by Meg Wolitzer
“I didn’t make Lee into anything,” said Raymond. “She emerged from her mother’s womb fully formed. A pencil behind her tiny little ear.”
Was that true? Could a woman writer simply appear in the world, unconcerned about her stature, or whether she’d be laughed at or ignored? This one could. I watched Lee drink her martini; the glass was so large that she looked like a cat lapping from a bowl. She had never once asked me anything about myself or really spoken to me at all the entire time we were in Vietnam. She was one of those women who has little interest in other women, and whose light is entirely directed toward men. She didn’t like me, and so I decided: Fine. I would dislike her intensely in return.
Later, in bed at the hotel, under a slow fan in the stirred heat, I dreamed about the mother and her baby in the hut in Cam Chau, wondering how they were possibly managing, where they were, where they would go. I saw the baby’s head growing and becoming covered with hair; I watched the bones join at the place where the head was still soft and unfinished. Then I saw the mother and baby hiding in the trees, exploding in gunfire, and I saw their hut burned to the ground. And in the free-flowing logic of dreams, the mother suddenly transformed into Lee the journalist. She was drinking nondairy creamer, which inexplicably turned into napalm—Incinder gel, they called it here—as she tipped her head back to swallow.
* * *
Joe and I went to many other cities together over the decades: Rome, for he had won the Prix de Rome and we got to spend a year with our children in a palazzo, fully funded; London, because the English loved him and wanted him on their chat shows; and Paris, because his publisher there had deep pockets; and Jerusalem, for its famous book fair. There was also Tokyo, though Joe’s novels were a source of puzzlement there, the translations awkward (Overtime became, loosely, When a Man Cannot Go Home Yet but Must Be at the Office After the Others Have Left), and Joe himself was considered exotic. We went everywhere together, racking up mileage well before mileage counted for anything. We were globe-trotters, we were international; wherever Joseph Castleman’s novels appeared in translation, we went there, dropping the children with this friend or that if we weren’t able to take them along. I felt sick about leaving them, and missed them badly. We’d call home from wherever we were, and the sounds of anarchy would come through the phone, making me want to return at once. Susannah would complain, Alice would cry, begging us to come home immediately, and David would say he’d just read in a book that the world was coming to an end in five years, and was that true? Someone would drop the telephone, and there would be sounds of shouting for a while.
“They’ll be fine,” Joe would remind me, and of course he was right. When we returned they were the same as we’d left them, though maybe a little more melancholy. “It lets them know that their parents have a life,” he’d said. “So many kids have parents who don’t go anywhere, don’t do anything. At least they know their parents are in the world. I think that counts for a lot.” Year after year we traveled; he gave readings, he picked up awards, he made appearances, city after city after city.
And then finally we arrived here in Helsinki. At night the shining, quiet city sometimes possesses the atmosphere of a fraternity: young men, out for the evening, drink too much and knock into strangers on the sidewalk. Couples sit in cafes, eating sublime triangular Karelian pastries and drinking, and once in a while they slide off the chairs and onto the floor, where an unimpressed waiter lifts them up by the armpits and replaces them in their seats.
So it was no great surprise that when Joe Castleman came to Finland, he soon found himself afloat in a pond of alcohol. The reporters who came to the hotel to interview him all said yes when Joe perfunctorily offered them a drink from the enormous stocked bar in the suite, and then he had to join them. When he went to a television station to be on a morning news show, the greenroom featured a lineup of flavored vodkas. The second day, after we’d recovered from jet lag, his schedule was intense, nonstop, requiring Joe to traverse Helsinki and the surrounding regions, sometimes to show himself to the Finns, other times so they could show themselves to him. Wine was served at a small college in Jarvenpaa, where he appeared onstage before five hundred amazingly well-read students (“Tell me, Mr. Castleman, how you would compare the themes in the work of Mr. Günter Grass and Mr. Gabriel García Márquez.”). And there was a constant flow of vodka and gin at the luncheon held in an enormous sunlit room in the hypermodern Helsinki Public Library with its Möbius strip design and unusually placed pinpoints of light.
After the library lunch was over, Joe and I were taken on a tour of the rare books archives, and all of us in the party were fairly sloshed as we made our way through the stacks, led by a tiny elf of a woman who suddenly turned and recited from Kalevala, Finland’s famous nineteenth-century epic poem, which the Finns say served as the model for Longfellow’s Hiawatha. Finland, like all small countries, has its stories, its anecdotes, its pride, and it carries them openly. For without the connection to Longfellow, without the fresh fish and Sibelius and Saarinen, there is the anxiety that Finland might crack off from Scandinavia forever, falling into the sea of forgotten things. Beautiful Finland might be lost. Like Atlantis. Like me without Joe, or so I always used to think. He took my arm now, but I pulled slightly away.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. He looked at me for a moment but didn’t pursue it.
Only later, walking back through the lobby of the Inter-Continental Hotel after lunch, having been driven there by our cool, square-headed driver, Joe said to me, “Whatever’s been pissing you off so much on this trip, could it wait until we’re back in New York?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Oh, no? I thought you were looking forward to coming here.”
“I was.”
“And?”
“What do you think?” I said. “It’s a bit much. And really, Joe, this shouldn’t surprise you. But it’s not just that. It’s everything.”
“Oh. Wonderful. Delighted to hear that, Joan. Everything. So now I know that it isn’t possible for me to set things right. I’d have to take on the entire world. While we’re here in Finland I’d have to look back through our entire history together and come up with all the things that piss you off. All the hot spots in the Castleman marriage.”
“Something like that,” I said.
And then a voice called, “Joe.”
Together we turned. There on a couch in the lobby sat Nathaniel Bone, the literary critic who’d been an intermittent presence in our lives for a long time. He was around forty, still skinny as an adolescent with a long drift of brown hair and pink-rimmed eyeglasses that were hamster-effeminate. I hadn’t heard that he was coming to Helsinki, though I shouldn’t have been surprised, because he’d turned up at various places over the years. I have never trusted Nathaniel Bone, not since the first time I met him at our house in Weathermill, about ten years ago.
He had driven up from the city that day in hopes of ingratiating himself to Joe and being given the honor of calling himself Joseph Castleman’s authorized biographer. Both an unauthorized and an authorized biographer, of course, would be allowed to sit for hours with their subject, if that subject was still alive and willing, or else sit for hours in an attic working open the drawers of an old warped bureau and pawing through ancient letters and diaries, if the subject was dead. But an authorized biographer is in pig heaven. He is happy, he gloats, he rolls around leisurely, because, unlike his unsanctioned colleague, he can show his conclusions to the world instead of coyly hinting, suggesting, flirting about his findings and then not following through with proof.
Nathaniel Bone, who’d been writing to Joe since college, had been certain that he would have no trouble charming Joe in person, since he’d apparently charmed everyone else from the moment he was born, not unlike Joe himself. Bone came from a wealthy family in California, with two psychiatrists for parents and college at Yale, where he charmed the chairman of t
he English department and was permitted to write an “experimental” honors thesis combining elements of history, biography, and fiction. It was this thesis that had landed him various magazine assignments after Yale. Bone did literary profiles and book reviews, commentary on different topics from both high and low culture, the kind of pieces in which he somehow managed to mention the names Jacques Lacan and George Jetson in the course of a single paragraph.
It helped that he was good-looking in a lesser-rock-star way, though I always thought he was spineless as a sea horse, slouching whenever he entered a room. His hair was kept long and scrupulously washed. A notable thing about him was that though he did in fact charm people in positions of power, no one else particularly liked him. He had no time for ordinary people, and they had no time for him. He sucked up without subtlety to everyone he wanted something from. I could tell this right away as soon as he came to our house that day.
But another notable detail about Nathaniel Bone was that he was the first person I ever met who seemed to understand the importance of sucking up to the wife. He actually seemed to realize that if the wife of an important man did not like him, then he was fucked. And so that first day, ten years ago, when Bone was a younger man in his early thirties, and he drove upstate to meet Joe and formally discuss his proposal to be Joe’s authorized biographer, he brought me a little gift.
“Oh, wait, Mrs. Castleman,” Nathaniel Bone had said, standing in the kitchen. I’d just let him in and we were waiting for Joe to come downstairs; as it would turn out, we would wait quite a while. After he became famous, Joe seemed to like to keep people waiting. “I almost forgot.” (Yeah, right.) “This is for you.” And Bone retrieved from his back pocket a beautiful, hand-tinted postcard of some young women onstage at a Smith College skit-night performance in 1927. Northrop House Follies, read the caption.
“Northrop!” I said. “I lived there.”
“I know,” he said, smiling.
The postcard was in fact the kind of thing I might have bought for myself if I’d seen it in a bin at a flea market. It was a clever gift, but immediately I didn’t like him, felt him to be an obscure threat, and was uneasy that he was inside our house, standing in the kitchen in his jeans and snakeskin boots and casually drinking the iced sun tea I’d poured him.
Joe had had young men around him since his first book came out; they flitted and swirled and did a dance around him, although along with their excitement the men were jealous, secretly hoping to unseat Joe. Most of these young men were writing their own novels: long, rambling, “ambitious” books that weighed as much as full-term infants. Nathaniel Bone, as it would turn out, had been trying to write a novel for two years, but wasn’t succeeding. His book, he himself had realized, was too wordy. “Too full of ideas,” a friend had told him, and this was the kind of criticism that Bone could live with. “You should definitely do a book,” the friend went on, “but make it nonfiction.” So it was a short leap to bring Nathaniel Bone to the doorstep of Joseph Castleman, to whom he’d been writing since college. That first letter had been addressed to Joe care of his publisher, then forwarded, back when Bone was a sophomore at Yale:
Dear Mr. Castleman,
A few of us were sitting around the lounge at Silliman last night playing Essences, the game in which you have to guess a famous person based on certain impressionistic clues, such as: What animal is this person? And I had you in mind, Mr. Castleman, using the following clues:
What animal is this person? A panther.
What gem? Opal.
Which Beatle? John, obviously.
What musical instrument? A bassoon.
What food? A kasha knish, with hot sauce.
What part of the body? The brain.
What household appliance? An electric can opener.
I’m not sure if any of these answers will make sense to you, but I am sending them ahead with my deepest admiration for your work, which I’ve loved ever since I read The Walnut in high school.
With best regards,
Nathaniel Bone
Box 2701
Yale Station
Joe wrote back, vaguely amused by the nerviness of this young guy, thanking him for recognizing “the indisputable truth, that deep within my soul, I am but a kasha knish.” And that was supposed to be the end of it, except that Nathaniel Bone wrote to Joe again, this time not through the publisher but using the return address on Joe’s envelope, sending him an undergraduate paper he’d written about Joe’s short story “The Cigarette Tree,” a critical interpretation that struck Joe as being more intelligent than most of the reviews he’d read about his work.
“Look at this,” he’d said to me, and I’d read it too, agreeing with how smart it was, but feeling as if the real subject of the paper was not Joe’s short story at all but Nathaniel Bone’s intelligence.
And then, as the years passed, Bone continued to write from time to time, sending compliments and thoughts about a particular novel or story or essay of Joe’s. Joe always responded with a short note of thanks. I guess I ought to have seen, back then, that Nathaniel Bone was grooming himself, aiming for some sort of special place within Joe’s world, but it just didn’t occur to me. I thought he was simply a reader, a fan, a distant, foppish worshiper. But he was surprisingly persistent and scrupulous, showing off to Joe with fragments of his knowledge, preening in front of Joe, dazzling him (or trying to) even as he himself was dazzled by Joe.
And all of it eventually led to the young man standing in his snakeskin boots in our kitchen roughly a decade after he’d first written that note from New Haven. He stood nervously by the refrigerator, playing with a fruit magnet, playing with his hair, trying to appear casual and confident in the home of his favorite writer, trying to impress his favorite writer’s wife and cause her to turn to her husband late that night after Bone was gone and say something like:
“That boy. The one who came today?”
“Bone, you mean?” a sleepy Joe would reply, yawning.
“Yes.”
“He’s hardly a boy.”
“I suppose not. There’s something very engaging and intelligent about him.”
Joe would nod. “Oh yes. Bone is bright, all right. Brilliant, probably.”
“He brought me a gift, you know. A little Smith postcard from 1927.”
“That was thoughtful. He’s a serious person, I think. He might be pretty good.”
Both of us would nod, picturing young Nathaniel Bone, wondering why our own son couldn’t have turned out like him, imagining, in a way, that he was our son. The one we’d been meant to have, instead of the underachieving, angry, sometimes violent one we did have. And we’d both drift off together into a kind of placid, parental sleep, nurturing Joe’s future biographer in our minds.
But this was a fantasy: Bone’s, not ours. As much as he loved his fame, Joe didn’t like to think about being the subject of a serious biography. That would mean he would have to take measure of his life, and reconcile himself to its eventual end. He was terrified of death. More immediately, he was terrified of sleep, death’s dress rehearsal.
Other books about him had been written already: short, undistinguished volumes published by university presses, but nothing particularly insightful, nothing definitive, nothing with dirt in it, with juice. Bone’s biography would certainly be interesting; it would be very clever and garner the author a good deal of attention.
Joe said no.
The two men had gone upstairs that day at the house, and they’d sat in the study and smoked cigars, then later on they’d gone out to Schuyler’s General Store and bought Sno-Balls, and Bone had amiably eaten a pack of them, too, in a show of ritual solidarity—as though he liked them as well, as though every grown man did. They sat on the porch of Schuyler’s and ate those spongy, sugary Sno-Balls together and Bone talked about why he was the right man for the job.
“Someone’s going to do it, and it might as well be me” seemed to be the thrust of his argument. Lesser writ
ers, according to Bone, would present Castleman as a one-dimensional figure: the mournful, fatherless little kid from Brooklyn who turned into a man of letters. But because Nathaniel had taken it upon himself to make a study of Castleman’s work over all these years, he would be the only person able to infuse the biography with an authentic sense of who Joe was.
“Like that first letter I sent you a long time ago,” Bone tried. “In which I told you about the game of Essences I played, remember? What kind of tree are you, et cetera? I would show your essence in the book. And your entire readership would finally understand who you really are.”
It was that last comment, I think, that sealed it. No writer I’ve ever met wants to be understood in the way that he was suggesting.
Joe took a bite of the pink, chemical pastry in his hand; I imagined there was the barest sucking sound of the marshmallow against his teeth. He swallowed, and then said, “I think not.”
A pause. “You think not?” Bone was shocked that he was being rejected; he didn’t know what to do with this information. “There’s an old joke,” he tried. “Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Do you want a drink, sir?’ And Descartes says, ‘I think not.’ And then he disappears.”
Joe nodded, tried to smile; he wasn’t going to disappear, he’d still exist in the world even if he wasn’t written up by Nathaniel Bone. But Bone had been studying the man; he’d been painstakingly writing him letters, publishing little essays on his work, and for what? To wind up sitting on the front porch of some dark, cluttered general store in a little town in upstate New York, eating pink marshmallow-and-coconut garbage and being told no?
There was wheedling and begging. There was flattery, and then a few pathetic threats. Bone seemed about to collapse into tears, as though astonished Joe had said no, when in fact very few people had said no to him in his life.
But still Joe continued to say no, repeating his answer in a good-natured way, as many times as he needed to, until finally Nathaniel Bone was made to see that Joe wasn’t going to change his mind. Standing up, shaken, straightening himself out, brushing coconut flakes from his shirt front, Bone told Joe, “You know, the thing is, I’m sure I’ll end up writing the book anyway.”