John's Wife: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  The Stalker has returned but without the Model. The Artist has not foreseen this, no one has. There is an inadmissible question that seems to rise like mist around the Artist’s ankles, and then, pulling his heart down with it, to sink again. The forest has not been burned, but it has been charred here and there, as though scarred by the Artist’s pain. It is not resignation he feels so much as emotional exhaustion. The jaded expression on the Stalker’s face suggests that he has depleted himself with cruel pleasures, a suggestion he does nothing to deny. “Ah yes,” he sighs, touching a dirty fingertip to the nipple of a childish breast in a drawing lying at the Artist’s feet, then tracing a sinuous line down across her navel, over her pale little belly, twisted in anguish, and into the hidden crevice between her clenched thighs, “a pure delight!” The Artist wishes, not merely to smash his face in for this vile profanation, but utterly to destroy him, to eradicate the depraved monster from the face of the earth, but grief has sapped his strength and will, and he feels that it is he who is being slowly but inexorably erased. Like the rock beside the river-bank on which she once had knelt: vanished now, as though dissolved into the stream, itself diminished to a trickle like drying tears, ever more diminishing. “I know what you have done,” he says bitterly, indicating with disdain all the drawings scattered loosely on the barren ground about him. “You see, I have imagined it all.” The Stalker studies the drawings with an undisguised admiration that borders upon awe. “An extraordinary likeness!” he exclaims, picking up a drawing of himself, reared high in wild-eyed revel behind the Model’s upraised buttocks, his hands tightening the studded chains around her throat as he slakes his savage appetite, and he holds the drawing up before his face as though gazing into a mirror. “It is as though you have violated the border between art and reality!” “Art neither contemplates nor intrudes upon the real,” the Artist replies dispiritedly. “It is the real, upon which all else intrudes.” The Stalker shuffles through the drawings, spreading them about, selecting this one, then that one, for closer scrutiny. “Yes, you have seen everything,” he acknowledges, stroking the Model’s outflung thigh in a particularly barbarous sketch as though to ease her terrible pain, or to recall it. He tosses the drawing aside. “And you have seen nothing.” The Artist has feared just this rebuke. He is a sensitive and decent man, he knows, and no doubt there are depths of depravity his imagination, which in his pride he likes to think of as boundless, cannot plumb. “In truth,” sighs the Stalker, “I do not know where she is, nor have I seen her since she left you.” “But you both disappeared at the same—!” “I was searching for her. Perhaps to do with her as you have fancied. But to no avail. She’s gone.” The Artist, stunned by this revelation, if it is one and not just another cruel deception, stares down at his drawings, which he believed to be passionate and intransigent pursuits of imaginative truth when he made them, but which now seem little more than feverish bunglings of a corrupt and pornographic soul, cartoons from hell. “All I found was this,” the Stalker says, reaching into a ragged shirt pocket and handing the Artist a scrap of paper which he recognizes as a corner torn from one of his own drawings. On it is written: “Art’s true source is not in the seen, but in the longing for the not-seen.” In her handwriting, of course, the naive evenly looped script of an innocent child. The Artist’s hands are trembling. “Do you think she might come back?” “It seems like a farewell message,” says the Stalker. “It is, I suppose, her way of continuing as your Model.” He smiles wistfully. “A lot less fun, though, isn’t it?” The Artist stands, feeling a bit shaky. How much time has passed? When he looks around, the Stalker has gone. He is alone in his darkening forest. He leaves his materials and drawings behind and steps into it, as a way of stepping out of it: what has a center must somewhere have an edge.

  What makes a man step out of himself and into some no-man’s-land of the spirit? What is it that turns the healthy courting of danger within the rules of the game—games like mountain climbing, say, or skydiving or war—into a self-annihilating urge to dissolve the borders of the game itself and defy its rules as one might defy gravity or number or the passage of time? John did not understand this urge but he knew what it felt like, having found himself, more than once in his life and often as not in Bruce’s company, poised on that frontier and tugged toward its fatal breaching. It had the aura of a joke, a final joke shared between friends, and as that larger self they created between them laughingly dared to assail the edges, so they each dared, too, feeling a part of something that compelled them to deny their lesser mortal selves. Admittedly, he got a passing buzz out of it. But John, unlike his city friend, had played too many team sports to be seduced by these commonplace delusions of the almighty group self, nor did he suppose that concerted derring-do would give them any sort of magical freedom from the inexorable laws of the game, as Bruce in his restless transgressions sometimes seemed to. In fact, John loved the rules, for he was, as always, team captain, and the rules empowered him and defined the limits by which he tested himself and moved and judged others. John’s game was life, Bruce’s death, but he understood that Bruce therefore lived closer to the truth than he did, was in reality another side of himself, one he could not finally bring himself to embrace, except by proxy in the person of his nihilistic friend. And now, as though to taunt John for his pussyfooting ways in the face of the Great Fucking Mystery, as Bruce would say, the walls that Bruce had assaulted with his abduction of Knucksie’s little girl were in effect the very ones between them, or at least those built by John: his community and (if Nevada was to be trusted, as of course she wasn’t) his own family. Nevada’s note had said that Bruce, who seemed “very violent, very suicidal,” had apparently used the girl’s big brother Philip as go-between to lure both Jennifer and Clarissa to the airport. She thought he was headed up to the cabin and that he had something “very ugly” in mind. “I think he’s checking out and trying to take the world with him.” She’d found out about the plot too late to save Jennifer, but she’d managed to “distract” (her quotes) the kid from his Clarissa mission and get false word to Bruce that the boy had chickened out so that he’d leave with only half his prey. The meaning of that wistful high five that Bruce had given him during their two-on-three the last time they were together up at the cabin was transparent to him now: So long, buddy. Catch me if you can. The dark-souled sonuvabitch. John loved him, but he wasn’t sure, as he rolled down the runway and lifted up into the gathering twilight, a rifle in the seat beside him (not the one he wanted, which for some reason seemed to be missing), if he was headed up there to rescue Bruce from himself or to kill him. Light filled the plane as he rose into it, but the land below, as he banked to the north, was cast in shadow and the unlit town looked small and vulnerable, lost on the vast prairie, diminishing, as though it might not be there when he returned.

  It had been a beautiful day, one that, it seemed, could go on forever, so it was almost a surprise when all of a sudden the light began to fade and twilight fell. Out at the edge of town, Mitch popped the Lincoln’s lights on as he pulled into the parking lot at the retirement home (didn’t want to hit one of these old dodderers wandering around, they’d sue your ass off), thinking about retirement himself, but not here, one reason being he wouldn’t mind getting away from some of the old ladies in town who once were not so old. Aging with your wife was one thing, seeing what your old loves turned into really took the starch out, something his son didn’t seem to mind so much, having perhaps more starch to start with. Other car lights were coming on around town as well: Lorraine’s on her way back to the party, for example; Nevada’s as, disappointed, she pulled away from the airport; Cornell’s on the back road to the Ford-Mercury garage. Stu wanted to turn the light on in the office out there, but Rex said no. Waldo, snuggled into his lovenest, as he liked to call it, also preferred the lights off, the invading dimness adding a kind of melancholy beauty to this simple little room where he felt more at home than in his own home. Sassy Buns said it was like nowher
e, man, like some piece of sterile shit they’d sent into orbit and then forgot about, but her shoes and shirt were off and her sudden anger when he’d made the mistake of calling her Sassy Buns to her face (“You got some kinda sick buttocks fetish, old man?” she’d snapped, and Waldo had had to admit: “Yeah, haw! I sure do …”) had subsided and he had the impression she was enjoying the luxury nose powder he’d procured for her. Until she said: “Phew, what’s this shit been cut with, bathroom cleanser?” Waldo had paid top dollar and was sure of his source, she was just giving him a hard time. As he would do for her, sweet thing, in turn. Dutch was not behind the two-way mirror watching them for once: to hell with all that. In fact he was thinking of closing down the Back Room, his days and nights were getting too mixed up. He’d woken up in his office when the staff came in to tell him about the thefts of food and linens. He didn’t remember having fallen asleep in the office, but he was glad he was there instead of someplace else. He’d checked out the losses, called Otis. He’d thought that was this morning, just a little while ago, but now the sun had suddenly gone down and Otis and a couple of his cops were in his front office, taking down the numbers. He decided he’d also lay off the beer for a few days. After he finished the one in his hand. Otis was trying to recruit him for some kind of posse he was getting up, but Dutch said he planned to stay right here, stand guard over what was left. Otis gave him a two-way radio to use in case the two thieves showed up again and asked him who brought John’s Porsche out here? Dutch didn’t know. “Has it been parked out there awhile?” “Can’t say.” Otis was used to running John’s cars home of late and he had to go there anyway. As usual, the keys were in the ignition, so he sent the others to pick up Duwayne at the jail and meet him at John’s while he checked out the golf course and the airport in the Porsche, following other leads. He was not happy about the onset of darkness. Made the hunt harder. But he couldn’t wait until tomorrow, Corny and Pauline had become a serious threat to the community and they had to be stopped now. The country club looked shut down and empty as he swung by, enjoying the machine he was in, though in fact Marge was out there on her own, caught out by the sudden twilight while cutting through a dogleg on the back nine and unable to find her ball on the other side of it for a moment even though it was in the middle of the fairway. She knew she should quit, but she was still blowing off steam, running her aborted mayoral campaign from hole to hole as if from issue to issue. Her golf shoes had been in the car trunk with her clubs, but with the clubhouse closed, she’d been forced to play in her business suit, which made her feel like she was clapped in irons and greatly stifled her drives. She could sense the terrible weariness of the long day overtaking her and felt about to drop, but there were only a couple of holes to go and she had to walk them to reach her car anyway. There was no one else out here, so she unbuttoned her blouse and rolled her skirt up around her waist and, loosened up now, took her frustrations out on her approach shot. Which was a beauty. Lofted up out of sight, then falling down through the dusk onto the middle of the green and rolling backwards toward the hole. Seemed to disappear. Hey! Had she holed out? Beautiful!

  Meanwhile, back at the center of the dying day’s doings in John’s backyard, where the garden lights were coming on, the guests were reluctantly preparing to make their farewells, lingering for a last drink or maybe a couple, perhaps one more of those juicy quarter-pounders, said to have been ground from the flanks of blue-ribbon winners at the last 4-H Fair upstate, or else a final handful of crunchy liqueur-filled chocolates, imported direct from Switzerland, or even both at the same time, in the same bun, why not—any macaroni salad left?—Pioneers Day only happens once a year. This was what Lorraine saw when she returned with Waldo’s shotgun, loaded with buckshot, in her fist: a lot of drunks falling goofily about in the gathering dark with their jaws snapping. How long had she been gone? Off-key party songs were erupting here and there, yips and shouts, loose laughter like belches, the birds and crickets, slow off the mark, now making up for lost time in raucous chorus behind it all. Reverend Lenny and a deflated Trixie were cradling a newborn, still red in the face, under a bug light on the back deck, surrounded by oohers and ahers, Daphne among them, telling everyone Stu had something to do at the garage, he’d be here soon; Lorraine heard the same thing twice like an echo: it was a recital, the woman desperately clinging to the only thing she could remember, her mind otherwise murky as a sump pit. The shotgun got a certain amount of attention as she passed through the crowds, but as far as Lorraine could tell not many people even knew who she was. Out in the pot-scented rose garden, where children were chasing lightning bugs, John’s daughter, in a seething rage, was snorting something through a straw; the girl’s furious thoughts were incoherent, but Lorraine empathized with their import: insult, betrayal, murder on her mind. “Sure, be glad to give you a lift,” some guy standing in the flower beds said as Lorraine drifted past, “how’s this?” “Woops! There went my drink!” “Ha ha! Wait here, I’ll bring you a new one.” “Just a little one!” “Don’t worry, honey, it’s all he’s got!” No one tending the glowing barbecue pit, where meat burned quietly. Caterers were collecting empty pans and dishes, picking up some of the rubbish in black plastic bags. Lorraine found an abandoned whiskey glass and downed its contents. Yeuck. Stale and watery with a butt at the bottom. Still a shot or two at the bottom of one of the bottles: she finished that off, too, sucking from the neck. Nearby, Veronica sat slumped in a lawnchair, still as a stone. The image in her head was fetal and slimy and its name was Second John. The image seemed locked there like a fixed exhibit in an empty room, and Lorraine understood that head was badly damaged. Takes one to know one, she said with a shudder, and rubbed her aching brow with her free hand. She climbed up past the Holy Family, kicking a couple of beercans aside (Daphne was saying: “Something he had to do out at the car lot…”), and went into the kitchen, where Marge’s one-eyed Trevor was huddled miserably over a hot cup of coffee, his sick hangover making Lorraine’s hurt head hurt the more. Kevin was in the hallway, leaning against the john door, hustling a bank teller with a sad story. No Sweet Abandon, all tattered and torn. No Waldo either. Lorraine didn’t need to tune in to get the rest of the story. She knew where they were.

  Thus, John’s annual Pioneers Day barbecue drew, somewhat abruptly, toward a close, for some a pleasure, others not, some lives changed by it, most merely in some small wise spent, a few wishing it could go on forever, others that it had never happened, or, having happened, that it could be forgotten, of all wishes wished, the one most likely to be granted; but first, while many were still finishing their last, or nearly last, drink, police chief Otis arrived, raised his bullhorn, and addressed the remaining guests in John’s backyard.