by Meg Wolitzer
“So you won’t meet him?” I asked my mother.
“Oh, really, what do you think, Joan?” she said, and it was true that the prospect of a sit-down with Joe and my parents was horrible no matter how you looked at it. He would see two skeletons clutching highballs; they would see a fast-talking garment salesman with a penis as big as a loaf of challah. No, they could never meet.
But of course they did meet, much later on, when everything had settled down, or had gotten all charged up, depending on how you looked at it, and Joe’s place in the world was unshakable. They actually wanted to know him then, for the only famous writer they’d ever met was Thornton Wilder, who as a favor to a friend in the 1940s had spoken at my father’s club, giving an eight-minute ramble about the state of the American theater, and then fled.
But for now, before his success, Joe was still the Jewish rapist, and I was still the girl who improbably loved him. I left my parents’ apartment, walking down Park Avenue, which now looked as empty and charmless as my parents’ living room. I was sprung; that I knew. But if I was truly going to be on my own with Joe, then what I’d said to my mother simply had to come true. Joe needed to be talented; he needed to be brilliant. It would cancel out his Jewishness, the unsavory scraps of his adultery, the crappy room he’d rented for us, and all the other flaws and disappointments that surrounded him.
Maybe he really was a talented writer. Maybe I couldn’t see it, because I wasn’t talented enough myself. But he’d told me I was; that was partly why he took me to New York with him. It wasn’t only about going to bed with me; he could have had that with many other girls, who would have happily simpered and opened their legs. He just had to be talented; it would pick us up by our bootstraps, it would satisfy Joe once and for all and let him feel at ease beside me, at ease among other men; it would also make a point, pleasing my mother and my father, even if my mother insisted she wouldn’t feel “one iota” different. Iota; what a strange word, I thought as I walked over to Lexington and climbed on the train, heading back downtown. No one ever said “two iotas,” it was always one. Language only felt infinite; instead, everyone swam through surprisingly narrow channels when they spoke or wrote.
Iotas were dancing inside me, along with other things: my mother’s words, so vulgar and crabbed; my grandiose dreams of greatness for Joe. He would be a writer; the hopes I had for him were like the hopes men had for themselves: to conquer, to crush and astound. I didn’t particularly want to do any of that myself; it didn’t even occur to me that I could. I kept thinking of Elaine Mozell, and how she’d tried to make her way among the men. Elaine with her drink held loosely in her hand, and her slightly sloppy lipstick. I didn’t want to play in the same field as the men; it would never be comfortable, and I couldn’t compete. My world wasn’t big enough, wide enough, dramatic enough, and my subjects were few. I knew my limits.
By the time I got back to the Waverly Arms, a sort of miracle had occurred. It was as though Joe had been intuiting my new catalog of hopes for him, for when I let myself into the room, he stood and waved two masses of papers at me.
“What’s this?” I asked, knowing full well.
“The first twenty-one pages of The Walnut.”
“I see. The Walnut,” I said. “So I guess it’s a novel about someone working in a walnut factory? A gritty look at the world of walnut laborers?”
Joe laughed. “Oh, yeah. It’s going to stand the walnut-packing industry on its head,” he said. He pulled me down onto the bed and lifted my hand, guiding it slowly, lowering it onto his pages. “You,” he said. “Read.”
Chapter Four
* * *
SO THEN HE was king. It happened quickly, the way these things do: one minute you’re tugging a sheet of paper from your typewriter and pulling at the skin of your lips and muttering I hate myself, I hate myself, then the next minute there’s a royal bugler at your door unscrolling a proclamation that makes your ascendance official.
And yes, he ascended, a straight shot upward, no qualms, no second thoughts, none of those late-night fears that sometimes terrorize young writers: What if everything’s different now? What if we’re different?
Joe wanted everything to be different, and so did I. Filth was boring, and so was a diet of egg foo yung. A man needed to have something to grab on to, something that made him feel fine about himself, or else every failure that had ever struck him in his lifetime would come creeping back, all the math tests, the ejaculations that didn’t wait for their cue, and the halfhearted reprimands of a gentle, depressed shoe-salesman father whose face could barely be remembered after the assault of time. An unsold novel was just one more failure.
But an enormously successful novel was a thing of beauty, and Joe and I jumped and slapped each other’s back and dove into the bed and out into the street and talked of nothing else but the book, and him, and the reviews, and “the future,” that nebulous hallway. In the winter of 1958 we moved from our room at the Waverly Arms into a real apartment on Charles Street off Greenwich Avenue with its own bathroom and high ceilings and wide-beamed floors, the kind of place where a successful young writer should live.
Writers need light. They always tell you this, as though they’re parched, as though they’re plants, as though the page they’re working on would look completely different with a southern exposure. Writers need light, and the place on Charles Street was flooded; we had light, we had heat, we had a continuous drip of money for the first time since we’d been together. We clung and drank and collected new friends at every book party and reading and dinner we were invited to. My doubts about having left Smith disappeared. We were having fun. Mostly, the quality of our life had changed so greatly because of what he had been given. Sometimes I thought of it as a crown, at other times a key: a way inside the vast world of broad-shouldered writers. And in this world, the men feasted and drank until all hours, though once in a while they were summoned to stand up on stages and speak.
Joe loved this part best of all. While I watched, beaming nervously, nodding, he leaped up onto every stage, clutching the trim first novel that had gotten him there. Whenever he gave readings in those early days, he often repeated what he’d said at a reading the night before, having plotted and planned his entire set of remarks down to the jokes, the casual, off-the-cuff type of patter, and even the ritual sipping of water.
One night in New York City during that first year, Joe was appearing somewhere, I think it was the Ninety-second Street Y, though I’m not positive; the grand auditoriums have all come together in my memory by now as one enormous chamber with thousands of rows. I wore a blue velvet dress—that part I’m sure of—and no makeup, my hair pulled back in a ribbon. It was one of Joe’s first readings and I was sick with overstimulation, retching into a toilet in the women’s rest room, and was then so embarrassed about it that I didn’t come out of the stall for a while. I just knelt on the floor, listening as two women stood at the sinks and talked about Joe.
“The Walnut is my favorite book this year. And I hear he’s an awfully good reader,” one said. “My friend Elise heard him read last week.”
“Oh yes,” said the other, “and he’s very attractive. I just want to eat him up like a dish of ice cream.”
“But you can’t. He’s taken,” said the first one.
“So?” said the second, and they both began laughing.
At which point I forced myself to emerge from the stall, letting the door swing wide as if I were a gunslinger in a Western, bursting into a saloon. But the women paid no attention to me. I wasn’t a threat, with my pale cloth coat and anemic good looks. I had the appearance of someone who’s already landed the man she wants; they were two women still leisurely searching and enjoying themselves.
One woman was dark, with a sheet of black hair and olive skin. The other was fair and freckled, with improbably large breasts. I could imagine her nipples like twin pale snouts, poking into Joe’s delighted face.
Which woman would he choose? I
t seemed important that I be able to tell, that I know what he would like, so that in the future I could block him, distract him, keep him from his ideal.
Foolishly, I spoke to these women. “You know,” I said, “I’m so glad you both enjoy Joe’s work.”
“Pardon?” said one.
“Oh my God,” said the other one quietly, under her breath.
“Wait, Joseph Castleman is your husband?” said the dark one.
“Yes,” I said.
“He’s wonderful,” said the light one. “You must be really proud of him.”
“Yes,” I said, washing my hands. The water splattered out boiling hot, but I didn’t even pull my hands away. It was as though I wanted to poach my hands right there in front of these two young women.
“Is he writing something new?” dark asked.
“Yes,” I said. “A second novel.”
“That’s great,” said light. “We’re really looking forward to hearing him read tonight.”
Then they were gone, and the bathroom door hadn’t even shut all the way before I could hear their whispering and laughter. I knew what I was up against, that women would fling themselves at him like lemmings who had a love-wish instead of a death-wish. Adorable lemmings batting their eyelashes and trying to open his pants with their sharp little claws. I knew it, because in a way I had been one of them, and before me there had certainly been others. I just assumed, though, based on no evidence whatsoever, that Joe had learned by now to refuse the other lemmings, to gently pull their claws from his shirt, and that he would continue to refuse them as time went on, because now he had me, and I was different.
Onstage, Joe read the first chapter of The Walnut, in which Michael Denbold, a literature instructor at a small women’s college in Connecticut, meets Susan Lowe, his most promising student; so begins an intense sexual relationship with her, during which he ultimately abandons his wife, Deirdre, an unhinged ceramicist, and their new baby boy. His novel was splayed open on the sloped surface, and he drank glasses of water throughout the evening because the novelty of giving readings excited him so much that his mouth dried out and his speech was filled with spitless ticking sounds, and he needed to drink and drink like a baby goat.
The audience ate him up, just like those girls had wanted to. The young men longed to be like him, and went home with a new resolve to work on their own novels; and the women, for the most part, wished they could have some piece of him, the edge of a sleeve, the tip of a finger, the thick feathering of an eyebrow, something that could be theirs for good. They admired him, wished he would hunch over a typewriter in their apartment, smoke a cigarette in their bed, spread himself across them so easily and casually, the way he did across me.
I sat in the front row, holding his briefcase that had carried his book and notes, listening to the words with pride, flinching slightly when he read a line I didn’t love, and stirring pleasurably in my chair when he read one I did. This is his briefcase, I wanted to announce to the people sitting around me, especially the young women from the bathroom, to whom I also wanted to add, Fuck you both, with your cinched waists and your batting eyes. After he’d been introduced, Joe sprang forward and bounded up the steps onto the stage, as eager and harried as he’d been the first day of class at Smith, but now possessing some new kind of fizz that would have been inappropriate if he hadn’t just become so famous.
Later, at the reception, I watched as the two dark and light women flanked him, saw his eyes dart from side to side, saw how his hand cradled his drink, and his back arched slightly and stretched. Hal Wellman, my boss and now Joe’s editor, was standing beside me, watching me look at Joe, and in a kind voice he said, “Don’t worry about that.”
I turned to him. “No?”
“No,” said Hal. He was tired, a big, stooped, ruddy man who had to catch a train at Grand Central soon. “Look, he’s feeling pretty full of himself. Anybody would.”
We stood together watching Joe and the women, saw the light one pull out a copy of The Walnut and ask him to sign it. The dark one offered up a pen, and then Joe said something that was apparently so hilarious that the dark one opened her mouth and basically shrieked, and the light one clapped her hands to her face.
“But still,” I said to Hal. “It’s not a pretty sight.”
“No,” he said. “It’s not. So you know what, Joan? Let’s get you a big glass of wine.”
Throughout the rest of the reception, Hal stayed beside me. We drank together, watching Joe and providing a mildly ironic commentary, and then finally Hal looked at his watch and announced he had a train to catch.
Over the next few decades Joe followed him to three different publishing houses, until Hal’s death from a cerebral hemorrhage in his office, his head down on a pile of unread manuscripts. But for as many years as I needed him, Hal had stayed with me at those cocktail parties, protecting me from something vague and threatening that was always in the room.
That night at the Y, after the reading and the reception and the small dinner afterward at a French restaurant in the neighborhood, Joe and I came home to our Village apartment loopy and a little sickish. There was garlic on our breath and a pickling dose of wine that audibly sloshed around inside us when we moved, and so we fell onto the bed, side by side, not touching.
“You know what?” he said. “I’m a famous person.”
“That you are.”
“I don’t feel famous,” he went on. “I just feel like myself. It’s really no different from teaching English to a bunch of silly girls. When you walk into a room, everyone looks at you. Big deal.”
“I wasn’t a silly girl.”
“No, you weren’t, not at all,” he said, and I heard the indulgence in his voice. He lay on his back, stuffed and drunk and taking the pulse of his fame, listening for its sprightly gallop. I thought about the two women at the reading, their darkness and light, their interest in him, and his interest in return.
“What’s the matter?” he asked me.
“Nothing,” I said, and this was the same answer I would continue to give over the years, with notable, occasional exceptions when I accused him of betrayals and cried. Mostly, “nothing” became my mantra. Nothing was wrong, nothing at all. Or at least, if anything was wrong, I’d asked for it. I’d asked for him and all his problems. I’d demanded him, and here he was, mine. His divorce had come through when The Walnut was still in page proofs, and we’d gotten married shortly before its publication.
That fall, when Life magazine did a feature on today’s bumper crop of new writers, Joe was the one they favored with an entire page. Amid photos of Khrushchev, and Ike and Mamie, and rural Southern children picking peaches, and teenaged couples locked in some ephemeral dance craze, there was a picture of Joe walking down the street with a cigarette in his hand, his face screwed into an expression suggesting deep thought. There, too, was Joe at the White Horse Tavern, talking to some other writer who was seen only from behind.
The Walnut had been written in the kind of first-novel, foaming fever that never repeats itself, no matter how hard a writer tries to re-create the recipe, the sleepless jangle, the effluvium of words. When the novel was finally done, we’d celebrated at the Grand Ticino, and the next day I bound the pages up in a thick rubber band and brought them to work with me at Bower & Leeds, where, mumbling and blushing, I placed the manuscript on Hal Wellman’s desk, telling him he really ought to take a look at it, but not saying anything more.
That night, I saw Hal carry the manuscript home with him. I imagined it tucked under his arm as he boarded the commuter train to Rye, pictured him unsnapping the rubber band and leaning back against his seat to read. Then, later, I saw him in the living room of his Tudor house, stationed in an easy chair with a drink in his hand. I saw his children hanging on to him, trying to pull him down onto the floor for a ride, but he would resist them. The lure of The Walnut was just too strong, the siren song of this undiscovered writer. A virgin.
Virgin writers have
a sheen to them, a layer of something that comes off on your fingers when you touch it, like powder from a moth’s wing. A virgin writer still has a chance to surprise you, to club you over the head with his brute brilliance. He can become anything you need him to be. Joe was a very good specimen, with a clear, clean-lined book that had plenty of hubris and thoughtfulness behind it. And he was handsome and rumpled, with eyes that looked tired all the time; journalists sometimes commented on that, and he would tell them about not sleeping. Tired and sad and wise. Wise: I’ve always hated that word; it’s so overused, as though weary, successful people somehow have secret access to larger truths.
Hal Wellman seemed to think this was the case with Joe. Hal read the manuscript of The Walnut that first night at home, and he said he just had to read on, he had to stay with it, he couldn’t stop, because it was just too mesmerizing. Apparently he laughed out loud in a series of harsh barks, and Mrs. Wellman came in from the kitchen because she feared her husband was choking.
So Hal, not knowing that the author was the man I lived with, offered to buy the book for $2,500. I confessed to where I had gotten the manuscript, but Hal didn’t mind; he published the novel the following fall. I could say here that I was surprised that it all worked out so well, but actually I wasn’t. I knew the novel was good in a confessional, artful way. I’d been reading the slush pile, after all; I’d been reading Courage, Be My Guide and Mrs. Dingle’s Secret, but I’d also been reading the books that we actually published at Bower & Leeds, and while some of them were terrific—“powerful and riveting,” we editorial assistants routinely wrote as part of the flap copy—many were dull and just waiting to be dumped into remainder bins. There were World War II and Korean War stories, and there were gentle meditations by women on the nature of love. There were children’s books with their soothing nursery cadences, and glossy books of photographs of Morocco and other exotic locales, meant to be placed on someone’s coffee table beside a bowl of mints. But The Walnut was different.