage that can’t produce progeny. But for this client I’ve turned the concept on its head. What if the woman does not engage the man sufficiently to copulate? My guess is that when she sees what I am capable of she’ll settle. And it’s not like she doesn’t deserve it. This is marriage number four for her, not counting the annulment I found in Nevada, and every one of them a goldmine. It offends my sensibilities, her inability to be self-sufficient.
“Sawyer?”
“Yes.”
“Let me guess. From the clacking of the keys you’re still at your desk. It’s nine twenty. On a Friday. Do they lock you in?”
I stop typing.
“I really am sorry. It’s just so hard to get out of town. Can we talk about this when I get home?”
“Sure, but check your schedule. I was hoping to do it in September.”
Since I don’t know what “it” is, I go with, “Next September?” I can’t help but be incredulous since that’s almost six months away.
“Come on Sawyer—I never ask anything of you, but I can’t do this alone and I promise The Wonderland Trail will be the adventure of a lifetime. Mount Rainier is—well—it’s everything.”
Now we're getting somewhere. Mount Rainier, Washington, trail. What the hell, it’s only a weekend in Seattle.
“Sure, why not. Can I text you when I’m finished? I realize I have a little more to do.”
“Of course, and thank you. It’s going to be epic!”
I file the brief electronically at ten forty-five. I feel bad for Ulla since I said we’d get dinner, but I’m sure I can find something at the house. I leave everything else on my desk. I’ll be back in seven days and I don’t even want to remember my name while I’m in Paris. As I walk down the hall I see Will Jacobs, the current most senior partner—grandson to the last most current senior partner. Not uncommon given the hours we both keep. Usually only a nod passes between us but tonight he holds out an envelope. My vacation bonus. So quaint and unnecessary at this point given the way they pay me, but one does not want to be rude. I take it from his hand as I walk by.
“Much appreciated as always,” I say in passing because Will does not chat.
“You’ve earned it,” he calls out from down the hall. “And Sawyer, enjoy airplane mode—it never lasts long enough.”
Already there.
I wait until the elevator doors close before opening it. Nice. Only Will would think to give me the right currency, and from the color of the bills and the width of the envelope it looks enough to cover a spa day at the George V. It’ll be nice to get all plucked and polished—the least I can do for Jonathan.
Even though I could use a longer walk I take the shortest way home by the wig place on Haywood. It looks creepy in the dark. All those dismembered heads looking out the window are something out of a horror flick. But within the myriad colors, I spot one that makes me smile. It does not exist in nature but I bet a neon pink bob would be seriously cute at a festival. Like that blue lagoon one in Reykjavík—the music one. What is it called? Just the idea of masquerading in that pulsing crowd makes me feel the itch. And this street must want to fully clothe me for such an outing as my eyes are caught by another shade of pink. I stop and stare, full of envy for the mannequin in the next window that is wearing a black leather corset laced with a mile of pink satin ribbon. Looking back and forth between them, I determine that paired they’d be devastating. You should get it. Jonathan would lose his shit if I walked out in something like that. Forgive me on the spot for taking my sweet time hopping over. I think he may be angry about that. He keeps reminding me we’ve not gone this long since law school.
I’ll do it. I’ll come back in the morning. If I don’t snap it up, someone will be sporting it at Rocky Horror next weekend. So funny that they still do that here. Part of why I have grown to love Asheville with its melting pot of patchouli-laden, alternative, dreadlocked, foodie soccer moms—and me. Some call it the Paris of the South. Too bad I’ll have to give it up, but if all goes as planned I’ll be a partner soon and opening the new office in Atlanta.
“My goodness, do you need help?” I ask when I see Ulla standing on the sidewalk with an assortment of bags slung over her shoulders. She says she’s fine, but she seems embarrassed for having to pack that way and I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. At least I have a great gift idea for her.
Passing the winged lions that guard the double doors, Ulla for the fiftieth time since I’ve met her says “I can’t believe you live in the Grove Arcade. People sip champagne here. They don’t live here.”
But they do, and it’s wonderful. So cavernous inside that it feels like a train station. When you walk in, your eyes are drawn up past the spiral staircases to the wrought iron railings of the second and third floors. In the daytime, ferns hang in the sunlight that filters in from the vaulted glass ceiling. It’s like an indoor Bourbon Street with shops and restaurants on the first floor, businesses on the second, and apartments on the third. Bridges in the air connecting them all. I wish I could move my office here and then I’d have everything I needed within its carved marble walls.
When I take the stairs, Ulla is not surprised. She knows I avoid elevators when I can, even if she doesn’t know why. She asked once so I told her I liked the exercise. We meet on the third floor and I unlock the door and swing it open to give her and her accoutrements room to enter.
“Every time I come here I feel like I’ve stepped into a page of Architectural Digest.”
“I think it was actually, a few years back in some article about historic preservation. But I can’t take credit, it was already decorated when I sublet it from Will. All I’ve added to the decor are my antique glass bottles and a new mattress.” Will understood when I donated his; bachelors do not share mattresses.
“Well, thanks again. I look forward to pretending to live here for a week.”
“No, it’s me who appreciates it. The last time I came back from a trip I found all my plants dead. And since they’re the only other living things in here, I’d like to try and keep them alive.”
“I thought you had people for that?”
I don’t answer because I do now, but she likes staying here when I’m gone and it’s a good excuse.
“Are you hungry?” I call as I walk into the kitchen. “A client sent a thank you basket and it’s sure to have goose liver pate, which I love, but can’t possibly eat.”
“Do you know what they do to those—”
“Yes. That’s why I can’t eat it. Champagne?”
“If you’re having some.”
“No, not tonight,” I say, grabbing a glass of ice and pouring in three fingers of Blanton’s.
“Damn, I can smell that from here. I’ll take one, with ginger ale if you have it.”
With Blanton’s? But I add a splash and hand it to her along with a plate of overpriced water crackers and some local, artisan cheese. I would like to sit a minute in quiet and savor the bite of the bourbon, but Ulla starts right in. In ten minutes I know more than I ever needed to know about the Wonderland Trail, a 94-mile loop that encircles Mount Rainier in northwest Washington State, although she has confused me as much as enlightened me.
“What do you mean you have to apply?” I say.
“Well they’re hundreds, actually thousands of hikers that want to do this trail every year so you have to send in an application and lottery for it.”
“So what you’re saying is you need to make a reservation to walk outside?”
“Yes. This isn’t like one of your weekends on the balds. You can only camp in designated sites and there’s only so much room in each. They do give walk up passes if there are open spots on a day by day basis, but we couldn’t risk it. What if we spent all that money to fly out, buy gear, and cache food only to be disappointed on the day we arrived?”
Then we would have a perfectly wonderful weekend in Seattle.
The windows are open and all of the sudden I’m chilly, so I grab a throw and pull it over our legs.
“Wait, cache? As in stockpile?”
“What’s the longest hike you’ve ever done?”
“Eight days.”
“Really? Where?”
“In Peru. Inca trail.”
“Of course. Did you have to carry your own food?”
“No they had llamas for that.”
“Of course they did. Well on Wonderland, you have to carry everything and it takes ten or eleven days. Hence the caches.”
“Ten days! That’s just nine miles a day. Tell me we can do better than that.”
She reaches into her bag to get her IPad. After a minute she turns it around and I am looking at a vertical trail map that looks like the Dow Jones Bull is fighting the Bear. Damn.
“Hardcore, right?” she says.
“It does look… challenging.” Who am I kidding? I’ve never seen the like and I’m not an inexperienced hiker. I’ve spent a good bit of time on the Appalachian Trail since I moved here, and when I was at Yale I would drive up into the White Mountains as often as I could. But as I stare at the screen, following each peak and dip, I can’t fathom the 22,000 feet of elevation change she says she plans to walk.
“Why do you have to climb all those peaks to walk around a mountain?”
“It’s not just a mountain. It's a volcano with glaciers that have carved out ridges, and it's surrounded by mountains. I know it seems like a lot. It is a lot. You could climb all the way to the peak with less gain in altitude but we won’t be climbing Rainier, just circling it.”
She’s using we. She thinks I’m going.
You said you would.
This is what I get for trying to communicate in a work fog. By the time we fly out and back it will be two weeks. “Ulla, I don’t know what to say, but there is no way I can swing two weeks in September.” Before she can protest, I ask, “Why not your roommate?”
“She’s driving me mad. I’m not kidding, she has no understanding of personal space. If I took her to the land of Zen she’d murder it.”
I’d murder myself if I had to have a roommate at our age.
“Ulla, I’m really sorry. But I’m already taking a week for Paris and two more to dive with Jonathan this summer, and I can’t bail on him.”
“By the way, how is Jonathan?”
I can see her brain working. She’s stalling for time, looking for an angle.
“He’s fine.”
“Yes. He is. Hold on I’ve gotta pee,” she announces and she walks toward the guest bath seemingly upset. When she comes out she has a look of determination on her face and I think here we go. Ulla is nothing if not tenacious. But this is more than that, it’s like she’s afraid to tell me something.
“Listen, when I couldn’t get you on the phone last week I went ahead and applied—for us.” She must see the look on my face because she adds, “Don’t be upset, it’s no big deal. I’ll look for someone else, I promise. But there was a deadline. I mean it’s a huge long shot anyway and the idea may grow on you. You don’t have to say yes Sawyer, but please don’t say no. Not yet.”
I don’t.
Chapter 2
Over the next three hours we proceed to finish the Blanton’s while toasting vacations and sex and Jonathan and Paris and the entire time I am pushing back against the anxiety that is catching up with me—that always catches up with me. It seems I can only run from it 364 days a year. That’s why I fly on the sixty-fifth. Can’t lose it on a plane. Too many people watching.
"Is it gone?” I hold the bottle at arm’s length, but my focus is off.
“I think I’m drunk,” Ulla mumbles.
“I know you’re drunk,” I reply, not quite drunk myself but certainly numb.
“Say, if I ask a favor will you do it?” she asks.
“Another?”
“This one's real small. But kinda strange. You know I don’t believe, but I want Wonderland—bad. And the odds are long. So. . . will you pray at the Notre Dame for me?”
She says it so fast I’m not sure I heard her.
“Just light a candle or something. Because that church has been around a long time, so if any place has a lock on. . . whatever. . . it would be there.”
“Have you ever been?” I ask resting my head on the pillow and closing my eyes.
“No, but once I almost completed a 1500 piece puzzle of the rose window.”
"Well it’s beautiful, but dirtier than you would expect—on the outside. Centuries of smoke and smog.”
“So will you do it for me? Of course, that’s if you ever leave your bed.” And she leans over to knock me on the shoulder and practically falls off the couch.
“Jonathan is good in that department.”
“Better than I’ve had in a decade.” She admits.
“Only for a lack of trying. You’ve got to get out there, or get someone in there.” And she snorts the ridiculous laugh of the truly wasted.
“You’re one to talk! Tomorrow's your birthday but you have to fly across an ocean to get laid.”
I stop breathing.
“Oh, Sawyer. I can’t believe I said that.” Her hand leaves her mouth to touch my arm. She continues to mumble apologies for being a stupid, wasted, horrible friend as I stare at her fingers, concentrating on pushing the tears back into the ducts and down my throat so I can swallow them.
“It’s just you’re so beautiful, and smart, and you travel, and have a ridiculous sense of humor. You must be asked out all the time. Why are you still tied down to a man who’s so far away? You know he’s not coming back, right?”
I take a deep breath and look up and smile, “Yes, of course, I know that. That’s why it works.”
“That makes no sense at all. Hey, look. The moon is up.” And sure enough a full-looking moon has just entered the top of the arched windows. Ulla walks towards it and opens the removable screen to step onto the patio which is really just the roof. I walk to my bedroom, needing some time to myself. When I return she’s asleep on the couch. As I pull the throw over her I think, when did I go from being someone she hung out with to someone she wanted to know?
I find it difficult—her questions. Some small part of me wants to tell her. To shake her awake. To say it out loud. Today’s twenty years and that’s why I leave. That’s why I can’t even bear to be on the continent. But of course I don’t. I’m not a person who lets others in. Objectively I can understand how it would be nice. But I've learned over the years that I can't acclimate myself to the uncomfortable sensation of exposure. So instead I slip on the shoes by the door and silently step out.
I walk aimlessly until I run into the bright red awning that marks the old Woolworth building. I turn right because even though I want another drink it’s the last thing I need, and if I go left I’ll end up at the Crow & Quill for last call. A streetlight blinks out above me and I try to remember what that’s supposed to mean. Before long I find myself sitting at one of the chess tables in Pritchard Park, surrounded by the marijuana haze that hovers here at 2 a.m. I assume the drum circle has pulled me this way. I try and focus on the beat of the drums but I find myself flashing back.
You said you wouldn't do this. You said you'd try.
I look down, my eyes going in and out of focus as I concentrate on the board. Black, white, black, white, black, white, black, white... Year twenty-one pushes in—one of the worst. I didn’t even know the name of the man whose bed I awoke in, and even now I couldn’t tell you what mind altering substances I took that night. When I snuck out to find my car I discovered I was not even in New Haven. And I had no shoes.
It’s pathological. After twenty years you’d think I’d come to grips with it. But it’s always the same and tonight is no different. I want to curl in on myself until I’m one point—until I can blink out.
Enough.
I tug at the buttons of my over-starched shirt to remove it. Kicking heels under the table, I pull my hands through my hair to take it down. Once I’ve slipped my bra from beneath my cami I feel better. Like I can breathe. I discard it all on the chessboard and walk towards the crowd. My eyes close, but I’m so close I can feel the heat coming off their bodies. I let the beat vibrate across my skin until I feel space to step in. They brush against me—sweat soaked as I disappear into the scene.
Chapter 3
I love the rooftops that stretch out to the horizon. I love fresh spring strawberries that are only as big as your thumb, bruise if you look at them, and are blood red all the way through. I love real champagne and post-coital snacks in general, but not the tristesse. It makes no sense. I’m in Paris with a very, very good friend having good sex—an indulgence I almost never allow myself at home—so why do I feel so sad? Jonathan is so used to my moods that he doesn't even comment as we eat fruit and cheese five floors above the 4th Arrondissement. Standing at the railing, I notice the buttresses of Notre Dame make it look like a spider. I’m trying to count the legs. I need to remember to go there for Ulla. Ulla, who woke on Saturday to find me gone. I felt bad when I made it home. She seemed worried, but for once there was nothing to worry about. I actually did a pretty good job this year, and made my flight. And I’m pretty sure the reason I haven’t seen a bit of the city yet is due to the last minute purchases that morning.
“Que voulez-vous faire?” he asks.
“I think I’ll shower and then go stare at my favorite Rodin for an hour.” My eyes drop five stories as a delivery man calls out something I can’t translate.
“The Kiss? You're going to leave your lover to stare at marble ones?”
I turn. His voice is off somehow.
“You can come if you like.”
“No. You go.” He says too sharply.
“Are you okay?”
“No, I don’t think I am.” He gets up from the patio table and walks towards me. “Sawyer, I’m afraid we’re going to have to stop meeting like this.”
I laugh—it’s our joke, that we’re some old couple in a 50’s movie like Roman Holiday. But he doesn’t join in.
“I know you love me . . . in your own way.” And without warning, the tenor of his thoughts appear in my mind. I want to clap my hands over his mouth but I’m paralyzed. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion. You know what’s coming. You can see it coming but you still feel surprised when it hits you head on.
“I know there's no one you're closer to. I know that what we have is unlike anything we’ve ever had with another.” As he speaks, I watch him rub the back of my hand with his thumb but instead of warming me, the gesture makes me grow cold. “But I know when you leave you are likely to go weeks without thinking of me.”
“But—”
“Let me finish. The thing is, I do—think of you—too much. I wonder every day at noon what flavor of Torani you’ve put in your coffee so I can add the same to mine. I keep the sheets on for weeks after you leave because of the subtle scent of nutmeg you leave behind. I dream one day you’ll be here forever.”
I walk through the French doors trying to escape it. He follows but drops my hand. Sitting on the futon, I stare blindly out the window and I feel him sit next to me.
“I just wanted so much for it to mean more this time. I’ll never regret what we’ve had.”
How can this be happening?
I stop myself before I can tell him I love him. Because I do, in so many ways, but clearly not enough. I don’t picture him when he’s not with me. He’s like a treat, not a daily need. But if I wanted to I could convince him to stop this, to take it all back. If I wanted to. Selfishly I do, but when I turn to look at him, I know that after all of these years he deserves better than a lie.
“Jonathan, honestly, I don’t know what to say. Maybe I’m just not made that way because I think what we have is perfect. But I want you to have the fairy tale if that’s what you need.”
“Sawyer, we’re 36. There’s no fairy tale. But maybe there is a companion who doesn't live five thousand miles away and maybe, just maybe, there's more.”
“Are you saying you’re not dating? When I’m not here? I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t. You actually picture me seeing women, don’t you—and feel nothing. But it’s different for me because somewhere between Budapest and Prague I fell in love with you. Slovakia I think, on that stupid broken down train. It's not that I haven’t been with other women. I have. But I have to stop comparing everyone to you. I have to let you go, to even have a chance. It’s so fucking cliché it makes me sick.”
Oh my God, it’s been years.
“And I get it, that you don’t love me—or not in that way. It’s okay.”
It sounds anything but. He stands.
“Sawyer, I just can’t be the friend you fuck anymore.”
Shame spreads over my skin.
“I’m going to shower.”
“Do.” He leans in and kisses my cheek and I feel as tired as I’ve ever been. When I open my eyes he’s my friend again.
I wonder what it cost him.
“And then you and I will go to the Rodin Museum and stare at the Kiss and all the lovers that come to see it and see if we can’t figure out a way to manifest that for ourselves.” He reaches out his hand but I can’t find the will to take it.
I stand in the shower and let the water beat down on me. How hard would it be to love him? How hard? Maybe that quack was right. Maybe I really do have an attachment disorder. And even though I know he will try, I can already feel the distance building. Which is sad, because he’s the only one who comes close to knowing me, not from me, but just from time. He took long enough to learn me and I am throwing it all away. I let the shampoo sting my eyes so I can pretend I’m not crying.
When I enter the kitchen, Jonathan hands me a mimosa and then quickly realizes his mistake. He pours me another one without orange juice. At that moment I hate how well he knows me.
He asks me, “So which one do you want to see? The marble at the museum or the bronze at Tuileries?”
“Both please.”
Why can’t you love him more?
***
I congratulate myself for not getting kicked out of the museum. I’ve been known to touch The Kiss. It’s so hard not to caress their white, cool, entwined bodies. If you watch them long enough you’re sure they’re going to move into the next scene, whatever that may be.
Jonathan stayed with me the full hour. On the way out through the garden, I glanced at the horror of the Gates of Hell and their gloom follows me. I asked if we could get coffee so we crossed over to the “little island” to go to that place on the corner. Right now Jonathan has icing on his nose from the cream puff he just ate. I brush mine to let him know. From the umbrella table, we watch the Seine flow by. He is trying so hard, but I am heartbroken, and that is patently unfair. When the tension gets too much I tell him I need to cross over to Notre Dame to do a silly favor for Ulla. He lets me go, seemingly relieved to have a moment alone which makes me even sadder.
I duck into the dimmest chapel I can find, not wanting company. No one cares that I’m crying in the chapel of the lady of sorrows. Her tears are like clear bubbles of glass.
Light the candle. That’s why you're here. And because I can’t bear to let down another living soul today, I put a coin in the metal box and hear it rattle. I choose a big one and light it for Ulla and her Wonderland. As I’m turning to leave—for no particular reason I drop another in the box. The flame sizzles as I touch the wick. I look at the tearful Madonna, but we both know I am not praying to her. Pulling the ring from my finger, I look around me because I feel like a fraud surrounded by these sacred icons. I kneel on the red velvet bench and put on the face of a penitent, but I don’t know what to ask for. I squeeze the ring so hard it cuts into my skin. You decide. Something. Anything. Just not this anymore.
Someone coughs nearby and I wake out of the insanity of talking to the dead. Grabbing my purse from the ground I realize it’s time to go home.
Wonderland is an 85,000-word contemporary fiction novel. A synopsis is available upon request.