John's Wife: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  Lorraine was right of course, dream prophecy or no, about Waldo’s infidelity, though she may have underestimated its extent. In truth, he was fucking around at every opportunity and the opportunities were far from few. Clarissa’s view of her father’s malls as magic spaces was one Waldo, had he known of it, would have shared. Since John had moved the home decoration business out to the new big one, Waldo was having a rousing great time, working some of the same turf Clarissa did, though at a different mall. He could have done with a more intimate business maybe than paint and wallpaper, but Waldo could work bedroom fabrics and bathroom fixtures like others worked novelties and lingerie, and there were always the food courts and the movie lobbies and the corridor outside his place of business which faced a bank of phones and a ladies’ room. Much of the traffic was off the highway, it was like meeting in an airport terminal, but his targets were less the transient crowds than the mall’s own working staff, a lot of them drifters themselves, migrant labor from out of town, just passing through. He’d hired a lot of them, with or without the telltale bruises on the inner arms that made them more vulnerable, and fucked not a few. He’d had some bad times, some of these gals being pretty tough cookies and a far cry from the sorority debs of the golden age, but mostly good times, hard, clean, invigorating, and without complicating residue. Quickies he took to a little office behind the stock room, a Vice Presidential perk (thanks, good brother John), but for true love he used Dutch’s motel, his old pal there having given him a key to use, asking only that he call ahead to be sure the room was free. It made Waldo proud to live in a place where folks went out of their way for you, just because they knew and respected you. Smalltown life: shit, you couldn’t beat it with a stick.

  Dutch, who shared Waldo’s appreciation of smalltown life, was grateful to the paint-and-wallpaper man for taking up some of the slack at the motel with his impromptu midday affairs when otherwise business was slow, and when the room, even when curtained, was still pretty well lit. Like a clear stream on a gray day. Dutch now owned a piece of the new luxury motel up near the Interstate and had money in a number of John’s enterprises, including his cargo operations, but his little motel at the edge of Settler’s Woods with its Getaway Bar and Grill and secret Back Room was his real home and where you could usually find him any hour of any day when he wasn’t fishing. Dutch of course preferred his performers young, high school fumblers and nervous virgins festooned with zits, cocky college kids excitedly bringing home their newly acquired expertise, but this was prime-time pageantry mostly. For daytime shows you had to take what you could get. True, there was something drearily predictable about Waldo’s scores, but for Dutch, a movieseat connoisseur by now of meat fever’s finer points, there were never ever two exactly alike, and Waldo himself was always open to any kind of goofiness and generous with the money that perked these women up, losers mostly, or at least that helped them go along with Waldo’s games, which, depending on how much he’d had to drink, could be a bit rough but never mean. The most memorable of recent vintage was the woman with the colored dice tattooed between her tits and what looked like the Second Coming all over her butt (Dutch, silently, pleaded with Waldo to bring the woman over to the mirror to show him the sights, but no such luck), who told Waldo, in between humps, if he gave her a hundred-dollar bill she’d turn a trick he’d never seen before. Waldo, grinning expectantly, got one out. She rolled it up carefully, holding it up for him to see, then, spreading her legs wide to give him, and Dutch, too, a good view, slowly inserted it into her gash, pushing it deeper and deeper until it disappeared. Then she invited Waldo to try to get it out of there without using his hands. This was the sort of challenge the old sportsman relished, especially whilst recharging, and laughing his donkey laugh, he went after it with mouth, tongue, nose, cock, even his toes. “Give up?” “Naw!” He tried some of the gadgets that Dutch left lying around in that room (“No hands!” the woman giggled, the dice bouncing on her chest), but finally it was the simplest tool that worked: his own breast-pocket toothbrush clenched between his teeth. He worked the brush end in past the rolled-up bill and slowly eased it out of there. He unrolled it and what he found was a single dollar bill. “Haw!” he snorted in amazement and went fishing with his hands, causing the woman to whoop and squeal, but that C-note was gone for good. To Waldo’s credit: to his delight. He gave that apocalyptic high roller a good fucking after and tucked another hundred up her gully to match. Witnessing Waldo having a poke was, admittedly, about as much fun most of the time as watching slugs fuck, but Dutch admired the guy’s gutsy persistence, his bighearted determination to get it up, and up again. Too many wimps in this town got turned into grumpy house pets too fast, and as for their women, if they were having it off with other men more like men, this was not, for the most part, happening at Dutch’s motel, though there were entertaining exceptions, Daphne and her young well-hung mechanic most recently. Irregular showtimes, but most often between lunch and happy hour. Daphne’s ass had, to put it kindly, matured over the years, but then so had everyone else’s, Dutch’s included, he did not begrudge her this, especially given the exhibition the two of them were staging for him now. They went at it like animals, ravenous and wild, and Dutch, too, watching them from the Back Room, would often find himself up on his feet and pumping away like a madman, having to bite his tongue to keep from letting out a whoop when he popped his cork. And it was after one of these sheet-ripping furniture-wrecking sessions one afternoon that Dutch suffered a jolt of déjà vu that took him back a decade or more to the days when his motel was new, when old Stu’s Winnie was still alive and Stu and Daphne were going at it in this same room. It was Daphne who brought it up then, too, if he remembered rightly. Now, Daph and her grease monkey were stretched out smoking and Dutch had just zipped up and turned to leave the Back Room, go check on things at the bar, when, over his shoulder and on the other side of the mirror, he heard Daphne say: “Hey, lover. Listen. What are we going to do about the old man?”

  Déjà vu, as Ellsworth could have told anyone who wanted to know, was French for “already seen,” and was properly used to describe that uncanny but illusory experience of feeling that something that was happening for the first time had actually happened before. It was in this sense that he had used it in his novel-in-progress when the Artist, leading his Model down to a riverbank and perching her on a stone there, has the sensation suddenly, as the Model leans forward to peer down into the gently flowing river, that he has witnessed this entire scene before, perhaps in a dream or a vision, but certainly at some psychic level profounder yet less concrete than the literal prospect that confronts him now. Alas, this was another scene largely obliterated by the Stalker: only the barren stone remained like an unoccupied pedestal, or something hard fallen into reality, inexplicably, out of a dream. Dreams and déjà vu often seemed to go together. The preacher’s wife Beatrice tripping or Lorraine in the middle of her histrionic nighttime theater often felt that they somehow “recognized” the scenes they were in, as though from another life, just as Floyd, slicing the throat of the redhaired faggot outside Wichita, had the uncanny feeling, and not for the first time in such matters, that it had all happened before, as if in a crazy dream he’d had. Or, weirdly, was still having. What caused Veronica to faint in church when Reverend Lenny quoted from the Second Letter of John the Elder to the Elect Lady and Her Children, if it was not this sort of déjà vu? When Opal remarked to Kate, back before the librarian died, that sometimes she felt like she’d dreamt her whole life before living it (she’d only meant to suggest how simple and predictable it all was), her friend had frightened her by replying: “You probably have some childhood story you don’t want to tell me, Opal…” That Kate. She’d also told Opal once that falling in love in a dream and then meeting that love in real life, an example of déjà vu often reported, if seldom believed, should not be regarded as an uncanny experience at all, and that those who did so held to an outdated, mechanistically passive theory of perception. �
�The percept is, always, a creation,” she said, or something like that. Over Opal’s head, really, and when she said so, Kate said: “We see what we want to see.” “Oh yes.” When Clarissa and Jennifer asked Uncle Bruce if he believed it was possible to fall in love in a dream, he said it was the only way he had ever fallen in love, all the women he had loved and even some of those he had married he had met first in dreams, and it was just a matter of recognizing them when they turned up later. In fact, he was still waiting for some of his dream loves to show up in the real world. Then a wink their way: or grow up.

  That dreamlike “I’ve been here before” feeling that occasionally overwhelms travelers to strange realms was one that, with all its force, struck young Turtle, alias Maynard III, alias Little, alias Nerd the Turd (at the moment he felt most like Little), when he found himself at last face-to-face, so to speak, with that which he was certain he had never seen before, and by a route unavailable to him until just recently: a keyhole. He supposed there were a lot of houses in town with keyholes you could see through, but the houses his parents always lived in were too new, and maybe that was why they were so unhappy. Ever since his best buddy Fish pointed them out to him, Turtle had been peering through all the keyholes he could find, but mostly at the manse where he hoped he might see Jennifer in her underwear or Zoe taking a pee or something; there weren’t any girls in his own house either, just his old mom. Usually he did this when Fish was not around, because it seemed to make Fish mad for reasons Turtle could not understand, not after he’d told him about keyholes in the first place. For all the time he spent stooped over and squinting through them, though, it seemed that all he was going to get out of it was a bad reputation around the manse, since he’d seen nothing, but they’d all seen him (Jennifer snuck up from behind one day and gave him a terrific kick that made him wham his eyebrow into the doorknob, and she called him a turdy nerd and a jerkoff and a sick little weirdo, it was as bad as what his mom was calling his dad these days, and about all he could do, and it wasn’t much, was stick his tongue out at her and silently wish her pitched straight into hell on the end of a hot fork), but then one day there it was, like a magic show. It was the first thing he saw as he bent down to peek and at first he didn’t even know what it was until he finally recognized the big fat legs sticking out on both sides of it. Wow. It—she—was lying out flat on a bed with her knees over the side, completely naked except for a pair of bright red boots with paired horses’ heads burned into the sides as though with branding irons, and her eyes were wide open, but it was like she was asleep. By now, he was inside the room (that was how he could tell about her eyes), but he didn’t remember opening the door and coming in and he was pretty sure the door was still shut behind him. She didn’t seem to mind that he was there or maybe she didn’t even see him, so he leaned down to get a closer look and this was when he had that powerful sense of having been here before though he knew he hadn’t. Maybe it reminded him of something he had seen at the state park where they had all those funny rock formations and tall skinny caves. It was dark and damp-smelling and hairy all around, which made it seem secretive and hidden, but the thing itself, as best he could tell where the inside began and the outside ended, was soft and pink and puffy with a little lidded bump on top which he knew the name of from the books Fish had shown him but which felt different than he expected when he touched it. Under the bump, it seemed to become paler and paler in color the more toward the middle you got, almost like, deep inside, at, like, floor level, there was a light on. As Turtle knelt down as to a keyhole to see what he could see, he suddenly remembered old man Floyd hooting out in Sunday school: “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away!” Yikes. So he changed his position and, pushing her heavy legs apart so as to get in closer, peeked in with his left.

  While the experiences of Little, Floyd, or Ellsworth’s Artist were classic examples of déjà vu, the term was also often used, more loosely, to take note of cyclical or repetitive behavior or occurrences, or to describe one’s sudden awareness of the similarity of events distant from one another in time. This was the sort of déjà vu Dutch was experiencing when he heard Daphne deliver a line much like one he’d heard a decade or so earlier but had since forgotten, a line with dramatic consequences then, perhaps again now. Or that which Nevada felt a short time later when, looking into the boyish face of a new sexual partner, she thought she found traces of an old love there. It was the sort of déjà vu that the police chief Otis suffered on that earlier occasion when dead Winnie’s expression behind the shattered windshield of the wrecked car recalled one he had been confronted with the day before when she was still alive, an experience that, for a while anyway, changed his life. It might well describe that initial shock that Pauline felt that same day when, her husband preoccupied with his photos of the wreck, she saw those pictures in his secret albums that he’d taken of his mother years before: déjà vu. Even Alf, much less superstitious or susceptible to emotional reactions than either Otis or Pauline, experienced something not unlike déjà vu that night of the wreck when, somewhat drunkenly, he was helping his driver haul old Stu out through the sprung door on the driver’s side and worrying how the hell they were going to extricate the pinned and crushed body of Winnie from the other side. Everyone else out there at the humpback bridge that night was wandering around in a state that reminded Alf of shell-shocked war victims, and when that dwarfish clubfooted woman, later known to him as Cornell’s new wife Gretchen, came stumbling down the side of the ditch to help, he had sudden total recall of a battle scene during the war when a limping gnomelike creature, apparently out there scavenging from the dead, took time out from corpse robbing to help Alf dig a survivor out from under fallen debris, and afterwards he could not remember if that battle scene had ever taken place or if it was something he had seen in a movie or read about or only imagined. As for Gretchen’s husband Cornell, gripping the steering wheel of his car up on the road that night of the wreck as though suffering a sudden seizure, whether or not he was experiencing anything like déjà vu at that moment, as his alarmed expression might have suggested, will never be known. Certainly the confused young man would have had no idea what the strange phrase meant, having repressed what little of that unfriendly language he learned in school after his postgraduation trip to Paris, retaining only a single French word, picked up over there on that awesome occasion, a word he never learned the meaning of, though forget it he never could. Returning with his bottle of wine that last night, though not the one she had in her perversity sent him out to find, he discovered that Marie-Claire had sprayed it gaudily on her studio wall: HINK. Probably there was meant to be another letter afterwards, but Marie-Claire’s paint ran out, so to speak. There was just a long red swath down to the floor where Marie-Claire lay, her naked body, cooling, whiter than one of her fresh unpainted canvases. All now slashed to ribbons, the painted ones as well.

  One of these slashed paintings, the only one known to have survived the artist (big money alone rescued this one from her tight-lipped parents’ conflagration), found its way eventually to a back corner of John’s and Bruce’s fishing cabin, where Bruce was able to study it at his leisure, and his impression, after taking it down from the wall and folding its tatters back into place, was that it had not been slashed randomly: there was a pattern to the violence, as to the painting that preceded it. The original image on the canvas had been produced by the flinging of paint, from a can perhaps, or a loaded brush, maybe just by fistfuls (two parallel smudged fingerprints in a patch of green suggested this, a swipe at the ground itself as though to scar it), but there were powerful intimations in these blots and streaks and splotches of a life-crazed universe, utterly mad and made more so by the erotic urge, suggested by the vibrant untempered colors and their sensuous but frenzied encounters on the raw canvas, itself pale as bloodless flesh. The instrument Marie-Claire had used to rip up this cosmorama had been razor sharp, and she had blitzed it from the outside in, circling rou
nd in her offensive as though to entrap her prey before annihilating it. Her slashing, then, for all its daffy passion, appeared as a kind of hopeful, rational, and moral act, a defiant assault upon the heedless force that disturbed the universe at its core, seeding it with impossible dreams, and that deluded and destroyed its bearers incarnate. Of which, Bruce one: Marie-Claire had clearly been a kindred spirit, a pity he never knew her. He’d nearly had that pleasure. John had called him a few weeks before she died, asking him to come down and take her off his hands. She had returned to John’s town, it seemed, to pay respects at her ex-soldierboy’s tomb and attend the christening of her goddaughter, and, these pious rites accomplished, had progressed to more ecstatic ones, John the object now of her devotions. And thus his call to Bruce, committed at that moment, regrettably, to a high-risk Caribbean business deal and unable to rush to his old pal’s rescue, delightful though that task appeared. Clothing had become a nuisance that week to Marie-Claire, an encumbrance to be cast off that the spirit might soar (the skin would have to go, too, of course, Bruce foresaw that in his kindredness), and since the spirit might launch itself abruptly from any street corner or market aisle, taking her out anywhere was risky, while keeping her at home made home a wacky and sometimes dangerous place, John’s wife recovering still from the difficult birth, so somewhat remote and difficult even to focus upon (even more so nowadays for reasons Bruce did not understand) in the presence of that vivid dark-ringleted beauty, wet from the bath, say, dancing wildly through the house while singing “Mademoiselle from Armentières” in a schoolgirl’s sweet and vulnerable voice, and dressed only in bright silk scarves (the famous Marie-Claire palette) knotted round her thighs and throat. John, seeking escape and release as well, made the mistake of taking this manic creature up in his private skymobile: a glorious feast (quoth John), but she painted the landscape below with her flimsy things and might have flung her flimsy self out at that hard canvas as well had not John, his ardor cooled and flying one-handed, restrained her with a desperate fingerlock deep within her nether canals. He’d had to sneak her home that afternoon in greasy airport coveralls, plotting the while her quick return to Paris.