Authors: Meg Wolitzer
Lev Bresner, by now a widower for years and still sexually active, but more depressed than ever, took over, starting the tilting of the head and the application of his lips to Joe’s, and then the pounding of Joe’s chest, and the next thing I knew, paramedics had pushed through the wooded back room of The Cracked Crab and had Joe on a stretcher with an oxygen mask over his face. Someone put an arm around me; I heard a mesh of voices, and I reached out toward Joe, but he was already being wheeled away.
Five months later, after a long, cranky recovery from what had actually been a fairly mild heart attack, Joe required surgery to replace one of his human valves with a pig’s. He lay in our bed in Weathermill and read letters and novels, talking on the phone to various people around the world. Both of our daughters came and stayed at the house a couple of times, trying to cheer me up and be helpful to their dad. Even David telephoned, and though he didn’t ask directly about Joe, I knew that was why he was calling.
I clung to Joe that year, extremely frightened. I forgot his flaws; they flew away as quickly as the taste of that meal. I have never eaten crab again. I fretted at his bedside, and I wished desperately for his recovery, and I got what I wished for.
On our final night in Finland, Joe and I walked up the wide marble steps of the Helsinki Opera House side by side, my arm in his, surrounded by the chatter of cameras, which weren’t meant only for us. Anyone of prominence in Finland was here tonight, all the writers and artists and members of government, the people with curiously interesting names like Simo Ratia, Kaarlo Pietila, Hannes Vatanen. The names rang similarly, seductively, and the faces bore the same high color and fine bone structure. Everyone’s teeth looked strong and even, too, as though one orthodontist serviced the entire country. Men and women filed into the Opera House in their bulky Nordic parkas; only after they had entered and stripped down to their evening dress could you see how prepared they were for an evening of high couture. Here was a high point, the annual release from a frozen, static state, the tiny crack in the ice that let in the world. And the crack in the ice, this year, was in the name of Joseph Castleman, a small, overweight man in a tuxedo walking beside me up a set of shallow steps and into the gilded light of the Helsinki Opera House.
I was seated in a box beside the President of Finland and his wife. While Joe was ushered backstage, I was formally introduced to the president, a man of my age named Mr. Timo Kristian with a stern face not unlike Finnish architecture. He wore one of those diagonal sashes fashioned of multicolored silk. His wife, Mrs. Karita Kristian, slightly younger, dressed in black, with a string of amethyst around her neck, sat frozen in place beside him. They had nothing to say to each other, or so it seemed, and they didn’t even try to give the illusion of rapport. Presidents served for six years in Finland; this was the beginning of Kristian’s fifth year in office, and both he and his wife looked very tired.
Finally Mrs. Kristian took it upon herself to speak to me. There we were, wife to wife. “So, Mrs. Castleman,” she said in careful English, “you are enjoying your stay here in Helsinki?”
“Oh yes,” I said.
“What are your impressions of the Finnish people?” she wanted to know, and I spoke a little about their quiet pride, their good eye, their elegant simplicity, all of which seemed to be the right responses, for she appeared pleased.
“And how about you, Mrs. Kristian?” I said. “What is your life like here in Helsinki?”
The president’s wife was confused. I immediately realized that the question probably seemed insolent and strange. Or maybe she was just unused to such direct interest. “My life,” she began uncertainly, and then she quickly looked around to see who might be listening. No one was. The president was talking to one of his cabinet members, a man with an enormous blond mustache. “My life,” Karita Kristian went on in a quiet, controlled voice, “is so very unhappy.”
I stared at her. Had I heard her right? Maybe she’d said her life was so very
happy
instead; how could I find out? Her face gave nothing away, but appeared as placid as it had been moments before. The lights dimmed just then and everyone in our box and in the entire audience grew silent. Mrs. Karita Kristian, the First Lady of Finland, turned to face forward as the heavy, scalloped curtains were pulled upward on the stage, revealing a small sea of men that included my husband. One or two women sat among them, their dresses providing the only bright bits of color.
Soon Joe was given a medal by the acting president of the Finnish Academy of Letters, Teuvo Halonen, the man who had first telephoned to inform us that Joe had won the prize. The gold disk hung on white silk, the disk engraved with a miniature copy of
Kalevala,
and a pair of hands holding it open, and even from all the way up here in the opera box I could make out the medal’s winking light. Short selections from several of Joe’s novels were read aloud by a film actress who flipped back her hair often as
she read in a sonorous voice. And then finally Joe stood up.
“Good evening,” he began, “and thank you for your kind welcome.” He tipped his head in the direction of the Finnish Academy. “Members of the Finnish Academy, I would like to say that I am deeply grateful and moved.” And then, slowly, he raised his head in the direction of the box. “President Kristian,” he said. “Thank you for honoring me in your beautiful country.”
Blah, blah, blah,
he went on. No, that’s unfair of me, the words were reasonable, though mostly uninteresting. I listened hard. He hadn’t let me see his speech beforehand; it was important to him that he wrote it himself and that no one else offered an opinion before he came to Finland. “I’ve felt, ever since I arrived here,” he said, “what a tonic this land is after the harsh locus of resentment and plenty that is otherwise known as the United States. In these days since terrorism has accelerated its global pace . . .”
I was mortified that he was talking about terrorism; it was such an easy subject, an all-purpose, cheap one. All you had to do was invoke the specter of terrorism and everyone dutifully went somber on you. Lips pursed. People bowed their heads slightly. Couldn’t he have come up with something more original? Joe went on in this vein, quoting Rilke and Saul Bellow and Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du mal.
And his speech meandered predictably through the war against terrorism—through the windy caves of Afghanistan, and the Middle East—and wrapped itself around the world until it returned home again. He was almost done. Joe paused here, and then his eyes moved subtly over to me as he said, “I’d like to say a few words about my wife, Joan.”
Everyone dutifully looked upward, their heads tilted toward me. “My wife, Joan,” Joe repeated, “is truly my better half.”
Don’t,
I thought.
Don’t do this to me. I asked you not to.
“She has made it possible for me to find the stillness inside myself—as well as the noise—to write my novels,” he said. “Without her, I am certain I would not be standing up here tonight. I would instead be at home staring at a blank piece of paper with my mouth open in stupefaction.”
There was indulgent laughter; of course he would have been up here anyway, the audience thought. Yet how admirable it was for the winner of the Helsinki Prize to be so generous toward his wife, to acknowledge her like this as he stood onstage to accept this award for a long, hard labor on the fiction chain gang. He’d been breaking rocks apart, and there I was, wiping his brow, offering him cool drinks. He’d been nearly prostrate from the heat and the strain of being a novelist, and yet I was always there, stripping away his soiled shirt, bringing him a clean one, helping him slip his arms into it, doing up the buttons myself, urging him on when he needed encouragement, lying beside him at night, telling him
you can do it,
even as his ankles were shackled together and he was exhausted and in tears. You can do it, we wives said, you can do it, and when they actually did do it, we were as happy as mothers whose babies have taken a first, shaky step, letting go of the furniture forever.
Those well-meaning Finns regarded me, those people who had given my husband a check worth $525,000. They gave us their
markka
and they smiled up at me, nodding and praising the charms and subtle skills of the wife.
Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to the Stop & Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.
But it’s their choice, Bone might say. They make a choice to be that kind of wife, that kind of mother. Nobody forces them anymore; that’s all over now. We had a women’s movement in America, we had Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem with her aviator glasses and frosted parentheses of hair. We’re in a whole new world now. Women are
powerful.
Valerian Qaanaaq will probably be standing on this very stage in a couple of years, wearing traditional Inuit garb and reflecting upon her childhood in that notorious sod-and-snow igloo.
Some women don’t make that choice, it’s true. They live another life entirely: Lee, the journalist I met in Vietnam; Brenda the prostitute. Or else they work out some version involving elaborate child care or a husband who doesn’t mind staying home all day with an infant. A husband who lactates, perhaps. Or maybe they don’t even
want
babies, some of these women, and life opens out to them in an endless field of work. And once in a while the world responds in a big way, letting them in, giving them a key, a crown. It does happen, it does. But usually it doesn’t.
You sound bitter,
Bone would say.
That’s because I am, I would tell him.
Everyone needs a wife; even
wives
need wives. Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else.
“Listen,” we say. “Everything will be okay.”
And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is.
DRUNK;
Joe and I were drunk in a way that is allowed, even expected, following moments of great, preening triumph. You would have seen us in that Opera House at the banquet and thought, from the way he leaned in to whomever he was talking to, and tilted his head and slapped his knee, that we too were Finns. Drunken Finns, trying to forget the encroaching half-year of darkness; happy Finns; carefree Finns—
Huckleberry
Finns. Joe had received his award and given his remarks and we’d spent the evening at the banquet, circulating, being circulated around, meeting the luminaries of not only the Scandinavian countries but also the clusters of novelists, journalists, and publishers who’d been imported from London, Paris, Rome. The ceilings were high in the Opera House’s atrium, where extremely long tables had been set up and draped in linen, and the acoustics amplified the excited, multilingual jabber. Toasts took place in many languages, without interpreters, and Joe and I smiled and raised our glasses along with everyone else, never really knowing what we were toasting, what we were signing on for, what we were gamely laughing at.
The president and his wife left early; someone mentioned in
passing that Kristian liked to watch Sky TV every night and then go right to sleep, and that he never deviated from this strict routine, not even once a year for the winner of the Helsinki Prize. I wanted to say to his wife, “Oh, couldn’t you stay on without him?” but it was too late, they’d been swept away, back down those marble steps and perhaps into some waiting coach driven by reindeer.
Hours later, Joe and I finally left, too, in the company of two dozen agreeable publishers and writers and dignitaries who begged Joe not to end the evening just yet, but to let it go on and on a bit longer, this one special night that, like Passover, was different from all other Finnish nights. Passover, a holiday that few of these people would know a good deal about. (“Yes, yes, that is the one on which the
Yewish
people recline, no?”) They were charming and lively, wanting to discuss American fiction and geopolitics with Joe, wanting to talk more about terrorism and anxiety about the future. In a fleet of limousines, we rode off to a very old, classic brasserie in the middle of the city; the management had been told we would be coming, and was prepared, for when we arrived the rooms were festooned with flowers and ornaments and brightly lit ice mountains on which crayfish lay, but none of us could eat much, for the banquet earlier had been an embarrassment of riches, with bricks of foie gras and individual game birds and a geometrical array of cheeses.
Some of the members of the Finnish Academy were now patiently teaching Joe the opening lines of
Kalevala
in both Finnish and English. Slurring, they looped their arms around one another and recited. Joe was in the middle of the crowd, beaming, impish, his voice louder than anyone’s. He’d eaten too much tonight; I’d seen him shoveling in the solid blocks of trans fats and animal flesh with its scorched jackets of skin, and cheese upon cheese, followed by the best wines of the world, the bottles brought up from deep down inside some Nordic cellar. I’d watched him pack it in earlier, saw him with his mouth open so wide that I could view his dental history, the silver and the gold
packed into the hollows, and the long, dark throat that led down toward his imperfect heart with its secondhand valve.
Our business was almost done, I thought as I tossed back another drink and watched him. Our entire transaction was nearly complete, the endless exchange of fluids, of vital information, the creation of children, the buying of cars, the taking of vacations, the winning of prizes in far-flung places. The winning of
this
prize. The effort of it all: God, what effort. Enough already, I should say to him. Enough of this. Let me go now, and not have to wake up beside your satisfied face every morning for the next decade, and your well-fed stomach that deprives you of the sight of your own penis, curled in wait.