The Wife

  “The blond shiksa entrancing the Jewish guy.”

  “That’s me. Upholding the tradition.”

  We stirred our drinks and tried to laugh a little; we both finally let our gazes lift and looked up at the rectangle of light. We were dawdling together in some strange, new way, as though we were finally comfortable with each other when in fact we weren’t. He pushed a silver bowl of pretzel sticks toward me and I ate some, and then he said, “You could really add something to my book, you know. You’d finally get to speak; it would be a real feminist moment for you.”

  “Oh, Nathaniel, come on, you have no use for feminism,” I said.

  “Yeah, but you do.”

  In his own way he was seductive, if only because he wasn’t Joe. I was getting old, and Joe was getting old, and Bone was relatively young. And long after Joe and I were gone from the world, Nathaniel Bone would still be kicking around, getting another book contract, appearing at the Ninety-second Street Y on a panel called “Truth-Telling and the Biographer’s Task.” Why not give everything to him? He hungered for it; he knew it was there in me. He wanted the Joe Castleman story to make sense, to have the satisfying shape and closure of a novel.

  “I won’t rush you, Joan,” said Bone. “You can take your time; we can do it however you want. I could tape you, or just take notes. We’ll both be here for one more day, right? There’s the ceremony, and then the banquet, and you’ll be completely overextended. I’ll be somewhere up in the peanut gallery. The walnut gallery. We could meet the next morning, say around ten, in front of the Academic Bookstore. Joe wouldn’t have to know. That place is enormous; these Finns read and read, don’t they? What else do they have to do all winter other than drink, am I right? We could meet, and you could make up your mind about exactly what you want to say to me. How does that sound?” I shrugged; that was all I’d commit to. “I think you really do want to talk to me,” he said. “I’m like a therapist in a way. People have often told me that.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a bad therapist,” I said. “The kind who gives away other people’s secrets.”

  “True,” said Nathaniel, smiling. “My parents are psychiatrists—maybe that’s why I went bad. Kids of shrinks are completely fucked up from the start. We don’t even have a chance.”

  “Poor, poor you,” I said.

  “I know you’re only teasing, but if you actually knew what my life was like, you would feel sorry for me,” he said. “You, Joan, you’ve got this marriage, this life, your kids and grandkids, a house, lots of friends. I don’t have any of that. I’ve got my work. The Joe Castleman project. That’s my life. That’s my house. My kid. Too bad for me.”

  Then Bone abruptly paid the bill, trying to figure out how many markka to leave, how many penniä, holding each coin up to the light of the sloping window, peering at it through his little lenses to see what it was and how much it was worth, though soon the euro would sweep these specifics into irrelevance. I left him there in the restaurant frowning over a confusion of lightweight coins and flyaway paper money, and headed out into the dark evening in this Midwestern-sized city where I knew no one and no one knew me, and people banged absently into one another like bumper cars on a wide, polished surface.

  * * *

  With or without my participation, Bone’s biography of Joe will certainly include some basic facts that many people already know. We were once potheads, briefly, in that embarrassing way of the far-too-old, but we never let that stop us. In the late 1960s we were into our thirties. Picture us, if you can bear it: There’s Joe with a paisley scarf at his neck and striped bell-bottoms, his black hair hanging down in a long, girlish sheaf, his eyes clouded with smoke. He was always tilting back his head and applying dewdrops of Visine to those eyes back then, or else laughing over something not very funny at all. And me in my paper dress or maxi-skirt and granny glasses, holding a bouquet of wildflowers. My hair was long and parted in the middle. I believe I owned five different shawls, which I wore throughout this time of marching, screaming, revelry, and a complete absence of irony.

  But what was more mortifying than how we looked was what we did. Using the durable excuse of “research,” Joe explored the world of “swinging,” a term that is itself mortifying. Ou sont les “swingers” d’antan? If they are still alive, they are subscribing to Prevention magazine and baby-sitting for their grandchildren and taking gingko biloba supplements to restore their memories of details they probably would do better to forget.

  Research took bell-bottomed Joe into a Manhattan club somewhere in the West Fifties called Den of Iniquity, a place with a “clothes-check girl” and a coed steambath and a dark room where men and women lay down on plush surfaces and opened their robes to each other.

  I went with him there once, because he asked me to. We were still living in the Village then, and the children were at home with a sitter, David watching Star Trek and the girls dressing their helpless hamsters in doll clothes, and we headed uptown in a taxi, already slightly stoned from the joint we’d quickly sucked on in our bathroom, a place the children never entered. The admission fee to Den of Iniquity was outrageously high, and Joe paid it and we entered, walking along the purple carpet as if into a bad-taste suburban home. Some of the patrons were young and beautiful, and they located one another quickly. The older, homelier types stood alone in their robes, the men as though they’d come here for a chaste steambath, the women with a certain chin-up bravery, pulling in the soft stomachs that had long ago disgorged a baby or two, and moving their heads ever so slightly to the rhythm of the San Francisco psychedelic background music that was piped in over the quadraphonic speakers all around us.

  Joe and I were somewhere in the middle of these two groups: too old to be beautiful, and too young to be repulsive. We entered the room with its rubberized suction door that made the place seem like the interior of a refrigerator, and we sat down together in our robes on the couch whose consistency, I would realize years later, was that of one of Joe’s Hostess Sno-Balls. We were high and laughing, but the ambience was mammogram-waiting-room as opposed to sexual cave.

  Soon a young guy with a tall bong in hand arrived and all of us in the room gathered around him. We passed the bong in a circle, and I recall being vaguely disgusted by the shared spittle that is a main feature of any communal water pipe. I thought that if I was disgusted by the communal spittle of strangers, then I was certainly not going to have a big future in group sex. But the man quickly dropped his robe and tentatively placed a hand on my neck, and Joe watched as the man bent forward to kiss me, though I was a good ten years older than he was. The woman beside me eased closer, touching her mouth to my neck; she was dark-haired and pixielike, and could have been Audrey Hepburn’s stunt double.

  I can’t say the night wasn’t arousing; it was, in the animal way that anything damp and breathy and rhythmic invariably is. The couple, whose names were Don and Roz, were applying all their attention to me while Joe watched. The husband’s hands were large, and his wife had an extremely small mouth, which kissed me in hunt-and-peck fashion, as though she kept remembering and forgetting and then remembering what she was doing here.

  “Oh, you’re so soft,” she whispered like a child revealing a secret, and though it was incumbent upon me to say something in return, I couldn’t. Joe was watching; I saw him leaning back against the furred wall, nodding his head slightly in stoned appreciation.

  I wondered what my life might have been like with another woman—a life away from men and their caterwauling and continual need for affirmation, for stroking, as though within their minds they were always deep in the Den of Iniquity, always waiting with robe belt loosely tied, wanting a woman to pull it open and make them happy. Men and women drifted through the room; distantly through the smoke I could smell a malodorous breath of anxiety, behind which someone wondered if they would find pleasure tonight, if their robe would be opened by warm, new hands.

  By the time Joe and I left, the sun was coming up. Later in the da
y, thinking about what had happened, I would be appalled, forever ending my brief moment of casual, bisexual sex, and my brief opportunity to imagine escaping from the man I’d attached myself to in an early fit of girlish optimism.

  In addition to such stories, Bone’s biography will certainly include what happened between Joe and Lev Bresner on December 20, 1973, inside the Bresners’ long-halled Riverside Drive apartment. Joe was never violent before that night—never, not once. I think the truly self-absorbed find it difficult to lift themselves up out of their stupefaction and inflict pain. The arguments we usually had—about his career, money, the children, real estate, and even occasionally about women—were never violent but were often savage.

  “I hate when you do this!” Alice screamed at us once when she was small and Joe and I were in the middle of a frenzied fight. “Can’t you behave yourselves for a change?”

  “Your father,” I said carefully, breathing in controlled little sips, “has trouble behaving himself. That’s exactly the problem.”

  Alice and Susannah wept and begged us not to fight, and another time, during what seemed like a peaceful family dinner, Susannah handed Joe a piece of construction paper covered with doilies like a valentine, on which she’d written:

  If you and Mom/Stop you’re Yelling

  Believe me, Dad, they’ll be no telling

  How much I will love you.

  Which made Joe burst into tears.

  He stood up then and knelt down beside our older daughter’s chair; he crushed her against him, made her milk glass fall over and spill, made her cry with confusion, and made Alice uncharacteristically chime in crying, too. “I love all you little ducklings,” he said. “I never, ever want to hurt you. Sometimes I do stupid things. Big, stupid things. Ask your mother. I’m so sorry.”

  “I forgive you,” Alice decided after a moment, and then Susannah seconded it, her voice trembling. David said nothing, but just kept eating as though nothing was happening around him.

  I sat there thinking how easily Joe got off the hook, how smooth he was, how penitent. Across the table, five-year-old David watched everything with the same cool, critical eye, and I have to say I admired him for it.

  No, Joe wasn’t violent. Not until December 20, 1973, anyway. It was the night of the Chanukah party at the Bresners’ apartment, an annual celebration in which the rooms were all infused with the smell of frying, and tiny Tosha Bresner stood in her beige kitchen, a spatula in one hand and an enormous skillet of potato pancakes in the other. She was like a one-woman assembly line, shredding potatoes and onions and forming them loosely with her red, long-ago-frostbitten hands, and then dropping them into spitting oil, only to remove them moments later when they achieved an exterior perfection, and a moist egginess inside that made all who ate them forget about anything terrible in their lives. The wives, biting into these potato pancakes, forgot about the infidelities of their husbands. And the husbands, in turn, forgot about the anxiety of the literary horse-race that otherwise coursed through their bodies, upsetting their metabolism.

  “Tosha, can I help?” I asked her that night.

  “Oh, Joan, you are so good,” she said. “Here. Could you maybe carry these out? The men are starving. They are like animals! Oh, I hope I have enough!” She giggled wildly and somewhat inappropriately, handing me a platter.

  In the living room, men and women stood around various homemade, strategically placed menorahs and watched the colored candles burn down to stubs, and drank beer and wine and talked over the scratch and thump of a Jefferson Airplane album. We would soon be leaving rock and roll forever, donating it to our children, its real owners, but we didn’t yet know it. Soon we would be able to tolerate only the music we’d grown up with: big band, and jazz, and classical. Nothing else would be able to penetrate our aging skulls.

  What were we talking about that night? It was the twenty-four-hour Nixon channel back then: all Nixon, all the time, the paranoid and fleshy basset face, the fallout from the Watergate break-in, the elaborate White House gavotte. The living room was divided into clusters, and from each of those clusters an occasional name was spat out like hot oil from Tosha Bresner’s pan: Haldeman. Ehrlichman. For laughs, Martha Mitchell, with her mouth that wouldn’t shut up. We despised these figures, and yet we followed their horrific antics with a certain feverishness. Here it was Chanukah, wintertime, only eight months before Nixon and poor bony, hesitant Pat would leave the White House lawn.

  Men’s ties were wide as roads then, and the hair of male writers and college professors was still slightly long, or else overly wide, formed into the topiary that became informally known as the Jewish Afro. (There were, for the record, no black people in the room. We had known some well in the sixties, during the civil rights movement, and later on there had been the occasional black writer who would appear in someone’s living room, but they drifted away from our world, or else had been cut loose.) Wives wore dresses of indigo and maroon, and beaded necklaces from Central America. Most of them worked now, having grabbed jobs or graduate degrees as though there were a big game of musical chairs taking place and they needed to be gainfully employed before the music stopped.

  Into this room I brought a new platter of potato pancakes. “Food!” I announced, and people came from their separate groups and ate, taking the latkes with their hands, happily burning their tongues. When Tosha finally ducked into the room, she was greeted with applause and responded shyly, pinkening from this brief moment of attention, which represented the smallest fraction of the amount of attention her husband received in a single day. She looked too happy to me, so happy that she might split, and she ran her hands up and down the sides of her dress, murmuring to herself.

  “You’re a genius, Tosha,” said a garrulous man named Belstein, whose novels all followed the life of a character named Felstein. He gave her a kiss on the top of her head, where the hair was pulled into a dark, gleaming ball. Someone else handed her a drink and she stayed for a while and drank, which was unusual for this woman, who liked to scurry off into corners where she would not be seen. She was like one of the endless series of hamsters that had lived in our children’s rooms. When you tried to pay attention to those animals, to touch them or show them affection, they scrammed into one of the tube-tunnels that had been installed in their cages. The kitchen was often Tosha Bresner’s tunnel, but tonight she had emerged from its heat and its damp surfaces, just in time for what would turn out to be the famous fight between the two famous husbands.

  It started, as these things seem to, out of virtually nothing. A bit of casual talk, a string of political remarks, and some lightweight dismissal of an overrated nonfiction writer. “Did you see that picture in the paper last week?” Joe asked. “His nostrils were huge. I bet he keeps entire reams of paper up there.”

  “Who cares about his nostrils?” said Lev. “You are making fun of the man physically? You are saying his nose, it is too big?”

  “Well, he’s an arrogant ass,” said Joe. “The nostrils make him look snobbish. As though he had them deliberately carved. Enlarged. To give him an aristocratic look. His books are so false, Lev, even you can see it.”

  “What do you mean, even me? Am I so dense I am handicapped from seeing the truth about a writer?”

  “Yeah, this particular writer, I seem to recall you have a blind spot about,” Joe went on. “You always defend him for some reason.”

  “He is my lover,” Lev deadpanned, the back of his hand to his forehead, and the circle of writers and editors laughed. These men had no homosexual blood, oh no, not them. No homosexuality, no hemophilia, nothing rarefied about them whatsoever.

  “He’s not your lover,” said Joe quickly. “He’s your fucking brother in the Talmud.”

  There was quiet in the room. “What?” asked Lev. He was reassessing Joe, taking his measure; this happened once in a while between Lev and other writers; I’d witnessed it before, but had never seen it between him and Joe.

  “Nothing,”
muttered Joe.

  “No, tell me.”

  “All right. You know you tend to favor other Jews. You know you do,” Joe went on. “It’s a fact about you. I accept it. Look, this isn’t some anti-Semitic gotcha moment, Lev, so don’t try to turn it into one.”

  But Lev kept at him, trying to parse his words, and Joe rose up, uncoiled, and soon the men were shouting at each other, smearing each other’s work. Joe was “full of shit,” said Lev. “A pretender to the throne of Big Fucking American Writer.”

  And Lev, said Joe, was using his “concentration-camp childhood like a free pass into important places.”

  “Fuck you,” said Lev.

  “No, fuck you,” said Joe.

  And then Lev slugged him. Joe staggered but wasn’t badly hurt; anyone could see that. This wasn’t fatal. No teeth were loosened or lost, and no lip was split, spilling blood in a dramatic but benign way. (The lip, oh the lip, so melodramatic with its endless blood, but no one ever died of a broken lip.) Still, the blood flowed, and it frightened Joe after he brought his hand to his mouth and it came back brightly shining. He struck back, and the men fought each other sloppily, slapping, punching, kicking, calling each other names: “You little shit,” “You fraud,” “You prick,” “You asshole, you.”

  And then Joe added, “You know what? I’d like to see you write one novel, Lev, just one, in which you aren’t allowed to use the following keys on your typewriter: H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T.”

  As the other guests watched, fascinated and appalled, the two writers fell into one of the bedrooms together. It was the Bresners’ younger daughter’s room, with pink walls and a canopy bed, and Lev and Joe both ended up on that bed, landing on an oasis of pointy-footed, half-nude Barbie dolls. Thank God our own children had refused to come to this party, saying it was boring and there was no one their age to talk to. Everyone crowded into the doorway, nominally trying to break up the fight between the two men, but no one really wanted the fight to end.