John's Wife: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  Barnaby’s eyes were wide open. He had never been more lucid. It often happened this way at the dewy end of a night. The two halves of his cracked brain slid together like train cars coupling, and he could see clearly, if only for a short time, about as long as it took the dew to rise, what a fucked-up old ruin he was. In these dawn moments he had no confusions, understood everything: how Audrey, dying too soon, had undone him utterly with her bastardized will, how John had pushed him to the edge, then over, imprisoning him here in this cheap pre-cremation motel after the stroke, how his beloved daughter, literally all he had left in this world, had drifted away from him, probably blaming him for everything that had happened, how even his old friend Alf had lost interest (and, hell, who wouldn’t?), patronizing him at best and leaving him pretty much in the hands of that dotty old lady who liked to pretend she was Audrey. Alf at least took his side on the civic center controversy, even if he supposed Barnaby wasn’t listening when he talked to him about it, and, living in one of Barnaby’s houses, praised his craft in his dour taciturn way: “You built things to last, Barn. Trouble is, that scares people. Nowadays, they need things around them that wear out faster than they do.” Sanctuaries of the family, that was what Barnaby was building—solid foundations, rational structures you could trust, tasteful neighborly details, a principle of restraint and comfort and proportion throughout—but people didn’t have families in the old way anymore. If they ever did. Just an illusion maybe, a mere veneer. Look at his own. A damned catastrophe and heart irreparably broken after. Figuring out the real world made you want to kill yourself—in fact, come to think of it, he’d meant to, he had rescued his old handgun for the purpose, holstering it under his armpit so he wouldn’t forget where it was, but it wasn’t there anymore. John’s sponge-brained mother must have hidden it; maybe her son had told her to. He was as good as dead anyway, why not prolong the agony? Watch the old boy twitch and wobble, have a few laughs. So why hadn’t he shot himself when he had the gun in hand? Because he’d wanted to explain himself to his daughter before he died. Warn her about what was happening. Tell her how much he loved her. He no longer believed he was able to do that. Even in these sounder moments, the words that came out were not the ones he was thinking. Dying was about all he was able to do now, and that wouldn’t be easy. Barnaby had come to understand that dying was not acquiescence to something inevitable, quite the contrary—life was what was passive. The body could go on forever, or nearly; to die it had to be instructed. This was the function of what men called spirit, nihilism was after all man’s truest instinct, this was the ultimate message of his acids: turn it off. His own self-destruct switch had been flicked, the instructions had been passed, but the circuits had shorted out. At this rate of staticky disintegration it could take forever. So where the hell had that stupid old woman hidden the goddamned thing? Probably in the bottom of the laundry basket, said his daughter. Right. Good idea. The laundry basket. He sidled, dragging his dead leg, toward the bathroom door. This was hard work. He felt like he was struggling against strange impersonal forces. Like the sort that ran the town now. Used to be one big family. No longer. What John had done, in effect, was take the roof off. Neighbors and strangers were the same thing. Locks on all the doors now. Burglar alarm systems. Even though no one stayed home. He poked around, found a shirt he’d been looking for. Here all the time. Not why he’d come in here, though. He struggled to pee and dribbled on his bedroom slippers. Just a trickle, didn’t really need to go. So that wasn’t it either. His medicine maybe. He fumbled with the cap on the plastic vial. When it finally popped off, everything spilled into the sink and on the floor. To hell with it. Wouldn’t kill him to do without until Audrey came, and if it did, he’d have done himself a favor. Where was the old bag anyway? It was getting light outside. The birds were going at it. Was his daughter just here? Had he been able to tell her anything? Why was there all this dirty laundry all over the floor?

  The early light of day found Barnaby’s lawyer and fellow plotter Maynard in the woods at the edge of town, kicking irritably through the dew-drenched undergrowth. He didn’t remember coming out here; rage must have brought him. The birds had their dawn chorus cranked up full throttle, the shrieking little shit-factories—he wished he had his gun along to shut the fuckers up. He must have dressed in the dark: red-and-orange golf shirt with the green monogrammed pocket now containing the house keys, chafing his left nipple, the shirt tucked into black pinstripe suit pants belted high over his pot, tennis shoes without socks. In the past when he’d stormed away on sleepless nights, Veronica had sometimes locked him out. She could never explain herself afterwards. Maybe she wanted him to hit her, needing the attention. She often hit him back or threw stuff at him. It was about their only way of talking to each other; the rest was mostly just senseless screaming. The only thing in his pants pockets was the ancient garter, always with him, frayed and limp from so much fondling over the years. Maynard fondled it now. It was dark in here and damp, but beyond the leaves a pale violet light was spreading across the sky like a morbid stain. It was probably going to be what some would call a beautiful morning. Maynard hacked up a gob and spat contemptuously. Beauty. Only humans in their egomaniacal perversity could dream up such a sick idea. Warped everything. One night out at the club he’d heard old Alf argue that intimations of beauty were nothing more than the old pleasure/pain principle in operation, and Maynard could go along with that but not with the association of beauty with pleasure. He came on a patch of wild bluebells poking up in the dim light, stepped on them. That’s it, he told himself. Fuck everything. Christ! He loathed—bitterly, deeply, and intimately—this town and everyone in it, loathed his wealth, his career, his family, his past, his future, life itself. What would have happened, he often wondered, had he not been born a Maynard between Maynards? What if he had been free to leave town for good when he left high school as so many did? As apparently his brat of a son had done, a Maynard or no? Same thing probably. And (he twisted the garter around his fingers) fleeing this shithole was just not on, not for him, not for the moony lovesick Nerd. Whom he loathed above all others. Ahead of him, like secret writing in the dark forest, loomed a stand of young birch trees, ghostly in the dawn glow, inviting his admiration. He turned away in disgust, found himself at the edge of a small thorny ravine. Recognized it. A grin spread painfully across his bristly face, couldn’t stop it. The little guttersnipe’s baptism that wretched night had been his as well. In commemoration of the sickening occasion, he took his prick out to pee and was just letting go when his true love came riding by on her bicycle, dressed in her white tennis costume. She waved and smiled, but he could not wave back, both hands busy trying to stop what he was doing and get covered up without pissing all over himself. And then (he was beardy and rumpled, unwashed, smelled bad, was dressed for the circus with his widdling weenie on view, no wonder she didn’t stop) she was gone. He staggered down through the ravine and up to the road, thought he could see her pedaling around the turn just up ahead, a flash of pure white like a bird in flight, and hitching up his pin-striped pants, Maynard II went stumbling after.

  The daughter of the lady cyclist glimpsed by the rumpled lawyer at the edge of Settler’s Woods was getting married. It was a modern wedding. The bride was dressed in a string bikini, high heels, and a bridal veil that opened and closed like a shower curtain. It was not clear who the groom was, but Clarissa’s father was there, looking pleased as punch, and chiding Granny Opal for not being with it, the old stick. Jennifer, who had been kept awake all night by the wanderings in and out of her bedroom by her spacey sleepwalking big-bellied mother, was glad her best friend was getting married and so wouldn’t be mad about getting left out of the day’s coming adventures. Which she could not quite imagine but which filled her with a kind of apprehensive delight, like the first time she had to jump off the high diving board, knowing she’d love it if she didn’t kill herself. Her dad was there that time. He didn’t do anything, he didn’t hold her hand o
r jump with her or even say anything, he just stood down there smiling up at her in that easy way he had, and she knew it would be all right. Nevada had a smile like that and now it was Nevada Jen trusted to see her through whatever was coming next. She could hardly wait, she was so in love she ached all over, but she was scared, too, and Nevada’s smile seemed to say: Stay cool, don’t worry, it’s okay. Jump. Nevada was at the wedding, too. She was arranging the flowers. Heaps and heaps of them, so piled up that people disappeared in and out of them. It looked like fun, sort of like playing house in leaf piles, but when Jennifer started to follow her sister Zoe into a particularly inviting hole to roll around, Nevada, smiling her serene smile, steered her away and up toward the altar where the wedding was to take place. Jen’s mother, who was no longer pregnant, was up there playing the organ (dressed only in her underwear, good grief, Mom as usual), and her father was trying to get her brother Philip to come out from behind the pulpit where he was hiding. Philip was up to some kind of mischief back there, and her father was getting exasperated. “It’s beginning!” he shouted. But it wasn’t. Almost everyone in town was there, wandering about in a completely disorderly fashion like at a very crowded cocktail party. It’ll never happen, Jennifer thought, laughing. They’re just pretending. It was funny and she kept laughing, almost like someone was tickling her. But there was also something dangerous about it all. Clarissa had stained her lips with real blood as though to try to warn Jennifer about something, something she couldn’t tell her out loud, and when Jennifer, trying to be cool and friendly, asked, “So, who’s the lucky guy?,” Clarissa’s eyes flashed with anger and something like panic. “Hey, sorry,” Jen said (the church seemed to have darkened: had they started the ceremony?), and she noticed now the little tattoo just below and to one side of Clarissa’s navel. It was of a semiautomatic weapon, its black barrel pointed down into the bikini, butt toward the hipbone. This had several meanings, she knew, like “PULL MY TRIGGER” and “DO IT AND DIE,” which was the name of a hot movie out at the mall, but it also seemed to have a secret message, meant for Jennifer alone. There was a little flame at the tip of the gun barrel like a licking tongue and two words by the handle she couldn’t quite see. It was, she realized, a cry for help. Clarissa was going to die! Or someone was! Jennifer went looking for Nevada but apparently she’d done her decorating job and left. Her dad was gone, too, and the music had turned metallic and heavy, like a funeral march performed by a rock band, not at all the sort of thing her mother played. Old Hoot, the hardware store man, was in the pulpit, looking straight at her and shouting out in his loud nasal whine about the fires of hell, which sounded more like the farce of hail. But in fact it was getting hot in here. Jennifer understood now why Clarissa had been wearing a bikini, it made sense. The flowers had wilted and were beginning to rot, it was suffocating. There was a spotlight on her and the relentless music was driving her up the wall. Then the man in the pulpit shouted out something really weird: “Cut off her hair!” he cried. What—? Jennifer sat up, sweating, with the sun in her face and music blasting out of her brother’s room, remembering now the words she’d seen on the tattoo under Clarissa’s navel: “BUTT OUT.” She smiled to herself, pushing her tangled hair out of her face, wiping her neck and chest with her nightshirt. Her father was right. It was beginning.

  It was the phone that made Otis sit up that morning: Snuffy had pulled him out of the line and put him in as quarterback in a tough game, and his throwing arm had gone dead on him just as he got the snap and the opposing team was coming at him: he couldn’t get rid of the ball, he couldn’t even get his arm above his waist, his linemen had faded from sight as though they didn’t exist, he was going to get killed. He came to with his arm gone to sleep from snoozing on top of it there at his desk. It was Pauline. He stood and did a couple of quick knee-bends, pumping his arm to get the tingling out, telling Pauline, yeah, yeah, speak slower. He hadn’t been sleeping well at night lately, too many worries, and so found himself occasionally nodding off like this at the station, making his workday a bit blurry at times. There were a lot of things about the town that weren’t sitting just right with Otis these days, but what was worrying him most was John’s wife. More than once now, he’d found her car, unlocked and the keys inside, parked far from home—in the empty supermarket lot late one night, for example, once behind the church, last night right in front of the station—and, his neck tingling in a funny way, had had to run it home for her. It was unusual and just the sort of irregularity that made Otis nervous, more so because it had to do with her. When John got back later today, he’d try to talk to him about it. Otis couldn’t understand what Pauline was saying, he was too groggy and she was very agitated, so he excused himself brusquely and set the phone down on the desk, went over to the cooler to splash his face with a handful of ice water. The thing that was most nightmarish about that football game was the crowd. The bench itself was empty, just a kind of cold wind blowing down it, even old Snuffy had left or else had gone to sit in the stands—where no one was cheering, it was very dark and moody up there, more like they were a crowd at a funeral. Or an execution (he remembered thinking, if only she were here, everything would be all right, but she wasn’t and he was up the spout). The field was dark, too. He could see those goons coming but he couldn’t see their faces. He wiped his own face with his handkerchief, blew his nose, and picked up the phone. Pauline said she had to see him, something awful was happening, there was no one else she could turn to, Gordon was gone, he had to come right away. The urgency of Pauline’s appeal, as though she just couldn’t wait for it, excited Otis, but the idea of seeing her alone again also made him feel uneasy. Last time was not so good, it was like he couldn’t get it up as big around her anymore or else she was getting loose with age or something, and he’d thought at the time that maybe their long romance was finally over. When the shoe don’t fit no more, as the old song goes … Though they could still be friends. Old shoe friends. But he could hear her crying on the other end so he said, okay, hang in, he’d be over in a jiff. “And bring a bag of doughnuts,” she begged. He supposed the problem had to do with her husband, the station had been getting several phone complaints about Gordon of late, that flake finally losing it maybe, so what met Otis at the studio, though he thought he was ready for anything, caught him completely by surprise. He pushed in with the doughnuts, ringing the little bells, called out, heard Pauline’s whimpering reply in the next room where Gordon shot his portraits. Otis noticed there was a scatter of unopened mail on the floor that had come through the door slot; Gordon didn’t seem to be paying much attention to business. Curtains were drawn, the place looked closed down, though he remembered seeing lights when he had passed by here on his rounds last night. Ellsworth had been up all night, too, maybe Gordon had had to get some work finished for the Crier. And maybe not. Otis parted the bead curtains and stepped back into the portrait studio, thinking he’d probably better check out Gordon’s newest batch of photos, there might be something to all those complaints, and what he saw, squatting on her haunches there on the little stage like a carnival exhibit, was Pauline, wild-haired and sobbing, wrapped in nothing but a bedsheet, and big as a mountain. Even squatting, she was eye-level with Otis. Otis couldn’t think what to say. He tipped his cap back and scratched his head. If that don’t beat all—! Her teary eyes spied the sack of half a dozen doughnuts and, from the look that crossed her big red face, he figured he’d better give them to her right away, though he had thought they were going to share them. They vanished in six bites and she looked like she might eat the sack as well. And then she did eat the sack. “Oh, Otis,” she bawled with her mouth full of chewed paper. “What’s happening to me?” He didn’t know. He had the idea, though, that those blown-up photos of her private parts might have something to do with it and he thought maybe he ought to examine them again. Just in the line of duty. He lifted one edge of the sheet to have a look (kept his other hand resting on his hip holster, didn’t know why, but it was like
he was scouting out strange territory and had to be ready for anything): she was one huge woman. Not fat, just huge. Her flexed knees were big as football helmets, her colossal butt like a pair of boulders. Still soft, though. And they bounced when he jiggled them like they always did. His walkie-talkie buzzed, interrupting his inspection. The station had just got another complaint about that kinky photographer, he’d been caught hanging out in women’s changing rooms out at the mall again, what should they do? Otis told them to send a squad car out to pick him up and hold him down at the station until he got back. “Might be a while,” he said. Pauline was still sniveling, using a corner of the sheet to wipe her nose, but she’d calmed down considerably, and now watched him with the hopeful wet eyes of a good old birddog waiting to be told what to do. So he told her: “Now, let’s go see them photos again. You won’t need the sheet.”

  Many—Dutch, for example, or Waldo, Nevada, Bruce, or Daphne—would have dismissed these photographs that Otis was now so intently examining (later, he would take them with him as “material evidence,” though evidence of what he could not say) as mere pornography, butt and beaver shots intended to arouse the scopophile, disparaging perhaps the model, whose shape was generous and skin not without blemish, even while admiring the technical quality of the image, some—Bruce in particular—admiring as well the perversity of the image-taker, a profession Bruce likened favorably unto the sadist’s. Others, too—Trevor, Marge, Lorraine, Floyd—would have found these photographs perverse or worse, a cruel theft of sorts, a violent dispossession of the other, and wretched of purpose, but Ellsworth, with an understanding bred of lifelong friendship, would have perceived their profound lyrical intent and artistic integrity—and did in fact, for he had viewed them and most others in Gordon’s private albums, kept unaware of one series only, that which now had undone (his own undoing) the photographer and plunged him into such despair as well as trouble with the law. For this was a man, Ellsworth would have said, who loved less flesh than form, more pattern of light and dark than what tales or implied excitements those patterns might bespeak, one who sought to penetrate the visible contours of the restless world, ceaselessly dissolved by time, to capture the hidden image beyond, the elusive mystery masked by surface flux, and the name he gave that which he pursued was Beauty. When Ellsworth, for whom movement was all and the stasis that his friend coveted was not Beauty but Death, or both at best, complained about “the easy accident of an opened lens,” Gordon had insisted that “accident,” as he called it, was in fact the essential creative gift, defending his photographs in terms of found objects and aleatory music, about which he knew only what Ellsworth himself had told him when he came back, showing off a bit, from the outside world. To prove it, he gave Ellsworth a camera and told him to go take a hundred photos or so (Ellsworth was bored after a dozen) and they would judge them after as works of art, and of course none stood up as Gordon’s did, though Ellsworth was personally fond of a picture he took at a young war hero’s tomb during a visit by his family there with the French girl who later committed suicide (this little exercise happened a long time ago), simply because there was so much story concealed in it, however ill-managed the shot, and another of three middle-aged women, grinning stupidly at him, seated together on a park bench in the old city park (now vanished), only one of whom, themselves at the time in mourning for a lost friend, was still alive today, an innocent image of love and grief, emotionally enhanced by overexposure and poor focus. He published both (with byline) in The Town Crier, but took no other, for his friend was right, he was no photographer, nor a visual artist of any kind, appreciative of the real thing though he could be, and moreover he came to understand, in more than just a metaphoric sense, that things as well as people actively showed themselves to the photographer because of his gifts, country roads stretching out to display their longing to him, vistas unpeopling themselves to reveal their troubled depths, houses fluttering their starched lace curtains at him like flirtatious lashes, light entering their wide porches to open them into a broad friendly smile, their flower-bordered cement walks reaching out to the front sidewalk like firm proffered handshakes or decorated cleavage. Sometimes. Sometimes there was a darkness, withdrawal, implicit rebuff, threat. Gordon shot the town, Ellsworth often thought, as if it were a strange dream enacted, a dream dreamt by the dead in which the living were condemned to mythic servitude, Gordon as artist not their liberator but the revealer of their common condition which might yet lead to liberation if they would but look closely enough, something his own Artist once said in another way (a line now lost, or rather, perverted by the Stalker, in the novel’s sudden turnings) with respect to the mythology of the pose. For Ellsworth, much as he admired his friend’s talent and respected his quest, no single photo, no single painting or artifact of any sort, no matter how magisterial, could equal any of these things, however modest their quality, when linked together in telling pattern, and for that he often loved the photos Gordon himself most disdained. The family portraits, for example, trite compositions when singly seen, utterly trivial, artificial, and repetitive, but bearing in their austere and staged formality the power of tragedy when seen in temporal sequence, a record of loss and joined resistance to loss. If Gordon prized most that photo of laundry hung out to dry, crisp and stiff in the cold, or this of pale luminous buttocks, all detail burned away except at the perfect fork, or that of a gleaming black coffin held aloft in an overcast sky by four ropy hands as white as bone, Ellsworth loved more his own fat photo archives with their gas stations and orators and sliding Little Leaguers and humpback bridges and trailer parks and Rotary club meetings and pet graves in backyards and Bermuda-shorted duffers and candy-poled barbershops and dancing high schoolers and ginger-breaded bandstands and beaming trophy bearers all ajumble, like a million stories waiting to be told and a million more with every shuffle of the pack. He could appreciate Gordon’s fascination with an empty mall parking lot as a mysterious space, as though nothing had given birth to itself, but he got much more out of it in context with other photos of that mall at other times and of other malls besides. Here a photo of a since-dismantled fountain from an early mall in town, its cement belly adorned with scrawled graffiti (all that rich local culture, lost forever!), there one of the glittery escalator at the inauguration of the new highway mall, the six-screen cinema ads and opening day sales as oracular backdrop, both set beside this one of the steamy food court, filled with the downy young like chicks in an incubator, at yet another mall (though the viewer might commingle them), each enriched with faces and fashions and all the passing foolishness of their times, and add to these another of the bus station soda fountain and pinball machines, once locus of the courting rites of the young now no longer young, and yet another of the abandoned Night Sky Drive-In movie theater, sacrificed to the highway which gave birth to the newest mall, showing its desolation of spirit by the grass and weeds sprouting through the cracks in the cement ramps, the sagging fences, leaning screen, marred by the stones and bottles thrown at it, and then a worker standing in rubble, guiding a beam aloft, and a tennis-costumed woman and her leather-jacketed children in that parking lot before seen so deserted, now filled with gleaming vehicles of the latest models, and a stark empty-windowed downtown dime store closing down forever, and so the story grows: of the town, and of the viewer, and of the photographer, too.