by Meg Wolitzer
And he was right; the children would be fine without us, just the way they were during the day when we were unavailable. Usually, we stopped in at the White Horse, which inevitably gave Joe a dose of nerve, for he was always recognized there and he would engage in free-floating conversations about other writers, other books, or the buildup in Vietnam. We went to Folk City and to jazz clubs, and we listened to female poets standing at microphones, their multiple bracelets jangling like loose change as they read their quivering poems to an attentive audience.
One night Joe told me that he wanted his second novel to contain a scene with a prostitute in it.
“Prostitutes are boring,” I said. “They’re all the same. They’ve got those same terrible backgrounds: the lecherous father, the dirt road, the nowhere life.”
“They’re not boring if they’re done right,” he said, and I realized that he wanted to go visit a prostitute for research, and he wanted my permission. He wouldn’t have sex with her, he would just ask her questions, trying to understand what it meant to be a woman who did what she did. The prostitute would need to be conveyed realistically, otherwise that section of the new novel, Joe explained, would feel pulpy and lurid. “You can come with me, Joan,” he said. “In fact, I wish you would.”
And so I went, wearing a powder blue cloth coat and carrying my little purse. We climbed the stairs of a small apartment building downtown near the Hudson River; the breezes brought in fresh shipments of garbage-stink. One of Joe’s friends, a dissipated writer he knew from the White Horse, had arranged the visit. The prostitute’s name was Brenda, and her hair was swirled into a blond beehive and she wore Capri pants and a man’s shirt. Her face was rough and thick with makeup. She sat on an armchair and said, “What is it you want to know?” Her toenails, in their sandals, were painted milk white.
“So how did you get your start, Brenda?” Joe asked her, trying for familiarity.
Brenda paused, lighting a cigarette. “My sister Anita was in the business,” she said, “and she always had cash to buy clothes with and whatnot. Our mother never had spending money, and she used to sew us these homemade dresses with big puffy sleeves that I hated. I wanted something more, and Anita had it. She’d come home with these dresses and strappy shoes, and all I wanted was clothes like that. She told me to follow her lead, and I did. I didn’t like it at first, all those fellows with hair growing on their back, some of them smelling like garlic or whatnot, but after a while I began to make lists in my head when I was lying there. I would make lists of all the things I had to do later, and of all the things I wanted to buy myself: the dresses, and the shoes, the stockings. And pretty soon the guy would make that little sound, and I would know he was finished and I could get up and go about my business and whatnot.”
“What about pregnancy?” I suddenly asked, imagining the sperm of these garlicky men starting their mindless swim upstream. Joe nodded to me gratefully when I asked this, because the question would never have occurred to him.
“Well, I’ve had three accidents,” Brenda said, “and each time I had it dealt with, you know? One of the other girls knows a doctor in Jersey City, and that’s where everyone goes. First time I bled so much Dr. Tom got scared it wouldn’t stop, and he wanted me to go to an emergency room and say I had done it to myself with a coat hanger, but I refused to leave, and thank God the bleeding stopped on its own.”
As she spoke, Joe was scrawling notes in a little pocket spiral notebook. He was like a reporter, never trusting that a novelist could remember all he needed to when the time came to put everything down on paper, never trusting that the gelatin of art could contain and suspend it all. So he had notes about everything people said, jottings about styles of dress and moles that speckled people’s cheeks, and about an interesting argument we’d once heard blooming between a man and a woman in a Chinese restaurant.
Brenda eventually appeared as Wanda, the fragile prostitute in Overtime, Joe’s second novel. He had gone back to see her after that first meeting, and I had declined to go with him then. Maybe I knew that he wanted to go to bed with her that night, something that he would have furiously denied. I pictured Joe and that sexy but mangy woman, her head craned backward in a position that wouldn’t destroy her beehive. Her toes, painted that peculiar, shellacked shade of white, wouldn’t splay out the way people’s toes did in orgasm, for there would be no orgasm, not with one of these customers, not ever. Joe was doing research, he’d tell himself as he tucked in his shirt afterward and hurried down the stairs, past the hamburgers spitting on the stoves in other apartments, past the half-heard voices, and even though Brenda had been depressed and forgettable, the experience would have given him an odd kind of charge.
These men, who have so much, need so much to sustain themselves. They are all appetite, it sometimes seems, all wide mouth and roaring stomach. Joe prowled around, just like Nathaniel Bone the critic said; I knew this, and I also knew that other people knew it, too, and that they assumed I didn’t know it. Our friends would look at me with a kind of pity, thinking I was innocent and trusting. But really, it gave me more power to know something like this and yet do nothing about it. What could I do, anyway? We had some fights: I accused and he denied and then we dropped it and went on.
I accompanied him whenever he asked. I posed questions to the people we met, and he took notes. We did this repeatedly over the years, not just with Brenda the prostitute but also with a fisherman at the seaport, and a vacuum-cleaner salesman, who later appeared as the character Mike Bick in I Hardly Knew You, that not-entirely-successful short novel from the mid-seventies. We paid for child care all over the place, though when Susannah turned thirteen she was put in charge of the others.
Lev Bresner’s wife, Tosha, that tiny woman with the number stamped on her arm and the black-olive eyes of a Chihuahua, could not imagine how I allowed myself to “join in,” as she put it. All she wanted, she said, was to be left alone, to be allowed to go off somewhere with her women friends, to shop at a department store and have lunch with them and sit down with her shopping bags all around her and laugh.
“The men!” she said. “No offense, but how can you stand them, Joan? They just talk and talk and never shut themselves up.”
This was true; they talked day and night, as though inside them an endless scroll of paper were unraveling out through the mouth. They were so arrogant! So certain of themselves, even when they were wrong. Why couldn’t women be that way? (A few years later, of course, when feminism became such a force, the women would talk and talk in voices louder than the men’s, smoking furiously, gathering in living rooms and comparing notes on the satisfactions of the handheld vibrator and the horror of housework, and much more.)
I could have been like Joe if I’d wanted to. I could have swaggered around; I could have been hostile, lyrical, filled with ideas, a show-off, a buzzing neon sign. I could have been the female version of him, and therefore not lovable but repellent. Or else I could have dazzled with my erudition and charisma and connection to a potent man. But I wasn’t Mary McCarthy or Lillian Hellman. I didn’t want the attention; it made me skittish and unsure. What a relief it was to see the spotlight tilt its cone toward Joe.
“What about your own writing?” a few people sometimes asked me kindly, the ones who knew that once upon a time I’d written a few decent undergraduate stories, and that in fact Joe and I had met in his classroom.
“Oh, I don’t write anymore,” I’d say.
“Joan is extremely busy,” Joe would add, “baby-sitting for my ego.” There would be laughter, after which Joe would lightly mention the charity that occupied some of my time. It was a refugee organization called RSA, and I’d gotten involved with it in the late 1970s. Someone, usually one of the other wives, would persist in asking if she could read anything I’d written in college, and I’d say no, no, nothing I’d done had been given a chance to mature, all of it would be completely mortifying to me if I looked at it now.
The things I used to w
rite were nothing like the writing of these men. The men’s prose spread out on the page, sprawled leisurely like someone having a bath and a shave and then yawning, arms outstretched. Male novelists made up words in their fiction: “phallomaterialism”; “ero-tectonics.” They wrote about themselves, not even bothering to change autobiographical details. What would be the point? They weren’t afraid to have alter egos; they weren’t afraid to have egos. They owned the world, remember, and everything in it.
I didn’t own the world; no one had offered it to me. I didn’t want to be a “lady writer,” a word-painter in watercolors, or on the other hand a crazy woman, a ball-breaker, a handful. I didn’t want to be Elaine Mozell, the one who had warned me a long time ago. She’d been loud and lonely, and she’d faded from view.
I had no idea who could love a show-off woman writer. What sort of man would stay with her and not be threatened by her excesses, her rage, her spirit, her skill? Who was he, this phantom, unthreatened husband who was still attractive and strong himself? Maybe he lived under a rock somewhere, sliding out once in a while to celebrate the big ideas of his brilliant wife, before returning to the shadows.
His big ideas, of course, carried us far. Once, in mid-sixties, I went to Vietnam with him. A cluster of writers and reporters would be traveling to Saigon for an informational tour of the region and Joe was among those invited. Most of the writers had been sent by newspapers and magazines. This was back in a time when your editor would say with a shrug, “Sure, why not, go ahead, write a long piece; use as many words as you need.” War had never been a subject of great fluency for Joe. Wars existed on the outskirts of his fiction, both Korea and World War II and, later, Vietnam, though the men in his novels personally never made it past training camp. One of them, Michael Denbold in The Walnut, shot himself accidentally in the foot, just like Joe had done. Joe’s characters were both frightened and excited by guns. They hated and were thrilled by the dreadful, heavy feel of them in their arms; it made their hearts race and left them helpless, the same way, later on, they would love and be frightened by the feel of their babies in their arms.
Just as Joe was uncomfortable during his brief stint in the army during the Korean War, he also wasn’t entirely comfortable in the fictional fields of war. He read everything on it that he could, all hawkish and leftist views, and went to antiwar meetings and demonstrations, where once he was pushed to the ground and trampled on, and though some of his characters worried openly about how we would ever extricate ourselves from Southeast Asia, they never became obsessed with it.
Like everyone we knew, we did what we could to protest the war. We signed, and we worked, and we brought our children with us to storefront offices to make calls and type letters. We used mimeographs, the purple ink getting all over us, the place smelling like a schoolroom, and we headed down to D.C. in a long, fossilized traffic jam of cars. The children cried in the backseat, and we pushed them on the Mall in strollers while they begged for juice, their faces blazing with heat, and Joe was among the writers who stood up and screamed into screechy, inadequate mikes.
But back then, Vietnam still felt fresh to us, a new, terrible subject to learn about, with a crash course in geography required, and Joe needed me with him, so I went. Our kids stayed behind with the boisterous, arty, menagerielike family of one of Alice’s friends, who simply absorbed them into their household without seeming to notice, and off Joe and I went on an Air France flight. “They’ll be fine,” Joe said, a father’s refrain, based on nothing except the intolerance of the possibility of disaster, and then there we were, standing on an airstrip in Bangkok during our stopover. I wore a kerchief on my head and wraparound sunglasses, a look favored by wives of that era.
There were a few other women along, and all of us gathered together except for one, a journalist who had cast her lot with the men, standing in a clutch of them and speaking in an animated fashion, though I couldn’t hear her words over the stuttering choppers and cargo planes and delivery trucks that wove through the airstrip. Her name was Lee, and she was a serious, clever writer who seemed unconcerned about her minority status in this male world.
It was as though there were a box I kept under a bed and pulled out only once in a while, and in this box were crammed Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman and Carson McCullers and now Lee the journalist. If I opened the lid, their heads would pop out like jack-in-the-box clowns on springs, mocking me, reminding me that they existed, that women could occasionally become important writers with formidable careers, and that maybe I could have done it if I’d tried. But instead I was standing with the wives, the kerchief-wearers, all of us holding ourselves in a way we’d grown accustomed to, arms folded, purses slung over shoulders, eyes flicking left and right to keep watch over our husbands.
I shouldn’t be here! I wanted to cry. I’m not like the rest of them! I wanted to be beside this woman Lee, to feel a confidence in the middle of this hectic and alien place. But somehow the men and the famous woman journalist were on one side, and all the other women were on the other side. The wives and I stood talking and clutching our kerchiefs so they weren’t ripped from our heads in the wind. Lee wore nothing on her head; her hair was black and loose.
A while later we were off to Saigon, landing in the midst of smoggy honky-tonk central, with street carts selling watches and cigarettes and firecrackers in cheerfully colored paper wrappers that reminded me of taffy for sale on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Cyclos drove past with their solitary passengers riding through the spoiled streets past restaurants of all ethnicities. I imagined unclean, tiny kitchens in the back with blackened pots on stoves, and ancient Vietnamese women ladling some sort of generic, clouded broth. It was February, hot, mosquito-addled, my nylons sucking against my legs. A bus was supposed to have met us on the street, but it hadn’t come yet, and so all the Americans clustered together, quickly overcome by little children who wanted money or who cheerfully offered to supply the men among us with “extra-discount fucks.” Joe looked uneasily amused as he shooed them away, but they kept returning, pulling on the men’s sleeves and trouser legs.
The next day our junket of journalists went out in helicopters over the trees and leafy fields to the west of the city, and as I sat with Joe and Lee and her husband, Raymond—also a journalist, though unknown—the four of us in pith helmets and headphones and sunglasses, I felt that the helicopter was no more than just another cyclo carrying the privileged above the mess. Small airplanes continually dove and dropped their bombs into the greenery and then lifted again, and Joe and Lee and Raymond took notes in their pads, discussing the Viet Cong in knowing voices, though really all of us were just tourists, letting ourselves absorb everything we needed to know in order to go back to the States seeming knowledgeable.
We toured a refugee camp in Cam Chau, one that was considered temporary, and the filth there was head-breaking. A few pigs wandered around, scavenging for anything edible in the piles of garbage and waste. A woman was enduring childbirth inside her hut, screaming nonstop; the medic taking care of her kept asking the rest of us for sterilized water, please, please, he said, but there was none. The conversation went on and on, like dialogue in an absurdist drama:
“Water! Water! Sterile water!”
“No, we have no water.”
“Water! Water! Sterile water!”
“No, we have no water.”
There was almost no water whatsoever for this camp of two thousand people. In the doorway, a child stood watching mildly. The laboring woman continued screaming the same words over and over, and finally I asked one of the tour leaders for a translation.
“She say she want to die, because she is in so much pain she feel like a dog,” he explained. “She say please shoot her like a dog.”
Because no one told me not to, I went over and held the woman’s hand. Her eyes swiveled to mine, and I held her hand. Together we squeezed hands as her baby crowned. “Crowning,” what a crazy word, I thought as the skull came through the wide
ning space with its flat black hair painted onto the head, the webbing of infinitesimal veins showing, and then the shoulders being turned and eased out by the medic, and then the mother holding her own baby’s hand. He had crowned, but he was no king; he’d have to live in the rathole of Cam Chau forever. No one found sterilized water. Someone did bring a small plastic container of nondairy creamer, though, and the mother tilted back her head and drank it. The baby was attached to her breast and he drank, too, and though I wanted to stay, wanted to help if I possibly could, the men said we had to go, it was time to leave for the Marine Press Base, where we were all promised a four-star dinner.
The rest of the tour of Vietnam was a carousel of cheerful propaganda; on a nuclear carrier we were assured that they only hit military targets in the north, nothing more, but all of us were narrow-eyed and unconvinced.
“I hope you’ve been taking it all in,” Joe said on our last night, as we sat in a dining room drinking martinis from big frozen glasses whose shape reminded me of the inverted, shellacked straw hats of the cyclo drivers.
“I’ve been trying,” I said, looking out at the moon-bright Saigon night, the fronds shuffling together, and listening to a phonograph elsewhere on the base that was playing the swooning pop song “Town Without Pity.” All the American writers huddled together at this final dinner, eating everything that was put before us, the bloody steaks, the twice-baked potatoes, some of the group already turning experiences into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs.
“Joan and I are a team,” Joe was saying to the other people at our table. “She’s my eyes and ears. Without her I would be nowhere.”
“You’re a lucky man,” said Raymond, the chinless husband of glamorous Lee the journalist.
“I found him in an alley,” I explained gamely. “He was all bent out of shape. Down and out.” Joe always liked when I said such things.
“Yeah, she picked me up and dusted me off,” he put in, “and made me into what I am today.”