The Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

partway up.
    All of them, the novelists, the story writers, the poets, desperately long to win. If there is a prize, then there is someone somewhere on earth who desires it. Grown men pace their homes and scheme about ways to win things, and small children hyperventilate over the prospect of gold-plated trophies for penmanship, for swimming, for just being cheerful. Maybe other life-formsgive out awards, too, and we just don’t know it: Best All-Round Flatworm; Most Helpful Crow.
    Several of Joe’s friends had been talking to him about the Helsinki Prize for months. “This year,” said his friend Harry Jacklin, “you’re going to get it. You’re getting old, Joe. You shall wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled. They don’t want to overlook you; it would be egg on their faces.”
    “You mean egg on my face,” said Joe.
    “No, theirs, ” insisted Harry, whose own field was poetry, which pretty much guaranteed that he would remain entirely unknown and broke forever. Even so, he was deeply competitive; a mean vein of spite ran through him, as it did through all of the poets Joe knew. It always seemed that the smaller the pie, the greater the need to have more of it.
    “I’m not going to win,” Joe said to Harry. “You’ve told me I would win for three years straight. You’re like the boy who cried wolf.”
    “It needed time,” said Harry. “Now I get their strategy. See, they were sitting there in Helsinki, eating their smoked fish and waiting. Their plan was that if you were still alive by now, they’d give it to you. You’re politically correct, and that really counts these days, at least as far as the Helsinki is concerned. You’ve got that extra gene, that sensitivity toward women. That unwillingness to objectify the opposite sex, isn’t that what they say about you? That you invent a female character and put her in a marriage, a family, a king-sized bed in the suburbs, and yet you don’t feel the need to describe . . . I don’t know, her pubic hair in literary terms: ‘a burnt-sienna nimbus,’ or whatever, like the rest of your crowd would.”
    “I don’t have a ‘crowd,’ ” said Joe.
    “You know what I’m saying,” Harry went on. “You mix in all this feminism, if you want to call it that—even though it always makes me think of dykes with chain saws. You’re an original, Joe! A great writer who isn’t a total prick. You, you’re fifty percent prick, fifty percent pussy.”
    “Ha!” said Joe. “That’s so kind of you to say. And lyrical, too.”
    But other friends agreed with the poet’s logic, pointing out that this year there weren’t too many obvious contenders for the Helsinki Prize anywhere in the world. In America, it had been a year of literary deaths, one after the other, men whom Joe had known since the fifties, when they used to gather sometimes for socialist meetings. A decade later they gathered at marathon, all-night readings whose purpose was to protest the war in Vietnam and suck all the energy out of the audience. And then they gathered again in the early eighties after they had all sheepishly agreed to pose for ads for a fearfully expensive wristwatch manufactured by an old, elegant German company with an unsavory Nazi history. And then, finally, they began to gather for one another’s funerals. Every single one of those writers, Joe noticed at the service for playwright Don Lofting, still wore the German wristwatches they’d been given.
    Harry Jacklin was right that there were few of Joe’s peers left standing who deserved the prize, few writers whose body of work was such a marbled block of muscle. Lev Bresner’s Helsinki moment had come seven years earlier—no surprise at all, it had been expected for a long time—but even so, that news had sent Joe to bed in a darkened room for days, subsisting mostly on barbiturates and scotch. Then, three years later, Lev had miraculously gone on to win the Nobel prize, and to this day Joe could hardly bear