Free The Wife by Meg Wolitzer Page A

steal over them eventually, a desire to move on, to burst out into bigger cities, to not waste their Ph.D.’s and carefully composed lectures on girls who would dutifully absorb everything and then immediately go get married and reproduce, inevitably beginning the long process of forgetting.
    The Castleman house was a gray saltbox, set back from the street behind a bumpy lawn. The bell on the front porch made a halfhearted blat when I pressed it. In a moment Professor Castleman himself was at the door, lit from behind by a yellow bulb.
    “You must be freezing,” he said as he let me in. He wore a half-opened dress shirt, an unknotted tie draped around his neck. “I’m warning you, it’s chaos here,” he said. He smelled of some sort of shaving balm, and a spot of blood was on his chin. Therecord album from South Pacific was playing distantly, and from somewhere behind him a baby rhythmically cried, and then a woman’s voice called out, “Joe? Joe? Could you come up?”
    His name was Joe. I didn’t known this, and I’d been afraid to attach a specific first name to him. His wife descended, carrying the baby over her shoulder. I lifted my eyes to look. The baby was quiet now, though bright red in the face. Mrs. Castleman wasn’t beautiful; she was a small, frazzled woman in her middle twenties, with boyish brown hair and darting eyes. What did he see in her? I imagined my professor in bed with this unglamorous little woman. Mrs. Castleman was so different from the Smith girls who grazed all around the campus like gazelles nibbling foliage. She stood with her hand reaching up the back of the baby’s outfit to check the status of a diaper, and she gave the appearance of a puppeteer in that moment, the hand inside the cloth, the baby entirely under her power, at least for now.
    “Hello,” Castleman’s wife said without much interest. “I’m Carol Castleman. Nice to meet you.”
    I tried to appear neutral, cheerful, a Smithie straight out of a college brochure. Autumn leaves should have been falling all around me as I stood at the foot of the uncarpeted staircase. “You, too,” I said. “Hello, honey,” I forced myself to say in the general direction of the baby. “Aren’t you adorable.”
    “We haven’t left her with a sitter before,” Mrs. Castleman explained. “But she’s still so young, I can’t imagine it’ll scar her for life, regardless of what I’ve been trained to think.” The professor’s wife shifted the baby to her other arm and explained, “I’m studying to be a psychoanalyst.” Then she added, “Let me show you around.”
    The rooms of the house were disorganized, with piles of books and toys and tilting lamp shades. Carol Castleman didn’t seem to care, or to feel the need to apologize. The baby slept in her parents’ room, and I was taken up there, knowing that I was about to enter the place where Castleman lay each night with his wife. The bed was made, though clearly in a hurry, and beside it was a whitewicker bassinet. On one of the night tables was a scattering of walnuts. Joe came out of the bathroom and stood in the doorway, now fully dressed. His hair was wet and pushed back off his face, and his tie was knotted. From the record player, a dreamy, tropical female voice sang, “Here am I, your special island, come away, come away. . . .”
    “Carol,” he said. “Is the tour over? We should get going.”
    His wife took his arm, and in that frozen pose they appeared to be a clean, presentable young faculty couple going out for the night. They clearly received something from each other, a reciprocity that was founded on things I couldn’t even imagine, for he was so handsome and she so shrunken and ordinary. I thought of my own parents, who were as remote as two stalactites hanging side by side in the same cave, never touching in public, my father in his dark suits that smelled leafy and masculine, my mother in her dresses with patterns that gave them the appearance