“Are you okay?” I asked Joe, who always became frightened during the quiet anticlimax of a descent, when it seemed as though the engines were conking out and the plane was coasting like a child’s balsa-wood flier.
He nodded and said, “Yeah, thanks, Joan, I’m fine.”
I hadn’t asked him the question out of actual concern; it was more of a marital reflex. All over the world, husbands and wives routinely and somewhat pointlessly ask one another: Are you okay? It’s part of the contract; it’s the thing to do, because it implies that you care, that you’re paying attention, when in fact you might be deeply and relentlessly bored. Joe actually looked calm, I saw, though some of that was probably a side effect of sleep deprivation. I couldn’t remember the last time he had gotten a decent night’s sleep. I’d always known him to be an insomniac, but every year his sleeplessness inevitably reached a kind of crisis right before the winner of the Helsinki Prize was announced.
Always, each year, you hear stories about how some winner or other assumed the call was a prank. There are legendary tales of writers being shaken from sleep by a ringing telephone and cursing the man with the accent on the phone, telling him, “Do you know what time it is?” Only then, lifting to the surface of consciousness, did they realize what the call was about, that it was genuine, and that it meant that their life would change shape forever.
This wasn’t the Nobel prize, of course; it was a few steps down, a defiant stepchild that had enhanced its reputation over time by the sheer power of its prize money, which this year was the equivalent of $525,000. It wasn’t the Nobel, just as Finland wasn’t Sweden. But still the prize was an extravagant honor and thrill. It elevated you—if not to Stockholm heights, then at least partway up.
All of them, the novelists, the story writers, the poets, desperately long to win. If there is a prize, then there is someone somewhere on earth who desires it. Grown men pace their homes and scheme about ways to win things, and small children hyperventilate over the prospect of gold-plated trophies for penmanship, for swimming, for just being cheerful. Maybe other life-forms give out awards, too, and we just don’t know it: Best All-Round Flatworm; Most Helpful Crow.
Several of Joe’s friends had been talking to him about the Helsinki Prize for months. “This year,” said his friend Harry Jacklin, “you’re going to get it. You’re getting old, Joe. You shall wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled. They don’t want to overlook you; it would be egg on their faces.”
“You mean egg on my face,” said Joe.
“No, theirs,” insisted Harry, whose own field was poetry, which pretty much guaranteed that he would remain entirely unknown and broke forever. Even so, he was deeply competitive; a mean vein of spite ran through him, as it did through all of the poets Joe knew. It always seemed that the smaller the pie, the greater the need to have more of it.
“I’m not going to win,” Joe said to Harry. “You’ve told me I would win for three years straight. You’re like the boy who cried wolf.”
“It needed time,” said Harry. “Now I get their strategy. See, they were sitting there in Helsinki, eating their smoked fish and waiting. Their plan was that if you were still alive by now, they’d give it to you. You’re politically correct, and that really counts these days, at least as far as the Helsinki is concerned. You’ve got that extra gene, that sensitivity toward women. That unwillingness to objectify the opposite sex, isn’t that what they say about you? That you invent a female character and put her in a marriage, a family, a king-sized bed in the suburbs, and yet you don’t feel the need to describe . . . I don’t know, her pubic hair in literary terms: ‘a burnt-sienna nimbus,’ or whatever, like the rest of your crowd would.”
“I don’t have a ‘crowd,’ ” said Joe.
“You know what I’m saying,” Harry went on. “You mix in all this feminism, if you want to call it that—even though it always makes me think of dykes with chain saws. You’re an original, Joe! A great writer who isn’t a total prick. You, you’re fifty percent prick, fifty percent pussy.”
“Ha!” said Joe. “That’s so kind of you to say. And lyrical, too.”
But other friends agreed with the poet’s logic, pointing out that this year there weren’t too many obvious contenders for the Helsinki Prize anywhere in the world. In America, it had been a year of literary deaths, one after the other, men whom Joe had known since the fifties, when they used to gather sometimes for socialist meetings. A decade later they gathered at marathon, all-night readings whose purpose was to protest the war in Vietnam and suck all the energy out of the audience. And then they gathered again in the early eighties after they had all sheepishly agreed to pose for ads for a fearfully expensive wristwatch manufactured by an old, elegant German company with an unsavory Nazi history. And then, finally, they began to gather for one another’s funerals. Every single one of those writers, Joe noticed at the service for playwright Don Lofting, still wore the German wristwatches they’d been given.
Harry Jacklin was right that there were few of Joe’s peers left standing who deserved the prize, few writers whose body of work was such a marbled block of muscle. Lev Bresner’s Helsinki moment had come seven years earlier—no surprise at all, it had been expected for a long time—but even so, that news had sent Joe to bed in a darkened room for days, subsisting mostly on barbiturates and scotch. Then, three years later, Lev had miraculously gone on to win the Nobel prize, and to this day Joe could hardly bear to talk about it.
The Nobel prize was well beyond Joe; we both knew that, and somehow we’d both accepted it. Though he was popular in Europe, his work didn’t traverse the globe in the important way it would have needed to. He was American and introspective and always taking his own pulse on the page. As Harry had said, he was politically correct, yet somehow he wasn’t at all political. Even the Helsinki Prize was a reach. Yet critics had always admired Joe’s vision of contemporary American marriage, which seemed to plumb the female sensibility as thoroughly as it did the male, but amazingly without venom, without blame. And early on in his career, his novels had made the leap into Europe, where he was considered even more important than in the States. Joe’s work was from the old, postwar, “marital” school—husbands and wives stranded in tiny apartments or boxy, drafty colonials on suburban streets with names like Bethany Court or Yellow Swallow Drive. The men were deep but sour, the women sad and lovely, the children disaffected. The families were crumbling, full of factions, American. Joe included his own life, using details from his childhood and his early adulthood and then his two marriages.
His novels were translated into dozens of languages, and the shelf in his study was lined with these books in translation. There was his first novel, The Walnut, that slender book from a much more innocent time, about a married professor and his best student who fall in love, leading to an event that causes the professor to hurriedly abandon his wife and child, flee to New York City with the student, and eventually marry her. This book is pure autobiography—the story of the two of us and Joe’s first wife, Carol.
Beside it on the shelf were the foreign versions of The Walnut, variously called La Noix, Die Walnuß, La Noce, La Nuez, and Val-not. And then there was his Pulitzer prize–winning book Overtime, also called Heures Supplémentaires, Überstunden, Horas Adicionales, and Overtid. The Pulitzer prize had been restorative, a bracing snootful of pleasure, but it was so many years ago that even that dose of gratification was by now forgotten.
In the author photograph on the back of Overtime, Joe still had his thick head of floppy black hair, which sometimes, to my surprise, I still grieve for. It long ago thinned out and went white, but back then it used to fall across his face, and I would push it away so I could see his eyes. He was attractive and thin as a greyhound in the early years, his stomach hard and concave. His erections were endless, held aloft by some woman’s invisible hand (not necessarily mine), a muse who whispered into his hot ear, You’re brilliant. Decades have elapsed since the Pulitzer, though there ha
ve been other American awards, too, prizes that took Joe to chicken-breast luncheons in the bland banquet rooms of New York hotels to claim his loot and give a speech, while I sat quietly watching with the other wives and the occasional husband. But now it was time for another prize, a big one. He needed the fuel it would provide, the sumptuous, caloric pleasure and the accompanying delirium.
On the night before the call from Helsinki would come, if it was going to come, I went to bed early. Joe, of course, was still prowling the house. It is an old house, painted white and well kept, standing behind a low stone wall tufted with moss, and it dates back to 1790. There are many rooms for a sleepless man to walk through. I knew that if I were a better person, I would have stayed up with him, the way I used to do each year. But I was tired, and longed for sleep the way I used to long for the press of our two bodies. And besides, I didn’t want to go through this yet again. I could hear him scrabble around downstairs like a hamster, opening drawers in the kitchen and taking things out, banging together what sounded like a cheese grater and a spoon, in an obvious, pathetic attempt to wake me up.
I knew how he operated; I knew everything about him, the way wives do. I even knew the inside of him, having been there that day in Dr. Ruffner’s office to review the footage of Joe’s colon. We sat and watched light travel through his most intimate inner tubing, and after that we were really bound together for life. When you watch your husband’s colon at work, at play, see the shy, starburst retraction of his sphincter, the amble of barium through an endless human hose, then you know that he is truly yours, and you are his.
And then, years later, in the company of a small, elegant, Brahmin cardiologist named Dr. Vikram, I had the chance to see sonograms of Joe’s heart, that defective, overachieving fist, its mitral valve closing sloppily, almost drunkenly.
And I knew him again tonight, could see the way his mind was forming ideas, hunches.
“I might actually have won this time,” Joe had said to me at dinner. We were eating Cornish game hens, I remember, with their pileup of tiny bones on the plate afterward. “Harry thinks so. Louise does too.”
“Oh, they always think so,” I said.
“Don’t you think it even might be the case, Joan?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Just give me a percentage,” he said.
“You want me to give you a percentage of your chances of winning the Helsinki Prize?” Joe nodded. On the table stood a milk container, and at that moment my eye happened to leap to it and so I said, “Two percent.”
“You think I have a two percent chance of winning?” he asked glumly.
“Yes.”
“Oh, fuck it,” he said, and then I shrugged and said I was sorry, and told him I was going to bed.
So there I lay, knowing I had extraordinary power in this moment of withholding, knowing that I ought to go to him, to keep him company as he kept vigil. But instead I just lay there, fully awake, and a very long time passed, and finally I heard his footsteps on the old, narrow stairs. If I wouldn’t come to him, then he would come to me. Wives are meant to be sources of comfort, showering it like wedding rice. I used to do this superbly for him and for all three of our children, and mostly I enjoyed the job.
I always sat up with Joe when he agonized, and with the kids during their various bad dreams, and even during a mescaline trip our daughter Alice once took, in which all of her childhood stuffed animals came to life and mocked her. She was so frightened that night, and she clung to me like a marsupial, or like a much younger child, saying, “Mom, Mom, help me, please, help me!”
Her cry was plaintive and almost unbearable, but like all mothers, I held on tight with racing heart and poker face, babbling an endless cycle of motherly white noise at her, and eventually she came down from the trip and was able to sleep.
And I did this kind of thing again and again during our son David’s explosive outbursts, which have taken place periodically over the years. In school, where they told us he was brilliant but emotionally troubled, he lashed out at other kids. In his twenties and thirties there have been bar brawls and street fights, and once he repeatedly hit his recovering-heroin-addict girlfriend with a heavy loaf of bread. This is our heartbreak: David is a rangy man in his late thirties now, alternately indifferent and angry, a handsome nighttime word processor at a New York law firm who has no other ambitions, no hopes for happiness or glory. But he is one of my children; Joe and I made him. And so when, in moments of repentance, he has come to me, I’ve negated his claims of worthlessness, countering them not with any hard evidence, but simply with my quiet, effective presence in a nightgown, and the compassion that rolls out easily in the face of the suffering of one’s own child.
I always made myself available, both to David and to his sisters, Susannah and Alice, and I was good at it. I spoke softly to them, and when the situation called for it I would stroke their hair and bring them cups of midnight water.
Now, late at night in the house, waiting and anxious, Joe wanted me to stroke his hair, to push it away from his eyes the way I used to do. He reached the landing and came into the bedroom, lying down and putting his arms around me while I pretended to be asleep. I could tell, instinctively, that he didn’t really want this touch to spread out into sex, but that he was running out of alternatives. Sex used to be a good idea, one we both liked equally, the coats on somebody’s bed spilling to the floor, a mouth on a breast, a mouth on a penis. Occasionally, afterward, we would discuss the high hilarity of all these objectified pornographic images, their primitive quality, the way they equalized us, smacked and flattened our entire species into one pancake of desires and fluids and predictable outlets for similar urges.
Urges. We both had them, Joe and I, and usually we weren’t embarrassed by them, though once, long ago, he’d said to me, “You could kill a crocodile with those thighs, Joan,” so severe was my grip on him, and I was embarrassed. Women don’t want to have the tungsten strength of their sexual desire pointed out to them; it’s supposed to go unnoticed, like the passing of gas. For a long time I was as strongly sexual as he was, and then suddenly, somewhere in my forties, I realized that I wasn’t anymore, that it had simply gone away, taking with it my happiness, my willingness, my sense of being Joe Castleman’s other half.
But on this night of anticipation, though we’d barely touched each other in ages—had it been a whole year?—Joe suddenly seemed to find a hidden stash of longing and nostalgia inside himself, and so he slid a hand to my breast, and I felt the nipple collect itself into an obedient knot.
“Don’t do this,” I said, no longer pretending to be asleep.
“Don’t do what?” He knew what.
“Use me because you can’t sleep,” I said.
“I’m not using you, Joan,” he said, but he dropped his hand. “You’re so inflammatory. I just wanted to touch you.”
“You wanted to find something to do with yourself,” I said, sitting up in bed. “You are completely nuts and climbing the walls.”
“All right, fine, maybe I am, but I don’t understand why you’re not,” he said. “This is one of those nights when we find out if the world has passed me by.”
“You know it hasn’t,” I said. “There’s so much proof of that; how much do you need? You own the entire world, Joe. You’re still up there. You still matter.”
But he shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “I don’t feel it at all.”
I looked at him, realizing I was still able to extract some tenderness toward him from inside myself. Here was a moment of it, a core sample lifted from me in the middle of the night. I could be furious at him, could dislike him and think of devious psychological ways to punish him, could go to bed early and leave him to wander our big old house forlornly, but despite my better instincts, here I was.
“Do you know that you’re a totally pathetic person?” I said.
“I trust you mean ‘pathetic’ in the best sense of the word,” said Joe with a slight smi
le.
“Oh yes,” I assured him. “Absolutely.”
Joe lay with his head against my shoulder, and we settled in for what remained of the night. If the sun rose in the morning and we were still lying here like this, the telephone having stayed silent, he would know that another year had passed and he hadn’t won the Helsinki Prize, and that most likely he never would. But still, somehow, everything would be all right, because he had a wife, which is something that everyone needs.
Joe once told me he felt a little sorry for women, who only got husbands. Husbands tried to help by giving answers, being logical, stubbornly applying force as though it were a glue gun. Or else they didn’t try to help at all, for they were somewhere else entirely, out walking in the world by themselves. But wives, oh wives, when they weren’t being bitter or melancholy or counting the beads on their abacus of disappointment, they could take care of you with delicate and effortless ease.
At five-twenty in the morning, my sleep was very deep, occasionally punctuated by the usual barnyard assortment of snorts and sighs that most people my age begin to make. But Joe was lying wide awake beside me then, when the telephone rang.
Later, when telling the story to friends, he would revise the events of the night, putting himself in the role of an innocent sleeper startled awake by the phone. In this idealized version, the phone rang and he sat up in bed, disoriented (“Wha . . . ? Wha . . . ?”), and his hand reached out and grabbed for the phone, knocking over a glass of water. When he eventually spoke into the receiver, it was in a mush-mouthed, unprepared voice. And I, beside him, was supposed to have gasped and embraced him when I heard the news (“Oh Joe, Joe, you’ve worked so hard for this. . . .”), and then we both began to cry.
He had to tell it this way, otherwise he would have seemed too eager, like someone who had been confident that the call from Finland really would arrive this time.