John's Wife: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  The body as a cosmic, or at least an outsized presence and, when grasped entire, potential source of revelation, was also the subject of Otis’s sober (more or less sober) study, when abruptly interrupted by the arrival of John striding into his office at the police station with that team captain’s bearing of his and asking what was going on. “Material evidence,” Otis said, hurriedly shuffling the photos into a drawer. “Odd case. Has me stumped. I’m glad you’re back, John.” And he was, too, but wished he’d been announced, unable yet to stand to take John’s hand. It was the phone that rescued him. “Hasn’t stopped,” he said, leaning around to pick it up. Another call about the traffic lights, all out of sync. And who switched the street signs at Third and Main? “Some kid’s prank,” he growled, rising. “We’re working on it.” He hung up, ordered all calls put on hold, and John, shaking his hand, asked then about the photographer, offering to pay his bond and find him legal help; Otis said there was none to pay, he was letting the man out soon, and legal help was not the sort that sad fruitcake needed. He filled John in on what had been happening out at the mall and apparently at the swimming pool, too, maybe right out there on Main Street, they had a real problem here. He didn’t tell John about the ruined photos of Pauline he’d seen hanging in the basement darkroom, because he didn’t understand them himself. Like the man was losing his touch or something, and it might be pushing him over the edge? No, too simple and it didn’t explain Pauline. Might just be something artsy he was trying that Otis didn’t understand—or it might be more sinister than that. John wondered aloud about the newspaper that hadn’t come out yet this week, and Otis said he didn’t know what was wrong over there but planned to check it out when he got a moment free. Which wasn’t going to be right away, the calls were coming in about one every three minutes; he told John about them, disguising his own misgivings by saying it was probably just the kids let out of school with nothing better to do than mischief, and John, laughing, agreed. John did make Otis feel better just by being here, as though his mere presence in town were somehow a calming force, jurisprudential in nature, decreeing order and the common good. Otis told him so in his own gruff words (“This town needs you, John, you should stay home more!”), and when asked, agreed to tear up the overdue parking tickets (also two for drunk driving) of some of John’s visiting business associates on the grounds that the fines might get in the way of much larger investments here. Sure, why not, made sense. Hard to collect them anyway. He was glad to hear about the trucking firm, less happy about the racetrack, though he didn’t say so. Together, they went over the planned safety and security procedures of the parade route, which ended as usual with patriotic and political speeches in the civic center parking lot, where local churches, clubs, and merchants would be setting up the stalls that had replaced the old Pioneers Day fair since the city park had disappeared. Otis explained how he intended to have the cars off the parade route streets the night before, then went on to mention, a bit hesitantly, that, speaking of cars left on the street, he’d found one of John’s abandoned late at night a couple of times while he was gone, and had had to take it home for him. John thanked him, adding: “She’s getting a bit too big for her britches, that girl, I’ll have to talk to her. Let me know if it happens again.” That’s right, it could have been the kid, that made sense, too, as with most everything John had to say, and Otis let it go at that, but he didn’t think this was the answer to what he felt more like an eerie taunt. They were releasing Gordon just as John was leaving and Otis could see by the wince of consternation that John had instantly grasped how disturbed the man was, his round face flushed and his eyes damp and inwardly focused, his mouth partway agape. “If there’s anything my wife or I can do for you—?” John offered, startling the photographer, who seemed to see him now for the first time: he turned pale and began to tremble, then spun about and left without a word. “Better go with him,” Otis told the officer who’d brought him through. “Make sure he gets home okay. And check on his wife.” John had left while this was going on, saying he’d be out at the club if he wanted him, so Otis added: “And don’t be surprised by what you see.” More phonecalls then, stacked up on hold (“There’s been some kinda robbery over to the drugstore, Otis, I’ve sent a couple guys over to check it out…”) while John had paid his courtesy call, among them the sullen motel-keeper out by Settler’s Woods, reporting the bold daylight theft of sheets and food. “Right out the back door. A whole damned truckload, Otis. I think it was that dipshit kid from the drugstore.” Oh oh. Before he could get through to the photographer’s studio, his officer called in on his cellular phone: “It’s a mess over here, Otis. She’s broke out and took the back door with her.”

  By the time John reached the club, Kevin had his irons newly polished, woods lightly waxed, their “Club Champion” mittens laundered, all grips gently textured with fine resin-dusted ebony paper (Kevin’s own secret treatment), the bag’s leather bits rubbed down with boot oil, and stocked with all new tees and golf balls, scorecard, sharpened pencils, and a couple of deeply dimpled, slightly heavier putting balls that Kevin had been experimenting with and which John, too, had taken a liking to. John was in one of his better moods and Kevin felt uneasy about disturbing it, so he held back most of the main news of the past couple of days, telling John only about the job interviews he was conducting and the story everybody was telling about the preacher’s kid on the car dealer’s roof, including Waldo’s version about polishing the shingles. John laughed generously and asked if his wife had been out. “Uh, not sure,” Kevin said, turning away. Wrong question. “Might have seen her out on the back nine.” John accepted that with a shrug, asked him to whip him up a beef-and-pepper while he was changing and Kevin had to tell him that the kitchen had been stripped bare this morning by thieves, the best he could offer him was peanuts or olives from the bar. John’s big smile faded and he glared at Kevin for a moment as though blaming him for the theft of his lunch. “Well, goddamn it, Kev, have you called Otis?” “Sure,” he lied, though it was only a white lie because he planned to, as soon as he could figure out what to tell Otis that he’d believe. “What is this, some fucking third-world country? Who the hell would steal food nowadays? Christ! Call Waldo at the mall and tell him to grab up a bunch of tacos out there, take the rest of the day off, and meet me in half an hour at the fourth tee.” Kevin could have laid on an answer to John’s question had he waited for one, but he was relieved not to have to, not yet. He had earlier spied the little piss-yellow van weaving up the groundsmen’s private access road, kicking up dust and gravel, and he’d gone trotting out to chase it away, but what he’d seen as he came up over the rise near the dogleg at the fifteenth had brought him up short: a gigantic woman in a red cape was squatting at the edge of the rough down there, taking a dump. She’d looked familiar, but Kevin hadn’t been able to place her, not in those proportions, she’d made the trees look like saplings, the van a toy. She was with a skinny little wimp less than half her size, and they were both staring up at him like he was the weird thing on display. He’d yelled at them to get the hell out, this was private property, and he shook his fist at them, but he didn’t go on down there. The woman had wiped herself with a big white bath towel, which she’d dropped on the fairway after using, and then had crawled back into the van, unable after several tries to get her humungous bod in any way but butt first, pulling her head with its thick bird’s nest of black hair in after, and off they’d gone. Curiosity had got the better of Kevin, and he’d gone on down to take a look at what she’d left there (he’d kicked the filthy towel into the rough, let somebody else bring the damned thing in), and while he was studying the amazing pile, he’d heard someone ask him if he needed any help. It was John’s wife, dressed in her bright blue-and-violet Bermuda shorts with the matching top, the one that left her midriff bare, just climbing down off her electric golf cart at the edge of the fairway. “No, no!” he’d exclaimed, stepping hurriedly out of the high grass and weeds. “Just, you kno
w, making my, uh, whaddaya call ‘em, rounds …” She’d asked him then, showing him her seven-iron, if she was using the right club for her lie. He’d recommended the five and had found it for her in her bag. Her irons had seemed tarnished or smeared with something ugly and, oddly, she’d seemed to be playing without a putter. “Hey, bring me your clubs when you come in and I’ll clean them up for you.” She’d smiled, glancing over his shoulder into the rough, and he’d left her then, not looking back, knowing damn well if he did so she wouldn’t be there, humping it straight back to the clubhouse, where he’d discovered he had been cleaned out, right down to the mustard and ketchup pots, and not at all sure what he’d seen and not seen.

  They were rocketing through town at what seemed to Pauline like roller-coaster speed, Corny hunched over the wheel of the old pharmacy van and jerking about as though he were playing an old pinball machine, or one of those new beeping and quacking games with the TV screens she’d seen out at the mall, her view out the windows from her scrunched-up position in the back not unlike those colorfully violent screens, full of racing objects streaking by and suggestions of mass mayhem at the edges. Rarely as many as half the van’s wheels were touching the ground at the same time, the shockless old vehicle hitting bottom with every serious contact, the wheels scrubbing the frame with each screeching turn; if Corny wasn’t hitting the things that flashed past, he was surely taking the skin off them. It was a scary ride, and painful, too, as her body slapped the sides and her head banged against the metal roof with every swerve and bump, but squeezed in there with all the tools and supplies and other junk, something big and hard wrapped in a tarpaulin had got jammed between her thighs and Pauline was riding it with the kind of abstract gratification she’d not known since she gave up bicycles. In truth, under the circumstances (what demands her body was making!), she appreciated Corny’s crazy speed and, even more, his amazing food-gathering ingenuity, which frequently, given his techniques, necessitated the sort of quick exit he always made anyway, Pauline being more afraid of death by starvation than of any mere car crash which, with her new size, seemed somehow less able to do her much harm. She felt, in short, she was more likely to dent than to be dented. A lot of the stuff in the back of the van had been hastily dumped out in the alleyway so she could squeeze in when Corny had first swung the old beat-up yellow van around, and he’d promised, looking over his shoulder anxiously, hair in his face and his wispy little moustache twitching, to get rid of more once they got underway—and he’d done so, they’d been leaving a trail of debris wherever they’d gone, clearing the van to give her more breathing—and eating—space, though the more room he created for her, the more she seemed to need. She knew she wouldn’t be able to stay in here forever, but at least she was free and being fed and maybe together they could find a safe place she could get in and out of, that was what she’d asked of him, and Corny, always the silent type, had nodded his agreement. Corny had seemed desperate to get out of the alley where he’d found her as soon as possible, shoving her in as soon as he’d cleared some space and then tearing out of there, wheels spinning, like a cat with its tail on fire (one of Daddy Duwayne’s favorite pastimes when he was in a good mood), leading Pauline to assume that Corny had probably borrowed the van without the owner knowing it was being borrowed, an aspect of this adventure that took her back to her high school days and added to the nostalgic pleasure she was getting from the rough lump of tarp and metal between her legs and from being unexpectedly reunited with this strange little boy from her past, the only person in the world who had ever said to her: “I love you.” Unless her mother had before she could remember, if she ever really had one. Pauline had never forgotten that touching but bewildering moment, even though Corny had seemed to, had seemed to forget over the years he ever knew her. Nothing strange in that. None of the boys she was friendly with back then acknowledged her now, and even Otis was a different Otis from the one who used to take her out parking in his panel truck, a smelly old thing with a corrugated floor not unlike this tin box she was rattling around in now, and he such a sweet softie back then, a harder man now. They all seemed embarrassed about that past they shared with her, which always gave her such pleasure when she thought about it, at best pretending to know her only as the town photographer’s wife and helper, as though, becoming that, the rest of her history had been miraculously erased from the town’s memory. But maybe Corny hadn’t been pretending. When she’d called out to him, he’d seemed suddenly to wake up, as though from a deep coma, and to see her there for the first time since before he went on his graduation trip to Paris. And he hadn’t hesitated. He’d come over behind the Ford pickup to let her pull the trigger on his twiggy little cock-and-load zinger three or four times in a row (not an easy thing to do without hurting him with her new treetrunk thighs and truncheon fingers: his testicle—she remembered how he loved to have her hold it as he spilled his seed—was like a seed itself, a wee little shotgun pellet, when she took it between giant thumb and forefinger), then, pulling up his pants, had dashed off to get the van and, hardly before she knew it, their wild ride had begun. They’d raided dumpsters and garbage cans, private refrigerators (starting with his own at home), restaurant kitchens and bakeries, supermarkets, butcher shops. He’d hit the malls, motels, the golf club (where, gratefully, she’d been able to use the bathroom), fastfood joints, and all-you-can-eat buffets. Some of it he’d paid for, most apparently not, for they were always on the run. But he actually caught up with her appetite, and soon they were emptying out more things from the van and stocking it with food and other supplies, such as the laundry sacks full of sheets and towels he stole from the motel, from which she might fashion a new garment now that she was outgrowing her burgundy cloak with the bead trim. There was a lucky haul at a highway steak house, where four black plastic bags of fresh garbage lay waiting for them, but they couldn’t fit them in, just splitting them when they tried, sowing her and the van with pungent refuse, and they knew then they’d have to find a place for her to hide while Corny went foraging on his own. But where?

  Reverend Lenny had seen the pharmacy van careening past in front of the doctor’s office, just before Beatrice’s friend Veronica came squealing around the corner from the other direction, jumping the curb as she hit the brakes and the parking meter, more or less at the same time, crumpling one fender and popping the back trunk ajar. She flung the door open and dashed pell-mell into the building in wild-eyed alarm as though something were chasing her, whereupon, closing her door and trunk for her, Lennox had begun to rethink the central theme of next Sunday’s sermon, which, though not yet fully fleshed out, had to do with the miracle of motherhood, an ancient Christian topic of great inspiration and solace. Rethinking it because, to tell the truth (he had just stepped out to the street from the bedlam of the doctor’s waiting room where his miracle-stunned wife sat glassy-eyed and estranged, benumbed by her prodigious burden), there was also something eerily unsettling about reproduction’s uncanny power over the reproducer, as though God were in the gamete not the gamers, His eye on, not the sparrow, but the sparrow’s sperm, not the rueful soul, but the ruthless seed. As the police passed by with the downcast photographer, about whom dreadful rumors now circulated, he had thought of his own past trials with the law and with his loins, and of those of his children now, Philip and Jennifer, with little Zoe no doubt soon to follow, and the unborn unnamed child as well, ensnared, as all within the animate world, in pleasure’s cruel deceptions, condemned as all to suffer love’s remorseless punishments. His sermon, he realized, was not to be a message of good cheer, God bless Mom and all that, but rather one provoking somber meditation upon the enigma of life itself. When, in all sincerity, we ask, “Who am I?,” is there an I to be asking and is it an impertinence, mere tools of purposes not our own, to assume so much as an attribute of who-ness? In short, what can we be sure of beyond the middle term of that inquiry, the is-ness of our immediate presence in the world, an is-ness which itself knows no person nor
belongs to one? Across the street, the old pharmacist whose van he’d just seen roaring past emerged from the cafe with two of his blond-haired grandchildren and was greeted there in the bright midday sunlight by John’s mother, holding the hand of her little grandson Mikey, and Lennox’s sudden affliction of the heart was in some manner assuaged, this genial clasp across the generations somehow ameliorating the essential tragedy at the core, to which, momentarily, he had been a witness but for which he need not be a servile messenger, and at the same time providing him a consolatory homespun image for a sermon which had threatened to become a bit doleful, not a great idea in the summertime when attendance was anyway never at its best. Alf came down then with Veronica, his head bobbing lugubriously, to look at something in the trunk of her car (he seemed appalled, she horrified, but as far as Lenny could see there was nothing there), then the doctor, holding up his hands from which some dirty ooze dripped, shook his old gray head in disgust, rolled his eyes at Lenny as though begging for mercy, and returned to his office, while the hysterical woman, pointing at something in the street, left the car and went running back in the direction she’d originally come from, and Lenny thought: Without an I as God-given, we have to invent one with our thoughts, our passions, our actions, or ones we think of as “ours,” and this we offer up somewhat desperately as our humanity, though, alas, no one may be receiving, no one watching. Well, I am watching, Lenny thought, and I will testify to the nobility of their self-creations and the righteousness of their desires, and thus, in spite of everything, will celebrate motherhood after all. A rusty old pickup pulled up and two men unloaded a man from the back, incongruously dressed in pinstriped suit pants and a golf shirt. It was Veronica’s husband. “Is that my car—?!” he gasped faintly as they carted him inside. For wasn’t survival within the dark inscrutable heart of paradox (he was staring into the junk-laden rusted-out back end of the pickup as though the awesome mystery he was contemplating might be physically visible there) miracle enough? And wasn’t motherhood’s essence the perpetuation, in blind hope and wistful joy, of that impossible paradox, of that unquenchable faith in life’s invisible but ultimately discoverable meaning? Yes, he had his sermon! Lenny was halfway home before he remembered that he had left his wife back in the doctor’s office, so he turned back, hoping he wouldn’t forget the best lines, and when he pulled up to the curb the nurse was just coming out the door, looking outraged about something, her face flushed and eyes wincing in the sunlight. “You’d better go in there,” she snapped. “Your wife’s making a spectacle of herself!” And then she charged off down the street, her fat back squared, in fury and disgust. Inside, Beatrice lay swaddled in wide loops of paper on the floor, ecstatically entranced, serenading the world with one of her otherworldly hums, her outlandish belly rising above her as though it were something that had fallen upon her, pinning her there. He decided to take her home and visit the doctor another day, enlisting the help of the two good Samaritans from the pickup truck in getting her out to his car. It wasn’t easy. The paper swaddling came unwound, tripping them up, and Trixie was into one of her more energetic trips, tossing and twisting as though in the grip of wild cosmic forces, her pink belly bobbing in the sunlight like a buoy afloat on a violent sea. “Looks like she’s about to pop,” grunted one of his helpers, gazing uneasily into the very source of the mystery that was the intended subject of Lenny’s sermon, and the one supporting her bucking rump groaned: “Whoof! What’s she got in there, cannonballs?” An ambulance came whining up while Lenny, one arm locked in his wife’s armpits, was struggling with the door, and the driver jumped out to join them. “Is this the one? I thought we was to pick up an older dude with palpitations.” “Nah, he’s inside, mac. But give us a hand, for chrissake, before we drop her and crack her open!” She sang to him from the backseat all the way home, going silent only at the moment he pulled into the driveway, when he heard her say, quite distinctly: “But where, then, is the center?” “What?” he asked, turning round, but she was sound asleep. Not a bad line, though: he could use it. He left her there and went inside to draft his sermon, thinking: it’s in life’s quiet moments when the truth most clearly resounds. This enlightening stillness did not last, however: his little daughter Zoe, apparently left all alone in the manse, shattered it with her hysterical wailing as she came running down the stairs into his arms. “Daddy!” she sobbed. “I’m so scared!” “It’s all right, honey. We’re home now. Where’s Jennifer?” “I—I don’t know!” Her little chest was heaving, her eyes swimming, she could hardly speak so choked up with terror was she. “Calm down, sweetheart, there’s nothing to be afraid of now.” “Daddy!” she blubbered, gasping for breath and hugging him close. “There’s a … there’s a great big monster lady in the church!”