John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  Harriet, bringing the news, had heard about Yale’s distant death in the jungle from her husband Alf, he having been called out to attend to poor Kate, who had collapsed on receiving the notice. Oxford, too, though he fussed confusedly over his wife, seemed utterly stricken, and little Cornell sat in a corner staring mutely, unwiped snot running down his quivering upper lip like liquid glue. Only Columbia, home from university where she was studying pre-med, had had the presence of mind to call Alf and then use a little basic first aid for treating shock victims, feet up and all that, both parents submitting to her ministrations as though in a trance. After everyone else had been taken care of and the body had been brought back from the war zone and the memorial service held, Lumby fell into something of a melancholic stupor herself, though no one noticed by then or took it seriously, no one except her teachers at college who flunked her out of pre-med. But she couldn’t keep her eyes on the page, couldn’t even sit through an exam without her mind drifting off. Yale had been her favorite, maybe the only human male in the world she had truly loved and admired, and the world just seemed emptied out when he was gone, not worth the effort. When her mother asked her what was wrong, she said nothing seemed real anymore, she couldn’t believe in it, it was like everybody was just pretending. All life’s an artifice, her mother said. We are born into the stories made by others, we tinker a bit with the details, and then we die. She said this so sadly it made Lumby cry, and then that made her angry. Her mother never did really get over what happened to Yale, she just slowly declined over time, becoming ever more silent, until she died three years later, shortening her suffering at the end with a bottle of sleeping tablets from the drugstore, a withdrawal and departure that Lumby, needing her, could never quite forgive her for. Before that, however, there was one brief moment when the family pulled itself together to receive Yale’s French sweetheart Marie-Claire when she paid a return visit to the town a year after his death, staying with John and his wife, who was an old friend, and also coincidentally Yale’s girlfriend once upon a time. Lumby’s parents treated Marie-Claire like a daughter that week, hosting quiet, somewhat dreary dinners, taking her out to visit Yale’s grave, going through all of Yale’s belongings with her, presenting her with many mementos of him, and returning her letters to her. She received these things gratefully, tearfully even, trembling all over, yet left them behind when she went home, taking Cornell with her like something she’d won at the carnival but didn’t want; they had to bundle Yale’s effects up and mail them to her. She was not there to receive them. Lost forever, those things. Nearly lost her stupid little brother Corny in the bargain.

  Paying her respects at Yale’s tomb was not the only purpose of Marie-Claire’s visit to town that year. She was also returning her friends’ second honeymoon trip to Paris of the year before and attending her little godchild’s christening (godmotherhood not really a part of that Protestant ceremony, but on the subject of religion John and his wife were generously broadminded and worked it in), which had been especially arranged for her arrival. The baby, named Clarissa in honor of Marie-Claire, was a restless child who kept the household up all night (“She is, what you say, a girl-party, no?” said Marie-Claire with pride), and all day, too, as though afraid that she might miss something if she closed her little eyes. When Marie-Claire, touring John’s airport, asked him what they would have called the baby had it been a boy, he jokingly replied, little Hankie, thank-ee. Though reminiscent still of the homemade dirt strips of aviation’s early days, John’s airport had been expanding. Over the year, getting friends to pitch in, and with money from his mother-in-law, John had been able to install a generator out there, build a new hangar, and clear enough land to extend his runway to nearly six thousand feet, about half of it paved. The paved length was all he needed for his little single-engine four-seater, of course, but he was already thinking far ahead to the time when jets and cargo planes would land here and he might even have a feeder airline of his own, or at least be operating some kind of air taxi service, linking his town to the great urban centers, which, from up on high, seemed to shimmer on the curved horizon like untapped treasure troves, spoils for the airborne adventurer. From up there, he could see, too, displayed like a briefing chart, how his town down below would grow, and in which direction, which properties he should buy, which sell, and where he should build his malls and housing developments. These revelations his wife missed out on mostly, grounded by her mother as she was, the doctor’s prenatal seconding of the motion, after the difficult birth, still in place as well. The way things turned out, John probably should have left Marie-Claire on the ground, too, but though John enjoyed women in every imaginable way, what he loved most at that youthful time in his life was getting blown at the controls a couple of thousand feet up in the sky, and Marie-Claire had a kind of crazy explosive voracity, as he had discovered already last year in Paris, which not only turned her small delicate mouth with its pebbly rows of teeth and muscular tongue into something between a hydraulic pump and an automatic carwash gone amok, but which seemed to possess her entire body, causing her to tremble violently from head to foot and, whimpering like an animal at the door, even as her mouth with its flickering tongue raced madly up and down his shaft, to clutch and claw at his flesh as though trying to dig her way inside. Of course, fucking Marie-Claire was, if sometimes a bit like throwing yourself off a cliff, an even greater treat, but this was not Paris and at home on the ground that late spring, everyone supposedly mourning Yale, he was trying, with only partial success, to keep his distance from this wildly unpredictable girl, so susceptible to contagious sorrows, and up in the air fucking was impossible.

  Or so he thought. It was his new troubleshooter Nevada more than a decade later who finally taught him otherwise, though she was more an athlete than an inflamed and impetuous lover. By then John had bought and sold a fleet of planes (though he still had the little Skyhawk and even took it up now and then for old times’ sake), and the airport itself, now incorporated into the town and eligible for federal funding, had municipal electricity and water, its own septic system, parallel runways big enough for executive jets and small pressurized turboprops, a modest terminal and office building with toilets, payphones, and food and drink dispensing machines, a crew of mechanics and cargo handlers and a fulltime manager (his old football coach), parking lots for both planes and cars, fuel pumps and storage tanks, well-equipped hangars and repair sheds and warehouses, and new runway landing lights like glowing sapphires that could be activated from the air with a radio signal in the same way as automatic garage doors, a little parlor trick that always delighted the women when they found themselves caught out after dark, still dangerously high up off the ground, a trick that Marie-Claire, who would have loved it, did not live, poor girl, to see. Well, a sad story, but Marie-Claire was a lady of sad stories, excess and abandon the flame to her mothy passions, as Bruce once said of her when John told him of his Paris adventures. Not so their Nevada. Nevada was tough, smart, beautiful, efficient, cool. And spectacularly talented. There was no position she could not or would not assume, many of which neither Bruce nor John had ever enjoyed before, and she had a vagina clever as a trained circus animal. Bruce called it the “evil beaver,” and loved it at least as much as did John, who first sent her to him as a kind of comic valentine, telling him to go take a flying fuck. Out of this world! As John said after one of their weekend cabin revels, it was as though she were what he had been looking for all along, and Bruce thought so, too, even though John was speaking as a compassionate pragmatist, Bruce more from the nihilistic point of view.

  Of course, she blew her cool that first time up, but lots of women must have peed themselves in John’s planes, probably he got a charge out of it. Certainly he liked to get them scared, she could see that right away in the sensuous menace of his crooked grin, it was a way of softening them up for what he wanted out of them, which was not just sky-high head, she sensed, but also a kind of quivering compliance, and scared w
as one emotion Nevada did not have to fake up there, that first time anyway. After a loop or a roll or two, most women, leaking helplessly from every orifice, probably went grabbing for his joystick like a security blanket. Any straw in a whirlwind, as they say. “Wow! What a trip!” she groaned as, her heart still pounding, she wiped her mouth against his strong lined throat and nuzzled in the graying hair behind his ear, wondering, somewhat lightheadedly as he took one hand off the controls long enough to give her soggy thatch a grateful squeeze, where her wet panties, flung from the window like a captured battle flag or a candy wrapper, might have landed. John had just told her a moment before, his free hand clenched in her hair then and his hips beginning to buck, that what he loved most in this world were the days of his life, and Nevada, glad merely that she was going to see another, now thought she rather liked the days of his life, too. “My turn,” she whispered, stroking him stiff again. “If you can manage it,” he laughed, somewhat surprised, and to show what a clever girl she was, she did a dexterous split across his lap, burying that magnetic pole of his, and, switching her torso from left to right without losing him or interfering with his piloting, corkscrewed him, as it were, thus providing him, as he dropped creamily (she seemed to hover for a moment, weightless, tingling all over), then pulled up fiercely, climactically, into her as her augmented mass bore explosively down on him, with the line with which he’d later send her up to Bruce. He loved it, loved her, she felt, he said he’d never known anyone quite like her, and she began to see how John might be different from the rest, how he might be pointing her toward something new, dizzyingly new, and how Rex might soon become a nuisance. Not to mention, of course, John’s wife.

  When Nevada told Rex about the scare she got and what John had said up there about loving the days of his life, Rex said: “That’s his privilege, baby. He’s a rich fucker. His days don’t cost him anything. How can you help but love your life if every day’s like winning the lottery?” Rex, who loved Nevada in his bluesy downbeat way and so had his own notions about what love was, had started out here in town working for John, like most people did, but he had got fed up with the bullying sonuvabitch and so blew that shit off and now he worked for Stu, repairing cars at the old boy’s Ford-Mercury garage, working from a fake-book and a good right hand. No green in it. Nevada pulled down a lot more than he did, and sweated less doing it. But it kept him from wigging out, alone in a motel room or a lousy bar. Rex still wasn’t thirty, but one thing he had learned: making money was the easiest fucking thing in the world, but you had to have some to get some, and when it had come to handing out the stakes, he’d got left out, simple as that. Man, he really hated fat cats like John and his wife, not because they were loaded, but because they didn’t even know why it was they had it so good. He fixed their cars for them, all right, but in more ways than one. He’d put a new fanbelt on for them, but loosen a wheel or drain the brakes. He’d grind their valves, then leave the rocker gasket off, watching all the time for an angle, a gimmick, his break, access to a piece of the action. He hated Stu, too, but the old fart was a harmless boozer who spent most of his time dozing or telling his tedious cracker jokes, generally steering clear of the service area, so Rex got along all right with him. It was during one of Stu’s dumb jokes one day that Rex looked up and found himself staring, from under her Town Car, straight up John’s wife’s skirt. She was patiently tuned in to Stu’s bull, her back to Rex, and neither of them noticed him down there, so he had a good long look. He couldn’t say afterwards exactly what it was he saw, it was like staring at the Milky Way through a telescope that wasn’t quite in focus, but it made him feel like he was getting something for nothing, a piece of John’s goods, so to speak, and it got him so hot, he had to reach under and pull himself off to keep from howling or going for the pot and jumping her where she stood. That’d give old Stu a punchline he’d—ungh!—never forget, he thought as he came, exploding powerfully into his greasy overalls. He opened his eyes again, still holding himself, still coming probably, feeling loose and dreamy, wanting another look, one he could remember, but she was gone. His mouth was dry. He felt deflated. Like a loser again. Cheated and robbed. He took his screwdriver and punched a hole in her muffler, thinking: So that honcho motherfucker loves the days of his life. Terrific. Me, I just get through them. And he spat drily and punched another hole.

  Though he seemed not to notice, Stu was aware all along of Rex’s hatred, thought of it as a sick streak in the boy, a transmission failure of a sort, knew also Rex was stealing him blind, but somehow, in spite of all this, Rex’s malice, his paranoia, horniness, thievery, Stu felt some kind of kinship with the lad, and generally let him do what he wanted. Even lent a helping hand, often as not, though it made him feel a little like his block was cracked. Sometimes, just to let Rex know he wasn’t completely stupid, Stu would try to catch him in some mischief or other. He’d leave a tenspot on a counter or a workbench, say, then demand to know what had happened to it when it disappeared. The kid would scowl at him, act like he was dealing with a crazy man, and Stu would have to reverse gears, back down, no longer sure whether he’d put the ten bucks there or only intended to. Same with the other stuff that went missing: Maybe it wasn’t there in the first place, or vanished years ago. Couldn’t say. Goddamn memory. Strangest maybe was the way he kept throwing that black-hearted whelp and his little darlin’ together. He knew Daphne had the hots for the young scamp, the way she dressed and teased and showed her backseat every chance she got. Broke old Stu’s heart to see them carrying on, but weirdly it gave him a charge, too, as though by giving Daph the keys to the inner office and leaving the lot on some invented errand or other, or letting Rex give her a ride to the Getaway, he were getting a stalled car moving again. Maybe, somehow, he was reliving his cheatin’ days through the tacky little hotrod, whom he hated and feared, yet felt close as a father to. Stu had this ambivalent relationship with about everybody in town. He thought John was a great guy, for example, top of the line, but he didn’t really like him. He did like John’s wife, liked her a lot, hell, he’d do anything in the world for that girl, yet at the same time he felt he couldn’t care less about her. For the most part, this relationship was mutual: everybody in town loved old Stu, their hearts went out to him, yet they all considered him a worthless old drunk who might as well be dead. He was everybody’s friend, but nobody knew him.