“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, you could probably expand it and sell it as a short story, for instance. And then keep writing more of them, and sell those, too. Maybe not to the very top places—God knows how they decide who to let in—but certainly to some of the better small literary magazines. And you might even decide to write a novel,” he went on.
“Why?” I said.
“Why?”
“Why would I want to do that? What’s the point?” I thought of Elaine Mozell pulling me aside in the alcove.
Castleman looked at me. “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “Because you’re good. Because you have something to say. Plenty of writers have only one or the other, but not both. And it’s always interesting when the world gets to see things from a woman’s perspective. We’re so accustomed to getting the man’s view; whenever we get a chance to see through the eyes of a female, it’s refreshing.”
Elaine Mozell didn’t write like a woman usually did; she wrote with big, sweeping arcs and lists and the assumption of authority, and because of all this she also seemed greedy, inappropriate, not female at all. All of my characters so far had been girls or women, and the tone of my writing was quiet and observant, almost catlike. Women would want to read my writing, I thought, not men.
Maybe Castleman was right; in several years I could publish a perfectly decent first novel, a coming-of-age story with a title like Summer at the Shore, and I might be asked to give an alumnae reading at Smith. The girls in the audience would nod in recognition, while the few men present would drum their fingers and wish they were somewhere else. The men would long for armored writing, protected writing, writing that was muscle-bound and never ceased flexing itself. Writing that chose to take in the entire world, including the hundred-year wars as well as the ten-minute arguments in some suburban couple’s avocado-hued kitchen.
But Professor Castleman was a man and he liked my fiction. “Personally, I have trouble writing about women authentically,” he admitted. “It all comes out sounding like men talking. A bad ventriloquist’s act, where you see the guy’s mouth moving the whole time. I still can’t connect to the hearts of women, to all that feminine mystery, and those secrets they keep. Sometimes I just want to shake it out of them.” He stopped. “It’s extremely frustrating to me as a writer,” he said. “The wall that separates the sexes, that keeps us from getting to know each other’s experience. Everyone has to face this, more or less, though some of the best writers seem to find a clever way around it. As for me, I’m afraid I’m extremely limited.”
“Oh, but you aren’t,” I said quickly.
“You’ve never read my work,” he said. “I’ve had two stories published in my life; you don’t know them.”
“I’d like to,” I said.
“You would?”
“Yes, definitely.”
Castleman moved some papers and books and walnuts around on his desk until he fished up a slim literary magazine called Caryatid: A Journal of Art and Criticism. I’d never heard of it, and probably almost no one else had either, and Castleman seemed both proud and embarrassed as he handed it over to me.
“You can borrow it if you’d like,” he said. “Let me know what you think.”
I nodded and said I was flattered, and that I was sure I’d love it. Then I looked down the table of contents to find the name of his story. There it was, “No Milk on Sunday,” by J. Castleman—and as I read the name he slid his chair forward until our knees were touching. I looked up, shocked that he was so close.
“Maybe,” he said, “you could tell me how to make it better.” It was the first contact between two sets of blind knees, signifying something not quite decided, something still up for grabs. Was this a conversation about writing? He took an index finger and slowly moved it to my lips. Then Castleman’s face came forward, and suddenly he was kissing me in this plain little office where piles of ordinary student stories lay unloved. He kissed and kissed me, and though he seemed to want to lick and swallow my talent, my perceptiveness, whatever it was he thought I had, I still felt that of the two of us he was the important one, and I was unfinished. He could finish me, I thought; he could provide the things I needed to actually become a whole person.
He kept kissing me, but did nothing more; his hands braced my shoulders, not shifting from their mooring. Even untouched, I nearly had an orgasm, and was surprised and then embarrassed by my exaggerated responsiveness. The girl was embarrassed, I thought, a story opening before me, and I felt relieved to be at a literary distance from myself and this man who was holding my shoulders and kissing me until I felt sure that even if I hadn’t been a writer before, I was one now.
I told no one in Northrop House, not even my friend Laura, who suspected something was up but didn’t push me for specifics. “This has got to be good, am I right?” she said, and I simply smiled, preferring to keep the moment to myself, unwrapping it and reimagining it during a history lecture, or when taking a shower in the tin stall with the green rubber curtain, listening to the waterfall of other showers all around me. On the first night that I knew I’d have uninterrupted reading time, I sat in my bed with Caryatid open in my lap. Delicately, carefully, I turned to his story and began to read. I was excited, anticipating something that would only enhance what I already felt about him. My lips moved along with the story as I read, but soon it became apparent that the story was no good. I was confused; how could this story be no good? Yet in the universe of “No Milk on Sunday,” the women characters spoke in stilted sentences, and the men were clichés of uneducated men, all glowers and stoic, unspoken pain. The story was like an imitation of something literary, made by someone who hadn’t developed a distinctive voice of his own.
Elaine Mozell’s farm story had been more authentic, more believably male. Castleman was an actual man; why couldn’t he write like that? What was wrong with him that he couldn’t? I closed the journal and put it aside, upset and sorry I’d read it, not having any idea of what to tell him. Maybe, I thought, he would forget he’d given it to me and would never mention it again, and I wouldn’t have to go through the unpleasantness of talking to him about it. Maybe, I hoped, it would simply never come up.
Wednesday at noon, a note came to me through intercampus mail in an English department envelope, and I snapped it up quickly, moving away from the other girls who were milling around opening letters and Bundt cakes sent from home.
Dear Miss Ames,
My colleague, Professor Tanaka, who teaches Eastern religions here, has asked me if I would recommend a student who might come in and feed and walk his dog once a week on Friday afternoons. Would you be interested in the job?
Sincerely,
J. Castleman
The letter, it seemed, was in code, so I immediately wrote back and agreed to walk and feed Professor Tanaka’s dog, though I doubted the dog existed. The following day, a key and an address appeared in my mailbox, and on Friday I walked down a sloping street called Crafts Avenue and let myself into an apartment building with a bakery downstairs. The building smelled of yeast, and when I entered the third-floor apartment with the nameplate that read “H. Tanaka,” an actual dog began a frenzy of yipping from somewhere inside. It was a dachshund, old, gray-haired, and desperate for company, its spine curving in discrete ridges like a dinosaur’s.
“Here, boy,” I said as I walked through the barely furnished living room, and even in his arthritic state the dog began to mount my leg, as though he, too, knew why I had come here.
In the kitchen I found a can of Beef-o for Small to Medium Dogs, poured it into a tin bowl, keeping my head averted from the stink, and watched dispassionately as the dog ate like a wolf. After I took him for a short walk, I went back inside and sat on the rug. The nameless dachshund, sated and happy, lay on his back and exposed his graying stomach to me, his penis sliding from its casing, then retracting. There were a few Japanese prints on the walls above us: women in kimonos serving thimbles of tea, and a ser
ies of scenes involving rock pools and nesting cranes. I was sitting in this unfamiliar, calm room, looking around me, waiting, when the bell rang.
“Who is it?” I asked through the intercom.
“Joe,” he said.
So he was Joe now; that was new. I let him in quickly.
“Hello,” he said, and he walked past me, putting down his books and papers and folding his coat over the back of a chair. “Is the dog behaving himself?” he asked.
“The dog is fine,” I said. “I wasn’t even sure he was real.”
“Oh, he’s definitely real,” Joe said.
“I know. He mated with my leg.”
Joe smiled. “So pretty soon we should be seeing little half-dog, half-leg creatures running around the apartment, am I right?”
“Right,” I said.
Now he stood still and looked at me. “Miss Ames. I mean, Joan. What should we do with you?”
“Pickle me?” I said.
He stepped forward and then he held me in his arms, kissing my hair and neck. “So can we go to bed, please?” he asked.
Professor H. Tanaka’s bedroom was much like the living room, with just a few prints on the walls and a simple bed. A gray light filtered in through the paper shade, enough to reveal the basic image of Joe as he stripped off his clothes. He was good-looking, tightly muscular. There was a scar on his foot, pink and shiny, the tissue pulled tight. A bullet hole, I assumed, the source of his slight limp, and I imagined him as a Korean War hero, though later, of course, I’d learn how he’d accidentally shot himself in training camp. When he touched me, his skin was cold as a seal’s. In bed, with my own clothes gone, my nipples seemed to turn and tighten, and I resisted the impulse to cross my arms and cover myself. My breasts felt excessive, a detail that men generally liked, though it embarrassed me. I saw him look at my breasts and at that seemingly arbitrary patch of pubic hair, but I tried to imagine I was with him by the side of a Japanese rock pool, and that what we were about to do now would be as gracefully executed as a tea ceremony. I held his penis in my hand, observing it for an uninterrupted moment. It was my first penis, and it seemed so optimistic in a way, much more so than he was. It was agreeable, ready, unconscious of the possibility of failure. I lay back against the pillow and watched him snap on a Trojan, which made a single twang like a banjo string, and then I let him push into me, hoping that in some larger way my presence here helped him. I knew I was certainly helping myself, lifting above the flocks of girls with their long plaid skirts swishing. Joe was quickly breaking a sweat, and his ice-cold feet curled around mine, holding on like those of some primitive tree-dweller. The way he shoved into me was very painful, and this surprised me, as though his sensitivity and love of books might have some bearing on the level of pain he would inflict when he deflowered a Smith girl. I thought again of his knees in gray wool trousers, and now his bare knees, those dusty, exposed knobs where the skin was pulled tight, the calves below flexing and releasing. I wrapped my legs around him, and I seemed to be holding him by mechanical means; I’d never known my legs were this strong. A while later, I wanted to sleep, but Joe didn’t, or couldn’t.
“Oh, don’t worry about me, I never sleep,” he told me. “It’s one of the most basic facts about me.”
“One of the only facts I know,” I said.
“I’ll tell you anything you want,” he said, and waited for me to ask.
I had no idea of what I wanted, and so I posed some simple questions about his upbringing (Brooklyn, Jewish, fatherless), his education (Columbia University, B.A., M.A.), his military history (Korean War, briefly; self-inflicted shrapnel sending him home before combat), his marriage (bad, to a woman grown shrill, whose most significant crime was that, since the baby was born, she no longer wanted to have sex. She refused him, he said, turning away from him again and again. “Do you have any idea of what that does to a man?” he asked me, and I had to say that no, I didn’t), his politics (unoriginal: thrilled when Welch stuck it to McCarthy, stirred by Brown v. Board of Ed., especially as he had a couple of close Negro friends in the city), his favorite moments (listening to Mark Van Doren lecture at Columbia), and his outlook on life (melancholic, like most writers).
After I had exhausted the interview, we were silent for a while, until suddenly he said, “Oh, now I want to ask you something.”
“Go ahead,” I said, thinking that he was going to ask me all about myself, and that I’d have to tell him the mundane details of being a privileged girl growing up in New York City: the Brearley School, my formal-dance class, my parents’ puzzling coldness, the money that was scattered around me like an uninteresting garnish. And I’d also have to tell him of my insecurities, my percolating political sympathies, my desire not to be insubstantial. I dreaded having to talk to him about myself, and yet I was also relieved. So this was what it meant to be with a man: he told you things that he cared about, then you told him things you cared about, and you each responded with outrage or sympathy at appropriate points in the other person’s story. It was like having a friend, a strange mirror version of yourself—though with an entirely different anatomy and set of memories. When you were both done talking you felt as though you’d been given extraordinary access into each other’s inner workings and storehouses of experience.
But instead, he asked me, “So what did you think of my story?”
His story; oh God. For a moment I had no idea what to say. I was confused, and flustered, and said nothing at all.
“Did you read it yet?” he persisted.
I nodded, trying to form some sort of emergency response as quickly as I could. “Yes,” I said brightly. “Just last night. I was going to tell you.” Then I waited a second. “I loved it,” I told him. It was easy to say that.
“You did?” he said. He propped his head up on one elbow. “You didn’t think the ending was too abrupt? The part where he gives her the scarf and then walks away?”
“No,” I said. “Not at all. It was the gesture of the scarf that counted, wasn’t it? I thought it was perfect.” But I knew it wasn’t perfect; it was all wrong, it was forced.
“You really mean it?” he asked me.
“Of course. I was going to tell you, but you got there first.”
“Well, that’s just wonderful,” he said, smiling. “Now you’ve really made my day, Joanie.”
I let out a quiet breath; the praise had made him happy and peaceful, the way sex was supposed to do. Eventually he said it was time to go; he had to stop off at the State Street Market to bring home a sack of flour his wife had requested, and he also had to pick up some baby formula for his daughter. Flour and formula; these were the paraphernalia of a life that had nothing in common with mine.
We stood and dressed, turned shyly away from each other. “Joe,” I said, trying out the plain, single syllable. He looked at me. “What do you think is going to happen?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer for a second, and then he said, “How can I possibly know? We’ll have to wait and see, I guess.”
A little while later, as I walked by myself back to campus in the deepening afternoon, past the hardware store and the secondhand bookshop and the grand facade of the Academy of Music, I wondered whether he might ever love me, and how I might rush that love into existence.
As it would turn out, we soon developed a routine, meeting once a week when I walked and fed Professor Tanaka’s dachshund. “Walking the dog” became a euphemism. The dog is very hungry today, he would tell me as he flipped up the hem of my dress and touched me with the tip of a finger. I had myself fitted for a diaphragm in the dim office of the Lithuanian female doctor in Springfield.
One day when we lay in Professor Tanaka’s bed, Joe handed me something wrapped in tissue paper and a ribbon. I opened it and saw that it was a walnut, and that on the side he had written something in red paint with a fine brush. To J., it read. In awe. J.
I held it for a moment, trying to rearrange my disappointment into something else. O
f course he had no way of knowing that I’d gone through his wife’s drawer and seen the almost identical walnut he had given to her. I didn’t like eating walnuts; sometimes you got some shell with the meat, and you ended up trying to pull flecks of it off your tongue like tobacco leaves. And the taste was too dark and somehow wrong, as though you were eating bits of cork floating in a glass of wine. Joe had said he liked walnuts for all of these reasons; they were a complicated nut, with all those knobs and curves in them. A walnut left an oily trail behind after you had eaten it, an aftertaste that Joe also liked. He liked the taste of women, too, he had said once in Professor Tanaka’s bed; he liked the first moment when he could dip down and taste me, even though I was embarrassed in the beginning and unable to relax with his head clenched in the grasp of my legs. All I could think about was what he was tasting, the mix of salt and talc and who knew what else. Nothing could hide a woman’s taste, thank God, he’d said. A walnut, too, could always be detected when it was baked into a cookie, or when its oil was used in a salad. There was a sweet, dark taste released, with the hint of decomposition, like something found on the floor of a forest.
I put the walnut on the bureau in my room in Northrop House, leaving it there among the crisscross spray of bobby pins and the jumbo tub of cold cream. Weeks passed and his walnut stayed on the bureau. I had almost forgotten it was there until the day when I came home from my art history class on Holbein and Dürer and opened the door of my room to find Joe’s wife sitting on the bed, waiting for me. Carol Castleman stood up when I came in.
“Can I help you?” I asked, and I thought for an insane moment that Joe was dead, and that his wife had come here to break it to me, as though I would be the truly bereaved one, not her.
“Can you help me? You know why I’m here,” Mrs. Castleman said. She wore a camel-hair jacket and a creased skirt; she was small, frantic, unspooling. “I let you into my house,” she continued, her body starting to fibrillate. “I trusted you with my baby, okay? And this is what you do. You act so young and adorable, but you have a lot of nerve.”