The Wife (6 page)

I’ve always had a fear of being small and ordinary. “How can I just have this one life?” I used to ask my mother incredulously when I was twelve and sat at the dining room table in our apartment in New York after school, eating a cruller. I’d delicately chew the whorls of fried dough and try to look into the windows of other apartments across the double width of Park Avenue.

My mother, an angular, worried woman whose life was spent serving on committees to organize charity dinner-dances at the Pierre and the Waldorf, didn’t really know what I was talking about, and my sudden spasms of nascent existentialism always made her anxious.

“Joan, why do you say such things?” she usually said before drifting into another room.

By the time I was in college, I was desperate to have a big effect, to tower over people, to loom, which seemed a completely unlikely possibility in the occasional moments when I saw what I’d become: a slender, hygienic Smith girl who didn’t know much about anything, and had no idea of how to learn.

English 202—Elements of Creative Writing—was held in the late afternoon on Mondays and Wednesdays. I’d heard that the class had previously been taught by a Mrs. Dymphna Worrell, who’d published flower poems (“One Sprig of Freesia,” “The Bud That Wouldn’t Bloom”) in a publication put out by the New England Horticultural Society, and who sat sucking lozenges and praising everyone’s work in the same sweeping way: “Expressive use of language!” But now Mrs. Worrell had retired to a rest home in nearby Chicopee, and none of us knew anything about her replacement except his name, which the course catalog listed as Mr. J. Castleman, M.A.

I enrolled in the class not because I imagined I was talented, but because I
wished
I was, though really I’d never tested it out,
for fear I would be told I was average. There were twelve students in English 202, and after we’d arrived at the seminar room in Seelye Hall on the first day of class and chatted blandly for several minutes while opening our notebooks to fresh, hopeful pages, the entire classroom fell into a worried silence. Whoever J. Castleman, M.A., was, he was late.

But when he swung into the classroom at seventeen minutes past the hour, I wasn’t prepared for him; none of us was. He was in his mid-twenties and skinny, with uncombed black hair and high color stippling his cheeks. He was definitely handsome, but seemed to have been constructed in a slapdash manner, and his books were loosely held together by a strap, giving him the appearance of a frantic schoolboy. Professor Castleman walked with a slight limp, a hesitant scraping of one foot before it lifted off the floor.

“Sorry,” he said to the class, popping open the clip that held everything together, and releasing a burst of his belongings onto the surface of the wide, glossy table. He took from his coat pockets two handfuls of walnuts in their shell. Then he looked up and said, “But I sort of have a good excuse. My wife had a baby last night.”

I didn’t say a word, but several of the other girls began to murmur their congratulations; one said
“Awww,”
and another one said, “Boy or girl, Professor?”

“A girl,” he said. “Fanny. After Fanny Price.”

“The Jewish vaudeville entertainer?” someone tentatively asked.

“No, Fanny
Price,
from
Mansfield Park,
” I corrected quietly.

“Yes,” said the professor. “That’s right. Extra credit to the girl in blue.”

He looked at me gratefully, and I glanced slightly to the side, uneasy at having singled myself out.
The girl in blue.
My remark suddenly seemed so obviously vain and self-serving, and I could have slapped myself on the side of the head. But I had always been the kind of reader who marked up books and lent them out
indiscriminately, knowing I’d never see them again but wanting friends to read them and be as thrilled by them as I was. I’d owned three copies of
Mansfield Park
at one time or another. For some reason, I wanted him to know all of this about me.

J. Castleman, M.A., brought from his pocket a small silver nutcracker, and then picked up a walnut. As quietly as possible he began cracking nuts and eating them. Almost reflexively, he offered them to the class, but we all shook our heads and murmured “No thanks.” He simply ate for a few moments, then closed his eyes and ran his hands through his hair.

“The thing is,” Castleman finally said, “I always knew that when I had a baby it would have to have a literary name. I want my children to know how important books are. And I want all of you to know that, too,” he said. “Because as you get older, life sort of eats away at you like battery acid, and all the things you once loved are suddenly harder to find. And when you do find them, you don’t have time to enjoy them anymore, you know?” We didn’t know, but we nodded somberly. “So I named my baby Fanny,” he went on. “And when you girls start to become baby machines in a few years, I expect all of you to name your little girls Fanny, too.”

There was uncomfortable laughter; none of us had any idea of what to make of him, though we knew we liked him. He stopped talking for a moment, taking time to crack a few more walnuts, and then, in a softer voice, he spoke a little about the writers he particularly loved: Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Joyce.

“Joyce is
it
for me,” he said. “I bow down before the genius-shrine of
Ulysses,
of course, though I have to admit my heart really belongs to
Dubliners.
It doesn’t get any better than ‘The Dead.’ ”

Then Castleman said he was going to read to us from the final passages of “The Dead.” He produced a sea-green paperback copy of
Dubliners,
and as he read aloud we stopped twiddling our pencils and rotating the rings on our fingers and yawning silently in
that sluggish, late-afternoon way. Parts of the novella, particularly near the end, were stunning, and the room became absorbed and silent. His voice, as he read, was reverential. When he was done, he spoke for a few minutes about the meaning of the death of poor, doomed Michael Furey, who had stood lovesick in the frozen night in James Joyce’s story, and died.

“I would kill to write a story half as good. Literally kill,” the professor said. “Well, okay, figuratively kill.” He shook his head. “Because when I really face the facts, girls, I remember that I’ll never even come
close
to doing what that man did.” He paused, looking away self-consciously, then he said, “Now comes the moment in which I have to confess that I’m trying to be a writer myself. I’ve written a few stories here and there. But for now,” he went on quickly, “we’re not supposed to be talking about me; we’re supposed to be talking about
literature
!” He pronounced the word archly, with humor, then looked around the room. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe one of you will write something truly great one day. The verdict isn’t in yet.”

I understood that he was implying that for him the verdict
was
in, and it wasn’t good. He continued to speak for a while longer, and the most diligent girls in the class took notes. I peered sidelong at Susan Whittle, the redheaded, blush-prone girl in mohair beside me. On a page of her binder, in perfectly formed letters, she had written:

Fiction = ART MIXED WITH EMOTION! i.e., the novels of Virginia Wolfe (sp?), James Joyce, etc., etc. Experience should be undiluted.
Similes!!
Note: MUST pick up streamers & keg TODAY for soph. mixer.

Outside the tall windows of Seelye Hall, the light was being wiped from the sky; I saw a few girls walking along the paths, but I didn’t register them particularly; they were people walking, nothing more. I looked back at Professor Castleman. He was a new father with a wife and a baby lying in the warmth of the
nursery of the local hospital. He was a sensitive, intelligent man with a suggestion of a limp; he’d most likely gotten it in Korea, I guessed, or else as a child, having survived polio.

I imagined him ten years old, trapped inside the cylinder of an iron lung, lying with only his head sticking out, while a kindly nurse read to him from
Oliver Twist.
The image was pitiful, made me almost want to cry for the poor boy whom I was starting to confuse, in my mind, with the character of Oliver Twist himself. I felt an uncomplicated love for Professor Castleman, and even a kind of love for his wife and tiny baby, the three points that made up this delicate Castleman constellation.

When class ended, many of the girls tried to establish personal contact with the professor, as though to say:
Yoo-hoo, over here!
It wasn’t that they necessarily imagined him as their lover—he was already taken, after all—but even something about his
being taken
made the situation so much more exquisite.

“Write what you know,” he advised as he sent us off to complete our first writing assignment.

That night after dinner (shepherd’s pie, I remember, for I sat there looking at it and trying to describe it to myself in a writerly fashion, though the best I could come up with was, pathetically, “a roof of mashed potato spread thickly atop a squat house of meat”), I climbed to the upper reaches of the Neilson Library. On tall steel shelves all around me were ancient bound volumes of scientific abstracts:
Annals of Phytochemistry, Sept.–Nov. 1922; International Journal of Haematology, Jan.–Mar. 1931.
I wondered if anyone would ever open any of these books again, or whether they’d remain shut for eternity, like some spell-fastened door in a fairy tale.

Should I be the one to open them, to plant kisses on their frail, crisp pages and break the spell? Did it make any sense to try and write? What if no one ever read what I wrote, what if it languished untouched on the chilled shelf of a college library forever? I sat down at a carrel, looking around at the ignored spines of books, the lightbulbs suspended in their little cages, and I listened
to the distant scrapes of chair legs and the rumble of a lone book cart being rolled along one of the levels of stacks.

For a while I stayed there and tried to imagine what it was I actually
knew.
I’d seen almost nothing of the world; a trip to Rome and Florence with my parents when I was fifteen had been spent in the protection of good hotels and pinned behind the green-glass windows of tour buses, looking at stone fountains in piazzas from an unreal remove. The level of my experience and knowledge had remained the same, hadn’t risen, hadn’t overflowed. I’d stood with other Americans, all of us huddled together, heads back and mouths dropped open as we peered up at painted ceilings. I thought now about how I’d never been entirely naked in front of a man, had never been in love, had never gone to a political meeting in someone’s basement, had never really done anything that could be considered independent or particularly insightful or daring. At Smith, girls surrounded me, the equivalent of those American tourists. Girls in groups were safe as shepherd’s pie.

Now I sat in the upper part of the library, freezing cold but not minding, and finally I made myself begin to write something. Without censoring it or condemning it for being trivial or narrow or simply poorly constructed, I wrote about the impenetrable wall of femaleness that formed my life.
This,
apparently, was what I knew. I wrote about the three different perfumes—Chanel No. 5, White Shoulders, and Joy—that could be smelled everywhere on campus, and about the sound of six hundred female voices rising up together at convocation to sing “Gaudeamus Igatur.”

When I was done, I sat for a long time at that carrel, thinking of Professor J. Castleman and how he’d looked in class with his eyes closed. His eyelids had had a purplish, nearly translucent quality, making them appear inadequate to the task of keeping the world out. Maybe that was what it was like to be a writer: Even with the eyes closed, you could see.

*   *   *

During his office hours the following week, sitting on the bench in the hallway, I waited with nearly rabid anticipation. Someone was already in there; I could hear the dueling murmurs of a male voice and a female one, punctuated by an occasional shriek of female hilarity, all of which increased my annoyance. Was there a cocktail party going on? Were drinks being served, and damp little sandwiches? Finally the door opened and Abigail Brenner, one of the other students from the class, emerged, holding her tedious story about her grandmother’s recent death from double pneumonia, which she had been reworking pointlessly since the first day of class. From within the office, I could see Castleman at his desk; his jacket was off, and he was in his shirtsleeves and tie.

“Well, hello there, Miss Ames,” he said, finally realizing I was there.

“Hello, Professor Castleman,” I said, and I sat across from him on a wooden chair. He held my new story in his hand, the one I’d left in his department mailbox.

“So. Your story.” He looked at it serenely. There were almost no markings on it, no red-pen hieroglyphics. “I’ve read this twice,” he said, “and frankly, both times I’ve found it to be wonderful.”

Did he say this about everyone’s story? Had he even said it about Abigail Brenner’s dumb story about her grandmother? I didn’t think so. It was
my
story that was good. I had written it for
him,
specifically wanting to please him, and apparently I’d succeeded.

“Thank you,” I said quietly, not meeting his eyes.

“You barely know what I’m talking about now, am I right?” he asked me. “You have no conception of how good you are. I love that about you, Miss Ames; it’s a very touching quality. Please don’t change.”

I nodded, embarrassed, and I understood that this was how he wanted to see me: unusual but innocent, and I found that I didn’t mind appearing this way. Maybe, I thought, it was even true.

“Miss Ames, Miss Ames,” he said, smiling. “What am I going to do with you?”

I smiled back, beginning to feel at ease in this strange new role. “As my friend Laura would say,” I told him, “maybe you should pickle me.”

Castleman folded his hands behind his head. “Well,” he said slowly, “maybe your friend Laura has a point.” Then the playful moment passed and we got to work, leaning together over my story. There was walnut on his breath, I noticed. “ ‘The trees bent back, as if in apprehension,’ ” he read aloud. He made a bunched-up face, as though he’d eaten a bad nut. “I don’t think so. Kind of phony, don’t you think? You’re better than that.”