by Meg Wolitzer
Joe nodded. “You’ll do whatever you have to,” he said. “We all do.”
Probably this lack of anxiety on Joe’s part incensed Bone; why couldn’t he get a rise out of Castleman? What did it take to register on the radar of the great novelist? Bone didn’t know yet that the men who own the world don’t get to do that by being magnanimous and overly interested in other people. They get to do it by taking care of themselves along the way. They stoke the fire of their own reputations, and sometimes other people come by, asking: What’s that you’re doing there?
Oh, stoking the fire of my reputation.
Can I help?
Certainly. Go get some wood.
Bone was furious, though he didn’t show it. A few months later he did in fact receive a large contract from a major publishing house to write an unauthorized biography of Joe, and from that moment forward, there was an uneasiness between the two men, a wariness that never shifted. A pure dislike, actually. Bone was as ubiquitous as the moon, showing up in the audience over the years at readings and panel discussions and even at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in Wales, where Joe made an appearance. There he was in one of the first few rows with his long hair and his distinctive eyeglasses.
And now, ten years after Nathaniel Bone had stood awkwardly in the kitchen of our house, here he was, slouched against a sofa cushion in the lobby of Helsinki’s Inter-Continental Hotel, once again, as always, waiting for Joe. We stood for a moment, taken aback, and looked at him.
“Oh God,” I whispered to Joe, who sighed. Suddenly, after the tense talk between us, there was a brief moment of solidarity.
“Again with the showing up,” Joe said. “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t have made any sense if he’d skipped this one, would it?”
“No,” I said. “Go to him. You have to.”
“Hello, Nathaniel,” Joe said, approaching with false pleasure. The men shook hands, and then Nathaniel kissed me on the cheek, and we all stood back for a “well, well” moment, after which Joe simply nodded, muttered vaguely, said, “Good to see you,” and turned away.
This is the prerogative of the famous. Joe walked off without thinking he’d been rude to Bone. His thoughts were already elsewhere: on the prize he’d be receiving tomorrow night at the Opera House, and the banquet that would follow, and the swoon of attention that is everyone’s dream throughout life, though most of us never achieve it, never even come close, and we feel a surge of giddiness when we so much as glimpse our own grainy image on a closed-circuit video screen in a Duane Reade drugstore. That’s me up there, we think with a sad puff of pride.
I started to follow Joe out of the lobby with a quick smile to Bone, but then I remembered that Joe had invited Irwin Clay and the people from the publishing house to come by our suite for drinks and hors d’oeuvres. I didn’t really want to be there, making small talk about Joe and the award and the various events of the week, so instead I turned and left the hotel. I was armed with a street map and so I took a walk along Mannerheim, where the shops advertised the usual assortment of delicate fabrics and Nokia cell phones as small and flat as throat lozenges. It was late afternoon and the sky had already dropped into darkness, a preparation for the sunless winter. As I walked along, someone fell into step beside me. It was Nathaniel Bone again; he’d apparently followed me out of the hotel.
“Joan,” he said, clearly desperate. “Hello! Can I maybe buy you a drink? We’re in Finland,” he added. “Don’t say no.”
As though the fact that we’d both come to this strange, northerly country might affect my decision. Oddly, I think it did. I imagined him wandering the Helsinki streets later that night, drunk and blinking, or sitting in a bar having no one to talk to, or no one who would talk to him. The Finnish language wasn’t penetrable to outsiders; it was a complex collection of aural hieroglyphics, with the stress on every first syllable, and a deep, mooing quality infusing most conversations. I am here at the end of the world, and you are here at the end of the world, the people seemed to be saying. So let us drink.
Because no one else would drink with Nathaniel Bone, I told him I would.
Chapter Five
* * *
OKAY, SO that wasn’t why I went for a drink with him. I went because it gave me a private pleasure to sit with someone Joe wouldn’t want me to sit with. Even though I said nothing of substance, nothing controversial, it still gave me pleasure. We sat in a landmark Helsinki restaurant called the Golden Onion; above our heads, a slanted window looked out over the Uspenski Cathedral.
“The onion dome,” Bone pointed out, but I was getting a little weary of all things Finnish: the domes, the planar architectural triumphs of Saarinen and Aalto, the smoked fish and clusters of hard little cloudberries, the Longfellow cadences of Kalevala. We drank vodka tonics together and talked stiffly of the trip, the various tourist sites we’d each been to, the array of people we’d met here, and how different the Finns seemed to be from every other group in Scandinavia.
“They got a bit of an inferiority complex, living under the shadow of the Soviets for so long,” Bone said. “That’s why they had to establish the Helsinki Prize in the first place. To give their country a boost, a little jolt of self-esteem. I think it’s worked pretty well, actually. Everyone here gets so excited each year when the winner comes to town, and for a few days there’s all this international focus on Finland. Everyone’s really thrilled to have Joe as their man. Myself included, I have to admit. Look, you might think I’ve got a whopping case of spite and envy, but I don’t, really. I don’t hold anything against him. He’s a great writer. He deserves what he gets.”
“Oh yes,” I said. “He does.”
“I wish I could quote you, Joan,” said Bone wistfully. “It would make my day.”
“Well, you can’t.”
“I know, I know,” he said, “but even if I could, the inflection wouldn’t be there on the page. The way you said ‘He does.’ The way it makes you sound.”
“How does it make me sound?”
“You know. Jealous,” he said, and he tossed a nut into his mouth.
In the yellowing darkness of the Golden Onion, with murmuring all around us, Nathaniel Bone and I sat with our drinks and our plates of some sort of damp, savory, rolled pancakes in front of us. He looked stranger and more sinuous than when I’d seen him last. He was middle-aged now; soon he’d be finishing the book he’d been working on intermittently for ten years, while in that same period of time Joe had published four novels.
I felt sorry for Nathaniel Bone as we sat drinking in the Golden Onion. He’d been chasing Joe for a long time, and too many years had passed and here we all were, the three of us, much older, ragged, not nearly as compelling or attractive as we used to be. Who would read Nathaniel Bone’s book when it finally came out? Maybe very few people would, although his advance ten years ago had been big, the kind of money that gets written up in media columns to show that someone has hit the jackpot in the mostly money-hemorrhaging enterprise of publishing. Because Bone’s biography of Joe was taking him much longer than he’d thought it would, enough time had elapsed to create a literary sea change.
These days Joe was a leftover from another era, still important but rapidly on his way out. Sales of his last two novels had been extremely disappointing. Big writers today were different. In addition to the usual new crop of swaggering young men, there were many more women out there. This wasn’t 1956, when I’d taken his fiction class.
The biggest woman of all was named Valerian Qaanaaq. She was a novelist who was a member of the Inuit tribe of Labrador. She was young and beautiful, with black hair, green eyes, and sharp, bright teeth. She claimed to have grown up in an igloo made of sod and snow, though already there was a backlash against her, a bitter muttering that she was a charlatan who used her looks and unusual ethnicity to get so far, that she’d only spent a few months in that igloo, and the rest of the time in an apartment with a satellite dish on the roof. She’d gone to St. Hilda’s Colleg
e, Oxford, after leaving home, and her first novel appeared when she was twenty-three. It was called Whaleskin and was about a woman whaler and the young member of Parliament who becomes obsessed with her. The novel was as long as the Bible, filled with arch, erudite, bawdy scenes, flights that took the reader from Labrador and into 10 Downing Street. The book was pan-ethnic, risky, maddening, and extraordinarily popular in the States and in Europe. Back when I was young, Valerian Qaanaaq didn’t exist, but now her novel was beloved. More than 1.5 million copies of the hardback edition had been sold. The back of the book featured a glossary of words in the Inuit-Inupik language.
She was a recent phenomenon and there were a few others in this vein: women who were writing and publishing in ways that struck me as masculine. I tried to ignore their work, for its very existence made me unhappy. Better to stay among the dinosaurs like Joe and Lev and the others. Better to be miserable and feel cheated than to welcome this new breed that I didn’t understand and for whom I had no affection.
Bone was leaning forward across the small table, his breath a warm, fermented current, saying to me, “Listen, we could talk a little bit while we’re both here in Helsinki. You could tell me things. We could meet up again, and you’d tell me the things you want people to know.”
“And what do you think those things are?” I asked.
“I won’t put words in your mouth,” he said. “It wouldn’t be right. But I know you have things to say, Joan. People have been saying that for years.”
“What people?”
“An old friend of my parents, in particular,” Bone said mildly.
“Oh? Who are you talking about?”
“A woman I knew when I was growing up in California,” he began, and from the way he drummed his fingers and pinched at his shirt front, I knew he was uncomfortable. “She lived a few blocks away with her husband,” he went on. “He was some kind of failed artist, the type who paints driftwood. She was a shrink, like both of my parents, except she was definitely out there at the time, into all kinds of alternative therapy. But I liked her. She was one of those women from the sixties with those long, dangling earrings and flowered muumuus and nutty theories about everything. She had a daughter, too. Older than me, and really dark and smart. My older brother knew her. She wrote poetry for the high school literary magazine.”
“Okay,” I said, ungrounded in the story, bewildered by it. “Go on.”
“The woman—the therapist—had been married once before,” he said. “And it had ended badly; her first husband had left her and the baby, but she’d moved on, making a new life for herself and starting a career. The first husband became famous,” he continued lightly. “A novelist.”
“Oh shit,” I said. “Not this.” Quickly, Bone looked away from me, as though he was apologetic, embarrassed about his sordid errand here. I felt equally embarrassed and found out. “Okay,” I said finally, holding up a hand. “I get it, Nathaniel. I get what you’re doing here. The suspenseful narrative. The dragging-out of the story. The big surprise ending. Well, all right, I’m surprised.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you want me to stop now? Am I out of line?”
But I shook my head; he knew that of course I would want to hear the story of what had happened to these people, the abandoned, crazy first wife, Carol, and the baby, Fanny, who had disappeared into the baked depths of California.
“Carol was smart and sort of wounded, and she said a lot of things over the years to my parents,” Bone said. “She told them all about her first husband, and how, though she used to hate him, she’d stopped. Hatred didn’t last, she said, unless you made a real effort, keeping at it, rubbing two sticks together or something. Instead of hating him, she was always kind of amused by his success, because she’d never thought he was particularly talented. But then again, she’d always add, what did she know?”
I watched Bone as he talked. He was both embarrassed and stimulated; there was nothing particularly sadistic in his demeanor. He was just excited, like a literary detective who has found an important manuscript in the bottom of a drawer and is quietly savoring it and stroking it.
Joe and I hadn’t had reason to speak often of Carol or Fanny for many years. They’d faded away like characters in a novel that has become unfashionable, and once in a while I would ask Joe about them, usually about Fanny, who would be forty-five years old by now. (That baby, forty-five!) Joe would shake his head and ask me not to bring the matter up, for it made him feel too bad. We knew where they were, and roughly what they were, but not much more. It was as though they were permanently installed in California, the mother a therapist, the daughter a lawyer. Facts were known, had been gathered over the decades, and, in recent years, with the help of the Internet. Face-to-face contact wasn’t wanted either by them or Joe. For a long time he’d tried to see Fanny, every few years, out of both curiosity and courtesy, but when she rebuffed him he was relieved.
He’d visited them once, back in the early sixties during a book tour, and he had come home from California feeling depressed, for his daughter didn’t know who he was and didn’t seem to want to know. She’d played in her sandbox in the yard in Sausalito while he’d crouched on the green wooden edge and tried to ask her questions about herself. She’d answered in monosyllables and then finally, in the way of small children, she grew too bored and simply began to sing.
The house Carol and Fanny lived in then was small but pretty, the rooms painted like the inside of a seashell. Everything had a pink glaze to it, Joe said, including Carol, and when he looked into her eyes he had no idea of who she was or how it was possible they’d ever been married. Out of context—taken from a cold climate and transplanted into a warm one—she seemed like another person entirely, and this baby they’d collaborated on appeared distant and unknowable. There was heartbreak there for Joe to feel, if he thought about it long enough, but he decided not to let himself. He’d left that seashell house and hurried home to us.
“Tell me about the daughter,” I said to Bone now. “Fanny. She’s a labor lawyer; we know that much.”
“Went to law school at Pepperdine,” he said. “Unmarried. Hardworking. Humorless, I think.”
“Joe tried to stay in contact with Fanny at first, you know,” I said, but there wasn’t real conviction to this statement. “He was busy,” I went on. “And Carol didn’t want his money; it wasn’t about child support. She wanted very little to do with him, and then he’d become a big deal, and time passed, and we had our own family. She just wanted to be done with him.”
I stopped talking, dredging up the ancient image of Fanny the baby lying beside me on Joe and Carol’s bed in Northampton. I’d told that baby: I’m falling in love with your daddy. And I’d really like to go to bed with him. And then I’d done exactly that, as though it had nothing to do with Fanny at all, or Carol, but only had to do with Joe and me, the two of us floating on a tiny island, our very own Bali Ha’i.
We were terrible. I was terrible. I’d charged ahead, distracting him from his wife and baby, although I hadn’t been able to see any of it back then, but had only heard Joe talking bitterly about the ways in which his wife denied him love, kept herself from him. He needed sexual release, he needed relentless love, he needed a woman, but Carol wasn’t that woman. I was. The wife and child receded, as though they were bit players and their moment was over. Fanny and Carol exit, stage left. Carol lifts the baby’s tiny hand and moves it back and forth in a gesture of farewell.
“Look,” I said to Bone, “I know it’s a bad story. It doesn’t make me look good, or Joe either. But there it is. All I could focus on at the time was that Carol didn’t make him happy. And anyway, she seemed crazy.”
“Yeah. Nuts,” he said, smiling. “The walnut,” he clarified. “I’ve heard the whole story from her point of view. She never thought she was actually going to hurt you when she threw it. She thought she’d just shake you up a little. Because the thing was, it wasn’t the first time.”
“
What do you mean?”
“There had been someone else, apparently. Back in New York, when they first got married,” Bone said. “A philosophy student. And apparently he gave her one of the walnuts, too. He admitted everything to Carol when she confronted him.”
“Oh,” I said, imagining a truckload of painted walnuts being distributed to different women before me and after me.
“By the time she found out about you, she was really fed up with his behavior,” Nathaniel said.
I’d always thought Carol was off-kilter, but maybe she was just furious. Sorry, I wanted to say to her. Sorry, I wanted to say to Fanny. Sorry for ruining your lives.
“Carol always felt mortified that Joe actually wrote about how she threw the walnut at you. But at least, she felt, the book was well written. That always impressed her,” said Nathaniel.
We were silent for a little while, and then he said, “I hope I’m not being too aggressive about this, Joan. I was a little apprehensive about mentioning it to Joe. But sitting here with you . . . I thought I could do it.”
“It’s all right,” I told him; I was the one doing the comforting here.
“You know, of course, I’ve read Joe’s early work,” he said suddenly. “There’s one story in particular that I dug up, ‘No Milk on Sunday,’ from that little literary magazine. I have to say, it’s not so great.”
“I know. Awful,” I agreed, and we laughed a little.
“Carol was always amazed that he’d come so far,” Nathaniel said. “She started saying that maybe Joe was able to find his voice only after he’d ditched her. Or,” he added, “after he met you. That maybe you became his muse.”
“I guess I did, in a way,” I said.