In the end, Ellsworth printed one of the barn photos: “UNSIGHTLY LANDMARK TO VANISH SOON.” But in the photo it was not unsightly. Gordon’s lens had so intimately caressed the structure’s ancient decrepitude one felt a compelling attachment to it, as though only now, in the fullest realization of its potential for rot and purposelessness, had it achieved its true beauty, its true meaning. The ruined barn lay, agonizing, against the white sky, Ellsworth realized with horror and fascination, like a dying body on a bed, like Gordon’s own mother, her mind long gone, empty as the loft of that dusty old barn, dying alone in her room above the photo shop that early spring under the steady morose gaze of Gordon’s cameras and lamps, the very reason Ellsworth was trying to keep his friend busy and out of the studio so much of the time. Ellsworth did not understand these photos Gordon was taking of his mother, now little more than a pathetic defecating vegetable. Gordon’s father had died in the war, she had raised him, had been all Gordon had of family. “Didn’t you love her?” he would ask. He remembered how, timidly, she would interrupt their play with cold milk and a tray of cookies, freshly baked. “Of course I loved her. I still do.” Gordon was photographing the poor addled creature, head to foot, back to front, over and over again through the months and days of her progressive decline, contorting her shriveled limbs into bizarre attitudes as though in bitter mockery of the classic poses (he insisted no mockery of any kind was intended), but focusing mostly on her collapsing face, her gaping mouth, her blankly staring eyes. Ellsworth had sat through one of these sessions, but only one, he could take no more. The theme of the day seemed to be armpits. His own, as he watched his ponderous friend, eye locked to viewfinder, bear relentlessly down, felt moldy and perishable. The woman was diapered and her legs were covered with a sheet, so at least he didn’t have to look at the bottom part, what he saw was sickening enough. Her breathing was shallow and raspy, punctuated by little snorts and grunts, but apparently unrelated to the awkward posturings her son was subjecting her to, just little mechanical tics and toes, like the creaks and knocks one heard in an old house. Or an old barn. Ellsworth proudly eschewed the moral position in art and life alike, especially around Gordon, so he could not openly say what was truly disturbing him, could not even admit it wholly to himself, and instead deflected his acute distress into an argument about artistic principles. This, damn it, was not beautiful. “Maybe not,” shrugged Gordon, framing armpit, chin, and nostrils, one shrunken breast, “but it might be. And if it can’t be, then beauty can’t be either. That’s all. Now do me a favor, Ell, and hold her arm up beside her cheek like this, see—come on, just take hold of the wrist here and hold it straight up, so that—Ell—? Where are you going?”
These photos, taken some time before she had met her photographer husband, were among those Pauline showed to Otis many years later, long after her own first modeling experience and Duwayne’s ruckus and arrest and her marriage, long after their periodic visits to the old trailer that followed over the years like a strange recurrent dream, interrupted finally by the death of the car dealer’s wife and Otis’s solemn promise to the Virgin, a promise he managed to keep for over three years, and then did not really break, not at first anyway, he and Pauline becoming friends again but only that, meeting for coffee now and then, enjoying relaxed comfortable chats like an old couple who had got used to each other. Otis was vaguely tempted at times maybe, his cock stirring faintly inside his stiff gray gabardines as though it had a memory of its own, a wayward thought it was trying fitfully to express, but he was able to keep things under control, and anyway Pauline, pushing thirty, was not quite the looker she used to be, especially in the midmorning glare coming through the plateglass window of the old Sixth Street Cafe, where they usually sat. No, he now saw Pauline from time to time, but he could still look the Virgin in the eye. Pauline had told him a lot of stories during these talks, some pretty disturbing ones, given the kind of life she’d had, poor kid, one in particular about the night before John’s wedding, back when Otis was away at war, that Otis didn’t know whether he should believe or not, and she had mentioned the photos several times before Otis finally realized that there was something about them that frightened her, a woman not easily frightened, and that he should maybe have a look. So, one morning when Gordon was busy all day at the high school taking senior class portraits, Pauline led Otis into the back of the shop and opened up the locked cabinets. There were hundreds of albums back there, an amazing sight (of course, he was a dogged fellow, her husband, turning up everywhere with his shoulderbag of fancy gear and rolls upon rolls of film, and he’d been at it for a quarter of a century, after all), but she went straight for the ones she wanted him to see. The pornographic photographs of the naked old lady Pauline showed him were pretty disgusting, all right, especially when Otis realized that the old thing was still more or less alive and must have been posing for that fruitcake, or been made to, but they were not, by themselves, what had upset Pauline. Pauline had told him about Gordon’s early photo sessions with her, how she had explained what she wanted but how Gordon didn’t seem to hear, how he wouldn’t even let her take her clothes off at first, but insisted on shooting nothing but her face, and how she had to admit later he had found a kind of quizzical beauty on a face she had never been all that proud of, but then how he had slowly begun to undress her, literally ripping her summer frock off strip by strip at first, as though unwrapping a present or peeling an apple (what she was worried about at the time, she said, was how she was going to get home after, and what Daddy Duwayne would say when he saw her), making her put some underwear on when he reached that part—she had come without any, but he had found an old yellowed bra somewhere, a petticoat, and some of those thick silky panties from the war years you sometimes saw at a rummage sale—and then working these things off her, inch by inch, photographing every step of the strip from every angle, favoring the close-up of course, yet never touching her, just pah-click, pah-click, pah-click with that camera until she had begun to feel something crawling over her, a real physical presence of some kind sliding over her body, exciting in a way, but scary too, and then how he had begun posing her on a bed in a room upstairs in all these odd positions, getting around at last, or so she thought, to those photos she had come asking him for in the first place, yet somehow not as sexy as she had hoped, weird even sometimes, like when he shot up into her nostrils or focused on her feet or on her Sodom-and-Gomorrah or her armpits. Now she showed Otis those photos, mostly huge blowups that turned her body into a kind of vast rolling landscape, gigantic in scale yet minute in its details, distant and dreamy as desert dunes yet intimate as a pubic freckle, a wet nipple, an anal pucker. And the point was, they were, many of them, exact positional replicas of his photos of the old lady. It was spooky. It was as though, you know, as though … But Otis by now was only half listening. He could not get his eyes off the giant enlargements of Pauline’s intimate parts. It was like some kind of magical voyage. He felt transported back to his childhood, until this moment all but forgotten, and to the stories of Merlin and Buck Rogers from the comicbooks, Sinbad and Plastic Man. So, when Pauline unzipped him, Otis knew he’d have to let the Virgin down.
Here, meanwhile, are some other photos from Gordon’s albums, taken over the decades of his career as the town photographer: (1) On the sidewalk in front of the wide plateglass window of a simple one-story stucco structure filling the space between two older two-story buildings, one of brick, the other covered with imitation stone siding, a woman turns back to watch her leashed dog, a terrier of some sort, sniff at the sidewalk sandwich board announcing a turkey meatloaf and “cheese spuds” special, together with (“Hey Sweet Stuff!”) homemade green apple pie with a cinnamon crust “all la Mode.” The rainbowed lettering on the plateglass window reads SIXTH STREET CAFE, and there are two or three indistinct faces behind the window looking out, one wearing a baseball cap. Posters in one corner of the window announce the junior class play and the high school football schedule. The wom
an, slender, young, or probably young, is dressed in light wool slacks, turtleneck sweater, and an open anorak, and is watched by an older square-headed man in droopy white overalls with a clipboard in his hands, who stands with his back to the camera at the right of the picture, near the hood of an old Ford pickup parked at the curb; he seems to be taking inventory of the items in the window of the hardware store beside the cafe. A sign above the handle of the cafe door between them, clearly legible, says GIMME A PUSH, I LOVE IT! The glass of this door has been cracked and taped. The building on the left of the picture, the one with the artificial siding, has a sign in its window that says CLOSING DOWN SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO!, but this sign may have been there for some time; the building itself looks long since abandoned, casting an eerie shadowy emptiness on that side of the picture toward which the woman and dog are proceeding. The photo would appear to have been taken with an ordinary 50mm lens from across the empty oil-stained street, perhaps through a window. (2) A dark shallow puddle in what looks like an alleyway pothole reflects the corner of a brick wall or building and a creosoted pole, probably a light pole. In the stripe of pale light between these two imaged objects, rising (or falling) in their reflections like canyon walls, the surface of the puddle is broken by the tips of three larger stones, barren islands in the puddle’s dead flat sea. Bits of litter—cigarette butts, a bottle cap, gum or candy wrappers—lie scattered randomly about the rocky shores of this miniature sea like unplanned settlements, or their ancient remains, for nothing here seems alive. The only object in the photograph out of scale with this modeler’s perspective is the twisted bicycle wheel, its spokes broken and bent, only partly seen at one edge of the picture. It is vaguely abrasive, an irritant, like one idea rubbing up against another. It suggests that there is another picture, incompatible with this one, lying outside the one being seen; it suggests that there is always another picture lying outside the one being seen, that the incompatibility is irresolvable. (3) In a supermarket, a woman, possibly the same woman seen with the dog in the previous photo, though with longer hair now and dressed in pedal pushers and a sleeveless flowered blouse, squats to eye level with a small boy. Together they hold a tin can of something. Perhaps she is giving it to the boy to put into the shopping cart overhead. Or perhaps the boy has taken it off the shelf and she is putting it back. Her hair falls loosely over her back and bare upper arms, revealing more by seeming to conceal, just as her summer clothes, decorously loose-fitting, conceal as they seem to reveal: even where the heel of her shoe digs into one cheek of her buttocks, for example, there is no hint of the flesh beneath the cloth. The near aisle, the woman and the boy, the shelves behind them, the aisles beyond, all seem to be on much the same plane, suggesting the use of a telephoto lens. Into which the small boy is, wide-eyed but without expression, staring. (4) A heavy man in a plaid shirt and workpants sits on a straightback wooden chair in what seems to be the timbered inside of a rude garage or workshed. There are rough-hewn shelves overhead on which sit a row of gallon paint cans, most showing thick dull drips down the sides, though some with fresh spatterings, and next to them are crusted bottles of turpentine, small cans of stains and varnishes, a galvanized bucket half-concealing an old license plate pinned up behind it, and at the edge of the frame, a grimy dried-out fruit jar with the wooden handles of paintbrushes sticking out like black rabbit ears. The wooden wall beneath is damply stained as though a can of dark paint had been thrown at it. An old truck tire hangs there, draped by the twisted coils of a rubber garden hose, so long hooked on that spot above it that it comes to a sharply creased V over its nail. The man holds a double-barreled shotgun between his legs with unmistakable suggestiveness, stock between his knees, thumbed triggers at the crotch, barrels in his mouth. The top of his head is gone, though bits of it can still be seen on the underside of the shelves above and on the wall and elsewhere. The license plate with its meaningless sequence of letters and numbers seems to serve or to wish to serve as a kind of title for this photograph, but the title of the thick album in which it is archived is “The Environment of Violent Departure.” (5) The front of the photographer’s own shop, seen from the front corner, has been stove in by a panel truck belonging to the town paint and wallpaper store, according to the princing on the side. The truck, rearing up on its back wheels like a springing animal, is about halfway into the shop, and glass and photos and other odds and ends lie scattered about like bomb debris, but the driver’s seat is empty. A short stout policeman in shirtsleeves, suspenders, and gabardine twill trousers tucked into polished boots, back to the camera, ponders the mess with hands on hips, the closely shaved roll of fat on the back of his neck, under the cap, faintly flushed as though with exertion. The two top-floor windows have been shattered as well, and in one of them a young woman stands, gazing placidly down upon the policeman, her hands at her blouse buttons. The two windows are browed with decorative lintels and so give the whole building, with its crenellated parapet, hinged sign in the middle, and gaping mouth below, the look of a startled human face, obscenely assaulted.
Mad Daddy Duwayne. Just went berserk that day Pauline moved out of the trailer and into the photographer’s flat above his shop. He turned up in the street outside, red-eyed and bristling with weapons like a maniacal one-man assault team, and started blasting away, as though the building itself was something alive he was trying to kill. Sometimes he howled like an animal, sometimes like a preacher, bellowing then about the Whore of Babylon and God’s great rod of wrath and the desecration of the temple, by which he probably meant the farewell message she had left scrawled on the toilet wall of the old trailer, and about the Day of Rapture (which he always pronounced as “Rupture”) coming to cleanse the earth of false prophets and graven images and other dreadful abominations, otherwise just bellowing. Of course, Pauline had heard it all before, especially about the rod of wrath and the black stinking pits of hairy hell, Daddy Duwayne’s theological specialties. She was alone in the building, Gordon having locked her in for safety’s sake when he went off to photograph the funeral of the doctor’s wife, and after her crazed daddy drove her away from the second-floor windows with his glass-splattering gunfire, spitting out his rabid thou-shalt-nots like foaming swearwords, she just went into the back bedroom where Gordon had been taking her picture, shut the door, and lay down on the old iron bed up there. She closed her eyes and listened to Daddy Duwayne carry on down in the street like it was the soundtrack from some old TV movie playing somewhere else, a trick she used to use in the trailer park to distance herself from his bruising exhortations. Sooner or later, she knew, he’d be in to get her and drag her out and then whip her down the street all the way home like he always did whenever she tried to run away. And she didn’t think the photographer would come to take her back either; nobody ever stood up to Daddy Duwayne, he was too crazy. The bare mattress she was lying on had a kind of stale antiseptic smell, strange to her but not unpleasant. A lot nicer anyway than the trailer’s garbagey old-socks stink with its infested floor-mat for a bed and its damp reeking toilet, small as a coffin, where he sometimes locked her up while he went out to spirit up the dead, as he called getting drunk. There was a long silence then, just like those times in the toilet. The shooting stopped. The shouting. Her hopes were not raised by this. She had learned long ago to distrust such peaceful pauses. She waited for the door to open and the bad part to begin. Instead there was a tremendous explosion and the whole building shook like maybe her daddy was right about it being the Day of Rupture after all, and she didn’t know if she fell off the bed or leapt off, but she found herself on the floor on all fours, gaping at the door which had popped open by itself and expecting anything to come through it, maybe Jesus himself, or even worse. Nothing did. There was just the slow settling of plaster dust all around. She heard sirens. By the time she had crept through the broken glass to the front window and peeked out, they were carrying Daddy Duwayne away from the smashed-up panel truck on a stretcher. Out cold but under guard. He hadn’t se
riously hurt himself, as it turned out, but once they got ahold of him, they never let him go, so she couldn’t help but have a soft spot in her heart for Otis after that. Daddy Duwayne got charged with a whole catalogue of crimes, just about all the Commandments getting mentioned, and all of which he was guilty of many times over, except maybe the charge on this occasion of attempted murder, which was a little unfair. Her daddy knew how to shoot. If he had seriously wanted to kill something, he would have.
Veronica was minding John’s paint and wallpaper store that day, most everyone else in town having gone off to the funeral of poor Harriet whom she hardly knew. Not one for funerals anyway, really. Old Alf, Harriet’s husband, she knew better; he’d done her a favor once. She sent him a nice card, expressing her deepest sympathy, but was happy to oblige when John asked her to watch the store. Veronica had returned home a year earlier after the failure of her first marriage, needing, for therapy as much as money, some kind of job, and John’s wife, a former high school classmate, had helped her get on at the paint store, in those days still downtown, she remembering that Veronica had once wanted to be an interior decorator, or perhaps it was Veronica who had reminded her of that. They had never been all that close, since Veronica never got along with her best friend Daphne, still didn’t, but she didn’t mind using what little influence she had because, anyway, she felt, John owed her one, that whole family did. Life had not been kind to Veronica. Braces, migraines, anemia, tonsilitis, asthma, she’d had it all as a kid. Then, once she got to high school, things were a little better, she was a cheerleader and a member of the choral society and popular enough, everybody calling her Ronnie back then, but though she was generous with her person (too generous, she always thought), she didn’t believe in going all the way, not yet, she was too idealistic, and so she got a P.T. reputation, ridiculed the more, the more she gave. Daphne, especially, was cruel to her, and one day at the country club pool, in front of all the boys, asked her if she thought orgasms were more fun to have alone or in company, and Veronica, who wasn’t really sure at that time what an orgasm was exactly (though when she did find out, she realized she had been having them all along, no big deal), could only turn red and stammer out something stupid about believing that was something one didn’t talk about in public. “Aha! Just as I thought!” laughed Daphne and all the boys started laughing with her. “Alone!” And then, finally, when she did start going all the way, the worst possible thing happened, and that was when she got Alf to do that favor, if a favor was really what it was, she still had nightmares about it (or him: she had named the thing as though thereby to put it to eternal rest, but rest it, or he, would not), and worried, to the extent that she believed in such things, that she might have condemned herself to everlasting hell. She was scared after that, and ran into marriage the first offer that came along, an older guy she met in college and hardly knew before they were suddenly man and wife, and again she was too idealistic, but he wasn’t, and when she couldn’t take any more, she came back home and hired Maynard and his father and got a divorce, which dragged on and was very messy and depressing and left her feeling old and used up when it was over. But, never say die, she joined the choir at church and the Literary Society at the library and got a job at the paint and wallpaper store and started going out some with Maynard, who had just recently graduated from law school, but already looked forty. Maynard had also gone through a wretched first marriage and divorce, and like Veronica, had suffered from name-calling and undeserved ridicule all his life, and he probably hated Daphne, whom he called his old ball-breaker, even more than she did, so at least they had something in common. Just the same, even though she sympathized with him, he was in many ways still the Nerd he had always been, at least everybody in town seemed to think so, the only difference being that he now had a permanent five o’clock shadow, and so, whenever he brought up the subject of marriage, always seeming to have some kind of nasty grimace on his face, like it was a dirty joke or something, she always said she wasn’t ready. That was until the day that crazy man came crashing into the store just as she had started to doze off, making her fall off her chair and nearly swallow her tongue. She couldn’t see anything for a moment—blinded with panic was what she was, she suddenly knew what that meant—and when finally her focus came back again, there he was, pointing a gun at her face and demanding the keys to the panel truck outside. She had no idea where they were, so he started shooting at all the cans of paint. She was crying and praying and trying not to have an asthma attack, not knowing what to do and hating John for leaving her in a mess like this, not for the first time. Finally, in desperation, she opened up the cash register to give him all the money, and there were the keys. When he was gone, she decided, collapsed to the floor under a dripping paint can, where they found her later, somewhat out of touch and spackled all over with Provincial Blue, that maybe the working world was not for her after all, and two months later, when she’d got her breath back, she and Maynard were married.
John's Wife: A Novel Page 17
