The Wife (24 page)

“Do you want to go into town this afternoon?” one of the other wives asked me. She was a woman named Liana Thorne, who looked like one of those stick-insects that can change color at any given moment so as to be entirely unnoticeable. Her expression was full of hope. Her husband, Randall Thorne, used to be famous, though in recent years his novels had fallen into remainder bins everywhere, but he was friends with the director of the conference and was asked back every summer.

Later in the day, when our husbands were off teaching their workshops—when Merry Cheslin was sitting near Joe, her eyes locked into his, taking down notes on every single thing he said about “voice” and “the willing suspension of disbelief”—I climbed into Liana’s beat-up Yugo with her and two other wives, Dusty Berkowitz and Janice Leidner, and we headed to town.

“Free at last, free at last,” Dusty Berkowitz said as the car pulled through the stone gates of Butternut Peak. “Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.”

We all laughed a little, and then Janice said, “Even Dr. King didn’t have to put up with what we do.”

“No, but I hear Coretta did,” I said.

“It’s hard, being them,” said Liana finally.

“Being
black
?” Dusty asked.

“No, being those men,” Liana said. “Writers whom everyone
wants to listen to. The kind of men who other people decide hold the key to everything. Randall tells me that he tries so hard to please everyone, but he just can’t do it.”

Dream on, Randall, I thought, imagining the way that Liana’s husband must certainly have envied Joe’s currency in the world.

We arrived in town and uncollapsed ourselves getting out of the car; this, I thought, was the kind of car that most writers’ money could buy: something squat and ugly and perhaps unsafe, with a faculty parking sticker slapped on the windshield. Although all four men had been known to be unfaithful, I believe only Joe participated in his affairs in such a vigorous way. We four wives looked at handmade scarves in a window of one of the local crafts shops, Vermont Country Artisans, admiring weave and texture and color, then soothed ourselves inside the store, fingering material, gathering our own sensual pleasure where we could. An eggplant-colored shawl had long, silken fibers that I ran my hands through as though they were hair.

Merry Cheslin’s hair was darker than that. I put my face against the shawl, nuzzled it.

“Isn’t that a beauty?” the young saleswoman said, trying to be helpful. “It’s made by a local craftsperson. And she happens to be blind, which I think is really neat.”

What did Merry Cheslin have to offer, besides long, frequently shampooed hair and bad fiction and a body that could be smoothed out onto a bed like this shawl, like a comforter, an offering? Joe needed that; it was blood plasma to him.
It’s hard, being them,
Liana Thorne had said, and I never really tried to think what exactly was so hard, what it was these men lacked, what they needed, what we couldn’t give them.

We gave them everything we had. All our possessions were theirs. Our children were theirs. Our lives belonged to them. Our weary, been-through-the-mill bodies were theirs, too, though more often than not they didn’t want them anymore. My body wasn’t bad; it still isn’t, and yet while I lay my head against an eggplant-colored fabric in a crafts store, Joe was looking into
the eyes of the woman he would be lying down with later in Birchbark.

And then, in the middle of Vermont Country Artisans, I burst into tears. The other wives, alarmed, hustled me out of the store and into the little vegetarian cafe next door, where they gathered around me in solidarity.

“I admire you, I really do,” said Janice, after I’d admitted why I was crying. “We all see what Joe’s up to, summer after summer, and yet you always seem as if you don’t really care.”

“We had no idea it upset you,” Dusty Berkowitz murmured. “We thought you were somehow . . . completely above it. Like you knew everything but didn’t give a shit. Like you were superior to the whole thing.”

I blew my nose into a napkin made of brown pulpy paper and let the other women take care of me. Why had Merry Cheslin gotten to me? I wondered, when last summer that student of Joe’s named Holly something hadn’t bothered me one bit? Why did the author of “That Firefly Summer” cause me to weep openly in town in front of these women I hardly knew?

I’d never cried at great length before about one of Joe’s affairs, or at least not in front of anyone but Joe. I’d maintained that I was never entirely threatened, because as far as I knew, most of the women he slept with weren’t talented, and neither, of course, was Merry Cheslin.

But what if talent didn’t matter at all, at least when it came to Joe’s women? What if talent wasn’t simply meaningless, but was actually a liability? Did he like her more because she was a bad writer? Did it make him feel safe sliding along the body of a woman who would never be a great challenge to him?

Yes, it did.

I believe he spent the entire twelve days at Butternut Peak engaged in an affair with Merry. He seemed happy during those days, agreeably doing his part during the skits that the young waiters sometimes put on at dinner. “It’s time to play Butternut Peak
Jeopardy!
” the headwaiter, a rotund twenty-three-year-old
fiction student exclaimed one night, while the rest of the serving staff hummed the perky game-show theme. “I’m your host, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Trebek,” he said, to much genial laughter.

There were a series of “answers” put to three “contestants,” a shy short-story writer named Lucy Bloodworth, Harry Jacklin, and Joe, who was coaxed from his seat, where he had just begun tucking into a dish of bread pudding.

The tone was jokey-literary, and the first Daily Double was directed at Joe. Part of a paragraph from a recent novel of his was going to be read aloud, and he would be asked to finish it.

“I quote,” said the headwaiter, “ ‘Shirley Breen was not a covetous woman. No one had ever said of her, “There goes Shirley Breen, desirer of things she cannot have.” In her life, there was only
one thing
she wanted that she had not been able to get.’ ” The headwaiter paused dramatically.

This was an easy one. The answer, in the form of a question, was: “What is . . . ‘a shot glass that had been drunk from by Mae West.’ ” At least one-quarter of the dining hall could have shouted these words in unison. But Joe just sat there in front of all of them, scratching his head and looking embarrassed.

“Oh God,” he finally said. “I’m royally screwed now. You’ve all learned my terrible secret.”

“And what secret would that be?” asked the headwaiter.

I watched Joe with curiosity. “That I’ve got a bad case of Alzheimer’s,” he said. “Can’t even remember my own writing a minute after I finish it. Somebody shoot me now.”

In the vegetarian cafe with the three other wives, I wept and wept and they were a mass of heads and elbows, comforting me, or trying to. “I just feel so humiliated,” I said, “getting up every morning and stepping outside the building, knowing what everyone else knows. Do you all think I’m ridiculous? A pathetic figure?”

“No! No!” they cried. “Not at all! Everyone admires you!” But who
were
these women? By default, they were my friends, my companions, these weary wives with their own careers that people tried hard to be interested in.

“How’s the social work going, Liana?” a conference student asked her at a picnic one afternoon, though there was no answer that could have kept his eye from leaping away from her and onto the more desirable targets: famous novelists spitting watermelon seeds in that grove.

“How’s the refugee work going, Joan?” an older, shy female poet named Jeannie asked me another time, for she’d heard about my occasional involvement with the relief organization. I told her just enough to be conversational, and no more, though she seemed disappointed, and truly wanted to hear. Joe had exaggerated my involvement with the charity over the years, trying to make me sound as though I was engaged in something in a way that would command quiet respect.

“I have
nothing,
” I said to the wives, and they told me I was wrong, I had so much, I contributed to the world, I was a positive presence, they’d always thought I was “stylish and intelligent,” to use Janice Leidner’s words.

“It’s like you have a whole other life going on inside you,” said Dusty Berkowitz.

“We all do,” I said.

“
I
don’t,” she said with her rolling, self-conscious laugh. “What you see is what you get.”

Dusty Berkowitz, fifty-five, her chest freckled from sun exposure, her hair as red as a leprechaun’s, no longer existed for her husband.

Janice Leidner still existed for her own husband, though only in outline: the idea of her, rather than the particulars.

Liana Thorne, deeply melancholy and bland, had a husband who longed to be part of the men’s club and who continually elbowed his way in, to the exclusion of any other activities or interests.

And me, blond, thin, aging but preserved in the acidity of this long marriage. The marital juices kept me alive, kept me going. Joe and I swam in a jar together; I swam alone whenever he went off to kiss the tender parts of Merry Cheslin. Then, tired, he always swam back to me.

There he was at 3
A.M.
that morning, slowly opening the door of our room in Peachtree and appearing with the hall light behind him.

“Joan?” he said. “You up?” He came into the room, bringing a draft of cigarette smoke with him, much of it absorbed into his hair, his sweater, the pores of his skin.

I lifted my head from the deep sleep I’d been in. “Yes,” I always said, even when it wasn’t really true. “I’m up.”

He hoisted himself onto the bed beside me, that smoky, clouded man, too old for blue jeans even then but wearing them anyway, his eyes inflamed from the smoke that had filled the room he’d been in, that party with godly writers and lowly students coming together, and then the private party afterward, in Birchbark, when he climbed onto a bed identical to this one, with a woman who bore no resemblance to me whatsoever.

At three in the morning that summer, and the summers that preceded it and the summers that followed, we were together, a husband and wife united in the foggy middle of a Vermont night. Bats circled the pines all around our cottage and sometimes hung like change purses from the roof of our veranda, and the night bristled with forest-bright animal eyes, and the arrhythmic clicking of strange bugs that I hoped never to see, but which I’d simply agreed to live among for twelve days. He was with me; we slept together and we woke up together, day after day, which is a lot more than I can say for Merry Cheslin, who, after that summer, was never heard from as a writer, and who, in the Butternut Peak alumni newsletter, recently described herself this way:

“I’m divorced,” writes
MERRY CHESLIN
, “no kids, never published my novel (sigh . . .), but I’m happily working for a small educational software company in Providence, Rhode Island, which believe it or not actually gives me a chance to use some of the creative skills I learned all those summers ago in Vermont. . . .”

*   *   *

Merry Cheslin will appear in Bone’s biography, at least in some vaguely described way. So, too, will other women from Joe’s visiting stints at universities, as well as occasional hangers-on and New York publicists. There were beautiful young women in gauzy blouses and cowboy boots, and stylish, recent college graduates looking for jobs in publishing.

In addition to the women, Joe’s “attempted strangulation” of Lev will make it into the biography. And so will Joe’s heart attack and eventual valve replacement; this is a distinctly unsexy portion, for instead of jump-rope weapons or awards or couplings there is only a miserable scene in a restaurant called The Cracked Crab in the winter of 1991. There we were, six male writers and some wives, the men having achieved various footholds of success in their writing lives, their pitons dug deep into a rock wall, hairlines receded or vanished or else the hair itself staying resiliently wiry and Einstein-clownish.

Joe, in this group, still occupied the center. He wasn’t the loudest (that would have been Martin Benneker, with his roar and flying hail of spittle) and he wasn’t the richest (definitely Ken Wooten, whose urbane and chiseled espionage novels had all been turned into movies), nor was he the most intelligent, not by far. (Lev had that role; he’d lunged for it.) Joe had a special, indefinable position among these men, a kind of quiet seniority. Joe loved to talk, and once in a while he loved to cook thick, undifferentiated stews that he could stand over for hours, pouring red wine into the pot and tossing in some meat and bones and the occasional handful of parsley. He loved to read and listen to jazz and eat his Sno-Balls and drink at a tavern and play pool.

We sat at a large, round table at The Cracked Crab that night. The surface had been lined with white butcher’s paper, and was covered with crabs, as though we’d stumbled upon a colony of them. There they were, a mess of claws and jointed legs doused
with a spray of Old Bay seasoning. Beer bottles, lifted and lowered during animated talk, left their rings all over the paper.

As usual, the wives had somehow banded together from their separate seats, straining forward to talk, maybe discussing some new Chinese-language film, and the men were joshing and boasting in their usual way, and there was the incessant, almost soothing sound of crab cartilage being crushed or pulled, when suddenly, with a mouth full of food, Joe reared back in his chair and said,
“Shit.”

Then his chair slammed forward to the floor and his face smashed down onto the butcher paper, and all of us leaped forward.

“
Are . . . you . . . choking?”
boomed Maria Jacklin in a voice she’d learned from CPR class, and Joe made the slightest movement with his head that indicated no. His eyes were squeezed tight in pain, and his hands clasped his chest, and he seemed to stop breathing, and immediately the men were hoisting his body up onto the table, right into the middle of the crustacean bed, where they fell upon him the way they’d done long ago during the fight with Lev.