by Meg Wolitzer
The truth was that Joe reached for the phone in one swift movement, knocking over nothing. His voice was strong when he said hello. The connection was infused with a crackle and the slightest quality that suggested both voices were trapped in a time-delay tunnel.
A foreign man spoke, his tone both meek and hearty at once. He asked for Mr. Castleman, “Mr. Yoseph Castleman,” he specified, and then he told him the news. Joe swallowed, felt his chest expand with an aching pride that seemed a troubling, distant relative of heart attacks; he pressed his palm flat against his heart, shushing it.
“Can my wife, Joan, get on the extension?” Joe asked Teuvo Halonen, the acting president of the Finnish Academy of Letters. “I think she should hear this too.”
“Of course,” the Finn said.
By this time, I was sitting up in bed and staring at Joe with wild eyes, my own heart going nuts, chemicals flooding into me from every port, and I scuttled down the hall in my nightgown to pick up the phone in what used to be Susannah’s room.
“Hello,” I said into my daughter’s pink Princess phone. “This is Joan Castleman.” I sat on her bed beneath the bookshelf with its ancient, pristine sets of Nancy Drews and Trixie Beldens.
“Hello, Yoan—that is, Mrs. Castleman. I am hearing that you wish to be part of this conversation,” said Mr. Halonen. “Well, your husband is our choice for this year’s prize.”
I gasped. “Whoa!” I said. “Oh! Oh my God!”
“He is a wonderful writer,” continued Halonen calmly, “who deserves these accolades. We are honored to have had the opportunity to choose this gentleman, for we find his work to have been heartbreakingly beautiful and important over the years. His career has a great span to it; he has grown in stature, and it has been a pleasure to observe. Each book is increasingly mature. I must say, my personal favorite is Pantomime, for in many ways the characters of Louis and Margaret Strickler remind me of myself and my wife, Pippa. So fallible! So human! You should know,” he went on, “that later today, Mrs. Castleman, you shall be fending off the press.”
“I’m not a movie star, Mr. Halonen,” said Joe from the other extension. “I’m a fiction writer, and that’s not very big in the States anymore. People have much bigger things to worry about now.”
“But the Helsinki Prize is important,” Halonen said. “We know it’s not the Nobel, of course,” he added obligatorily with a self-conscious and revealing laugh, “but still everyone gets excited. You will see.” He went on to explain more details, including the breathtaking prize money and the visit to Helsinki that Joe would be making. “We expect you to come, too, Mrs. Castleman, of course,” he added quickly. This week there would be an official interview done at the house, and next week a photographer would do a formal sitting with Joe, in preparation for our trip to Finland. “But I recognize that we have awakened you,” Halonen continued, “and I shall let you get back to sleep now. The undersecretary from our offices shall be in contact with you later today.” He must have known, of course, that no one ever went back to sleep after receiving this call.
We all said good-bye like old friends, and when we had hung up I ran into our bedroom, throwing myself down beside Joe on the bed.
“Oh my God, this is it now,” I said. “You were right. You were right. I feel like fainting, like vomiting.”
“I didn’t know I’d be right.” Joe leaned against me. “This is the beginning of a new phase, Joan.”
“Yes, the insufferable phase,” I said.
He was silent, ignoring that. “What should I do?” he asked after a moment.
“What do you mean, what should you do?”
“What should I do?” he repeated, childlike.
“Call Lev,” I said. “He’ll tell you what he did. He’ll give you tips on everything. He’ll walk you through it step by step, how you deal with it. But basically, I think you do what you’ve always done. It’ll be the same, but bigger.”
“Thank you, Joan,” he said to me quietly.
“No, don’t say that. Don’t start. I don’t think I could take it.”
“But I have to say something,” he said.
“There’s nothing new to say,” I told him. “And please, no matter what happens, don’t even think about thanking me when you get up on that stage in that gigantic hall, or whatever it is, in Helsinki.”
“But I have to,” he said. “It’s what everyone does.”
“I don’t want to be the long-suffering wife,” I said sharply. “You can understand that, can’t you? I mean, come on, Joe, think about how you’d feel.”
“Can we worry about that later?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I suppose we can.”
He kissed me hard on the mouth, and we both tasted the vinegar of sleep. Then he did the strangest thing: he slowly got up and stood on the bed, towering unsteadily in the room, looking down from this new angle. The room was tilted but still ordinary. Joe Castleman knew he was special, though not so special that he could avoid the things of everyday life. They surrounded him, as they always had. Yet now, he knew, he could pay less attention to them; he could let himself exist in another world, a parallel dimension where big-time prizewinners lay on chaises eating figs in the sun and thinking of nothing but themselves. He would have to fight that impulse, keep himself from getting soft. He’d have to keep publishing, keep his output strong and constant.
“What are you doing up there?” I asked now, peering up at him as he stood on the bed.
“I want to jump,” he said. “Like the kids used to.”
I thought of David and Susannah and Alice, and the way their small bodies had shot up into the air, pajamas flapping, shrieks of pleasure accompanying each jump. Why did children love to jump? Was there actual pleasure to be found in the up-and-down of childhood: the bed, the playground swing, the seesaw, as opposed to the blindly determined in-and-out of adulthood?
“Come on,” he said. “Jump with me.”
“For joy?” I asked, not smiling.
“Maybe,” Joe said, though he must have known that joy was not exactly here right now in this bedroom at dawn, with the sun discreetly poking into the windows, illuminating both our faces, pointing out the similarities between men and women that age creates, the androgynous tempering and etching.
What was here was something else, something exciting but maybe a little bit too exciting, too stimulating, so that it blurred the sensations, reducing the possibility of joy until it dwindled down to nothing.
“Jump with me,” he said again.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to.”
“Oh, come on, Joanie.”
It was a name he hadn’t called me in a very long time, and he understood that the siren call of it would have an effect. It did. Despite myself, it roused something in me. I was an idiot to be taken in again and again by him, wasn’t I? To celebrate him, to sing him, but I couldn’t find it in me to be any other way. It took a moment, but finally I brought myself to a wobbly standing position on the bed.
“This is extremely weird,” I warned.
We faced each other, bouncing lightly. We certainly didn’t feel the kind of freedom our kids had once felt, the simplicity of bodies inhabiting undefined space, and I reflexively crossed my arms over my chest so my breasts didn’t swing up from under my nightgown and sock me in the chin. I tested the mattress, getting used to the give of it, its trampoline possibilities. Despite everything, there was some pleasure here, no matter how self-conscious; it lightly stirred the air as we started to jump.
Soon the telephone would be ringing all the time, and it would always be for him, or about him. So what else was new? I was used to that by now; Joe had been famous for a very long time, and there’s an inevitable uniformity to fame, regardless of its level or quality, whether it’s the TV kind with its feral, laser-bleached teeth or the political kind with its puffed hair and cuff links, or Joe’s kind: the rumpled sweater and the perennial drink gripped in a fat hand.
Soo
n the round of interviews and congratulations would start. Soon it would be too much for me to bear—as the days passed I began to see that. I wasn’t going to handle this well; it would inflame me with the worst kind of envy. It would leave me all alone in my unadorned, wifely state. Soon he would gloat and preen and discuss his triumph nonstop, inflated with ecstasy and self-importance. Soon it would be intolerable. And soon, too, we’d be on an airplane—this airplane, now—lowering slowly through the clouds into an unlikely pocket of Scandinavia and into the end of everything between us. But for one moment on the bed, Joe and I were fine, entirely the same, our ridiculous late-life selves in crumpled pajamas, briefly lifting off above the earth, before finally settling back down.
Chapter Two
* * *
IT KILLS ME to say it, but I was his student when we met. There we were in 1956, a typical couple, Joe intense and focused and tweedy, me a fluttering budgie circling him again and again. Even our clothing is an embarrassment, at least seen from the Olympian vantage point that time provides: his suede elbow patches that attempted to transform a Brooklyn Jew into Mr. Chips, and my long plaid skirts and flats, which I wore because he was short and I was tall, and the last thing I wanted to do was scare him away.
There was no danger of that; he wasn’t scared of me, he was extraordinarily confident and dedicated. He pursued me and I responded, just the way other students and their professors were doing all around the country, engaging in steamy little couplings that were pleasurable and infuriating and grossly imbalanced. I felt honored to have been chosen by him, and relieved, too, for it lifted me out of the prolonged stupor that seemed to have infected the entire student body of Smith College in 1956. This wasn’t strictly our fault. Though many of the girls in my dormitory chattered like castanets about getting married right after college and buying homes in places like Old Lyme, Connecticut (Chancey Foster had already decided which one she wanted: a sprawling Tudor with a goldfish-stocked pond, though she had not yet selected a husband), we were not all silly, or empty, or unaware. There was an intense knot of imperious, political girls in my dormitory, and while I liked them and felt excited when they got fired up at dinner, I wasn’t one of them. Though filled with my own opinions and information, I was too soft-spoken, too mild. I was an English major with a side interest in Socialism, though on a campus comprised of vines and porch swings and dinner rolls, this interest was almost impossible to sustain, for everything here was washed in a golden, female light.
None of us was in the thick of anything; in 1956 we understood that we were being kept separate from the world that mattered, the world of single-minded, odious men on Senate subcommittees with their big microphones and their slicked-back hair, and men in hotel rooms with their pressing needs. We were being preserved for some other purpose, willingly suspending ourselves like specimens in agar for four years.
When Joe first arrived at Smith that fall, he was stunned by the sheer volume of femaleness, something he hadn’t experienced since he’d lived among women in Brooklyn. But this, of course, was different: this was young and freshly showered, this was dewy and waiting and extremely responsive. This was the female equivalent of a prison full of men, all of whom would know it the moment a woman entered the prison gates. She would be palpably sensed, she would be felt through some kind of bloodhound radar; as she swished on through, the entire prison population would tremble as one. Which is exactly what we did when Joe walked into the classroom in Seelye Hall, seventeen minutes late, on the first day of classes that September.
Girls were everywhere in his view, of course; he could just as easily have plucked another one from a life of term papers, field hockey, and Saturday-night mixers, but instead he plucked me, and up I went—whoosh—without any resistance at all. The other girls were ubiquitous, chattering, equally pluckable, though they were also more patient, taking their sweet time at everything they did. A bathroom door in my dormitory would swing open to reveal a girl with a naked leg up on the sink, a razor traveling leisurely up a field of foam. They crossed the Smith campus in clusters, these girls, as though they might simply tip over if forced to stand alone. The air was congested with the scents of three dominant perfumes that joined together like distinct strains of pollen, giving the whole place the quality of some sort of nectar bar.
The men we usually had access to weren’t men at all, really; I understood that they were a rehearsal version, a softer, less demanding breed than what we’d eventually have to contend with. And they, too, were hidden far away on their own gated campuses until the weekends, when they would suddenly burst into town with their baby faces and thick necks, leaping out of their cars like soldiers on leave, following the zigzag trail of pollen and carrying some of us off to local bars, or dances, or beds.
At age nineteen, I wanted nothing to do with these boyish, slightly illegitimate men. After a couple of evenings spent in their company, drinking foamy tropical drinks shaded by tiny umbrellas, eating steak and foil-wrapped potatoes and talking dully about our postcollege plans, or about Army-McCarthy, or about whether Judge Kaufman had been too tough on those poor, sallow-faced Rosenbergs (absolutely not, the date usually said with a fist down on the tabletop and the grim, sorrowful conviction he’d probably picked up from his father), I’d decided: enough. No more drinks. No more putting on pearls, or fluffy cardigans, no more staring O-mouthed into a mirror as I applied Taste of Xanadu lip color, no more being met in the parlor of my dormitory by a galumphing boy with an outsized Adam’s apple. No more grasping, no more breasts perennially being popped from the shells of brassiere cups in the darkness of that same boy’s car, no more letting his wet and hopeful doglike face land on those breasts. For if I kept doing those things, I knew, then I would become tinier and less substantial, of no real interest to anyone, male or female, and when I finally had access to the world, it wouldn’t want me.
I’ve always had a fear of being small and ordinary. “How can I just have this one life?” I used to ask my mother incredulously when I was twelve and sat at the dining room table in our apartment in New York after school, eating a cruller. I’d delicately chew the whorls of fried dough and try to look into the windows of other apartments across the double width of Park Avenue.
My mother, an angular, worried woman whose life was spent serving on committees to organize charity dinner-dances at the Pierre and the Waldorf, didn’t really know what I was talking about, and my sudden spasms of nascent existentialism always made her anxious.
“Joan, why do you say such things?” she usually said before drifting into another room.
By the time I was in college, I was desperate to have a big effect, to tower over people, to loom, which seemed a completely unlikely possibility in the occasional moments when I saw what I’d become: a slender, hygienic Smith girl who didn’t know much about anything, and had no idea of how to learn.
English 202—Elements of Creative Writing—was held in the late afternoon on Mondays and Wednesdays. I’d heard that the class had previously been taught by a Mrs. Dymphna Worrell, who’d published flower poems (“One Sprig of Freesia,” “The Bud That Wouldn’t Bloom”) in a publication put out by the New England Horticultural Society, and who sat sucking lozenges and praising everyone’s work in the same sweeping way: “Expressive use of language!” But now Mrs. Worrell had retired to a rest home in nearby Chicopee, and none of us knew anything about her replacement except his name, which the course catalog listed as Mr. J. Castleman, M.A.
I enrolled in the class not because I imagined I was talented, but because I wished I was, though really I’d never tested it out, for fear I would be told I was average. There were twelve students in English 202, and after we’d arrived at the seminar room in Seelye Hall on the first day of class and chatted blandly for several minutes while opening our notebooks to fresh, hopeful pages, the entire classroom fell into a worried silence. Whoever J. Castleman, M.A., was, he was late.
But when he swung into the classroom at seventeen minu
tes past the hour, I wasn’t prepared for him; none of us was. He was in his mid-twenties and skinny, with uncombed black hair and high color stippling his cheeks. He was definitely handsome, but seemed to have been constructed in a slapdash manner, and his books were loosely held together by a strap, giving him the appearance of a frantic schoolboy. Professor Castleman walked with a slight limp, a hesitant scraping of one foot before it lifted off the floor.
“Sorry,” he said to the class, popping open the clip that held everything together, and releasing a burst of his belongings onto the surface of the wide, glossy table. He took from his coat pockets two handfuls of walnuts in their shell. Then he looked up and said, “But I sort of have a good excuse. My wife had a baby last night.”
I didn’t say a word, but several of the other girls began to murmur their congratulations; one said “Awww,” and another one said, “Boy or girl, Professor?”
“A girl,” he said. “Fanny. After Fanny Price.”
“The Jewish vaudeville entertainer?” someone tentatively asked.
“No, Fanny Price, from Mansfield Park,” I corrected quietly.
“Yes,” said the professor. “That’s right. Extra credit to the girl in blue.”
He looked at me gratefully, and I glanced slightly to the side, uneasy at having singled myself out. The girl in blue. My remark suddenly seemed so obviously vain and self-serving, and I could have slapped myself on the side of the head. But I had always been the kind of reader who marked up books and lent them out indiscriminately, knowing I’d never see them again but wanting friends to read them and be as thrilled by them as I was. I’d owned three copies of Mansfield Park at one time or another. For some reason, I wanted him to know all of this about me.
J. Castleman, M.A., brought from his pocket a small silver nutcracker, and then picked up a walnut. As quietly as possible he began cracking nuts and eating them. Almost reflexively, he offered them to the class, but we all shook our heads and murmured “No thanks.” He simply ate for a few moments, then closed his eyes and ran his hands through his hair.