John's Wife: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  Accomplished, but not before further indiscretions, the most spectacular being the night the uninhibited young mam’selle danced bare-assed and -foot on broken glass out at the Country Tavern at the edge of Settler’s Woods, giving those old boys out there a vision that the next day they’d only half-believe, she having run away from John’s house in anger after receiving no encouraging reply to her demand, issued in their master bedroom where John was just stepping into pajamas and his wife was feeding the insatiable baby: “Wut ees happen to ze hainqui-dainqui—?!” The young rookie cop on the beat that night was Otis, recently returned war hero and onetime Tavern regular, and fortunately, when called out (“Get your ass out here, Otis! On the double! She’s smashing up the fucking place!”), he recognized the freaky girl from previous sightings around town and called up John, who called in Alf, who sedated her on a beer-stained table out there with a shot in her tight little fanny, Otis remarking to himself as he helped hold the wild thing down that this was the same table on which he’d carved the confession of his secret love many years before. Still in high school then, football over for the year, beer season begun. Yes, there it was, near the edge, much scarred over now with other hatchmarks and obscenities (a comically bespectacled cock-and-balls, for example, borrowing the V for one egg and poking erectly through the O of LOVE) and the accumulative hammerings of fists and bottles, and darkened with grease and beer and spit and sweat, but visible still and in fact grown more distinctive with age, he’d scored it deep. He hoped John, gripping the mad quivering girl on the other side, didn’t see it, though he wouldn’t know who’d cut it there even if he did. Could have been anyone, Otis had no monopoly on his love, any more than he had a monopoly on his religion or his patriotism, much as they may have defined him. And he was glad it was there, glad he’d done it, even if it was the sort of crime against property he was now paid to punish. He felt that for once in his life, he’d made a statement, definitive and true, a pledge of sorts that would ever guide him, and all the better only he could read it.

  The interlacing of caricaturesque cock with Otis’s solemn declaration on the tavern table, rediscovered by the young police officer the night of Marie-Claire’s demented dance, had been accomplished four years earlier during the stag party the night before John’s wedding, Otis then away at war, the innovative artist one of John’s visiting fraternity brothers, known to all as Beans. The caricature, given away by the horn-rimmed specs: that of his best mate Brains, not, alas, in attendance at this historic occasion, being summer-scholared off to Oxford, thence no doubt to worlds beyond that bonehead Beans would never know, and so, sad times ahead. That anyway was Beans’s doleful mood the night he ravished Otis’s chaste troth on the tavern table with his own loving tribute to his friend. As Bruce to John, so Beans to Brains, pals inseparable, or so it had seemed to Beans until that fateful night. Or morning: the hour was uncertain. Beans sat in a stupor so thick it had evidently stopped his watch as well. Music played still on the old relic of a jukebox, a twangy stuff that scratched at Beans’s inner ear with the persistence of a gnawing rodent, while drunken cardplayers growled and snorted fitfully in a cigar haze nearby, and on the far wall blue movies flickered silently, bare botties humping away with the dull regularity of waves breaking on a rocky beach. On a drizzly day. Staring at them, Beans thought: nothing ever changes. The old bump and grind: all there is, and all there’ll ever be. Over by the ancient upright piano, a naked ex-wrestler, bruised and grimy, snored peacefully, his privates lidded with an overturned ashtray. Someone had tied his big toe to the tripodded cymbals: that hope that springs eternal going for one last moment of whoopee. Too late. It had been a glorious day full of song and laughter and world-class inebriants—in the hotel bar, on the golf course, at the wedding rehearsal and the dinner after (where Beans had stolen the show, he wished old Brains had been there to see it), and then out here at the Country Tavern, where, among his many feats of elocutionary prowess and athletic skill, he’d won with customary style the farting contest—but now the party was over. His fraternity brothers were all gone, and most everyone else as well. Did he see them go? Couldn’t remember. It was like they were here, and then they weren’t here. Like old Brains himself: it almost seemed like he never was. Beans was alone at table with his Swiss Army knife and a bucket of stale beer and a sorrowful heart, his future—dull, lonely, and utterly predictable—spread out before him like those rolling landscapes of cleft flesh on the far wall: pale fugitive routes to a black and bottomless pit.

  It was the announcement of the farting contest, at which Beans was soon to excel, that finally drove an appalled and long-suffering Maynard out of the Country Tavern that night, but had he known the consequences of that hasty retreat, he would have been glad to stay and blow the fucking Ninth Symphony out his ass, and throw in the “Hallelujah Chorus” for an encore. He’d hated every minute of the night as he was to hate every minute of the wedding day to follow, and all he wanted at the time was to get the hell out of there and go home. So when he got in the way of John and his asshole buddies trying to sneak out of the place and insisted they take him along, he’d thought he was just catching a ride into town. He was so goddamned upset he was nearly bawling, so they’d finally given in, not out of charity or palhood, but so as not to draw attention to themselves, the chickenshits. And that was how Maynard, condemned to Nerdhood and member all his life of little else, became a member of the Dirty Six and, in the end, maybe the dirtiest of the bunch. Certainly the stupidest. How had he let it happen? If he hadn’t been keeping his distance from his insufferable cousin all night he might have noticed how weird they were all acting, and shown a bit more caution. Harvie the druggist’s son had apparently concocted some kind of hallucinogenic brew they’d been throwing down and they’d all blown their fucking gourds. When they tried to force some of the crap on Maynard on the way to the clubhouse, he pretended to drink it but didn’t. Later, though, when they’d pulled his pants down and got him between the legs of the girl, they’d shot it up his ass like an enema, using an old mosquito spray gun that hung on the wall out there and a lot of brute force. The gangbang was one thing, a helluva way to lose your cherry, but worse was to happen. For one thing, although everything suddenly had become lucidly clear to Maynard as though he’d just been given a total vision of the way the whole goddamned world worked, he found he’d lost control of his emotions. When he felt like crying or screaming, he heard himself laughing like a freaking maniac. When Harvie, testing the limits of the young kid’s womb with his impossible broompole during their climactic six-on-one (Maynard was in her right hand), leaned down deliriously in mid-orgasm toward John’s hairy ass, bucking away in front of his face, and took an ecstatic bite, Maynard, in horror and revulsion, let out an ecstatic yahoo of his own and blew jism all over what might be called the trysting place, coming for the first time really all night, though in truth it hurt like hell and gave him the peculiar impression for a moment that he was vomiting between his eyes. He loathed his cousin with all his heart, but when, over the little glassy-eyed guttersnipe’s exhausted body, greasy with sweat and cum, Dutch proposed a toast, in all fucking seriousness, to John’s bride of the morrow, Maynard found himself falling between John’s bare arms and weeping like a baby with loving gratitude. Gratitude—?! It was terrible. And the worse it was, the more he seemed to be enjoying himself. He was overswept by a mortifying shame, being a man who never let himself go in public, but hated it when he had to put his clothes back on, singing them all an Indian war-song while dancing around buck-naked, wearing his shorts on his head like a chieftain’s feathers. They had to wrestle him back into his clothes just as they’d wrestled him out of them. At Dutch’s insistence, they took up a collection to pay the little tramp, whom they’d just learned was only fourteen years old, though she looked too out of it to care one way or the other about money. Dutch started it by tossing two twenties and a ten down on her bare belly, John raised him twenty on her glistening pubes, Dutch matched h
im up her privates with a grin. That got everyone into it, and in the end they all emptied out their pockets on or in her anatomy, which seemed to be rolling and heaving like a storm-tossed sea. Maynard was only carrying about fifteen or so, but he threw in everything he had, slapping it down in the sticky place between her undulating breasts where John had been as though spreading a royal flush. He felt like he was being robbed and, god, it was wonderful. Sheer bliss. John cut out then with heartfelt well wishes and blown kisses from all and Dutch said he’d take the little jailbait home to the trailer park; he asked Maynard to come along: she was dead meat and he’d need help. Nothing Maynard wanted more than to spring his wretched ass out of that reeling hellhole, but he couldn’t move. Couldn’t leave his old pals Harvie and what’s-his-name and the other guy, could he? Christ, Dutch! Have a fucking heart! He was taking his clothes off again, but he had tears in his eyes. “Hey, buddy,” Dutch whispered in his ear, one heavy arm wrapped around his shoulder as though clapping him in irons, “the best is yet to come! C’mon, now, let go your dick and give me a hand.”

  The dress Pauline wore to John’s bachelor party, torn and stained though it was after, lasted her all through high school; nowadays, her clothes didn’t seem to last her a week. She had been carhopping at a rootbeer drive-in that spring (Daddy Duwayne turned up sometime before Memorial Day, drunk and dangerous, and lost her her job), so when the fat boy invited her to the party, she used up all she’d saved to buy a sleeveless princess dress, a see-through bra, and new panties with a little lace fringe all round. She didn’t have enough left over for new shoes or tights, so she had to go in her old school shoes and socks, the ones with the school colors at the tops. These, one shoe, and the dress were all she got home with, the dress in bad shape already and even worse after Daddy Duwayne got done with her, but she mended it and washed it and went on wearing it right up until the time she moved into Gordon’s studio—in fact, it was still in the trailer when she and Otis went there after Daddy Duwayne’s arrest, only Daddy Duwayne had hung it up in the toilet and shot it full of holes. For three or four years after that, she and Otis were close friends and visited the trailer together a lot, until something happened, she never figured out what (when she went to the police station and asked him, Otis turned red and wouldn’t even look at her and said in his barking way that “that case was solved,” or something like that), and they didn’t become really good friends again for several years. In the meantime, though, the city cleaned up the trailer park and condemned Daddy Duwayne’s trailer and hauled it away, and Otis got them to give her compensation for it, which she appreciated, since Gordon was nice to her but never gave her any money to spend. She bought some new designer jeans, a quilted anorak, some pretty blouses and a beaded vest, new pantyhose and underwear, a slinky sweater, a pair of ankle boots and some wedgies, popular back then, and three new dresses, including one with screenprint reproductions of the World’s Fair, which was her favorite, and she was still wearing almost all these things seven or eight years later—really, right up until the last couple of weeks, when suddenly nothing seemed to fit anymore, not even the boots. Well, age was catching up with her, she supposed, you can’t stay in kid sizes forever, and she made a trip out to one of the malls to buy a few new things, using money from the cash register that Gordon never missed. She’d hardly got used to her new clothes, however, when they no longer seemed to fit either. She split the new pantyhose trying to get them on, the jeans seemed to have shrunk before they’d even been washed, she couldn’t get the nice sloppy sweater with silver tears and glitter on over her head, and her new full skirt suddenly wasn’t full anymore. So, in pinned skirt, bedroom slippers, and one of Gordon’s cardigans, she went hurrying out there again. As she passed through the food court with its delicious smells, she felt a terrible urge to stop for pancakes or a hamburger or maybe several, but she was afraid if she did she might not make it to the fashion shops in time. The safety pin popped on the skirt even as she ran past the video arcade. She not only needed new clothes, she needed them right away.

  Clarissa, Jennifer, and Nevada were sitting at a table near the taco bar when Pauline went galumphing by, but only Nevada noticed her, the girls too absorbed with Uncle Bruce’s beautiful girlfriend, whom both supposed to be at least a famous model and maybe even a singer or a movie star. It was amazing running into her out here, and they were both flattered that Nevada recognized them and actually took time to sit down with them and have a smoke and a diet cola with a lemon slice in it. This was hardly Hollywood or the Riviera, and Clarissa suddenly felt embarrassed about this place that she and Jennifer loved so, but when she tried to apologize for it, Nevada waved at her own smoke and said very emphatically, “Your father’s a great builder,” and that made it all right again. Clarissa knew that everyone sitting around them was watching them, and she wished her dad had not made her promise not to take up cigarettes because she felt it would be really cool now to share one with Nevada. When Clarissa asked if Uncle Bruce was in town, Nevada exhaled with pursed lips, smiled, and said: “Well, he’s been in … and out…” When she smiled, you realized she wasn’t quite so young after all, but the little lines that appeared, Clarissa thought, made her more beautiful than ever in a kind of wicked and knowing way. It was how Marie-Claire must have looked. She could see why Uncle Bruce would be crazy about her, at least for a while, but she wasn’t at all jealous, or anyway not very. Jennifer was the real problem. When Nevada asked her where her mother was, Clarissa said she was pretty busy these days and didn’t seem to be around much (busy at what? Clarissa didn’t know), maybe she was on a trip somewhere, and Jen said, “My mom’s always on a trip somewhere,” which made Nevada smile again. Clarissa started to say that Granny Opal, who had brought them out here, had gone to the nursing home to visit her granddad who’d had a stroke, but thought better of it in the nick of time, and instead, pushing her hands into her leather jacket, she asked: “Did Uncle Bruce fly here in his own plane?” “Yes, we both did. He has a new one, you know, a jet. A real dream. Would you two like to go up with us sometime?” “Oh yes!” they both exclaimed at once, and Nevada smiled again, but this time more at Jennifer than at Clarissa, and this gave Clarissa a very unpleasant feeling. What was worse, she could see Granny Opal coming through the door at the far end with that dippy old-lady smile on her face, which for some reason made her want to hit Jennifer. Maybe Bruce’s girlfriend saw her, too, or saw it all in Clarissa’s face, because she stubbed out her smoke, tossed some money on the table (way too much, it was very flamboyant and showed the kinds of places she was used to), and rising in a very smart way that was almost like from a TV commercial, said: “Hey, it’s been cool, team. I like this place. It’s funky and real.” Was she making fun? It didn’t seem like it. Certainly Nevada seemed very sincere when she smiled down at them and added: “I’ll catch you here again sometime soon.”

  It disturbed Opal to see the two children sitting with that older woman with the mask-like face who worked for John (when Opal asked her son one day what the woman did, he said she was his troubleshooter, and Opal wondered then: what trouble?), especially when the woman got up and left hurriedly without looking back as though sensing that Opal was approaching the table—what did it mean? what was going on?—but Opal was disturbed by so many things of late, this particular disturbance seemed relatively insignificant and was quickly shelved in a back corner of her mind: little Clarissa was a clever child and could take care of herself. Opal was less assured of her own ability to do so: she felt bewildered, apprehensive, and alone. She had just been visiting Barnaby who as usual mistook her for Audrey, and Opal, for one disorienting moment, had found herself answering back as though she were indeed Barnaby’s dead wife, defending her in her own voice, as it were, from Barnaby’s befuddled harangue. Then, that peculiar goggle-eyed photographer had lumbered into the room uninvited and started taking pictures of poor old Barnaby, standing there scratching his neck, unshaven and dentures removed, dribbling a bit, head
cocked awkwardly to one side, bathrobe gaping and the fly of his boxer shorts, too, and Opal, finding this rude intrusion an insult to the old gentleman’s dignity, had upbraided the photographer smartly and sent him backpedaling out the door, again behaving more like Audrey than herself. She had felt certain she had done the right thing, but such outbursts were so rare for her, she had felt faint afterwards, her heart palpitating and her hands shaking, and she had had to sit down suddenly, while Barnaby, cursing her and the rest of the world, staggered off to the bathroom, dragging one leg like an accusation. What was worse, Opal had seen something inside the gaping robe that made her believe Barnaby might be contemplating taking his own life, and she didn’t know what to do about it, or whom to tell. The truth was, at this time in her life, Opal no longer had anyone she could confide in. Her grandchildren, though still dearer to her than her own life, had begun to distance themselves from her; her husband Mitch, having become very important up at the state capitol, was rarely in town anymore, much less at home; her best friends were all passed away; her brother Maynard, with whom she had never been close anyway, was slipping into senility; the young preacher, whom she had also run into at the retirement home, making his pastoral rounds, seemed to her to be on cloud nine most of the time (something Audrey always used to say) and of no use as a source of sane counsel; and even her son and his wife were rarely to be seen, seeming each to be living a life at some remove from her own—even when they were in the same room together, it was as though they existed on different planes, able to pass right through one another without touching. If she spoke up and said, “I believe Barnaby may be thinking about killing himself,” who would listen? She was invisible. Perhaps Barnaby felt the same way. He was very angry about something, and no one was paying any attention. It seemed to have to do with business. He believed Audrey had done something that had destroyed his company. But of course it wasn’t destroyed, it was ticking along very nicely, thank you, one reason Opal saw so little of her son these days. So maybe it was something that had happened years and years ago, if at all. Barnaby took business too seriously. As if he should be worrying about such things now, poor man! It was what had brought on his stroke, as best Opal could tell, she having been at that sad dinner when the old fellow collapsed. There had been some sort of bad news phoned in—Opal, distracted by little Mikey who had come into the dining room to show her his disappearing lipstick trick, not even trying to understand it—and down he’d gone. A shock to everyone. She herself had not been able to move, and later remembered what her friend Kate had said about the moment she got the news of her son Yale’s death: “Time stood still’ That hackneyed line from cheap novels. I suddenly understood it, Opal. Everything stopped. Cold. It was the freezing form that anguish takes in the human heart and mind, turning everything, even time, to stone.” When the ambulance came to take Barnaby away, Opal had found herself in the kitchen, washing dishes, though John and his wife had more than enough domestic help, and talking out loud about the strange but beautiful accidents families were. Was John’s wife standing there with her? She seemed to be. “He’ll be all right,” Opal had said, but perhaps only to her invisible self. And now, here he was, the shattered old man, consumed by rage and resentment, and much of it directed against his own son-in-law, in spite of all that John was doing for him, finding the best doctors, watching over his business, naming the new civic center after him (the dedication ceremony one of the few wholly happy events in Opal’s life of late), and providing generously for him now when he was no longer able to provide for himself. It was tragic, really. Opal hoped her own mind would be clearer when the time came for John to take care of her, so that she could let him know how appreciative she was. It was scary to think about. But it might not be the worst thing that had happened to her. She’d be free from her frettings, for one thing, which now, in her solitude, were quite getting her down. And even if she might not be able to understand it all perfectly, she and her son would be close again, for the first time really since he was a little boy.