Rona Jaffe - Mazes and Monsters

Yes, Robbie thought, a psychiatrist was a good idea. You couldn’t pick up your life after having blanked out and expect everything to be the same. He couldn’t imagine what he’d be able to tell a psychiatrist. He didn’t even have any interesting dreams. Maybe he could be hypnotized and that would help. It made him feel safer, in any case, to know there would be someone professional to talk to about all this.

He liked Jay Jay’s apartment; and Jay Jay’s mother, whom he’d seen twice for just a minute each time, was so young and pretty he couldn’t believe she had a son in college. When Robbie told her, she had laughed and said she had found Jay Jay on the doorstep.

“She only kept me because I was in a Gucci box,” Jay Jay said.

It was strange, Robbie thought, to realize that other people had unhappy home lives too, and never talked about it. For some reason he had supposed he was the only one. Poor Jay Jay. His own childhood had been much better than Jay Jay’s, even with the fighting. At least he hadn’t been all alone.

“I wish I could make this up to you,” Robbie told his friends.

“Make what up?” Jay Jay said.

“I mean, coming to get me, and sticking with me now …”

“Robbie,” Kate said, “your problem is you never understand your worth. You’re a wonderful person. We care about you. You always do things for everybody, and you never ask for anything for yourself.”

“Is that true?” He was so pleased to have all these compliments that he felt a glow of genuine pleasure. He’d always thought he was the dull, average one, tagging along behind them, being allowed to share in their game and their lives, and it hadn’t occurred to him that his presence actually added anything to their lives.

Jay Jay’s mother’s apartment was enormous, and Robbie had his own room, but Jay Jay and Daniel took turns staying in it with him at night “for company.” Robbie knew they were watching him, afraid he might flip out again. He didn’t think he ever would. The pressures were over, weren’t they? College was over. The game was over. He would have all that free time this summer, just to recuperate and relax.

But he liked having someone with him at night. It was cozy. Robbie decided it wasn’t too dreadful to be a little bit selfish just for a few days. After all, he’d been sick. And sometimes, when he let himself think about the enormity of having amnesia for such a long time, it really did terrify him.

The third day, Kate, Daniel, and Jay Jay drove Robbie up to Greenwich to his parents. His mother cried, this time, and both his mother and father hugged and kissed him. His friends stayed for dinner and then they had to drive back to Grant to take their Final Exams. They all wished each other luck and promised to see each other soon. The extraordinary thing was that his mother was hardly drunk at all.

That night she came into his room and sat on the foot of his bed. She hadn’t done that since he was a little kid when he’d screamed out after a nightmare.

“I’m so thankful you’re back,” she said.

“I’m glad to be back,” he said. He wasn’t sure that was true, but he knew she would like to hear it.

“I won’t ask you any questions if you don’t want me to,” she said. “But there will be reporters. You don’t have to talk to them. I’ll be here every minute and I’ll keep them away.”

“Thanks,” Robbie said gratefully.

“And …” She gave him a wan smile. “I know how much you always hated my drinking. I’m going to stop. I’m going to try to stop — okay?”

He was moved. “That would be … that would be really terrific, Mom.”

“We’ll both get well this summer,” she said.

Robbie Wheeling’s safe return revived the story of his disappearance, and, as expected, reporters arrived at the Wheeling home to find out what had happened. Robbie’s parents spoke for him. He was, they said, having a well-deserved rest after what was naturally an ordeal, and would prefer to let the whole matter vanish into the past. There were tremendous tugs and pulls on any young person starting college — the question of career, the battle for good grades, the search for his own identity, the distractions of romance. He had been upset over the end of a relationship with a girl, his parents said, and he had been worried about Final Exams. He had left school to clear his head, reestablish his priorities. It was much the same thing they had been saying all along.

In the newspaper articles that were written about his escapade, the reporters reminded their readers that what had made the story so interesting at first had been the belief that Robbie had met with foul play because of a game. Mazes and Monsters was a popular game on the Grant campus, as it was in other schools, but one particular group of players had gone too far, taking it from their rooms to the forbidden caverns near the college. All the publicity had done a great deal for sales of the game, but the game had turned out to be a false lead. Mazes and Monsters had nothing to do with Robbie’s mysterious adventure — if indeed it had been an adventure at all.

A photographer did manage to take one picture of Robbie, as he was leaving the house to get into a car. You could see how handsome he was, and of course that sold more papers. Robbie’s parents said that he was certainly expecting to go back to Grant again in the fall, where his friends would be waiting eagerly to see him.

On the commuter train to New York from a suburb not far from where Robbie and his family lived, a man named James Herman looked at Robbie’s picture in the newspaper and his jaw tightened in anger. He felt a little fear too, and a great sense of irony. His shoulder still hurt from where he had been stabbed, and even though the stitches were out there was an ugly fresh red scar. He was lucky he hadn’t been killed. It was hard to tell from a newspaper photo, and it had been a while, but he was positive this “nice” Robbie Wheeling was the hustler who’d tried to kill him the night he’d been cruising. No wonder the kid wouldn’t talk about where he’d been and what he’d been doing. Wouldn’t that be a shock for the parents!

James Herman sighed and tried to relax. Life was shit, and there wasn’t much left you could believe in. He had two kids of his own, teen-agers, and he hoped he was bringing them up well. He had a responsible, well-paying job in a big company, a bright wife, a comfortable home complete with swimming pool. There was also a dark side to his nature — the compulsion to seek out young men in degrading places for sex — but no one knew it. No one ever would. He had not gone back to Times Square again, and when the need struck him he would go somewhere safer; perhaps hire a professional call boy.

He didn’t know what had turned him into the kind of man he was: a respectable, well-meaning citizen with one fatal flaw. He didn’t know what had turned that privileged college student into a knife-wielding junkie. He worried about his own children. He worried about the whole damn world.

The only thing he wasn’t worried about was that goddamn Wheeling kid. Robbie Wheeling’s secret would stay just that. Let the parents find out for themselves.

Kate went home after college was over, to see her family and get ready for the trip to Europe she was going to take with Daniel and Jay Jay at the end of June. The three of them had not only passed their exams but gotten good marks, and her father was in an expansive mood because of his new baby daughter and had agreed right away to pay for Kate’s share of the expenses. There were some things she had to sort out in her mind before she left, and she needed this quiet time at home to think.