The Wife (21 page)

These days Joe was a leftover from another era, still important but rapidly on his way out. Sales of his last two novels had been extremely disappointing. Big writers today were different. In addition to the usual new crop of swaggering young men, there were many more women out there. This wasn’t 1956, when I’d taken his fiction class.

The biggest woman of all was named Valerian Qaanaaq. She was a novelist who was a member of the Inuit tribe of Labrador. She was young and beautiful, with black hair, green eyes, and sharp, bright teeth. She claimed to have grown up in an igloo made of sod and snow, though already there was a backlash against her, a bitter muttering that she was a charlatan who used her looks and unusual ethnicity to get so far, that she’d only spent a few months in that igloo, and the rest of the time in an apartment with a satellite dish on the roof. She’d gone to St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, after leaving home, and her first novel appeared when she was twenty-three. It was called
Whaleskin
and was about a woman whaler and the young member of Parliament who becomes obsessed with her. The novel was as long as the Bible, filled with arch, erudite, bawdy scenes, flights that took the reader from Labrador and into 10 Downing Street. The book was pan-ethnic, risky, maddening, and extraordinarily popular in the States and in Europe. Back when I was young, Valerian Qaanaaq didn’t exist, but now her novel was beloved. More than 1.5 million copies of the hardback edition had been sold. The back of the book featured a glossary of words in the Inuit-Inupik language.

She was a recent phenomenon and there were a few others in this vein: women who were writing and publishing in ways that struck me as masculine. I tried to ignore their work, for its very existence made me unhappy. Better to stay among the dinosaurs like Joe and Lev and the others. Better to be miserable and feel cheated than to welcome this new breed that I didn’t understand and for whom I had no affection.

Bone was leaning forward across the small table, his breath a warm, fermented current, saying to me, “Listen, we could talk a
little bit while we’re both here in Helsinki. You could tell me things. We could meet up again, and you’d tell me the things you want people to know.”

“And what do you think those things are?” I asked.

“I won’t put words in your mouth,” he said. “It wouldn’t be right. But I know you have things to say, Joan. People have been saying that for years.”

“What people?”

“An old friend of my parents, in particular,” Bone said mildly.

“Oh? Who are you talking about?”

“A woman I knew when I was growing up in California,” he began, and from the way he drummed his fingers and pinched at his shirt front, I knew he was uncomfortable. “She lived a few blocks away with her husband,” he went on. “He was some kind of failed artist, the type who paints driftwood. She was a shrink, like both of my parents, except she was definitely
out there
at the time, into all kinds of alternative therapy. But I liked her. She was one of those women from the sixties with those long, dangling earrings and flowered muumuus and nutty theories about everything. She had a daughter, too. Older than me, and really dark and smart. My older brother knew her. She wrote poetry for the high school literary magazine.”

“Okay,” I said, ungrounded in the story, bewildered by it. “Go on.”

“The woman—the therapist—had been married once before,” he said. “And it had ended badly; her first husband had left her and the baby, but she’d moved on, making a new life for herself and starting a career. The first husband became famous,” he continued lightly. “A novelist.”

“Oh shit,” I said. “Not this.” Quickly, Bone looked away from me, as though he was apologetic, embarrassed about his sordid errand here. I felt equally embarrassed and found out. “Okay,” I said finally, holding up a hand. “I get it, Nathaniel. I get what you’re doing here. The suspenseful narrative. The dragging-out of the story. The big surprise ending. Well, all right, I’m surprised.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you want me to stop now? Am I out of line?”

But I shook my head; he knew that of course I would want to hear the story of what had happened to these people, the abandoned, crazy first wife, Carol, and the baby, Fanny, who had disappeared into the baked depths of California.

“Carol was smart and sort of wounded, and she said a lot of things over the years to my parents,” Bone said. “She told them all about her first husband, and how, though she used to hate him, she’d stopped. Hatred didn’t last, she said, unless you made a real effort, keeping at it, rubbing two sticks together or something. Instead of hating him, she was always kind of
amused
by his success, because she’d never thought he was particularly talented. But then again, she’d always add, what did
she
know?”

I watched Bone as he talked. He was both embarrassed and stimulated; there was nothing particularly sadistic in his demeanor. He was just excited, like a literary detective who has found an important manuscript in the bottom of a drawer and is quietly savoring it and stroking it.

Joe and I hadn’t had reason to speak often of Carol or Fanny for many years. They’d faded away like characters in a novel that has become unfashionable, and once in a while I would ask Joe about them, usually about Fanny, who would be forty-five years old by now. (That baby, forty-five!) Joe would shake his head and ask me not to bring the matter up, for it made him feel too bad. We knew where they were, and roughly
what
they were, but not much more. It was as though they were permanently installed in California, the mother a therapist, the daughter a lawyer. Facts were known, had been gathered over the decades, and, in recent years, with the help of the Internet. Face-to-face contact wasn’t wanted either by them or Joe. For a long time he’d tried to see Fanny, every few years, out of both curiosity and courtesy, but when she rebuffed him he was relieved.

He’d visited them once, back in the early sixties during a book tour, and he had come home from California feeling depressed,
for his daughter didn’t know who he was and didn’t seem to want to know. She’d played in her sandbox in the yard in Sausalito while he’d crouched on the green wooden edge and tried to ask her questions about herself. She’d answered in monosyllables and then finally, in the way of small children, she grew too bored and simply began to sing.

The house Carol and Fanny lived in then was small but pretty, the rooms painted like the inside of a seashell. Everything had a pink glaze to it, Joe said, including Carol, and when he looked into her eyes he had no idea of who she was or how it was possible they’d ever been married. Out of context—taken from a cold climate and transplanted into a warm one—she seemed like another person entirely, and this baby they’d collaborated on appeared distant and unknowable. There was heartbreak there for Joe to feel, if he thought about it long enough, but he decided not to let himself. He’d left that seashell house and hurried home to us.

“Tell me about the daughter,” I said to Bone now. “Fanny. She’s a labor lawyer; we know that much.”

“Went to law school at Pepperdine,” he said. “Unmarried. Hardworking. Humorless, I think.”

“Joe tried to stay in contact with Fanny at first, you know,” I said, but there wasn’t real conviction to this statement. “He was busy,” I went on. “And Carol didn’t want his money; it wasn’t about child support. She wanted very little to do with him, and then he’d become a big deal, and time passed, and we had our own family. She just wanted to be done with him.”

I stopped talking, dredging up the ancient image of Fanny the baby lying beside me on Joe and Carol’s bed in Northampton. I’d told that baby:
I’m falling in love with your daddy. And I’d really like to go to bed with him.
And then I’d done exactly that, as though it had nothing to do with Fanny at all, or Carol, but only had to do with Joe and me, the two of us floating on a tiny island, our very own Bali Ha’i.

We were terrible.
I
was terrible. I’d charged ahead, distracting him from his wife and baby, although I hadn’t been able to see any
of it back then, but had only heard Joe talking bitterly about the ways in which his wife denied him love, kept herself from him. He needed sexual release, he needed relentless love, he needed a woman, but Carol wasn’t that woman. I was. The wife and child receded, as though they were bit players and their moment was over.
Fanny and Carol exit, stage left. Carol lifts the baby’s tiny hand and moves it back and forth in a gesture of farewell.

“Look,” I said to Bone, “I know it’s a bad story. It doesn’t make me look good, or Joe either. But there it is. All I could focus on at the time was that Carol didn’t make him happy. And anyway, she seemed crazy.”

“Yeah. Nuts,” he said, smiling. “The
walnut,
” he clarified. “I’ve heard the whole story from her point of view. She never thought she was actually going to hurt you when she threw it. She thought she’d just shake you up a little. Because the thing was, it wasn’t the first time.”

“What do you mean?”

“There had been someone else, apparently. Back in New York, when they first got married,” Bone said. “A philosophy student. And apparently he gave
her
one of the walnuts, too. He admitted everything to Carol when she confronted him.”

“Oh,”
I said, imagining a truckload of painted walnuts being distributed to different women before me and after me.

“By the time she found out about you, she was really fed up with his behavior,” Nathaniel said.

I’d always thought Carol was off-kilter, but maybe she was just furious.
Sorry,
I wanted to say to her.
Sorry,
I wanted to say to Fanny.
Sorry for ruining your lives.

“Carol always felt mortified that Joe actually wrote about how she threw the walnut at you. But at least, she felt, the book was well written. That always impressed her,” said Nathaniel.

We were silent for a little while, and then he said, “I hope I’m not being too aggressive about this, Joan. I was a little apprehensive about mentioning it to Joe. But sitting here with you . . . I thought I could do it.”

“It’s all right,” I told him; I was the one doing the comforting here.

“You know, of course, I’ve read Joe’s early work,” he said suddenly. “There’s one story in particular that I dug up, ‘No Milk on Sunday,’ from that little literary magazine. I have to say, it’s not so great.”

“I know. Awful,” I agreed, and we laughed a little.

“Carol was always amazed that he’d come so far,” Nathaniel said. “She started saying that maybe Joe was able to find his voice only after he’d ditched her. Or,” he added, “after he met you. That maybe you became his muse.”

“I guess I did, in a way,” I said.

“The blond shiksa entrancing the Jewish guy.”

“That’s me. Upholding the tradition.”

We stirred our drinks and tried to laugh a little; we both finally let our gazes lift and looked up at the rectangle of light. We were dawdling together in some strange, new way, as though we were finally comfortable with each other when in fact we weren’t. He pushed a silver bowl of pretzel sticks toward me and I ate some, and then he said, “You could really add something to my book, you know. You’d finally get to speak; it would be a real feminist moment for you.”

“Oh, Nathaniel, come on, you have no use for feminism,” I said.

“Yeah, but you do.”

In his own way he was seductive, if only because he wasn’t Joe. I was getting old, and Joe was getting old, and Bone was relatively young. And long after Joe and I were gone from the world, Nathaniel Bone would still be kicking around, getting another book contract, appearing at the Ninety-second Street Y on a panel called “Truth-Telling and the Biographer’s Task.” Why not give everything to him? He hungered for it; he knew it was there in me. He wanted the Joe Castleman story to make sense, to have the satisfying shape and closure of a novel.

“I won’t rush you, Joan,” said Bone. “You can take your time;
we can do it however you want. I could tape you, or just take notes. We’ll both be here for one more day, right? There’s the ceremony, and then the banquet, and you’ll be completely overextended. I’ll be somewhere up in the peanut gallery. The
walnut
gallery. We could meet the next morning, say around ten, in front of the Academic Bookstore. Joe wouldn’t have to know. That place is enormous; these Finns read and read, don’t they? What else do they have to do all winter other than drink, am I right? We could meet, and you could make up your mind about exactly what you want to say to me. How does that sound?” I shrugged; that was all I’d commit to. “I think you really do want to talk to me,” he said. “I’m like a therapist in a way. People have often told me that.”

“Yeah, but you’re a
bad
therapist,” I said. “The kind who gives away other people’s secrets.”

“True,” said Nathaniel, smiling. “My parents are psychiatrists—maybe that’s why I went bad. Kids of shrinks are completely fucked up from the start. We don’t even have a chance.”

“Poor, poor you,” I said.

“I know you’re only teasing, but if you actually knew what my life was like, you
would
feel sorry for me,” he said. “You, Joan, you’ve got this marriage, this life, your kids and grandkids, a house, lots of friends. I don’t have any of that. I’ve got my work. The Joe Castleman project. That’s my life. That’s my house. My kid. Too bad for me.”

Then Bone abruptly paid the bill, trying to figure out how many
markka
to leave, how many
penniä,
holding each coin up to the light of the sloping window, peering at it through his little lenses to see what it was and how much it was worth, though soon the euro would sweep these specifics into irrelevance. I left him there in the restaurant frowning over a confusion of lightweight coins and flyaway paper money, and headed out into the dark evening in this Midwestern-sized city where I knew no one and no one knew me, and people banged absently into one another like bumper cars on a wide, polished surface.