John's Wife: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  Dutch, from beneath this six-ring circus, had a similar view, through the girl’s unwashed hair, of his tit-fucking buddy’s flaming head, but though stoned, he knew it merely to be the haloing effect of the gas lantern overhead. Dutch harbored no illusions. Things were what they were. There was no magic. Not even in Harvie’s hallucinogens. Life and the mechanics of life were the same thing. He liked to keep his distance, keep his eye on it. At that moment he was lying on his back on the mattressed kitchen table with his dick up the ass of a young girl, ceremonial proxy (he knew, they all knew) for the bride-to-be, but he would just as soon have had someone else where he was and be watching it all from an easy chair. Wouldn’t have all this fucking weight pressing down on him, for one thing, or be rubbing testimonials with a freaking Hard Yard between the girl’s quivering thighs and thus between his own as well, risking a multi directional scattershot shower of cum from all the others. Well, anything for old John. This stag night’s entertainment, just climaxing, was Dutch’s personal wedding gift to his old battery mate, that and the special wedding party rate at the downtown Pioneer Hotel, owned by Dutch’s old man. Dutch and John went back to childhood when Dutch caught John in Little League. They’d been through school together and a lot more besides. The hotel went back much further of course, but not, as some thought, to pioneer days, though some kind of hostelry may have been appended to the livery stable that once occupied the spot, according to an archive photo. The Railway Saloon stood there during the days when a spur was laid to town, but both were gone now, and some time after the Great War the Pioneer Hotel was built in anticipation of a boom that never happened, not in these parts. Dutch’s granddad picked it up at a bankruptcy auction, ran it as a bar and roominghouse until a new war gave it life again, the linens dating from that brief revival. John’s wedding party was its last hurrah. A few years later when the old man died, the two pals struck a deal and John tore it down and built a bank and office block there, Dutch moving out to catch the highway trade with his new motel.

  Floyd stayed out there when he first hit town. The motel had just been built, you could smell the fresh-laid cinderblocks and the carpet glue. Booked in for a night, stayed for three weeks, then moved into town, hitting a bit of luck rare in his life, so rare he was never able to say for sure after whether it had been good or bad. Floyd, on the mend from mean times, had in desperation grabbed up several sales jobs, peddling a versatile cheapjack line that ranged from coolers and cosmetics to brushes, Bibles, and magical potions for men afflicted with baldness and loss of vigor. He stopped in at the local hardware store to push his range of screwdriver sets and do-it-yourself rockingchair kits, which he’d had a bit of luck with in these independent backwater operations, often starved for a gimmick to beat the chains, but now all too few and far between. There was a tall broad-shouldered guy in there with his sleeves rolled up who looked skeptically down his slightly broken nose at Floyd, picked up one of the screwdrivers, and bent it double with his bare hands. “This stuff’s junk,” he said. “Hell, I know it,” Floyd acknowledged with a shrug, glancing around. “I do believe in the do-it-yourself line, though, and I don’t see enough of that in here. You should ought to have an auto parts section, too. You’re away behind the times.” The guy studied him a moment. He looked like he might be about to take a swing, so Floyd turned to go, figuring on maybe a bowl of chili and a piece of pie at the cheap cafe next door, but the guy stopped him. “Wait a minute. You want regular work? My manager just quit. I’m looking for somebody to run this store.” Floyd paused, loath to get pushed around, especially by a young shit, still wet behind the ears, but startled by the offer and the amazing timing and needing the job. He didn’t even know how he was going to pay his overnight motel bill. “I got a job. But I’ll think on it.” “I haven’t got time to fuck around, friend. I mean right now. On with the overalls or out the goddamn door.” Floyd sighed, gazed round the dusty old store, peeled off his checkered jacket. “Let me see if they’re my size.” John covered his motel bill for three weeks while he looked for a house. He called his wife Edna who didn’t believe him until he sent her a bus ticket to help him join in the house search. She was so happy once she got to town, she asked for it for the first time in a decade. It made Floyd’s heart swell and fill his chest to see her all flushed and eager like that, she almost looked a girl again.

  Dutch saw her, too. Not much to see, but he was testing out his two-way mirrors still, and the salesman gave her quite a ride, enough to get off on anyway while waiting for a better show. Of which plenty to come, to spend a phrase. He’d seen it all, Dutch had, over the dozen years since then, a seamless flow: Marriage nights, adulteries, group gropes. Old guys taking virgin blood. Young kids fumbling. Child sex, dog sex, toilet sex, you name it. Rapes and whippings, faggots and dykes. Gangbangs. Incest. But mostly forlorn meat-beaters, all alone. Melancholy places, highway motels. A lot of fucking solitary sadness, as Dutch knew well. Some used fancy gadgetry, especially the women, others anything at hand. Dutch liked the improvisors best, left stuff around for them like bait to use, but learned more from the others. Sometimes he wanted to reach out and pat a quivering unknuckling ass, say well done, knowing then how God must feel, having to keep his distance, else spoil the show. Couldn’t even use the spectacle as a turn-on for a fuck or bring a buddy in for laughs, as in the old days at the Palace Theater, that’d be the end of it. He used to think that what God went for, if there was a God, was all the stories, why else would He keep watching, but now he thought there were no stories, only one: this ceaseless show and he/He who watched it. Or maybe Dutch had the wrong seat in the house. For stories, he eventually came to believe, somehow always had to do with numbers, numbers and sequence, and maybe this was God’s game, too, having started maybe with one and two and set them humping, but having long since gone on from there, Dutch in his innocence sitting still in the kiddie rows with his useless dick in his hands like a fishing pole, the real stories having all moved elsewhere. The only other who knew about the Back Room mirrors was John, having installed them for Dutch when he built the place, compensation for his lost Palace. Saved a couple of seats from the old moviehouse, too, and the banner that hung in the lobby: “Where the Movies Are Still the Movies.” John got no delight in ogling what he couldn’t get his organ into, but sometimes used the room when opening and closing deals, lodging clients and adversaries there, his interest not in bottoms but in bottom lines, and so closer to the notion Dutch had of story, or maybe the notion’s inspiration. John rarely dropped by himself, just let Dutch tape the conferences and calls.

  Which was how John found out about his father-in-law’s attempt a year or so ago at the time of their civic center squabble to wrest his construction firm away, the thankless old fossil. Could have wiped John out. It would never have happened if Audrey were still alive, she the smart one in that pair, and loyal to John who’d helped her double their retirement fortune with his genius for investment, a fortune funding now Barnaby’s callous raid. Behind the wedding vows all those years before lay other contracts, silent shifts of wealth and property, unseen by most but sending ripples of rumor and anticipation through the town as in election years or before state championships or raffle draws. John’s ancestors had come to town as harness makers and blacksmiths, his great-great-grandfather a manufacturer of horse troughs and owner of the town’s first hardware store, or at least that was the legend. Paint and wallpaper had soon been added, a real estate agency and a sheet metal company, and his father Mitch had got into heating, refrigeration, and air-conditioning, landing lucrative wartime contracts through his political connections, even though almost everything had to be subcontracted out. Mitch had plowed his profits back into minerals, banks, and land, cheap farmland mostly, bought at mortgagors’ auctions and become prime sites when they put the highway through. Mitch had kept the land and investments but given John the family businesses to use as tokens in his nuptial dealings with the builder, a simple exchange that gave the boy a qu
arter of the new amalgamated construction firm and related enterprises, his wife’s power-of-attorney forms effectively making it a half. When Audrey died, they each, thanks to a will John had helped her to draft, had thirds, and John, then in his thirties and chafing at the bit, set about easing his grieving father-in-law into an early and hopefully distant retirement. Old Barnaby was a builder famous for his solid constructions, most of the best houses in town had been built by him, but he was slow and too expensive, such craftsmanship was for the rich, a limited market in such a town as this, and out of step with the throw-away times. John understood the common need, wanted to build not houses but whole developments, his own an art of most for least, quick, cheap, and functional, disdaining the vain illusions of perpetuity, a view which Barnaby understood but poorly, so causing them endless friction. And then, just when John had overreached himself in his civic center and newest mall constructions and faced a cash-flow crunch, there came an irresistible offer from an unexpected source: an upstate client of his sorehead cousin Maynard, an industrial and commercial paving company, looking for a merger. Their other chips included an insulation and roofing company, a small tile manufacturer, and a line in septic tanks and cesspools, as well as real estate; they wanted only thirty percent of the final package and were offering a three hundred grand cash investment to close the deal. It seemed too good to be true. “They think you’re hot,” said Maynard with a sour shrug, which John found he could only half believe. As they approached the signing stage and the negotiators came to town, John offered them free lodging at Dutch’s motel, joined Dutch in the old movie seats in the Back Room for once to watch the show, see who turned up and what got said. He figured there had to be a card they hadn’t shown yet. He hadn’t expected it, though, to be his father-in-law.

  Maynard II, who had helped old Barnaby cook up the deal to get his company back, stolen from him by John, was not, it’s true, a happy man. It was he who’d caught the garter at the famous wedding when John’s fraternity brother shied from it, mindful not of its alleged foretellings but of the sweet warm leg from which it came; he who, having finally two years later, third time lucky, passed the bar, had then, feeling magnaminous, wed the gatherer of the bride’s bouquet, public boobs, bad rep, and all, a marriage that had lasted less than a year, though it had seemed a century or two longer than that; and he who, with one exception, loathed all women only slightly less than he loathed all men, that exception not being the thriftless screamer who was his present legal mate and mother of his only son. It might be said that Maynard had courted John’s wife all the six years before her marriage, her four in high school and two beyond, though as Maynard had no gift at courting, only he could have known that was what he was doing. Certainly she could have had no inkling, though she must have noticed he was always there, humble and serviceable as a pencil sharpener or a cafeteria tray. One day, the happiest of his life perhaps, she turned to him suddenly, the great distance between them dissolving for a moment as her gaze uncharacteristically penetrated his, and said (he’d just rethreaded and tightened the chain on her bicycle): “Maynard”—she always called him Maynard, even in casual haste, never “Nerd” or “Junior” as the others did—“Maynard, you’re really very sweet.” Or at least that was what she seemed to say, he could not be sure, his ears were ringing so. He thought for a moment then she was going to kiss him, a thought that nearly made him let go in his corduroys, but she only squeezed his hand (a hand that for some time after went unwashed) and then, as though without transition, she was gone again, their torrid romance ended when not yet begun. She married in due time his cross-cousin John, a ruthless cocksman who’d systematically cracked half the hymens in high school, as though he’d bought or won the rights to them, what did he need another for? The heartless egotistical hardballing sonuvabitch, how could he help but hate him?

  Thus, though most men admired John, a model for all men, there were many among them who also feared him some, and even those who, resenting him for his usurpations, mistrustful of his success and power, would have been glad to see him fall, feeling the relief of a balance struck, as when gangsters or presidents die, or wars disturb the dull interminable peace.

  But not Waldo. No, Jesus, he’d be dead without that beautiful bastard, John was all that stood between Waldo and the awful abyss, a mighty rock in a weary land, may he live and prosper to the end of time. Waldo was not from this town. He and John had been drinking buddies at college. Waldo had brought John into the fraternity, had protected him from most of the pledge horseshit, seen to it that John succeeded him in the chapter presidency. Those were the days, oh man, playing ball, boozing, screwing sorority girls, then all-night bridge and poker till the break of dawn, he and Long John and Knucks and Beans and Brains and old Loose Bruce, a fuck-off’s golden age. Waldo, in love with those times, couldn’t leave them, was still raising hell and drifting drunkenly through a series of worsening sales jobs, dragging Lollie and the kids about, when he ran into John at a home builders show in Chicago and overnight became an Assistant Vice President in Charge of Sales for a number of John’s enterprises. Now about all he did was preside over John’s local paint and wallpaper business and run an errand now and then, like the one that helped to nail wicked old Barn, but he knew, whatever happened, shit, old John, good brother, would take care of him.

  John’s fraternal succor both rankled Waldo’s wife Lorraine and reconciled her in some small part to her wretched fate: how had a class act like herself—once voted “Most Likely to Marry a Millionaire,” a B-plus lit major, and a hotshot on the tennis courts—ended up a desexed overweight smalltown hausfrau chained to a shopping basket, three of the world’s most unabashed underachievers, and a prehistoric Ford stationwagon off Stu’s used-car lot, suffering from crankcase drip and a fatal skin disease? She should have left the sodden deadbeat she’d wed—madly, after a wild party—years ago, before she met him in fact, but not only were there the two kids to think about, tedious little louts though they were, the truth was, her lot once cast, her options were few. Alimony would have been zip in those shiftless years adrift, jobs she could have tolerated or even applied for were few, and the mirror on the wall told her plain she’d been condemned to a brief bloom: one pollination and the “Here’s Lollie!” show was over, nothing but bracken and stinkweeds after, only a drunk in a dark room could ever again get up a semi-tumescent interest. Which was how she got knocked up the second time, not even sure Waldo knew who he was with when, like a bushel of old winter apples, he fell on her, scattering himself mushily in all directions. So she was relieved to have someone come to their rescue, even if, as rescues went, it was a pretty half-assed affair, regretting only that that someone had to be the callous sonuvabitch who took the only maidenhead she ever had. Not that she missed it—what the hell, let it go, good riddance, it was just getting in her way anyhow—but she really didn’t want ever to see the capricious bastard again, much less live in the same goddamned town with him. Made her feel vulnerable and exposed, as though she’d stepped out naked from behind the doctor’s screen and found herself and her sagging ass on Main Street. She still didn’t know where to look when they were in the same room together, and in mixed-doubles foursomes on the golf course, it cost her a stroke each time John glanced her way or handed her a tee for one she’d splintered. Did he get a charge out of that? Probably, who knows. She sometimes had the weird feeling that John had brought to this town, not Waldo, but her, and no doubt others like her as well, not out of any sense of caring for an old flame (that was flattering herself), and not just to make her eat shit and feel the fool either, though she wouldn’t put it past him, but just because, a smalltowner to the bone, he’d started up these stories and wanted to keep them all around him, see how they all came out.

  Beatrice would have been startled by Lorraine’s insight, had she known of it, so similar was it to one of her own. For her husband Lennox, too, whom Waldo called Knucks and the townsfolk Reverend Lenny, had by John been raised from the
dead, brought here, and restored to a station of eminence and dignity not his since his days as fraternity chaplain and pledge master, and she, too, thought she might have been the secret beneficiary of John’s unexpected brotherly love—his midlife atonement, as it were, for the dissolute excesses of his youth. For which, at least as they affected her, traumatic as it had all been at the time, she forgave him. Lennox’s feelings, she knew, were more ambivalent, as they always were, part of his character really, a trait that sometimes approximated moral weakness, though now in his new pastoral career, he had learned to dissemble a certain steadfastness in his convictions, an appearance—most of the time—of equanimity and resolve, and so was held by his congregation in general good repute. They saw him, she believed, as a good man, honest and forthright, gentle in his chastisements, understanding at hospital bedsides and burials, artistic in his church services, if perhaps a bit vague and overly intellectual, and they saw her as the good man’s wife and helpmeet, his organist and choir director and mother of his three children. Most of which was nearly true.

  Floyd, who taught Sunday school in Reverend Lenny’s church, thought of him as a candy-ass and a prevaricator, a pulpit flimflammer not to be trusted, sinful in not hating sin enough. The silly prat probably didn’t even know what it was. Did Floyd know? Too well. Still had nightmares, blood on his hands. This town, the church, the hardware store: a wall Floyd was throwing up between himself and his past. He was still tough as the nails he sold, old Floyd was, but now he was tough for the Lord. He and Edna had been in town a couple of years already and felt like locals when the new preacher turned up, some old college bud of John’s, people said, just like that seedy bozo Waldo, who came wallowing in the year after, tongue out and wagging his broad behind, and whose only serious job, as far as Floyd could tell, was to sub for John from time to time on the compulsory bridge nights, the female knee then under the table as alluring as a bend in a rusty drainpipe. These people all made Floyd feel old. And vulnerable. John was taking over the family construction company in those years, encouraged by his mother-in-law, not yet dead then but soon to be, and Floyd saw less and less of him, cut from the party invite lists, ignored at the old family hardware store while bigger things got done. Even Stu and they had drifted apart what with poor old Winnie dead and gone, these were lonely times for him and Edna, potluck suppers at the church, the bowling league, and TV quiz shows mostly what they had here of social life. Sometimes Floyd felt like taking a big hammer and smashing every cussed thing in sight. Even that wall he was so painstakingly building. He wanted to shove his fingers deep into the bloodred-rimmed fingerholes of his personalized bowling ball and roll a strike of such terrific force that nothing, nothing, was left standing after.