The Wife (28 page)

“Don’t move, you fat fuck,” David said from behind him.

“David,” said Joe, his voice a whisper, “what is it you want from me?”

“I want you to admit what you’ve done,” David said.

This, out of nowhere. What had brought it on?

“What is it you think I’ve done?”

“
You
know.”

“If I’ve been a less-than-perfect father, I apologize.”

“What you’ve done to
Mom,
” David broke in.

“Your mother is fine. She’s at her book group.”

“She’s not fine,” David insisted. “You’ve kept her your
slave
all these years.”

“Oh, give me a break,” Joe said. “I don’t know what you mean. Your mother is content.”

“She
thinks
she’s content. You’ve obviously tricked her.”

At which point Joe began to cry a little. “I love you, David,” he said. “We used to go hiking, remember? Mount Cardigan, and that stream we found with hundreds of little fish, and you wanted us to count them?” David was unmoved. “I tell you what,” Joe went on. “We’ll call Mom right now at the book group and ask her to come home, okay?”

“Fine,” said David.

And so they called me at Lois Ackerman’s house, and though I didn’t know anything yet, I was alarmed and roared home immediately. Soon I was back in our house, where Joe and David
were now pacing the living room, regarding each other in mutual distrust, David still holding one of the steak knives, though no longer against Joe’s neck. Joe was playing the good, slightly impotent father, a soft-bellied, easygoing man.

“Sweetheart, what’s happened?” I asked David. He looked sickly and sweaty, this boy we’d once driven to Wesleyan with a station wagon full of things, the trunk and the extra-long sheets and the mini-refrigerator that he was supposed to stock with Coke and beer and peanut butter and other college-boy things, but which instead remained empty, its door swung open like a looted safe.

“Ask him,” David said.

“He wants to kill me,” Joe blurted out. “He held that knife to my throat.”

“Give me the knife,” I told my son. “It’s a good steak knife. It belongs in the set.” I was improvising. To my astonishment, he simply handed it to me. “Thank you,” I said. “Can we all sit down now?”

So we all sat in the family room, beneath the row of Audubon prints, the birds staring blankly, and David said, “I’ve always known what a monster Dad is, with a big swinging dick. It’s like he’s turned you into his fucking handservant.”

“I will not sit here and listen to this garbage,” Joe said. “Because it’s nonsense, okay? Absolute, raving nonsense.” I didn’t say a word. “Feel free to jump in at any time, Joan,” he added.

“All right. It’s nonsense,” I said, and David watched me, his eyes narrow, wanting the truth, trusting that he could get it from me, and I nodded slightly and he seemed to relax a little. “Total nonsense. I’m not your father’s handservant. I’m his wife. His partner. Just like any other couple.” The words were ludicrous; they embarrassed me as I spoke them. But what was I supposed to do? Come clean? Make him feel justified? I couldn’t do that; I had to be his mother. He was a grown man but he was still immature and fragile. He needed to be protected from his own fears. He wanted them negated.

“You don’t write his books?” David said.

“No,” I told him. “Of course not.”

“I don’t believe you,” David said, but he seemed uncertain. He kept looking at me, wanting guidance.

“I can’t make you believe me,” I told him softly. “It’s up to you what you believe.” He looked as though he would cry. And then I took his head in my hands, that head filled with stylized comic-book imagery, all of it laid out in frames and dialogue balloons, and I pressed it against me, onto my shoulder, the edge of my breast, the wide swell that women use to comfort men and children alike. “I’m fine, David. Really,” I said. “No one controls me.”

David didn’t understand that in the early years with Joe, everything was more than bearable. It was
fun.
The reviews excited me. I possessed a secret talent, and the secrecy added to the pleasure. Joe was expansive and loving to me, and because we stayed close together for the gestation of each novel, he truly felt that he was, in a sense, the actual, sole author. He must have found a way to believe it, because if he didn’t, his life would have been excruciating. As it was, over time, there were nights when Joe would pace and smoke and fret, and he’d say to me, “I feel so bad about what we’ve entered into here,” never naming it directly, always alluding, as though the house were bugged, and I would end up calming
him
down, which then made me forget that I was the one who needed the reassurance, not him.

We fell right into it; it happened fast and slow and after a while it didn’t seem so strange, sitting in those rooms together all those years, me at the typewriter, him on the bed; then, later on, me at the Macintosh computer with its little smiling face, him on the Abdomenizer, desperately attempting to corrugate his softening abdomen.

But there were tiny cracks. He began to cheat in obvious ways; his abdomen was being corrugated not for me but for other women. His betrayals had started early, not long after his first book came out, and I both knew it and didn’t know it, because
when I thought of what I’d done for him, I felt there ought to have been some reciprocity.

But here is the partial list of Joe’s women:

Our baby-sitter Melinda.

Brenda the prostitute.

Several women at readings Joe gave around the country.

Merry Cheslin.

Two publicists named, coincidentally, Jennifer.

The occasional letter-writer and ardent reader who came on a pilgrimage to meet him.

The young woman who worked at a grocery in Chinatown.

The film producer who made
Overtime
into the 1976 dud starring James Caan and Jacqueline Bisset.

I ignored it whenever I could. It never occurred to me to say, Okay, here’s your part of the deal:
Control yourself.

Control yourself. But they can’t, these men, can they? Or
can
they, and we simply don’t require them to? I tried to force him every few years, confronting him and making demands, and he’d be vague and apologetic or perhaps defiant, insisting I was making it all up, at which point I thought it was better to drop the whole matter. What if he
left
? I knew I didn’t want that, so why harangue him since he seemed incapable of change?

“You should take a lover,” my friend Laura suggested, for after her divorce she’d slept with a string of men and had enjoyed herself thoroughly until she contracted genital herpes from an urban planner. But I had no interest; Joe was more than I could take.

Most of the men I know from this generation have made love with women who weren’t their wives; it was a requirement, at least back when they were young husbands. If you were a man, you worked so very hard, your neck bent in unnatural positions over a keyboard. So you needed the downtime, the recreation, the notion of women as Ping-Pong, poker, women as a dip in a stream. Sorry, wives, they’d say, but this is something you’ll never understand,
so we husbands can’t even try and explain it. Just let us be. The long-term damage to the marriage will be insignificant compared with what it would be if we
did
control ourselves, and forced ourselves to keep our bursting needs under wraps.

He told me details for the novels, sexual stories of great interest, and we pretended that they were all fantasies from an imaginative and restless man. “What if,” he said about a character, “the husband has an affair with the young woman at the grocery in Chinatown? The one who sells him star anise?”

“All right,” I said. “Tell me.”

So he told me why and how and what it might feel like to this character, this flawed male we were inventing, and then I
interpreted
for him without judgment, put it all into a storm of language that came from somewhere—who knew where: my history, my education, my central nervous system, the lobe of my brain that was wired for imagination?—all the while sitting stone-faced at his writing desk.

He sat on the bed and watched me type, nodding like someone listening to jazz as the clack-clacking went full tilt. He loved me so much and so continually. His gratitude could be intuited at all hours of the day, at least for a while. I was his other half, his better half, and there hasn’t been a single day, all these years, when I haven’t been reminded of this.

The walls in the Presidential Suite of the Helsinki Inter-Continental Hotel may be especially thick, but they aren’t thick enough to have contained the argument Joe and I had inside those massive rooms. Other guests down below must have heard us fighting at dawn, though most likely none of them knew exactly what they were hearing, for our words were spoken in rapid, anguished English.

We were back in the bedroom now, out of the sauna, both of us still pink and overheated, him in a towel, me in my sopping nightgown.

“If you were this miserable with everything, miserable enough to leave,” he said, “then you should have told me, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ And I would have done something.”

“What?” I said. “What would you have done?”

“I don’t know,” Joe said. “But we’re
married.
Doesn’t that count? We have kids, and those sweet grandkids, and real estate, and Keoghs and IRA’s and friends we’ve known forever, who are going to start dying on us one by one, and where will you be then? Where will you be, Joan? Living on your own in some apartment? Being brave? Is that what you want for yourself? Because I find it hard to believe it is.” He was pleading, which was something I’d rarely seen him do over the years, and I was surprised. “Every marriage is just two people striking a bargain,” he went on in a softer tone. “I traded, you traded. So maybe it wasn’t even.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “It was the worst deal in the world, and I grabbed it. I should have done my own work, taken my time, waited awhile and watched things start to change in the world. But they haven’t changed enough anyway. Everyone is still fascinated by the inner lives of men.
Women
are fascinated. Men win, hands down. They’ve got control. Look around. Turn on the TV; there they are in Congress, with their bad ties and their seaweed comb-overs—”

“Joan,” said Joe, “I’m not a terrible person.”

“No, you’re not. You’re an enormous baby, that’s all you are.”

He nodded. “I’m sure that’s true.” Then he shook his head and said in a small voice, “I just don’t want to be alone at this point in my life. I can’t even think about what that would be like.”

But I knew he could take care of himself, even if that meant he fed himself forever on ham in a can and wheels of Brie and liquor-enriched stews, and the lunches his editor or agent or an awards committee treated him to. He didn’t need my physical, corporeal presence, either, for there would still be young women skimming by who would approach his overstuffed body with awe. He needed me at the computer, me with my head bent, tapping away.

“No more of this, Joe,” I found myself saying. “You’ll get used to living with yourself.
I
did.” Then, less angrily, I said, “You’ll be okay.”

He sat on the bed and lay back against the pillow, as if he was beginning to give in to the idea that I really would leave him when we returned home, that this wasn’t just histrionics.

“So let me ask you this,” he said finally. “What exactly did you say to Nathaniel Bone?”

“I said nothing to him that would freak you out,” I assured him.

“Oh, good,” he said. “To be honest, I thought you’d probably said something you couldn’t take back.”

We were quiet, and I wondered what good it was to leave Joe. Would it register with him at all? So he’d never publish another book; so what? He’d already published enough; Helsinki was honoring him now, saying,
You’ve done a good job; now you are free to fade away with aplomb.
Finally, maybe he understood that that would be the best option. Taking more accolades from the world would be too greedy. Even now, I realized, he was possibly a little embarrassed about himself. Perhaps that was what he’d meant when he asked me to think about why he hadn’t really wanted Alice and Susannah to come to Finland. This prize was so big, too big, that he wouldn’t have been able to meet their gaze. He would have been ashamed of himself.

Maybe he’d always been a little bit ashamed. But that had never changed things before, and probably it wouldn’t change anything now. He wanted to keep going and going forever, with me beside him.

“You know, I think I have to tell Bone, actually,” I said after a moment.

“What?” Joe said. “Joan, don’t forget, I’m an old man here; I’m not your enemy. It’s just
me.
”

I thought of Joe as a young, thin man with dark curls and fanning chest hair, and was again astonished at the change and bloat that had taken place, that I’d helped to take place. He’d gone soft
as a Sno-Ball and so had I, and we’d had a soft, good life together and now it was almost done.

“Yeah, Bone should probably hear everything,” I said to Joe, and I stood up and walked into the dressing room with its hulking bureau. I’d get dressed, I decided, and go see Nathaniel, waking him up in his own hotel room and starting to talk to him before he even understood what was happening.

I was taking a bra from the drawer when Joe’s hand moved to my shoulder and he turned me around to him.

“Come on, this is crazy,” he said. “Don’t make us go through this. You know you’re just putting on a show for me. And it’s very effective.”

“Stop it,” I said, pulling on my bra. My hands were shaking as I closed the clasp. “Bone is staying on the sixth floor, he gave me his room number, and I’m going to sit down and have a drink with him and tell him to get his notepad out, and then I’m going to give it to him because I don’t want to be this person I
hate.
I’m a good writer, Joe, really good. You know what? I even won the Helsinki Prize!”

That was too much for him. As I moved to get past him again he pushed me back against the dresser. The blond wood shuddered but didn’t sway; everything in this room was built for royalty, for people who needed their furniture to be as thick as trees. I pushed him back, not hard, pushing like a
girl,
I thought, using both hands.