John's Wife: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  About the same time that helluva goddamn son-of-a-Mitch was slipping out of the Country Tavern with five of his pals for what they were calling “a prayer meeting,” his helluva goddamn father, fresh black stogie in his jowls, was drifting smugly, if somewhat boozily, out of the old Pioneer Hotel, having conducted a little communion service of his own, closing down the bar in there while closing a deal with some of his capitol pals, in town for tomorrow’s wedding, a deal that would route the new proposed highway across some twenty miles of his own land holdings, opening up hundreds of acres out there for development—this area was growing by leaps and bounds, and God bless the bounder who leapt first, amen. Mitch foresaw that the rest of his life would be spent in this enterprise and those that would follow naturally thereupon, and he was proud of it. What were the fucking pioneers themselves, after all, but early land developers? He was taking his place in the great national epic, and he felt like a goddamned hero, a saint, a giant among pygmies. He was feeling “high,” as the young folks liked to say nowadays (and he wasn’t so old himself, goddamn it), high and dry, too much so certainly to turn in just yet. His wife Opal was home already, driven there earlier by the bride’s parents, as were most of the locals past the age of twenty-five or so, and the younger ones were all out at the Country Tavern or else at parties of their own, so the prospect facing this giant among pygmies, standing legs apart out there on the sidewalk in front of the darkening Pioneer Hotel and weaving just a bit, was one of solitude and impenetrable shadows and deep tranquillity. In short, no fun at all. It was at moments like this that Mitch missed the big city. Always somewhere to go, something to do, someone to get to know, in a Biblical manner of speaking. Nothing doing here even if something was doing: to wit, his old maxims about taking your trade out of town, sowing wild oats in distant fields, keeping hair pie off the local menu, and so on, all of which Mitch equated with family values, which he vigorously championed and rigorously (more or less rigorously) adhered to, as he planned to now, unsteady though he was. He considered taking a quiet midnight stroll in the park, still lit up across the way with its old-fashioned postlamps, get his feet back under him, as it were, but he remembered he was carrying a lot of weekend cash in his pocket. This was the sort of town where you could park your car (it was John’s little souped-up silver Mustang awaiting him, he saw, John had taken the Continental for the night) with the motor running, leave your house wide open when you left town for a week, drop your wallet in the street and get it back intact, always had been since it first got settled over a hundred years ago, but times were changing, and there were a lot of strangers in town now. Besides, he might interrupt something over there, a kiddy orgy under the bandstand or crazed drug addicts in the bushes, he’d heard rumors. That was why they were beefing up the police force. Ever since they had found what they said was an illegal substance in the car of those kids who got killed playing chicken on the highway out by the trailer park. It was a fucking shame the way families were falling apart these days, failing their responsibilities, Mitch thought, unlocking the Mustang and stumbling a bit as he struggled with the door. Couldn’t remember walking over to the car, but here he was. He took a deep pull on his cigar, blew smoke up at the flickering streetlamp overhead, getting his bearings, then lowered himself inside. Fucking bucket seats. Got one leg in all right, had problems with the second one. Whoo, felt like he was grappling with some kind of prehistoric beast (“Bucking fuck-it seats!” he said out loud to the night crowding around him, hoping to make it back away a bit), or else he’d grown the leg of an elephant, and he suffered a sudden pang of longing for his beautiful old prewar Packard, the one with the running board. He could crawl in and out of that fantastic machine when he was so drunk he couldn’t walk, and whether or not the goddamned thing was standing still. The trouble today, he thought, as he dragged the rest of him in out of the menacing night at last, hauled the door shut with an echoey whump (that reassuring running board on his old Packard had somehow reminded him once more of family values), and then fumbled, grunting, for the keys which he’d dropped on the floor, was that there was too much self-centeredness, not enough thought for the other guy, and especially the young. What the hell was happening to this country? If Mitch had his way, every time a kid got in trouble, he’d clap his old man’s ass in jail until it was sorted out. Teach the egocentric sonuvabitch a little goddamned civic virtue. Something Mitch (there they were—but where was the cigar? Jesus) would never have to face: his boy was a fucking prince. Had a wild hair or two, of course, wouldn’t be Mitch’s son if he didn’t, but John was a great kid, straight as they come. And now, hell (he found the cigar, scuffed at the sparks on the floor with the clutched keys, planted the dead stub back in his jowls, straightened up confusedly: felt like he’d fallen down a well somewhere), the boy was getting married, hard to believe. It was like things were speeding up somehow, how did we get here so fucking fast? Next thing you knew, he’d be a grandfather, and then … shit… But not yet. Not yet, goddamn it. Mitch turned the ignition, revved up from a gentle purr to a low growl, and pulled out into the lonely night, jaws clamped defiantly around the cigar. Not yet! He was glad to see John marry, of course (that’s right, dumbo, turn on the damned lights), and a good choice, lovely girl, Audrey’s kid, Homecoming Queen and all that, and he believed marriage would help John understand him better, help him appreciate his old dad’s steadfast whaddayacallit, forgive him his trespasses. So, yes, he was in a celebrative mood all round, Mitch was, and he realized that, in this mood (he was thinking about Audrey, the old prewar Packard-vintage model, so wild and beautiful—and now they were to be in-laws, who could have foreseen such a thing?), he was headed out toward the stag party at the Country Tavern. Now, he knew the last thing those young studs wanted was some old fucker hanging around, looking over their shoulders, he’d been the first to point that out to his peers when the lads took off from the hotel hours earlier, he had no intention of going out there, hell no, won’t go, and yet, here he was, the nose of the silvery beast (he tapped the accelerator and felt it spring forward with a throaty snarl) pointed unerringly toward that place like a well-trained birddog with a bone-on and getting up speed. Well, what the heck, wouldn’t hurt to drop in for a beer, unload a joke or two, let them know he was one of the boys at heart, a good guy they could count on in the clutches, then buy them a final round and, duty beckoning the lonely hero, roar off, chin up, into the melancholic night.

  Ellsworth had not, except for a general mention of the “weekend festivities,” reported on that stag party in his newspaper, The Town Crier, though he knew about it, or some of it anyway. It was not for reasons of taste that he omitted it from his coverage of the wedding, otherwise extensive if not in fact exhaustive—no, what did he care about such matters, he who had snubbed his nose at propriety all his life? Nor was it a factor that the father of the bride was his patron; the record must be kept, as Barnaby himself would say, no fudging, my boy, on that. The point was, Ellsworth was interested only in recording significant history, and a-historicity was the very raison d’être, he knew, of stag parties, and indeed of all such carnivalesque activities. It was his duty as the town chronicler to bear witness, not to mere surface excitements, but to history’s deeper design. Or so he told himself back in those early days, his file cabinets still as orderly then as a genre plot, more folders in them than documents and reassuringly comprehensive, like a local map of time. So, though Gordon for reasons of his own was rather keen on following through on the night’s more irregular activities, Ellsworth was satisfied (comedians excluded) with the formal wide-angle lens photographs of the rehearsal dinner, paid and posed for by the parents of the betrothed, and after these had been taken he led a reluctant Gordon back to his studio to discuss the photo coverage of the wedding itself on the morrow and to carry on with the conversation they had begun as boys some twenty years before. Gordon’s growing fascination with the irrational, the erotic, the sensational, the morbid bordered, Ellsworth felt, on porn
ography, and caused him to doubt his friend’s continued commitment to those higher artistic principles they had once so passionately held in common, and which Gordon still claimed, all evidence to the contrary, allegiance to. There was, for example, the bizarre series of pictures Gordon was taking at this time of his dying mother, no longer compos mentis or even continent, confined now to her old iron bed in one of the dismal little back rooms above the shop. Perhaps, like all men, Gordon was blind to his own transformations. Ellsworth suspected that photography itself, not in his judgment an art form at all, might be the efficient cause of this relapse, the effortless voyeuristic eye replacing the critical eye of the creative artist, who must construct, out of the void of a blank canvas, over and over again, ever afresh, his own space, forms, patterns of light and color, unaided by the easy accident of an opened lens.

  Pauline, who knew everything there was to know about ahistoricity, being a longtime native of those unlighted regions, also had cause to wonder about her husband’s artistic principles, not to mention the soundness of his mind, though this was sometime later, his mother whom she never knew passed on by then, her daddy jailed, John’s wedding ancient history, her own more recent but even more forgotten. Pauline, it should be said, was not a curious person. Teachers had often noted this with some dismay on her report cards. It was something Daddy Duwayne, ever her most influential mentor, had broken her of early on. Narcissistic men sometimes found this characteristic lessened their erotic enjoyment when with her, but most found it comforting. Being incurious, Pauline supposed all others, except maybe teachers, were as well, and it was not until little Corny and his friends started using her like an animated pop-up picture book that it occurred to her she might have something to offer to those wanting to see but not use, and willing to pay for it besides, and if she could not thereby wholly escape her ahistorical condition, she might, if fortune smiled, escape at least the trailer park. Had she not been by nature or by education so incurious, that first photo session, after Gordon had shooed Corny and his father and that poor little French girl out of the studio and locked the door, might right then have made her think twice about returning for another, but Pauline had long since grown accustomed to the eccentricities of the aroused male, and so not only came back for further sittings, so-called (sitting being what he rarely let her do), but in time moved in above the studio and, after the ruckus with Daddy Duwayne, married the photographer. By then, of course, she had given up on the glittering kingdom of the centerfold, just a childish fantasy anyway, she supposed, and had come to accept as her lot in life these safe dusty rooms overlooking Main Street, wherein she was, if not transported, at least more or less content. Gordon’s photos of her were much too unusual for the men’s magazines, needless to say—he kept trying to turn her into something other than what she was—nor would he have sent them there even had they been suitable. His photos of her, as with many others, were not for general viewing, but were kept in large thick albums in locked cabinets at the back of the shop. Others might have been curious about these albums, but Pauline of course was not. Though, like all artists, he was a bit peculiar, her husband, though he sometimes hurt her, rarely had much to say, and had a crazy way of staring, he had nevertheless taken good care of her and was, she believed, essentially a good man or anyway benign—at least that was how she felt up to the time that poor lady was killed at the humpback bridge and Gordon, obsessed with the accident and exhausted from overwork, uncharacteristically left some of his secret albums out and open where she could not help but see. One lot in particular gave her goosebumps. She decided to tell Otis about them the next time she saw him.

  This was not to be for some time, as it turned out, due to a religious experience suffered by the town’s police chief. After Duwayne’s arrest some four years before, Otis, not yet the chief, had picked Pauline up at the photo studio in his squad car and driven her out to the trailer park to ask her some questions about what he had found there in the course of his investigations. Though Pauline told it without emotion, it was a pretty sordid story of rape, child-battering, incest, torture, and all manner of filthy and unnatural sexual acts, all mixed up with her father’s mad evangelical harangues—sordid but also quite exciting: the next thing Otis knew he was getting sucked off again, and this time he didn’t cry. After that, he and Pauline visited the trailer more or less regularly. He picked up more of the story, ashamed that it was such a turn-on, and over time a kind of friendship grew up between them. Otis would ask her to show him exactly what it was her father did to her, she would get him to play the part of the father, though of course he would never really hurt her, and they would end up on the floor a little later in a sweaty cuddle, he telling her by then about his own boyhood, his troubles at home after his old lady walked out on them, the black moods his old man went through until finally he blew his stupid brains out, and then about his own marriage, too early probably, right out of the army, didn’t even know what it was all about before the kids started coming, but mostly about his job and about life down at the station, where he hoped to be promoted soon. She was a good listener, never asked questions, but remembered all the things he told her, making them seem important. She got married, he gave her and the photographer a nice present, his wife had more children that her husband photographed, the promotion came through, they went on meeting out at the trailer. It was like a second life they could visit from time to time, and so the months and years went by. But then one day he stepped out of the trailer, still buttoning up, and there was John’s wife. He was momentarily blinded as though suffering some kind of holy vision, his ears started to pop and ring, and he found himself, crazily, reaching for his revolver. Somehow, instinctively, he managed to slam the door shut behind him, hoping Pauline took the hint, and as his vision cleared he saw that John’s wife was not alone, but with some sort of committee of housewives. He still couldn’t hear what they were saying, but enough leaked through to suggest it had something to do with the town beautification program. The trailer park was an eyesore and they wanted to do something about it. He stood there with his circuits blown, nodding stupidly, a speechless imbecile trying to look serious, hoping only that his fly was done up but afraid to look. One of the women, squinting suspiciously, took a sharp look for him, then cast her skeptical gaze up at his face, seeming to peer straight through him and on into the trailer behind. This was the wife of the Ford-Mercury dealer. One night later she was dead. Grotesquely. Upside-down, blood leaking from her ears. But still staring. And the day after that, Otis arranged for a long weekend and went on religious retreat, promising the Virgin never to see Pauline again.

  Here is one of Gordon’s photographs of what Otis saw that night out at the bridge: Viewed in silhouetted profile through a shattered side door window against bright spotlights beamed down from the road above and bouncing off the trickling creek in which the crushed automobile lies, a head, partly submerged, dangles upside down from a broken neck, wearing the shallow creek water across its forehead like a flatcap or a mortar board. Headlamps pierce the night like a blind stare and, in the center of the photo, one high wheel provides a visual echo of the rainbow-arched bridge rising bleakly, upper right, into the dense dark sky above. On the left, a squat figure, also in silhouette and featureless except for thick spectacles ablaze with reflected light, descends the slope from the road above like some sort of otherworldly beast of prey, hunched over and knees bent as if about to pounce, while higher up in the center of the picture, near the foot of the concrete bridge, a scarecrowlike personage, well-lit and seen from the rear, slumps contortively, legs bandied and long arms draped over the shoulders of two white-jacketed helpers, his head fallen forward and out of view, so giving the impression of a headless man with loose airy limbs fluttering in the night breeze. This photograph, now in one of Gordon’s shelved backshop albums, is labeled simply “W-37,” suggesting that what is important is not the identity of the persons in the photograph or their stories or any conceivable meaning that might
be attached to the events displayed, but rather simply the composition itself: Time, a fraction of it, frozen into an aesthetically compelling pattern, and all there is to know. This austere view, however, is undermined by the photograph itself, for in it there is another figure, uniformed and proxy for the absent viewer, gazing out upon the scene from a position just below the foot of the bridge with a look of profound perplexity, his billed cap tipped back, seeming almost to turn his head from character to character in his effort to interpret what he sees before him. To locate, or to confirm, its meaning. Even the photographer seems part of the policeman’s intense study, which engages us as it engages him. Something is being revealed. What is it?

  “Honey, you can be the first to congratulate me,” Daphne was telling her best friend on the telephone the next morning, that day that Otis made his sacred vow. “I’m engaged again.” Her friend did not seem terribly impressed by this news. Of course, Daphne had been engaged half a dozen times at least over the last ten years, married thrice, it was not the sort of news that made the world shake. Still, Daphne had more to tell, just wait until she heard it all. Her last husband was Nikko, the pro out at the country club. That one didn’t last a year, but it wasn’t her fault, Nikko had vamoosed with that little fifteen-year-old exhibitionist, daughter of the town’s orthodontist, after the little fanny twitcher, already notorious for swimming topless at the country club pool, had scandalized the entire community by turning up at the Pioneers Day parade as an Indian princess dressed in nothing but beads and psychedelic body paint. When Nikko blew town, John brought in young Kevin, the present club pro and barkeep, prodigal son of a business crony, with whom Daphne enjoyed a brief consolatory if hazy fling. Probably John’s wife thought that’s who she was going to marry now. “No, not Kevin, sweetie, that’s been over for ages. Listen, Kevin’s approach shots are clever and he’s fun in the rough, so to speak, but the boy’s drives are short and choppy and he can never keep his eye on the ball, if you follow me. Pulls the flag too soon, too. No, I’ve been seeing—well, now don’t tell anyone, sugar, it wouldn’t look right, not yet, but let me put it this way, your old chum is going to be driving nothing but T-birds and Lincolns from now on. That’s right. Well, he’s old, I know, but that only makes him all the more appreciative, and believe me, appreciation is something I could use more of just now. I’ll be honest, when that shithead Nikko left me for that little high school kid, I realized suddenly that my ass was at least ten years out of date—I mean, god-damn it, honey, I’m not cute anymore. You’ve been lucky, it’s been harder for me. And besides—this is just between us girls, but as someone who’s got pretty high standards you’ll appreciate this—Old Stu’s hung like a horse. I kid you not. It’s a real old country-boy dong, the kind they tell jokes about. Admittedly it doesn’t have a lot of starch in it—mostly it just lies there, curled up like an old hounddog in front of the fire, as Stu says—but I’ve made it get up on its hind legs and do a few tricks, and old Stu’s so grateful he cries, and then I cry, too, and I realize if it’s not love as I’d always imagined it, what the hell, it’s love just the same. So you’re going to have to stand up there with me and the preacher one more time, can you bear it? Honest to God, sugar, I don’t know what we’d do without you around here. And at least that cute fraternity-boy preacher’s new, so we’ll be able to tell this batch of wedding photos from the last ones, right? I think I’ll wear burgundy red this time, it’s the color of the Thunderbird Stu’s giving me. We have to wait for the funeral of course, but—what? Winnie? Winnie got killed last night, hadn’t you heard? Out at the humpback bridge. Sorry, I thought you knew …”