John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  Floyd, who taught Sunday school in Reverend Lenny’s church, thought of him as a candy-ass and a prevaricator, a pulpit flimflammer not to be trusted, sinful in not hating sin enough. The silly prat probably didn’t even know what it was. Did Floyd know? Too well. Still had nightmares, blood on his hands. This town, the church, the hardware store: a wall Floyd was throwing up between himself and his past. He was still tough as the nails he sold, old Floyd was, but now he was tough for the Lord. He and Edna had been in town a couple of years already and felt like locals when the new preacher turned up, some old college bud of John’s, people said, just like that seedy bozo Waldo, who came wallowing in the year after, tongue out and wagging his broad behind, and whose only serious job, as far as Floyd could tell, was to sub for John from time to time on the compulsory bridge nights, the female knee then under the table as alluring as a bend in a rusty drainpipe. These people all made Floyd feel old. And vulnerable. John was taking over the family construction company in those years, encouraged by his mother-in-law, not yet dead then but soon to be, and Floyd saw less and less of him, cut from the party invite lists, ignored at the old family hardware store while bigger things got done. Even Stu and they had drifted apart what with poor old Winnie dead and gone, these were lonely times for him and Edna, potluck suppers at the church, the bowling league, and TV quiz shows mostly what they had here of social life. Sometimes Floyd felt like taking a big hammer and smashing every cussed thing in sight. Even that wall he was so painstakingly building. He wanted to shove his fingers deep into the bloodred-rimmed fingerholes of his personalized bowling ball and roll a strike of such terrific force that nothing, nothing, was left standing after.

  Intimations of covetous Floyd’s hidden yearnings reached young Clarissa and her friends through his Sunday school lessons, in which he seemed to take special delight—his thin wide lips twitching then in a scary kind of grin that the other kids, who called him Old Hoot ‘n’ Holler, often made fun of—in describing the tortures of hell and the terrific ways God smote his enemies and the day Jesus suddenly blew his cool and almost wackily set about “cleansing the temple,” as the Bible said, or supposedly said, a story which Clarissa tended to take personally, since she associated her dad with the temple, and probably rightly so, too. That man managed one of her father’s stores, and it was like he was working for her dad and against him at the same time. Still, you couldn’t take him seriously. Clarissa and her friends mostly regarded Old Hoot’s ravings as just so much overexcited horsedookie frankly, even her best friend Jennifer, whose own dad was the preacher and had told her it ain’t necessarily so, and the older boys at the church called him a dumb cracker who ought to go join the holy rollers, what was he doing in a serious church like this one anyway? There were exceptions, her something-cousin Little Maynard, for example, or Turtle, as he was now called: he was all eyes and ears, a disciple born and bred, so turned on by all the blood and gore he seemed almost to look forward to God wasting the earth and sending them all screaming into the pits of hell. He was always trying to scare her little brother Mikey and the younger kids with his weirdo ideas, and once when they were smaller Clarissa had even caught him tying Mikey and Jennifer’s baby sister Zoe down and pinching them with barbecue tongs, which he said were the devil’s pincers. They had a fight then, and she called him the name all the other kids were calling him, even though back then she didn’t like to use bad language, and because she was bigger than he was, she was able to give him a good slapping and take the tongs away from him and untie the two little ones, who then surprised her in a way she was never able to understand by siding with him against her. They didn’t really do anything, they just pushed at her and yelled at her to stop hitting him, all of them bawling like babies now and calling her names, so she left them in disgust, wondering why she had ever bothered to try to help in the first place. A lesson learned.

  Little Maynard was the firstborn of twice-wed Maynard II and Veronica, proudly named Maynard III, proudly but thoughtlessly, for it is a bad enough thing to be called the Nerd, much worse to be Nerd the Turd. It had started already in the second grade. Little, as his folks called him, didn’t even get the joke at first, and he certainly couldn’t figure out where it all came from, it being the sort of thing his dad never wanted to talk about, blowing his stack whenever he was asked, even swatting Little once across the back of the head. Hard. Finally it was his mom who let it all out one day when she was fed up with his dad, one of the many days, she was fed up with him most of the time, and she always let the whole world know about it. So, that was when he found out that back when his own mom and dad were still in junior high, and Grandpa Maynard had just got elected mayor of the town, everyone at school had started calling his dad Mayor Nerd. Okay, ha ha, very funny, but come on, that was centuries ago, how did the guys in his class know that? Little figured it must have something to do with Clarissa and Mikey, who were Uncle John’s kids, Uncle John being one of his dad’s worst enemies and so probably the person who had started it all in the first place. Clarissa was mean and sneaky enough to do something like that to Little, she was always bullying him, he hated her and had often found himself wishing that Jesus or somebody would order him to take her pants down and spank the daylights out of her, and although Mikey was a spooky little twit who kept to himself pretty much and hardly ever said anything at all, Little didn’t trust him. He didn’t trust much of anybody actually, it was more like a general principle, something his dad had taught him early on, about the only exception being his friend Fish, one of the preacher’s kids, Zoe’s and Jennifer’s big brother. Fish was older than he was, already in high school, and knew just about everything, at least the things Little wanted to know. The first thing he taught him was his weekly paper route when Little took it over, but even that first day they soon got to talking about lots of other things, starting with baseball and God, but pretty soon moving on to more interesting stuff. Things that happened on the paper route, for example. Fish was a good explainer. Then one day Fish heard one of the other kids calling him Turd while they were playing video games out at the mall (“Quit hogging the fricking machine, Turd!” is what the dumb jerk said), and Fish just grabbed him by the back of the neck and said: “What did I hear you say? I think I heard you say, ah, ‘Turtle,’ is that right?” “Yeah, yeah! Ow! Turtle!” the kid squeaked and they all laughed nervously, and after that they mostly called him Turtle, though some of them still said it with a d. It was like some kind of joke they were all in on, but that was okay, he was in on it, too. So everything was cool. It was Fish and Turtle from then on. And it was Fish who told him about collecting for the Crier at the big house of Turtle’s Uncle John one Saturday morning and finding his aunt there all alone. Just out of the bath. Fish said. Naked. Stark naked. You should have seen.

  Naked flesh: ever a sight to see, with all its glowing surfaces, its creases and dimples and hairy bits, and especially when generally withheld from view. As was the case with most in town past the crawling age, at least in public between the sexes, John’s wife no exception. Many had imagined her au naturel, as Ellsworth, showing off, once put it in The Town Crier when describing the orthodontist’s scandalous daughter at a famous Pioneers Day parade (“how natural,” is how most folks thought that naughty phrase got spoken, the naughty girl herself long gone from here), but though few would miss the chance, few had actually seen John’s wife starkly so. Young Fish’s brag, if overheard, would have aroused doubt in most, envy in many, rage in a few perhaps and/or anxiety or mad desire, but certainly in all quarters a great curiosity. For Gordon, who longed to photograph John’s wife exhaustively, it would have added another shot for his projected study: “John’s Wife (Wet) Draped in Falling Towel.” He had not thought of this one, not yet, though he had envisioned her, before his lens, on a barren hilltop, dressed in a gauzy stuff like mist, gently pivoting on one foot, glancing around, her hair caught by a breeze, her far hip lifting slightly, her trailing hand waist-high, a mysterious shadow bet
ween her thighs: “John’s Wife Turning Through Diaphanous Wisps.” And also, more akin to the paperboy’s uncorroborated report, standing naked (“John’s Wife …”) in the rain, face uplifted, arms outstretched, feet together, her body streaming and glistening in the downpour, diamonds of light in her pubic hair. This one he had practiced with his wife Pauline, and the results, free as he was to play with angles, lenses, filters, and exposures, were professional enough, quite admirable in some respects, but there was no magic in them. No radiance. Not even in his blowups of the diamonds of light.

  “Radiance” was a word often used when speaking of John’s wife, though what was meant by it, few could say. “Radiant” was how her parents Barnaby and Audrey described her as a baby when astark, delighting in the little creature, excessively so perhaps, she being the only one they ever had, though others, too, privileged back then to behold her entire, John’s folks Mitch and Opal among them, often remarked that the precious child truly “glowed with health.” She was still “dazzling” (see the testimonials in her high school yearbooks) as she blossomed into the well-dressed woman whom John undressed, starkly, to his great delight, but whom others glimpsed in similar state along the way, or thought they did, Gordon’s friend Ellsworth, for example, who babysat her and dressed her up (and down) for the make-believe games they played. “Babes in the Woods.” “Sleeping Beauty.” “Narcissus and Echo.” “Alice Through the Looking-Glass.” And games that Ellsworth made up from scratch, like “Dreaming Awake” and “The Artist and His Model.” “Narcissus and Echo” was a particular favorite of both of them, copycat play that was lots of fun, followed by a kind of hide-and-seek. Ellsworth would hunch over his own reflection—in a rain puddle, a paddling pool, a hubcap, kettle bottom, or snow shovel, most often just a handmirror at his feet—while she “vanished,” leaving her clothes behind, the playacting ones she wore on top. While she was looking for a hiding place, Ellsworth, his gaze fixed upon the pale acne’d image of himself (sometimes, cheating, he’d tip the mirror to see, between his legs, the dress-up clothes come off), would call out to her in phrases stolen from Ancient Mythologies and she would shout back at him the last words that he said—“Won’t anyone come play with me?” “Play with me!” “Why can’t I see you?” “See you!” “Don’t be such a nincompoop!” “Poop!” “Where have you gone?” “Gone!”—until she had finally hidden, and then she would be silent and he would go looking for her, tickling her when he found her. But not too hard. Just a little. The tickling was not her favorite part. Nor, though he liked it, his. After that, they’d get dressed up and do it again, though sometimes, just to be fair, he’d be Echo. Of course, this was a long time ago, when Ellsworth was even younger than Fish was now.

  Fish, whose proper name was Philip, Fish being the name his baby sister Jennifer gave him when they were both just toddlers, was the oldest of three children and the only son of Beatrice and Reverend Lenny, though when he was born his parents were still known mostly as Trixie and Knucks. That is to say, he was certainly Beatrice’s oldest, she never able to say for sure, after what happened that night at the fraternity house toga party, that Lennox was the father, in fact probably he wasn’t, though of course she told him he was, and he seemed to accept that and married her willingly when she asked him to, being a good man at heart, whatever he believed. “Why not?” he said. “Let it happen.” A good man, but also, truth to tell, a weak man, with a talent for trouble, trouble she had had to share over the years, and as for what he believed, that was always pretty vague, whatever the subject, rather too vague for a man of the cloth, as she often remarked, though always with understanding and forbearance. Needful virtues in their trying years adrift. When Philip was born and Lenny had graduated, thanks to a fraternity brother named Brains who wrote three of his final papers for him, she and Lenny had left the baby with her mother and taken a little honeymoon, a spiritual holiday, as Lenny called it, irony being one of his redeeming qualities. He had signed up for a dozen or more credit cards and they had gone on an international spree, living like royalty all over the world until the credit limits were all used up and the collection agencies came after them. Not much those blue-suited bullies could do. All she and Lenny had left when they got back was an old car hidden in her mother’s garage and the baby. The bullies found and took the car. Carted it off on a truck bed, Lenny having sold the wheels. Well, she and Lenny had had a wonderful time, quite literally the time of their lives, and they felt no guilt about the credit card companies, it was their fault for giving them all that credit in the first place, right? But now what? In college, Lenny had majored in philosophy and religious studies, and jobs in these fields were scarce, especially now that he had more or less lost his credibility as a moral exemplar, at least in the eyes of the establishment. About the best they could find were part-time jobs in charity organizations, working with the underprivileged and the handicapped, Beatrice sometimes able to give music and dancing lessons or, until she got pregnant with Jennifer—who was more likely Lenny’s, most likely of the three—to play the piano in bars and restaurants. Finally, like a miracle, Lennox landed a job teaching religious studies at a small liberal arts college, hard up for cheap staff and willing to overlook his minor misdemeanors. In fact, the times were such, his credit card-burning had a certain heroic luster: down with the system, yay. The teaching went well, the students seemed to love him, and he even managed, at Beatrice’s insistence, to get ordained in his spare time. Beatrice helped the students put on an underground satirical revue, they experimented with the drugs that were popular at that time, little Zoe was born. If it had not been for that unfortunate incident with one of Lenny’s hysterical freshman students they might be there still. When he got fired, Lennox seemed to lose all his self-esteem and stayed stoned almost all the time. Luckily, Beatrice had been a zealous sender of Christmas cards, so over the years, throughout their travels and travails, they had stayed in touch with John. It was not exactly Christmastime, but she got in touch again. It was good timing. For all his faults, she thought, God bless John.

  Reverend Lenny, ever more ambivalent than his wife, would have to agree and, of course, disagree. Even about the timing, for as it happened, when they first came to town a decade ago, their arrival coincided with the violent death of Stu’s first wife Winnie, Lenny’s first service here—or anywhere—therefore a funeral, a discouraging omen, and besides, Lenny knew nothing at all about funerals, having always, on principle, avoided them. Even his own father’s he had skipped out on. So, to gear up for this newest trial and because he feared it was expected of him, he decided to pay a pastoral visit, hat in hand, to the bereaved, hoping that if they had to pray, they could pray in silence. He had found the old boy on his knees, all right, but only because he couldn’t stand up. He was pie-eyed, nose bandaged, tongue loose in his mouth as a bell-clapper, and his pants looked like they’d been used for a floor-mop in a men’s room. He offered Lenny a drink on condition that he’d pour two, having lost his bottle grip, and Lenny decided it was probably the Christian thing to do, his own throat parched moreover with all his day’s—week’s, month’s—hypocritical posturings, he badly needed one. Time passed, during which old Stu tried to sell him a car (credit no problem), sang a song about honkytonk women, confessed to murder, and told him what he said was a true story about a nun, eventually canonized, who had a second rectum where her other business ought to be. The worst thing was that Lenny found himself laughing like a heathen, another bottle, at least one, having been opened in the meantime. Actually that was probably the second worst thing. The worst thing was that he realized he couldn’t walk, he was alone in a darkening kitchen with a confessed murderer, and there was a committee of ladies from the church at the front door, bearing gifts of food, John’s wife among them. There was the honorable and manly way to behave on such occasions, and there was the despicable tail-between-the-legs sneak-thief way. He chose as always the latter, snatching up his hat and Bible and clattering on his hands and knees into
the bedroom and under the bed, where he awoke four hours later, his nose full of dust balls and his erstwhile host snoring overhead like a pneumatic drill. He crept out, thinking about his wife and the terrific story he would have to make up, and found himself face-to-face with a woman, stretched out on the bed beside the brain-dead widower, fully dressed, even to a hat and black veil, and resting a bottle on her belly. “Hey, Preacher, good to see you back among the living,” she slurred throatily this side of the raucous snores, the bottle doing a little dance as she spoke. She wore the veil tossed back like a ballplayer with his cap on backwards. “Whaddaya say we take a little communion, hunh?” She winked broadly, raising her knees and spreading them, her green eyes crossing, then refocusing. “If you do, honey, I’ll tell you where your shoes are.”

  Serving on church committees, consoling those who had lost loved ones, and providing sustenance to those in need were but a few of John’s wife’s volunteer civic and religious activities in town. She was also a member of the BPW, Ladies’ Aid, the Parent-Teacher Association, and the Literary Society, which met each month in the town library, except in the summer, less often since the longtime town librarian had died. She rarely missed a school play, attending even those in which friends’ children performed. When old Snuffy retired after nearly thirty years of high school teaching and coaching to take up a managerial post out at John’s airport, it was she who presented him at halftime of the homecoming game with the honorary “Coach of the Century” trophy from his players and ex-players, which read simply: DIG IN, SON. Many in town might pass unnoticed for weeks on end, old Snuffy himself, for example, or others like the drugstore simpleton, tethered to his pinball machines and video games, or his sister Columbia, sullenly overweight and whited out by her nursing uniform, or timid Trevor, housebound Edna, and most old folks much of the time, sad to say, but not John’s wife. She was at the inaugural meeting of the town cleanup campaign, and when they stenciled KEEP OUR TOWN BEAUTIFUL on all the trash-cans in town, she helped cut the stencils, and people said hers were the neatest. She collected door-to-door each year for the Community Chest and the March of Dimes, sang in the church choir, and though she rarely sought or held office, was treasurer for two years of the Pioneers Day parade committee. She was always in the parade itself, on one float or another or perched on the backseat of one of the lead convertibles, usually dressed in a beautiful pioneer costume, her presence as indispensable as a definiendum’s to a definition (something Kate the librarian once said, though not even Ellsworth could repeat it after). When the decorating of the city fire hydrants was in fashion, she painted one a vivid emerald green, trimmed in metallic gold, which many said was an expression of her true personality, hidden beneath her modest, somewhat dry and formal surface, and others said showed a lack of a sense of humor. Ellsworth recalled that these were the colors of the dress a princess wore in a story he had read to her as a child and Maynard that this was how her high school bicycle was painted, each deriving his own private meaning from his recollection, which may or may not have been accurate. Gordon’s photos of the hydrant and its painter added nothing to his knowledge, though a swatch of glitter on her bluejeaned thigh did haunt for a time his darkroom nights. Waldo’s wife Lorraine, who interpreted all the painted fireplugs as condom fantasies (hers she’d painted like a one-eyed toothless Martian in a tux, though lame Gretchen won first prize with a winsome portrait of her white-jacketed father-in-law), felt a twinge of jealousy when she saw John’s wife’s hydrant, but Barnaby felt only sorrow, perceiving his daughter’s deep malaise.