The Wife (19 page)

There was almost no water whatsoever for this camp of two thousand people. In the doorway, a child stood watching mildly. The laboring woman continued screaming the same words over and over, and finally I asked one of the tour leaders for a translation.

“She say she want to die, because she is in so much pain she
feel like a dog,” he explained. “She say please shoot her like a dog.”

Because no one told me not to, I went over and held the woman’s hand. Her eyes swiveled to mine, and I held her hand. Together we squeezed hands as her baby crowned. “Crowning,” what a crazy word, I thought as the skull came through the widening space with its flat black hair painted onto the head, the webbing of infinitesimal veins showing, and then the shoulders being turned and eased out by the medic, and then the mother holding her own baby’s hand. He had crowned, but he was no king; he’d have to live in the rathole of Cam Chau forever. No one found sterilized water. Someone did bring a small plastic container of nondairy creamer, though, and the mother tilted back her head and drank it. The baby was attached to her breast and he drank, too, and though I wanted to stay, wanted to help if I possibly could, the men said we had to go, it was time to leave for the Marine Press Base, where we were all promised a four-star dinner.

The rest of the tour of Vietnam was a carousel of cheerful propaganda; on a nuclear carrier we were assured that they only hit military targets in the north, nothing more, but all of us were narrow-eyed and unconvinced.

“I hope you’ve been taking it all in,” Joe said on our last night, as we sat in a dining room drinking martinis from big frozen glasses whose shape reminded me of the inverted, shellacked straw hats of the cyclo drivers.

“I’ve been trying,” I said, looking out at the moon-bright Saigon night, the fronds shuffling together, and listening to a phonograph elsewhere on the base that was playing the swooning pop song “Town Without Pity.” All the American writers huddled together at this final dinner, eating everything that was put before us, the bloody steaks, the twice-baked potatoes, some of the group already turning experiences into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs.

“Joan and I are a team,” Joe was saying to the other people at
our table. “She’s my eyes and ears. Without her I would be nowhere.”

“You’re a lucky man,” said Raymond, the chinless husband of glamorous Lee the journalist.

“I found him in an alley,” I explained gamely. “He was all bent out of shape. Down and out.” Joe always liked when I said such things.

“Yeah, she picked me up and dusted me off,” he put in, “and made me into what I am today.”

“
I
didn’t make Lee into anything,” said Raymond. “She emerged from her mother’s womb fully formed. A pencil behind her tiny little ear.”

Was that true? Could a woman writer simply appear in the world, unconcerned about her stature, or whether she’d be laughed at or ignored? This one could. I watched Lee drink her martini; the glass was so large that she looked like a cat lapping from a bowl. She had never once asked me anything about myself or really spoken to me at all the entire time we were in Vietnam. She was one of those women who has little interest in other women, and whose light is entirely directed toward men. She didn’t like me, and so I decided:
Fine.
I would dislike her intensely in return.

Later, in bed at the hotel, under a slow fan in the stirred heat, I dreamed about the mother and her baby in the hut in Cam Chau, wondering how they were possibly managing, where they were, where they would go. I saw the baby’s head growing and becoming covered with hair; I watched the bones join at the place where the head was still soft and unfinished. Then I saw the mother and baby hiding in the trees, exploding in gunfire, and I saw their hut burned to the ground. And in the free-flowing logic of dreams, the mother suddenly transformed into Lee the journalist. She was drinking nondairy creamer, which inexplicably turned into napalm—Incinder gel, they called it here—as she tipped her head back to swallow.

*   *   *

Joe and I went to many other cities together over the decades: Rome, for he had won the Prix de Rome and we got to spend a year with our children in a palazzo, fully funded; London, because the English loved him and wanted him on their chat shows; and Paris, because his publisher there had deep pockets; and Jerusalem, for its famous book fair. There was also Tokyo, though Joe’s novels were a source of puzzlement there, the translations awkward (
Overtime
became, loosely,
When a Man Cannot Go Home Yet but Must Be at the Office After the Others Have Left
), and Joe himself was considered exotic. We went everywhere together, racking up mileage well before mileage counted for anything. We were globe-trotters, we were international; wherever Joseph Castleman’s novels appeared in translation, we went there, dropping the children with this friend or that if we weren’t able to take them along. I felt sick about leaving them, and missed them badly. We’d call home from wherever we were, and the sounds of anarchy would come through the phone, making me want to return at once. Susannah would complain, Alice would cry, begging us to come home immediately, and David would say he’d just read in a book that the world was coming to an end in five years, and was that true? Someone would drop the telephone, and there would be sounds of shouting for a while.

“They’ll be fine,” Joe would remind me, and of course he was right. When we returned they were the same as we’d left them, though maybe a little more melancholy. “It lets them know that their parents have a
life,
” he’d said. “So many kids have parents who don’t go anywhere, don’t do anything. At least they know their parents are in the world. I think that counts for a lot.” Year after year we traveled; he gave readings, he picked up awards, he made appearances, city after city after city.

And then finally we arrived here in Helsinki. At night the shining, quiet city sometimes possesses the atmosphere of a fraternity: young men, out for the evening, drink too much and knock into strangers on the sidewalk. Couples sit in cafes, eating sublime
triangular Karelian pastries and drinking, and once in a while they slide off the chairs and onto the floor, where an unimpressed waiter lifts them up by the armpits and replaces them in their seats.

So it was no great surprise that when Joe Castleman came to Finland, he soon found himself afloat in a pond of alcohol. The reporters who came to the hotel to interview him all said yes when Joe perfunctorily offered them a drink from the enormous stocked bar in the suite, and then he had to join them. When he went to a television station to be on a morning news show, the greenroom featured a lineup of flavored vodkas. The second day, after we’d recovered from jet lag, his schedule was intense, nonstop, requiring Joe to traverse Helsinki and the surrounding regions, sometimes to show himself to the Finns, other times so they could show themselves to him. Wine was served at a small college in Jarvenpaa, where he appeared onstage before five hundred amazingly well-read students (“Tell me, Mr. Castleman, how you would compare the themes in the work of Mr. Günter Grass and Mr. Gabriel García Márquez.”). And there was a constant flow of vodka and gin at the luncheon held in an enormous sunlit room in the hypermodern Helsinki Public Library with its Möbius strip design and unusually placed pinpoints of light.

After the library lunch was over, Joe and I were taken on a tour of the rare books archives, and all of us in the party were fairly sloshed as we made our way through the stacks, led by a tiny elf of a woman who suddenly turned and recited from
Kalevala,
Finland’s famous nineteenth-century epic poem, which the Finns say served as the model for Longfellow’s
Hiawatha.
Finland, like all small countries, has its stories, its anecdotes, its pride, and it carries them openly. For without the connection to Longfellow, without the fresh fish and Sibelius and Saarinen, there is the anxiety that Finland might crack off from Scandinavia forever, falling into the sea of forgotten things. Beautiful Finland might be
lost.
Like Atlantis. Like me without Joe, or so I always used to think. He took my arm now, but I pulled slightly away.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. He looked at me for a moment but didn’t pursue it.

Only later, walking back through the lobby of the Inter-Continental Hotel after lunch, having been driven there by our cool, square-headed driver, Joe said to me, “Whatever’s been pissing you off so much on this trip, could it wait until we’re back in New York?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Oh, no? I thought you were looking forward to coming here.”

“I was.”

“And?”

“What do you think?” I said. “It’s a bit
much.
And really, Joe, this shouldn’t surprise you. But it’s not just that. It’s everything.”

“Oh. Wonderful. Delighted to hear that, Joan.
Everything.
So now I know that it isn’t possible for me to set things right. I’d have to take on the entire world. While we’re here in Finland I’d have to look back through our entire history together and come up with all the things that piss you off. All the hot spots in the Castleman marriage.”

“Something like that,” I said.

And then a voice called,
“Joe.”

Together we turned. There on a couch in the lobby sat Nathaniel Bone, the literary critic who’d been an intermittent presence in our lives for a long time. He was around forty, still skinny as an adolescent with a long drift of brown hair and pink-rimmed eyeglasses that were hamster-effeminate. I hadn’t heard that he was coming to Helsinki, though I shouldn’t have been surprised, because he’d turned up at various places over the years. I have never trusted Nathaniel Bone, not since the first time I met him at our house in Weathermill, about ten years ago.

He had driven up from the city that day in hopes of ingratiating himself to Joe and being given the honor of calling himself Joseph Castleman’s authorized biographer. Both an unauthorized and an authorized biographer, of course, would be allowed to sit for hours with their subject, if that subject was still alive and willing,
or else sit for hours in an attic working open the drawers of an old warped bureau and pawing through ancient letters and diaries, if the subject was dead. But an authorized biographer is in pig heaven. He is happy, he gloats, he rolls around leisurely, because, unlike his unsanctioned colleague, he can show his conclusions to the world instead of coyly hinting, suggesting, flirting about his findings and then not following through with proof.

Nathaniel Bone, who’d been writing to Joe since college, had been certain that he would have no trouble charming Joe in person, since he’d apparently charmed everyone else from the moment he was born, not unlike Joe himself. Bone came from a wealthy family in California, with two psychiatrists for parents and college at Yale, where he charmed the chairman of the English department and was permitted to write an “experimental” honors thesis combining elements of history, biography, and fiction. It was this thesis that had landed him various magazine assignments after Yale. Bone did literary profiles and book reviews, commentary on different topics from both high and low culture, the kind of pieces in which he somehow managed to mention the names Jacques Lacan and George Jetson in the course of a single paragraph.

It helped that he was good-looking in a lesser-rock-star way, though I always thought he was spineless as a sea horse, slouching whenever he entered a room. His hair was kept long and scrupulously washed. A notable thing about him was that though he did in fact charm people in positions of power, no one else particularly liked him. He had no time for ordinary people, and they had no time for him. He sucked up without subtlety to everyone he wanted something from. I could tell this right away as soon as he came to our house that day.

But another notable detail about Nathaniel Bone was that he was the first person I ever met who seemed to understand the importance of sucking up to the wife. He actually seemed to realize that if the wife of an important man did not like him, then he was
fucked.
And so that first day, ten years ago, when Bone was a
younger man in his early thirties, and he drove upstate to meet Joe and formally discuss his proposal to be Joe’s authorized biographer, he brought me a little gift.

“Oh, wait, Mrs. Castleman,” Nathaniel Bone had said, standing in the kitchen. I’d just let him in and we were waiting for Joe to come downstairs; as it would turn out, we would wait quite a while. After he became famous, Joe seemed to like to keep people waiting. “I almost forgot.” (Yeah,
right.
) “This is for you.” And Bone retrieved from his back pocket a beautiful, hand-tinted postcard of some young women onstage at a Smith College skit-night performance in 1927.
Northrop House Follies,
read the caption.

“Northrop!” I said. “I lived there.”

“I know,” he said, smiling.

The postcard was in fact the kind of thing I might have bought for myself if I’d seen it in a bin at a flea market. It was a clever gift, but immediately I didn’t like him, felt him to be an obscure threat, and was uneasy that he was inside our house, standing in the kitchen in his jeans and snakeskin boots and casually drinking the iced sun tea I’d poured him.

Joe had had young men around him since his first book came out; they flitted and swirled and did a dance around him, although along with their excitement the men were jealous, secretly hoping to unseat Joe. Most of these young men were writing their own novels: long, rambling, “ambitious” books that weighed as much as full-term infants. Nathaniel Bone, as it would turn out, had been trying to write a novel for two years, but wasn’t succeeding. His book, he himself had realized, was too wordy. “Too full of ideas,” a friend had told him, and this was the kind of criticism that Bone could live with. “You should definitely do a book,” the friend went on, “but make it nonfiction.” So it was a short leap to bring Nathaniel Bone to the doorstep of Joseph Castleman, to whom he’d been writing since college. That first letter had been addressed to Joe care of his publisher, then forwarded, back when Bone was a sophomore at Yale: