The Wife

by Meg Wolitzer

  You sound bitter, Bone would say.

  That’s because I am, I would tell him.

  Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else.

  “Listen,” we say. “Everything will be okay.”

  And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is.

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  DRUNK; Joe and I were drunk in a way that is allowed, even expected, following moments of great, preening triumph. You would have seen us in that Opera House at the banquet and thought, from the way he leaned in to whomever he was talking to, and tilted his head and slapped his knee, that we too were Finns. Drunken Finns, trying to forget the encroaching half-year of darkness; happy Finns; carefree Finns—Huckleberry Finns. Joe had received his award and given his remarks and we’d spent the evening at the banquet, circulating, being circulated around, meeting the luminaries of not only the Scandinavian countries but also the clusters of novelists, journalists, and publishers who’d been imported from London, Paris, Rome. The ceilings were high in the Opera House’s atrium, where extremely long tables had been set up and draped in linen, and the acoustics amplified the excited, multilingual jabber. Toasts took place in many languages, without interpreters, and Joe and I smiled and raised our glasses along with everyone else, never really knowing what we were toasting, what we were signing on for, what we were gamely laughing at.

  The president and his wife left early; someone mentioned in passing that Kristian liked to watch Sky TV every night and then go right to sleep, and that he never deviated from this strict routine, not even once a year for the winner of the Helsinki Prize. I wanted to say to his wife, “Oh, couldn’t you stay on without him?” but it was too late, they’d been swept away, back down those marble steps and perhaps into some waiting coach driven by reindeer.

  Hours later, Joe and I finally left, too, in the company of two dozen agreeable publishers and writers and dignitaries who begged Joe not to end the evening just yet, but to let it go on and on a bit longer, this one special night that, like Passover, was different from all other Finnish nights. Passover, a holiday that few of these people would know a good deal about. (“Yes, yes, that is the one on which the Yewish people recline, no?”) They were charming and lively, wanting to discuss American fiction and geopolitics with Joe, wanting to talk more about terrorism and anxiety about the future. In a fleet of limousines, we rode off to a very old, classic brasserie in the middle of the city; the management had been told we would be coming, and was prepared, for when we arrived the rooms were festooned with flowers and ornaments and brightly lit ice mountains on which crayfish lay, but none of us could eat much, for the banquet earlier had been an embarrassment of riches, with bricks of foie gras and individual game birds and a geometrical array of cheeses.

  Some of the members of the Finnish Academy were now patiently teaching Joe the opening lines of Kalevala in both Finnish and English. Slurring, they looped their arms around one another and recited. Joe was in the middle of the crowd, beaming, impish, his voice louder than anyone’s. He’d eaten too much tonight; I’d seen him shoveling in the solid blocks of trans fats and animal flesh with its scorched jackets of skin, and cheese upon cheese, followed by the best wines of the world, the bottles brought up from deep down inside some Nordic cellar. I’d watched him pack it in earlier, saw him with his mouth open so wide that I could view his dental history, the silver and the gold packed into the hollows, and the long, dark throat that led down toward his imperfect heart with its secondhand valve.

  Our business was almost done, I thought as I tossed back another drink and watched him. Our entire transaction was nearly complete, the endless exchange of fluids, of vital information, the creation of children, the buying of cars, the taking of vacations, the winning of prizes in far-flung places. The winning of this prize. The effort of it all: God, what effort. Enough already, I should say to him. Enough of this. Let me go now, and not have to wake up beside your satisfied face every morning for the next decade, and your well-fed stomach that deprives you of the sight of your own penis, curled in wait.

  “I’m going back to the hotel,” I whispered to him. “I’m ready. I’ve had it for the night.” He was telling a story to the entire table about growing up in Brooklyn; I heard the word “brisket” spoken, and then a translator gave an explanation to everyone in Finnish about what a brisket was, and I knew I really wanted to be out of there. I’d heard all of Joe’s stories many times, the unadorned or embellished tales.

  Joe turned. “You sure?” he asked, and I said yes, I was tired, the driver would take me, and Joe should stay, which of course he would. Everyone bade me a fervent good night, all these new friends I would never see again, the elegant men and women of this lovely, brave country. Brave, I thought, for being located so far from the rest of the world it partially emulated, away from horror, from easy thrills. Brave for knowing it would soon be put to sleep for an entire winter, only to be roused again, with the bears, when the earth’s rotation brought it briefly into sunlight.

  I slid across the backseat of the limousine and the driver started us toward the Inter-Continental Hotel. It was after 3 A.M., and we drove slowly past the harbor, where a boxy, aging Russian ocean liner—the Constantin Simonov, I read on its side—was docked beside a sleeker Norwegian one. I remember looking at the enormous ships, and listening politely as the driver told me some bit of waterfront history, but then I succumbed to my drunkenness, my head a punch bowl filled with various Finnish liquors. I lay down in the backseat with my feet up and thought about the pleasure of leaving a party alone. Often the Siamese-twinship of marriage keeps you waiting in rooms you’d rather vacate, but tonight I was out of there on my own. He was my other half and I wanted us divided.

  “Are you really going to leave him?” a voice asked.

  It was a woman speaking to me from inside the drunken punch bowl. I could see her without even bothering to open my eyes. She was someone I hadn’t seen in over forty years: Elaine Mozell, the novelist who’d given that reading at Smith. She looked the same, her hair full, her face red. She was the same, a frozen ghost, and she was still drunk, but I was drunker.

  “Yes,” I said to her. “I am.”

  “Did you get what you want?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure what it was she wanted,” said someone else, who was quickly revealed to be my mother, hovering nearby. “That man was a Jew,” she continued. “That was her first mistake.”

  My mother’s hair still stank of the beauty parlor, even eighteen years after her death. In the afterlife, then, there were beauty parlors, with upright, lost souls sitting under inverted cones and staring at nothing, the thoughts blasted right out of their heads in the heat.

  “She wanted to be by his side,” another person said, and I saw that it was poor Tosha Bresner, the suicide. A small, scrawny woman, her hands still fashioning something out of wet potatoes and egg and onions, moving it from hand to hand.

  “Who wouldn’t? It was her chance to be with a big man. To prop him up,” explained Elaine.

  “No, that’s not it at all,” I said to the row of faces. “You don’t get it at all.”

  “She could have done it differently” came a new voice, accented, commanding, and this belonged to the novelist Valerian Qaanaaq, dressed in full Inuit garb. “I did it, after all,” she said. “And I had absolutely no help. Do you think my family expected me to become a writer? Get real. Yet I did it anyway.”

  They waited, these wraiths; they floated in place, wanting to hear what I had to say for myself.

  I had to think back to the early days, to an archival image of me at nineteen sitting in my carrel in the Smith Colle
ge library, writing stories. Professor J. Castleman, M.A., had brought out that desire in me, had extracted it through the way he spoke about books, through the way he revered literature, revered James Joyce’s small, perfect masterpiece, “The Dead.”

  “Well, I guess, a long time ago I did start thinking about becoming a writer,” I admitted to them.

  “So did you get to be one?” asked Elaine.

  “I did,” sang out Valerian Qaanaaq, as if anyone had asked her.

  “I told you that they wouldn’t let you in, didn’t I?” Elaine Mozell said.

  “You did. But maybe I was weak,” I said.

  “Oh no you weren’t,” said Tosha. “I admired you. You seemed so bold. I could never do half the things you did, or say the things you said. I was afraid, but you weren’t.”

  “I was afraid, too,” I told her.

  “No, you were just realistic,” said Elaine. “You knew you couldn’t have what they have. You wanted their muscularity. You wanted to matter. To make sure your voice still kept chattering from beyond the grave. Chattering on and on in the hell that a certain kind of writer goes to when he leaves this world. The thing is: the minute he enters hell, he owns that place, too.”

  “He’s a Jew,” said my mother.

  “A big fat novelist,” said Elaine Mozell. “The man who took everything.”

  “He’s my boy!” cried a new voice, and this, I saw, was Joe’s mother. She circled above all the others in her flowered dress, huge and luminous, her face pink with pleasure. “That’s all he is, a boy! Why are you giving him such a hard time? You should forgive him everything. After all, what other choice do you have?”

  * * *

  In the lobby of the hotel, two clerks stood at attention as though it were a reasonable hour of the day instead of the dead middle of the night. They nodded as I picked my way across the room’s grand dimensions in my silvery gray evening gown and heels, and I tried to appear gracious and dignified and regal instead of simply drunk.

  “Did you have a nice evening, Mrs. Castleman?” asked one of them. “We watched the proceedings on television.”

  “Very nice,” I said. “Thank you. Good night now.”

  I stood for a moment digging into my little purse to find the key to the elevator. As I stood riffling through it, I thought about how I would go upstairs now and dip my fingertips into a small pot of face cream, and before a wall-sized mirror in one of the stunningly large bathrooms, I’d remove the makeup I’d scrupulously applied hours earlier. No one would be there to unzip me; no Joe with his hand on my nape, moving downward, the zipper sound itself like the distant cry of a woman heard beneath the strains of a zither.

  No Joe. I would have to unzip myself from now on after we separated for good, learning to tip my elbow up at the proper angle, as I used to do, and then switch hands midzip, taking it all the way down to the tailbone, the bottom, and then stepping out.

  Our hotel suite had been made up for the night, worked at, apparently, by an army of maids who had sent their arms whipping across the comforter on our bed, flattening it so that it was like sand blown across a desert. After I got undressed, I pulled back the comforter, ruining the effect, and fell immediately asleep.

  At 5 A.M., I heard Joe’s card in the door and the quiet, responding click that allowed him access. He stumbled in, his tuxedo askew, the cummerbund slung over his arm, as if he were a waiter carrying a napkin. He looked dopey and happy, his medal still around his neck. He came into the room and removed first his medal, then his shirt and undershirt.

  “You up, Joan?” he asked.

  “I’m up,” I said, sliding to a sitting position against the headboard.

  “I’m drunk,” he said, unnecessarily. “And I ate too much, like a dog. They wouldn’t stop feeding me, those Finns. God, I love the Finnish people; they are completely underrated. And that Kalevala is terrific! One of the members of Parliament—that fellow with the pointy red beard—kept reciting it, and everybody began crying like babies, myself included. My next book is going to have a Finn in it. Definitely.”

  “Joe, stop,” I said. “You’re just talking at me, and it’s too much right now.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s hard to turn it off, you know, to just shut it down.” He shook his head. “I’m going to take a sauna.”

  And then he stripped off the rest of his clothes and went down the hall of the suite to the sauna. I heard the door open, and he was in. I followed him to the tiny room, peered through the dark square of glass and saw him lying down on the wood under a towel, already half dozing. I opened the door, entered the blaze in my nightgown, which immediately seemed to turn liquid.

  “Joe.”

  He looked up at me with one eye open and said, “What, Joan? What is it?”

  I breathed in, then out, and told him, “I have to say something. There’s no good time to do it.”

  “So say it,” he said, sitting up.

  “Okay. When we get back to New York, I want a separation. I’ve thought it all through.”

  “Oh, I see,” he said. “You wait until my body’s heated to a million degrees to tell me this. You wait until there’s nothing I can do, until I’m fried.” He poured some more water, and it sizzled on the coals.

  “Look, try to imagine my situation. I want another chance at life,” I said. “I’m sixty-four years old. I’m almost a senior. I can go anywhere half price, and I want to go there alone. Please don’t act furious, or heartbroken, or shocked, none of which you could possibly be. For once, try to be thoughtful, just try to listen.”

  “So that’s my big congratulations,” he said. “Well, you know what? Fuck that.”

  “Big congratulations? Why exactly should you be congratulated?” I asked. “Don’t you get enough of that elsewhere?”

  He paused. “I happened to introduce you to the world, remember,” he said, but no, this wasn’t true; I was the one who had taken him there, who had led him in. I saved the day for that young writer of “No Milk on Sunday.”

  “The thing is, I recently realized that I’m exhausted from you,” I said.

  “That’s why you’ve been so bitchy,” he said.

  “It’s amazing to me that I lasted this long,” I told him. “Realistically, I should have been gone years ago.” He was flushed red and damp. He put a hand to his head. I’d looked and looked at him for so long; I’d made a habit of it, a vocation, and I could stop looking now. “When we get home,” I went on, “I’m going to see Ed Mandelman and start the process.”

  “You almost never used to complain about what we had,” he said. “You used to be content.”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Yeah, and you were thrilled,” he said. “You told me how exciting it all was. To be a part of everything. Then you got old and all of a sudden nothing was acceptable. You became like all those old ladies in restaurants: Send this back. I don’t want it. You know, it’s this prize,” he went on. “That’s what did it, I think. That’s what pushed you. The fact that when I die, someone might actually remember me and think about me for about two minutes, even though my son hates me, and my daughters think I’ve failed them, and my wife tells me she’s done with me.”

  “Don’t you ever wonder why?” I asked. “You think these things just happen to you, don’t you—that you’re this innocent bystander.”

  “No, I never said that.”

  “You kept the children at arm’s length,” I said. “Even now. Their father wins the Helsinki Prize, and you don’t particularly want them there.”

  “Did it ever occur to you why I wouldn’t want them to watch all this, or to see them watching this?”

  “No,” I said. “It hasn’t.”

  “Well, maybe it should.”

  “You’re completely mysterious to me, Joe,” I said. “I never understand how you can do the things you do.”

  “I see,” said Joe. He lay on his back and closed his eyes for a moment. “I’d like to remind you that no one force
d you to accompany me through life, Joan,” he added.

  “Define force,” I said. “You were who you were; you demanded things. And I had nothing, I was in awe of you. Basically, I was a pathetic person.” He didn’t try to refute this, and I added, for some reason, “I had a drink with Nathaniel Bone.”

  Joe stared, then he nodded. “I get it. He started working on you, is that it? What did he say? Leave him, Joan. Have your own life. You can do better. He’s a pig, that husband of yours, wouldn’t give me his blessing, wouldn’t authorize me to write his biography.”

  “He said nothing like that,” I told him.

  The heat of the sauna was everywhere on me now. I thought I’d faint, or melt, or decompose. Finally I sat down on the wooden bench across from Joe, the two of us red-faced and furious and unrelenting in this tiny room. I tossed water onto the pile of rocks and watched as a wall of steam sprang up between us.

  “You,” Joe had said to me that afternoon in the Waverly Arms in 1956. “Read.”

  He’d brought my hand down onto the pile of pages he’d written that day while I went off to my parents’ apartment. I’d made the appropriate cooing sounds of enthusiasm and surprise, and then I’d sat on the bed to read the first twenty-one pages he’d frantically written of The Walnut. He actually sat across from me and watched me read to myself.

  “Joe, you’re making me nervous,” I’d said. “Please stop.” But I was just buying time, for already, three minutes into the thing, I was panicking.

  Finally I kicked him out and he walked through the Village on his own, wandering along Bleecker Street, stopping in at a record store, where he stood in a booth and listened to Django Reinhardt. Eventually he couldn’t take it anymore—he just had to know what I thought—and he came back to the hotel.