The Wife (26 page)

“I’m going back to the hotel,” I whispered to him. “I’m ready. I’ve had it for the night.” He was telling a story to the entire table about growing up in Brooklyn; I heard the word “brisket” spoken, and then a translator gave an explanation to everyone in Finnish about what a brisket was, and I knew I really wanted to be out of there. I’d heard all of Joe’s stories many times, the unadorned or embellished tales.

Joe turned. “You sure?” he asked, and I said yes, I was tired, the driver would take me, and Joe should stay, which of course he would. Everyone bade me a fervent good night, all these new friends I would never see again, the elegant men and women of this lovely, brave country. Brave, I thought, for being located so far from the rest of the world it partially emulated, away from horror, from easy thrills. Brave for knowing it would soon be put to sleep for an entire winter, only to be roused again, with the bears, when the earth’s rotation brought it briefly into sunlight.

I slid across the backseat of the limousine and the driver started us toward the Inter-Continental Hotel. It was after 3
A.M.,
and we drove slowly past the harbor, where a boxy, aging Russian ocean liner—the
Constantin Simonov,
I read on its side—was docked beside a sleeker Norwegian one. I remember looking at the enormous ships, and listening politely as the driver told me
some bit of waterfront history, but then I succumbed to my drunkenness, my head a punch bowl filled with various Finnish liquors. I lay down in the backseat with my feet up and thought about the pleasure of leaving a party alone. Often the Siamese-twinship of marriage keeps you waiting in rooms you’d rather vacate, but tonight I was out of there on my own. He was my other half and I wanted us divided.

“Are you really going to leave him?” a voice asked.

It was a woman speaking to me from inside the drunken punch bowl. I could see her without even bothering to open my eyes. She was someone I hadn’t seen in over forty years: Elaine Mozell, the novelist who’d given that reading at Smith. She looked the same, her hair full, her face red. She
was
the same, a frozen ghost, and she was still drunk, but I was drunker.

“Yes,” I said to her. “I am.”

“Did you get what you want?” she asked.

“I’m not sure what it was she wanted,” said someone else, who was quickly revealed to be my mother, hovering nearby. “That man was a
Jew,
” she continued. “That was her first mistake.”

My mother’s hair still stank of the beauty parlor, even eighteen years after her death. In the afterlife, then, there were beauty parlors, with upright, lost souls sitting under inverted cones and staring at nothing, the thoughts blasted right out of their heads in the heat.

“She wanted to be by his side,” another person said, and I saw that it was poor Tosha Bresner, the suicide. A small, scrawny woman, her hands still fashioning something out of wet potatoes and egg and onions, moving it from hand to hand.

“Who wouldn’t? It was her chance to be with a big man. To prop him up,” explained Elaine.

“No, that’s not it at all,” I said to the row of faces. “You don’t get it at all.”

“She could have done it differently” came a new voice, accented, commanding, and this belonged to the novelist Valerian Qaanaaq, dressed in full Inuit garb. “
I
did it, after all,” she said.
“And I had absolutely no help. Do you think my family expected me to become a writer? Get real. Yet I did it anyway.”

They waited, these wraiths; they floated in place, wanting to hear what I had to say for myself.

I had to think back to the early days, to an archival image of me at nineteen sitting in my carrel in the Smith College library, writing stories. Professor J. Castleman, M.A., had brought out that desire in me, had extracted it through the way he spoke about books, through the way he revered literature, revered James Joyce’s small, perfect masterpiece, “The Dead.”

“Well, I guess, a long time ago I did start thinking about becoming a writer,” I admitted to them.

“So did you get to be one?” asked Elaine.

“
I
did,” sang out Valerian Qaanaaq, as if anyone had asked her.

“I told you that they wouldn’t let you in, didn’t I?” Elaine Mozell said.

“You did. But maybe I was
weak,
” I said.

“Oh no you weren’t,” said Tosha. “I admired you. You seemed so bold. I could never do half the things you did, or say the things you said. I was afraid, but you weren’t.”

“I was afraid, too,” I told her.

“No, you were just realistic,” said Elaine. “You knew you couldn’t have what they have. You wanted their muscularity. You wanted to matter. To make sure your voice still kept chattering from beyond the grave. Chattering on and on in the hell that a certain kind of writer goes to when he leaves this world. The thing is: the minute he enters hell, he owns
that place,
too.”

“He’s a
Jew,
” said my mother.

“A big fat novelist,” said Elaine Mozell. “The man who took everything.”

“He’s my
boy
!” cried a new voice, and this, I saw, was Joe’s mother. She circled above all the others in her flowered dress, huge and luminous, her face pink with pleasure. “That’s all he is, a
boy
! Why are you giving him such a hard time? You should forgive him everything. After all, what other choice do you have?”

*   *   *

In the lobby of the hotel, two clerks stood at attention as though it were a reasonable hour of the day instead of the dead middle of the night. They nodded as I picked my way across the room’s grand dimensions in my silvery gray evening gown and heels, and I tried to appear gracious and dignified and regal instead of simply drunk.

“Did you have a nice evening, Mrs. Castleman?” asked one of them. “We watched the proceedings on television.”

“Very nice,” I said. “Thank you. Good night now.”

I stood for a moment digging into my little purse to find the key to the elevator. As I stood riffling through it, I thought about how I would go upstairs now and dip my fingertips into a small pot of face cream, and before a wall-sized mirror in one of the stunningly large bathrooms, I’d remove the makeup I’d scrupulously applied hours earlier. No one would be there to unzip me; no Joe with his hand on my nape, moving downward, the zipper sound itself like the distant cry of a woman heard beneath the strains of a zither.

No Joe. I would have to unzip myself from now on after we separated for good, learning to tip my elbow up at the proper angle, as I used to do, and then switch hands midzip, taking it all the way down to the tailbone, the bottom, and then stepping out.

Our hotel suite had been made up for the night, worked at, apparently, by an army of maids who had sent their arms whipping across the comforter on our bed, flattening it so that it was like sand blown across a desert. After I got undressed, I pulled back the comforter, ruining the effect, and fell immediately asleep.

At 5
A.M.,
I heard Joe’s card in the door and the quiet, responding click that allowed him access. He stumbled in, his tuxedo askew, the cummerbund slung over his arm, as if he were a waiter carrying a napkin. He looked dopey and happy, his medal still around his neck. He came into the room and removed first his medal, then his shirt and undershirt.

“You up, Joan?” he asked.

“I’m up,” I said, sliding to a sitting position against the headboard.

“I’m drunk,” he said, unnecessarily. “And I ate too much, like a dog. They wouldn’t stop feeding me, those Finns. God, I love the Finnish people; they are completely underrated. And that
Kalevala
is terrific! One of the members of Parliament—that fellow with the pointy red beard—kept reciting it, and everybody began crying like babies, myself included. My next book is going to have a Finn in it. Definitely.”

“Joe, stop,” I said. “You’re just talking at me, and it’s too much right now.”

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s hard to turn it off, you know, to just shut it down.” He shook his head. “I’m going to take a sauna.”

And then he stripped off the rest of his clothes and went down the hall of the suite to the sauna. I heard the door open, and he was in. I followed him to the tiny room, peered through the dark square of glass and saw him lying down on the wood under a towel, already half dozing. I opened the door, entered the blaze in my nightgown, which immediately seemed to turn liquid.

“Joe.”

He looked up at me with one eye open and said, “What, Joan? What is it?”

I breathed in, then out, and told him, “I have to say something. There’s no good time to do it.”

“So say it,” he said, sitting up.

“Okay. When we get back to New York, I want a separation. I’ve thought it all through.”

“Oh, I see,” he said. “You wait until my body’s heated to a million degrees to tell me this. You wait until there’s nothing I can do, until I’m
fried.
” He poured some more water, and it sizzled on the coals.

“Look, try to imagine my situation. I want another chance at life,” I said. “I’m sixty-four years old. I’m almost a
senior.
I can go
anywhere half price, and I want to go there alone. Please don’t act furious, or heartbroken, or shocked, none of which you could possibly be. For once, try to be thoughtful, just try to listen.”

“So that’s my big congratulations,” he said. “Well, you know what? Fuck that.”

“Big congratulations? Why exactly should you be congratulated?” I asked. “Don’t you get enough of that elsewhere?”

He paused. “I happened to introduce you to the world, remember,” he said, but no, this wasn’t true; I was the one who had taken him there, who had led him in. I saved the day for that young writer of “No Milk on Sunday.”

“The thing is, I recently realized that I’m exhausted from you,” I said.

“That’s why you’ve been so bitchy,” he said.

“It’s amazing to me that I lasted this long,” I told him. “Realistically, I should have been gone years ago.” He was flushed red and damp. He put a hand to his head. I’d looked and looked at him for so long; I’d made a habit of it, a vocation, and I could stop looking now. “When we get home,” I went on, “I’m going to see Ed Mandelman and start the process.”

“You almost never used to complain about what we had,” he said. “You used to be
content.
”

“A long time ago.”

“Yeah, and you were thrilled,” he said. “You told me how exciting it all was. To be a
part
of everything. Then you got old and all of a sudden nothing was acceptable. You became like all those old ladies in restaurants:
Send this back. I don’t want it.
You know, it’s this prize,” he went on. “That’s what did it, I think. That’s what pushed you. The fact that when I die, someone might actually remember me and think about me for about two minutes, even though my son hates me, and my daughters think I’ve failed them, and my wife tells me she’s done with me.”

“Don’t you ever wonder
why
?” I asked. “You think these things just happen to you, don’t you—that you’re this innocent bystander.”

“No, I never said that.”

“You kept the children at arm’s length,” I said. “Even now. Their father wins the Helsinki Prize, and you don’t particularly want them there.”

“Did it ever occur to you why I wouldn’t want them to watch all this, or to
see
them watching this?”

“No,” I said. “It hasn’t.”

“Well, maybe it should.”

“You’re completely mysterious to me, Joe,” I said. “I never understand how you can do the things you do.”

“I see,” said Joe. He lay on his back and closed his eyes for a moment. “I’d like to remind you that no one forced you to accompany me through life, Joan,” he added.

“Define
force,
” I said. “You were who you were; you demanded things. And I had nothing, I was in awe of you. Basically, I was a pathetic person.” He didn’t try to refute this, and I added, for some reason, “I had a drink with Nathaniel Bone.”

Joe stared, then he nodded. “I get it. He started working on you, is that it? What did he say?
Leave him, Joan. Have your own life. You can do better. He’s a pig, that husband of yours, wouldn’t give me his blessing, wouldn’t authorize me to write his biography.”

“He said nothing like that,” I told him.

The heat of the sauna was everywhere on me now. I thought I’d faint, or melt, or decompose. Finally I sat down on the wooden bench across from Joe, the two of us red-faced and furious and unrelenting in this tiny room. I tossed water onto the pile of rocks and watched as a wall of steam sprang up between us.

“You,” Joe had said to me that afternoon in the Waverly Arms in 1956. “Read.”

He’d brought my hand down onto the pile of pages he’d written that day while I went off to my parents’ apartment. I’d made the appropriate cooing sounds of enthusiasm and surprise, and
then I’d sat on the bed to read the first twenty-one pages he’d frantically written of
The Walnut.
He actually sat across from me and watched me read to myself.

“Joe, you’re making me nervous,” I’d said. “Please stop.” But I was just buying time, for already, three minutes into the thing, I was panicking.

Finally I kicked him out and he walked through the Village on his own, wandering along Bleecker Street, stopping in at a record store, where he stood in a booth and listened to Django Reinhardt. Eventually he couldn’t take it anymore—he just had to know what I thought—and he came back to the hotel.

“Well?” he demanded, the moment he came into the room.

I had finished a while ago. The pages were already facedown, and I was smoking. I thought of the rejection letters he’d told me he’d received from literary magazines, even the teeny, inconsequential ones. “Try us again,” they’d offered in a sprightly handwriting, as if he had all the time in the world to keep trying, as if someone might support him financially while he painstakingly tried and tried.

“Look,” I said, and I was almost in tears. “You asked me to be honest, and I will,” though later, when I thought about it, I realized that he hadn’t, in fact, specifically
asked
me to be honest; that was my own assumption of what he wanted. I paused, then said, “I’m really, really sorry. But it just doesn’t work for me.” I squinted up my eyes and tilted my head, as though in sudden dental pain. “Somehow it never really comes alive,” I added quietly. “I wanted it to more than anything, and I mean, my
God,
it’s the story of the beginning of our relationship, so shouldn’t it actually
resonate
? Shouldn’t it make me feel all the emotions I’ve actually been feeling? Like the part where Susan goes to the apartment of Professor Mukherjee to feed his cat, and then she and Michael Denbold sleep together? I found myself thinking,
I have no idea of who these people are.
Because, well, no offense, Joe, you haven’t made them real.”