John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  Where Alf at the time was taking his midmorning coffee break, hunched over in front of the dusty plateglass window with his old friend Oxford and Oxford’s two youngest grandchildren, a pair of twins, not yet four, who had their father’s heart-shaped face and wispy blond hair but who, under their granddad’s patient tutelage, were already reading and doing their numbers. “It was like he felt he was locked out or something, and didn’t know how to get back in,” Alf said, gazing wearily out on the asphalt street which seemed to be sweating in the morning glare. He had been trying to describe his nighttime encounter with Oxford’s peculiar son Cornell in the back alley, but Oxford, fascinated by his grandchildren, excitedly filling in their dot-to-dot books at the table next to them (“It’s a lady! With a pointy hat on!”), seemed to be only half listening. The street was eerily empty. Civic center or no, the downtown was going to hell. The newspaper office across the street looked shut for the duration. No paper so far this week and no sign there’d ever be one again. Alf rubbed his eyes, wondered if he ought to look in on Ellsworth, make sure he was all right. “Still not sleeping well, I take it.” “No.” “Alcohol’s a clumsy sedative, Alf. Flurazepam’s better.” “Tried it.” “Methaqualones? There are some good ones out now.” “Hard on the liver.” “Especially when mixed with scotch, I suppose. You know, now that you mention it, Kate once said something amusing to me about doors. It was not long before she died, at the time they tore down the Pioneer Hotel. It was a sturdy old thing, that hotel, not unlike an ancient warrior, as Kate said, hard to bring to his knees.” “Mmm. Harriet and I stayed in that old warrior for a week or so when we came back after the war. From the smell, we must have been booked into the armpit.” “So John finally had to use dynamite—” “I remember. It was like a goddamn bomb had hit.” Brought it all back. Couldn’t sleep for a week after. It was the week when missing Harriet hit him hardest. “And when the dust cleared, all that was left standing was the big front door, completely intact, columns, architrave, and all. Majestic. Inviting. But opening onto nothing.” Alf remembered that standing door, remembered identifying with it in some way, but the memory seemed to be in black and white, so he didn’t know whether it was from actually seeing the thing itself or from the photo of it in the newspaper. If Alf had been asked, he would have said he never read the local rag, but now that it had not come out, he realized he was badly missing the silly thing. ‘“Mostly we build walls,’ Kate said then, ‘to separate the inner from the outer, the private from the public, the sacrosanct from the common, the known from the unknown. Doors are put in the walls to ceremonialize the crossing from one into another, which is sometimes a fulfillment and a delight and sometimes a frightening transgression.’” Oxford glanced over at his grandchildren. “Like in the story of the three little pigs: a ritual transgression of the sanctity of the home that takes place at the doorway.” “Always thought that was an oedipal fantasy,” Alf said, signaling for a coffee refill. Should get back. The preacher’s wife would be there by now. And there was that hysterical message on his answering machine this morning: “Help! That thing you took out! It’s back!” No clue who it was who’d called. “You know, the home as womb with Big Bad Daddy outside, trying to blow his way in.” “Maybe. Same thing. The door as a ‘magical threshold,’ as Kate called it, promising access to some mystery beyond or within. And what John had done, she said, was strip the door of all illusions, reminding us that all magic was nothing but sleight of hand, and thresholds were mere artifices in the middle of nowhere.” Oxford smiled wistfully, glancing over at his busy grandchildren. “And maybe you’re right about the three little pigs, Alf. Maybe poor Corny is just missing his mom.” John was back. Alf saw him emerge from the hardware store next door with a look on his face that said he’d either just fired old Floyd or given him a raise, with John you couldn’t tell which. Alf, glancing at his finger, remembered there was something he needed to talk over with John (what was worse, it seemed to be growing), but just then the waitress came over to say that he had an urgent phonecall. It was his nurse. An emergency. A man struck blind. Come quickly, she begged, the poor man was beside himself.

  Nurse Lumby’s quaint expression, used figuratively to describe her hysterical patient (to whom, on the doctor’s orders, she was now administering a mild sedative, with some pleasure, by injection), would have been understood more literally by her brother Cornell who had become more and more convinced that there was not one of him but two. It was as though there were a parenthetical Corny inside the outward one (or containing it), or as if he were carrying a shadow around that did not always move as he moved, and from time to time he would spin around to see if he could catch the shadow out, or if not the shadow, then, in whatever form, that other self. He had to be careful not to do this when the woman called Gretchen was around, because she cut him off from his video games whenever she caught him at it (this morning, for example: he thought he felt something, like—what?—like a tap on his shoulder, he spun around—and there she was, scowling at him through her bottle-glass lenses; she clumped over like a movie monster, pulled the plug on the one drugstore machine that still worked, slapped his head when he tried to protest) on the grounds that the games were making him battier than he already was, though from his perspective, if not from his shadow’s (he couldn’t speak for that other self who seemed, incredibly, to be married to that peg-legged freak and to be the father of more children by her than he could count, never mind learn their names), she was the one who was crazy. Sometimes the whole world seemed crazy, but this did not worry Cornell, his mother always said that most right thoughts were, when first thought, thoughts of one lonely person—most crazy thoughts, too, of course—but the point was, it was cool to be different. Which he was, really was, and she always said she loved him because of it. Now, deprived of his only compensatory pleasure in this upside-down world (or was it inside out?), Corny curled up in a niche behind the drugstore publication racks and thumbed gloomily through the magazines, exploding in his pants whenever he glimpsed plump bosoms or inviting nests of pubic hair or even sometimes just pictures of round juicy things with creases in them, but otherwise inconsolably bored and depressed. A bummer, man, it truly was. Life, everything. Maybe later, when fish-eyes wasn’t looking, he’d steal a pocketful of coins and the keys to the store van and sneak out to the mall arcade, in spite of the ridicule he often suffered out there from the teen-meanies—the zit-snits, as he used to call them in at least one of his lives. He was staring dejectedly at a picture of a nun, dressed only in her wimple and white stockings, being ogled by a priest hiding behind a cathedral gargoyle (it was the hideous gargoyle that most fascinated Cornell even as he popped off at the sight of the nun’s naked bottom with the thorned heart of Jesus tattooed on one cheek: when would this nightmare end, he wondered?), in a photo feature called “Les Girls de Paris,” when a woman standing near the racks peered over his shoulder and asked him if he was planning to travel to France this summer. He recognized her. Though she was married and rich and famous now, he remembered her mostly as Yale’s girlfriend in high school. He used to follow them around, especially in the house or at the movies, to see what they did together. What they did was hold hands a lot, though once Yale kissed her, and that was the first time that thing happened in Corny’s pants when he wasn’t asleep or at least in bed. Her remark now might have been meant as a joke, but she didn’t appear to be making fun. She seemed more like his mother when he brought stuff home from school, like, you know, really interested, and when he mumbled he could never go back there, she asked him why, and he (he was afraid the woman with the stubby leg would come over and tell him to keep his wackiness to himself, but she didn’t even seem to be listening) told her all about it. What door? she asked when he’d finished. So he led her out into the alley and took her, step-by-step, through his midnight searches, though everything looked different in the daytime. More ordinary. A plain old dirty alley, that’s all it was, it was embarrassing, man. He began to see himself a
s Gretchen saw him—a pathetic loony with messy pants—and he was sorry now he’d brought the lady out here. But then, in a dark place out of the sun, he saw the trash cans again: KEEP OUR TOWN BEAUTIFUL, they said. And he knew, if he turned around (why were his knees shaking? why was he hesitating? what was he afraid of?), the door would be there. But when, screwing up his courage, he did, it wasn’t. Nor was the lady. What was there was a great huge womanish thing hunkered down behind a pickup (she was so big she was only half hidden by it), snorting and whuffing like a wild animal as she pawed ravenously through the garbage of the Sixth Street Cafe. She looked up at him (or down, really) through her uncombed hair, a blob of meringue on her nose and wilted lettuce leaves hanging off her lower lip. His heart skipped a beat. But not from fear. “Corny?” she whispered. “Is that you?”

  The old Ford pickup Pauline was crouching behind belonged to the hardware store on the corner, a family enterprise operated by John, run by his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him, and before that John’s great-great-grandfather, the famous pioneer horse-trough maker who first set up shop here where, on the rolling prairie, there was then no corner, thus, as though drawing an X on the ground, creating it and all that followed, or in some such mythic language had Ellsworth once put it in a popular Town Crier article years ago about “Dreamers and Builders.” The historic two-story brick structure was one of the few downtown businesses left intact, more or less intact, from the old days, though not the old days of the great-great-grandfather. Why had John spared it and so little else? Some said that it showed a sentimental streak in John, others that he’d cynically set out to enhance its value by destroying its more beautiful competitors; most, though, thought he just hadn’t got around to it yet. For the past dozen years or so, John had entrusted the day-to-day management of the old family business to an out-of-towner named Floyd, a former trucker and traveling salesman who happened to be passing through when the manager’s position was vacant. Floyd was not a hunter or a golfer, was not a social drinker, and had not flown nor would he ever, but he was a good bowler and his past life had afforded him opportunities to play a lot of cards (he had earned John’s respect as a bridge partner), to read the Bible through and through, and to pick up several manual skills of the sort taught in such places, which he had used to good effect since coming to town. And the store he managed, in spite of the competition of the malls, most of it created by John himself, had managed always to show a small profit from year to year, a tribute to Floyd’s nuts-and-bolts know-how and his tenacity. So while Alf, next door at the Sixth Street Cafe, might have surmised that John, emerging from the hardware store with that icy grin on his face, had just fired old Floyd (good riddance if he did, he was an irascible old sonuvabitch, and something of a religious kook, nobody liked him), the truth was that John, who knew how to use the talent he found, had just promoted Floyd out of the hardware store at last, doubled his salary, and put him in charge locally of the new national trucking line he had acquired on his most recent business trip out West, a company he intended to link, as he explained to Floyd, with his air cargo operations. Which was why the hardware store manager, more emotional than most in town supposed, could now be found down on his white-overalled knees in the do-it-yourself section, next to the wind chimes and redwood twin-lounge kits, giving tearful and vehement thanks to his divinity: Redemption! Sweet Jesus! It was really possible! All his dark and tortured past seemed to fade away like a dissolving nightmare and he bellowed out his rapturous joy (the high school kid who worked for him, alarmed by his employer’s hysterical rant, ducked out the back door: whoo, Old Hoot’s gone off the deep end again, time for a joint) as God’s grace descended upon him like light filling a room or water a bucket—Praise the Lord! He was saved! Saved at last! And, so saved, once-covetous Floyd, gripped by a love of the world now sublime and pure, coveted no more.

  The man whose wife Floyd had once in sin but, now redeemed, no longer coveted felt himself, back in his old hometown after invigorating westward journeys, on something of a mission. The town (he had not been paying enough attention to it and it was important to him) seemed idled, confused, unfocused—“sunk in the doldrums,” as his mother would say—its communal pulse slowed, its eyes glazed over, and John, charging purposefully through it, was bringing it back to life again. At the airport when he’d landed (the last ten miles and final descent had seemed much longer than usual, he was probably trail-wearier than he thought, but he shook it off), he’d found his manager and town’s future mayor dozing, snorting resonantly through his sausagey nose, and unable to say, when abruptly awakened with a boot to his shins, whether he’d seen Bruce or not, though Bruce’s private jet was parked there. To get Snuffy up and running again, John had taken him on a brisk tour of the warehouse sheds, asking him to figure out where they were going to house the local headquarters of the national trucking firm he’d just bought and to get estimates on any new loading bays and access roads they’d have to build; when he left him, on the phone to his crew and barking out orders in his trademark no-crap rhetoric, the old coach’s eyes had brightened and the familiar fire had returned. In town, John stopped in at his bank offices (a teller whose child had developed bone cancer squeezed his hands and thanked him for helping to bump her up on the priority list for an urgently needed marrow transplant, which she said had gone well, and everyone in the bank seemed to straighten up an inch or two and flash a smile as he passed through) to check his mail, sign checks, return calls (Nevada said: “We have to talk …”), send out a couple dozen faxes, order up flowers for his wife and call the caterers to make sure everything was ready for his Pioneers Day barbecue: “Whatever we did last year, you better increase it by about twenty percent. It’s going to be a big one.” At home, he got Clarissa who, sounding radiant and cheerful, clearly shared his good mood; she said she just loved Granny Opal and she’d leave a note for Mom that he’d called. Yes, she thought Uncle Bruce was probably in town. He phoned his mother to thank her for all her help with the children and for visiting poor old Barnaby so regularly (“Anything I can do for him?” “No! No, he’s—he’s fine!”), then called Kevin out at the club to tell him to get his clubs ready, he’d be out shortly after lunch. When asked, he told Kevin to go ahead and hire someone for the club shop, he’d sort it out with the board later. “Also, start thinking about a food-services manager who’s able and willing to fill in at the bar, Kev. You need more time out on the course to keep your competitive edge.” “Great! I’ll get started on that today, John!” He had decided to accept outstanding offers, modest though they were, on some of the assets Barnaby had acquired in his failed takeover bid so as to help cover the purchase of the trucking firm and to provide cash for the development of the racetrack, so he dropped by Trevor’s office to get the paperwork started, but he wasn’t in. Off to lunch maybe. Not a bad idea, but John wasn’t hungry. He’d talk Kev into throwing together one of his classic hot beef-and-pepper heroes out at the club when he got there. Which he hoped would be soon: he felt a string of birdies coming on, lined up on his scorecard like fucking turtledoves on a clothesline. He dropped down to the chamber of commerce, back in their old quarters after finding their new civic center offices too damp and noisy, to see how the parade committee was coming along (lagging behind as usual, maybe more than usual, his visit serving as a wake-up call), picked up a map of this year’s route, told them about the latest new business he was bringing to town, dropped hints about the racetrack. They seemed upset that this week’s town newspaper had not appeared, not yet anyway, with all the Pioneers Day announcements and advertisements (it was almost like they’d begun to believe the goddamned holiday would not occur unless the paper announced it), and he assured them he would drop by Ellsworth’s shop to check it out. “Will, uh, will your wife be in the parade this year, John?” “Sure, why wouldn’t she be?” On his way over to the hardware store where he had a surprise to spring on old Floyd, he saw Lenny helping heavy-bellied Trixie out of their car in fro
nt of Alf’s antiquated medical facility. The only doctor still with downtown offices, the building itself a decrepit fossil like its occupier, ready for the wrecking ball. He’d offered Alf a good price to move to one of the new medical centers but Alf said he was too old to change kennels, he’d die soon enough, and John, though he’d joked to the contrary, allowed that was probably so. The minister and his wife waved and John waved back as he crossed over to the old family store. His cranky tough-as-nails manager in there collapsed unabashedly into tears when he told him he was putting him in charge of the central operations of the new trucking line and raising his salary by half again with additional bonuses based on traffic, after which the old cracker broke into either prayer or joyful cussing, John couldn’t be sure which. He paused at the door on the way out: about time to rethink this ancient relic, what his father liked to call the family’s public badge of honor, though he often winked when he said it. So what, then? A watering hole for the out-of-town racetrack crowd maybe? Souvenir shop? Museum? Or: all three at once. Why not? A slowly rotating bar, say, in the middle of a cyclorama of the age of the pioneers (he knew just who to hire as a technical consultant), old weapons, clothes, and implements on display, and some coin-operated interactive video machines for exploring the daily life of the prairie settlers. In virtual reality maybe: walk around in their vanished lives. Unspeakably dreary when lived, an entertainment when revisited. He already had a piece of the new high-tech action, he could put it to practical use right here at home. Probably have to buy up the cafe next door for floor space, eat up some of the alley, but it could be a big money-spinner, bring traffic in off the highway, too: he’d have them, so to speak, all drinking out of great-great-grandpop’s famous horse trough again. He called out to old Alf, just shuffling back to work across the street, reminding him about the barbecue (Alf nodded, asked him to give him a call later, John said he’d see him out at the club), then popped his head in the door of the Sixth Street Cafe to remind Oxford of the same thing. “Pioneers Day! Already? Can’t be—!” “I’m afraid it is, Oxford. Time flies!” “But—” “House flies!” shouted one of the children and they both giggled. “And bring the grandkids!” He left the old pharmacist, nose down to the table, muttering to himself and trying to read the dial of his wristwatch through his thick lenses, and crossed over in the direction of city hall and the police station, nearly getting run down twice, first by the pharmacy van reeling out of the alleyway with witless Cornell hunched over the wheel, then by his cousin Maynard’s black sedan, which came barreling around the opposite corner, tires squealing, driven by a wild-haired stony-eyed Veronica who looked like she’d just fallen out of bed. Had she been trying to hit him? John grinned his clenched-teeth grin, brushed his sleeve. He had a surprise in store for her fucked-up hubby, too, one that should cheer him up. He was planning to offer his abused cuz the chance to run the new racetrack (best to have someone in the legal profession in the front office, he figured), assuming of course that Mange was ready to make the right sort of investment in the enterprise, but he was saving this announcement (have to make sure they were invited, struck as they were from the official lists: he made a mental note) for the barbecue.