by Meg Wolitzer
Both of our daughters had offered to accompany us to Finland, but Joe didn’t seem to want them there, so they stopped asking. They were used to this by now.
“The thing is,” Joe said to Susannah, “if you come, I’ll feel so guilty about having no time for you. I’ll worry about it. It’ll distract me. Instead, why don’t you and Mark and the boys plan on coming to Weathermill when I get back? We can spend a long weekend here. I’ll be a hundred percent available. I’ll give myself over to all of you. I’ll be your love slave.”
He had an impish look in his eye, that old-man whimsy he’d learned to do well ever since age had caught him and slowed him and damaged his heart. I felt that he would be distracted having the kids there, but that really his concerns were for himself, not them. He’d won the Helsinki Prize. He took it seriously. He wanted to savor it slowly, carefully, and not have to be distracted by making sure that everyone around him was happy, which in any family is an impossible task.
Over the years, when he’d won lesser prizes, there they’d been at the banquets and dinners and cocktail parties, his scrubbed children at various stages of childhood and adolescence. I wasn’t sure how he felt about their presence, but me, I’d loved having them around me. I’d clung to them when it all got to be too much. To be honest, I’d used them as human shields. There they’d been in their pretty little dresses, and David in his monkey suit, strangling under the knot of some green and gold slippery tie from The Boys’ Shoppe.
I’d always had a lot to drink at these celebrations, guzzling down the white wine they offered me, and the champagne, and anything else. My children could always see it, could tell the moment when my eyes became swimmy.
“Mom,” Susannah once whispered as we stood under a tent at the Academy of Arts and Letters, to which Joe had just been inducted. The wet mouthfuls of poached salmon I’d eaten at the lunch hadn’t been enough to absorb the full force of the spirits I’d consumed. I was pickled. I rocked lightly back and forth on my feet, and Susannah, age thirteen, steadied me with her hand.
“Mom,” she said a little louder, scandalized. “You’re drunk.”
“A little, honey,” I whispered back. “I’m sorry. I mean, I’m sorry if I’m embarrassing you.”
“You’re not. But let’s go somewhere,” she said, and I let her steer me away from the Big Top for a while. We walked down to the street there in uppermost Manhattan, where a few taxis loitered and a man stood smoking outside a bodega. We sat on the stoop of a building in our formal clothes and I drank a bottle of guava nectar that she bought me at the bodega, and tried to sift through the fog so I could return to the festivities.
“If you’re so miserable,” my daughter said delicately, “then why don’t you leave him, Mom?”
Oh, my darling girl, I might have said, what a good question. In her worldview, bad marriages were simply terminated, like unwanted pregnancies. She knew nothing about this subculture of women who stayed, women who couldn’t logically explain their allegiances, who held tight because it was the thing they felt most comfortable doing, the thing they actually liked. She didn’t understand the luxury of the familiar, the known: the same hump of back poking up under the cover in bed, the hair tufting in the ear. The husband. A figure you never strove toward, never worked yourself up over, but simply lived beside season upon season, which started piling up like bricks spread thick with sloppy mortar. A marriage wall would rise up between the two of you, a marriage bed, and you would lie in it gratefully.
What I actually said to Susannah was “Who said I’m miserable?”
She looked at me pointedly, silent. “When I get married, I want it to be so easy that everyone will look at us and understand exactly why we ended up with each other,” she said.
So she married a man who was different, but not, as it would turn out, satisfying. Mark was attractive, built like a whippet with a runner’s body, golden filings of hair on long tan wrists. But the man never read a book unless it was a biography of Jefferson or Franklin or a true story of an Arctic expedition; fiction was outside his realm, and so in fact was art of any kind.
Susannah was lonely; I knew that about her, could see it among all the other small trophies of unhappiness that she lined up on triumphant display for me, the way children often do, providing an entire museum of disappointments and inviting the parents in, as if to say: You see? You see how you fucked me up and what it led to? It led to this!
My daughter was a woman whose father had disappointed her. She’d made Joe clay pots over the years in art class, an endless ceramics shower in a prolonged effort to win his attention. She already had his love; love was easy. Attention was something else entirely, and how could she ever get that? She wasn’t a sex partner. She wasn’t a colleague. She wasn’t a book. She was a girl at a potter’s wheel, furiously spinning cups and bowls and plates for a father who would never drink out of them, never eat off them, but would occasionally stuff a clump of pencils in one of the mugs or shove one of the plates to the back of his desk.
Eventually Susannah stopped the pottery altogether, said it was too time-consuming, though by that point she’d quit Stengel, Mathers & Broad and was home with her boys—my adorable grandchildren—Ethan and Daniel all day.
Alice had never really tried to win Joe over in the ways that her sister had. It was as though she’d sized him up early on and realized it was impossible to capture the heart of such an egotist. Other women liked Alice, were charmed by her. She looked good, in a bracing, freshly laundered way. As an adult, she tolerated Joe, gave him hard, affectionate hugs, and was slightly more loving to me. Pam, whom she lived with now in Colorado, was perplexing to me as a life choice for Alice because she seemed so literal. She was pretty in a flattened and poreless way; her eyes were small and light. She practiced Pilates, and her cooking was superb, if you could open yourself to the wonders of all the different members of the root-vegetable family.
But of course I really did understand what Alice got from this marriage: Pam was the wife, and that was what my daughter wanted, perhaps without even knowing it.
Both our daughters were home with their families right now—one with real longing and regret, wishing she could be here with us, with him, the other not really caring all that much. David, of course, didn’t offer to come. He almost never went anywhere, but kept to a simple path each day, like a monorail: his neighborhood coffee shop, a used comic book store, a Chinese take-out place, his job, and then home again. He had no curiosity about this trip we were on; he’d asked nothing, offered no congratulations, made no inquiries. While Joe and I traveled the length of a hotel lobby in Finland, David was in his basement apartment reading one of those graphic novels he loved, with their pen-and-ink depictions of a bleak futuristic life. He’d have a white carton of Chinese food open on his lap, depositing noodles everywhere. I saw him filling himself up with oily take-out food and reading about fantastical lives and hidden postapocalyptic worlds, and occasionally confronting a strand of memory about a life that he hadn’t lived in a long time. Childhood.
I walked beside Joe now, our bodies moving together through space, neither of us looking at the other. No pure tenderness existed here; whatever we had was threaded with familiarity. As we headed with the bellmen toward a bank of dimpled-glass elevators that led to a private VIP floor, I noticed a young woman glancing at Joe with an expression of interest. She appeared nervous and tentative as she stepped forward and blurted something out in his direction.
“Mr. Yoseph Castleman, you are a wonderful writer!” she said. “My felicitations to you.”
She wasn’t beautiful, exactly, though she wore an expression of Scandinavian grace. Her hair was the color of a manila envelope.
“Thank you,” said Joe, smiling and stopping briefly. “That’s very kind.”
He extended a hand and she shook it; her hand held on, clutching his for just a little too long. Vaguely, it occurred to me that she might be a stalker, but then I remembered that I had never heard
of a Finnish stalker. Stalkers often seemed to come from the Midwest, though occasionally they rose up like swamp creatures from the wetlands of Florida. Over the years Joe had received letters from some of them, and though the men tended to be more overtly threatening, it was the women he feared most. Men were so obvious with their hostility, and if you were in danger you’d know it. Joe had been in danger more than once, and the person who had been most hostile to him was our son.
David wasn’t insane, he wasn’t psychotic, only “marginal,” only “borderline,” those catchwords for all unpredictable outsiders. And David was fragile, which meant that it was easy to knock him over, to make him lose his way.
The night that David threatened Joe, I wasn’t home; instead, I was out at Lois Ackerman’s house for a meeting of my longstanding women’s book group, which that month was reading The Golden Bowl. Joe and David were alone in the house together. It was a freezing night in upstate New York. David, in his twenties at the time, was staying in our house because his apartment had flooded and he had nowhere else to go.
To say that he was a stellar child at the beginning is to make light of his intellect, the somber way he approached everything big or small. When he was born, Joe had been thrilled to be the father of a boy, at last; a boy would save the day, would give back something of what Joe had lost when his own father had dropped dead so long ago, changing the future.
Joe often turned his attention to David in a way I’d never seen him do with the girls. They went fishing together, they played pool, they hiked Mount Cardigan in New Hampshire in heavy boots, carrying knapsacks I’d stuffed with foods they liked. Most of these activities were done in the presence of other men, usually writers. Joe rarely took David off alone; what would they have talked about, hour after hour? As a boy, David liked to pummel you with questions, one after the other, like one of those fact-crammed children’s books: Do insects have eyelids? How come you can’t tickle yourself? Why are people interested in the smell of their own farts? Joe became weary quickly, and when he returned from an outing he would hand David off to me and disappear for hours.
I’d go and visit with David in his room, sit on the side of the bed as he removed his muddy boots. “Did you guys have fun?” I’d ask, touching his head. One day, I knew, I wouldn’t be able to touch his head; one day he would flinch as though my hand were burning hot. So I’d better do all the touching I could while he was still young. He tolerated my touches but never basked in them the way the girls did. This was a boy thing, I decided. A necessary part of manhood. He just sat there patiently, waiting until I’d finished.
Like Joe, David was handsome, dark, big-headed, with black curls. Joe was thrilled by our son’s intellect, by the fact that the school had said he was a genius. When David was little, Joe often took him to bars, though I didn’t know it at the time, and our little boy played with his Hot Wheels cars in the sawdust at his father’s feet. Other famous writers and groupie types reached down and absently ruffled David’s hair; he barely seemed to register their touch, or if he did, he never felt it as affection, and he was rarely affectionate back. He lived in our midst, he did his schoolwork with alarming speed, making very few mistakes, and he went off on hiking trips with Joe and Joe’s friends, but there was no real warmth emanating from him. His sisters had always been puppyish, wanting to please, confiding in me about friends and working for hours on Valentine’s Day cards for their father, but David was cooler, more remote, less rewarding.
A psychiatrist we consulted long ago told us we were making something out of nothing. “He’s a brilliant boy,” the man said, for apparently he’d never tested a child who scored as high as David, and the Salinger’s Glass Family level of his IQ simply canceled out any possibility of his being defective. He wasn’t autistic, like the son of a poet we knew who walked around repeating fragments of phrases from TV commercials. “Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat . . .” that boy would sing, his voice high and ethereal.
David was extraordinary, we were told by everyone, and we should just leave him alone. Joe in particular was insistent that we give David enough “latitude,” as he put it, imagining, I suppose, that David would use all that space to invent, to cure, to compose, to dream. But instead he kicked another kid at school in the groin, and he upturned a cafeteria table. And once he taunted a teacher, saying she had a mustache like Hitler and that no man would ever love her. She feared it was true and called in sick every day for a week.
Off to a residential school for troubled but intelligent kids—one of those places with beanbag chairs everywhere, and “circle time,” and a full staff of therapists—David kept to himself, then graduated first in his class and miraculously was accepted to Wesleyan, thanks to some string-pulling and heavy bartering on Joe’s part. But David lasted less than four semesters; in New York City over sophomore spring break, he threatened a man with a box cutter in an East Village bar, and wound up in jail. When we went to see him, talking to him from the other side of a Plexiglas wall, David was agitated and restless, mortified to be confronted in prison by his parents. Joe kept asking how in the world David could have done this, and David understood that the subtext was “How could you have done this to me?”
“How could I do this?” David said. “What kind of a question is that?”
“It’s a reasonable question,” Joe said. “So answer it.”
“We’re concerned,” I added.
“I know you’re concerned, Mom,” David said finally, addressing me only, as if Joe weren’t there. “I fucked up, okay? I have anger issues.”
“Issues,” said Joe acidly.
“Yeah, issues,” said David.
“You don’t just have issues, you have a whole subscription,” said Joe.
David turned and walked away, facing the corner, and it wasn’t until we got him out of there that he spoke to us again. We took him back to our house that night, and he said very little over the next few days. We tried to talk about the legal situation, but he appeared mostly uninterested. When we drove him back to Middleton, Connecticut, David was eager for us to go.
“Okay,” he said, after we came inside with him. “Well, thanks for the ride. Do you need anything? Because I really should get back to things. . . .” We didn’t know it yet, but he would quit school abruptly, permanently, a few weeks later, without explanation.
That night, he wanted us to leave right away and not bother him. He was dismissing us. I was briefly insulted, but I got over it. Joe didn’t. He stood in his coat with his hands jammed into his pockets. And when we did leave, a few minutes later, David hugged me, surprising me by the sudden gesture. Joe he simply nodded to. He didn’t like his father, and maybe never had. But now the shape of the dislike seemed to be changing. I didn’t pick up on the extent of it, and neither did Joe.
Over the years, David, after he left school and moved to New York, got into occasional bar fights and confrontations with women. He would describe these scenes to me in mortified detail, as though talking about someone else entirely. He never spoke specifically about his anger at Joe. I knew that sons often raged at their father. I’d read Arthur Miller, and the usual body of Greek drama. I could picture the classic distant, towering father, and the son with the primal, unmet needs. I could imagine the passage of years, and the slow freeze on the part of the son, met eventually by the slow thaw of the father, by which point it’s far too late. Damage has been done, and the son turns away, saying “Sorry, Pop,” and leaves the old man hunched and weeping in his BarcaLounger. But I never really saw any of that in our family.
For a long time David and Joe stayed at a certain level of uneasy, mutual dislike, maybe contempt. But finally it was ratcheted up much higher. This was the night that David’s apartment became flooded, the entire place suddenly ankle deep in murky New York water. His books and newspapers were sent floating, and because he had nowhere else to go, I insisted he come stay with us.
“It’s just for a while,” I said. And so he came.
> At first the living situation went surprisingly well. The house in Weathermill is big, and David kept to himself except during meals, fixing himself fried-egg sandwiches for snacks and then going out for the night, visiting the local bars to drink and shoot pool. Old high school friends who still lived in the area would call—friends who worked at the Rexall drugstore, or for their father’s exterminating business—their voices low and hangdog on the telephone. Who were they, really? Pornographers? Drug dealers? I had no idea. My son’s world was closed to me.
The night David turned on Joe seemed peaceful enough at the start. We had dinner together, the three of us. Joe and I did most of the talking, while David offered a few monosyllables between forkfuls of steak. Nothing seemed unusual to me. When I went off to Lois Ackerman’s house for my book group, I remember feeling grateful to be going, to have a reason to get out. David was oppressive. It was a sad thing when you wanted to be away from your son, but it wasn’t a tragedy. After the drive along winding roads, when I sat down in Lois’s living room surrounded by these kind and intelligent women who shared a common interest in closely reading the books we’d forgotten all about since college, I wished I could stay there, move into Lois’s spare room. She was divorced, and clearly lonely; when she kissed everyone hello, she hugged too hard, lingered too long. She was tall, lantern-jawed, dressing in heavy turquoise jewelry she’d acquired on her solo trips to the Southwest. Lois was always solo. Her isolation was painful to her, yet very appealing at times to me. Her house seemed to be an oasis, the big bed covered in a pristine duvet, the night table with its box of French caramels, bottle of Nivea lotion, and pile of old Merchant-Ivory videos. The place was man-free. Quiet. Right now it chimed with the sounds of women’s voices. Individual words and phrases rose up from the conversation: modernity; narrative structure; Princess Casamassima.
The food was good, too, the coffee table strewn with dips and small, marinated things. I was relaxed, drinking and eating and joining in the spiraling discussion of betrayal within a marriage. I didn’t know if it was paranoia, but it seemed as though, whenever I made a comment, everyone listened more keenly, because they knew I had firsthand knowledge of betrayal. Still, I wasn’t feeling particularly betrayed at that moment.