by Meg Wolitzer
“I will not sit here and listen to this garbage,” Joe said. “Because it’s nonsense, okay? Absolute, raving nonsense.” I didn’t say a word. “Feel free to jump in at any time, Joan,” he added.
“All right. It’s nonsense,” I said, and David watched me, his eyes narrow, wanting the truth, trusting that he could get it from me, and I nodded slightly and he seemed to relax a little. “Total nonsense. I’m not your father’s handservant. I’m his wife. His partner. Just like any other couple.” The words were ludicrous; they embarrassed me as I spoke them. But what was I supposed to do? Come clean? Make him feel justified? I couldn’t do that; I had to be his mother. He was a grown man but he was still immature and fragile. He needed to be protected from his own fears. He wanted them negated.
“You don’t write his books?” David said.
“No,” I told him. “Of course not.”
“I don’t believe you,” David said, but he seemed uncertain. He kept looking at me, wanting guidance.
“I can’t make you believe me,” I told him softly. “It’s up to you what you believe.” He looked as though he would cry. And then I took his head in my hands, that head filled with stylized comic-book imagery, all of it laid out in frames and dialogue balloons, and I pressed it against me, onto my shoulder, the edge of my breast, the wide swell that women use to comfort men and children alike. “I’m fine, David. Really,” I said. “No one controls me.”
David didn’t understand that in the early years with Joe, everything was more than bearable. It was fun. The reviews excited me. I possessed a secret talent, and the secrecy added to the pleasure. Joe was expansive and loving to me, and because we stayed close together for the gestation of each novel, he truly felt that he was, in a sense, the actual, sole author. He must have found a way to believe it, because if he didn’t, his life would have been excruciating. As it was, over time, there were nights when Joe would pace and smoke and fret, and he’d say to me, “I feel so bad about what we’ve entered into here,” never naming it directly, always alluding, as though the house were bugged, and I would end up calming him down, which then made me forget that I was the one who needed the reassurance, not him.
We fell right into it; it happened fast and slow and after a while it didn’t seem so strange, sitting in those rooms together all those years, me at the typewriter, him on the bed; then, later on, me at the Macintosh computer with its little smiling face, him on the Abdomenizer, desperately attempting to corrugate his softening abdomen.
But there were tiny cracks. He began to cheat in obvious ways; his abdomen was being corrugated not for me but for other women. His betrayals had started early, not long after his first book came out, and I both knew it and didn’t know it, because when I thought of what I’d done for him, I felt there ought to have been some reciprocity.
But here is the partial list of Joe’s women:
Our baby-sitter Melinda.
Brenda the prostitute.
Several women at readings Joe gave around the country.
Merry Cheslin.
Two publicists named, coincidentally, Jennifer.
The occasional letter-writer and ardent reader who came on a pilgrimage to meet him.
The young woman who worked at a grocery in Chinatown.
The film producer who made Overtime into the 1976 dud starring James Caan and Jacqueline Bisset.
I ignored it whenever I could. It never occurred to me to say, Okay, here’s your part of the deal: Control yourself.
Control yourself. But they can’t, these men, can they? Or can they, and we simply don’t require them to? I tried to force him every few years, confronting him and making demands, and he’d be vague and apologetic or perhaps defiant, insisting I was making it all up, at which point I thought it was better to drop the whole matter. What if he left? I knew I didn’t want that, so why harangue him since he seemed incapable of change?
“You should take a lover,” my friend Laura suggested, for after her divorce she’d slept with a string of men and had enjoyed herself thoroughly until she contracted genital herpes from an urban planner. But I had no interest; Joe was more than I could take.
Most of the men I know from this generation have made love with women who weren’t their wives; it was a requirement, at least back when they were young husbands. If you were a man, you worked so very hard, your neck bent in unnatural positions over a keyboard. So you needed the downtime, the recreation, the notion of women as Ping-Pong, poker, women as a dip in a stream. Sorry, wives, they’d say, but this is something you’ll never understand, so we husbands can’t even try and explain it. Just let us be. The long-term damage to the marriage will be insignificant compared with what it would be if we did control ourselves, and forced ourselves to keep our bursting needs under wraps.
He told me details for the novels, sexual stories of great interest, and we pretended that they were all fantasies from an imaginative and restless man. “What if,” he said about a character, “the husband has an affair with the young woman at the grocery in Chinatown? The one who sells him star anise?”
“All right,” I said. “Tell me.”
So he told me why and how and what it might feel like to this character, this flawed male we were inventing, and then I interpreted for him without judgment, put it all into a storm of language that came from somewhere—who knew where: my history, my education, my central nervous system, the lobe of my brain that was wired for imagination?—all the while sitting stone-faced at his writing desk.
He sat on the bed and watched me type, nodding like someone listening to jazz as the clack-clacking went full tilt. He loved me so much and so continually. His gratitude could be intuited at all hours of the day, at least for a while. I was his other half, his better half, and there hasn’t been a single day, all these years, when I haven’t been reminded of this.
The walls in the Presidential Suite of the Helsinki Inter-Continental Hotel may be especially thick, but they aren’t thick enough to have contained the argument Joe and I had inside those massive rooms. Other guests down below must have heard us fighting at dawn, though most likely none of them knew exactly what they were hearing, for our words were spoken in rapid, anguished English.
We were back in the bedroom now, out of the sauna, both of us still pink and overheated, him in a towel, me in my sopping nightgown.
“If you were this miserable with everything, miserable enough to leave,” he said, “then you should have told me, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ And I would have done something.”
“What?” I said. “What would you have done?”
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “But we’re married. Doesn’t that count? We have kids, and those sweet grandkids, and real estate, and Keoghs and IRA’s and friends we’ve known forever, who are going to start dying on us one by one, and where will you be then? Where will you be, Joan? Living on your own in some apartment? Being brave? Is that what you want for yourself? Because I find it hard to believe it is.” He was pleading, which was something I’d rarely seen him do over the years, and I was surprised. “Every marriage is just two people striking a bargain,” he went on in a softer tone. “I traded, you traded. So maybe it wasn’t even.”
“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “It was the worst deal in the world, and I grabbed it. I should have done my own work, taken my time, waited awhile and watched things start to change in the world. But they haven’t changed enough anyway. Everyone is still fascinated by the inner lives of men. Women are fascinated. Men win, hands down. They’ve got control. Look around. Turn on the TV; there they are in Congress, with their bad ties and their seaweed comb-overs—”
“Joan,” said Joe, “I’m not a terrible person.”
“No, you’re not. You’re an enormous baby, that’s all you are.”
He nodded. “I’m sure that’s true.” Then he shook his head and said in a small voice, “I just don’t want to be alone at this point in my life. I can’t even think about what that would be like
.”
But I knew he could take care of himself, even if that meant he fed himself forever on ham in a can and wheels of Brie and liquor-enriched stews, and the lunches his editor or agent or an awards committee treated him to. He didn’t need my physical, corporeal presence, either, for there would still be young women skimming by who would approach his overstuffed body with awe. He needed me at the computer, me with my head bent, tapping away.
“No more of this, Joe,” I found myself saying. “You’ll get used to living with yourself. I did.” Then, less angrily, I said, “You’ll be okay.”
He sat on the bed and lay back against the pillow, as if he was beginning to give in to the idea that I really would leave him when we returned home, that this wasn’t just histrionics.
“So let me ask you this,” he said finally. “What exactly did you say to Nathaniel Bone?”
“I said nothing to him that would freak you out,” I assured him.
“Oh, good,” he said. “To be honest, I thought you’d probably said something you couldn’t take back.”
We were quiet, and I wondered what good it was to leave Joe. Would it register with him at all? So he’d never publish another book; so what? He’d already published enough; Helsinki was honoring him now, saying, You’ve done a good job; now you are free to fade away with aplomb. Finally, maybe he understood that that would be the best option. Taking more accolades from the world would be too greedy. Even now, I realized, he was possibly a little embarrassed about himself. Perhaps that was what he’d meant when he asked me to think about why he hadn’t really wanted Alice and Susannah to come to Finland. This prize was so big, too big, that he wouldn’t have been able to meet their gaze. He would have been ashamed of himself.
Maybe he’d always been a little bit ashamed. But that had never changed things before, and probably it wouldn’t change anything now. He wanted to keep going and going forever, with me beside him.
“You know, I think I have to tell Bone, actually,” I said after a moment.
“What?” Joe said. “Joan, don’t forget, I’m an old man here; I’m not your enemy. It’s just me.”
I thought of Joe as a young, thin man with dark curls and fanning chest hair, and was again astonished at the change and bloat that had taken place, that I’d helped to take place. He’d gone soft as a Sno-Ball and so had I, and we’d had a soft, good life together and now it was almost done.
“Yeah, Bone should probably hear everything,” I said to Joe, and I stood up and walked into the dressing room with its hulking bureau. I’d get dressed, I decided, and go see Nathaniel, waking him up in his own hotel room and starting to talk to him before he even understood what was happening.
I was taking a bra from the drawer when Joe’s hand moved to my shoulder and he turned me around to him.
“Come on, this is crazy,” he said. “Don’t make us go through this. You know you’re just putting on a show for me. And it’s very effective.”
“Stop it,” I said, pulling on my bra. My hands were shaking as I closed the clasp. “Bone is staying on the sixth floor, he gave me his room number, and I’m going to sit down and have a drink with him and tell him to get his notepad out, and then I’m going to give it to him because I don’t want to be this person I hate. I’m a good writer, Joe, really good. You know what? I even won the Helsinki Prize!”
That was too much for him. As I moved to get past him again he pushed me back against the dresser. The blond wood shuddered but didn’t sway; everything in this room was built for royalty, for people who needed their furniture to be as thick as trees. I pushed him back, not hard, pushing like a girl, I thought, using both hands.
He fell against the bed and all of a sudden his shoulders rose in a peculiar way and he clenched his jaw and said, “Shit, Joan.”
Which was just like his heart attack at The Cracked Crab, the same tight words, the same staccato. “Joe,” I said now, “are you okay?” He didn’t respond. “Help!” I cried out into the room. “Someone, help!” But my voice was tiny and the suite was a fortress.
“Okay, now, okay,” I said to him, to myself, terrified, and then I called the front desk and heard the cooing European ring. I shouted into the phone; the person who answered was calmly confident, and I knew that paramedics would be rushing in momentarily, and that they would administer CPR to Joe, breathing their cold, snow-blown breath into him. But until then I had to do it, for he seemed to have stopped breathing, though I wasn’t sure, was too frantic to think clearly, and I knelt over him the same way Lev Bresner had done once before in that seafood restaurant, applying hands and pressing hard, putting my mouth against his and wildly blowing.
In emergencies, men and women tilt each other’s chins up, swipe a finger in to clear the airway, then hotly breathe, trying to remember the sequence laid out in the CPR manual, the code to crack. I couldn’t remember anything I’d learned so long ago, and so I just pushed on him and breathed and breathed into him.
It was as if we were engaging in some alternate language, some strange ritual, like the way Eskimos say hello by rubbing noses, at least according to the legends of children. My own daughters used to do that with each other, standing with no space between them, tip of nose to tip of nose, heads moving from side to side, feeling the graze and touch, the thrill that accompanied the barest connection of separate bodies. After all these years, I crouched over Joe Castleman, his head tipped back, our mouths open upon each other, a husband and wife finally saying good-bye.
Chapter Seven
* * *
DYING IN A strange country is similar to being born: the confusion, the nonsensical language, the activity, the fuss, with the flickering light of the person in crisis as the centerpiece. They worked on him and worked on him, those indefatigable Finns, and though he didn’t respond at all, I held his hand and told him insistently he was going to live. Someone pressed an oxygen mask over his face, and those dark eyes of his did a fade, and I tried to pull him back to me, to keep him, to hold him here.
Death was pronounced not in the hotel room but later, in a triage room at the nearby Loviso Hospital, where a young doctor, who appeared to me like a lesser character in an Ibsen play, removed the earpieces of his stethoscope, which trembled like fronds, and said, “Mrs. Castleman, I must say to you it is over.”
I was stricken and shocked, and my voice cracked, and I sobbed against that man’s narrow chest. He didn’t try to stop me, but then after a very long time I simply stopped on my own. Joe was lying on the table with loops of wires still attached to him. He was Gulliver, passive, slumbering, inappropriate, huge, and it was an unbearable sight. Excruciating. A dead man is nothing; it’s all gone from him, everything you’ve ever thought was his. Eventually, two nurses came in and quietly removed the wires; I could hear sucking sounds as the rubber cups were taken off. I sat on a hard chair beside Joe, terrified to touch him, for his body seemed so abraded now, with its Venn diagram of pink circles everywhere. For a few minutes we stayed awkward and resigned and pitifully lonely, side by side, the way we’d often been in the last years of our marriage.
The next day, after the paperwork of death had been finished, after I’d cried until my eyes could barely open, and then actually slept at night, pushed along by the tiny blue pills the doctor at the hospital had given me, I left Finland forever. Joe’s body lay in a temporary, plain casket secured in the cargo hold, and I held a crushed, wet bloom of tissues in my hand. Several stunned representatives from the Finnish Academy had accompanied me to the Helsinki-Vantaa Airport, though I told them it wasn’t necessary, for the delegation from Joe’s publishing house and literary agency was there, too. Everyone seemed frightened to talk to me at length. Joe’s agent, Irwin Clay, could barely meet my eyes. I was steered into a VIP room and it was arranged for me to board the plane early, so as not to confront the several reporters who were quietly collecting nearby. When I said good-bye to the people from the academy, Teuvo Halonen spontaneously cried, and had to be led away so he
wouldn’t upset me more.
Beside me on the plane was a mournful, slightly jowly woman from the academy named Mrs. Kirsti Salonen, whose job it was to accompany me back to New York, even though I said I would be all right. If I’d wanted company I could have sat with Irwin, but the academy had insisted on sending someone, and for some reason I was grateful. Mrs. Salonen patted my hand and whispered solicitous, parental comments to me. She spoke gently about how important it was to be good to myself and, as time passed, to let others do good things for me. Somewhere in there she spoke about God, too, and about how I should try to sleep.
“Mrs. Salonen, may I ask you something personal?” I suddenly said, and she nodded. “Are you married?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “My husband and I just celebrated our twenty-seventh anniversary.” She reached into her handbag and produced a photograph of a lanky man in a short-sleeved shirt with a pen clipped onto his pocket. “Erik is a chemical engineer,” Mrs. Salonen went on. “A quiet man who likes things just so. We have a weekend house in Turku that we enjoy.”
Will you be my wife? I wanted to ask her. Will you take care of me now, the way you certainly take care of Erik the chemical engineer?
I’d been a good wife, most of the time. Joe had been comfortable and safe and surrounded, always off somewhere talking, gesturing, doing unspeakable things with women, eating rich foods, drinking, reading, leaving books scattered around the house facedown, their spines broken from too much love. Late at night, or during the day, he told me stories of things that had happened to him, or ideas that had occurred to him, and I filed them away or took them out for reuse whenever the time came, and allowed an anecdote to be boiled and cooled and transformed into something recognizable but new. Something that would be mine, but would still always be partly his, too. It wasn’t fair, of course; it had never been fair, right from the beginning. Fairness wasn’t what I’d wanted.
Sleep, now: that was what I wanted. The flight home was long, and I tilted my seat back and thought about Joe as a child, attending his father’s funeral. The moment his father had died, something might have collapsed in Joe and never been restored. Or maybe that was simply an excuse, for plenty of young boys without fathers grow up to write strong and urgent prose, often about loss. Joe could never do that; he didn’t have the natural ability, and no one could ever have implanted it in him, like a microchip, a pig valve, a miracle.