The Wife (12 page)

“Mr. Yoseph Castleman, you are a wonderful writer!” she said. “My felicitations to you.”

She wasn’t beautiful, exactly, though she wore an expression of Scandinavian grace. Her hair was the color of a manila envelope.

“Thank you,” said Joe, smiling and stopping briefly. “That’s very kind.”

He extended a hand and she shook it; her hand held on, clutching his for just a little too long. Vaguely, it occurred to me that she might be a stalker, but then I remembered that I had never heard of a Finnish stalker. Stalkers often seemed to come from the Midwest, though occasionally they rose up like swamp creatures from the wetlands of Florida. Over the years Joe had received letters from some of them, and though the men tended to be more overtly threatening, it was the women he feared most. Men were so obvious with their hostility, and if you were in danger you’d know it. Joe had been in danger more than once, and the person who had been most hostile to him was our son.

David wasn’t insane, he wasn’t psychotic, only “marginal,” only “borderline,” those catchwords for all unpredictable outsiders. And David was fragile, which meant that it was easy to knock him over, to make him lose his way.

The night that David threatened Joe, I wasn’t home; instead, I was out at Lois Ackerman’s house for a meeting of my longstanding women’s book group, which that month was reading
The Golden Bowl.
Joe and David were alone in the house together. It was a freezing night in upstate New York. David, in his twenties at the time, was staying in our house because his apartment had flooded and he had nowhere else to go.

To say that he was a stellar child at the beginning is to make light of his intellect, the somber way he approached everything big or small. When he was born, Joe had been thrilled to be the
father of a boy, at last; a boy would save the day, would give back something of what Joe had lost when his own father had dropped dead so long ago, changing the future.

Joe often turned his attention to David in a way I’d never seen him do with the girls. They went fishing together, they played pool, they hiked Mount Cardigan in New Hampshire in heavy boots, carrying knapsacks I’d stuffed with foods they liked. Most of these activities were done in the presence of other men, usually writers. Joe rarely took David off alone; what would they have talked about, hour after hour? As a boy, David liked to pummel you with questions, one after the other, like one of those fact-crammed children’s books: Do insects have eyelids? How come you can’t tickle yourself? Why are people interested in the smell of their own farts? Joe became weary quickly, and when he returned from an outing he would hand David off to me and disappear for hours.

I’d go and visit with David in his room, sit on the side of the bed as he removed his muddy boots. “Did you guys have fun?” I’d ask, touching his head. One day, I knew, I wouldn’t be able to touch his head; one day he would flinch as though my hand were burning hot. So I’d better do all the touching I could while he was still young. He tolerated my touches but never basked in them the way the girls did. This was a boy thing, I decided. A necessary part of manhood. He just sat there patiently, waiting until I’d finished.

Like Joe, David was handsome, dark, big-headed, with black curls. Joe was thrilled by our son’s intellect, by the fact that the school had said he was a genius. When David was little, Joe often took him to bars, though I didn’t know it at the time, and our little boy played with his Hot Wheels cars in the sawdust at his father’s feet. Other famous writers and groupie types reached down and absently ruffled David’s hair; he barely seemed to register their touch, or if he did, he never felt it as affection, and he was rarely affectionate back. He lived in our midst, he did his schoolwork with alarming speed, making very few mistakes, and he went off on hiking trips with Joe and Joe’s friends, but there was no real warmth emanating from him. His sisters had always
been puppyish, wanting to please, confiding in me about friends and working for hours on Valentine’s Day cards for their father, but David was cooler, more remote, less rewarding.

A psychiatrist we consulted long ago told us we were making something out of nothing. “He’s a brilliant boy,” the man said, for apparently he’d never tested a child who scored as high as David, and the Salinger’s Glass Family level of his IQ simply canceled out any possibility of his being defective. He wasn’t autistic, like the son of a poet we knew who walked around repeating fragments of phrases from TV commercials. “Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat . . .” that boy would sing, his voice high and ethereal.

David was extraordinary, we were told by everyone, and we should just leave him alone. Joe in particular was insistent that we give David enough “latitude,” as he put it, imagining, I suppose, that David would use all that space to invent, to cure, to compose, to dream. But instead he kicked another kid at school in the groin, and he upturned a cafeteria table. And once he taunted a teacher, saying she had a mustache like Hitler and that no man would ever love her. She feared it was true and called in sick every day for a week.

Off to a residential school for troubled but intelligent kids—one of those places with beanbag chairs everywhere, and “circle time,” and a full staff of therapists—David kept to himself, then graduated first in his class and miraculously was accepted to Wesleyan, thanks to some string-pulling and heavy bartering on Joe’s part. But David lasted less than four semesters; in New York City over sophomore spring break, he threatened a man with a box cutter in an East Village bar, and wound up in jail. When we went to see him, talking to him from the other side of a Plexiglas wall, David was agitated and restless, mortified to be confronted in prison by his parents. Joe kept asking how in the world David could have done this, and David understood that the subtext was “How could you have done this to
me
?”

“How could I
do
this?” David said. “What kind of a question is that?”

“It’s a reasonable question,” Joe said. “So answer it.”

“We’re concerned,” I added.

“I know you’re concerned, Mom,” David said finally, addressing me only, as if Joe weren’t there. “I fucked up, okay? I have anger issues.”

“Issues,”
said Joe acidly.

“Yeah,
issues,
” said David.

“You don’t just have issues, you have a whole subscription,” said Joe.

David turned and walked away, facing the corner, and it wasn’t until we got him out of there that he spoke to us again. We took him back to our house that night, and he said very little over the next few days. We tried to talk about the legal situation, but he appeared mostly uninterested. When we drove him back to Middleton, Connecticut, David was eager for us to go.

“Okay,” he said, after we came inside with him. “Well, thanks for the ride. Do you need anything? Because I really should get back to things. . . .” We didn’t know it yet, but he would quit school abruptly, permanently, a few weeks later, without explanation.

That night, he wanted us to leave right away and not bother him. He was dismissing us. I was briefly insulted, but I got over it. Joe didn’t. He stood in his coat with his hands jammed into his pockets. And when we did leave, a few minutes later, David hugged me, surprising me by the sudden gesture. Joe he simply nodded to. He didn’t like his father, and maybe never had. But now the shape of the dislike seemed to be changing. I didn’t pick up on the extent of it, and neither did Joe.

Over the years, David, after he left school and moved to New York, got into occasional bar fights and confrontations with women. He would describe these scenes to me in mortified detail, as though talking about someone else entirely. He never spoke specifically about his anger at Joe. I knew that sons often raged at their father. I’d read Arthur Miller, and the usual body of Greek drama. I could picture the classic distant, towering father, and the
son with the primal, unmet needs. I could imagine the passage of years, and the slow freeze on the part of the son, met eventually by the slow thaw of the father, by which point it’s far too late. Damage has been done, and the son turns away, saying “Sorry, Pop,” and leaves the old man hunched and weeping in his BarcaLounger. But I never really saw any of that in our family.

For a long time David and Joe stayed at a certain level of uneasy, mutual dislike, maybe contempt. But finally it was ratcheted up much higher. This was the night that David’s apartment became flooded, the entire place suddenly ankle deep in murky New York water. His books and newspapers were sent floating, and because he had nowhere else to go, I insisted he come stay with us.

“It’s just for a while,” I said. And so he came.

At first the living situation went surprisingly well. The house in Weathermill is big, and David kept to himself except during meals, fixing himself fried-egg sandwiches for snacks and then going out for the night, visiting the local bars to drink and shoot pool. Old high school friends who still lived in the area would call—friends who worked at the Rexall drugstore, or for their father’s exterminating business—their voices low and hangdog on the telephone. Who were they, really? Pornographers? Drug dealers? I had no idea. My son’s world was closed to me.

The night David turned on Joe seemed peaceful enough at the start. We had dinner together, the three of us. Joe and I did most of the talking, while David offered a few monosyllables between forkfuls of steak. Nothing seemed unusual to me. When I went off to Lois Ackerman’s house for my book group, I remember feeling grateful to be going, to have a reason to get out. David was oppressive. It was a sad thing when you wanted to be away from your son, but it wasn’t a tragedy. After the drive along winding roads, when I sat down in Lois’s living room surrounded by these kind and intelligent women who shared a common interest in closely reading the books we’d forgotten all about since college, I wished I could stay there, move into Lois’s spare room. She was divorced,
and clearly lonely; when she kissed everyone hello, she hugged too hard, lingered too long. She was tall, lantern-jawed, dressing in heavy turquoise jewelry she’d acquired on her solo trips to the Southwest. Lois was always solo. Her isolation was painful to her, yet very appealing at times to me. Her house seemed to be an oasis, the big bed covered in a pristine duvet, the night table with its box of French caramels, bottle of Nivea lotion, and pile of old Merchant-Ivory videos. The place was man-free. Quiet. Right now it chimed with the sounds of women’s voices. Individual words and phrases rose up from the conversation:
modernity; narrative structure; Princess Casamassima.

The food was good, too, the coffee table strewn with dips and small, marinated things. I was relaxed, drinking and eating and joining in the spiraling discussion of betrayal within a marriage. I didn’t know if it was paranoia, but it seemed as though, whenever I made a comment, everyone listened more keenly, because they knew I had firsthand knowledge of betrayal. Still, I wasn’t feeling particularly betrayed at that moment.

And Joe, meanwhile, was sitting in our living room at home with a swirling, clinking bourbon, appreciatively listening to Herbie Hancock on the new Bose sound system he’d just bought. (The men who own the world are obsessed with sound systems; don’t ask me why.) He was nested in his maroon chair reading the paper and drinking and listening. David was upstairs in our house, burrowing in his childhood bedroom.

I thought the evening would go on like that; I thought everyone was doing what they ought to be doing. Then the telephone rang at Lois’s. She answered, then came and got me. “It’s Joe,” she mouthed silently, as Sylvia Brumman continued an overexcited, stuttering comparison of early versus late Henry James.

I picked up the telephone in Lois’s kitchen and spoke, alarmed to hear Joe’s strained voice saying, “Hello, Joan, sorry to disturb you, but things are a bit difficult here at the moment.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“David,” he said.

“David? What’s the matter?”

“Yes, he’s right here,” said Joe.

“You can’t talk?” I said.

“No,” he said. “I can’t. But maybe you should come home. I could use you here.”

And then Lois popped her head into the kitchen to make sure everything was okay, which of course it wasn’t. I made my excuses, then left immediately and roared home. One thing led to another, and that night I convinced David to let me drive him to a small psychiatric hospital in Westchester for an evaluation. He ended up staying there for two weeks, sleeping a lot, adjusting to the antidepressant medication they’d put him on. When a couple of the women from my book group called me to find out what had happened, I vaguely told them there had been a “scene” between Joe and David, and I left it at that. I didn’t want to discuss it. No one asked for details. They knew I had a troubled son, and how painful that was to me.

Though David still takes medication, or at least he’s supposed to, he’s never had to be hospitalized again. For the past couple of years he’s managed to keep working at the same law firm, appearing there late at night, often looking ragged, but his typing skills are intact. There have still been occasional fights, dustups, nothing too serious.

The tension between David and Joe never really went away, though I guess we all grew used to it. But potential violence came from elsewhere, too, not just from our son, making Joe wonder what it was about him that charged people up.

Once Joe had received a letter that began:

Dear Mr. Castleman,

You think you are GOD’S GIFT don’t you? While I am just a LOSER!! But I am writing my own novel, and you’d better watch your ass, Castleman, for your [
sic
] in this book, too. And your character doesn’t live to see how it ends. . . .

Joe had called the police in on that letter—I’d urged him to—and when the two Weathermill patrolmen arrived that night, he’d felt some embarrassment, for the more he considered it, the less he could believe that someone would actually kill a novelist. A nonfiction writer maybe, though even that seemed to defy credibility. What was the point of killing a writer? Politicians, actors, former Beatles: those he could in some way understand, for they had tangible power in the world and could actually
do
things, but
a novelist?