The Wife (3 page)

Meanwhile, you’re suddenly
horrified
by your fat mother—this woman who can work her way through an entire Ebinger’s Blackout Cake in its green windowed box—the thick spackled icing, the porous, pitch-dark interior—in ten minutes,
easy,
without feeling any shame. You’re repelled by the mother with whom you used to stroll the neighborhood; she was always powdered and perfumed and large but noble: a sofa that walked.

You used to love her madly, wanted to marry her, tried to figure out whether or not that would be technically possible, and if it
were
possible that you might someday stand beside her and work a ring onto her finger, you wondered whether you could ever be worthy of her. Lorna, your mother, in her busy floral dresses bought at a store in Flatbush called the La Beauté House of Discount Fashions for Large Women, was everything to you.

But now life is different. Suddenly you want your mother to be small, constructed of wishbones only. Narrow, a size 2. Fragile but beautiful. Why can’t she look more like Manny Gumpert’s mother, a stylish woman whose body is as small and compressed as a hummingbird’s? Why can’t she just
go away
?

But she didn’t, not for a long, long time. For years after poor Martin Castleman dropped dead in his shoe store, slumping down in his low vinyl seat with a girl’s leg locked between his own, and a box of saddle shoes in his hands, Joe was left with his mother and the other women. She was there in his life until Joe was fully grown and had married his first wife, Carol, and only then, while circulating at Joe and Carol’s wedding, did Lorna disappear. It was a heart attack that came out of the blue, just like her husband’s had, leaving newlywed Joe orphaned and fully aware of his own inherited faulty pump. His mother’s death was very upsetting, Joe said, though not as traumatic as his father’s.

But I have to admit here that when he told me this story, my first, awful thought was:
good material.

I pictured his big, flushed mother in high spirits; the aunts
with their fancy dresses and clutch bags, the waiters circling with their trays of rainbow sherbet in frosted silver cups; I even heard the strands of sinuous klezmer music playing as he and his bride, Carol, danced.

“I don’t really understand something,” I once said, early on in our own marriage. “Why did you even
marry
Carol in the first place?”

“Because it was what you
did,
” he told me.

But the thing was—or at least it was the thing that Joe would decide later—Carol was insane. Locked-ward certifiable, a classic lunatic. You can say this freely about a man’s first wife, and the other men in the room will nod vigorously; they understand exactly what you’re talking about. All first wives are crazy—violently and eye-rollingly so. They writhe, they moan, they snap into flame and crumple, they decompose before your eyes. Probably, Joe said, Carol was already crazy by the time he first met her at a lonesome coffee shop at 2
A.M.,
one of those Hopper’s
Nighthawks
type of places where everyone who’s slumped over the just-sponged counter looks like they might have a tragic life-story to tell if you make the mistake of agreeing to listen.

But Joe didn’t understand this about Carol yet. He was back from basic training and his accidental self-injury. He was alone and open, and so when he first met her that night he let himself be charmed by the peculiar appeal of the childlike woman with the brown hair cut across the forehead in neat bangs and the feet that didn’t even reach the floor. In her doll-hands she held a thick book:
The Collected Writings of Simone Weil.
Actually, it was the
Écrits
of Simone Weil, in the original French. He was immediately impressed, calling upon the one bit of obscure Simone Weil trivia that he knew—perhaps an apocryphal tidbit, but sworn to him by a college friend to be true.

“Did you know,” he said to this girl Carol Welchak who happened to be sitting on the stool next to his, “that Simone Weil was afraid of fruit?”

She gave him a fishy look. “Oh, yeah,
right.
”

“No, no, it’s true,” Joe insisted. “I swear to God. Simone Weil was afraid of fruit. I guess you could say she was a fructophobe.”

Both of them began to laugh, and the girl picked up a slice of orange that was lying ignored on the edge of her plate of pancakes. “Come here, Simone,
ma chérie,
” she said in a French accent. “Come and try my lovely orange!”

Joe was charmed. What a find! Apparently the world was full of girls like this, each of them simmering in her own stewpot, waiting to be savored by the men who would come by, lift their lids, and inhale.

“So what are you doing here by yourself in the middle of the night?” he asked. On Joe’s other side, a longshoreman scratched at his rashy neck, making Joe recoil and try to move a little bit closer to the girl, although of course he couldn’t, for the stool was bolted to the linoleum.

“I’m escaping from my roommate,” said Carol. “She’s a harpist, and she practices all night. Sometimes I wake up before morning and for a minute I think I’m dead, and that angels are flapping around playing music at the foot of my bed.”

“That must be gratifying,” Joe said. “Thinking that there
is
a heaven, and they’ve let you in.”

“Believe me,” said Carol, “I was a lot more gratified the day they let me into Sarah Lawrence.”

“Ah, a Sarah Lawrence girl,” he said with pleasure, deciding at that moment that she was a highly creative type, her hands damp with both acrylic paint from art class and ambrosia from some middle-of-the-night winter-solstice ritual. He also imagined her to be like one of those Mongolian sexual acrobats he’d read about, turning midair somersaults that would vault her directly and miraculously onto the pivot of his penis:
ka-ching!

“Well, I used to be a Sarah Lawrence girl,” she said. “I already graduated. So tell me, whoever you are,” she went on, “what are
you
doing here in the middle of the night?”

It was clear that she didn’t yet get it, didn’t yet know that men like Joe—brash men who loved the free verse of their own voices
and the smeared gleam of their reflections in their shoes—went to lonesome coffee shops in the middle of the night simply because they could. And New York City, at that particular moment in time, 1953, was a spectacular place in which to take a walk in the middle of the night if you were a young, ambitious, confident man. The city was constructed of neon lettering and bridge lights and subway steam huffing in checkerboard gusts up through vents into the street. Desperately kissing couples seemed to have been strategically stationed at every lamppost.

“What am I doing here?” Joe answered. “I’m an insomniac. I can’t sleep at night, so I get up and go for a walk. What I do is pretend that the whole city is my apartment. Over there’s the bathroom”—he pointed out the window. “And over in
that
direction is the closet where I keep my jackets.”

“And this must be the kitchen, I guess,” Carol said. “You just came in to get yourself a cup of coffee.”

“Exactly,” he said, smiling at her. “Let’s see if there’s anything in the fridge.”

They swiveled their stools restlessly back and forth in a little mating dance. Then they got their checks and paid, each of them grabbing a handful of those chalk-dusted mint pillows that for some reason sit in a straw basket beside every coffee-shop cash register in the world, as though all the coffee-shop owners had gotten together and agreed on this protocol. And then he held open the door for her and together they headed out into the night. With Joe by her side, both of them sucking mint pillows and purifying their mouths for the kiss that was likely to come sooner or later, Carol could begin to enjoy the late-night wilds of the city in a way she never could when she was alone. What euphoria to know what it meant to relax and not worry, to be part of something enormous and vital. The night was cold, and the points of the buildings seemed to have been freshly sharpened. He held her tiny white hand, and together they made the grand tour through shuttered streets, because he was one of those men, and all of it was his.

*   *   *

“We’ll be landing soon,” the brunette flight attendant said almost apologetically as she strolled the aisle of our plane. By now, of course, nine hours into it, the entire experience of the flight had moved from the clean, expectant pleasure that was there at the outset to the cranky, restless filth that occurred when you stayed within a small space for too long. The air, once so antiseptic, was now home to a million farts and corn chips and moist towelettes. Clothes were crushed; people bore corrugations on their cheeks from where they had slept against the seat or on their own crumpled jackets. And even the brunette flight attendant, who had earlier seemed such a seduction to Joe, now looked like a tired hooker who wants to call it quits. She had no more cookies to offer; her basket was empty. Instead, she returned to her seat in the back, and I saw her strap herself in and squirt breath freshener into her mouth.

We were on our own again. Rows and rows behind us, separated by curtains, sat Joe’s editor, Sylvie Blacker, and two young publicists, along with Joe’s agent, Irwin Clay. Joe had no significant relationships with any of them. They were all of very recent vintage; his longtime editor, Hal, had died, and his former agent had retired, and he’d been passed on to other people, some of whom had already left their jobs, and these particular people were here not because they were close to Joe but because it was appropriate for them to come, to take partial credit by association. Joe’s friends and the rest of our family had been left behind; he’d told them it wasn’t necessary that they come to Finland, that there was really no point to it, that he’d be home soon enough and he’d tell them all about it, and so of course they’d had to listen to him. The airplane began to lower through a thatch of clouds, bringing Joe and me and everyone else down toward a small, beautiful, unfamiliar city in Scandinavia at the end of autumn.

“Are you okay?” I asked Joe, who always became frightened during the quiet anticlimax of a descent, when it seemed as
though the engines were conking out and the plane was coasting like a child’s balsa-wood flier.

He nodded and said, “Yeah, thanks, Joan, I’m fine.”

I hadn’t asked him the question out of actual concern; it was more of a marital reflex. All over the world, husbands and wives routinely and somewhat pointlessly ask one another:
Are you okay?
It’s part of the contract; it’s the thing to do, because it implies that you care, that you’re paying attention, when in fact you might be deeply and relentlessly bored. Joe actually looked calm, I saw, though some of that was probably a side effect of sleep deprivation. I couldn’t remember the last time he had gotten a decent night’s sleep. I’d always known him to be an insomniac, but every year his sleeplessness inevitably reached a kind of crisis right before the winner of the Helsinki Prize was announced.

Always, each year, you hear stories about how some winner or other assumed the call was a prank. There are legendary tales of writers being shaken from sleep by a ringing telephone and cursing the man with the accent on the phone, telling him, “Do you know what time it is?” Only then, lifting to the surface of consciousness, did they realize what the call was about, that it was genuine, and that it meant that their life would change shape forever.

This wasn’t the Nobel prize, of course; it was a few steps down, a defiant stepchild that had enhanced its reputation over time by the sheer power of its prize money, which this year was the equivalent of $525,000. It wasn’t the Nobel, just as Finland wasn’t Sweden. But still the prize was an extravagant honor and thrill. It elevated you—if not to Stockholm heights, then at least partway up.

All of them, the novelists, the story writers, the poets, desperately long to win. If there is a prize, then there is someone somewhere on earth who desires it. Grown men pace their homes and scheme about ways to win things, and small children hyperventilate over the prospect of gold-plated trophies for penmanship, for swimming, for just being cheerful. Maybe other life-forms
give out awards, too, and we just don’t know it: Best All-Round Flatworm; Most Helpful Crow.

Several of Joe’s friends had been talking to him about the Helsinki Prize for months. “This year,” said his friend Harry Jacklin, “you’re going to get it. You’re getting old, Joe. You shall wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled. They don’t want to overlook you; it would be egg on their faces.”

“You mean egg on
my
face,” said Joe.

“No,
theirs,
” insisted Harry, whose own field was poetry, which pretty much guaranteed that he would remain entirely unknown and broke forever. Even so, he was deeply competitive; a mean vein of spite ran through him, as it did through all of the poets Joe knew. It always seemed that the smaller the pie, the greater the need to have more of it.

“I’m not going to win,” Joe said to Harry. “You’ve told me I would win for three years straight. You’re like the boy who cried wolf.”

“It needed time,” said Harry. “Now I get their strategy. See, they were sitting there in Helsinki, eating their smoked fish and waiting. Their plan was that if you were still alive by now, they’d give it to you. You’re politically correct, and that really counts these days, at least as far as the Helsinki is concerned. You’ve got that extra gene, that sensitivity toward women. That unwillingness to objectify the opposite sex, isn’t that what they say about you? That you invent a female character and put her in a marriage, a family, a king-sized bed in the suburbs, and yet you don’t feel the need to describe . . . I don’t know, her
pubic hair
in literary terms: ‘a burnt-sienna nimbus,’ or whatever, like the rest of your crowd would.”

“I don’t have a ‘crowd,’ ” said Joe.

“You know what I’m saying,” Harry went on. “You mix in all this
feminism,
if you want to call it that—even though it always makes me think of dykes with chain saws. You’re an original, Joe! A great writer who isn’t a total prick. You, you’re fifty percent prick, fifty percent pussy.”