Authors: Meg Wolitzer
Joe feared the psychotic ones, and had mild contempt for the legions of readers who conducted online discussion forums about his writing, who painstakingly sought out everything he’d ever published, who needed to find new ways to keep him close to them. When they confronted him in person, he hung back shyly, a little bit frightened and irritated by the intrusion, but flattered, always flattered, his eyes taking on a certain wet shine of vanity.
But when the fan was young and beautiful, he’d lift his head and frankly stare into her eyes, leaning forward slightly, stepping inside the outer edge of the circle of perfume she invariably cast. It was the most obvious thing in the world, the way he moved toward pretty women, wanting them so much, speaking in a low voice that tenderized the warm skin of their necks. In the beginning, all those decades ago, I would often look away when this happened, would go get another glass of reception wine, chat with the provost if we were at a college, or Joe’s introducer, or the publicist; I’d turn my back on the seduction that was taking place only a few yards away from me. Then, sometimes, I fought him, I chastised him, and he told me I was making things up, or else he caved in and apologized, saying that he knew how weak he was, and he hated it. But as time passed and his behavior didn’t change, I simply turned away again whenever it happened. I drank from my little plastic glass; I swooped a celery stick through a pool of dip, knowing that behind me, my husband was becoming acquainted with a young, beautiful girl, a faithful reader.
She might be saying to him, “You know the part in
Overtime
that begins with the daughter washing her hair? That is the most beautiful description of female adolescence I’ve ever read. How do you
know
such things, Mr. Castleman?” And he would shrug and thank her. Sometimes, days later, through means I never really knew, they would find each other again.
The charming young woman who faced him in the lobby of Helsinki’s Inter-Continental Hotel was probably a brainy Finnish girl from a provincial background who wanted to hold a Helsinki laureate’s hand for just a moment too long, and she was still smiling at him as he walked away from her and over to the elevator.
“Lucky you, they love you everywhere,” I whispered as one of the bellmen inserted a key in a lock on a panel, and the glass cage rose with the lovely, cushioned swoosh that could only be found in European lifts.
“I don’t think that woman loves me,” Joe whispered back. “You’re exaggerating.”
“Oh, I would put a little money on it,” I said.
“
Someone
has to love me,” he said. “As far as I can tell, the job is currently unoccupied.”
The bellman, standing by, gave no indication that he understood this cryptic marital sparring. The elevator rose and rose with its hum of cable and hint of fjord, letting us off at the silent, pristine VIP floor. In the distance, a maid scurried off. A wide oak door was swung open, and we were invited into the Presidential Suite. Enormous windows overlooked the cobblestones and the trees below.
“Hot,” the bellman said proudly in one of the bathrooms, yanking a brass tap in the veined-marble sink. “Cold,” he said, turning the other one.
There was a formal dining room in the suite as well as two bedrooms, a living room, a small library, and a sauna. The master bedroom held an enormous white bed with tall posts, and two thick robes were laid across it. Dazed from the effects of air travel and a surfeit of attention, and by all the splendor, Joe pulled off his clothes piece by piece and shrugged into one of the robes.
“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do next,” he told me.
“You know what we do? We sleep.”
He nodded, sat on the bed, testing the give of the mattress, and then he yawned ostentatiously. “Are you sure it’s a good idea?” he asked me. “Shouldn’t we wait until the evening? Shouldn’t we force ourselves to stay awake so that we can start to get on their timetable? Anyway, I don’t think I could sleep,” he said. “You know I never do.”
“Today you will,” I said. “I bet you’re more tired than you’ve ever been in your life.”
“That’s true,” he admitted.
So we stripped and crawled under the deep white waves of blankets. We ignored each other’s body; we were indifferent, like we’d usually been in recent years, except my indifference was mixed with hostility, which Joe tried not to notice right now. Loveless, we lay together. Elsewhere in the suite, hidden doors were opened and closed by meek and ghostly maids. Fruit was silently polished and arranged in baskets, and the ends of toilet paper rolls were fashioned into origami. Then eventually the distant collection of sounds stopped, and Joe and I lay in silence, our skin a perfect temperature against high-thread-count sheets. Joe appeared small beside me in the bed; bits of white chest hair frothed up over the edge of the blanket, and his nipples were exposed, those vestigial disks. He was frail and exhausted but contented, and uncharacteristically, for the first time in a very long while, he slept. We both did.
Voices awakened us eventually, an angel choir pulling us slowly from the unnatural sleep of travelers, and when we opened our eyes it was already late morning of the next day, and we were shocked to find our bright hotel bedroom filled with strangers, young girls dressed in white and carrying candles, singing their hearts out, all of it in Finnish. This was a Helsinki Prize rite of passage, someone at dinner later explained to us, a shameless copy of a similar Swedish display put on for winners of the Nobel prize, and while we lay there, dopey and sandy-eyed
from sleep, photographers appeared at the edges of the room to document the spectacle.
As they did, the candle-holders stepped back and the plate-carriers stepped forward, girls bearing fruit and cheese and sugar-dusted pastries. And then they, too, stepped back, and forward came two girls carrying huge cups of coffee—bowls, they were, the kind that kittens lap at—and then the food and drink and candles were placed on silver trays at the foot of our bed.
“How long is this going to go on?” Joe whispered to me, but I shushed him and smiled at the girls, and he knew enough to follow my example.
On cue, all the pretty girls joined hands, raised their delicate arms, and sang to us in voices that would have stirred the most frozen heart that ever beat. I didn’t know what the words meant; presumably they had something to do with the glory of the day and the greatness of the celebration, though I supposed that just as easily, for their own fun, they might have been singing:
“Fuck you, Joe Castleman,
the overrated writer we despise
Fuck you, American upstart,
who hath come and claimed our prize . . .”
* * *
Once upon a time there had been another hotel room, a very different one, in New York City. It was small and wretched, and no angel-girls sang to us in the morning. This was forty-five years earlier, but even after all this time I could visualize its shape and smell and its vague, implied filth. Joe and I had headed there first on the bus as we fled Northampton together, and then on a New York City subway train with its yellow woven seats and concave wall ads for Dreft laundry detergent and Chiclets. I was nineteen, hanging by a strap. In the middle of my forehead was the ludicrous purple goose egg that had been left when Joe’s wife, Carol,
had flung the walnut at me two days earlier. As I held on to the subway strap like an ordinary commuter, I saw Joe watching me, taking in the lump on the forehead and also the hollow of my underarm, that scooped-out place inside my creased yellow dress. I’d only brought a weekend’s worth of clothes with me; the rest would be sent down in a steamer trunk from Smith later. Here I was on the subway, which I’d almost never been on in my life, though I knew every stop on the crosstown bus, which I used to ride with friends after school most days.
I was terrified to call my parents and confess to them what I’d done, though I assumed that the college would have the privilege of doing just that. They were right here in this city, and though it was possible that I might actually run into them, it didn’t seem likely. They never went on the subway, or had reason to visit the part of the city where Joe was taking me. Their route was predictable and short, involving Park, Madison, and Lexington Avenues, and not much else. Of course I could have used their help, for Joe and I had very little money, but I somehow knew that I shouldn’t take their money now. This part of my life had nothing to do with them, and I didn’t want to bring them into it, at least not yet. I was with Joe now, and so I acted like a good sport, the willing undergraduate who’d thrust myself out the gates of Smith College and gone off to New York with my professor, though I suspected the mood wouldn’t last.
And it didn’t, of course. When Joe and I walked into the small, greenish lobby of the Waverly Arms, where the night clerk sat behind a barred window, I was appalled at what I found there, and I stood in pinched, schoolmarm silence while Joe signed the register. Room 402 was worse than the lobby; it too was greenish and had a window with so many dead flies trapped between the panes that they seemed to have been intentionally pressed there by a naturalist. The room gave off intimations of its unsavory history, convincing you that a particular type of soup had once been cooked there on a hotplate (Scotch broth), and that another time, someone had lain in a stupor of illness on the concave mattress of the bed.
“This is disgusting,” I said, sitting on the edge of that bed and starting to cry.
Joe had thought I would be able to overlook the hotel’s essential decrepitude because it was located in Greenwich Village. He’d hoped I would rise to the siren song of the Village, to the sounds of men dreamily practicing the horn, or just the way the people looked, dressing with a kind of defiant, jobless freedom. He’d hoped I would glance around and say:
This is what I want.
But it was impossible to take a Smith girl with no experience of the world except what had occurred in bed with you, and change her into something she’d never been, and didn’t seem to want to become.
“Is
this
what I’ve wound up with?” I asked melodramatically as I cried. “A terrible, ugly little room with dead flies?”
“No, no, it’s just temporary, Joanie,” Joe said, but he too was worried that we’d made some kind of irrevocably bad choice.
Really, though, it hadn’t been much of a choice; after she’d flung the walnut, Carol Castleman had thrown her husband out of their house, and he understood that even if he didn’t resign from the English department at Smith he would be dismissed. So now he was ruined academically and financially. But as for me, when I walked out of Northrop House, it was with a strange combination of disgrace and power. I’d told Joe how my friend Laura Sonnengard and other girls had lined up in their nightgowns to say good-bye to me like orphans in a Shirley Temple movie, and that they were tearful and deeply impressed, knowing that I was going off to a life that was likely to be more compelling than theirs, at least in the short run.
“You say it’s only temporary, but
life
is temporary,” I said to him. “So you’re not really making me feel any better.” I knew I was pathetic, sitting there on the hotel bed with my lump and my insistently girlish clothes.
“It’s not my job to make you feel better,” he told me. “And don’t give me your freshman-year philosophy. If you don’t want to be here, then please go. Get back on that bus and go back up to
Smith. I’m sure they’ll take you back; they’d be too scared of the legal end not to: the oversexed Jewish professor who raped the lovely young debutante.”
“I am not a debutante,” I said. “And screw you, Joe. You never raped me. I made up my own mind. I knew what I wanted to do.”
This seemed to startle him. “You did?” he said, sitting down next to me. “I thought it was all me, kissing you in my office, setting things in motion.”
“No, I felt it that first day of class,” I said. “When you walked into Seelye Hall and you were such a mess, and your wife had just had a baby, and you read aloud from ‘The Dead.’ Every girl in that class wanted to have some kind of relationship with you.”
“Oh,” he said, pleased. “I didn’t know that.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“I love you, Joanie, you know,” he told me, and I thought that maybe he actually did.
This conversation calmed me for a while, and soon I agreed to go out with him into the spring night, into the chatter and drifting music of the Village. Joe took me to supper at the Grand Ticino, where I ate a bowl of
spaghetti al burro,
the only dish I ever ordered back then in Italian restaurants, much to his irritation, and Joe ate brains. The hour was late but the place was still packed, which was so different from Northampton, where restaurants closed early. Joe talked about nights spent on Bancroft Road, pacing the rooms of his depressing house, fetching Carol the A&D ointment, watching her slick the rancid orange jelly onto the baby’s bottom.
“I am so glad to be away from there,” he said as he ate his plate of brains. “I thought I would die in that house. So thank you. Thank you for rescuing me from a life like that, even if it was unexpected.”
“Ah, don’t mention it,” I said, and he held my hand across the table.
“You’ve got butter on your lips,” Joe told me. “They’re shining; I think you must be a saint. Saint Joan.”
Soon we began to talk of other things, until, toward the end of dinner, he admitted that he didn’t only feel relief at having left Carol and Fanny; he also felt a kind of sorrow. He spoke in a breaking voice of holding his baby girl and touching the soft place on her head, the fontanel, where the bones hadn’t yet joined fully.
“I’ll help you,” I said automatically.
“You can’t help me.”
I couldn’t understand the loss a young father felt, he insisted. But, weirdly, I seemed to be able to. Both of us had conjured up the image of the abandoned baby, the little girl he had named after the literary Fanny Price. In a few weeks, Joe would write his wife a calm and repentant letter; actually, he would outline the general ideas he wanted to convey, and I would put them into words. The letter would be moving and earnest but not overly sentimental, and in it he’d sketch out the beginnings of an alimony and child support plan that he’d discussed with his lawyer friend Ned, and he’d request that he be allowed to visit the baby every month, inhaling her with the urgency of a father who no longer lives at home.