John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  Despite their rivalry and the social distance they generally kept from one another, even after they became in-laws, Barnaby and Mitch enjoyed a symbiotic relationship that helped make both their dreams come true, Mitch enriching himself on investments without which Barnaby could not have realized his vision for the town. Mitch’s political influence helped, too: his uncle by marriage was the mayor when the war ended, and his wife’s brother in time succeeded him, and what her kin couldn’t manage, money usually could. Thus when Barnaby, home on leave, told Mitch about his plans to develop the town around a new city park, the old one being a mere square block in front of City Hall and surrounded by business, making expansion of it impractical, Mitch set about buying up some of the rundown properties Barnaby had pointed out to him, surprising the owners with his generous offers, but knowing full well that the city, through Opal’s relatives, would pay him twice that when the park was built. And did. And he even got the old park in a tradeoff when they ran out of money, the most valuable piece of undeveloped real estate in town, demonstrating his generosity and public spirit (for which he was widely applauded) by moving the bandstand, statue of the Old Pioneer, and historic flagpole to the new park at his own expense, setting the statue on a new rugged stone plinth. The reshaping of the town around the new park was a phenomenal achievement. Only a war hero could have pulled it off. The whole community was reoriented, away from the dwindling creek and long-gone early settlements (even the Old Pioneer’s gaze was turned), toward its slummier back side which was totally erased and refashioned in Barnaby’s image, upgraded almost overnight into the most desirable properties in town, though Barnaby, taking only his construction earnings, owned none of it. Which Mitch thought was, frankly, pretty stupid. Mitch’s personal ethic, which he shared with most in town, was that the world, the only one around, the one they all lived and competed in, was a business world where wealth was synonymous with virtue and poverty was either a case of genetic bad luck (which was what charity was for) or of criminal weakness of character (poorhouses and jails). Mitch knew how to read this business world at a glance and act without hesitation (wherein lay his virtue), and he knew that within his own environs and generation the true saints would be in real estate and banking, quick-witted speculators, alert and well-connected, having, as it were, God’s ear. Grandpop’s old hardware store may have suited his own times (though Grandpop himself was a wise investor), but was now a mere symbolic relic, a sentimental image of his family’s proud historic role in the settling of this great nation, often mentioned in Pioneers Day speeches and newspaper articles, and worth keeping for that reason alone. If Audrey confounded everyone by settling down and marrying Barnaby, however, it was nothing to the surprise the townsfolk experienced when, within a year, rakish Mitch took to wife his business partner Maynard’s younger sister, plain straitlaced Opal. Well, it just goes to show, people said, that being about all they could say in the face of such a marvel, most predicting that Mitch, having married on the rebound from Audrey, would soon be chafing at the bit. The truth was, though, that Opal suited Mitch just fine: seducing innocents always did give him a charge, and then, after the pleasures of the conquest and the birth of a worthy heir, he was left free to live his life as he wished to live it, no bit to chafe him. And was Audrey ever part of that unchafed life? Who could say? Just how far Mitch ever got with Audrey was anybody’s guess, Barnaby’s included, but that Audrey developed such an intense affection, evident to all, for Mitch’s dashing young son surprised no one. With her daughter’s engagement and marriage to this bold handsome boy, Audrey seemed literally to experience a second blossoming; she became once more the life of the party, bright-eyed and vivacious, recovering as if a wand had been waved her lost youth, until it vanished suddenly one year and she was gone like the smoke, so moodily glamorous in its day, that killed her.

  At the dedication ceremonies for the new civic center, built by John and named for his father-in-law, now retired, the honoree’s venerable colleague and one-time rival, standing under the inspiring statue of the Old Pioneer, which now rose up six feet higher than before thanks to an imposing new pedestal donated to the city by his son’s company, declared in his public eulogy that the structure they were dedicating today, one of the most magnificent ever seen out here on this great prairie, represented all the noble values that he for whom it was being named stood for: pioneering contemporary design combined with old-fashioned comfort and functionality, technical expertise at the service of communal harmony and the good life and traditional family values. Mitch cited the retractable sunroof over the swimming pool as a tribute to Barnaby’s own architectural innovations, and likened it to the eyelid of a sleeping giant opening onto the heavens, an image suggested to him, he said, by his granddaughter who was sitting on the platform with him. She was applauded. Mitch took the occasion to lament the absence of Barnaby’s dear departed wife, whose heart was always young and whose irrepressible love of life and beauty was somehow embodied in this graceful structure, and the dead wife was also applauded. Mitch went on to say that the civic center symbolized a coming together of the entire community and a revitalization of its heart and nerve center, which had been allowed to deteriorate, putting the health of the entire town at risk, adding that Barnaby himself (who, jaw hanging open, was watching all of this with one cocked eye, the other, heavily lidded, seeming to have something else on its mind) had often spoken of his desire for just such a complex. On a more personal note, he told about the time that he and Barnaby worked together to create, virtually out of nothing, the old city park, on whose former grounds they all now stood, Barnaby confiding to him then his secret vision. “One day, Mitch, he told me, something important will happen here on this piece of land, something that will bring all our townsfolk together in fellowship and prosperity, and meanwhile we have to protect it, keep it green and free from careless development and out-of-town speculators until that day when its true homegrown purpose will be made manifest. And now, today, my friends, his dream has come true!” Marge, obliged to be present that afternoon, but experiencing nauseating waves of helpless rage and loathing, could agree with only one thing John’s un-regenerate father said all day, and that was that not even the Old Pioneer settled this land all by himself: it required concerted action by many people to achieve great changes. In fact it became part of her mayoral platform call for radical electoral reform, as outlined in her unpublished position paper, and something she used while canvassing the very neighborhoods that Barnaby had once created and laid out: only by working together could they bring down the corrupt and ruthless oligarchy (sometimes, depending on her audience, she said “patriarchy”) that ruled this town for its own profit. But after walking her butt off all day, trying to arouse grassroots enthusiasm for her “Rout Out the Rip-Offs” campaign, all she had were the three votes she’d started with, and she wasn’t completely sure of the other two. It was a nice day (too nice: she had chosen an austere business suit with a long skirt for this historic occasion, and she was sweating like a pig), most people seemed to be off picnicking or holidaying, and those who weren’t just stared at her in alarm like she was something from outer space, most of them slamming the door in her face while she was still explaining who she was. This wasn’t going to be easy. But then, exhausted and depressed yet as determined as ever, Marge conceived of a bold maneuver: she would go straight to John and solicit his public support for her candidacy. Not only would he have to admit that she was right on all the key issues, but more importantly, inasmuch as all tyrants, she knew, liked to preserve the illusion of democracy, then in truth, a truth he could be made to see, he needed her, even if only, from his perspective, as token opposition. Moreover, she thought, striding into John’s broad-lawned neighborhood now as though to the first tee, feeling upbeat about this campaign once more (what a coup this could be!), he might even perceive, at last, the longterm wisdom of establishing some sort of practical political partnership with her, one based on mutual respect and frank exchan
ge, thereby putting his great creative resources to more admirable ends. Like all polar opposites, they were two of a kind, a rare kind, persons of courage and integrity and boundless energy (in Marge’s mind, as she wove through all the cars parked out in front of John’s house as though negotiating the sandtraps at the twelfth green, and bounced up the front steps, she could see herself and John, crossing paths in all the air terminals and power centers of the world, acknowledging one another with an understanding nod and a smile—she was nodding, she was smiling—as they went about their complementary tasks for the betterment of all mankind): together they could do anything. John met her at the door in jeans and boots and a suede vest over his bare chest, a couple of bottles in his hand, and told her she didn’t need to knock, come on in, then turned his back on her and walked away, which threw her into some confusion and made her forget her opening sally. Nevertheless, Marge followed him on into the kitchen which was full of caterers and big metal boxes full of food, laying out her argument, or at least what she could remember of it that didn’t sound too silly in the rather stupefying circumstances of the crowded and busy kitchen, and somehow managed to get the point across that she was running for office and wanted his support. “Sure, Marge,” he said, setting the bottles down impatiently, and he reached in his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and gave her a dollar bill. “Now, come on, this goddamn thing’s bigger than ever this year and I seem to be short of help, I have to get the drinks around.” “What?” He glanced back at her from the screen door, as if seeing her for the first time. She stood there in her unseasonal suit, sweat running down her spine, her hair hanging in damp strings around her face, still holding the dollar bill out as if it were a ticket to something. “What goddamn thing?” “Hey. For Christ’s sake, Marge, Happy Pioneers Day. If you need a shower, help yourself. And while you’re at it, change the towels for me in the bathrooms and I’ll give you another dollar.”

  As his principal employer, kicking the monogrammed screen door open, came out on the back deck with bottles in his hands, Trevor, sporting his new black eyepatch, which had provoked considerable comment amongst the guests this afternoon, caught a one-eyed glimpse of his wife Marge standing in the kitchen in her business suit, looking drawn and defeated. No doubt John had been cruel to her once again. Yet she did seem always to bring it upon herself as though it were part of her exercise regimen, testing her virtue by stripping for a lecher, so to speak. Trevor tittered into his glass of iced gin, his third of the day, the doctor having told him a good snort now and then might be good for his circulation, preventive medicine against the sort of problem he was having. Traumatic neurosis was, Trevor believed, the technical term for it, but when he’d tried to explain to Alf what he now believed to be the true cause, heretofore repressed, of the first episode all those years ago, the doctor, harassed by a waiting room packed with distraught and clamorous patients—im-patients, more like it—had only half listened to his stammering confession, then had brushed it aside as poppycock, saying, as he wrote out a prescription, that as far as he was concerned all bodily disorders were ultimately electrochemical and should be treated as such, in kind. “As the main switching station of the central nervous system, the brain has too goddamned much to do to be able to handle all the incoming traffic and has to throw a lot of it out arbitrarily or shunt it off onto unused sidetracks. It makes mistakes, there are mixups, accidents, sometimes catastrophic wrecks, and then panic sets in. What we can try to do is correct the mistakes, clean up after the accidents, and by oiling the machinery, as we like to say, calm the panic. The rest, Trev, is just sentimental quackery.” After fitting him with his eyepatch today, Alf, grumbling that he was rusting up and suffering from catastrophic overload himself, had abruptly closed his office, shouting out over the protests of the other patients that if they didn’t leave now he’d lock them in until after the holidays, and then he’d offered Trevor a ride to the party. Party? The barbecue. Oh yes. So much had happened, he’d nearly forgotten. It was today, then? Before leaving downtown, Alf had stopped by the newspaper office to see if he could rouse the editor, but no luck. The editor had a life policy with Trevor and, having no heirs, had a complicated and whimsical list of beneficiaries (Trevor remembered the names and sums for each), including the library Literary Society, which no longer existed. He’d have to drop by soon and get the policy updated, at which time he would suggest a modest increase. This was the sort of knowledge Trevor carried around, the names and numbers that, boringly, filled his life and prevented him from living it. On the rest of the drive to John’s house, staring out the rolled-down car window with his one eye, Trevor had tried intently to see the town, to really see it, as perhaps the photographer saw it, without all the technicalities and computations and what in his business nowadays they called data processing that always blocked his view, concentrating now on its shapes (which were two-dimensional but somehow therefore more compelling as, flatly, they slid past one another), its summery hues and vivid midday contrasts of light and shade, the way most things flowed into everything else as though it was all of a piece, and yet the way certain objects stood apart, as though in a different dimension, displaying their peculiar contingency, a gleaming sky-blue tricycle in a shadowy front yard, for example, a porch swing rocking slightly in front of a broken window, a long-limbed dog sniffing at a dark wet trail that seemed smeared across Trevor’s flat framed view like an oil slick or gradeschool mucilage, a gleaming black funeral van parked incongruously in front of a gaily painted fire hydrant with a beer bottle perched on top. But it was no use. Even as he attempted, in effect, to control the incoming traffic and fill up the switchyard with enduring sensual evidence that he was here, in the world, that this was truly his life, his own singular and inimitable life, that was rolling by, never to roll by again, he realized he was still calculating, still beclouding his vision, halved as it now was (and if he wasn’t careful, he might lose the other one), with abstractions and doubts and sophistries, and that the life he was passing through would never really be lived, would never really be his own, he was not in the control tower but tied to the tracks, he hadn’t seen a thing, couldn’t recall it if he had. Even in his scrupulous surveillance of the photographer, which he now regretted, innocent as it was, or as he’d meant it to be, he had seen, and yet not seen. His wife’s friend Lorraine and her odious husband had arrived at the barbecue about the same time he had, he already drunk and noisy and slapping backsides (Trevor’s own got a swat in passing: “Hey, Triv, you ole pirate, bottoms up!”), she looking a bit more haggard than usual and, usually a beer drinker, moving straight in on the hard stuff, filling a tall beer glass with bourbon. Trevor had been, idly, wondering why as she went lumbering by on her way to the gazebo in the rose garden, evidently headed out there to get besotted all alone, and what she’d said, pointing to her head, was: “I’m trying to turn it off.” “That’s funny,” he’d replied without even thinking, “I’m trying to turn it on.” She’d paused for a moment to smile at that and he’d had the strange feeling that she understood him perfectly, might indeed be the only person in the world who did or ever could. And then she was gone, replaced by the banker and his wife, who wanted to know if he’d heard about the arrest of the photographer for exposing himself at the mall and about his wife who had left him and was said to be on some sort of wild crime spree. “They say she’s got big as a barn and has run off with the drugstore simpleton!” Trevor could add a pertinent tidbit or two, but it gave him a headache just thinking about what he’d done and what he’d seen, or thought he had (when was that?), and his good eye began to throb, so he tsk-tsked along with them, then excused himself (“Doctor’s orders, heh heh!”) to go fill up his gin glass again. When his wife Marge came out, she handed him a dollar bill and asked him to keep it for her but not to spend it, she had in mind making somebody eat it. She didn’t even seem to notice his eyepatch, she was in such a blind rage. And she looked drained, big wet patches in her armpits, her long face creased and sagging a
s though suddenly aged by a dozen years, fatigue attacking her like her appetites did, or like her enthusiasms did on better days, full frontally and without mercy. Lorraine came in from the rose garden and, after a moment during which she refilled her glass, she said: “But isn’t that blackmail, Marge?” “No, Lorraine,” Marge said grimly, “it’s politics.” Trevor didn’t know what they were talking about, but supposed it was bad news, and wondered if it was Lorraine who had put his wife up to this harebrained idea of running for mayor, but Lorraine glowered at him and said: “Are you kidding?” He topped up his glass, plunked in a cube, and went over to the grill where John, looking burly in his vest and jeans, his bronzed chest exhibiting a rich crop of curly white hair (Trevor was wondering about John’s wife: had no one else noticed?), was directing the caterers in broiling hamburgers, hotdogs, chops, and small steaks. Young Kevin, the burrheaded manager of the country club, had good-naturedly donned an oilcloth apron over his silvery blue golf shirt and lemon-colored pants to lend John a hand, and the busty gum-smacking blonde he’d brought (“Both she and the shirt are from our new line at the pro shop!” he’d grinned on introducing her) now turned to Trevor and said: “Hey! Cool! Eyepatches are so sexy! How did you lose it?” “Lose it?” “Your eye, silly!” “Ah, the first time?” “Sure, the first time. How many times can you lose an eye?” He hesitated. But she was gazing up at him with such sweet abandon, he found it was contagious. He smiled. “Oh, well, I killed someone.” “Yeah? No kidding! On purpose?” “Not exactly. Sort of. The possibility just presented itself and, not really thinking, I took it.” “Wow! That’s so romantic!” she sighed, and leaned against him, pulling a string of gum out from between her teeth and putting it back in again. Kevin, turning the meat on the grill with plastic-handled tongs, winked at him over his shoulder. Next, he thought, I will tell her about my career as a, well, a private eye. “Why is it always other people who have the groovy lives?”