The Wife (17 page)

Reading this now, I still bristle at the image of young Joe on the prowl, lurking in corners and hunting down women, or even not having to hunt at all and simply letting them come to him, but of course it’s all true, and I think I always knew that that would be part of the bargain, right from the beginning in his office at Smith, when he clanged his knees against mine.

His divorce had been surprisingly uncomplicated; because Joe had little to give Carol—almost no money, no property, for even the house on Bancroft Road was a rental from the college—there was nothing major she could stick him with. Out of cruelty she might have tried to force him to support her and Fanny in high style, but that wasn’t her way. Instead, she froze him out entirely. Her own family in Sausalito, California, had money; they would support the abandoned Carol and her child. She didn’t take money from Joe; she just took the baby. And Joe, for all his love
of this baby, for all his sighs and soliloquies about fatherhood and about the soft spot on a baby’s head, let Fanny go.

At first he balked. He wanted a schedule for visitation, he wanted it in writing, he wanted to be a
father.
His unhappiness was obviously a source of pleasure for Carol; she called our number in New York and taunted him, said that Fanny was changing greatly every day, that it was like one of those science films children are shown in school, in which the growth of a flower is miraculously speeded up, that she had begun to look just like
him,
that she was precocious, that she was amazing, that she, Carol, would teach the baby to forget all about the father who’d helped create her.

“Don’t be such a bitch about this, Carol,” I heard him say. “You’re going to screw her up for life.”

To which I’m almost certain Carol responded, “No, Joe, you’ve already done that.”

So he stopped fighting with her. He backed away, relinquishing the last traces of the failed marriage. With Fanny whisked off to Sausalito, it was more difficult to see her anyway, though once, years later, he did visit during a book tour. On another occasion we packed up a box of toys and shipped it to California, but we never heard back. For a while Joe sent letters, and while some were answered by Carol, tersely, most were ignored, and after a while Joe lost interest. His sighs about Fanny came less frequently. She became a ghost, joining Joe’s dead in that gallery of faraway, mourned souls: the fat, possessive mother, the melancholy father.

As far as he could see it, the collapse of his first marriage was still basically Carol’s fault. His guilt was of a mild variety. As he told me, Carol had stopped having sex with him after Fanny was born, even months later, when her episiotomy stitches had healed and there was no medical reason for her continued refusal.

“I’m afraid you’re going to rip me open,” she’d confided to him in bed.

“That’s delusional,” he’d said, but before he’d even entered
her—when he was positioning himself on top of her, both of them enduring the silent arrangement of body parts, his testicles grazing her skin—she’d pushed him off, weeping.

“I couldn’t possibly have hurt you,” he said. “I didn’t even have a
chance
to. What’s the matter?”

But Carol could do nothing but cry, and then, probably to her eternal relief, the baby joined in the chorus, rendering sex impossible for the night.
Whew,
thought Carol.
Fuck,
thought Joe, and he lay awake in a stew, wondering what it was about him that no longer appealed to her, and why women did this sort of thing, changing the terms, harboring inexplicable aversions. That was what her reaction was: an aversion. She didn’t want to touch any part of him, and she didn’t want him wrapped around her, marinating her in his smell, raising a topography of beard-burn on her cheeks, causing her to rise up from the protective crouch she’d been in since Fanny was born.

He didn’t want to leave things be, to let her retreat, to simply engage in a pantomime of a typical academic marriage. “For God’s sake, Carol,” he’d told her. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

But still she refused, telling him she wasn’t ready to be touched, she already had enough human needs to deal with, what with nursing the baby every few hours. And when finally he insisted, she howled in pain as though he were stabbing her with a pitchfork, and he felt like a rapist, a murderer. So he didn’t try again after that night, and then time passed and he turned away from her and toward me, and I didn’t refuse him; I had no stitches that could be loosened, no fear, no hesitation.

Our wedding took place at City Hall. We’d invited only my college friend Laura and Mary Croy, another editorial assistant from Bower & Leeds, and Joe’s recent friend Lev Bresner, and the poet Harry Jacklin. Carol was gone from his thoughts, and so, I suspected, was their baby. He wanted another baby now, a parallel one whom he could learn to appreciate and love.

Pregnancy would be misery at first, he’d warned. But he was
wrong. There was no real misery, only a swollenness and disequilibrium tempered by fantasy: Who would this baby be? Boy or girl? Rocket scientist? I heaved and squeezed in the maternity ward of the now-defunct Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital, having chosen so-called natural childbirth over the far more inviting twilight sleep.
Fuck you, Dr. Lamaze,
I thought as I huffed, imagining a suave and lean Frenchman in a tailored suit chain-smoking Gauloises. Joe himself was off in the cafeteria eating and reading. When he was brought in to see Susannah for the first time, I remember that he had a small slash of ketchup on his chin, and the
Times
rolled up under his arm.

But he loved our baby profoundly; he loved all of our babies in the same way I knew he’d once loved Fanny. I ignored the rapid burnout of his love for that firstborn; I pretended it was an aberration. We lay Susannah on our bed when she was an infant and sang her long love songs together, alternating verses, cracking each other up with what we hoped were witty rhymes. It was as though we were ensuring that the baby would never come between us, would never damage the marriage or the sex or the tenderness.

Joe liked to hold his children by the ankles and turn them upside down, or else lift one up onto his shoulders and stride down the street with him or her gripping his hair. It frightened me how carefree and loose he seemed with them; I was afraid they would fall off and die, their heads cracking open on the sidewalk. He wanted them on his shoulders; I wanted them on my breast.

Whenever I was nursing, I felt as if there was nothing else in the world I needed to be doing. It didn’t matter to me in those moments that I had no career of my own, no standing in the world. I was a nursing mother, and that was all I had to be. At first Joe liked the sight, was excited by it and moved, too, but as the months passed he would make remarks like “I hope you’re not planning on doing this forever.” Or, “I could be wrong, but I thought Dr. Spock said it’s a good idea to stop nursing them
before they start graduate school. It gets in the way of their classes.” And so I did stop, sooner than I might have otherwise.

Later on, when the babies turned into toddlers, Joe felt some relief from anxiety. Nights were for sleeping through now. Also, Joe felt he was able to imprint them a little. Sometimes he had Susannah perform party tricks when friends came over for the evening.

“Now, Susie,” he would say when she wandered into the living room at two years of age. The room was filled with smoke and writers and writers’ wives. “Go bring me the most overrated book on the shelf.”

And she would dutifully march over and pull down
The Naked and the Dead,
and everyone would roar.

But he wasn’t done. “And why, Susie, is this the most overrated book on the shelf?”

“ ‘Cause he’s fulla hot air,” she would say, and everyone would laugh again, though of course there was more to come.

“Oh ho, Susie Q, so he’s full of hot air, Mr. Norman Mailer?” said Joe. “Why don’t you show me a book that you find absolutely brilliant?”

And she would return to the shelf and look around for the familiar bright red spine, look and look until it leaped into her vision, and then she yanked on it hard with her fat, small hands and whipped it loose from the tightly packed shelf. Turning to face the room she would thrust out a copy of
The Walnut,
and the increasing laughter made her cheeks flush. She knew she was doing something winning, and that it helped her gain her father’s love, although she had no idea of exactly what it was she was doing.

I wanted to protect her from him, to rush across the room and scoop her up and tell Joe not to use her this way, that it would only lead to unhappiness. But I would have seemed insane, like an overinvolved mother, someone who wanted to smash the delicate love between father and daughter. And so I just smiled and nodded from the side of the living room. Joe gave Susannah a
kiss on her silky, fruity-clean head and dismissed her from her duties.

“Where are all the
good
fathers?” Susannah once complained to me when she was a teenager. “The TV fathers, the ones who go to work and then come home, and they’re
there
for you, you know what I mean?”

We were sitting and braiding lanyards together at the time; this was something we often did back then. It was tedious and soothing all at once, the long, slippery strands twining together, formed into bracelets she could give to her friends or her sister and brother, or even to me and Joe. He would wear a bracelet for a few hours with a certain smirking pride, the bright colors shimmering on his hairy wrist, but even then she would understand the irony involved, the fact that Joe got a
kick
out of being seen wearing her bracelet. Sometimes it seemed as though he liked being a father more than actually being this particular father to this particular girl and her siblings.

“I don’t know, honey,” I’d said to her, ashamed that I hadn’t given her the kind of father she wanted. I’d only occasionally seen such a man myself: a gentle father who was strong, too, not a monster and not a weakling with asthma and a button-down cardigan. Where
were
the good fathers of that generation? They existed, of course, but many of them were off somewhere else, having a drink or a smoke or playing pool or listening to jazz. They were restless, they owned the world, and they were probably out in it, looking around.

We hired a live-in baby-sitter named Melinda to help us when the kids were small and we were so busy, a young girl who took classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and comported herself with a certain surprised and poised air, as though the world were Schwab’s Drugstore and you never knew when you might be discovered.

Joe was drawn to Melinda, but I didn’t know that for a while, managed somehow not to know the extent of it at first. But within weeks of her appearance in our house, he was most certainly
making love to her up in the attic, where he knew I hated to go because of the mouse problem. Mice left their tiny hard little feces as calling cards on the floor, yet the old attic bed that was covered with sheets and quilts managed to stay droppings-free, or at least neither he nor Melinda seemed to mind the thought of mice scampering and crapping all around them, so taken were they with each other.

But it would be some time before I would realize all of this; mostly, when Melinda was in our house, novels got written. Though everything was chaotic, life seemed to be in balance. The children were loud and disorganized and project-oriented. One of the girls would hang on my leg, another would drag out a bag of flour and demand we make papier-mâché. There was Susannah with her lanyards, and Alice with a volleyball, and David in a dark room with a battery and two pieces of copper wire. I wanted to be with them as much as I could, but there was never enough time.

Once in a while Joe would suddenly turn to me and say, “Come.”

“Come where?”

“Hunting and gathering.”

This meant that he wanted to find some ideas for a story or a novel, and he needed me there with him. So I would kiss the children and reluctantly say good-bye. “Do you have to go?” they would cry. “Do you have to?”

“Yes, we have to!” Joe would shout back. And then he would grab me and we would head out into the Village night, as though ideas might be embedded, micalike, in the sidewalk. “They’ll be fine,” he’d say, waving a hand vaguely back toward our house.

“I know they will,” I’d say. “But still.”

“ ‘But still,’ ”
he’d tell me. “You want that written on your headstone? Come on.”

And he was right; the children would be fine without us, just the way they were during the day when we were unavailable. Usually, we stopped in at the White Horse, which inevitably gave Joe a dose of nerve, for he was always recognized there and he
would engage in free-floating conversations about other writers, other books, or the buildup in Vietnam. We went to Folk City and to jazz clubs, and we listened to female poets standing at microphones, their multiple bracelets jangling like loose change as they read their quivering poems to an attentive audience.

One night Joe told me that he wanted his second novel to contain a scene with a prostitute in it.

“Prostitutes are boring,” I said. “They’re all the same. They’ve got those same terrible backgrounds: the lecherous father, the dirt road, the nowhere life.”

“They’re not boring if they’re done right,” he said, and I realized that he wanted to go visit a prostitute for research, and he wanted my permission. He wouldn’t have sex with her, he would just ask her questions, trying to understand what it meant to be a woman who did what she did. The prostitute would need to be conveyed realistically, otherwise that section of the new novel, Joe explained, would feel pulpy and lurid. “You can come with me, Joan,” he said. “In fact, I wish you would.”

And so I went, wearing a powder blue cloth coat and carrying my little purse. We climbed the stairs of a small apartment building downtown near the Hudson River; the breezes brought in fresh shipments of garbage-stink. One of Joe’s friends, a dissipated writer he knew from the White Horse, had arranged the visit. The prostitute’s name was Brenda, and her hair was swirled into a blond beehive and she wore Capri pants and a man’s shirt. Her face was rough and thick with makeup. She sat on an armchair and said, “What is it you want to know?” Her toenails, in their sandals, were painted milk white.