The Wife (8 page)

We’d arrived at the middle of the campus when he said to me, “I was wondering, Miss Ames, whether by any chance you’re free Saturday night.”

I told him I was. All around us, girls trudged past.

“Good,” he said. “Would you be interested in baby-sitting? My wife and I haven’t gotten out since Fanny was born.”

“Sure,” I said flatly. “I love children.”

Which wasn’t even true. I felt a flush of humiliation about what I’d imagined, and how different the truth was, but still this was better than nothing, better than being ignored by him. So on Saturday night I declined to attend Northrop House’s big band party, walking away from the sounds of “String of Pearls” cranked loud on a phonograph, and the parry of male voices in the snapping air, and instead headed along Elm Street until it shook off its collegiate feel and became simply part of a neighborhood where families lived.

Bancroft Road was dark, with no streetlamps, and I could see into front windows where faculty members and their wives and children shuffled around living rooms. Was this the epiphany of adult life, that it actually
wasn’t
exciting and vast in possibilities, but was in fact as enclosed and proscribed as childhood? What a disappointment, for I’d been looking forward to the open field, the imagined release. Or maybe, I thought as I watched a young mother stride across her living room, then suddenly stoop down to pick something up (A shoe? A squeak toy?), only men ever felt that release. For women in 1956 were always confronting boundaries, negotiations: where they could walk at night, how far they could let a man go when the two of them were alone. Men hardly seemed troubled by these things; they walked everywhere in cold, dark cities and pin-drop empty streets, and they let their hands go walking, too, and they opened their belts and then their trousers, and they never thought to themselves:
I must stop this right now. I must not go any further.

Here on Bancroft Road, it appeared that I was in a land in which everyone seemed to have stopped themselves from going too far. This was Smith, not Harvard; prestigious but not of high academic voltage. The men who held these faculty positions would initially feel relief at being here, and would settle in for the long run, but something would probably steal over them eventually, a desire to move on, to burst out into bigger cities, to not waste their Ph.D.’s and carefully composed lectures on girls who would dutifully absorb everything and then immediately go get married and reproduce, inevitably beginning the long process of forgetting.

The Castleman house was a gray saltbox, set back from the street behind a bumpy lawn. The bell on the front porch made a halfhearted
blat
when I pressed it. In a moment Professor Castleman himself was at the door, lit from behind by a yellow bulb.

“You must be freezing,” he said as he let me in. He wore a half-opened dress shirt, an unknotted tie draped around his neck. “I’m warning you, it’s chaos here,” he said. He smelled of some sort of shaving balm, and a spot of blood was on his chin. The
record album from
South Pacific
was playing distantly, and from somewhere behind him a baby rhythmically cried, and then a woman’s voice called out, “Joe? Joe? Could you come up?”

His name was Joe.
I didn’t known this, and I’d been afraid to attach a specific first name to him. His wife descended, carrying the baby over her shoulder. I lifted my eyes to look. The baby was quiet now, though bright red in the face. Mrs. Castleman wasn’t beautiful; she was a small, frazzled woman in her middle twenties, with boyish brown hair and darting eyes. What did he see in her? I imagined my professor in bed with this unglamorous little woman. Mrs. Castleman was so different from the Smith girls who grazed all around the campus like gazelles nibbling foliage. She stood with her hand reaching up the back of the baby’s outfit to check the status of a diaper, and she gave the appearance of a puppeteer in that moment, the hand inside the cloth, the baby entirely under her power, at least for now.

“Hello,” Castleman’s wife said without much interest. “I’m Carol Castleman. Nice to meet you.”

I tried to appear neutral, cheerful, a Smithie straight out of a college brochure. Autumn leaves should have been falling all around me as I stood at the foot of the uncarpeted staircase. “You, too,” I said. “Hello, honey,” I forced myself to say in the general direction of the baby. “Aren’t you adorable.”

“We haven’t left her with a sitter before,” Mrs. Castleman explained. “But she’s still so young, I can’t imagine it’ll scar her for life, regardless of what I’ve been trained to think.” The professor’s wife shifted the baby to her other arm and explained, “I’m studying to be a psychoanalyst.” Then she added, “Let me show you around.”

The rooms of the house were disorganized, with piles of books and toys and tilting lamp shades. Carol Castleman didn’t seem to care, or to feel the need to apologize. The baby slept in her parents’ room, and I was taken up there, knowing that I was about to enter the place where Castleman lay each night with his wife. The bed was made, though clearly in a hurry, and beside it was a white
wicker bassinet. On one of the night tables was a scattering of walnuts. Joe came out of the bathroom and stood in the doorway, now fully dressed. His hair was wet and pushed back off his face, and his tie was knotted. From the record player, a dreamy, tropical female voice sang,
“Here am I, your special island, come away, come away. . . .”

“Carol,” he said. “Is the tour over? We should get going.”

His wife took his arm, and in that frozen pose they appeared to be a clean, presentable young faculty couple going out for the night. They clearly received something from each other, a reciprocity that was founded on things I couldn’t even imagine, for he was so handsome and she so shrunken and ordinary. I thought of my own parents, who were as remote as two stalactites hanging side by side in the same cave, never touching in public, my father in his dark suits that smelled leafy and masculine, my mother in her dresses with patterns that gave them the appearance of tablecloths. My parents had separate beds made of dark, shellacked wood, and once, after she’d had a lot to drink at a dinner party, my charity-addled mother swept into my room late at night and confided that my father had recently been “rough” with her “in a marital way.” I only understood this much later, though simply the idea of it was awful: my big, impersonal, corporate father roughing up my slender, tablecloth-wearing mother as he mounted her in one of their high twin beds. Here in the presence of this husband and wife who were
not
my parents, and who lived in a world much more complicated than mine, I felt retarded and slack-jawed. I’d called Fanny “honey,” but I hadn’t meant it at all. The nucleus of attraction was the baby’s father, a man who ate walnuts and read James Joyce aloud to his students.

“Good-bye now!” the Castlemans called as they left, leaving telephone numbers and bottles and clean diapers behind. “Good-bye!” they sang as they headed into the night air to a faculty dinner party.

When they were gone, I gathered up the loose sack of baby and explored the bedroom in depth. Here were the clues to this
man, all the evidence I’d ever need. Here in the closet were his shoes, lined up and worn, and here on the dresser was a bottle of his aftershave. Then, on a table, I saw a copy of Rilke’s
Letters to a Young Poet,
with my professor’s name on the flyleaf. “Joseph Castleman,” he’d written with big flourishes, “Columbia University, 1948,” as though he was guaranteed to be famous some day, and to excite someone who would eventually open this book and come upon his name. By 1956, of course, he still wasn’t famous, but the signature excited me anyway, and I ran a finger along it, tracing the curlicues. Then I put the book down and sat on his side of the bed, laying the baby beside me. I picked up some walnut shells, letting them sift through my fingers, and for a moment Fanny and I regarded each other coolly.

“Hello, you,” I said. “I’m falling in love with your daddy. And I’d really like to go to bed with him.”

In a final burst of nerve, I sprang up and opened the night table drawer. It was as though I needed to find out what it meant to be a wife, to have a life spent beside a man. And sure enough, I found something: a white plastic diaphragm case nestled against a tube of the cream that had to be squirted in along with it, as well as an applicator, all of it making me uneasy, forcing me to imagine the wife of my professor sliding plastic and potions into a deep slot in her body, preparing herself for him. There was a dental pick with a rubber tip in the drawer, too, and a single walnut. I picked up the walnut and looked at it; a red heart had been painted on it, and beneath it were the words:
C., I love you true.—J.

The walnut was more disturbing than the diaphragm. A diaphragm was a necessary, impersonal device, the sort of thing that Smith girls obtained by taking the bus to Springfield and visiting an old female gynecologist from Vilna who barely spoke English and asked few questions. But the inscribed walnut was much more intimate, and therefore somehow perverse. It even looked female, I thought, observing the lips of the nut and the grooves in the shell and the cold silk of the bumpy surface with its red-painted heart. I placed the nut back in the drawer and
turned my attention to Fanny, who was suddenly crying and in need of something: A bottle? A change? Who the hell knew? Her crying was an irritant, sand in the pants, and I couldn’t understand the universal fetish surrounding babies, why they were the prize I would supposedly desire in a couple of years.

I picked the baby up and held her, ineffectually shushing and rocking her. I had no power here, no authority, not even the secret kind like that of a newly sexual girl with a diaphragm buried deep inside her.

Still, though, when the Castlemans returned later, I pathetically tried to make Joe more aware of me. He thanked me and paid me and even offered to give me a lift back to Northrop House, but when I said that I’d be fine on my own, he didn’t insist. Instead, he seemed relieved to return to the quiet disorder of his dim house and the now-unconscious baby in the bassinet, and I was relieved, too, for what would we have talked about? How would we have survived the awkwardness as we sat on the cold, bouncy front seat of his car, heading for my dormitory, a place that I didn’t want to be? Where
did
I want to be? Not there, but not here, either, living life as a sleep-starved faculty wife and envious of the way my husband simply wandered in and out of our house whenever he chose. So I wandered out of their house on my own, too, trying to give the appearance of independence instead of loneliness.

The next morning, returning to my library carrel, I wrote about a small, furtive faculty wife about to go out with her husband for the evening, walking down a flight of stairs with her baby over her shoulder, the woman’s hand inside the baby’s sleeper like a puppeteer at work, imagining that she might be able to control her child for years to come. The mother trades the shadows and smells of her faculty house for the cold night air and a brisk walk with her husband toward another house, where all the lights are on, and music is playing, and faculty couples stand in hopeful clusters.

When I was done, I tried to write from the point of view of the
husband, including his thoughts as he stood beside his wife, his hand on her elbow as though women might need help navigating any new living room they entered. But something stopped me. I didn’t really know what men thought, or
how
they thought, couldn’t imagine what powered them, what steered them, and so I decided not to try.

Several days later, after I’d handed in my writing exercise, Castleman asked me to come see him during office hours. I climbed the wide stairs of Seelye Hall knowing that he’d either praise me as he usually did or else tell me I’d invaded his privacy by writing this piece, which the class would read. When he ushered another girl out and let me in, he sat holding my story in his hand.

Finally he leaned forward and said, “Miss Ames, I want you to listen to me. I’ve already told you that your work is good. But I’m not sure that I got through to you. The way you probably see it, my class is just like any of the others: French, or Renaissance art, or whatever it is you’re taking this semester. You’ll be very happy to get an
A,
and that will be that. But I guess I feel it’s important for you to understand that you can really
do
something with this, if you choose to.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, you could probably expand it and sell it as a short story, for instance. And then keep writing more of them, and sell those, too. Maybe not to the very top places—God knows how they decide who to let in—but certainly to some of the better small literary magazines. And you might even decide to write a novel,” he went on.

“Why?” I said.

“Why?”

“Why would I want to do that? What’s the point?” I thought of Elaine Mozell pulling me aside in the alcove.

Castleman looked at me. “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “Because you’re good. Because you have something to say. Plenty of writers have only one or the other, but not both. And it’s
always interesting when the world gets to see things from a woman’s perspective. We’re so accustomed to getting the man’s view; whenever we get a chance to see through the eyes of a female, it’s
refreshing.
”

Elaine Mozell didn’t write like a woman usually did; she wrote with big, sweeping arcs and lists and the assumption of authority, and because of all this she also seemed greedy, inappropriate, not female at all. All of my characters so far had been girls or women, and the tone of my writing was quiet and observant, almost catlike. Women would want to read my writing, I thought, not men.

Maybe Castleman was right; in several years I could publish a perfectly decent first novel, a coming-of-age story with a title like
Summer at the Shore,
and I might be asked to give an alumnae reading at Smith. The girls in the audience would nod in recognition, while the few men present would drum their fingers and wish they were somewhere else. The men would long for armored writing, protected writing, writing that was muscle-bound and never ceased flexing itself. Writing that chose to take in the entire world, including the hundred-year wars as well as the ten-minute arguments in some suburban couple’s avocado-hued kitchen.