Free The Wife by Meg Wolitzer

imagination as a big pantry, either well stocked with goods or else wartime-empty.
    Maybe she died. I never found out, for her novel joined the vast, rolling graveyard of unloved books, and perhaps she threw herself on top of the grave, inconsolable.
    One day, a month into the semester, having had three conferences with Professor Castleman during office hours, each one held aloft by his elaborate praise, he called my name at the end of class and I walked up to him, brimming, steadying myself.
    “Miss Ames, I wanted to ask you something,” he said. “Would you walk out with me and we can talk?”
    I nodded, seeing the way the others took note of this moment. One of them, Rochelle Darnton, whose short stories featured inevitable surprise endings—“Just like O. Henry!” Rochelle had explained in her own defense—sighed as she shrugged into her coat, watching student and teacher lingering together, as though she knew that she would never be asked to walk out with Professor Castleman, that she would never be asked to linger, to loiter, to give more of herself than she already did.
    I thought Castleman might be about to tell me that he was nominating me for a $100 college literary prize. Or maybe, I thought, he wanted to ask me to have dinner with him, to go out on a clandestine date, the way a girl who lived on my hall had done with her chemistry professor. I wasn’t sure which it would be: art or love. But with someone like J. Castleman, love of art could transform quickly into human love, couldn’t it? I hoped this was true, but was immediately mortified by my own thoughts, which seemed both delusional and deeply corrupt.
    We’d arrived at the middle of the campus when he said to me, “I was wondering, Miss Ames, whether by any chance you’re free Saturday night.”
    I told him I was. All around us, girls trudged past.
    “Good,” he said. “Would you be interested in baby-sitting? My wife and I haven’t gotten out since Fanny was born.”
    “Sure,” I said flatly. “I love children.”
    Which wasn’t even true. I felt a flush of humiliation about what I’d imagined, and how different the truth was, but still this was better than nothing, better than being ignored by him. So on Saturday night I declined to attend Northrop House’s big band party, walking away from the sounds of “String of Pearls” cranked loud on a phonograph, and the parry of male voices in the snapping air, and instead headed along Elm Street until it shook off its collegiate feel and became simply part of a neighborhood where families lived.
    Bancroft Road was dark, with no streetlamps, and I could see into front windows where faculty members and their wives and children shuffled around living rooms. Was this the epiphany of adult life, that it actually wasn’t exciting and vast in possibilities, but was in fact as enclosed and proscribed as childhood? What a disappointment, for I’d been looking forward to the open field, the imagined release. Or maybe, I thought as I watched a young mother stride across her living room, then suddenly stoop down to pick something up (A shoe? A squeak toy?), only men ever felt that release. For women in 1956 were always confronting boundaries, negotiations: where they could walk at night, how far they could let a man go when the two of them were alone. Men hardly seemed troubled by these things; they walked everywhere in cold, dark cities and pin-drop empty streets, and they let their hands go walking, too, and they opened their belts and then their trousers, and they never thought to themselves: I must stop this right now. I must not go any further.
    Here on Bancroft Road, it appeared that I was in a land in which everyone seemed to have stopped themselves from going too far. This was Smith, not Harvard; prestigious but not of high academic voltage. The men who held these faculty positions would initially feel relief at being here, and would settle in for the long run, but something would probably