John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  Edna’s husband Floyd had managed John’s downtown hardware store ever since then, and though he was good at it and made John a pile of money—money John spent on cars and guns and airplanes, and on pussy too no doubt, his wife on clothes, jewelry, and fancy fittings for their big ranch-style house, the one John built—Floyd always had the notion that John was only tolerating him. He should have got promoted out of this junkshop years ago, but he seemed stuck for good and all, like a rusty peg, right where he was at. It was Floyd whose introduction of the do-it-yourself line had completely turned the old museum around, but when John had set up a big new warehouse-style DIY store out at the new mall he had hired another guy to manage it, telling Floyd, after having effectively just pulled the plug on him, that he couldn’t afford to let the Main Street store go down the tubes and needed him there to keep the doors open. Since then, with hard work, smart buying, and a new Hobby Corner line, he had somehow managed to break even, probably mostly on account of his salary was so all-fired low, but in spite of that John had been on his back most of the time. He’d pop in unannounced, complain about the bookshelf kits that weren’t moving or kick at some of the crud littering the aisles or run a grim-faced check on the cash register, snapping at him that he wasn’t doing enough to stop petty theft and why wasn’t the goddamn garden stuff out, it was already the end of February. There was a time, back before the Bible, when Floyd would have stuck a man for talking to him like that. Still could, of course. Eye for an eye, self-defense, and all that, he had his rights, but he was more a New Testament man these days than Old. Or maybe it wasn’t just the Bible, maybe it was something about John himself that held him back. There was the day, for example, when, without any explanation, John had walked into the store, grabbed up an ax, and swung it flat-side against a pillar. Nothing had happened, so he had swung it again and again, ferociously, as like to bring the store down, until finally the handle had cracked. Then he had wanted to know why the hell Floyd was buying such cheap goods for the store. Floyd had been pretty amazed by this act, not to say a little terrified, and he’d felt like a sap for weeks, until finally one day he’d overheard John’s old college bud Waldo at the cafe next door telling a story about John trying to pry open a can with one of those axes on a hunting trip and having to take a lot of razzing from the boys he was with when the handle snapped. Floyd was so anxious to please John, so fearful of a rebuke, that sometimes it made him feel like a damned fairy. Which was partly why he coveted John’s wife, why he wanted to cuckold him, and not just cuckold him, but split his flicking old lady wide open, so the next time John visited that place, if ever he still did, the peckerhead would know a real man had been there before him. Whenever he imagined himself doing this, however, she was not really there. It was more like punching a hole in the universe.

  This was a strange thing about John’s wife: a thereness that was not there. She always seemed to be at the very heart of things in town, an endearing and ubiquitous presence, yet few of the town’s citizens, if asked, could have described her, even as she passed before their eyes, or said what made her tick, or if they could or thought they could, would have found few or none who would agree. Coveted object, elusive mystery, beloved ideal, hated rival, princess, saint, or social asset, John’s wife elicited opinions and emotions as varied and numerous as the townsfolk themselves, her unknowability being finally all they could agree upon, and even then with reservations, for some said she was so much herself that she was simply unapproachable (“unreadable,” as Lorraine liked to put it), others that the trouble was that she had no personality at all, so there was nothing to be known. Even fundamental matters were in dispute, her age, the tenor of her voice, the sizes that she wore. Take her eyes, for example. When a woman in New Orleans asked John one night their color, John didn’t know. Nor could Alf, who knew her inside out, have said, though he probably had it written down somewhere. They weren’t alone. Otis, who tended to look away when he talked to her, would have said her eyes were blue, the color of the Virgin’s, though Marge thought them brown, like mud, and Daphne green, the color of her own. Barnaby knew their color, but knew them as the eyes of an innocent child, peering up at him from his knee, and Ellsworth, too, recalling with such clarity the little girl he’d once big-brothered, sometimes found it difficult to see the married woman before his eyes. Indeed, most supposed her younger than she really was, and of those who knew her then some claimed she hadn’t changed since high school, even though she no longer seriously resembled her senior yearbook photo (nor did she at the time, they pointed out, one of the town photographer’s rare failures, as he himself would have, somewhat nonplused, acknowledged). Contrarily, Clarissa thought her ancient and completely out of touch.

  Of course, anyone over eighteen was ancient in Clarissa’s eyes. She had her favorites among those beyond the pale—her new high school biology teacher, Granny Opal, the lead guitar of Blue Metal Studs, her daddy (by whom, for Clarissa, the sun rose and set), and especially Uncle Bruce—but her mother these days was not among them. She didn’t exactly do anything, but she just kept getting in the way, even when she was nowhere in sight. Oh, she loved her, you couldn’t help but love your mother, she supposed, but life was both incredibly exciting and incredibly boring, and her mother was part of the boring bit. Even just the idea of her mother was. Destined, she felt certain, like the beautiful faraway lady she had been named after, for a tragic fate, Clarissa wanted to taste it all before it was too late, the world for her was like an awesome carnival full of dynamite surprises with bright lights and screams and laughs and wild killer rides, like in one of her favorite videos, and she had an appetite for it that wouldn’t quit, but when her mother came around, or just came to mind, it all went away, like someone shut the music off, making her feel edgy and restless and completely exhausted at the same time. Her mother didn’t seem to affect Mikey that way, but Mikey was different and still a baby—he had only just stopped wetting the bed and he still liked to dress up and put on his silly wordless plays.

  Clarissa’s parents’ second honeymoon in beautiful faraway Paris had been full of dynamite surprises, too, not least, though not then known, the conception, after nearly three years of trying, of their first child, and thus their daughter’s name, a tribute to their wonder-working hostess and to her gaiety and bravery and charm, and not, as Clarissa might have fancied—the events a part of her prehistory and their chronology confused—to Marie-Claire’s seeming propensity for romantic disaster. The invitation, proffered at the wedding three years before, had been to her parents’ palatial home in La Muette at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, and the first surprise, upon arrival, was that Marie-Claire had become an artist and had had what she called a “blow-off” with her parents, whom she described, flinging her thin hands about, then choking herself and bugging her eyes, as tyrannical and stiflingly bourgeois, and she had left home, moving into a kind of artist’s garret in an unspoiled corner of the Latin Quarter above an Algerian cafe, a cellar cabaret, and the site of an open-air market. This rooftop space—all higgledy-piggledy with a hundred stacked and leaning canvases in its one large many-angled room, sketches and clippings taped to the water-stained walls under its coven ceilings, the toilet on the far side of the refrigerator and the claw-footed bathtub under the front window next to the sofa bed—she lent to them, moving out to stay with friends, but turning up each day to be their guide and companion. Thus, for ten days, the very center of the city was theirs, the towers of Notre Dame visible over the tiled roofs of the ancient district from their bathtub, the boats and bookstalls on the Seine a few steps from their street door. And the nights, too, were theirs, after their festive brasserie suppers with Marie-Claire, and perhaps it was the wine or the feeling of recklessness and danger and improvisation or the spicy air of couscous on the street below, the harsh music, or the delicious dislocation, the oddity of living in a kind of unwalled efficiency bathroom high above a medieval congestion all but unimaginable to them just a week before, back
home in their neat brick house that Barnaby had built, that brought on such arousal, or more likely it was all of these things, together with, John had to admit it, the erotic presence of Marie-Claire, dressed mostly in wispy bits of widowy black (though the dreadful news did not come until the next-to-last day), but whatever the cause or causes, he seemed to be hot as a firecracker all the time, a veritable walking hard-on, in and out of the soft sweet saddle at every opportunity, and with an energy and urgency that took him back to his days as a high school athlete. And Clarissa—whose eyes, like John’s, were gray, and so no clue to the disputed color of her mother’s—was the consequence of this gloriously bohemian adventure. One of them anyway.

  Eye color he seemed not to have noted down, but as to Clarissa’s mother’s disputed age, Trevor the accountant could tell it to the day, knew too her social and medical history, as well as that of most of the people related to her. Yet, as though knowing these things so well made the rest more unknowable, when he tried to think of her, all he could see was an abstract point on the abstract graph of his insurance actuarial tables. Of course, most people in town occupied similar featureless points in Trevor’s imagination, but none so exclusively, nor were their points so, well, so restless, so inclined to go adrift. Aware that his tendency to reduce all life stories to statistical data was a flaw of sorts, and one moreover that might cause offense, Trevor would set off to, say, a gathering at the country club, determined to greet her as a fellow human creature, to comment perhaps, with his customary tact and caution, upon her dress or her good health, and to concentrate upon some particular of her person which he might later recall as peculiarly hers. Shyness limited his close attention to her upper reaches, her nose perhaps, her ear and ring, her throat at his most daring, but stare as he might her image would not stick. At home he would draw out his charts and, after careful computations, locate her point, all he had left for all his effort, and—inevitably—would find it moved. As though his stare had altered her life expectancy, or his, at least, of hers. This indeterminacy made no sense. John’s wife was unknowable perhaps, but she was also unchanging, the very image of constancy, at least in this town. She was, abidingly, what she was. So what did it mean that he could not fix the fixed? Trevor felt he had been given a privileged glimpse of something, but he did not know of what. Only that, whatever it was, it was, well, disconcerting. He had tried, obliquely, to speak of this to his wife Marge, who had known John’s wife since childhood, and had found himself clumsily rambling on about her mother Audrey’s premature death and what that might signify, the relative statistical risks of attractive and unattractive women, the wealth factor in the prolonging or shortening of life, and the hazards of being anywhere near the center of a community’s focus, little of which was to the point, Marge cutting him off finally with: “Oh, she’s all right. But what do you think about John?” “John?”

  What Trevor thought about John he could not, on that occasion, say, but what John thought about his schoolchum Marge was that she was a horsey, aggressive meddler, a knee-jerk belligerent, cold and flaky as canned tuna. He admired her competitiveness, especially out on the course, she was the perennial women’s club champion, but she was too impatient to be fun to play with, striding leggily down the fairway ahead of everyone, head bulled forward, furious with frivolous delay, which, for most people out there, was the whole point of the game. She set a lot of people’s teeth on edge, had done since a kid. Waldo, who ran John’s paint and wallpaper business and was frivolity personified, despised the woman, calling her, though rarely to her face, Butch and Sarge and Herr Marge, and referring to her prissy linen-suited husband Trevor (whom he called Triv) as “that little Dutchman with his finger in the dyke.” One night at the club, in front of everybody, Waldo told Kevin the bartender not to put any of those boxy pieces of ice with holes in their bottoms in his drink, because he’d had enough of those for one day. Marge had outplayed him once again that afternoon in a mixed-doubles foursome, snorting scornfully whenever he misjudged an approach shot or blew a putt, and asking him on the sixteenth, after he’d failed to get out of a sandtrap in spite of three mighty but impotent swings, if he’d like her to bring him a little bucket and shovel. His icy wisecrack later back at the clubhouse got him half a laugh, but cost him his night out, his wife Lollie doing her usual drag-bigmouth-Waldo-home act after that. John appreciated Waldo’s feelings, but, except when Marge interfered with his construction projects, was himself more discreet. She was his wife’s friend, for one thing, but more than that: Marge was a mobilizer, presiding over just about every club and charity in town, always collecting for one damned thing or another, a woman for whom no task was too daunting, no neighborhood too strange, no door exempt from the good cause’s knock; she would be useful to him if he ever ran for Congress.

  Though such an alliance might indeed have been negotiable, in spite of all the wars they had waged from the playground on, John’s forced politeness in truth wounded Marge more than any dumb salesman’s nasty cuts. She felt ill understood by John, though not surprised by this, John’s grasp of character being purely pragmatic and about as subtle as his taste in women, which ran, as far as she could tell, to busty party girls and ambitious little roundheeled gum-snappers. She felt sorry for his wife, her friend since grade school, but was angered by her, too, for letting herself be used so, and for letting John live a life so little challenged, exaggerating his power when she should have been testing it, honing it, making it count for something, instead of letting him wreck the town with it. Marge felt her own womanly powers wasted by such waste, but what could she do? His wife was the closest she could get to him except in a fight. Though she’d towered over most of the high school boys in town, runts still at that age, Marge in her college days had been merely tall, a lean handsome blonde, as she thought of herself, a little long in the legs maybe, a bit flat and broad in the hips and bony in the chest, but trim and fit, bright, engaged, a political force on a campus where women typically weren’t, a terrific conversationalist, more guys should have been interested. But somehow she always turned them off. She knew why. They felt threatened. It was her power, but she couldn’t switch it off, so it was also her weakness. Only Trev was not turned off, though turned on was not exactly what he was either.

  Waldo’s wife Lorraine had a theory about Marge. Marge was maybe her best friend in town, in spite of Waldo’s constant sabotage and Marge’s bossy ways. They played golf and tennis together, Lorraine served on Marge’s many committees and espoused her causes, showed up at her club meetings, cut the weed habit with her help, listened sympathetically to her harsh views on men, they had a lot in common and Lorraine felt she knew her well. Knew what made her melt a bit, what bored her, what drove her up the wall. She could tell almost to the hour, for example, when Marge’s period came on, though for that matter so could just about anyone else, Marge suffering periods powerful and sudden as a maddened mare’s. Her appetites were like that, too, hunger hitting her like a blow to the midriff, thirst suddenly taking her voice away, making her hands shake as she grabbed up the iced tea. The two had met while up at State together, though were not real friends there. Lollie, over the protests of many of her sorority sisters, had tried to pledge the ungainly girl after getting beat out by her for president of the Pep Club, but Marge had turned her down flat, letting her know at the time what she thought of the Geek Societies, as she called them, they’d had a pretty nasty scrap over it. Lollie, snubbed and sore, had not returned Marge’s waves and halloos thereafter, until Marge, running for student council president against a fraternity man, came by to seek the sorority’s support. And against all odds, got it, too, and Lollie’s renewed admiration as well, having mixed feelings by that time about fraternity men herself. But their real friendship had begun, a partial consolation for Lorraine, when fate unkindly brought her to this godforsaken town. Without Marge, she would have gone crazy here, and maybe vice versa, too. So Lorraine knew her well. And her theory about her was that, although ins
ide her crusty shell a sensuous woman lay dormant, in spite of her long marriage to Trevor and all her tough brave talk, Marge was still a virgin.