The Wife by Meg Wolitzer

Author:Meg Wolitzer [Wolitzer, Meg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780743456661
Amazon: 0743456661
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2004-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

* * *

OKAY, SO that wasn’t why I went for a drink with him. I went because it gave me a private pleasure to sit with someone Joe wouldn’t want me to sit with. Even though I said nothing of substance, nothing controversial, it still gave me pleasure. We sat in a landmark Helsinki restaurant called the Golden Onion; above our heads, a slanted window looked out over the Uspenski Cathedral.

“The onion dome,” Bone pointed out, but I was getting a little weary of all things Finnish: the domes, the planar architectural triumphs of Saarinen and Aalto, the smoked fish and clusters of hard little cloudberries, the Longfellow cadences of Kalevala. We drank vodka tonics together and talked stiffly of the trip, the various tourist sites we’d each been to, the array of people we’d met here, and how different the Finns seemed to be from every other group in Scandinavia.

“They got a bit of an inferiority complex, living under the shadow of the Soviets for so long,” Bone said. “That’s why they had to establish the Helsinki Prize in the first place. To give their country a boost, a little jolt of self-esteem. I think it’s worked pretty well, actually. Everyone here gets so excited each year when the winner comes to town, and for a few days there’s all this international focus on Finland. Everyone’s really thrilled to have Joe as their man. Myself included, I have to admit. Look, you might think I’ve got a whopping case of spite and envy, but I don’t, really. I don’t hold anything against him. He’s a great writer. He deserves what he gets.”

“Oh yes,” I said. “He does.”

“I wish I could quote you, Joan,” said Bone wistfully. “It would make my day.”

“Well, you can’t.”

“I know, I know,” he said, “but even if I could, the inflection wouldn’t be there on the page. The way you said ‘He does.’ The way it makes you sound.”

“How does it make me sound?”

“You know. Jealous,” he said, and he tossed a nut into his mouth.

In the yellowing darkness of the Golden Onion, with murmuring all around us, Nathaniel Bone and I sat with our drinks and our plates of some sort of damp, savory, rolled pancakes in front of us. He looked stranger and more sinuous than when I’d seen him last. He was middle-aged now; soon he’d be finishing the book he’d been working on intermittently for ten years, while in that same period of time Joe had published four novels.

I felt sorry for Nathaniel Bone as we sat drinking in the Golden Onion. He’d been chasing Joe for a long time, and too many years had passed and here we all were, the three of us, much older, ragged, not nearly as compelling or attractive as we used to be. Who would read Nathaniel Bone’s book when it finally came out? Maybe very few people would, although his advance ten years ago had been big, the kind of money that gets

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