Authors: Meg Wolitzer
He fell against the bed and all of a sudden his shoulders rose in a peculiar way and he clenched his jaw and said, “
Shit,
Joan.”
Which was just like his heart attack at The Cracked Crab, the same tight words, the same staccato. “Joe,” I said now, “are you okay?” He didn’t respond. “Help!” I cried out into the room. “Someone, help!” But my voice was tiny and the suite was a fortress.
“Okay, now, okay,” I said to him, to myself, terrified, and then I called the front desk and heard the cooing European ring. I shouted into the phone; the person who answered was calmly
confident, and I knew that paramedics would be rushing in momentarily, and that they would administer CPR to Joe, breathing their cold, snow-blown breath into him. But until then I had to do it, for he seemed to have stopped breathing, though I wasn’t sure, was too frantic to think clearly, and I knelt over him the same way Lev Bresner had done once before in that seafood restaurant, applying hands and pressing hard, putting my mouth against his and wildly blowing.
In emergencies, men and women tilt each other’s chins up, swipe a finger in to clear the airway, then hotly breathe, trying to remember the sequence laid out in the CPR manual, the code to crack. I couldn’t remember anything I’d learned so long ago, and so I just pushed on him and breathed and breathed into him.
It was as if we were engaging in some alternate language, some strange ritual, like the way Eskimos say hello by rubbing noses, at least according to the legends of children. My own daughters used to do that with each other, standing with no space between them, tip of nose to tip of nose, heads moving from side to side, feeling the graze and touch, the thrill that accompanied the barest connection of separate bodies. After all these years, I crouched over Joe Castleman, his head tipped back, our mouths open upon each other, a husband and wife finally saying good-bye.
DYING IN A
strange country is similar to being born: the confusion, the nonsensical language, the activity, the fuss, with the flickering light of the person in crisis as the centerpiece. They worked on him and worked on him, those indefatigable Finns, and though he didn’t respond at all, I held his hand and told him insistently he was going to live. Someone pressed an oxygen mask over his face, and those dark eyes of his did a fade, and I tried to pull him back to me, to keep him, to hold him here.
Death was pronounced not in the hotel room but later, in a triage room at the nearby Loviso Hospital, where a young doctor, who appeared to me like a lesser character in an Ibsen play, removed the earpieces of his stethoscope, which trembled like fronds, and said, “Mrs. Castleman, I must say to you it is over.”
I was stricken and shocked, and my voice cracked, and I sobbed against that man’s narrow chest. He didn’t try to stop me, but then after a very long time I simply stopped on my own. Joe was lying on the table with loops of wires still attached to him. He was Gulliver, passive, slumbering, inappropriate, huge, and it was an unbearable sight. Excruciating. A dead man is nothing; it’s all gone from him, everything you’ve ever thought was his. Eventually,
two nurses came in and quietly removed the wires; I could hear sucking sounds as the rubber cups were taken off. I sat on a hard chair beside Joe, terrified to touch him, for his body seemed so abraded now, with its Venn diagram of pink circles everywhere. For a few minutes we stayed awkward and resigned and pitifully lonely, side by side, the way we’d often been in the last years of our marriage.
The next day, after the paperwork of death had been finished, after I’d cried until my eyes could barely open, and then actually slept at night, pushed along by the tiny blue pills the doctor at the hospital had given me, I left Finland forever. Joe’s body lay in a temporary, plain casket secured in the cargo hold, and I held a crushed, wet bloom of tissues in my hand. Several stunned representatives from the Finnish Academy had accompanied me to the Helsinki-Vantaa Airport, though I told them it wasn’t necessary, for the delegation from Joe’s publishing house and literary agency was there, too. Everyone seemed frightened to talk to me at length. Joe’s agent, Irwin Clay, could barely meet my eyes. I was steered into a VIP room and it was arranged for me to board the plane early, so as not to confront the several reporters who were quietly collecting nearby. When I said good-bye to the people from the academy, Teuvo Halonen spontaneously cried, and had to be led away so he wouldn’t upset me more.
Beside me on the plane was a mournful, slightly jowly woman from the academy named Mrs. Kirsti Salonen, whose job it was to accompany me back to New York, even though I said I would be all right. If I’d wanted company I could have sat with Irwin, but the academy had insisted on sending someone, and for some reason I was grateful. Mrs. Salonen patted my hand and whispered solicitous, parental comments to me. She spoke gently about how important it was to be good to myself and, as time passed, to let others do good things for me. Somewhere in there she spoke about God, too, and about how I should try to sleep.
“Mrs. Salonen, may I ask you something personal?” I suddenly said, and she nodded. “Are you married?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “My husband and I just celebrated our twenty-seventh anniversary.” She reached into her handbag and produced a photograph of a lanky man in a short-sleeved shirt with a pen clipped onto his pocket. “Erik is a chemical engineer,” Mrs. Salonen went on. “A quiet man who likes things just so. We have a weekend house in Turku that we enjoy.”
Will you be
my
wife? I wanted to ask her. Will you take care of me now, the way you certainly take care of Erik the chemical engineer?
I’d been a good wife, most of the time. Joe had been comfortable and safe and surrounded, always off somewhere talking, gesturing, doing unspeakable things with women, eating rich foods, drinking, reading, leaving books scattered around the house facedown, their spines broken from too much love. Late at night, or during the day, he told me stories of things that had happened to him, or ideas that had occurred to him, and I filed them away or took them out for reuse whenever the time came, and allowed an anecdote to be boiled and cooled and transformed into something recognizable but new. Something that would be mine, but would still always be partly his, too. It wasn’t fair, of course; it had never been fair, right from the beginning. Fairness wasn’t what I’d wanted.
Sleep, now:
that
was what I wanted. The flight home was long, and I tilted my seat back and thought about Joe as a child, attending his father’s funeral. The moment his father had died, something might have collapsed in Joe and never been restored. Or maybe that was simply an excuse, for plenty of young boys without fathers grow up to write strong and urgent prose, often about loss. Joe could never do that; he didn’t have the natural ability, and no one could ever have implanted it in him, like a microchip, a pig valve, a miracle.
Suddenly the brunette flight attendant appeared again, the same woman Joe and I had been served by on our way over, she
of the booming bosom, who had leaned across him with her scented acreage of flesh and her basket of cookies and brought him briefly to attention. If she’d been there in the moments when he was dying, would she have saved him? He’d always been so directed toward women, yet so uninterested in them at the same time, a disparity that caused a kind of bored erection to lift, a pointless hot-air balloon, a need to possess a woman that was immediately followed by a need to be somewhere else, to be out in the world, walking around and thinking of simple things that men like Joe Castleman love: the taste of a barely cooked steak with a heap of fried onions, the mossy smell of an aged single-malt scotch, the perfect prose of a novella written by a genius in Dublin nearly a hundred years ago.
“Mrs. Castleman, I’m so sorry about your loss,” the flight attendant said to me when she leaned over now with a tray of canapés, and I thanked her. Mrs. Kirsti Salonen and I chewed the soft dough in silence. Then dinner was placed in front of us, and we ate that, too, and drank wine and settled back into our seats for the ride.
Hours passed, and eventually we reached the time in any transatlantic flight when travelers fall into a kind of shallow sleep, eyes skittering beneath their lids, no dreams penetrating the endlessly rebreathed air above everyone’s lowered or thrown-back head. Mrs. Salonen was now asleep beside me, her head leaning slightly too close, as though we were a couple, two lovers crossing the Atlantic. She would have been embarrassed if she saw how near to me she was; she would have drawn back and murmured apologies, but I would have seen for myself that even beneath a thick lacquer of formality, there was often a stirring toward love.
If Joe had lived, he would have been wide awake beside me. Bored and restless, his fingers moving on the thick, fleshy armrest. I would have been dozing and he would have been the sentinel, staying alert. I thought of how, that first day we’d met in his class at Smith, he’d read the end of “The Dead” aloud, a piece of
writing so memorable that it briefly silenced everyone who read it or heard it. Who in the world could write like that? Neither of us could; neither of us could even try. We’d just shaken our heads, marveling. Then one day we’d talked, and stirred, and met in Professor H. Tanaka’s bed, and started a life. It had swiftly carried us here, to the highest point, the lowest point, the end.
Now the lights were all off up and down the rows of the airplane, except for my own, which sent its yellow beam spreading down onto me and onto the edges of Mrs. Kirsti Salonen’s hair. I was almost asleep when I suddenly became aware that someone was standing over me, saying something.
“Joan.”
I looked up and was startled to see Nathaniel Bone. His trip was over, too, and he was returning home.
“Nathaniel,” I said. “I didn’t know you were on the plane.”
“Yeah, I’m way in the back. In steerage,” he whispered. “I hope it’s okay that I’m here. You probably want to be alone.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“Listen, my God, I’m so sorry about Joe. I was going to write you a condolence letter when I got home. I’ve already started composing it in my head. I’m stunned, Joan. Stunned.”
“Thank you,” I said. Beside me, my seatmate moved around and opened her eyes briefly.
I turned back to Nathaniel. “We can’t talk here,” I said. “Maybe we should go back to where you’re sitting.”
He nodded eagerly, and I stood up and followed him down the aisle, parting the ice blue Marimekko curtains that separated the first-class passengers in the nose of this Finnair plane from the larger group lying in repose in business class. They were, it seemed, actually all businessmen, their ties loosened and tossed to the side, their heads flung into profile, eyes shut, computers resting on tray tables, or clutched in laps like transitional objects. Then, onward through the next curtain we went, entering the bad-breath air of Economy, the long, enormous cabin with its pockets of darkness and light, entire families sitting four across, with bags of chips
openmouthed, rustling, their bodies turning rotisserie-style under inadequate squares of blanket, the occasional baby howling and being dandled by an overworked mother singing a Finnish lullaby. The aisle itself was littered as though there had been a windstorm. I stepped on a newspaper, and then on a woman’s shoe.
In the second-to-last row, Nathaniel’s seatmate was asleep, leaning halfway onto the other seat, and because the seat across the aisle was taken, we stood together in the very rear of the plane, by the bathroom and the metal drinks cart.
“Who’s meeting you at Kennedy?” he asked.
“My daughters.”
I’d called Susannah and Alice from the hospital, and their voices, even from so far away, and with the accompaniment of that inevitable overseas hiss, had sounded so forlorn. Heartbroken. “Oh no, Mom,” Susannah had said, sobbing. “Oh my God,” said Alice. “
Dad.
”
I’d had to leave a message on David’s answering machine with the news. (It was a miracle to me that he even owned an answering machine.) I didn’t like telling him this way, but I wanted him to learn it from me, instead of from somewhere else. He hadn’t called back yet. I didn’t know what his reaction would be, whether he would seem indifferent or glib or even, maybe, heartbroken, too. I really had no way to predict.
“You won’t have to go back to Weathermill alone,” Nathaniel was saying now. “That’s good.”
“I know,” I said, imagining the way Alice would come in and commandeer the house, and Susannah would immediately make me a jar of preserved lemons that I would never use and which would become barnacled in the back of the pantry. But at least both daughters would be there at night, sleeping in the rooms they grew up in. Now grown women too big for their childhood beds, they would return, briefly leaving their own families to help their widowed mother find her way, and to help themselves through the bewilderment and clumsy sorrow brought on by the death of a parent.
At night, when I found myself unable to sleep, just like Joe I’d wander the house and pause outside their doors. I’d hear them breathing, and maybe it would calm me down a little. They were still my girls, my children, Joe’s and mine, along with everything else we had: the huge flea market of things we’d assembled, gathered up, the astonishing array we’d amassed throughout the years, like any couple does.
“I came to the Academic Bookstore like I said I would,” Nathaniel was telling me softly. “You didn’t show, and I was surprised. Then I heard someone talking about Joe Castleman, saying he was
dead,
and I thought,
This can’t be,
and I ran back to the hotel to ask the concierge if what I’d heard about Mr. Castleman was true, and he said it was. I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t.”
Bone was both heartfelt and unconvincing, I thought, and I was reminded that Joe had never liked him, and that I didn’t either. He was insinuating, he was always around, he was like a cat in a bookstore window, letting his tail slowly drape across all the books as he wandered by. Joe’s instinct was sound when he’d decided not to give him anything all those years ago.