The Wife (2 page)

People usually thought we were a “good” couple, and I suppose that once, a long, long time ago, back when the cave paintings were first sketched on the rough walls at Lascaux, back when the earth was uncharted and everything seemed hopeful, this was true. But soon enough we moved from the glory and self-love of any young couple to the green-algae swamp of what is delicately known as “later life.” Though I’m now sixty-four years old and mostly as invisible to men as a swirl of dust motes, I used to be a slender, big-titted blond girl with a certain shyness that drew Joe toward me like a hypnotized chicken.

I don’t flatter myself; Joe was
always
drawn to women, all kinds of them, right from the moment he entered the world in 1930, via the wind tunnel of his mother’s birth canal. Lorna Castleman, the mother-in-law I never met, was overweight, sentimentally poetic and possessive, loving her son with a lover’s exclusivity. (Some of the men who own the world, on the other hand, were
ignored
throughout their childhoods—left sandwich-less at lunchtime in bleak school yards.)

Lorna not only loved him, but so did her two sisters who shared their Brooklyn apartment, along with Joe’s grandmother Mims, a woman built like a footstool, whose claim to fame was that she made “a mean brisket.” His father, Martin, a perpetually sighing and ineffectual man, died of a heart attack at his shoe store when Joe was seven, leaving him a captive of this peculiar womanly civilization.

It was typical, the way they told him his father was dead. Joe had just come home from school and, finding the apartment
unlocked, he let himself in. No one else was home, which was unusual for a household that always seemed to contain some woman or other, hunched and busy as a wood sprite. Joe sat down at the kitchen table and ate his afternoon snack of yellow sponge cake in the moony, stupefied way that children have, a constellation of crumbs on the lips and chin.

Soon the door to the apartment swung open again and the women piled in. Joe heard crying, the emphatic blowing of noses, and then they appeared in the kitchen, crowding around the table. Their faces were inflamed, their eyes bloodshot, their carefully constructed hairdos destroyed. Something big had happened, he knew, and a sense of drama rolled inside him, almost pleasurably at first, though that would immediately change.

Lorna Castleman knelt down beside her son’s chair, as though about to propose. “Oh, my brave little fella,” she said in a hoarse whisper, tapping her finger adhesively against his lips to remove crumbs, “it’s just us now.”

And it
was
just them, the women and the boy. He was completely on his own in this female world. Aunt Lois was a hypochondriac who spent her days in the company of a home medical encyclopedia, poring over the sensual names of diseases. Aunt Viv was perpetually man-obsessed and suggestive, forever turning around to display a white length of back revealed in an unclenched zipper’s jaw. Tiny, ancient Grandmother Mims was in the middle of it all, commandeering the kitchen, triumphantly yanking a meat thermometer from a roast as though it were Excalibur.

Joe was left to wander the apartment like a survivor of a wreck he couldn’t even remember, searching for other forgetful survivors. But there were none; he was
it,
the beloved boy who would eventually grow up and become one of those traitors, those cologne-doused rats. Lorna had been betrayed by her husband’s early death, which had arrived with no preamble or warning. Aunt Lois had been betrayed by her own absence of sensation, by the fact that she’d never felt a thing for any man except, from
afar, Clark Gable, with his broad shoulders and easy-grip-during-sex jug ears. Aunt Viv had been betrayed by legions of men—sleepy, sexy, toying men who telephoned the house at all hours, or wrote her letters from overseas, where they were stationed.

The women who surrounded Joe were
furious
at men, they insisted, yet they also insisted that he was exempt from their fury. Him they loved. He was hardly a man yet, this small, bright boy with the genitals like marzipan fruit and the dark, girlish curls and the precocious reading skills and, since his father died, the sudden inability to sleep at night. He’d roll around in bed for a while trying to think soothing thoughts about baseball or the bright, welcoming pages of comic books, but always he ended up picturing his father, Martin, standing on a puff of cloud in heaven and sadly holding out a pair of saddle shoes still nestled in their box.

Finally, around midnight, Joe would give in to his insomnia, getting up and going into the dark living room, playing a game of jacks alone in the middle of the rag rug. During the day he sat on that same rug at the women’s feet while they kicked off their pumps. As he listened to their unhappy, overlapping sagas, he knew that in some unstated way he ruled the roost and always would.

When Joe was finally sprung from the household, he found himself both enormously relieved and fully educated. He knew some things about women now: their sighs, their undergarments, their monthly miseries, their quest for chocolate, their cutting remarks, their spiny pink curlers, the time line of their bodies, which he’d viewed in unsparing detail. This was what would be in store for him if he fell for a woman one day. He’d be forced to watch her shift and change and collapse over time; he’d be helpless to stop it from happening. Sure, she might be desirable now, but one day she would be nothing but a giver of brisket. So he chose to
forget
what he knew, to pretend that the knowledge had never penetrated his small, perfect head, and he left this all-female revue and stepped onto the creaking train that sweeps people from their lesser boroughs into the thrilling chaos of the only borough that really counts: Staten Island.

Just a joke.

Manhattan, 1948. Joe rises from the fumes of the subway and enters the gates of Columbia University, meeting up with other brainy, soulful boys. Declaring himself an English major, he joins the staff of the undergraduate literary magazine and immediately publishes a story about an old woman who thinks back on her life in a Russian village (wormy potatoes, frozen toes, etc., etc.). The story is laughable and poorly written, as his critics will later point out while pawing through crates of his juvenilia. However, a few of them will insist that the
exuberance
of Joe Castleman’s fiction is already in place. He trembles with excitement, loving his new life, enjoying the feverish pleasure of going with college friends to Ling Palace in Chinatown and ingesting his first prawns in black-bean sauce—his first prawns of any kind, in fact, for nothing that calls a shell its home has ever entered Joe Castleman’s lips.

Those lips also receive the lips and tongue of his first female, and in short order his virginity is removed with the crack precision of a dental extraction. The remover is a needy but energetic girl named Bonnie Lamp who attends Barnard College, where, according to Joe and his friends, she has been given a merit scholarship in nymphomania. Joe is captivated by doe-eyed Bonnie Lamp, as well as by the amazing act of sexual intercourse. And, by association, he’s captivated by himself. After all, why shouldn’t he be? Everyone else is.

When he makes love to Bonnie, entering and slowly exiting, he’s impressed by the way their interlocking parts emit little, rhythmic
clicks,
like a distant secretary’s heels walking across linoleum. He’s also fascinated by the other sounds Bonnie Lamp makes independently. In her sleep she seems to mew like a kitten, and he watches her with a strange mixture of tenderness and condescension, imagining that she’s dreaming about a ball of yarn, a plate of milk.

A ball of yarn, a plate of milk, and thou,
he thinks, in love with words, with women. Their pliant bodies fascinate him—all those swells and flourishes. His own body fascinates him equally,
and when his roommate is elsewhere, Joe takes the mirror down from its nail on the wall and gets a long look at himself: his chest with its careless littering of dark hair, his torso, his surprisingly large penis for such a short and wiry person.

He imagines his own circumcision, so many years earlier, sees himself struggle in a strange bearded man’s arms, accepting a thick pinkie finger dipped in kosher wine, then sucking wildly on that pinkie, mining it for nonexistent fluid, and instead finding only a whorled surface with no hidden pinhole source of milk. But in this image the painting of sweet wine down his gullet dazes him, makes a hash of all the proud faces around him. His eight-day-old eyes close, then open, then close again, and eighteen years later he awakens, a grown man.

Time passes for Joe Castleman, and he stays on at Columbia for graduate school, and during this period there’s a shift in the environment. It’s not just the change of seasons, or the continual bloom of new buildings with their crosshatches of scaffolding. Nor is it simply the small socialist gatherings Joe attends, though he hates to be a joiner, can’t stand to be part of a group, even for a cause he believes in like this one, sitting earnest and cross-legged on someone’s mildewed carpet and just listening, just taking information in, not offering anything of his own. And it’s not only the increasing drumbeat of early 1950s bohemia, which leads Joe into a few narrow, underlit bongo clubs, where he develops an instant and lifelong taste for smoking grass. It’s more that the world is truly opening up to him, oysterlike, and he walks inside it, tentatively touching the smooth ridges of its cavity, taking a dry bath in its silver light.

There were moments during our marriage when Joe seemed unaware of his power, and those were the moments when he was at his best. By the time he hit middle age, he was big and ambling and casual, walking around in a beige fisherman’s sweater that never disguised his gut but merely cradled it indulgently, letting it swing when he walked, when he entered living rooms or restaurants or lecture halls, when he showed up at Schuyler’s
General Store in our town of Weathermill, New York, purchasing a new supply of Hostess Sno-Balls, those pink, coconut-rolled, entirely unnatural marshmallow domes to which he was inexplicably addicted.

Picture Joe Castleman at Schuyler’s on a Saturday afternoon, purchasing a fresh cellophane packet of his favorite treat and benignly patting the store’s resident arthritic dog.

“Afternoon, Joe,” Schuyler himself would say, an old stick of a man with a delft-blue, weepy eye. “How’s the work?”

“Oh, I’m trying the best I can, Schuyler, for what it’s worth,” Joe would reply with a deep sigh. “Which isn’t much.”

Joe always did self-doubt very well. He appeared vulnerable and tormented throughout much of the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, and the first part of the nineties, whether he was drunk or not drunk, reviewed badly or favorably, shunned or loved. But what exactly was the source of his torment? Unlike his old friend the eminent novelist Lev Bresner, a Holocaust survivor and painstaking chronicler of an early childhood spent as a prisoner in a death camp, Joe had no one, specifically, to blame. Lev, with the gleaming, deep eyes, should have won the Nobel Prize for Sadness, instead of for Literature. (Though I’ve always admired Lev Bresner, I’ve never thought his novels were all they were cracked up to be. To admit this aloud, say, at dinner among friends, would be like standing up and declaring, “I like to suck on little boys.”) It’s Lev’s subject, not his writing, that makes you flinch and tremble and dread turning the page.

Lev is authentically tortured; long ago, when Joe and I entertained regularly, he and his wife, Tosha, would come to our house for the weekend and he’d lie on our living room couch with an ice pack on his head and I would tell the kids
shush,
and they would drag their noisemaking toys out of the room, the doll that chattered its declarations of love, the little wooden spaniel that clacked when you pulled it on a string.

“Lev needs quiet,” I would tell them. “Go upstairs, girls. Go on, David, you too.” The children would stand for an extra
moment at the foot of the stairs, unmoving, transfixed.
“Go,”
I would urge them, and finally, reluctantly, they would ascend.

“Tenk you, Joan,” Lev would say in his heavy voice. “I am weary.”

He would say it and it would be
allowed.
Anything would be allowed of Lev Bresner.

But Joe could never say he was weary; what did he have to be weary about? Unlike Lev, life had spared Joe the trauma of the Holocaust; he had bypassed it easily by being a charming little boy playing hearts with his mother and his aunts in Brooklyn while Hitler goose-stepped across another continent. And then, during the Korean War, Joe accidentally shot himself in the ankle with an M-1 during basic training, spending ten days being indulged by nurses and scraping the skin off tapioca pudding in the infirmary before being sent home.

No, he couldn’t blame war for his unhappiness, so he blamed his mother, the woman I never met, but who has been described to me by Joe in detail over the years.

One thing I know about Lorna Castleman is that, unlike her two sisters or her mother, she was fat. When you’re very young, a mother’s fatness might make you feel safe, even proud. You flush hot with pride at the idea that your mother is the biggest mother you know; with haughty distaste you think of your friends’ mothers, those unhuggable shrimps.

Later, according to Joe, you transfer this feeling onto your father. Your father should be big and fierce if possible, a wide-shouldered wonder taking you into his office or his store or wherever it is he spends his gloomy, manly days, lifting you into the air and letting the women who also work there fuss over you, giving you linty sourballs, probably the kind that no one likes:
pineapple.
Your father should be a powerhouse; you can ignore the shiny, rapidly enlarging spot on his skull, the grunts he makes when he eats his daily plate of pan-fried liver. He might be quiet and retiring, but still he’s as strong as a draft animal, and when his urine hits the bowl it trembles the water, and the sound
rings out like a brook that winds wondrously through all the streets of Brooklyn.