The Writing Life - The Writer’s Wife

I cannot speak for writers’ husbands because I have never been or loved one. But I live with a writer’s wife, and I can tell you that the sentence of a writer’s wife is commuted by nothing short of death. You have seen them, smiling in crowded gatherings at no one because no one talks to them for very long except to say, “Oh, you’re Missus Him? How wonderful! “ as if she has balanced a ball on her nose or stolen Him from the women, student poets, who would nurse him in his powerful senility, or bake him cookies to crumble in a postgraduate bed. You have seen them, listening to Him read to strangers the story or poem or chapter or essay about his claim to have made long and tireless epiphanic love in a sweaty lather with a woman half her age but how it is she to whom he is true because of the metaphor his return to her makes it possible for him to write for them to hear while she sits among them and smiles while her face pulses and shines.

It isn’t always that bad, of course. We all know writers’ wives whose husbands are faithful. These are the fortunate women who can count on the fidelity with which he is going to tell them, every day, and often on the hour, how he feels--truly. He is going to report to them his fears and needs. When they were girl and boy, she knew at once that she was needed. He wooed her, you know, this faithful husband, this man who loves her more than his life (and as much as the present manuscript) with his words. They sat on the edge of the bed he could not coax her into during that first weekend together in Greenwich Village, five flights up over Charles Street, and he read her every story he had written. Each one, in order of composition, one after the other after the other. That was when she learned to keep her eyes wide in eager audition as if she were about to learn the salient fact for which, her whole life, she had waited. Feed me! Feed me! her happily hungry face was learning to say.

He is reliable. He greets her at the door, or limps (as if the constantly twinging flesh wound of life were aggravated by the weather, or committee meeting or seminar) from the car to the house, and he faithfully tells her of (a) how he wrote nothing good that day, (b) how the man or woman he went to graduate school with has won a MacArthur, the PEN/Faulkner and/or the Pulitzer, (c) his Ph.D.-bearing colleagues disdain him for a barbarian, (d) this wonderful student, you should see her, with hair the color of et cetera and breasts like so forth--ripe as a goddamned peach , he tells his day-worn wife of 10 or 20 or 30 years--has come to him in utter need, poor kid, she’s so dependent on him, because . . . And, reliably, with fidelity to the facts and to his emotions, he tells her something unessential that ultimately pivots on the painful fact of someone’s--could have been the student’s but it’s going to end up his--deep needs.

This is the wife who, traveling with him and their lap-riding infants to foreign capitals, has heard out his fears that he’ll never have the peace of mind--she’s changing the diarrhea-drenched diaper on the airplane as the child, in the sixth hour of their journey, squirms and wails--to get his writing done. This is the wife who watches--who helps him push--as he moves the furniture about their rented flat so that he has a work room. It is she who helps him find the typewriter-rental offices, who encourages him to buy the word machine they can’t afford because it is, after all, his art. This wife chased after a wandering 2-year old in the Lake District of England, a bag of rough yarn tied to her belt, as she knitted squares for a blanket she would use, she told her husband, as a shroud for either her or the kid--whoever succumbed first. He, meanwhile, had moved a desk into the largest room of their small stone house, the bathroom, and was writing a long story about something he had come--is there any doubt of this?--to feel with important urgency.

So he felt guilty. It took a while, because the self is deep and the writer surfaces slowly from his long, dark dive. And guilt, like colds to parents and grade-school teachers, builds immunities; it takes a while to understand you’ve caught it again. His soles are sticky with Kafka, he tracks Cheever on the floor, he sups the broth of Roth; guilt is on the wind and in the air and in his sinuses, his lungs. But, after a while, he understands that this soreness is his conscience, and he vows to change his ways.

This summer, he swears to her, he is not going to take his typewriter on their vacation. They have planned to spend two weeks in the woods next to Cathance Lake, in Maine, where they will be close to friends they don’t yet know they will lose forever, and where their two young boys can canoe and fish. They will rent a place at the isolated lake, and he will not write.

The writer’s wife is the woman pretending--see the wide eyes, the deceptively casual smile--that she does not envision a nightmare of summertime fidelity: He is going, she knows, to faithfully report every nuance of each terror of withdrawal from his work; she is going to be the protagonist of a Harlequin Romance entitled “Nurse Muse at Hell Lake.” She encourages him to bring his machine and spend their vacation bullying and whining about his work. Do it, darling. Do it for art. Do it for the National Book Awards committee. Do it for the advance you will barely persuade your publisher to come across with that you’ll tell me, after signing the contract, is too small.

But he is set on selflessness, and he carries it out with the drama of a diva in decline. That would have been a good corner to write in, he suggests, pawing at the fishing rod wrapped in a tangle of line and lure he will ultimately deliver, like a bleeding limb, for her attention. This is great, he says, leading the boys out to the canoe from which, she is positive, he will spill her sons to drown; it’s early and gorgeous, he tells her, and I’m not hidden inside writing at anything, I’m in the world. He discovers existence for her, and she can only--as she knows he needs her to--suggest that she take the boys while he write. Not this trip, he says, adjusting his shirt to the multiple arrows embedded in his martyr’s flesh.

And at night, on the screened-in porch, after seeing the boys in their beds, after some Irish whiskey and slow talk, they lie down to sleep. They are private, they are more in the woods than in the house here, and they listen to the loons call over the lake. And at dawn on the third day of vacation, she is wakened by his stiffening. No: not the happy, lazy lust of early morning. It is his entire body that is stiff. She opens her eyes reluctantly, for fear that she will see her husband’s heart explode through his chest, or his mouth twist in a stroke-frozen joke about laughter.

His eyes are huge. His lips are compressed, as if in pain, as if--yes: rage. Her husband in his boxer shorts, in a screened-in porch at Cathance Lake in Maine, is angry. Of course, he often is. There are totalitarians of right and left discoverable everywhere, and there are the usual editors bent on rejoicing or demeaning his work, and there are all the men and women of America who are trying to silence him by never buying his books. This one, though, is a fragile anger--he’s bewildered and outraged at once.

Responding to her motion, not moving his eyes--she sees them staring through the screen at the dense surrounding forest--he says to her, “Listen!”

She answers, “I don’t hear anything.”

“Listen, dammit.”

She hears nothing for them to fear.

He closes his eyes, and his face is like a fist. He hisses, “There. “

She shakes her head.

“Some son of a bitch,” he tells her, “is out there someplace typing. “

She listens harder, separating birdcall from squirrel squeak, wind through birches from the lake’s slow slap on the stones of the shore. She hears it, then, and focuses through the other noises, brings it in. Her face twists into what she knows he will later resent aloud as a patronizing smile. She suppresses what she can. She pulls the covers over her face and tries to hide.

He names it again, the personal affront, his lifetime’s disorder and salvation: “Who in hell is goddam typing this time of the day?”

She has to. She says it hurriedly and under the muffling bedclothes, and she knows he’s going to ask it.

“What,” he snarls.

So she comes up from under the blankets. “Woodpecker,” she confesses. “Welcome to the woods. It’s a woodpecker pecking for bugs.”

“It’s a woodpecker?” he asks. “It’s a bird?”

It’s your brain, she doesn’t tell him.

He says, “It’s a bird? Nobody’s writing?”

“Nobody’s writing,” she assures him, though he is, she knows.