De Amerikaanse schrijfster Meg Wolitzer werd geboren op 28 mei 1959 in Brooklyn, New York. Zie ook alle tags voor Meg Wolitzer op dit blog.
Uit: The Wife
“He
looked over at me suddenly, watched my face, and said, “What’s the
matter? You look a little . . . something.” “No. It’s nothing,” I told
him. “Nothing worth talking about now, anyway,” and he accepted this as a
good-enough answer, returning to his plate of Tollhouse cookies, a
small belch puffing his cheeks out froglike, briefly. It was difficult
to disturb this man; he had everything he could possibly ever need. He
was Joseph Castleman, one of those men who own the world. You know the
type I mean: those advertisements for themselves, those sleepwalking
giants, roaming the earth and knocking over other men, women, furniture,
villages. Why should they care? They own everything, the seas and
mountains, the quivering volcanoes, the dainty, ruffling rivers. There
are many varieties of this kind of man: Joe was the writer version, a
short, wound-up, slack-bellied novelist who almost never slept, who
loved to consume ninny cheeses and whiskey and wine, all of which he
used as a vessel to carry the pills that kept his blood lipids from
congealing like yesterday’s pan drippings, who was as entertaining as
anyone I have ever known, who had no idea of how to take care of himself
or anyone else, and who derived much of his style from The Dylan Thomas
Handbook of Personal Hygiene and Etiquette. There he sat beside me on
Finnair flight 702, and whenever the brunette brought him something, he
took it from her, every single cookie and smokehouse-treated nut and
pair of spongy, throwaway slippers and steaming washcloth rolled
Torah-tight. If that luscious cookie-woman had stripped to her waist and
offered him one of her breasts, mashing the nipple into his mouth with
the assured authority of a La Leche commandant, he would have taken it,
no questions asked. As a rule, the men who own the world are
hyperactively sex-ual, though not necessarily with their wives. Back in
the 1960s, Joe and I leaped into beds all the time, occasionally even
during a lull at cocktail parties, barricading someone’s bedroom door
and then climbing a mountain of coats. People would come banging,
wanting their coats back, and we’d laugh and shush each other and try to
zip up and tuck in before letting them enter. We hadn’t had that in a
long time, though if you’d seen us here on this airplane heading for
Finland, you’d have assumed we were content, that we still touched each
other’s sluggish body parts at night. “Listen, you want an extra
pillow?” he asked me. “No, I hate those doll pillows,” I said. “Oh, and
don’t forget to stretch your legs like Dr. Krentz said.”
Meg Wolitzer (New York, 28 mei 1959)