John's Wife: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  By the time Gretchen won the hydrant-painting competition, her husband Cornell, though the father of her six children, including triplets born just three months before the contest, much to Grandpa’s great delight (thus the beaming smile on the fireplug’s cartoon face), was little more than a peripheral nuisance to the family, which centered now around the thickly bespectacled lady from the north with the anguished grimace and the withered leg. Lumby loved her, Oxford did, as did all her babies of course (and there were more to come), and so did even, from a distance, her brother-in-law Harvie, grateful that his lonely sister had found true companionship at last, and so, with brotherly gratitude, loving the beloved. And Corny, who spent his mind-bombed days behind pin-ball machines and pornographic magazines, loved her, too, as best he could in his woeful way, having less than all his marbles, as was often said—a strange boy stranger yet as man: his thinning hair uncombed, his eyes unfocused, the hairs of his blond moustache hanging down over his pink mouth like a kind of wispy curtain, nothing but nonsense heard from behind it. With cause, of course, were his marbles lost and scattered, as all who knew his Paris story knew, but that boy was born to strangeness, not all there from the get-go, and in more marbly ways than one, as his sister Lumby would say, speaking euphemistically, she unable to figure out, given his little problem, just how the little sperm machine got the job done, so to speak. Though get it done he clearly did, his bride’s fecundity, even at this early stage in her parturient career, already notorious in the town and soon to become a local legend.

  One who was not surprised by the frequent ripening of the crippled drugstore lady’s womb was Pauline, who had seen Corny’s little problem, as his sister called it, from a different perspective. Though she and Corny had been in high school at the same time, just a class or two apart, Pauline had always thought of him as light-years younger, not only because she felt so much older than almost all the boys she knew, but because Corny was such a backward little shrimp, hanging out mostly with gradeschool children right up into her senior year in high school, which was when she began noticing him staring at her from across the room with that confused wall-eyed look of puppydog desire she had seen drift across the faces of successive generations of boys like the special effects in werewolf movies. She had known by all her five senses his two brothers before him, Harvie, the one they called Hard Yard, being off only by an inch or two, and Yale, who was so sweet, and she supposed, by the looks he was giving her, she would eventually know their little brother in like manner as well. This came to pass, though not without a great deal of hesitation on Corny’s part, a lot of time-wasting teasing and pretended hostility and disinterest and silly snickering in the corridors, before he finally turned up at the trailer park on his bicycle one twilit summer evening with two of his little friends, asking if she would like to go riding with them. Luckily, her Daddy Duwayne was not around, he would have eaten them alive. She asked them how much money they had and what they wanted. The idea of needing money had apparently not occurred to them: nothing but small change among the three of them. But what they wanted was small change, too: they merely wanted (after a long list of false wants was got through, starting with the supposed fun of a bike ride) to see. So she took them around behind the trailer and dropped her jeans and underpants, raised her tee shirt. Their frozen, pop-eyed, red-faced, grimacing expressions were so comicbook-like they made her laugh. “You can touch if you want,” she said, feeling generous. Corny held back but the others poked about gingerly like little kids trying to guess the contents of wrapped Christmas presents, and eventually Corny, timidly, joined in. Even body hair seemed strange to them, though one said squeakily he had seen his mother’s and it was just like that, as though this were some kind of brag. She chased them off finally with threats of her violent daddy’s imminent return, but they were back almost every week after that, with more money now and with more boldness in their explorations. They made her bend over and touch her toes, squat, lie down and spread her legs, roll over, get up on her knees and elbows, lie on her side with one knee in the air, press up on her shoulders with her knees by her ears, as they squeezed and patted and palpated and dipped their fingers in wherever they could. Then one evening, just for fun, she told them it was their turn, they had to take their clothes off now and show her. They went rigid with fear, and when she reached for one of their belt buckles, they ran off, leaving her giggling in her own puddle of cast-off clothes and feeling about a hundred years old. But then, later, Corny came back alone and, though he had seemingly lost his power to speak, he indicated by his undone belt buckle that she was to undress him and so she did, remarking to herself, as she took what she found down there into that cavity which had made her locally famous and by which she logged what simple memory she kept of that half of the town’s population, how much more interesting it was, even for an incurious person such as herself, to know mankind in all its variety than to surrender, like John’s wife, say, to the experience of one alone, no matter how beautiful.

  Pauline’s loving embrace of the world’s variety was not unlike that, if not of his wife, of John himself, though whereas Pauline was fundamentally interested in men’s zingers, as she often called them—a childish corruption of Daddy Duwayne’s “old sinner,” which, because it perversely pleased him, stuck—John was fundamentally uninterested in any zinger but his own, and in that only with respect to where, variously, he might safely and pleasurably put it. To be fair, it could be said that John did therefore share Pauline’s fundamental preference for a variety of sexual partners, but John’s love of the world’s novelty did not end there, nor was it even fundamentally sexual unless all human activities might be reduced to displacements for sexual ones, as some believed—Alf, for example, or Dutch, or Lorraine in her more bookish highbrow moments, more and more infrequent as the years rolled on. Moreover, even in the matter of sexual partners, there was a catholicity in Pauline’s taste which John, obeying some unstated aesthetic, did not espouse, to his discredit perhaps from a democratic point of view; but then, the democratic point of view was never one that appealed to John very much, though he paid lip service to it and found it profitable. John felt at one with the universe and the universe was not democratic, it was an uninhibited exhibition of colliding forces, of which a bruising game of football was only the barest echo, but an echo at least, which was why he loved it, and the less refereeing the better, a good fuck likewise. Democracy was a sad little human defense mechanism for the inherently powerless against the powerful, a pipe dream and a failure for the most part, instigated by fear and perpetuated by pissants like his cousin Maynard. Or that butch buttinski Marge. It sought to diffuse, curb, and redistribute power, but it did not, as John knew full well and to his daily increase, succeed. It was a joke. Like that variation on the old “put out or get out” line about the guy (old Stu always liked to hear John tell this one) in the beat-up Ford pickup who stops for a girl walking down a lonely country road crying, she explaining through her tears how she’d been taken out into the woods by a guy in a Lincoln Continental (it was a Cadillac when John had first heard it) who had presented her with that cruel and infamous choice, which of course to her was no choice at all. The guy in the truck tells her to hop in, he’ll take her to town, and they go bouncing and jolting and rattling down the road until finally the girl asks to be let out. “Right now, mister, I mean it!” she yells above the clatter. “I’d rather be raped any day in a Lincoln, than get jerked off in a goddamn Ford!”

  Stu himself liked to tell this joke when John was not around, occasionally substituting a Chevy or a Toyota for the Ford, though for some reason the joke had a way of stalling out on him when he did that. Another joke he liked to tell, one of his favorites, was the one about the oldtimer who, hollering out, “Mind if I play through, boys?,” goes skipping past the young fellows on the golf course, whacking out his long straight drives, then drinks them all under the table back at the clubhouse after, prompting one of them to ask: “Whoo! You still in s
uch fine whack in everything you do, old man?” “Aw, hell no,” he confesses, lighting up a nine-inch stogie. “Old age is a bitch, son. Take last night, for example. Woke my little darlin’ up about midnight and asked her how about it, and she says: ‘How about what? You just had it at ten o’clock and eleven o’clock, you old goat!’ That’s the trouble, see—goddamn memory’s goin’!” Stu’s little darlin’ was Daphne, and although she was a newer model, she was already, like her loving hubby and the principal heroes of his jokes, a pretty heavy guzzler, had been since their cheatin’ days, as Stu liked to call them, it was partly what brought them together, that and her ability to rouse back then his anesthetized pecker. Until recently, Stu was about the only one who ever saw the dear girl sober, and then he was usually soused to the eyeballs himself, which was just as well, since it could be a pretty demoralizing experience, being around Daphne when she didn’t have a healthy toot on, something more common of late, sad to say, have to remember to fire that young mechanic. Stu and Daphne laced their breakfast juice with gin every morning (Daphne called the drink “Amazing Grace,” Stu his day’s choke start) and sometimes never got around to supper at all. During weekdays Stu had his Ford-Mercury car lot to keep him busy, Daphne her phonecalls, but there was always a bottle reassuringly to hand for each of them, a comfortable old habit that helped to make their evenings mellow if not altogether coherent or easy to recollect after. Goddamn memory, as Stu would rumble with a grin, elbow sliding on the bar, trying to remember what it was he had to remember to do.

  Daphne, once briefly John’s little darlin’, had also been, more or less at the same time, John’s wife’s best friend and so maid of honor at her wedding, the day that her present ginwinner reckoned as Day One of the romance that brought him back from the living dead, though years were to transpire before she could get around to that little bit of prestidigitation, having to get fucked over first by a passing parade of other nameless pricks, so she was nearly thirty when she started solacing old Stu, he not yet a widower but soon to be. The first thing she ever did for him was to help him back up when he fell off his barstool, a favor he returned more than once, they were made for each other. Not, however, that she supposed so at John’s wedding ten years earlier, when, sick of the old redneck’s drooling half-witticisms at her side while she was trying, with an infuriating lack of success, to get the best man’s fickle attention, she whopped old Stu in the chops with a piece of cake, an event now part of the family legend. That still didn’t shut the relentless sonuvabitch up, and when, as a mimed punchline to some slurred dumb-ass hillbilly joke, he poked his long florid nose in her cleavage, yuk-yukking in his plate after, she coolly dipped her hand in the soupy bowl of strawberries and cream, turned, and licking his weedy ear to distract him, grabbed him in the crotch, leaving a vivid handprint that he apparently, falling in love (so he told her years later), never noticed, though everyone else did, not least that old warhorse he was married to: his colorful forced exit was admired by all, Daphne’s lone triumph of the day. Centuries later, she still thought of John’s wife as her best friend, and though what with her daily excursions into oblivion it could hardly be said that, besides old Stu, Daphne had any real friends anymore, in a way it remained true, because when Daphne went into orbit she often got into long gossipy telephone chats with John’s wife, just like in the old days, the only difference being that now John’s wife was not always on the other end of the line.

  Though most of the townsfolk who knew her would have agreed that Stu’s first wife, whom Daphne called a warhorse when not worse, must have been pretty hard to live with, not everyone would have blamed Winnie, that blowhard crapulous car dealer of hers being no bargain either (Stu would cheerfully admit this with a crooked grin, blinking his pale reddish lashes as though amazed at the wisdom of it, then tell the one about the old fleabag who swallowed a razor blade), and few, even among those who loved her least and laughed most at the jokes about her, would have painted her so blackly as did Stu and Daphne, who seemed sometimes almost to be trying to ward off her lingering presence by ridicule and invective even a decade after she was dead. Trevor’s wife Marge in particular was quick to leap to Winnie’s defense, both before and after the deplorable accident out at the old humpback bridge (an accident that changed Otis’s life, at least for a time), speaking of her as an essentially noble and principled woman, driven to a kind of impotent rage by the town’s antiquated and oppressive mores, of which her husband Stu was the perfect bonehead sexist exemplar. A woman of culture who had married a hick and a boor. Of course, Marge was said to be something of a dragon herself, and Winnie was her aunt. Ellsworth’s account of Winnie’s “tragic untimely death” in The Town Crier spoke of “her many cultural, civic, and religious activities” and of “this great inestimable loss to the community,” but in truth he hardly knew the woman, or her husband either for that matter, being a nondriver, nor a golfer either, it was a jaded cliché-ridden obituary, could have been about anybody. More than announcing a woman’s accidental death, it announced that something had died in him. Obits of course were a newsman’s ceaseless charge. Sooner or later, all, all pass away and, passing, exact their column inches no less than their graveyard footage. Ellsworth kept a file cabinet stuffed with bios ready to be plucked for print when a citizen fell, but truth to tell he was never ready when it actually happened, as surprised by others’ deaths as he would one day be by his own. That file cabinet, once his refuge, now made his heart sink when his eye fell on it and caused him to doubt the folly of his having cast himself as the town historian, he who could gather all the stuff of stories but could no longer find any story in the stuff, an apostle of the word fallen from grace, a deserter trapped in the trenches. More than anything it was the mind-numbing volume of mazy detail, the surfeit of story, life’s disorderly overabundance not death’s neat closure, that defeated him. That filing cabinet had no rear panel: it opened out upon infinity. When he reached into one of its crammed drawers he was reaching toward the abyss, and so toward madness. At the time of Winnie’s death, he had been back in this town for a dozen years and his fortieth birthday, no matter which way he turned, was staring him baldly in the face. Probably his best line in the obit in fact was when he compared her death to that of an infant: “Her life, at forty, barely begun, was, like innocence abused, abruptly and cruelly ended when …” Ellsworth decided to dig out his old novel-in-progress, which he was now calling The Artist and His Model, and start working on it again.

  Few in town had the dimmest notion as to what Ellsworth was talking about in that obituary, though most thought it grand. That at least was the opinion of Floyd’s wife Edna, she being another who got on passably with the deceased when she was still alive. When Edna and Floyd first moved to town, Winnie and Stu were their nearest friends, the only ones they had that first year really, most folks polite and kind to them in a Christian sort of way, but more like how people treated coloreds nowadays than truly come-on-over, kick-your-shoes-off friendly; Floyd felt it too, saying sometimes it made him almost homesick for truck stops and motels. They had just moved into their first rented house, everything still a sorry sight, no curtains on the windows yet and mice in the stove, when Winnie drove by to invite them over for supper that first time. Except for a cocktail party at John’s house which was more like an arrest than an invitation and where even the hired help made them feel unwashed, it was their first invitation out in donkey ears, since back when Floyd first hit the road really and started up all his troubles—Edna in her excitement found herself all dressed up about two hours before and having to use the clattery old toilet with its stained bowl and chipped wooden seat every ten minutes or so, leaving the door open because there was no light in there, Floyd teasing her and saying: “Hell, he’s seen my old heap, he just wants to sell us a car, that’s all.” But he was pleased and excited, too. Because true or not, it didn’t matter. It meant that for the first time since they could hardly remember they were part of something more than just ea
ch other, which sometimes honestly wasn’t all that much, it was almost like getting born again. And Floyd was right, that man did try to sell him a car, didn’t just try, he succeeded, but not without some fun about it, and in friendly accents that took Edna down-home again and almost made her cry for feeling so lost and uprooted. Stu poured some whiskey for him and Floyd after supper, put on some Cajun fiddle music, told some jokes, including one about a rich Texan he said he once knew who was so big he wouldn’t fit in his coffin until they gave the corpse an enema, and then they were able to bury him in a shoebox and had room for his boots as well, which made Edna, who had been constipated ever since she got here (she was bothered somehow by all those motel mirrors), giggle so hard she nearly fell off her chair, Floyd remarking as he sucked a cube that it sounded like the damn guy he was working for, setting her off all the more, God help, even Winnie joining the silly laughter now, and then Stu said he ought to give a Ford product a try. Floyd, winking at Edna, just excusing herself to go use the bathroom for a while, said he only drove General Motors cars on the road, having an old soldier’s respect for rank, but all right, he’d try a used car from him, about five years old, say, and if the results were satisfying, he’d be back later for a trade-in. Which was how they got their deep purple Mercury. Truth to tell, it wasn’t all that grand a car, they hardly drove it away but it needed a new clutch and the brakes relined, but they went on after that, buying all their cars from Stu, even after poor Winnie got killed in a wreck a couple of years later, it seemed like they owed old Stu that much, no matter that his young new wife never had them over anymore.