The Wife (7 page)

“Well, yeah, I wasn’t sure about that line,” I said, and all of a sudden I knew it to be the worst line ever written in the history of student assignments.

“You got carried away with your own voice there,” Castleman said. “I did that myself when I was an undergraduate. Of course, unlike you, I had no reason to get carried away.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’re a good writer,” I assured him.

“I don’t know what I am, but I’m certainly not one of the naturals,” he said. “I’m the type that sits there slaving away all day and thinking someone will give me credit for effort. But here’s an important thing to remember, Miss Ames: In life,
no one
gives you credit for effort.”

There was a knock on the door, and Castleman quickly closed my short story, then said, “So when you’re sitting up late at night agonizing over your work, just know that you have an admirer.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“And for God’s sake,” he said, “get rid of those apprehensive trees.”

I laughed in what I hoped was a knowing way, and then stood, taking the story from him. Our hands briefly touched, knuckle to knuckle.

“Come in!” he called out, and the door swung open and Susan Whittle, the redheaded girl from class, entered. Her skin, I’d noticed before, was so sensitive that all her reactions expressed themselves plainly on its surface. She seemed in a constant state
of mortification; even now, a doily of pink spread down her neck. I, however, was entirely calm, as though I’d been given a horse tranquilizer. I glided from the office, past the other offices where students and professors bent solemnly together, past the bulletin boards with their flyers about summer programs in Rome and at Oxford, past the elderly English department secretary with her glass jar of hard candies.

After that day, I felt peaceful in class, as if the imaginary horse tranquilizer had a long half-life. I was totally absorbed whenever Castleman spoke about literature or the craft of writing. He sat with his scatter of walnuts on the table, and he kept cracking the shells, picking the meat from the pried-open lips and chewing while he spoke.

One day he told the class that a “talented lady writer” would be giving a reading at the college the following week, and we were all required to attend.

“They say she’s very good,” he said. “I’ve only read the first chapter of her novel; it’s kind of bleak and disturbing for someone of the female persuasion, but I think she’s terribly smart, and you all have to go. I’ll be there with my attendance book, checking off names, so don’t even think about skipping it.” A few of the girls glanced at each other uneasily, actually seeming to believe his threat.

The following Wednesday evening I went to the Reading Room of the Neilson Library to listen to Elaine Mozell. This was the first reading I’d ever attended, and the chairs were arranged informally. Someone from the English department gave a brief introduction, and then the writer, a big and blowsy fair-haired woman with a purple scarf at her throat, stood at the podium.

“This is from my novel,
Sleeping Dogs,
” she said in one of those voices that seemed to have been extensively primed by alcohol and cigarettes. I recognized the timbre and admired it; nobody I knew really talked like that. “I know most of you haven’t read it,” she went on, “because it’s only sold 1,503 copies, despite so-called rave reviews. And most of those 1,503 copies,”
she went on, “were bought by my relatives. Who were paid handsomely by me.”

There were a few uncertain laughs, including mine. Whatever her book was like, I wanted to admire it. This suddenly seemed to be an important goal, and when she began to read I was relieved that in fact I
could
admire it. It was the story of a girl’s sexual initiation on a farm in Iowa, and Elaine Mozell used graphic language about the way the new farmhand pushed himself into the girl as they lay together in the hayloft, with the animals grunting their approval below. The girl’s point of view was represented, as well as the farmhand’s. This wasn’t a domestic novel by any means; it jumped outside the world of the girl’s farm life and even graduated into some actual detailed facts about corn and soybeans, and, very briefly, about the history of the John Deere Company.

Contemporary novels by men often seemed to include Homeric catalogs of information, moving from the costs of things to what they felt like and tasted like. Land, sea, the difference between wheat and chaff. Elaine Mozell’s novel was similar; her carefully chosen words rolled out in that nicotined voice, and as she read aloud she seemed to wake up the entire dreary room. She finished reading to great applause a solid hour later, and her face was flushed. Then she chugalugged the glass of water on the podium, her lipstick scalloping its edge.

Afterward, at the small reception, she stood in a corner of the room with its thin carpets and its old rust-and-sepia-colored globes, flanked by two faculty members, a man and a woman, and all three were talking in loud voices, though Elaine Mozell was the loudest of all, her voice rising up every so often in laughter and relief. She didn’t have to perform anymore tonight; she didn’t have to stand there in front of us, talking about sex and irrigation. She didn’t have to use the word “thresher” anymore. She was free again, and it showed in her bright eyes and now frankly red face. She was knocking back some whiskey, and while the other faculty members seemed to grow subtly drunk, Elaine Mozell became obviously so.

I stood in a gawking cluster of girls from my creative writing class, all of us watching the novelist and the animated satellites around her. Professor Castleman had now become one of those satellites, and I saw him angle for a place at Elaine Mozell’s elbow. She turned to him, they briskly shook hands, he whispered something into her hair, and then she laughed appreciatively and whispered something right back at him. I felt ridiculous standing at the side in my cardigan and tartan skirt. My skirt had one of those oversized gold safety pins stuck in it, and I suddenly wished I could pluck it out and jab myself in the eye with it.

I wouldn’t have approached her on my own, but now Professor Castleman saw me and beckoned, and soon he was introducing me to Elaine Mozell, telling her that I was “an extremely promising young writer.” She looked me over; I felt convinced that her eye went right to my stupid safety pin.
I’m better than I look,
I wanted to say, cringing as I shook her big, hot hand. I told her how much I’d loved her reading, and that I planned to read the rest of her novel on my own.

“Good for you, if you can find it,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to dig through lots of piles of loud male songs of innocence and experience. And then maybe you’ll get to my little tale, buried at the bottom.”

All around me, Castleman and the others protested, telling her how that wasn’t true, that her novel was powerful in its own right, and blah blah blah.

Suddenly my professor said, “Oh, come on, Miss Mozell, it can’t be as bad as all that.”

“And how exactly would you know?” she asked him.

“Well,” he said, “there are quite a few female novelists out there whom I admire greatly. Like those Southerners, that quilting bee made up of Flannery O’Connor and those others. Women whose work is inseparable from the region they inhabit.”

As he spoke to her I saw the looks exchanged, the dot-dash code between them, the cocking of her head, the way he leaned his elbow against a wall to appear casual, the way both of them
were interested in each other, and the rest of the faculty members and students stood in a docile ring around them like people singing the parts of villagers in an opera and stepping back to let the two principal players have their moment. She was bitter and difficult, a once-good-looking woman who had gotten a little too heavy and shouldered too much resentment to attract many people anymore, and yet Professor Castleman was taken with her. Maybe he was repelled by her, too, but still he was attracted. She was gifted; her gifts were strange and discomforting and sort of
male.
She was one of those angry women, this Elaine Mozell, angry because her novel had sold 1,503 copies and because she understood how talented she really was, but that it might never really matter.

“Listen,” she was saying now, “Flannery O’Connor
is
a genius, and I mean no disrespect to her, but she’s also something of a freak of nature, so visionary and devoutly Catholic and
stern.
”

“She’s an important writer,” one of the other men insisted. “I teach her every year in my course on the grotesque. She’s the only woman on the list; there’s really no one like her.”

“But Miss Flannery O’Connor has something going for her that I don’t,” Elaine continued. “Her Southernness gives her this ready-made, colorful region to write about, and for some reason it always seems so incredibly exotic to people.” She paused and let one of the men fill her glass again. “The public likes to hear about the crazy old South, and they certainly may admire Southern women writers,” she continued, “but they don’t want to
know
them, you know? Because they’re strange creatures, O’Connor and that squirrelly little androgyne Carson McCullers. I don’t want to be a strange creature. I guess I just want to be loved.” She took a deep drink and then added, “You know, I wish I was a lesbian, I really do.”

There were murmurs of protest again. “You don’t mean that,” I heard a timid female dean say, but Elaine Mozell overrode her.

“Oh, in a way I do,” she said. “The problem is that I love men
passionately, even though they don’t deserve it. But if I happened to be one of those
literary
lesbians, I wouldn’t give a goddamn about what the rest of the world thought of me, or
whether
it even thought of me at all.”

There was more response, more talk, and eventually the others turned away; the night was growing late and I could see the janitors waiting outside the room with their mops, and I stood crumpling a Smith-crested paper cocktail napkin in my hand, also waiting, though what I was waiting for was obscure to me. Elaine Mozell saw me waiting, and suddenly she took me by my arm, pulling me aside into a small alcove so quickly I couldn’t even express surprise.

“You’re talented, I hear,” she said.

“Well, maybe,” I began.

“Don’t do it,” she said. No one else heard this; we were surrounded only by marble busts of commendable, long-dead women.

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t think you can get their attention,” she said.

“Whose?”

She looked at me sadly, impatiently, as if I were an idiot. An idiot with a safety pin plunged into her skirt. “The
men,
” she said. “The men who write the reviews, who run the publishing houses, who edit the papers, the magazines, who decide who gets to be taken seriously, who gets put up on a pedestal for the rest of their lives. Who gets to be King Shit.”

“So you’re saying it’s a conspiracy?” I asked gently.

“If you use that word it makes me appear envious and insane,” Elaine Mozell went on. “Which I’m not. Yet. But yes, I guess you could call it a conspiracy to keep the women’s voices hushed and tiny and the men’s voices
loud.
” She raised up her own voice on this last word.

“Oh, I see” was all I could say, vaguely.

“Don’t do it,” she said again. “Find some other way. There’s only a handful of women who get anywhere. Short story writers,
mostly, as if maybe women are somehow more acceptable in miniature.”

“Maybe,” I tried, “women are
different
from men. Maybe they try to do different things when they write.”

“Yes,” said Elaine, “that could be true. But the men with their big canvases, their big books that try to include
everything
in them, their big suits, their big voices, are always rewarded more. They’re the important ones. And you want to know why?” She leaned closer and said,
“Because they say so.”

Then she abruptly left me, and I walked back to my dormitory, but all night I felt sickish, restless. As it would turn out, Elaine Mozell’s writing wouldn’t last. Her novel would go out of print and would never be reprinted; it would disappear, becoming a curiosity, the sort of moldy, obscure title that people buy for twenty-five cents at a tag sale on the side of a road in Vermont, and then put on the shelf of their guest room, but no guest ever actually takes it down to read.

I’ve occasionally wondered what became of Elaine Mozell, because after
Sleeping Dogs,
I don’t believe she ever published another novel. Maybe it was too hard for her; maybe she got married and had children and life intruded and there was simply no time for her work; maybe she became an alcoholic; maybe every publisher turned down her manuscripts; maybe she had “no more books left inside her,” as people often sorrowfully say about writers, envisioning the imagination as a big pantry, either well stocked with goods or else wartime-empty.

Maybe she died. I never found out, for her novel joined the vast, rolling graveyard of unloved books, and perhaps she threw herself on top of the grave, inconsolable.

One day, a month into the semester, having had three conferences with Professor Castleman during office hours, each one held aloft by his elaborate praise, he called my name at the end of class and I walked up to him, brimming, steadying myself.

“Miss Ames, I wanted to ask you something,” he said. “Would you walk out with me and we can talk?”

I nodded, seeing the way the others took note of this moment. One of them, Rochelle Darnton, whose short stories featured inevitable surprise endings—“Just like O. Henry!” Rochelle had explained in her own defense—sighed as she shrugged into her coat, watching student and teacher lingering together, as though she knew that she would never be asked to walk out with Professor Castleman, that she would never be asked to linger, to loiter, to give more of herself than she already did.

I thought Castleman might be about to tell me that he was nominating me for a $100 college literary prize. Or maybe, I thought, he wanted to ask me to have dinner with him, to go out on a clandestine date, the way a girl who lived on my hall had done with her chemistry professor. I wasn’t sure which it would be: art or love. But with someone like J. Castleman, love of art could transform quickly into human love, couldn’t it? I hoped this was true, but was immediately mortified by my own thoughts, which seemed both delusional and deeply corrupt.