Free The Wife by Meg Wolitzer Page B

of tablecloths. My parents had separate beds made of dark, shellacked wood, and once, after she’d had a lot to drink at a dinner party, my charity-addled mother swept into my room late at night and confided that my father had recently been “rough” with her “in a marital way.” I only understood this much later, though simply the idea of it was awful: my big, impersonal, corporate father roughing up my slender, tablecloth-wearing mother as he mounted her in one of their high twin beds. Here in the presence of this husband and wife who were not my parents, and who lived in a world much more complicated than mine, I felt retarded and slack-jawed. I’d called Fanny “honey,” but I hadn’t meant it at all. The nucleus of attraction was the baby’s father, a man who ate walnuts and read James Joyce aloud to his students.
    “Good-bye now!” the Castlemans called as they left, leaving telephone numbers and bottles and clean diapers behind. “Good-bye!” they sang as they headed into the night air to a faculty dinner party.
    When they were gone, I gathered up the loose sack of baby and explored the bedroom in depth. Here were the clues to thisman, all the evidence I’d ever need. Here in the closet were his shoes, lined up and worn, and here on the dresser was a bottle of his aftershave. Then, on a table, I saw a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, with my professor’s name on the flyleaf. “Joseph Castleman,” he’d written with big flourishes, “Columbia University, 1948,” as though he was guaranteed to be famous some day, and to excite someone who would eventually open this book and come upon his name. By 1956, of course, he still wasn’t famous, but the signature excited me anyway, and I ran a finger along it, tracing the curlicues. Then I put the book down and sat on his side of the bed, laying the baby beside me. I picked up some walnut shells, letting them sift through my fingers, and for a moment Fanny and I regarded each other coolly.
    “Hello, you,” I said. “I’m falling in love with your daddy. And I’d really like to go to bed with him.”
    In a final burst of nerve, I sprang up and opened the night table drawer. It was as though I needed to find out what it meant to be a wife, to have a life spent beside a man. And sure enough, I found something: a white plastic diaphragm case nestled against a tube of the cream that had to be squirted in along with it, as well as an applicator, all of it making me uneasy, forcing me to imagine the wife of my professor sliding plastic and potions into a deep slot in her body, preparing herself for him. There was a dental pick with a rubber tip in the drawer, too, and a single walnut. I picked up the walnut and looked at it; a red heart had been painted on it, and beneath it were the words: C., I love you true.—J.
    The walnut was more disturbing than the diaphragm. A diaphragm was a necessary, impersonal device, the sort of thing that Smith girls obtained by taking the bus to Springfield and visiting an old female gynecologist from Vilna who barely spoke English and asked few questions. But the inscribed walnut was much more intimate, and therefore somehow perverse. It even looked female, I thought, observing the lips of the nut and the grooves in the shell and the cold silk of the bumpy surface with its red-painted heart. I placed the nut back in the drawer andturned my attention to Fanny, who was suddenly crying and in need of something: A bottle? A change? Who the hell knew? Her crying was an irritant, sand in the pants, and I couldn’t understand the universal fetish surrounding babies, why they were the prize I would supposedly desire in a couple of years.
    I picked the baby up and held her, ineffectually shushing and rocking her. I had no power here, no authority, not even the secret kind like that of a newly sexual girl with a diaphragm buried deep inside her.
    Still, though, when the Castlemans returned later, I pathetically tried to make