John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  Beatrice’s apprehension of change, both imminent and immanent, was shared by many at that time, even at that moment, but not by all in town, lulled as they were by the walls around them, the immutable routines their lives were locked in, the regularity of their bowel movements. Even among those who acknowledged what Ellsworth called in his fortieth-birthday poem “the ever-whirling Wheel of Change” (which he sought “in vain to rearrange”), a poem published in The Town Crier a bit too close upon the automobile death of old Stu’s first wife Winnie and Stu’s snap remarriage to escape a dark joke or two at the time, many would have argued that change, too, was unchangeable, that like the heavenly bodies, it, too, had its enduring rhythms and routines, such that the very party at which Beatrice suffered her sudden perception of permutation-in-progress was itself a predesigned shaper and container of that change, and in its way unchangeable, in the way that the face of a clock, while never recording the same time twice, remained itself always the same. For some, this was terrifying, for others reassuring, just as these festivities, by which John and his wife solemnized for the town duration’s ticks and tocks, were for some a grim challenge, and for others a welcome release, tedium’s reprieve if not its remedy, and for not a few a taste of what might be but wasn’t. Waldo lived for John’s blowouts, whatever the hell they were or weren’t, Lennox surrendered to them with a passive smile admirers called beatific, Marge wished them over before they ever began, feeling herself dragged into a smug self-congratulating sacrament she didn’t believe in. John’s parties worried Otis the town guardian some, head counter and clock watcher that he was, amused Audrey in her time, provoked whimsical aphorisms from Kate (“The collective effervescence of these gatherings,” the late lamented librarian once remarked, “is like that of cheap champagne—it goes straight to your head, dissolving moral boundaries and separating self from body neat as an alchemical reaction, then awakens you, bloated and headachy, to an earthbound morning utterly without consolation …”), and whetted Veronica’s acquisitive appetites, those appetites that enraged her breadwinner Maynard so. What Veronica saw in John’s house, she sought to replicate in her own, even to the color of the bath towels and toilet paper, and by doing so thought of herself as a woman of taste. Well, no further worries for Maynard on that score: he and Ronnie had been permanently struck from the guest list since the recent company scandal, and had new things to fret and fume about: the wrecking of Maynard’s career in town since Barnaby’s stroke, for which he’d been largely blamed, their ostracization down on Main Street and out at the club, the disappearance of their son Little who had apparently run away from home when the scandal broke (Maynard, when gripped by his recurrent paranoia, could not escape the suspicion that his hard-assed cousin, in retribution, might have had the boy kidnapped), the bitterness dividing them as their social life withered and left them facing only one another. For Floyd the hardware man, who loathed every minute of John’s parties but hated it more when not invited, more and more the case with the passing years, they provided a stage for his imagined dramas of retribution, involving often as not some violation of the willing or unwilling hostess: on top of the rec room piano or the buffet-laden dining table, for example, or out on the croquet pitch in the middle of the Pioneers Day barbecue, her limbs pinned by wickets, steaks sizzling and beercaps popping. Is it the Christmas open house to which this year they had not been invited? Floyd saw himself unwrapping her beneath the decorated eight-foot tree with all the rip-it-off impatience of a kid on Christmas morning, then, the little brass bells overhead ringing acclamatorily—are you watching, John?—pumping sperm into her like great gouts of eggnog. Fantasies about banging John’s wife often enhanced Floyd’s nights with Edna, bringing a little fire and brimstone to their homespun copulations—at least at the outset, before Edna gave herself away with an airy rumble as she always did and reminded him where he was: his wife always belched when she fornicated, as though it gave her indigestion. Or cured her of it. Once, he had loved this: her vulnerability. Now it was just a part of her like her fallen arches or the fuzz on her upper lip; her chenille bedspreads, the paintings of flowers and dogs she hung on her plain papered walls.

  Of course, taste like John and his wife had, that cost money: what chance did Edna have, really? Edna’s painted dogs cost five dollars each, frames included, John’s Early American portraits and cowboy pictures thousands. Nevertheless, though she greatly admired John’s house, and in fact considered it the most beautiful house she’d ever been in, more beautiful even than the ones they showed in all the magazines in the doctor’s office, Edna (perhaps unique in this respect) did not envy John’s wife and would not have liked to live in her house. Veronica might drive her husband to bankruptcy trying to duplicate it and Marge might be so embittered by all that inaccessible beauty that she had to punish herself with a kind of spiteful austerity, but not Edna. Edna was a simple woman who liked simple practical things, and John’s house was just too grand, too intimidating. She and Floyd would go to a cocktail party there or a company get-together such as the one in which their little boy put on that funny little show with his hardhat and building blocks, or maybe to wander down through all that sprawling multileveled space to the oak-paneled rec room with its upright piano and drum set and hi-fi, its antique barroom spittoons and standing ashtrays and modern Greek throw rugs, to watch (Edna by now feeling oddly transported to one of those tunnel-of-love carnival rides) home movies or a football game, or perhaps to play bridge for an evening up on the main level in front of the monumental open-hearth fireplace with its old Dutch tiles and heavy brass implements, and she’d come out feeling six inches smaller. “What’re you fidgeting about?” Floyd would ask her on the way home. “I don’t rightly know, Floyd. My girdle feels like it’s gone loose on me or something.” Sometimes Edna had the impression that John’s wife felt the same way about the house she did, that it made her feel lost and sad and small, and she understood (though not in the same sarcastic way) Marge’s cruel remark that John’s wife went well with the gold carpets: she did sometimes seem to melt right into them. In a manner of speaking, of course. Or, well, not entirely in a manner of speaking: one night playing bridge, for example, Edna had looked up from laying down her dummy hand (she’d just carried John’s wife’s opening bid to four hearts and was a trifle unsure about it) and John’s wife was not there. Or seemed not to be. Maybe she’s went to the bathroom, Edna had thought, and had glanced in that direction, but when she’d looked back, John’s wife was smartly finessing the king of hearts with a jack from the board. Edna had mentioned this to Floyd afterwards, but all he’d said was: “She was lucky to make it, you overbid the hand.” Maybe I should ought to have my spectacles checked, she’d thought, not knowing that Marge herself had had something like the selfsame experience, though at dinner, not at bridge.

  Marge had missed Mikey’s sundered-grandpa skit, boycotting, over her husband Trevor’s soft but stubborn protest, that heartless victory whoop-up, the preliminaries for which, however, she had witnessed at the most painful dinner party she had ever attended, a ceremonial gathering called to celebrate the same loaves and fishes, one might say, though that first time not for real. A setup. She’d been, they’d all been. John’s parents Mitch and Opal were there, old Barnaby, looking a bit flushed and distracted, the bank president and his wife, Maynard and Veronica, Maynard’s parents, she and Trevor, a baker’s dozen. John had an offer, he’d said, that he wanted them all to consider. Thus, Trevor’s invitation as company accountant—or so she had thought at the time, wondering only what new environmental disaster John might now be hatching, and why wasn’t his Vicious President in Charge of Salaciousness there, she could have used Lorraine’s company. Later, though, she understood it all quite differently, understood that she, not Trevor, was the one John wanted present, she who’d joined Barnaby in his battle to save the town park, succeeding for a while, to John’s great annoyance, with her house-to-house petition drive, but unable in the end to buck city hal
l and the power of a bottomless purse. A target by ricochet, so to speak. There was a famous story about John from his childhood. His parents had given him his first BB gun for his eighth birthday and he had spent the following summer shooting starlings out of the trees and sparrows out of the bushes. True to form, he had even managed to turn play to profit, earning a dime a dead bird for knocking the pigeons off the roof of the flour mill, still in operation back then. His favorite game was to try to kill two sparrows with one shot, which he sometimes managed to do by popping them when they came together to mate. His nasty little pals always saw something hilarious in that. One day he bet a bunch of them he could kill two turtledoves, perched on a backyard clothesline, with one BB. Impossible of course, so they all took him up on it, wagering everything from camp-knife holsters and bike locks to baseball cards and bottlecap collections. Whereupon he nicked one of them, executed it in a manner Marge was later, to her unending horror, to witness, and with his jackknife dug out the spent pellet, put it back in his gun, and sat back waiting for the dead dove’s mate to return. “Hey! Not fair!” the other boys all complained, but they laughed, too, at John’s outwitting them yet again, and then, reminded that they hadn’t lost the bet yet, John still had to hit the second one and with a flattened pellet at that, they stuck around to see if he could do it. And no doubt hoped he would. They could say they were there. Which was when Marge turned up, only seven herself, but already on fire with her loathing of the local barbarians. When she saw what John had done and was about to do, she tried to stop him, but the other boys held her back, cursing her in their vulgar infantile way and clapping their filthy hands over her mouth when the widowed dove settled forlornly back on the wire and John took aim. All she could do was twist away and scream at the bird, but the stupid thing just sat there, asking to get hit, a crazy suicidal passivity she came to see over time as a peculiarity of most victims. John fired and the bird dropped, fluttering confusedly, to the ground, so they all let go of her and ran over to watch the end of this little life-and-death entertainment. The poor creature seemed to be trying to swim away from them, desperately flopping along ahead of its killers as they charged down upon it, shrieking out their monosyllabic ejaculations, like a company of battle-crazed comicbook soldiers. They caught up to it in a garage driveway, circling round, blocking its escape. John poked at it meditatively with his BB gun, then put his foot over its head, hesitating for a moment as though to feel the beat of its life under the sole of his sneaker. Marge begged him to let it go, it was only wounded, she could take it home and make it well again, and he smiled at her in a generous and friendly way and said, well, he’d be glad to, but then he’d lose his bet, wouldn’t he? And while he was smiling like that and giving every appearance of being reasonable and considering her appeal and the essential rightness of it, he shifted his weight onto the bird’s head. At that dreadful dinner party, she was thinking about this moment, not about the sickening little crunching noise like the cracking of a dried nut or the blood squishing out under John’s sneaker, nor even about the way the other boys howled at her to see her cry so, but about that warm considerate smile on John’s face as his foot came down, a smile he was wearing that night as he interrupted a rather stupid argument they’d all got into on the abortion issue, conventional hausfrau Veronica suddenly disturbingly shrill on the topic but as incoherent as usual, to tell them all about the extraordinary business opportunity he had been offered from a company upstate specializing in paving, roofing, and septic tanks, a merger of sorts which seemingly left their own partnership intact and gave them, along with a wide portfolio of valuable new assets, a substantial cash bonus to boot. “Almost too good to believe!” he said with that terrifying smile on his face, and then a maid came in to say that John had a phone call. He took it there in the dining room, switching on the speakerphone so all could hear. “You know the probe you asked me to run into that little construction outfit up north, John? Well, hang on to your fucking sombrero, ole buddy, I got a lalapaloozer for you!” It was Lorraine’s husband Waldo. The obnoxious lunkhead apparently wasn’t as thick as he’d always seemed. He knew more about the proposed deal than seemed humanly possible. Maynard blanched, then reddened, then went white again as the report came through. His father and John’s mother exchanged alarmed glances, Mitch bit clean through his cigar. Old Barnaby started, then slumped gray and shaken in his chair, a sponge for the terrible miasma of defeat and despair that had invaded the room like a gas attack. “The old judas is trying to snatch your goddamn company, John! Mange can give you the dingy details, since the shifty scumbag probably thought most of ’em up, but, in a word, the treacherous old buzzard is out to ruin you! You and his own daughter! Can you fucking believe it? Stealing every damned thing she’s got! Hello? John? You there?” Slowly Barnaby rose. It was almost as though something had got him by the nape and was lifting him, dead weight, from where he sat. He leaned blearily toward his daughter to utter his faint word of farewell (did she even hear it? She seemed almost to dim as a light might do, and for a strange moment, Marge could not even be sure she was there, the word more real than she was), then pushed away from the table, and turned toward the door. Which was further than he got.

  It was not until Maynard’s unexpected backhand swat on the drive home afterwards that Veronica—who had simply remarked, as she’d remarked at table, that opposing abortion on grounds of family values was not only dumb but self-contradictory—began to have some intimation of the true consequences of that fateful dinner party. “You stupid woman!” her husband had cried as he belted her, catching her in the solar plexus, just beneath the seatbelt, and knocking her wind out. “Weren’t you listening, for Chrissake? Don’t you know what’s happened?” There were tears running down his cheeks. “You mean about Barnaby?” she gasped and he hit her again and then banged his head over and over against the steering wheel. “Be careful!” “We’ve just been fucking had, you dumb bitch! We’re ruined! It’s all over!” She tried to grab the wheel, but he slapped her hands away and screamed: “Fuck off! If I want to kill myself, I’ll kill myself!” Hysterical as he was, they were lucky to get home in one piece, if lucky was the right word. The piece they got home with was not all that great. It was true, Veronica hadn’t really understood what John was going on about, business never did make much sense to her, even paint and wallpaper was over her head, nor had she paid much attention to that irritating phone call that John took at table, which she’d thought was plain bad manners, she’d been too upset about other things, had been really since they’d gotten dressed to go, when Maynard had glanced at her in her slip and asked her with a mean smirk if she was pregnant again, an insensitive remark at any time, but though he could not have known why (she’d told Maynard a lot about her past life back in their courting days, a big mistake, he clubbed her with it all the time, but not, thank heavens, about Second John), all the more so given the company she had to face that night at dinner. As she’d done before, of course, playing the shy discreet maiden who’d forgotten everything, aren’t we all just friends, but what she’d done so long ago had been preying on her of late, making her feel haunted, like in that old expression about being haunted by your past. She was. How could one not be in a town like this, everyone’s lives so intertangled, no way to get rid of anything, it all just kept looping round again, casting shadows on top of shadows, giving hidden meanings to everything that happened by day, turning dreams into nightmares by night. Partly her fault, she had to admit: in her loneliness before her second marriage and sometimes after, she had tried to imagine what might have happened had she not done what she did, and so had for a while brought a fantasy to life, and though she’d long since banished it from her daytime imagination, it still hung around in her dreams like a kind of leprous cowled mendicant, asking for what she could not give it. But if it was partly her fault, it was mostly this town’s. If she’d got out of here, as she had intended, it would have all been ancient history by now, but that was not the life she got
given. How could she have known back there on that night in the musty out-of-town motel cabin, just a scared obliging kid (she remembered crying silently, all scrunched up in a dark corner of that little metal shower stall afterwards, he’d sent her in there “to wash herself,” as he had put it, and then had brusquely stuck his head in and, chewing on a dead cigar, scrubbed her genitals for her, then slapped her on the butt as if she were a pal), that middle age would find her so consequentially in such company, pretending that the world began last week. Life was really strange, such a terrible gulf between inner and outer, she didn’t know if she could go on living it this way. How did John’s wife do it? And then, as though to prod her crisis onto centerstage, she got seated at dinner between them, father and son, John falsely cheerful and ingratiating, almost as though he were teasing her, leading her on, old Mitch grinding away at one of his nauseating cigars before and after the meal and ignoring her throughout, as though she were somehow beneath his notice. Finally she just blurted it out, she couldn’t help herself: “What do you think of the abortion issue?” Her husband snapped her a look meant to shut her up: what the hell are you trying to do, it said, don’t spoil things! She did not appreciate his nasty look one bit, but at the same time she was sorry, it wasn’t what she’d meant to say at all, nor how she’d meant to say it, why was she always so clumsy? “It’s not an issue, it’s a crime,” John’s father declared bluntly to the rest of the table but not to her, as though to put an end to this silly matter by merely speaking, and her dribbling father-in-law nodded his senile approval. The bank president said, “I suppose there must be exceptions,” and Mitch barked back: “None that I know of. People have to be responsible for their actions.” Marge dutifully took up the cudgels, but without much enthusiasm, she seemed unusually circumspect tonight, as Ronnie no doubt should have been; it was, to Ronnie’s surprise, John who laughed and said: “Of course anyone who wants an abortion should have one. Why not? Women can do whatever the hell they want with their bodies, who’s to tell them otherwise?” “Well, their husbands for one,” growled his father, “their parents if they’re not yet women, their religious counselors if they are, and the laws of the land if they’re heathens!” He pursed his lips and tongued the mashed cigar across his mouth from one cheek to the other as though turning on or off some switch. “It’s a question of family values, son, family values versus social anarchy!” “But that’s stupid!” Veronica exclaimed, emboldened by John’s complicit wink. “Most people who want or need—” “Most women, you mean, my dear,” interrupted Mitch condescendingly, turning to her at last, aiming the cigar obscenely at her face, and she thought: I’m going to tell it now. All of it. It’s time to let it out. Either that or she was going to cry. “Most women who want or need abortions and most men who want or need the women to have them either have no families in the first place or are trying to save the ones they have!” “Nonsense.” “But what would you do if you’d made some girl pregnant and she—” “Now see here!” Mitch bristled angrily. “What are you trying to suggest?” “You’ve never had to have one,” Maynard butted in, trying to cut her off, “so what do you care?” And just as she was about to tell him, tell them all, John rose and with a smile, the same smile he had on his face that night after the drive-in movie all those years ago, said he had an important announcement to make.