The Wife

  “Who told you this?” I asked miserably.

  Carol Castleman didn’t say anything. She just held up her hand and opened it slightly. Inside was the walnut, the one that Joe had given to me. Proof. Elsewhere in Northrop House, girls were getting ready for dinner; from downstairs, the smell of Yorkshire pudding was lifting through the building, eggy and thick and nourishing, an imitation of a previous life at home, a life in the womb, a life in which people took care of us, and we didn’t have to do a thing for ourselves. I wanted to eat that consoling food right now, to dig into a plate pooled with roast beef juices while hearing dinner-table stories about comically bad dates with Yale men. But instead I was here, facing Joe’s furious wife, who was holding a walnut in her hand.

  “So tell me about it,” Carol Castleman said.

  “I can’t,” I said, starting to cry.

  She let me cry for a little while, watching me the whole time, irritated, and then finally, when she couldn’t take it any longer, she said, “Tell me.”

  “I’m not a bad person, Mrs. Castleman,” I tried, and what I really meant was: You see, I’m not actually much of a person yet at all.

  “You little bitch,” said Carol Castleman. “You Smithie bitch with your stories. I’ve read those stories, and you want to know something? They’re not so terrific. I don’t know what the hell he goes on and on about them for; you’d think they were written by James Fucking Joyce.”

  And then Joe’s wife drew back her hand and hurled the walnut. It shot straight at me, but there was no time to shout or move out of the way. When it struck me, it was with a hard shock, one solid bop in the middle of my forehead, making a sound like a cobbler’s hammer, and for a suspended moment I wobbled before falling to the floor.

  I was vaguely aware of the sound of feet galloping toward me down the hall, and then the appearance of a ring of girls’ faces suspended above me, each one wearing an openmouthed expression, like a group of carolers in action. Someone had curlers on, another one had a pencil behind her ear. Everyone began speaking in overlapping voices, yet no one seemed to know what to do. Somewhere in the background Carol Castleman was weeping and telling the roomful of girls that her life had been destroyed. But all I could think about now, as I lay on the rug with a lump rising in the center of my forehead, was the fact that my own life had finally begun.

  Chapter Three

  * * *

  THE HELSINKI-VANTAA Airport is like every other airport in the world, only a little blonder. Not blond like Sweden or Norway, those cool albino hotbeds, but blond enough in patches to make any American take notice. The Finns have a Slavic darkness running right through them, but still there are plenty of fair heads bobbing in this tiny, lovely northern country. I couldn’t help but think this as Joe and I and the rest of our party moved through the airport in a whirl of Finns, some of them taking pictures, some asking questions, all of them wanting something from him, a touch, a word, a gently tired smile, as though his talent might rub off in these casual moments, imparting a little bit of a glow to them, which they would return by giving him a touch of their own brand of Scandinavian goldenness.

  They were blond and attractive, so many of these Finns, and the rest of them were simply noble- and heroic-looking, like heads carved on Viking ships, and he was a small, seventy-one-year-old, formerly handsome and dark-haired Jewish man from Brooklyn. But somehow, the lovefest between him and them was boundless, continuing all the way through the airport corridor, which struck me as being as long as a smorgasbord table. Love me, he seemed to say to them through his glazed and flight-worn eyes.

  Yes, we will love you, Mr. Yoseph Castleman, the Finnish people seemed to reply, if you will love us back.

  And what was not to love? They had chosen him, hadn’t they—the elderly men who comprised the Finnish Academy of Letters, and the younger ones, too, the hipsters who were probably only in their sixties. Joe seemed not to notice anything, so much was he getting a kick out of the pomp of his arrival; this was what he had been waiting for, always: to step off an airplane and be met like the Beatles landing in America. It would have been even better for him if, like the Beatles, he could have descended one of those shaky tin stairways onto an airstrip, his thin hair whipping around his head, waving his arm to the adoring people below. But instead we had stepped from the plane into one of those carpeted accordion tunnels and then wound up in the early-morning terminal outside the city limits, a clean, white space with eerie, department-store chimes playing and an amplified, soothingly generic female Euro-voice speaking incomprehensibly about departing and arriving flights, and then, inexplicably in English, asking would Mr. Kyosti Hynninen please meet his party at the baggage carousel.

  Going past the duty-free shops and kiosks and backlit wall photos of the splendors of Finland, Joe was friendly and charming to the members of the press who approached him and the handful of government representatives with their official clip-on badges that featured tiny images of their own Scandinavian selves, but I knew he was barely listening to anything they said in their careful English. He was high right now; he was ecstatic.

  I thought of Joe’s beginnings spent in the female universe of that Brooklyn apartment, his first, bad marriage and its noisy end, his second, long marriage and Joe’s professional ascendance during it. Then the kids, oh the kids! I hadn’t known what it would be like to have a household populated by children. I’d had stirrings toward babies, but fear as well. My desire to have a baby was swaddled in the need to make Joe happy. I couldn’t separate them; I peered into an imaginary carriage and saw Joe’s oversized head poking out from beneath the blanket.

  But when they were born, they became themselves, not him. Each child revealed his or her own specifics. Susannah, our first, was given extra attention, like all firstborns. She would come into the kitchen, where I’d be frying a lamb chop in a pan, and she’d announce, “Me help,” knowing that the food was for Joe, who was busy in the bedroom.

  “All right, my girl, you help,” I’d say, and Susannah would spear the chop in the hot pan and plunk it down on a plate, adorning it with crumpled pieces of paper meant to look like flowers. Then she’d carry it carefully down the hall and kick Joe’s door a few times in lieu of knocking. I’d hear murmuring between them: a father’s distracted words, a daughter’s quivering entreaties to “look at the plate, Daddy, look,” and then a father’s quick change of gears, his voice raising up in praise and saving the day.

  Me she loved; him she adored. I never minded this, and when she and I were together I felt completely relaxed, gratified by her smell, her smooth skin, her feverish excitement at all new things. If she’d had a tail it would have been continually thumping. When I was unavailable to her—when I was otherwise engaged, which was often, and had to leave her with a baby-sitter—her face would take on a tragic cast, and it would almost kill me.

  Her sister, Alice, wound up sturdy and athletic and more independent. She wasn’t good-looking like her sister, merely healthy-looking, her body small and tight like Joe’s had once been, her hair light brown and cut close to the head in Roman-boy fashion. When Alice became a teenager, her lesbianism finally presented itself, after many telegraphic years of crushes on favorite young ingenue–type teachers and a bedroom papered over with the witchy-haired women of rock, and tennis Amazons with hard brown thighs packed incongruously into little white dresses. And when it did present itself, I was relieved to hear it said aloud, though Joe seemed startled and personally hurt.

  “I like girls,” she burst out to us one night, out of nowhere, in the kitchen.

  “What?” said Joe, who’d been at the table, deep in the newspaper.

  “I like girls,” Alice continued bravely. “That way. You know.”

  The refrigerator suddenly stirred and clicked and began to manufacture ice cubes, as if to fill the awful silence.

  “Oh,” said Joe, staying pinned to his chair. My heart was immediately racing, but I walked over to Alice and hugged her. I told her I
was glad she’d said something, and I asked her if there was someone in particular she liked. Yes, she said, but the girl had been horrible to her. We talked politely about it for a minute or two, and then she slipped off to her bedroom.

  “It’s not about you,” I’d said to Joe that night in bed, as we furiously whispered back and forth. This would be a theme of our conversations about the children.

  “Yes, I’m aware of that,” Joe said. “That’s my point.”

  “So what are you saying, you want to be the centerpiece of your daughter’s sexuality?”

  “No,” he’d said. “Not at all. You’re a mother. You can’t understand what I might feel about this.”

  “Oh, that’s a good one,” I’d said, wanting him to believe that mothers knew everything, that we were the omniscient narrators of our families’ lives.

  David, the youngest, the troubled one, seemed incapable of finding a life for himself. Joe and I were always holding our breath and hoping everything would work out for him, but this was magical thinking. Very little would work out for David; that had become increasingly clear, and his life was up for grabs.

  But still we loved him. We loved them all, Joe and I, though not quite together. The children received two separate channels of love, one from me, a reasonably steady flow, and one from their father whenever he thought of it, whenever he could manage to turn away from himself. He was distracted so much of the time, caught up in the details of his professional life and all the accolades that kept accumulating like inches of snowfall. The children and I simply watched as Joe’s career grew and grew.

  And now, finally, he had made it all the way to Finland. The country was bafflingly sweet and bracing and fresh. Once a year, it was roughly roused from its slumber: Wake up! Wake up! An important person is a’comin’! As we kept walking through the airport with our publishing entourage, I realized that if I wanted to, I could easily disappear into the wilds of this country and never return. I wouldn’t stand out in Finland, with my fair hair and pale skin. I would fit right in, and they would think I was one of them. How wonderful to be able to begin a bewildering new life here, instead of returning in a week to the house in Weathermill, New York, with my giant baby of a husband, my genius, my very own winner of the Helsinki Prize.

  “Joe,” I said, “look to the left. They’re trying to take your picture.”

  He turned obediently, and there was a rapid flutter of stutter-whirring, and he held himself a little more stiffly and grandly. Tomorrow the photographs would appear in newspapers, showing this old American Jewish man squinting into the lights, revealing his awkward humanness, his exhaustion from air travel mixed with the vanity that had long propelled him through airports and the world.

  Outside the terminal, a limousine waited for us, as dark as its driver was fair, and the first strike of frozen air made me feel as though my lungs would collapse as we quickly slipped from building to car. It was the beautiful fall-foliage time of year here that the Finns called ruska, with its changing flip-book of brooding colors. Only late autumn, and yet Joe and I were both shocked by the cold. It was unmanageable, I thought, and I imagined a society in which people went skittering from house to car to office and back to car to house, and then the day was done. There wasn’t much sunlight left in this day, though right now the sky seemed hugely bright and endless. The sunlight in Finland tricked you into believing it would last; you couldn’t imagine that it would shut itself off with such grim finality even before the enzymes in your stomach had barely started to break down the components of your lunch.

  The car ferried us gently past the waterfront and the glass fronts of shops on the boulevard called Mannerheim that sold delicate things wrapped in foil and crinkled paper, and past sudden, long stretches of bridge rail. We’d been to Finland once before over the course of our marriage, back in the 1980s, when Joe had been invited to give a reading as part of the five-hundredth-anniversary celebration of the Finnish book, and it had seemed to me at the time that the entire country was shot through with ice.

  I liked Finland for its absence of overt rage or street crime. This wasn’t the United States, this wasn’t Spain. It was calm here, and moody, a gorgeous, elegant place with slightly off-kilter serotonin levels. A depressed country: this was an easy diagnosis to make, given the suicide statistics, which Scandinavia sometimes tries to deny, just the way Cornell University tries to allay the fears of incoming students’ parents about the famous Ithaca gorge, which, like a harvest ritual each fall, claims the life of a few more hopeless freshmen. Don’t worry, the college brochure should say. Though some students do in fact leap to their deaths, most prefer keg parties and studying.

  All of Scandinavia was alluring, with its ice fishing and snowcaps, but everyone knew about the legend of ingrained unhappiness among Finns, Norwegians, and Swedes: their drinking, their mournful, baying songs, their muffled darkness smack in the middle of the day.

  “And here is the Helsinki Opera House, Mr. Castleman,” the driver said as our car smoothly went past an enormous building that appeared capable of containing an entire kingdom within its thick walls. “It is where you will go, sir, to receive your award and be feted.”

  “Yes, Joe, you will be fetid,” I murmured, but he didn’t hear.

  I envisioned us in the Opera House, with Joe being honored for a body of work that surely must have puzzled the Finnish people, though apparently they read it anyway. They were a profoundly literate people. The winter was nearly endless; what else could they do but read? The novels puzzle me, too, he probably wished he could say to them in shaky Finnish, painstakingly accenting every word on the first syllable like the Finns do. His books were populated by unhappy, unfaithful American husbands and their complicated wives. Maybe it would have done Joe’s characters some good to have their days shortened, to force the sun to set a little sooner on their miserable marital and extramarital shenanigans.

  And then, after the ceremony, we’d be eating dinner at a long table in an enormous, chilly marble hall. Members of the Finnish Parliament would murmur in his ear, but he wouldn’t be intimidated by them, for they weren’t royalty. The Nobel prize, on the other hand, gives you a hefty shot of royalty, seating you beside King Gustav for an evening of awkward conversation.

  What had the King of Sweden and Lev Bresner talked about that night in Stockholm, the king sitting beside our friend, swathed in robes like a herring in cream? I didn’t have a clue. Joe would never have to make such a conversation. He wasn’t big enough in scope or darkness. Already it was killing me to be in Helsinki, to watch him encircled by people, to listen to their gravely earnest questions, to hear his answers, to watch them anoint him with essential oils and declare him the best.

  I hadn’t known for certain, before I’d gotten on the airplane in New York, that I would leave him. I’d had fantasies over the years, little scenarios in which I said, “Joe, it’s over.” Or else, simply, “Well, guess what, you’re on your own now.” But none of these had been translated into action; instead, like most wives I’d hung on for dear life, but in the past few weeks it had become too much, it was more than I’d bargained for, and I wouldn’t stay much longer.

  I kept looking at him, absorbing the familiar bump in his nose, the purpled skin of his eyelids, the thin white hair, and recalling that he had once been an angelic young boy, and then an ambitious and handsome young writing instructor, and then a nervy, celebrated novelist who stayed awake all night and wanted to suck up the entire world and hold it in his lungs for a moment before letting it out. And now he was old, with a humbling bio-prosthetic heterograft porcine valve (however you slice it, it’s just pig meat) stuck like a clove into his heart, and pig memories somehow looped into his brain: happy images of rooting around among old nectarines and tennis shoes. His energies had been funneled in a thousand directions and were now becoming depleted, and wherever he went, there were laurels crunching and rustling beneath him, and twining vines and leaves he could lounge upon, contented.
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  Before long our car pulled in front of Helsinki’s Strand Inter-Continental Hotel. Men in uniforms leaped from the hotel in synchrony, appearing untouched by the cold, yanking open the frozen doors of our car, and soon we were inside, our luggage trailing us, the owner and his ecstatic wife springing forward to say hello and to offer Joe their congratulations. Opulent warmth immediately replaced the startle of cold, and the interior smelled to me like the deepest part of a forest in some Scandinavian folktale, perhaps a tale called “Young Paavo and the Five Wishes.”

  Light seemed to slant into the lobby, as if through a break in the overarching branches of some enormous trees. Improbably, I smelled pine, and sap, and all at once, demented from jet lag, I felt like lying down right here on the dense carpet of the Inter-Continental Hotel, proving myself to be the sad, unbalanced wife of the newest winner of the Helsinki Prize.

  But still we had to keep going. We traversed the spongy forest floor, going past mahogany walls and long golden hallways, following the spanking-clean bellman and his two assistants, all of whom could easily have been brothers in a family in which the children were bred exclusively to service the Finnish hotel industry.

  Joe was confident now, walking quickly. He was easy in his skin, gliding smoothly by. The fact that he was the outsider, the Brooklyn boy, only added to the peculiar cachet he enjoyed in this alien country. Other than a small cluster of reporters and photographers and his nominal editor, Sylvie Blacker, the rest of the publishing people and Irwin, Joe’s sleepy agent of recent years, there didn’t seem to be any other Americans in sight. Whenever we were in Europe, we could usually recognize them by their slouch and smile, the way they clutched their beloved copies of the Herald Tribune, or by their too-bright clothing, their eagerness to be talked to by other Americans, as though without the familiar, rounded syllables of the heartland, they would become as frightened as lost children.