The Wife (20 page)

Dear Mr. Castleman,

A few of us were sitting around the lounge at Silliman last night playing Essences, the game in which you have to guess a famous person based on certain impressionistic clues, such as: What animal is this person? And I had you in mind, Mr. Castleman, using the following clues:

What animal is this person?
A panther.

What gem?
Opal.

Which Beatle?
John, obviously.

What musical instrument?
A bassoon.

What food?
A kasha knish, with hot sauce.

What part of the body?
The brain.

What household appliance?
An electric can opener.

I’m not sure if any of these answers will make sense to you, but I am sending them ahead with my deepest admiration for your work, which I’ve loved ever since I read
The Walnut
in high school.

With best regards,

Nathaniel Bone

Box 2701

Yale Station

Joe wrote back, vaguely amused by the nerviness of this young guy, thanking him for recognizing “the indisputable truth, that deep within my soul, I am but a kasha knish.” And that was supposed to be the end of it, except that Nathaniel Bone wrote to Joe again, this time not through the publisher but using the return address on Joe’s envelope, sending him an undergraduate paper he’d written about Joe’s short story “The Cigarette Tree,” a critical interpretation that struck Joe as being more intelligent than most of the reviews he’d read about his work.

“Look at this,” he’d said to me, and I’d read it too, agreeing with how smart it was, but feeling as if the real subject of the
paper was not Joe’s short story at all but Nathaniel Bone’s intelligence.

And then, as the years passed, Bone continued to write from time to time, sending compliments and thoughts about a particular novel or story or essay of Joe’s. Joe always responded with a short note of thanks. I guess I ought to have seen, back then, that Nathaniel Bone was grooming himself, aiming for some sort of special place within Joe’s world, but it just didn’t occur to me. I thought he was simply a reader, a fan, a distant, foppish worshiper. But he was surprisingly persistent and scrupulous, showing off to Joe with fragments of his knowledge, preening in front of Joe, dazzling him (or trying to) even as he himself was dazzled by Joe.

And all of it eventually led to the young man standing in his snakeskin boots in our kitchen roughly a decade after he’d first written that note from New Haven. He stood nervously by the refrigerator, playing with a fruit magnet, playing with his hair, trying to appear casual and confident in the home of his favorite writer, trying to impress his favorite writer’s wife and cause her to turn to her husband late that night after Bone was gone and say something like:

“That boy. The one who came today?”

“Bone, you mean?” a sleepy Joe would reply, yawning.

“Yes.”

“He’s hardly a boy.”

“I suppose not. There’s something very engaging and intelligent about him.”

Joe would nod. “Oh yes. Bone is bright, all right. Brilliant, probably.”

“He brought me a gift, you know. A little Smith postcard from 1927.”

“That was thoughtful. He’s a serious person, I think. He might be pretty good.”

Both of us would nod, picturing young Nathaniel Bone, wondering why our own son couldn’t have turned out like him, imagining,
in a way, that he
was
our son. The one we’d been meant to have, instead of the underachieving, angry, sometimes violent one we did have. And we’d both drift off together into a kind of placid, parental sleep, nurturing Joe’s future biographer in our minds.

But this was a fantasy: Bone’s, not ours. As much as he loved his fame, Joe didn’t like to think about being the subject of a serious biography. That would mean he would have to take measure of his life, and reconcile himself to its eventual end. He was terrified of death. More immediately, he was terrified of
sleep,
death’s dress rehearsal.

Other books about him had been written already: short, undistinguished volumes published by university presses, but nothing particularly insightful, nothing definitive, nothing with dirt in it, with juice. Bone’s biography would certainly be interesting; it would be very clever and garner the author a good deal of attention.

Joe said no.

The two men had gone upstairs that day at the house, and they’d sat in the study and smoked cigars, then later on they’d gone out to Schuyler’s General Store and bought Sno-Balls, and Bone had amiably eaten a pack of them, too, in a show of ritual solidarity—as though he liked them as well, as though
every
grown man did. They sat on the porch of Schuyler’s and ate those spongy, sugary Sno-Balls together and Bone talked about why he was the right man for the job.

“Someone’s going to do it, and it might as well be me” seemed to be the thrust of his argument. Lesser writers, according to Bone, would present Castleman as a one-dimensional figure: the mournful, fatherless little kid from Brooklyn who turned into a man of letters. But because Nathaniel had taken it upon himself to make a study of Castleman’s work over all these years, he would be the only person able to infuse the biography with an authentic sense of who Joe was.

“Like that first letter I sent you a long time ago,” Bone tried. “In which I told you about the game of Essences I played, remember?
What kind of tree are you, et cetera? I would show your
essence
in the book. And your entire readership would finally understand who you really are.”

It was that last comment, I think, that sealed it. No writer I’ve ever met wants to be understood in the way that he was suggesting.

Joe took a bite of the pink, chemical pastry in his hand; I imagined there was the barest sucking sound of the marshmallow against his teeth. He swallowed, and then said, “I think not.”

A pause.
“You think not?”
Bone was shocked that he was being rejected; he didn’t know what to do with this information. “There’s an old joke,” he tried. “Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Do you want a drink, sir?’ And Descartes says, ‘I think not.’ And then he disappears.”

Joe nodded, tried to smile; he wasn’t going to disappear, he’d still exist in the world even if he wasn’t written up by Nathaniel Bone. But Bone had been
studying
the man; he’d been painstakingly writing him letters, publishing little essays on his work, and for what? To wind up sitting on the front porch of some dark, cluttered general store in a little town in upstate New York, eating pink marshmallow-and-coconut garbage and being told
no
?

There was wheedling and begging. There was flattery, and then a few pathetic threats. Bone seemed about to collapse into tears, as though astonished Joe had said no, when in fact very few people had said no to him in his life.

But still Joe continued to say no, repeating his answer in a good-natured way, as many times as he needed to, until finally Nathaniel Bone was made to see that Joe wasn’t going to change his mind. Standing up, shaken, straightening himself out, brushing coconut flakes from his shirt front, Bone told Joe, “You know, the thing is, I’m sure I’ll end up writing the book anyway.”

Joe nodded. “You’ll do whatever you have to,” he said. “We all do.”

Probably this lack of anxiety on Joe’s part incensed Bone; why couldn’t he get a rise out of Castleman? What did it take to register
on the radar of the great novelist? Bone didn’t know yet that the men who own the world don’t get to do that by being magnanimous and overly interested in other people. They get to do it by taking care of themselves along the way. They stoke the fire of their own reputations, and sometimes other people come by, asking:
What’s that you’re doing there?

Oh, stoking the fire of my reputation.

Can I help?

Certainly. Go get some wood.

Bone was furious, though he didn’t show it. A few months later he did in fact receive a large contract from a major publishing house to write an unauthorized biography of Joe, and from that moment forward, there was an uneasiness between the two men, a wariness that never shifted. A pure dislike, actually. Bone was as ubiquitous as the moon, showing up in the audience over the years at readings and panel discussions and even at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in Wales, where Joe made an appearance. There he was in one of the first few rows with his long hair and his distinctive eyeglasses.

And now, ten years after Nathaniel Bone had stood awkwardly in the kitchen of our house, here he was, slouched against a sofa cushion in the lobby of Helsinki’s Inter-Continental Hotel, once again, as always, waiting for Joe. We stood for a moment, taken aback, and looked at him.

“Oh God,” I whispered to Joe, who sighed. Suddenly, after the tense talk between us, there was a brief moment of solidarity.

“Again with the showing up,” Joe said. “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t have made any sense if he’d skipped this one, would it?”

“No,” I said. “Go to him. You have to.”

“Hello, Nathaniel,” Joe said, approaching with false pleasure. The men shook hands, and then Nathaniel kissed me on the cheek, and we all stood back for a “well, well” moment, after which Joe simply nodded, muttered vaguely, said, “Good to see you,” and turned away.

This is the prerogative of the famous. Joe walked off without
thinking he’d been rude to Bone. His thoughts were already elsewhere: on the prize he’d be receiving tomorrow night at the Opera House, and the banquet that would follow, and the swoon of attention that is everyone’s dream throughout life, though most of us never achieve it, never even come close, and we feel a surge of giddiness when we so much as glimpse our own grainy image on a closed-circuit video screen in a Duane Reade drugstore.
That’s me up there,
we think with a sad puff of pride.

I started to follow Joe out of the lobby with a quick smile to Bone, but then I remembered that Joe had invited Irwin Clay and the people from the publishing house to come by our suite for drinks and hors d’oeuvres. I didn’t really want to be there, making small talk about Joe and the award and the various events of the week, so instead I turned and left the hotel. I was armed with a street map and so I took a walk along Mannerheim, where the shops advertised the usual assortment of delicate fabrics and Nokia cell phones as small and flat as throat lozenges. It was late afternoon and the sky had already dropped into darkness, a preparation for the sunless winter. As I walked along, someone fell into step beside me. It was Nathaniel Bone again; he’d apparently followed me out of the hotel.

“Joan,” he said, clearly desperate. “Hello! Can I maybe buy you a drink? We’re in Finland,” he added. “Don’t say no.”

As though the fact that we’d both come to this strange, northerly country might affect my decision. Oddly, I think it did. I imagined him wandering the Helsinki streets later that night, drunk and blinking, or sitting in a bar having no one to talk to, or no one who would talk to him. The Finnish language wasn’t penetrable to outsiders; it was a complex collection of aural hieroglyphics, with the stress on every first syllable, and a deep, mooing quality infusing most conversations.
I am here at the end of the world, and you are here at the end of the world,
the people seemed to be saying.
So let us drink.

Because no one else would drink with Nathaniel Bone, I told him I would.

OKAY, SO
that wasn’t why I went for a drink with him. I went because it gave me a private pleasure to sit with someone Joe wouldn’t want me to sit with. Even though I said nothing of substance, nothing controversial, it still gave me pleasure. We sat in a landmark Helsinki restaurant called the Golden Onion; above our heads, a slanted window looked out over the Uspenski Cathedral.

“The onion dome,” Bone pointed out, but I was getting a little weary of all things Finnish: the domes, the planar architectural triumphs of Saarinen and Aalto, the smoked fish and clusters of hard little cloudberries, the Longfellow cadences of
Kalevala.
We drank vodka tonics together and talked stiffly of the trip, the various tourist sites we’d each been to, the array of people we’d met here, and how different the Finns seemed to be from every other group in Scandinavia.

“They got a bit of an inferiority complex, living under the shadow of the Soviets for so long,” Bone said. “That’s why they had to establish the Helsinki Prize in the first place. To give their country a boost, a little jolt of self-esteem. I think it’s worked pretty well, actually. Everyone here gets so excited each year
when the winner comes to town, and for a few days there’s all this international focus on Finland. Everyone’s really thrilled to have Joe as their man. Myself included, I have to admit. Look, you might think I’ve got a whopping case of spite and envy, but I don’t, really. I don’t hold anything against him. He’s a great writer. He deserves what he gets.”

“Oh yes,” I said. “He does.”

“I wish I could quote you, Joan,” said Bone wistfully. “It would make my day.”

“Well, you can’t.”

“I know, I know,” he said, “but even if I could, the inflection wouldn’t be there on the page. The way you said ‘He does.’ The way it makes you sound.”

“How does it make me sound?”

“You know. Jealous,” he said, and he tossed a nut into his mouth.

In the yellowing darkness of the Golden Onion, with murmuring all around us, Nathaniel Bone and I sat with our drinks and our plates of some sort of damp, savory, rolled pancakes in front of us. He looked stranger and more sinuous than when I’d seen him last. He was middle-aged now; soon he’d be finishing the book he’d been working on intermittently for ten years, while in that same period of time Joe had published four novels.

I felt sorry for Nathaniel Bone as we sat drinking in the Golden Onion. He’d been chasing Joe for a long time, and too many years had passed and here we all were, the three of us, much older, ragged, not nearly as compelling or attractive as we used to be. Who would read Nathaniel Bone’s book when it finally came out? Maybe very few people would, although his advance ten years ago had been big, the kind of money that gets written up in media columns to show that someone has hit the jackpot in the mostly money-hemorrhaging enterprise of publishing. Because Bone’s biography of Joe was taking him much longer than he’d thought it would, enough time had elapsed to create a literary sea change.