The Wife: A Novel by Meg Wolitzer

Author:Meg Wolitzer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2007-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

His big ideas, of course, carried us far. Once, in mid-sixties, I went to Vietnam with him. A cluster of writers and reporters would be traveling to Saigon for an informational tour of the region and Joe was among those invited. Most of the writers had been sent by newspapers and magazines. This was back in a time when your editor would say with a shrug, “Sure, why not, go ahead, write a long piece; use as many words as you need.” War had never been a subject of great fluency for Joe. Wars existed on the outskirts of his fiction, both Korea and World War II and, later, Vietnam, though the men in his novels personally never made it past training camp. One of them, Michael Denbold in The Walnut, shot himself accidentally in the foot, just like Joe had done. Joe’s characters were both frightened and excited by guns. They hated and were thrilled by the dreadful, heavy feel of them in their arms; it made their hearts race and left them helpless, the same way, later on, they would love and be frightened by the feel of their babies in their arms.

Just as Joe was uncomfortable during his brief stint in the army during the Korean War, he also wasn’t entirely comfortable in the fictional fields of war. He read everything on it that he could, all hawkish and leftist views, and went to antiwar meetings and demonstrations, where once he was pushed to the ground and trampled on, and though some of his characters worried openly about how we would ever extricate ourselves from Southeast Asia, they never became obsessed with it.

Like everyone we knew, we did what we could to protest the war. We signed, and we worked, and we brought our children with us to storefront offices to make calls and type letters. We used mimeographs, the purple ink getting all over us, the place smelling like a schoolroom, and we headed down to D.C. in a long, fossilized traffic jam of cars. The children cried in the backseat, and we pushed them on the Mall in strollers while they begged for juice, their faces blazing with heat, and Joe was among the writers who stood up and screamed into screechy, inadequate mikes.

But back then, Vietnam still felt fresh to us, a new, terrible subject to learn about, with a crash course in geography required, and Joe needed me with him, so I went. Our kids stayed behind with the boisterous, arty, menagerielike family of one of Alice’s friends, who simply absorbed them into their household without seeming to notice, and off Joe and I went on an Air France flight. “They’ll be fine,” Joe said, a father’s refrain, based on nothing except the intolerance of the possibility of disaster, and then there we were, standing on an airstrip in Bangkok during our stopover. I wore a kerchief on my head and wraparound sunglasses, a look favored by wives of that era.

There were a

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