Authors: Meg Wolitzer
And then Joe added, “You know what? I’d like to see you write
one
novel, Lev, just
one,
in which you aren’t allowed to use the following keys on your typewriter: H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T.”
As the other guests watched, fascinated and appalled, the two writers fell into one of the bedrooms together. It was the Bresners’ younger daughter’s room, with pink walls and a canopy bed, and Lev and Joe both ended up on that bed, landing on an oasis of pointy-footed, half-nude Barbie dolls. Thank God our own children had refused to come to this party, saying it was boring and there was no one their age to talk to. Everyone crowded into the doorway, nominally trying to break up the fight between the two men, but no one really wanted the fight to end.
Me, I was ashamed. I didn’t want to watch; I wanted a cigarette and I wanted to go home. Tosha, however, was hysterical. “Joan, get them to stop!” she cried, clinging to me, and I hugged her, amazed that she was so invested in this cockfight.
“It will be over soon,” I said, and it was, but not in the way I’d thought.
Joe apparently reached onto the little girl’s bureau and grabbed the first thing he could find. It was a jump rope, and he wound it around Lev’s skinny neck, pulling it tight for one second, but long enough to send a pileup of guests frantically onto that canopy bed, which promptly collapsed under the collective weight of all those fiction writers and poets and essayists.
I am positive Joe did not want to murder Lev; it seemed that the gesture was for show, was a burlesque of anger, a kind of performance piece enacted with the most absurd prop in the world: a little girl’s jump rope. Still, somebody called the police, and Joe was taken away to the precinct, and I had to follow in a taxi, horrified. There were reporters, there was an exhausting night of talk, and meanwhile over in the ER at Columbia Presbyterian, Lev’s neck was examined by a few nurses who had never heard of Lev Bresner and did not understand what they were dealing with here, the boiling drama of this event, the reverberations it would have, the way it would become known as a “brawl,” a “feud,” a seminal moment in the lives of the two big men.
Tosha had to be treated for hysteria. She screamed and keened in the emergency room, shouting, “Mama! Papa!” though I knew that her parents had been murdered in the concentration camp long ago. The ER staff took her condition more seriously than her husband’s; I heard that there was talk of hospitalizing Tosha overnight for a psych evaluation, though finally she calmed down with a sedative, and they sent her home with Lev.
The story hung on for months: the bail I had to post, the court date for Joe, and then, finally, Lev’s very public dropping of the charges. He’d been convinced by their mutual friends to “let it go.” There had been soul-searching, agonizing over the whole pathetic, mortifying situation, and finally Lev decided not to pursue the case and the two men became friends again, apologizing to each other and embracing and weeping loudly, wiping their eyes and noses on each other’s shirts, laughing at it all, writing their respective sides of the event for a high-circulation magazine, going out to dinner again with us wives in tow.
We followed them and followed them, all around New York City. Once, on a rooftop (I’m not sure what we were doing there; it was freezing and late but the men wanted a view of the city), Tosha Bresner turned to me and said, “Oh, Joan, we have been putting up with these men for a lifetime.”
“Has it been all that bad for you?” I asked.
She paused, flustered. “Not all the time,” she said quickly. “And for you?”
“No,” I said. “Ups and downs.” I looked out over the buildings and the occasional flumes of smoke, and the Hudson beyond, which, if you followed it north, would lead to our house, sitting silent and dark, waiting. I used to like being there, waking up in the morning to the creak and stir of the settling wood, and even to Joe with his arm flung over his head, his eyes still squeezed shut as he held on to whatever sleep he could get. I wasn’t exactly lying to Tosha. I
wasn’t
always unhappy; Joe and I had had good moments, especially early on. We’d danced together in our living room. We’d made love against a wall. We’d baked a huge pie together for a party. We’d walked everywhere, wrapped together. And later on, for a while, there was comfort, small exhalations of relief. All marriages have moments. Even Tosha and Lev’s. Even ours.
But now she and I were sad and tired as we stood on that rooftop, and though she’d tried to tell me the extent of her suffering in that moment, I didn’t really want to hear it. I couldn’t know that to her this lifetime
was
unbearable, all she’d seen and all she was left with, scrambling after a famous, intense, and ambitious man, having to climb a metal ladder in the middle of the night to be with him on the roof of a building.
This was the early eighties, no later than that, because Tosha Bresner committed suicide in 1985. Even now, the fact of it shocks me. She was too frightened, too unstable, and images of her murdered parents and her sisters seemed to flood her more frequently, causing her to leave rooms, to excuse herself from parties, to take various pills for a depression and anxiety that could never be quelled, until finally she swallowed a whole bottle of Xanax one night while Lev was off giving the Carl Sandburg Lecture at the University of Chicago (Chicago, I’d heard, was the home of a woman Lev adored—a young divorcée who ran an elegant little bookstore on Clark Street with leather club chairs and
free wine), and when he came home the next day in a splendid mood from that bounty of praise and vigorous lovemaking, he found his wife dead in their bed, her hands splayed open, as if she were asking,
What else was I supposed to do?
He called us, sobbing and hysterical, and we went there.
I mourned her for years, and I blamed Lev, though I see that this was unfair of me. After Tosha’s funeral, sitting and taking off our clothes on our bed, back to back, I said to Joe, “He should have known better.”
“What does that mean? Known better than to leave her to go to Chicago? He didn’t know she would do what she did. How could he have known? My God, he’s devastated.”
“It’s just the whole
thing,
” I said. “She was so needy for so many years. What happened to her as a child—her whole family
murdered.
Her sisters, and her parents, and her grandparents, too. And then, later on, Lev’s thing with women. How many women were there?”
“I have no idea,” Joe said coldly.
“It was the last straw,” I said.
“You can’t really know what pushes someone over the brink. And you also don’t know what they said between themselves,” said Joe. “How they worked it out.”
As though he and I had
ever
said something like that, had ever openly acknowledged that a man’s need to be unfaithful to his wife was something to be protected and supported at all costs.
Bone’s biography will certainly include some of Joe’s women. The book will have to mention the way Joe sought women and was equally sought by them.
Most of Joe’s women would never come forward to speak to a biographer, and they’ve never been identified before by anyone; they’ve preferred to press into their own memory books the time when they were younger and Joseph Castleman caught their eye.
Women such as Merry Cheslin, who Joe met on a porch outside a cottage at a famous summer writing conference called Butternut Peak during the summer of 1987.
It seems improbable to me that Joe never realized I knew about her, when in fact she practically walked around that summer wearing a sandwich board that read,
I AM FUCKING THE GREAT JOE CASTLEMAN. PLEASE LOOK THROUGH THE BACK WINDOW OF BIRCHBARK COTTAGE AT MIDNIGHT TO SEE US GOING AT IT LIKE ANIMALS.
I minded, mostly, but in another way I
didn’t
mind, because I thought she was pathetic, this Merry Cheslin who had the looks of a dark-haired Rapunzel. She was young, in her mid-twenties at the time, an aspiring novelist like half the participants at Butternut Peak. But she was standout good-looking; it had been the thing she’d probably always had going for her. Ever since she started school, Merry Cheslin’s looks must have been the defining quality about her, the one detail that could be counted on each year. (“Oh, look, there’s Merry at her locker, she got even prettier over the summer, if you can believe it.”) Of course she ached to be a writer. Like so many women, she burned for it, all she wanted to do was to publish, and her whole life was leading toward the moment when she found an agent and a publisher and her first book appeared.
It might have happened, too, if she had been even a little talented. It might have happened if she’d figured out a way to make it happen. She was so directed that palpable ambition was released from her like kapok from a pillow, and after a while she didn’t bother to keep it in, but just let everyone know: Merry Cheslin was going to be a famous writer. She’d be one of those writers you hear about, those elegant, dark-eyed women whose novels are set in Hawaii or in Tuscany, and for whom “the entire town is a character,” or at least that’s what they say in interviews.
“I keep a journal,” she’d confided to Joe one day after his first workshop at Butternut Peak, and then she looked away quickly, as though she’d told him something crucial and furtive about herself, like
I was raped by my uncle as a child.
I’m making this part up. There was no journal; at least not one that I knew about. (But if there
had
been, it would have been covered
in some quilted material and had dried leaves inside it.) I actually don’t know
what
she said to him; Merry Cheslin is one of the people I have never spoken to. I can’t say what they talked about during intervals between the slapping of their bodies against each other in Birchbark Cottage at midnight, though I can imagine.
“I keep a journal,” she said, and Joe, who always hated journals, who loathed the concept of “writing for the self,” as opposed to writing for others to read (even that promiscuous journal-filler, Virginia Woolf, must have known that those pages would one day be read by others), had looked at her and said, “Oh, well, good for you. If you want to be a writer, you’ve simply got to keep writing. A journal is a pretty good start.”
Merry Cheslin’s fiction was horrible. This I actually do know, because though I was the wife, I got to look at the manuscripts he was going to deconstruct in his workshop, which would be held on Adirondack chairs in a field overlooking Butternut Peak. The good-smelling, mimeographed copies of the manuscripts sat on our old chipped dresser in the cottage they gave us that summer, which was called Peachtree. Joe was off on some porch drinking with other writers one evening. They were both male and female; the women tended to be soft-spoken and kind to students, while the men were an uneven lot—some powerful, others doglike and grateful to be there, for their novels were largely ignored by the reading public. Only here in the summer could they feel big.
While Joe sat on that porch, I took the stack of his student manuscripts onto our bed and began to read. There were a couple of Joe imitators in the pile, all men, mostly young, and a trembly, single-spacing woman, probably old, who had written, beneath the title of her 100 percent unpublishable story, “Copyright, Gloria Bismarck. First North American Serial Rights. Approximately 4,213 words.” Which was enough to break your heart rather than have contempt for. I imagined that Gloria Bismarck was a widow who lived in some suburb, and whose highlight of life was her two weeks at Butternut Peak. She didn’t even really exist in the
eyes of most of the faculty writers, because she was old and sad and ridiculous, and had bulbous veins in her legs, and for the rest of her life no one might ever touch her body or read anything she’d written unless they’d been paid to do so.
Merry Cheslin, on the other hand, immediately captured the attention of the men on the Butternut faculty. Most of them lifted their heads from their manuscripts or their conversations or their Bloody Marys when she stepped onto the porch, their nostrils quivering, their mouths dropping slightly open, wanting something from this woman simply because of the sheer wall of her beauty, which was all she had that mattered. Her work was irredeemably bad. She wanted to be poetic and whispery yet dark; she wanted to be irresistible and troubled all at once. The short story that she submitted to Joe was a mawkish girlhood reminiscence called “That Firefly Summer.”
Though she had no talent, still she thought a lot of herself, and still my husband took her to bed in the single room she’d booked in Birchbark, and pushed up her tight little strappy dress. What was I doing at the time? I was sitting in our own room, in Peachtree, stimulating my gums with a dental pick and thinking about how many days were left before Joe and I would be able to leave Vermont.
Wives are the sad sacks of any writers’ conference. Wherever I went during those twelve days—when I stepped out of Peachtree and onto the gravel path, voices would call out to me in gaiety: “Morning, Joan!” or, “Hey there, Joan, are you and Joe going to the picnic in the grove?”
Everyone liked me because I was not only a wife, I was the alpha wife, the spouse of the alpha dog. The alpha dog who, everyone knew, was blithely cheating on me, fucking himself dizzy in Birchbark, separated from Peachtree only by Wildwood and Silverspruce and by the great wooden dining hall, with its summer-camp smells and fresh-out-of-the-dishwasher glasses that warmed my orange juice each morning to approximately the temperature of the bath I took each night.
In the dining hall I sat beside Joe and across the table from other wives and their writer husbands. The occasional husband was there accompanying his writer wife, but most tended to stay away from the conference, saying they couldn’t take time off from their jobs. There were a few children underfoot, too, though by now ours were fully grown and off in their own lives. All of us in the dining hall behaved with a certain jollity that is required at writers’ conferences, for without it, everyone might look around and actually realize what they’ve gotten themselves into—all the narcissism and unpleasantness let loose among the scrub pines.