Authors: Meg Wolitzer
The car ferried us gently past the waterfront and the glass fronts of shops on the boulevard called Mannerheim that sold delicate things wrapped in foil and crinkled paper, and past sudden, long stretches of bridge rail. We’d been to Finland once before over the course of our marriage, back in the 1980s, when Joe had been invited to give a reading as part of the five-hundredth-anniversary celebration of the Finnish book, and it had seemed to me at the time that the entire country was shot through with ice.
I liked Finland for its absence of overt rage or street crime. This wasn’t the United States, this wasn’t Spain. It was calm here, and moody, a gorgeous, elegant place with slightly off-kilter serotonin levels. A depressed country: this was an easy diagnosis to make, given the suicide statistics, which Scandinavia sometimes tries to deny, just the way Cornell University tries to allay the fears of incoming students’ parents about the famous Ithaca gorge, which, like a harvest ritual each fall, claims the life of a few more hopeless freshmen.
Don’t worry,
the college brochure should say.
Though some students do in fact leap to their deaths, most prefer keg parties and studying.
All of Scandinavia was alluring, with its ice fishing and snowcaps, but everyone knew about the legend of ingrained unhappiness among Finns, Norwegians, and Swedes: their drinking, their mournful, baying songs, their muffled darkness smack in the middle of the day.
“And here is the Helsinki Opera House, Mr. Castleman,” the driver said as our car smoothly went past an enormous building that appeared capable of containing an entire kingdom within its thick walls. “It is where you will go, sir, to receive your award and be feted.”
“Yes, Joe, you will be fetid,” I murmured, but he didn’t hear.
I envisioned us in the Opera House, with Joe being honored for a body of work that surely must have puzzled the Finnish
people, though apparently they read it anyway. They were a profoundly literate people. The winter was nearly endless; what else could they do but read?
The novels puzzle me, too,
he probably wished he could say to them in shaky Finnish, painstakingly accenting every word on the first syllable like the Finns do. His books were populated by unhappy, unfaithful American husbands and their complicated wives. Maybe it would have done Joe’s characters some good to have
their
days shortened, to force the sun to set a little sooner on their miserable marital and extramarital shenanigans.
And then, after the ceremony, we’d be eating dinner at a long table in an enormous, chilly marble hall. Members of the Finnish Parliament would murmur in his ear, but he wouldn’t be intimidated by them, for they weren’t royalty. The Nobel prize, on the other hand, gives you a hefty shot of royalty, seating you beside King Gustav for an evening of awkward conversation.
What had the King of Sweden and Lev Bresner talked about that night in Stockholm, the king sitting beside our friend, swathed in robes like a herring in cream? I didn’t have a clue. Joe would never have to make such a conversation. He wasn’t big enough in scope or darkness. Already it was killing me to be in Helsinki, to watch him encircled by people, to listen to their gravely earnest questions, to hear his answers, to watch them anoint him with essential oils and declare him the best.
I hadn’t known for certain, before I’d gotten on the airplane in New York, that I would leave him. I’d had fantasies over the years, little scenarios in which I said, “Joe, it’s over.” Or else, simply, “Well, guess what, you’re on your own now.” But none of these had been translated into
action;
instead, like most wives I’d hung on for dear life, but in the past few weeks it had become too much, it was more than I’d bargained for, and I wouldn’t stay much longer.
I kept looking at him, absorbing the familiar bump in his nose, the purpled skin of his eyelids, the thin white hair, and recalling that he had once been an angelic young boy, and then an ambitious
and handsome young writing instructor, and then a nervy, celebrated novelist who stayed awake all night and wanted to suck up the entire world and hold it in his lungs for a moment before letting it out. And now he was old, with a humbling bio-prosthetic heterograft porcine valve (however you slice it, it’s just pig meat) stuck like a clove into his heart, and pig memories somehow looped into his brain: happy images of rooting around among old nectarines and tennis shoes. His energies had been funneled in a thousand directions and were now becoming depleted, and wherever he went, there were laurels crunching and rustling beneath him, and twining vines and leaves he could lounge upon, contented.
Before long our car pulled in front of Helsinki’s Strand Inter-Continental Hotel. Men in uniforms leaped from the hotel in synchrony, appearing untouched by the cold, yanking open the frozen doors of our car, and soon we were inside, our luggage trailing us, the owner and his ecstatic wife springing forward to say hello and to offer Joe their congratulations. Opulent warmth immediately replaced the startle of cold, and the interior smelled to me like the deepest part of a forest in some Scandinavian folktale, perhaps a tale called “Young Paavo and the Five Wishes.”
Light seemed to slant into the lobby, as if through a break in the overarching branches of some enormous trees. Improbably, I smelled pine, and sap, and all at once, demented from jet lag, I felt like lying down right here on the dense carpet of the Inter-Continental Hotel, proving myself to be the sad, unbalanced wife of the newest winner of the Helsinki Prize.
But still we had to keep going. We traversed the spongy forest floor, going past mahogany walls and long golden hallways, following the spanking-clean bellman and his two assistants, all of whom could easily have been brothers in a family in which the children were bred exclusively to service the Finnish hotel industry.
Joe was confident now, walking quickly. He was easy in his skin, gliding smoothly by. The fact that he was the outsider, the
Brooklyn boy, only added to the peculiar cachet he enjoyed in this alien country. Other than a small cluster of reporters and photographers and his nominal editor, Sylvie Blacker, the rest of the publishing people and Irwin, Joe’s sleepy agent of recent years, there didn’t seem to be any other Americans in sight. Whenever we were in Europe, we could usually recognize them by their slouch and smile, the way they clutched their beloved copies of the
Herald Tribune,
or by their too-bright clothing, their eagerness to be talked to by other Americans, as though without the familiar, rounded syllables of the heartland, they would become as frightened as lost children.
Both of our daughters had offered to accompany us to Finland, but Joe didn’t seem to want them there, so they stopped asking. They were used to this by now.
“The thing is,” Joe said to Susannah, “if you come, I’ll feel so guilty about having no time for you. I’ll worry about it. It’ll distract me. Instead, why don’t you and Mark and the boys plan on coming to Weathermill when I get back? We can spend a long weekend here. I’ll be a hundred percent available. I’ll give myself over to all of you. I’ll be your love slave.”
He had an impish look in his eye, that old-man whimsy he’d learned to do well ever since age had caught him and slowed him and damaged his heart. I felt that he
would
be distracted having the kids there, but that really his concerns were for himself, not them. He’d won the Helsinki Prize. He took it seriously. He wanted to savor it slowly, carefully, and not have to be distracted by making sure that everyone around him was happy, which in any family is an impossible task.
Over the years, when he’d won lesser prizes, there they’d been at the banquets and dinners and cocktail parties, his scrubbed children at various stages of childhood and adolescence. I wasn’t sure how he felt about their presence, but me, I’d loved having them around me. I’d clung to them when it all got to be too much. To be honest, I’d used them as human shields. There they’d been in their pretty little dresses, and David in his monkey suit, strangling
under the knot of some green and gold slippery tie from The Boys’ Shoppe.
I’d always had a lot to drink at these celebrations, guzzling down the white wine they offered me, and the champagne, and anything else. My children could always see it, could tell the moment when my eyes became swimmy.
“Mom,” Susannah once whispered as we stood under a tent at the Academy of Arts and Letters, to which Joe had just been inducted. The wet mouthfuls of poached salmon I’d eaten at the lunch hadn’t been enough to absorb the full force of the spirits I’d consumed. I was pickled. I rocked lightly back and forth on my feet, and Susannah, age thirteen, steadied me with her hand.
“Mom,”
she said a little louder, scandalized. “You’re
drunk.
”
“A little, honey,” I whispered back. “I’m sorry. I mean, I’m sorry if I’m embarrassing you.”
“You’re not. But let’s go somewhere,” she said, and I let her steer me away from the Big Top for a while. We walked down to the street there in uppermost Manhattan, where a few taxis loitered and a man stood smoking outside a bodega. We sat on the stoop of a building in our formal clothes and I drank a bottle of guava nectar that she bought me at the bodega, and tried to sift through the fog so I could return to the festivities.
“If you’re so miserable,” my daughter said delicately, “then why don’t you leave him, Mom?”
Oh, my darling girl,
I might have said,
what a good question.
In her worldview, bad marriages were simply terminated, like unwanted pregnancies. She knew nothing about this subculture of women who stayed, women who couldn’t logically explain their allegiances, who held tight because it was the thing they felt most comfortable doing, the thing they actually liked. She didn’t understand the luxury of the familiar, the known: the same hump of back poking up under the cover in bed, the hair tufting in the ear.
The husband.
A figure you never strove toward, never worked yourself up over, but simply lived beside season upon season, which started piling up like bricks spread thick with sloppy
mortar. A marriage wall would rise up between the two of you, a marriage bed, and you would lie in it gratefully.
What I actually said to Susannah was “Who said I’m miserable?”
She looked at me pointedly, silent. “When I get married, I want it to be so easy that everyone will look at us and understand exactly why we ended up with each other,” she said.
So she married a man who was different, but not, as it would turn out, satisfying. Mark was attractive, built like a whippet with a runner’s body, golden filings of hair on long tan wrists. But the man never read a book unless it was a biography of Jefferson or Franklin or a true story of an Arctic expedition; fiction was outside his realm, and so in fact was art of any kind.
Susannah was lonely; I knew that about her, could see it among all the other small trophies of unhappiness that she lined up on triumphant display for me, the way children often do, providing an entire museum of disappointments and inviting the parents in, as if to say:
You see? You see how you fucked me up and what it led to? It led to this!
My daughter was a woman whose father had disappointed her. She’d made Joe clay pots over the years in art class, an endless ceramics shower in a prolonged effort to win his attention. She already had his love; love was easy. Attention was something else entirely, and how could she ever get that? She wasn’t a sex partner. She wasn’t a colleague. She wasn’t a
book.
She was a girl at a potter’s wheel, furiously spinning cups and bowls and plates for a father who would never drink out of them, never eat off them, but would occasionally stuff a clump of pencils in one of the mugs or shove one of the plates to the back of his desk.
Eventually Susannah stopped the pottery altogether, said it was too time-consuming, though by that point she’d quit Stengel, Mathers & Broad and was home with her boys—my adorable grandchildren—Ethan and Daniel all day.
Alice had never really tried to win Joe over in the ways that her sister had. It was as though she’d sized him up early on and
realized it was impossible to capture the heart of such an egotist. Other women liked Alice, were charmed by her. She looked good, in a bracing, freshly laundered way. As an adult, she tolerated Joe, gave him hard, affectionate hugs, and was slightly more loving to me. Pam, whom she lived with now in Colorado, was perplexing to me as a life choice for Alice because she seemed so
literal.
She was pretty in a flattened and poreless way; her eyes were small and light. She practiced Pilates, and her cooking was superb, if you could open yourself to the wonders of all the different members of the root-vegetable family.
But of course I really did understand what Alice got from this marriage: Pam was the wife, and that was what my daughter wanted, perhaps without even knowing it.
Both our daughters were home with their families right now—one with real longing and regret, wishing she could be here with us, with him, the other not really caring all that much. David, of course, didn’t offer to come. He almost never went anywhere, but kept to a simple path each day, like a monorail: his neighborhood coffee shop, a used comic book store, a Chinese take-out place, his job, and then home again. He had no curiosity about this trip we were on; he’d asked nothing, offered no congratulations, made no inquiries. While Joe and I traveled the length of a hotel lobby in Finland, David was in his basement apartment reading one of those graphic novels he loved, with their pen-and-ink depictions of a bleak futuristic life. He’d have a white carton of Chinese food open on his lap, depositing noodles everywhere. I saw him filling himself up with oily take-out food and reading about fantastical lives and hidden postapocalyptic worlds, and occasionally confronting a strand of memory about a life that he hadn’t lived in a long time.
Childhood.
I walked beside Joe now, our bodies moving together through space, neither of us looking at the other. No pure tenderness existed here; whatever we had was threaded with familiarity. As we headed with the bellmen toward a bank of dimpled-glass elevators that led to a private VIP floor, I noticed a young woman
glancing at Joe with an expression of interest. She appeared nervous and tentative as she stepped forward and blurted something out in his direction.