The Wife

  There were a series of “answers” put to three “contestants,” a shy short-story writer named Lucy Bloodworth, Harry Jacklin, and Joe, who was coaxed from his seat, where he had just begun tucking into a dish of bread pudding.

  The tone was jokey-literary, and the first Daily Double was directed at Joe. Part of a paragraph from a recent novel of his was going to be read aloud, and he would be asked to finish it.

  “I quote,” said the headwaiter, “ ‘Shirley Breen was not a covetous woman. No one had ever said of her, “There goes Shirley Breen, desirer of things she cannot have.” In her life, there was only one thing she wanted that she had not been able to get.’ ” The headwaiter paused dramatically.

  This was an easy one. The answer, in the form of a question, was: “What is . . . ‘a shot glass that had been drunk from by Mae West.’ ” At least one-quarter of the dining hall could have shouted these words in unison. But Joe just sat there in front of all of them, scratching his head and looking embarrassed.

  “Oh God,” he finally said. “I’m royally screwed now. You’ve all learned my terrible secret.”

  “And what secret would that be?” asked the headwaiter.

  I watched Joe with curiosity. “That I’ve got a bad case of Alzheimer’s,” he said. “Can’t even remember my own writing a minute after I finish it. Somebody shoot me now.”

  In the vegetarian cafe with the three other wives, I wept and wept and they were a mass of heads and elbows, comforting me, or trying to. “I just feel so humiliated,” I said, “getting up every morning and stepping outside the building, knowing what everyone else knows. Do you all think I’m ridiculous? A pathetic figure?”

  “No! No!” they cried. “Not at all! Everyone admires you!” But who were these women? By default, they were my friends, my companions, these weary wives with their own careers that people tried hard to be interested in.

  “How’s the social work going, Liana?” a conference student asked her at a picnic one afternoon, though there was no answer that could have kept his eye from leaping away from her and onto the more desirable targets: famous novelists spitting watermelon seeds in that grove.

  “How’s the refugee work going, Joan?” an older, shy female poet named Jeannie asked me another time, for she’d heard about my occasional involvement with the relief organization. I told her just enough to be conversational, and no more, though she seemed disappointed, and truly wanted to hear. Joe had exaggerated my involvement with the charity over the years, trying to make me sound as though I was engaged in something in a way that would command quiet respect.

  “I have nothing,” I said to the wives, and they told me I was wrong, I had so much, I contributed to the world, I was a positive presence, they’d always thought I was “stylish and intelligent,” to use Janice Leidner’s words.

  “It’s like you have a whole other life going on inside you,” said Dusty Berkowitz.

  “We all do,” I said.

  “I don’t,” she said with her rolling, self-conscious laugh. “What you see is what you get.”

  Dusty Berkowitz, fifty-five, her chest freckled from sun exposure, her hair as red as a leprechaun’s, no longer existed for her husband.

  Janice Leidner still existed for her own husband, though only in outline: the idea of her, rather than the particulars.

  Liana Thorne, deeply melancholy and bland, had a husband who longed to be part of the men’s club and who continually elbowed his way in, to the exclusion of any other activities or interests.

  And me, blond, thin, aging but preserved in the acidity of this long marriage. The marital juices kept me alive, kept me going. Joe and I swam in a jar together; I swam alone whenever he went off to kiss the tender parts of Merry Cheslin. Then, tired, he always swam back to me.

  There he was at 3 A.M. that morning, slowly opening the door of our room in Peachtree and appearing with the hall light behind him.

  “Joan?” he said. “You up?” He came into the room, bringing a draft of cigarette smoke with him, much of it absorbed into his hair, his sweater, the pores of his skin.

  I lifted my head from the deep sleep I’d been in. “Yes,” I always said, even when it wasn’t really true. “I’m up.”

  He hoisted himself onto the bed beside me, that smoky, clouded man, too old for blue jeans even then but wearing them anyway, his eyes inflamed from the smoke that had filled the room he’d been in, that party with godly writers and lowly students coming together, and then the private party afterward, in Birchbark, when he climbed onto a bed identical to this one, with a woman who bore no resemblance to me whatsoever.

  At three in the morning that summer, and the summers that preceded it and the summers that followed, we were together, a husband and wife united in the foggy middle of a Vermont night. Bats circled the pines all around our cottage and sometimes hung like change purses from the roof of our veranda, and the night bristled with forest-bright animal eyes, and the arrhythmic clicking of strange bugs that I hoped never to see, but which I’d simply agreed to live among for twelve days. He was with me; we slept together and we woke up together, day after day, which is a lot more than I can say for Merry Cheslin, who, after that summer, was never heard from as a writer, and who, in the Butternut Peak alumni newsletter, recently described herself this way:

  “I’m divorced,” writes MERRY CHESLIN, “no kids, never published my novel (sigh . . .), but I’m happily working for a small educational software company in Providence, Rhode Island, which believe it or not actually gives me a chance to use some of the creative skills I learned all those summers ago in Vermont. . . .”

  * * *

  Merry Cheslin will appear in Bone’s biography, at least in some vaguely described way. So, too, will other women from Joe’s visiting stints at universities, as well as occasional hangers-on and New York publicists. There were beautiful young women in gauzy blouses and cowboy boots, and stylish, recent college graduates looking for jobs in publishing.

  In addition to the women, Joe’s “attempted strangulation” of Lev will make it into the biography. And so will Joe’s heart attack and eventual valve replacement; this is a distinctly unsexy portion, for instead of jump-rope weapons or awards or couplings there is only a miserable scene in a restaurant called The Cracked Crab in the winter of 1991. There we were, six male writers and some wives, the men having achieved various footholds of success in their writing lives, their pitons dug deep into a rock wall, hairlines receded or vanished or else the hair itself staying resiliently wiry and Einstein-clownish.

  Joe, in this group, still occupied the center. He wasn’t the loudest (that would have been Martin Benneker, with his roar and flying hail of spittle) and he wasn’t the richest (definitely Ken Wooten, whose urbane and chiseled espionage novels had all been turned into movies), nor was he the most intelligent, not by far. (Lev had that role; he’d lunged for it.) Joe had a special, indefinable position among these men, a kind of quiet seniority. Joe loved to talk, and once in a while he loved to cook thick, undifferentiated stews that he could stand over for hours, pouring red wine into the pot and tossing in some meat and bones and the occasional handful of parsley. He loved to read and listen to jazz and eat his Sno-Balls and drink at a tavern and play pool.

  We sat at a large, round table at The Cracked Crab that night. The surface had been lined with white butcher’s paper, and was covered with crabs, as though we’d stumbled upon a colony of them. There they were, a mess of claws and jointed legs doused with a spray of Old Bay seasoning. Beer bottles, lifted and lowered during animated talk, left their rings all over the paper.

  As usual, the wives had somehow banded together from their separate seats, straining forward to talk, maybe discussing some new Chinese-language film, and the men were joshing and boasting in their usual way, and there was the incessant, almost soothing sound of crab cartilage being crushed or pulled, when suddenly, with a mouth full of food, Joe reared back in his chair and said, “Shit.”

  Then his cha
ir slammed forward to the floor and his face smashed down onto the butcher paper, and all of us leaped forward.

  “Are . . . you . . . choking?” boomed Maria Jacklin in a voice she’d learned from CPR class, and Joe made the slightest movement with his head that indicated no. His eyes were squeezed tight in pain, and his hands clasped his chest, and he seemed to stop breathing, and immediately the men were hoisting his body up onto the table, right into the middle of the crustacean bed, where they fell upon him the way they’d done long ago during the fight with Lev.

  Lev Bresner, by now a widower for years and still sexually active, but more depressed than ever, took over, starting the tilting of the head and the application of his lips to Joe’s, and then the pounding of Joe’s chest, and the next thing I knew, paramedics had pushed through the wooded back room of The Cracked Crab and had Joe on a stretcher with an oxygen mask over his face. Someone put an arm around me; I heard a mesh of voices, and I reached out toward Joe, but he was already being wheeled away.

  Five months later, after a long, cranky recovery from what had actually been a fairly mild heart attack, Joe required surgery to replace one of his human valves with a pig’s. He lay in our bed in Weathermill and read letters and novels, talking on the phone to various people around the world. Both of our daughters came and stayed at the house a couple of times, trying to cheer me up and be helpful to their dad. Even David telephoned, and though he didn’t ask directly about Joe, I knew that was why he was calling.

  I clung to Joe that year, extremely frightened. I forgot his flaws; they flew away as quickly as the taste of that meal. I have never eaten crab again. I fretted at his bedside, and I wished desperately for his recovery, and I got what I wished for.

  On our final night in Finland, Joe and I walked up the wide marble steps of the Helsinki Opera House side by side, my arm in his, surrounded by the chatter of cameras, which weren’t meant only for us. Anyone of prominence in Finland was here tonight, all the writers and artists and members of government, the people with curiously interesting names like Simo Ratia, Kaarlo Pietila, Hannes Vatanen. The names rang similarly, seductively, and the faces bore the same high color and fine bone structure. Everyone’s teeth looked strong and even, too, as though one orthodontist serviced the entire country. Men and women filed into the Opera House in their bulky Nordic parkas; only after they had entered and stripped down to their evening dress could you see how prepared they were for an evening of high couture. Here was a high point, the annual release from a frozen, static state, the tiny crack in the ice that let in the world. And the crack in the ice, this year, was in the name of Joseph Castleman, a small, overweight man in a tuxedo walking beside me up a set of shallow steps and into the gilded light of the Helsinki Opera House.

  I was seated in a box beside the President of Finland and his wife. While Joe was ushered backstage, I was formally introduced to the president, a man of my age named Mr. Timo Kristian with a stern face not unlike Finnish architecture. He wore one of those diagonal sashes fashioned of multicolored silk. His wife, Mrs. Karita Kristian, slightly younger, dressed in black, with a string of amethyst around her neck, sat frozen in place beside him. They had nothing to say to each other, or so it seemed, and they didn’t even try to give the illusion of rapport. Presidents served for six years in Finland; this was the beginning of Kristian’s fifth year in office, and both he and his wife looked very tired.

  Finally Mrs. Kristian took it upon herself to speak to me. There we were, wife to wife. “So, Mrs. Castleman,” she said in careful English, “you are enjoying your stay here in Helsinki?”

  “Oh yes,” I said.

  “What are your impressions of the Finnish people?” she wanted to know, and I spoke a little about their quiet pride, their good eye, their elegant simplicity, all of which seemed to be the right responses, for she appeared pleased.

  “And how about you, Mrs. Kristian?” I said. “What is your life like here in Helsinki?”

  The president’s wife was confused. I immediately realized that the question probably seemed insolent and strange. Or maybe she was just unused to such direct interest. “My life,” she began uncertainly, and then she quickly looked around to see who might be listening. No one was. The president was talking to one of his cabinet members, a man with an enormous blond mustache. “My life,” Karita Kristian went on in a quiet, controlled voice, “is so very unhappy.”

  I stared at her. Had I heard her right? Maybe she’d said her life was so very happy instead; how could I find out? Her face gave nothing away, but appeared as placid as it had been moments before. The lights dimmed just then and everyone in our box and in the entire audience grew silent. Mrs. Karita Kristian, the First Lady of Finland, turned to face forward as the heavy, scalloped curtains were pulled upward on the stage, revealing a small sea of men that included my husband. One or two women sat among them, their dresses providing the only bright bits of color.

  Soon Joe was given a medal by the acting president of the Finnish Academy of Letters, Teuvo Halonen, the man who had first telephoned to inform us that Joe had won the prize. The gold disk hung on white silk, the disk engraved with a miniature copy of Kalevala, and a pair of hands holding it open, and even from all the way up here in the opera box I could make out the medal’s winking light. Short selections from several of Joe’s novels were read aloud by a film actress who flipped back her hair often as she read in a sonorous voice. And then finally Joe stood up.

  “Good evening,” he began, “and thank you for your kind welcome.” He tipped his head in the direction of the Finnish Academy. “Members of the Finnish Academy, I would like to say that I am deeply grateful and moved.” And then, slowly, he raised his head in the direction of the box. “President Kristian,” he said. “Thank you for honoring me in your beautiful country.” Blah, blah, blah, he went on. No, that’s unfair of me, the words were reasonable, though mostly uninteresting. I listened hard. He hadn’t let me see his speech beforehand; it was important to him that he wrote it himself and that no one else offered an opinion before he came to Finland. “I’ve felt, ever since I arrived here,” he said, “what a tonic this land is after the harsh locus of resentment and plenty that is otherwise known as the United States. In these days since terrorism has accelerated its global pace . . .”

  I was mortified that he was talking about terrorism; it was such an easy subject, an all-purpose, cheap one. All you had to do was invoke the specter of terrorism and everyone dutifully went somber on you. Lips pursed. People bowed their heads slightly. Couldn’t he have come up with something more original? Joe went on in this vein, quoting Rilke and Saul Bellow and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. And his speech meandered predictably through the war against terrorism—through the windy caves of Afghanistan, and the Middle East—and wrapped itself around the world until it returned home again. He was almost done. Joe paused here, and then his eyes moved subtly over to me as he said, “I’d like to say a few words about my wife, Joan.”

  Everyone dutifully looked upward, their heads tilted toward me. “My wife, Joan,” Joe repeated, “is truly my better half.”

  Don’t, I thought. Don’t do this to me. I asked you not to.

  “She has made it possible for me to find the stillness inside myself—as well as the noise—to write my novels,” he said. “Without her, I am certain I would not be standing up here tonight. I would instead be at home staring at a blank piece of paper with my mouth open in stupefaction.”

  There was indulgent laughter; of course he would have been up here anyway, the audience thought. Yet how admirable it was for the winner of the Helsinki Prize to be so generous toward his wife, to acknowledge her like this as he stood onstage to accept this award for a long, hard labor on the fiction chain gang. He’d been breaking rocks apart, and there I was, wiping his brow, offering him cool drinks. He’d been nearly prostrate from the heat and the strain of being a novelist, and yet I was always there, stripping away his soiled shirt, bringing him a clean one, he
lping him slip his arms into it, doing up the buttons myself, urging him on when he needed encouragement, lying beside him at night, telling him you can do it, even as his ankles were shackled together and he was exhausted and in tears. You can do it, we wives said, you can do it, and when they actually did do it, we were as happy as mothers whose babies have taken a first, shaky step, letting go of the furniture forever.

  Those well-meaning Finns regarded me, those people who had given my husband a check worth $525,000. They gave us their markka and they smiled up at me, nodding and praising the charms and subtle skills of the wife.

  Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to the Stop & Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.

  But it’s their choice, Bone might say. They make a choice to be that kind of wife, that kind of mother. Nobody forces them anymore; that’s all over now. We had a women’s movement in America, we had Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem with her aviator glasses and frosted parentheses of hair. We’re in a whole new world now. Women are powerful. Valerian Qaanaaq will probably be standing on this very stage in a couple of years, wearing traditional Inuit garb and reflecting upon her childhood in that notorious sod-and-snow igloo.

  Some women don’t make that choice, it’s true. They live another life entirely: Lee, the journalist I met in Vietnam; Brenda the prostitute. Or else they work out some version involving elaborate child care or a husband who doesn’t mind staying home all day with an infant. A husband who lactates, perhaps. Or maybe they don’t even want babies, some of these women, and life opens out to them in an endless field of work. And once in a while the world responds in a big way, letting them in, giving them a key, a crown. It does happen, it does. But usually it doesn’t.