The Wife (27 page)

He slumped down beside me. “But what about ‘No Milk on
Sunday’?” he said angrily. “That wasn’t so different. You liked that story.”

I cast my eyes down, plucked at the pilly blanket. “I was lying,” I whispered. “I’m really sorry. I couldn’t think what else to do.”

“Oh, fuck this,” said Joe. He stood up then, and said, “This isn’t going to work.”

“
What
isn’t?”

“This whole thing, this relationship with you. This life. I can’t do it, I just can’t.”

“Joe,” I said, “just because I didn’t like your novel doesn’t mean—”

“Yes, it does!” he cried. “What am I supposed to do, be your little houseboy? Sit here and wash the clothes and cook a crown roast while you become a literary sensation?”

I seem to remember that at this point I began to cry. “Our relationship isn’t about writing,” I said. “We have other things, other ways in which—”

“Oh, just shut up, Joan,” Joe said. “Just shut up. The more you speak, the worse it gets.”

“Joe, listen to me,” I said. “I left
college
for you. I know this is right. Think of what it feels like.”

“I can’t remember,” he said petulantly.

He got himself a pack of cigarettes and smoked one after another, calming himself down. He didn’t have to break it off with me tonight, he seemed to realize; he could still take more time to think, to figure it all out. Where was he going to go, back to Northampton to his angry wife, Carol, and their beet-red, crying baby and a college that no longer wanted him?

After a while he picked up the doomed pages, held them out to me, and said, “All right. I’ve been humbled. Show me what’s wrong. I can take it.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

We sat together with the pages spread out before us, and I
pointed out the obvious gracelessness of certain lines, the missed opportunities of others. I found I was able to see everything with clarity, as though the bad passages had all been highlighted by some overly helpful undergraduate. I’d been the undergraduate, once, reading novels for my literature classes and seeing the thread of the text, the art and nuance and sly imposition of meaning.
What did the writer intend?
This was the question we always posed, though really it was pointless to ask this. No one could know; no one could see into the densely packed, squiggled brains of those nineteenth-century novelists we read. And even if we
could
know, it wouldn’t matter, because the book became the body, the brain, the guts of the author. And the author himself—or, occasionally,
herself,
those bonneted Brontës, that arch social observer Austen—became the husk, the dried-out casing, no longer good for anything.

The books lasted if they were good enough. If they spoke loud enough. Who cared, finally,
who
had written them? I loved them as things, as jewel boxes, as jewels themselves. And I wanted to turn Joe’s manuscript into something I could love, too, and so I started in carefully.

“Now if it were me,” I said, “I would do it this way. You’re
not
me, of course, so please feel free to ignore this,” I continued, and I took a pencil to the pages and began gently crossing out words, replacing them with words that, the minute they appeared, were so obviously better, so obviously the antidote to his poor choices. I kept crossing words out until the page was simply one long blacked-out sheet. Then, after I’d finished, I retyped the new version on Joe’s typewriter; God, I thought, even my
typing
was better than his. I sat there working like a pert executive secretary, the words arriving as though they were being dictated by a hidden boss. I simply wrote them as if I’d lived them; it was no different from writing the stories I’d done in Joe’s class at Smith, and yet now the scenes lasted longer, the dialogue could be as charged as I wanted, I could be leisurely with description yet always economical, because I knew that less was more. Professor Castleman
had told me. When I was finished I handed the manuscript to him in silence, but I was thrilled, suppressing my own happiness, my own pride and vanity, which seemed capable of spilling over if I wasn’t careful.

Later that night, when we were both calmer, we went for a walk in the neighborhood, stopping in at a bright little Italian pastry shop to eat the squares of chestnut cake we both liked. “I’m very confused about everything in my life,” he said. “If I can’t write a decent novel, if I can’t get it published, then I’m fucked, Joanie.”

“You’re not fucked.”

“Yes, I am.”

He told me about how he’d always wanted to be a writer, ever since he was a fatherless kid at the Brooklyn Public Library, escaping his apartment of overbearing women, crouching in the stacks reading novels. He was almost in tears now as he talked about this. He turned away, his mouth tight, trying to keep himself composed. “My father was there every day, and then suddenly he wasn’t. And that was it.”

Joe wanted my help now, he said. Would I do that for him? It would only be this one novel; he could tell me things about the world that he’d witnessed or learned or simply intuited, and I could write them down; his head and his life were stuffed with experiences.

“After this one book,” he said, “it’ll be your turn. You’ll do a novel. You’ll be amazing.”

And it made sense to me; I could help him just this once, I could basically walk him through the entire book, and it wouldn’t be so bad. I would give him a crash course in how to do it, and then he’d never need me again in quite the same way, and I could in fact go on to write my own novels, as he’d said. He would be a novelist, and he would be mine, and we could move from the Waverly Arms into someplace better.

Joe had piles of favorite novels back in the house he’d left in Northampton; he could quote from them with his eyes shut,
those brilliant, heat-packing men like James Joyce, whose work made him lovesick each time he read it. But he wouldn’t become part of that fraternity, those men who had been packaged into neat paperbacks, carried everywhere under the arms of college students and dreamy lovers of literature. All he had was the look, the attitude, the reverence and the desire to be a great writer, but that was meaningless without what he called “the goods.” If he kept at it now, on his own, he’d spend his life publishing stories in
Caryatid
and the like, those tiny magazines printed on cheap paper in someone’s basement.
Try us again! Try us again!
the rejection slips cried in mocking mouse-voices.

It would just be one book,
The Walnut.
And I would be its shaper, working every evening after I came home from Bower & Leeds. It was a noble act on my part, and it would rescue us. Neither of us wanted a life of lulling routine, of sleepy academia, of a husband and wife listening to the songs of
South Pacific
as we got dressed for a faculty party on a snowy night. That was a life he’d already lived, and which I’d seen up close. I could even write about it if I had to. First novels were always at least somewhat autobiographical, and this one would basically leave nothing out from Joe’s first marriage, from the triangle we’d formed, Joe and me and the rejected Carol.

“Just this once,” he repeated.

Just this once
is meaningless.
The Walnut
was too big, and everything worked too beautifully, our life opening wide, Joe so happy and calm, together with Elaine Mozell’s cautionary words. Back then, who needed to try and struggle to become a woman writer in this world that had little regard for women, except
extremely
occasionally when they were brilliant and beautiful and attached to important men like Mary McCarthy was, or, more often, when they seemed empty and blank, or when they smelled delicious and paraded before you in their scant and scalloped underthings? Women were dazzling, they were ownable, and when they became writers the things they wrote were ownable too: dead-on miniatures that often focused on a particular
corner of the world, but usually not the whole world itself. Men were the ones who owned the world; Joe could do that, too, and he would never be threatened, would never leave me, and I, too, would have an extraordinary time of it, seeing everything, going along for the ride. I was meek, I had no courage, I wasn’t a pioneer. I was
shy.
I wanted things but was ashamed to want them. I was a girl, and I couldn’t shake this feeling even as I had contempt for it. This was the 1950s, and then it was the sixties, and by this time Joe and I had ironed it all out; we had a rhythm going, a style, a way of life together.

The children got raised, mostly, with lots of help from sitters. I had to hand them off all the time, like all working mothers do, and it almost broke me apart. They would cry as a sitter carried them off, and they would reach out to me with desperate arms, as though they were being taken to the electric chair. We had as much baby-sitting help as we needed, though often Joe and I had to lock ourselves in the room while the kids pounded on the door and wanted something from us.

“Focus, Joanie,” he would say. “We’ve got a long way to go here.”

He gave me plots, and anecdotes, and he disciplined me, keeping me in that room with him. He lay across the bed and I sat at his typewriter. We threw ideas back and forth; he told me stories from training camp during the Korean War, and he told me stories about the household he’d grown up in, all the women surrounding him, his big, florid mother and his grandmother and his aunts, and sometimes I climbed onto the bed and lay across him, saying I was wiped out, overwhelmed, that I didn’t know what it was like to be male, that I was out of my depth, but he always told me he would be my guide.

“And what am I supposed to be?” I asked.

“Well, let’s call you my interpreter.”

In the beginning, I always wrote slowly, just a page or two a day when I came home from Bower & Leeds. This made Joe irritable. “I know I don’t have a right to complain,” he’d begin.

“You’re right about that,” I’d say.

“But can’t you try to grease the wheels, so to speak?” he asked.

“ ‘Grease the wheels’? What a cliché. Good thing you’re not the one writing this,” I said.

He’d stand behind me and rub my shoulders. After I really understood the direction a book was taking—after Joe and I had talked it through in bed at night and I’d sat thinking about how to solve some plot problem—it came faster and freer and I could pound out many pages in a row. I’d quit my job by now; all I did was write. My metabolism was pitched high, and I didn’t need to stop and rest or even eat very often. Joe made us coffee and ran out for cigarettes, happily waiting around until I was done with a draft. Then I would hand it to him and he would ritually type out the final copy, sitting and pecking the whole thing out, making mostly insubstantial changes, but developing a familiarity between himself and the prose, getting to know it so it could feel like his.

The first book was dedicated to me. “To Joan, muse extraordinaire,” he’d typed out himself, though as a joke I’d later substituted the words “To Joan, muse extraordinaire, with love from Joan,” which he did not find funny at all. He ripped up the page like someone destroying evidence.

Months later, when one of the manuscripts was in production, I’d bow out completely, letting Joe go through the page proofs himself with a red pencil. He was happy doing that, the long pages spread out all around him, Mozart playing on the phonograph, and he was equally happy when Hal Wellman called to discuss flap copy for the book. Flap copy Joe could do. He was a perfectly good writer of the concise descriptive paragraph.

When the reviews came out in the early years, I rushed to read them first, then handed them over to him. We howled; we screamed in pleasure. Our friends were happy for Joe, though Laura Sonnengard seemed slightly confused. “You do help him with his work, right?” she asked.

“Oh, in some way, I suppose I do,” I said. “I mean, I’m pretty supportive. Why?”

“It just seems so different from him,” she said. “So
thoughtful,
no offense intended. You know I think Joe’s terrific.”

And our children, each in their own separate ways, had suspicions. The girls were quiet about it, mostly, though Alice was occasionally troubled.

“God, Mom, it’s like you do most of Daddy’s work for him,” she’d once said when she was a teenager.

“I’m just editing, Alice,” I replied lightly.

“Oh, don’t bullshit me, Mom. You know better than that. My bullshit detector is going off. Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!”

She was old enough to have woken up a little bit from the dream of adolescent self-absorption and noticed a few of the events that were taking place around her, though also old enough to sustain only a dwindling interest in anything that did not directly concern her and her friends. “I think you actually do a lot of the heavy lifting, Mom,” she went on, “and he just sits there clipping his toenails and eating those Sno-Balls.”

My trilling laughter was excessive. “What a funny idea,” I said to her. “I’ve basically propped your father up professionally. Why? Who would do such a thing?”

She looked at me and shrugged. “You would.”

“And why would I do that?”

“I have no idea,” she said.

“Well, it simply isn’t true, miss,” I said. “Your father is extremely talented.”

Susannah, for her part, seemed as if she couldn’t care less; she had little real interest in her father’s novels, and whether or not they were actually written by twelve monkeys with MFA’s from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She stayed out of it, congratulating him when his books came out and rarely expressing interest in a particular novel. She didn’t read them, I don’t think, though she pretended to.

David, however, was intensely absorbed by fiction; so much so
that, when he was young, a novel he’d read before bed would give him violent nightmares, and he’d wake up screaming and terrified. He never directly confronted me about Joe’s work, though finally, it came out anyway, on the night of the book group at Lois Ackerman’s house. The terrible, terrible night. I was sitting with the women blithely talking about Henry James and narrative strategy, while back at our house, David, who was staying with us because of his flooded apartment, walked quietly down the stairs to the living room, where Joe was sitting listening to jazz. Suddenly there was a steak knife at Joe’s neck. Joe reared back.