John's Wife: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  Maybe Stu’s ambivalent attitude toward Rex’s malice had something to do with his notion that as far as life expectancy went, bad luck was good, good bad, a notion Alf heard him trying to explain in the country club bar one night (an unusual night, as it turned out) to Trevor, the insurance salesman, meaning to put him straight, he drawled, about what was wrong with his damfool actuarial tables, meaningless as a used-car price tag. There were others standing around, too, or perched on barstools, most of them having long since stopped listening to the garrulous old lush, though he still had the polite attention of John’s wife beside him, always patient with the foolishness of others. Stu had just sold a Cougar and an Explorer XLT that day and so his rear axle was really dragging tonight, he said, since he thought of car sales as additions on the way to his own funeral: each man was given to sell so many cars in his life, and then: pfft! “Get ready to tow me to the junkyard, ole buddy,” he growled, clutching his chest and rolling his eyes as though it were one of his punchlines, “I feel another sale comin’ on!” And Trevor wheewheed in that silly sniggering way he had, covering his mouthful of bad teeth with his ring-studded left hand. Daphne, relatively sober and out of her usual baggy sweatsuit with the dirty seat and into a pink party dress for a change, told Stu to shut up, he was depressing everybody, and Stu sobered up for a second and gave her a look Alf hadn’t seen on his face since before Winnie died. Then he grinned his gap-toothed country-boy grin and, wrapping his drinking arm around John’s wife, asked her if she’d heard the one about the old boy here in town who’d died a few years back of diarrhea but his widow insisted they write “gonorrhea” as the cause on his inspection sticker. “Well, ole Doc here he wouldn’t have none of that, y’know, bein’ the—hee ha!—lawr-abidin’ sort and knowin’ the difference between them two ‘rhears’ and maybe even how to spell the little suckers, on accounta him havin’ a college diploma and all, and he reminds her that ain’t exactly the—haw haw!—gospel truth. ‘Aw, hellfire, I know it,’ she—whoof! wharr!—says, ‘but I’d—hoo!—I’d rather folks—yarff! hee! harr!—folks remembered the old clunker as a—heef!— as a—whoo!—”’ And, wheezing and snorting helplessly, he dropped his drink down John’s wife’s bosom and fell off his stool. Alf helped Daphne drag Stu out to his car and pour him in, and as he propped him up in the front seat, pushed the lock button on the door, and (Stu was muttering something incomprehensible about a fucked-up transmission) closed it, he thought: It’s silly to keep people like Stu alive. Alf felt ashamed for his own part in it. The old fellow, drooling, slid back against the door and batted his freckled head on the window. Stu’s wife Daphne, staring out at the little red pennant flapping over the eighteenth hole, now floodlit, said: “It’s a goddamn mess,” and Alf thought so, too. When he went back into the bar, vaguely uneasy about letting Daphne drive Stu home, he found John’s wife holding her silk blouse in her fingertips, away from her breasts, flapping it about as though to shake the gin out. There were a lot of jokes, or what passed for jokes, about the tonic virtues of gin, the new improved flavor of mother’s milk, and so on, and when they asked Alf his medical opinion, he sniffed and said that they smelled like martinis, okay, but he’d never seen them served in cups that big before. Trevor giggled like a moron at that one, and his wife Marge said: “Well, the party’s getting a little rough!” Marge’s cups wouldn’t hold a martini’s olive.

  How much, his little darlin’ Daphne wondered, driving foggily home that night, did Stu know about her and Rex? Plenty, probably. Hard to say, though, if it mattered. Maybe it even gave the old coot a peculiar pleasure to star in one of his own jokes. Made him a kind of living legend. “There was this old farmer, doncha know, who took him a young bride, a hot-wired little sports job who just couldn’t get enough juicin’ and left the old yokel too pooped out from so much time down in the Red River Valley to get his chores done out in the back acres. Ffoo! Fuckin’ spread goin’ to hell in a hangbasket and him, too, see. So directly he went and took on this young hired hand …” Did old Stu take notice when she stood over the horny boy while the kid was down in the pit, offering him the view she’d seen him gobbling up from the other women who came out there to get their oil changed and their motors tuned? Was he watching when she squatted down, knees spread, while sexy Rexy was on his back under a car, to kid around with him about needing a valve job or getting her own underbody greased? And if he did, if he was, did he care? Daphne had slipped into the somewhat boozy habit over the recent years of wearing a floppy fat-hiding sweatsuit wherever she went, gave her the illusion of being an athlete by day and it cushioned her and served for peejays when she fell over at night. Now, though, she was back into skirts again, not the old ones, of course, which no longer fit, had to buy a whole new closetful of the damned things, new underpants, too, with ribbons and peekaboo crotches and cute little messages the randy mechanic could read. Which he did, at first by long eye-filling gazes, hand on his connecting rod, later by braille, as you might say, which led her to crack back, when he alluded, somewhat cynically, to the mystery of her being attracted to a guy like him: “Mystery? Hell, honey, I’m an open book!” As the boy laughed his snarling laugh and nibbled at her clit, Daphne lit up and, blowing smoke at the motel room mirrors, thought about the long stupid shaggy-dog joke she and Stu had been playing out for so many years. Some of it right here in these rooms when warhorse Winnie was still around, though it really went back much farther than that, back to her best friend’s wedding reception and her mythical handful of strawberries and cream, old Stu’s “day of destiny,” as he called it, half her goddamned life. Maybe it was time for the punchline. “Fuck me, sweetie pie,” she whispered, stubbing out the smoke and squinting appraisingly at the tense mirrored buttocks of the creature hunched over her like a powerful predator gnawing at a carcass. “Fuck me hard!”

  Veronica had been a witness to Daphne’s attention-grabbing act with the strawberries that day of John’s wedding, a day that for Veronica was also, as it was for Stu, a day of destiny, but like all such days in her life, a dark one. She was still haunted by the consequences, it made her shudder to think about it. Or him. Gave her migraines for a week. Ronnie, as she was known back then to her classmates, Daphne being one of them, had always been intimidated by that brash, promiscuous, and unpredictable girl, a girl who always seemed to have so much more fun than Ronnie did, even when she did such awful things, things Ronnie could not bring herself to do, and then did anyway. It was a no-win situation. When she resisted Daphne she got ridiculed, and when she tried to keep up with her she got in trouble. Like that night before the famous wedding when Daphne subverted the hen party and led an assault mission out to the Country Tavern to invade the stags. Ronnie had argued against the idea, which she thought of as dangerous though didn’t say so. What she said was, let the boys be, they won’t like it. Daphne said the boys didn’t know what they liked until they saw it, and if Ronnie was chickenshit she could stay behind. So, naturally, she had to go, feeling she had a certain reputation to defend since that night at the drive-in with John which everybody seemed to know about, but first they argued about it for a while. There were others who had their doubts like Ronnie and a couple of them went home. Finally, when they did get out there, the party was pretty much over; certainly that guy Daphne had had her eye on all day was gone, and so was John. Daphne blamed Ronnie for that, said if she hadn’t been such an uptight pain in the patoot, they’d have got out here sooner and maybe had some fun tonight. Then they all got back in their cars and gunned it out of there, leaving her behind; Ronnie had to walk home all alone, kicking herself all the way, hating Daphne, but hating her own timidity, too. Now and then lights would appear on the road behind her, guys coming back from the tavern, no doubt, and she would have to hide down in a ditch or behind trees or bushes, not knowing how to explain herself out there and afraid of what they might do if they found her alone, drunk as they were. Sometimes she felt like just letting them do whatever they wanted, what did it matter, and sh
e only half hid as they passed by, but no one stopped. Not until she reached town, a few blocks from Main Street. A car pulled over. A silvery Ford Mustang, looking like a ghost in the moonlight: Veronica recognized it, and her heart skipped a beat as the door opened to her. When she saw who the driver was, she realized she was about to do something Daphne would never have dared to do. A first. Though it would be hard to brag about it. Happened in another town. Something about wild oats, he said. She got home a little before dawn. And a few weeks later, she had to go see Alf, tears in her eyes, and ask him for that dreadful favor, he stubbornly reluctant (it was a big crime then, he had a lot to lose, she knew that) until she told him who the father was.

  Ronnie had tears in her eyes again that night, years later, when her nemesis’s slobbering hubby, drunk as a dog, spilled his drink down John’s wife’s front in the country club bar, but this time they were tears of laughter. That it should happen to her! It was too funny! Everyone in the club was laughing, everyone except the father of the child Veronica finally did have, who was about to barf. Happened to Maynard from time to time. His “tender sensibilities,” as someone had cracked so many years ago, same cause then as now. A form of mourning, as he thought of it. He took a deep breath and held it, staring hard at the kid behind the bar, who was trying to act cool, wiping glasses, moving bottles around, but whose wide-eyed gaze was locked on the wet blouse. Whose wasn’t, but suffering Maynard’s? John’s linen-suited accountant Trevor was sniggering in his hiccuppy way while he stared at it, lard-ass Waldo was hee-hawing, John’s old man was grinning and grinding away at his cigar the way Maynard, back in school, used to chew rubber bands. Beside him, Maynard’s wife tittered and snorted like the witless beak-nosed twit she was, pushing her own cups forward, no doubt secretly jealous of the attention John’s wife was getting. Veronica was the material form Maynard’s bottomless misery had finally taken, the objective embodiment of his own self-loathing which it pleased him to strike out at from time to time, to slap and pummel and bury in curses, trying to purge himself of that which could not be purged, but giving him relief at least during the blind moments of his rage. The first wave of nausea passed (he was startled to notice Waldo’s wife Lorraine staring at him as though alarmed and he quickly looked away, that stupid cow, was he that transparent?), but then old Alf, coming back in from mailing Stu and Daphne home, jokingly poked his bent snout at her cleavage and sniffed, and the sickness returned, forcing Maynard, desperately clutching the frayed garter in his pocket, to swallow hard, then bolt down his own martini, hoping only it would not come right back up. His eyes watered and for a moment John’s wife was just a formless blur, not quite there. He blinked and brought her back, suddenly frightened about the risky moves (this was just before all the shit came down, when Maynard the eternally damned still thought he was going to whip his hateful cousin’s ass at last) that he and Barnaby were making. He was doing it for her sake, hers and her father’s, and John sure as hell deserved the pasting they were about to give him, but what would be her take on it? Well, she would be hurt, of course, that was unavoidable, but could she come to understand the issues at stake, the principles involved? In his fantasies, orphaned by the brawl between husband and father, she would turn to him for guidance and consolation (over and over, she had fallen, weeping, into Maynard’s gentle and caring embrace), but did she have even the foggiest notion of what John had done to her father? It might look like sheer madness to her. Well, they’d all know soon enough, it was fast coming to a head. John had invited them all over to dinner on the weekend to announce the merger. Barnaby would be there, John’s parents, his own dad, John’s accountant, people from the bank. There was no turning back. Maynard set his empty glass down on the bar as though to end a sentence, just as John’s depraved college buddy Bruce, a frequent hangabout in town of late, tucked his cigarette in the corner of his smirking lips, took the bar rag away from Kevin, and turned to John’s wife to help her wipe her blouse—Maynard headed for the men’s room, hoping his urgent stride would get him there in time.

  Kevin, who doubled as country club pro and barkeep, was keeping a close eye on events that night, after what had happened earlier in the day. John’s wife had always been a mystery to him, more so now. Kevin had come to town a dozen years ago, just out of university and one boozily happy but ineffectual year in the backwaters of the pro circuit; he’d meant to move on, get back in the competition, never did. His father, an upstate political friend of John’s and a business colleague, had got him the job here, his predecessor having flown the coop that summer with a wild teenybopper, we should all be so lucky. The place sounded like more fun than it was, but given his prospects he might have ended up in scummier holes. He managed the club, gave lessons, ran the bar and the pro shop, entered a few smalltime tournaments just to keep his hand in and his name in circulation. Long hours, but they paid him for them. Women were easy enough to come by, everything from high school kids to their grandmothers, he got in at least seventy-two holes of golf a week, the food and booze were free, and there was a lot of loose change lying around, so not a bad life. Giving lessons could be a drag, but it was extra money, and it was sometimes a way of making out. He found that women often liked him to help them with their grip and swing by standing behind them and reaching around to take hold of their hands on the club, one thing sooner or later then leading to another. And that was why he was watching John’s wife closely that night that Stu gave her knockers a gin bath. She’d had a lesson with him that day and had seemed puzzled when he’d tried to correct her open grip. Almost without thinking about it, he had stepped behind her and reached round to cover her hands with his, and as he pressed up, almost ritually, against her soft buttocks in their pink and green Bermuda shorts, he was overtaken suddenly by a delicious sensation unlike any he’d ever felt before, not exactly sexual though it gave him a hard-on that nearly ripped his fly apart, more like the silky feeling he sometimes got when lying with a woman and staring at a starry sky. Then, just as suddenly, how could he explain it, she didn’t seem to be there. He was holding only the club. He let go of it in alarm: and there she was, going into her swing. And so tonight, a night at the club like any other, the noise, the corny jokes, the usual barbs, John’s wife the center of attention as she always was, Kev was just into his third scotch and beginning to relax—and then, suddenly, there was the spilled drink. Did she seem to dim slightly, to slip from view as the gin splashed down her front? Kevin reared up straight, grabbed a glass to wipe. No, there she was, plain as day, he was just imagining things. Maybe even trying to. Probably he ought to take it easy on the hootch. When John’s pilot pal snatched up the bar rag and dabbed at her boobs, no problem, they bounced like anyone else’s, and Kevin felt reassured.

  John’s accountant Trevor had an opportunity that night to take a steady contemplative look at John’s wife’s breasts and, with a little more courage, might even have been able to dab at them with a cocktail napkin, too, like John’s happy-go-lucky friend, just in the spirit of the fun of course, and maybe that would have helped or maybe it wouldn’t have, but as it was, by the time they got home, he could no longer remember what it was he had seen, could not even be sure Alf’s rude remark about cup size was in any way descriptive. Vanished, yet again. If he let his mind drift, without concentrating, the expression on her face would come floating back: a kind of smile, or not a smile exactly, more like placid consent, or else a mild annoyance, politely contained. But the more he thought about it, of course, the less anything was there. Earlier in the day, he had seen the photographer take her picture during a golf lesson with the young pro, a picture he would very much like to see now, but he didn’t know how to ask for it. Perhaps he could do a study on golfing styles and life expectancy. He got out his graphs and charts while Marge was getting ready for bed and attempted to locate her point again. No use. It just wouldn’t stick. Too many variables or something. He recalled the old car dealer’s system of calculations and knew there to be a certain trut
h hidden in them: did this truth apply to John’s wife? He thought about her good fortune, her beauty, her wealth, her family, her seeming happiness, her sound health (he had seen the lab test results from her last physical, had perhaps a clearer image in his head of her blood and urine than he had of the expression on her face that night, thought sometimes he could even hear the beat of her heart inside the x-rayed chest or feel the squishy viscous dampness of the smear), and it occurred to him that all these assets were as equivocal as the “Negatives” on the lab test results: they revealed only absences, fixed nothing, contributed to the enigma of her existence rather than helping to resolve it. Marge was already snoring, sleep overtaking her with the same brute force that thirst or hunger always did. He knew about Marge’s life expectancy: she would live long and vigorously, but death would one day take her by the throat and ravage her mercilessly as though itself seized by a violent passion.

  What were snoring Marge’s dreams? She claimed to have none, sleep for her a complete blackout, a departure into nonexistence, every waking a resurrection. For dreams, if she missed them (she didn’t), she had her friend Lorraine’s to wallow in, Lorraine a host to vivid nocturnal theater of the most elaborate sort and, while evasive on the subject of her waking life, a prolix reteller of her dreamtime adventures, often as not with a revelatory tag. Thus, the night that Stu spilled his drink down John’s wife’s front at the country club bar, she dreamt that she and Marge were in a breast shop trying on different sizes and models and joking about the bizarre value men in their foolishness placed on the silly things. John was there, and he told them it wasn’t the breasts that were important but the nipples, and with that they got serious about their selection. There were all kinds, heaped up in wooden trays. John tried to make Marge wear a pair that looked like golfballs, but she fought him off. Yet ended up with them, just the same, dazzlingly white and marked only with a crimson dot (they came in a package of three, not two, but the third had been used and had a deep dirty gash). Lorraine fancied ones that looked like little eyeballs with lids that closed (she somehow had the idea that if she could flutter her lashes from her breasts, she told Marge, she’d have more luck), but somebody stole them. Who? Everyone was laughing, so she was pretty sure it was Waldo. “The sonuvabitch is having an affair, or is about to,” is what she said the next day to Marge, which was not unlike prophesying the rising of the sun maybe, but Lorraine knew with a certainty now, because of the dream, that it was true. A pattern exposed by purloined nipples. John’s wife was in the dream, too, but Lorraine couldn’t see her, or at least couldn’t describe her that next day to Marge. “Maybe she owned the place,” she said with a shrug. What Lorraine didn’t tell Marge, not yet anyway, needing more time to think about it, was why Maynard had startled her so the night before, when all eyes were on John’s wife and her soaked blouse. Clear as a bell, amid the laughter and the joking and the scraping of chairs and barstools, she had heard it, like a cry of pain: “I love you!” She’d glanced around in alarm and knew as soon as she saw him that it was Maynard who’d cried out. But his lips were pressed together, his scowling face with its dark jowls was devoid of any hint of that tender emotion, and there were no signs anyone else in the room had heard it. She was sure of it, though. And the feeling she’d had about John’s wife just then, at least as she remembered it the next day, was exactly the feeling she had about her later in the dream.