The Wife Read Online Free PDF

to talk about it.
    The Nobel prize was well beyond Joe; we both knew that, and somehow we’d both accepted it. Though he was popular in Europe, his work didn’t traverse the globe in the important way it would have needed to. He was American and introspective and always taking his own pulse on the page. As Harry had said, he was politically correct, yet somehow he wasn’t at all political. Even the Helsinki Prize was a reach. Yet critics had always admired Joe’s vision of contemporary American marriage, which seemed to plumb the female sensibility as thoroughly as it did the male, but amazingly without venom, without blame. Andearly on in his career, his novels had made the leap into Europe, where he was considered even more important than in the States. Joe’s work was from the old, postwar, “marital” school—husbands and wives stranded in tiny apartments or boxy, drafty colonials on suburban streets with names like Bethany Court or Yellow Swallow Drive. The men were deep but sour, the women sad and lovely, the children disaffected. The families were crumbling, full of factions, American. Joe included his own life, using details from his childhood and his early adulthood and then his two marriages.
    His novels were translated into dozens of languages, and the shelf in his study was lined with these books in translation. There was his first novel, The Walnut, that slender book from a much more innocent time, about a married professor and his best student who fall in love, leading to an event that causes the professor to hurriedly abandon his wife and child, flee to New York City with the student, and eventually marry her. This book is pure autobiography—the story of the two of us and Joe’s first wife, Carol.
    Beside it on the shelf were the foreign versions of The Walnut, variously called La Noix, Die Walnuß, La Noce, La Nuez, and Val-not. And then there was his Pulitzer prize–winning book Overtime, also called Heures Supplémentaires, Überstunden, Horas Adicionales, and Overtid. The Pulitzer prize had been restorative, a bracing snootful of pleasure, but it was so many years ago that even that dose of gratification was by now forgotten.
    In the author photograph on the back of Overtime, Joe still had his thick head of floppy black hair, which sometimes, to my surprise, I still grieve for. It long ago thinned out and went white, but back then it used to fall across his face, and I would push it away so I could see his eyes. He was attractive and thin as a greyhound in the early years, his stomach hard and concave. His erections were endless, held aloft by some woman’s invisible hand (not necessarily mine), a muse who whispered into his hot ear, You’re brilliant. Decades have elapsed since the Pulitzer, thoughthere have been other American awards, too, prizes that took Joe to chicken-breast luncheons in the bland banquet rooms of New York hotels to claim his loot and give a speech, while I sat quietly watching with the other wives and the occasional husband. But now it was time for another prize, a big one. He needed the fuel it would provide, the sumptuous, caloric pleasure and the accompanying delirium.
    On the night before the call from Helsinki would come, if it was going to come, I went to bed early. Joe, of course, was still prowling the house. It is an old house, painted white and well kept, standing behind a low stone wall tufted with moss, and it dates back to 1790. There are many rooms for a sleepless man to walk through. I knew that if I were a better person, I would have stayed up with him, the way I used to do each year. But I was tired, and longed for sleep the way I used to long for the press of our two bodies. And besides, I didn’t want to go through this yet again. I could hear him scrabble around downstairs like a hamster, opening drawers in the kitchen and taking things out, banging together what sounded like a cheese grater and a spoon, in an obvious, pathetic attempt to wake me