by Meg Wolitzer
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 Brookl
yn.
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.