The Wife (15 page)

Ray, the day doorman at my parents’ building, didn’t know of my disgrace, for he tipped his hat and asked me how it felt to be a
“coed,” and Gus the elevator man pulled the brass lever as we rode slowly upward and he told me about his son, off at New Jersey Technical College, where he was studying refrigeration systems. Then I was right there in the vestibule outside the apartment I’d grown up in, with the umbrella stand and the wicker chair that had never been blessed with the pressure of a human posterior. I let myself in and stood in the front hall, calling out tentatively, “Hello? Hello?”

My mother, in an aqua satin robe, appeared, and when she saw it was me she burst out crying—a surprisingly unrestrained bleat that made me want to run. I couldn’t comfort her; what could I possibly say? So we sat down in the pale living room with its low white couches and pastels of New York streets in the rain, and I watched her cry for a while. Finally she blew her nose in a handkerchief and then looked at me sharply.

“Your father is out playing golf with the Dorlings. We know that this isn’t the end of the world,” she told me.

“Good,” I said.

“But when the college told us this man was a Jew—”

“They
told
you that?”

“Yes,” said my mother. “We asked them. He’s a Jew, and he’s married, and somehow he’s convinced you that this is love.” Now she stood up from her couch and came over to mine; each of the couches was long and sleek, an individual ocean liner. “Believe me, Joan, I know how it is, they’re very persuasive,” she went on. “There was a man here once, a Mr. Milton Fish; he came to talk to your father about investing in his company. Something about textiles. I’ll never forget what he wore—it was a striped suit—and by the end of the evening your poor father was practically eating out of this Mr. Milton Fish’s hand, practically signing an enormous check to him that basically would have bankrupted our family forever. It was only when I called your father into the bedroom and gave him a talking-to that he came around. That he saw he was under this salesman’s spell. Which is exactly what’s happening with you and your professor. The powers of persuasion.
They speak well, they pride themselves on their history of ‘education,’ as they like to say, and they know how to use words with plenty of syllables, and they’re dark and mysterious, so that you feel as though you’ve entered a Gypsy den, and how much more thrilling
that
must feel than being with the kind of boys you’re used to, like Alec Meers, or the Bexleys’ son, am I right?”

Her words were so rapid and wild that I began to blink like someone under a strobe light.

“Am I right?” my mother was saying. “You
have
been with other boys, Joan, no? I mean, have you been with them in a carnal way, as man and woman? Because if you have, then probably you’re choosing your professor for his skills in that department. They aren’t afraid of sex, not them! They want to do it constantly, even when the woman has her menses, and they—”

“Mother, are you completely off the wall?” I leaped up. “I came here because I was lonely and Joe was working,” I told her. “He’s Jewish, yes, and so what if he wants sex all the time; I do too.” She blinked several times in response to this. “But he’s a talented writer, okay? A
good
writer, and he’s going to become famous and won’t it make a difference how you feel about him then?”

“Not one iota,” said my mother, her jaw as tight as the curls on her head that had been plastered there very recently; I could still smell the carnation odor of beauty parlor, could conjure the metal combs floating like specimens in blue water.

It was as though, having read Joe’s poor story in
Caryatid,
I needed to defend his honor more fervently than ever; if I didn’t, who would? His wife, Carol, hated him, and Fanny might soon be taught to hate him, too. His fledgling attempts at fiction weren’t anything to write home about, and yet here I was: shouting compliments about Joe through the mayonnaise-colored living room of my childhood and hoping I would start to believe them. He
was
talented, wasn’t he? He looked talented, anyway; he was brooding and unpredictable and bridling with sensations I didn’t understand, sensations that I dubbed
male.
Male and solid and influential, the emotions of men at war, or men hunched around
the smoking powwow of a poker game. I would tell everyone he was talented, and then he would rise to the occasion.

“So you won’t meet him?” I asked my mother.

“Oh, really, what do you think, Joan?” she said, and it was true that the prospect of a sit-down with Joe and my parents was horrible no matter how you looked at it. He would see two skeletons clutching highballs; they would see a fast-talking garment salesman with a penis as big as a loaf of challah. No, they could never meet.

But of course they did meet, much later on, when everything had settled down, or had gotten all charged up, depending on how you looked at it, and Joe’s place in the world was unshakable. They actually wanted to know him then, for the only famous writer they’d ever met was Thornton Wilder, who as a favor to a friend in the 1940s had spoken at my father’s club, giving an eight-minute ramble about the state of the American theater, and then fled.

But for now, before his success, Joe was still the Jewish rapist, and I was still the girl who improbably loved him. I left my parents’ apartment, walking down Park Avenue, which now looked as empty and charmless as my parents’ living room. I was sprung; that I knew. But if I was truly going to be on my own with Joe, then what I’d said to my mother simply had to come true. Joe needed to be talented; he needed to be brilliant. It would cancel out his Jewishness, the unsavory scraps of his adultery, the crappy room he’d rented for us, and all the other flaws and disappointments that surrounded him.

Maybe he really was a talented writer. Maybe I couldn’t see it, because I wasn’t talented enough myself. But he’d told me I was; that was partly why he took me to New York with him. It wasn’t only about going to bed with me; he could have had that with many other girls, who would have happily simpered and opened their legs. He just
had
to be talented; it would pick us up by our bootstraps, it would satisfy Joe once and for all and let him feel at ease beside me, at ease among other men; it would also make a
point, pleasing my mother and my father, even if my mother insisted she wouldn’t feel “one iota” different.
Iota;
what a strange word, I thought as I walked over to Lexington and climbed on the train, heading back downtown. No one ever said “two iotas,” it was always one. Language only
felt
infinite; instead, everyone swam through surprisingly narrow channels when they spoke or wrote.

Iotas were dancing inside me, along with other things: my mother’s words, so vulgar and crabbed; my grandiose dreams of greatness for Joe. He would be a writer; the hopes I had for him were like the hopes men had for themselves: to conquer, to crush and astound. I didn’t particularly want to do any of that myself; it didn’t even occur to me that I could. I kept thinking of Elaine Mozell, and how she’d tried to make her way among the men. Elaine with her drink held loosely in her hand, and her slightly sloppy lipstick. I didn’t want to play in the same field as the men; it would never be comfortable, and I couldn’t compete. My world wasn’t big enough, wide enough, dramatic enough, and my subjects were few. I knew my limits.

By the time I got back to the Waverly Arms, a sort of miracle had occurred. It was as though Joe had been intuiting my new catalog of hopes for him, for when I let myself into the room, he stood and waved two masses of papers at me.

“What’s this?” I asked, knowing full well.

“The first twenty-one pages of
The Walnut.
”

“I see.
The Walnut,
” I said. “So I guess it’s a novel about someone working in a walnut factory? A gritty look at the world of walnut laborers?”

Joe laughed. “Oh, yeah. It’s going to stand the walnut-packing industry on its
head,
” he said. He pulled me down onto the bed and lifted my hand, guiding it slowly, lowering it onto his pages. “You,” he said. “Read.”

SO THEN HE
was king. It happened quickly, the way these things do: one minute you’re tugging a sheet of paper from your typewriter and pulling at the skin of your lips and muttering
I hate myself, I hate myself,
then the next minute there’s a royal bugler at your door unscrolling a proclamation that makes your ascendance official.

And yes, he ascended, a straight shot upward, no qualms, no second thoughts, none of those late-night fears that sometimes terrorize young writers: What if everything’s different now? What if
we’re
different?

Joe wanted everything to be different, and so did I. Filth was boring, and so was a diet of egg foo yung. A man needed to have something to grab on to, something that made him feel fine about himself, or else every failure that had ever struck him in his lifetime would come creeping back, all the math tests, the ejaculations that didn’t wait for their cue, and the halfhearted reprimands of a gentle, depressed shoe-salesman father whose face could barely be remembered after the assault of time. An unsold novel was just one more failure.

But an enormously successful novel was a thing of beauty,
and Joe and I jumped and slapped each other’s back and dove into the bed and out into the street and talked of nothing else but the book, and him, and the reviews, and “the future,” that nebulous hallway. In the winter of 1958 we moved from our room at the Waverly Arms into a real apartment on Charles Street off Greenwich Avenue with its own bathroom and high ceilings and wide-beamed floors, the kind of place where a successful young writer should live.

Writers need light. They always tell you this, as though they’re parched, as though they’re
plants,
as though the page they’re working on would look completely different with a southern exposure. Writers need light, and the place on Charles Street was flooded; we had light, we had heat, we had a continuous drip of money for the first time since we’d been together. We clung and drank and collected new friends at every book party and reading and dinner we were invited to. My doubts about having left Smith disappeared.
We were having fun.
Mostly, the quality of our life had changed so greatly because of what he had been given. Sometimes I thought of it as a crown, at other times a key: a way inside the vast world of broad-shouldered writers. And in this world, the men feasted and drank until all hours, though once in a while they were summoned to stand up on stages and speak.

Joe loved this part best of all. While I watched, beaming nervously, nodding, he leaped up onto every stage, clutching the trim first novel that had gotten him there. Whenever he gave readings in those early days, he often repeated what he’d said at a reading the night before, having plotted and planned his entire set of remarks down to the jokes, the casual, off-the-cuff type of patter, and even the ritual sipping of water.

One night in New York City during that first year, Joe was appearing somewhere, I think it was the Ninety-second Street Y, though I’m not positive; the grand auditoriums have all come together in my memory by now as one enormous chamber with thousands of rows. I wore a blue velvet dress—that part I’m
sure of—and no makeup, my hair pulled back in a ribbon. It was one of Joe’s first readings and I was sick with overstimulation, retching into a toilet in the women’s rest room, and was then so embarrassed about it that I didn’t come out of the stall for a while. I just knelt on the floor, listening as two women stood at the sinks and talked about Joe.

“
The Walnut
is my favorite book this year. And I hear he’s an awfully good reader,” one said. “My friend Elise heard him read last week.”

“Oh yes,” said the other, “and he’s very attractive. I just want to eat him up like a dish of ice cream.”

“But you can’t. He’s taken,” said the first one.

“So?” said the second, and they both began laughing.

At which point I forced myself to emerge from the stall, letting the door swing wide as if I were a gunslinger in a Western, bursting into a saloon. But the women paid no attention to me. I wasn’t a threat, with my pale cloth coat and anemic good looks. I had the appearance of someone who’s already landed the man she wants; they were two women still leisurely searching and enjoying themselves.

One woman was dark, with a sheet of black hair and olive skin. The other was fair and freckled, with improbably large breasts. I could imagine her nipples like twin pale snouts, poking into Joe’s delighted face.

Which woman would he choose? It seemed important that I be able to tell, that I know what he would like, so that in the future I could block him, distract him, keep him from his ideal.

Foolishly, I spoke to these women. “You know,” I said, “I’m so glad you both enjoy Joe’s work.”

“Pardon?” said one.

“Oh my God,” said the other one quietly, under her breath.

“Wait, Joseph Castleman is your
husband
?” said the dark one.

“Yes,” I said.

“He’s wonderful,” said the light one. “You must be really proud of him.”

“Yes,” I said, washing my hands. The water splattered out boiling hot, but I didn’t even pull my hands away. It was as though I wanted to poach my hands right there in front of these two young women.

“Is he writing something new?” dark asked.

“Yes,” I said. “A second novel.”

“That’s great,” said light. “We’re really looking forward to hearing him read tonight.”

Then they were gone, and the bathroom door hadn’t even shut all the way before I could hear their whispering and laughter. I knew what I was up against, that women would fling themselves at him like lemmings who had a love-wish instead of a death-wish. Adorable lemmings batting their eyelashes and trying to open his pants with their sharp little claws. I knew it, because in a way I had been one of them, and before me there had certainly been others. I just assumed, though, based on no evidence whatsoever, that Joe had learned by now to refuse the other lemmings, to gently pull their claws from his shirt, and that he would continue to refuse them as time went on, because now he had me, and I was different.