The Wife (16 page)

Onstage, Joe read the first chapter of
The Walnut,
in which Michael Denbold, a literature instructor at a small women’s college in Connecticut, meets Susan Lowe, his most promising student; so begins an intense sexual relationship with her, during which he ultimately abandons his wife, Deirdre, an unhinged ceramicist, and their new baby boy. His novel was splayed open on the sloped surface, and he drank glasses of water throughout the evening because the novelty of giving readings excited him so much that his mouth dried out and his speech was filled with spitless ticking sounds, and he needed to drink and drink like a baby goat.

The audience ate him up, just like those girls had wanted to. The young men longed to be like him, and went home with a new resolve to work on their own novels; and the women, for the most part, wished they could have some piece of him, the edge of a sleeve, the tip of a finger, the thick feathering of an eyebrow,
something that could be theirs for good. They admired him, wished he would hunch over a typewriter in
their
apartment, smoke a cigarette in
their
bed, spread himself across them so easily and casually, the way he did across me.

I sat in the front row, holding his briefcase that had carried his book and notes, listening to the words with pride, flinching slightly when he read a line I didn’t love, and stirring pleasurably in my chair when he read one I did.
This is his briefcase,
I wanted to announce to the people sitting around me, especially the young women from the bathroom, to whom I also wanted to add,
Fuck you both, with your cinched waists and your batting eyes.
After he’d been introduced, Joe sprang forward and bounded up the steps onto the stage, as eager and harried as he’d been the first day of class at Smith, but now possessing some new kind of
fizz
that would have been inappropriate if he hadn’t just become so famous.

Later, at the reception, I watched as the two dark and light women flanked him, saw his eyes dart from side to side, saw how his hand cradled his drink, and his back arched slightly and stretched. Hal Wellman, my boss and now Joe’s editor, was standing beside me, watching me look at Joe, and in a kind voice he said, “Don’t worry about that.”

I turned to him. “No?”

“No,” said Hal. He was tired, a big, stooped, ruddy man who had to catch a train at Grand Central soon. “Look, he’s feeling pretty full of himself. Anybody would.”

We stood together watching Joe and the women, saw the light one pull out a copy of
The Walnut
and ask him to sign it. The dark one offered up a pen, and then Joe said something that was apparently so hilarious that the dark one opened her mouth and basically shrieked, and the light one clapped her hands to her face.

“But still,” I said to Hal. “It’s not a pretty sight.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not. So you know what, Joan? Let’s get you a big glass of wine.”

Throughout the rest of the reception, Hal stayed beside me.
We drank together, watching Joe and providing a mildly ironic commentary, and then finally Hal looked at his watch and announced he had a train to catch.

Over the next few decades Joe followed him to three different publishing houses, until Hal’s death from a cerebral hemorrhage in his office, his head down on a pile of unread manuscripts. But for as many years as I needed him, Hal had stayed with me at those cocktail parties, protecting me from something vague and threatening that was always in the room.

That night at the Y, after the reading and the reception and the small dinner afterward at a French restaurant in the neighborhood, Joe and I came home to our Village apartment loopy and a little sickish. There was garlic on our breath and a pickling dose of wine that audibly sloshed around inside us when we moved, and so we fell onto the bed, side by side, not touching.

“You know what?” he said. “I’m a famous person.”

“That you are.”

“I don’t
feel
famous,” he went on. “I just feel like myself. It’s really no different from teaching English to a bunch of silly girls. When you walk into a room, everyone looks at you. Big deal.”

“I wasn’t a silly girl.”

“No, you weren’t, not at all,” he said, and I heard the indulgence in his voice. He lay on his back, stuffed and drunk and taking the pulse of his fame, listening for its sprightly gallop. I thought about the two women at the reading, their darkness and light, their interest in him, and his interest in return.

“What’s the matter?” he asked me.

“Nothing,” I said, and this was the same answer I would continue to give over the years, with notable, occasional exceptions when I accused him of betrayals and cried. Mostly, “nothing” became my mantra. Nothing was wrong, nothing at all. Or at least, if anything was wrong, I’d asked for it. I’d
asked
for him and all his problems. I’d demanded him, and here he was, mine. His divorce had come through when
The Walnut
was still in page proofs, and we’d gotten married shortly before its publication.

That fall, when
Life
magazine did a feature on today’s bumper crop of new writers, Joe was the one they favored with an entire page. Amid photos of Khrushchev, and Ike and Mamie, and rural Southern children picking peaches, and teenaged couples locked in some ephemeral dance craze, there was a picture of Joe walking down the street with a cigarette in his hand, his face screwed into an expression suggesting deep thought. There, too, was Joe at the White Horse Tavern, talking to some other writer who was seen only from behind.

The Walnut
had been written in the kind of first-novel, foaming fever that never repeats itself, no matter how hard a writer tries to re-create the recipe, the sleepless jangle, the effluvium of words. When the novel was finally done, we’d celebrated at the Grand Ticino, and the next day I bound the pages up in a thick rubber band and brought them to work with me at Bower & Leeds, where, mumbling and blushing, I placed the manuscript on Hal Wellman’s desk, telling him he really ought to take a look at it, but not saying anything more.

That night, I saw Hal carry the manuscript home with him. I imagined it tucked under his arm as he boarded the commuter train to Rye, pictured him unsnapping the rubber band and leaning back against his seat to read. Then, later, I saw him in the living room of his Tudor house, stationed in an easy chair with a drink in his hand. I saw his children hanging on to him, trying to pull him down onto the floor for a ride, but he would resist them. The lure of
The Walnut
was just too strong, the siren song of this undiscovered writer. A
virgin.

Virgin writers have a sheen to them, a layer of something that comes off on your fingers when you touch it, like powder from a moth’s wing. A virgin writer still has a chance to surprise you, to club you over the head with his brute brilliance. He can become anything you need him to be. Joe was a very good specimen, with a clear, clean-lined book that had plenty of hubris and thoughtfulness behind it. And he was handsome and rumpled, with eyes that looked tired all the time; journalists sometimes commented
on that, and he would tell them about not sleeping. Tired and sad and wise.
Wise:
I’ve always hated that word; it’s so overused, as though weary, successful people somehow have secret access to larger truths.

Hal Wellman seemed to think this was the case with Joe. Hal read the manuscript of
The Walnut
that first night at home, and he said he just had to read on, he had to stay with it, he couldn’t stop, because it was just too mesmerizing. Apparently he laughed out loud in a series of harsh barks, and Mrs. Wellman came in from the kitchen because she feared her husband was choking.

So Hal, not knowing that the author was the man I lived with, offered to buy the book for $2,500. I confessed to where I had gotten the manuscript, but Hal didn’t mind; he published the novel the following fall. I could say here that I was surprised that it all worked out so well, but actually I wasn’t. I knew the novel was good in a confessional, artful way. I’d been reading the slush pile, after all; I’d been reading
Courage, Be My Guide
and
Mrs. Dingle’s Secret,
but I’d also been reading the books that we actually published at Bower & Leeds, and while some of them were terrific—“powerful and riveting,” we editorial assistants routinely wrote as part of the flap copy—many were dull and just waiting to be dumped into remainder bins. There were World War II and Korean War stories, and there were gentle meditations by women on the nature of love. There were children’s books with their soothing nursery cadences, and glossy books of photographs of Morocco and other exotic locales, meant to be placed on someone’s coffee table beside a bowl of mints. But
The Walnut
was different.

Soon the book appeared in print, lightly edited by Hal, and then Joe was famous and found himself stepping onto stages and drinking glasses of water behind various lecterns. I was given a raise at work and the promise of being made an editor one day soon myself, but despite that promise, Joe began to urge me to quit.

“Leave,” he said after his book went into a fourth printing.
“What do you want to stay there for? Your salary’s tiny, and there’s no prestige.”

And mostly I didn’t want to stay in that office where men were kings and women were geishas (except for one powerful woman editor named Edith Tansley, who looked like a hawk and terrified everyone, man and woman). The men often gathered together in some editor’s office; I could hear their laughter and sense the force field of their pleasure at being together in a contained space. They were kinder to me now; they had to be, for I had been the finder of
The Walnut.
There was a sort of respect granted me that hadn’t been given to an editorial assistant before, though it was still suffused with a mirth that I didn’t understand.

“Morning, Joan,” Bob Lovejoy would say with a wink. “Tell me, how’s the wunderkind doing?”

“Joe’s fine.”

“Send him my regards. Tell him we’re all waiting for his next one. And don’t wear him out, okay?”

Finally I did quit; though some of the other assistants made me a party and said they’d miss me, I was relieved to be away from there. I would stay closer to home now, closer to him, where we could share our joy, our boundless excitement and self-love. Carol had never been a part of anything that was important to Joe; she didn’t even read his work, he’d complained, insisting that fiction wasn’t “up her alley.”

“Nothing was up that alley of hers, actually,” he’d said. “I think it was a bowling alley. But you, you’re different, thank God.”

I was the wife. I liked the role at first, assessed the power it contained, which for some reason many people don’t see, but it’s there. Here’s a tip: If you want access to someone important, one of the best ways is to ingratiate yourself to his wife. At night in bed, before sleep, the wife might idly speak well of you to her husband. Soon you will find yourself invited into the important man’s home. He might ignore you, standing in a corner with his fleet of admirers, telling stories in a self-assured voice, but at least
you’re there, inside the same room he’s in, having made your way past some invisible velvet rope.

Joe often liked to boast to people that I was the central nervous system of this marriage. “Without Joan,” he would say grandly, when we were out with a group of friends and everyone had been drinking, “I’d be nothing. A shriveled-up little shrimp in a shrimp cocktail.”

“Oh, please,” I’d say. “He’s crazy; ignore him, everyone.”

“No, no, she keeps me in line, this girl,” he’d go on. “She keeps the world at bay. She is my discipline, my cat-o’-nine-tails, my better half. Truly, I don’t think people appreciate their wives half as much as they ought to.”

The implication was that
he
truly appreciated me, and he did seem to, back then. After all, he was the only writer I knew who wanted his wife around so much of the time. The other male writers Joe came to know—the circle of confident men that sought him out and lured him in, the way they did with any new male literary animal—were forever shrugging off the women in their midst.

Lev Bresner, at the beginning a haunted young immigrant whose English was still shaky but whose autobiographical short stories of life in the death camps had begun appearing with regularity in magazines, had a young wife he’d brought over from Europe, a tiny woman named Tosha with black hair piled in a bun. She was sexy in a malnourished way; you felt that if you took her to bed, first you would have to give her a hot meal.

Tosha appeared at events with Lev only infrequently, when the occasion required that men show up with women. There they were, the Bresners, at dinner parties and cocktail parties. But she never came to his readings, which freed Lev up afterward to go out to a bar and drink and argue with other men.

If Tosha was there, she would forever be pulling the edge of his sleeve, saying, “Lev, Lev. Can we please go home now?”

Why do women so often want to
go
and men want to stay? If you leave, then you can preserve yourself better. But if you stay,
then essentially you’re saying: I’m immortal, I don’t need to sleep or rest or eat or take a breath. I can stay all night at this little bar with these people, talking and talking and swallowing so many beers that my stomach bloats and my breath becomes a hot, unbearable blast, and I never have to imagine that this wonderful, stunning time will ever come to an end.

Joe wanted me beside him. He needed me there with him before a reading, and during it, and after it was over. Much later, in an article on Joe, the critic Nathaniel Bone wrote:

Often, during this early, fertile period of Castleman’s career, his second wife, Joan, was by his side.

“She was an extremely quiet person,” remembers Lev Bresner. “Her reticence had a certain mysteriousness about it, but her presence was itself a kind of tonic. He was nervous, and she was very, very soothing.”

Another writer, unnamed, remarks that Castleman didn’t want to be away from his wife very often, except “when he was on the prowl.”