John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  “Compassion? He calls that shit compassion?” his cousin Maynard would have snorted bitterly had he known John’s thoughts, though of course he didn’t. Couldn’t. He had trouble enough reading his own dark mind, forget the minds of others. And the Nerd, or Backdoor Mange, as his ex-wife Daphne sometimes called him, was not the sort of person John or anyone else would ever confide in, except for Veronica of course, who did, and wed him, then suffered ever after having her past flung back at her like those custard pies they throw in the movies. Sympathy was not in Maynard’s vocabulary, compassion wasn’t, nor in his heart either. Love was, but narrowly so, so narrowly only he knew it was lodged there. Like a rock, a deeply imbedded stone that his thoughts tripped over, losing coherence, and that sometimes turned red-hot and caused his senses to fail him and his body to shake as though with a fever and his organs to expel their contents. It was strange, he did not understand it, never could, thought of it as something completely crazy, but he could not shift it out of there, it was as much a part of him as his stubby dong, his hairy flat feet, his five o’clock shadow. So instead of kicking at it, he tried to polish it, but everything he did, always for her or for his love for her and his need to be near her, went wrong somehow, whether it was marrying her best friends to be closer to her or producing a kid to companion hers or trying to protect her and her father from John’s cruel depredations or just keeping up the pretense of a social life (he hated the social life) so as to see her from time to time (only she could polish what he could not): all failed. His love was dumb and blind and taught him nothing: he was, classically, its hapless fool. And now, since her father’s foiled raid, though he’d only done it for her: anathema. The great deceiver, cast as, he was, and so cast out wholly. He could not even speak to her anymore nor look her way when she passed by. If ever she still did, it was as though they existed in different worlds. Compassion? Hey, save it for the Nerd, whose pain was deep and, save for a frayed garter in his pocket, utterly without balm.

  Certainly no solace from his same-named son, a rival of sorts who also had his eye on John’s wife, or hoped to soon; according to his best pal Fish, it went with the paper route. Love was not in Little’s vocabulary either, not yet anyway, though it was growing—his vocabulary, that is (other things, too, as he excitedly showed to Fish)—growing by lips and buns, as you might say, laps and bums, mostly filling up as it was at this time with words for bodily parts and what you did with them. Fish, as always, was his master in this, and not just in the naming but also in more practical instruction, the preacher’s son being a talented artist in his own right and also having access to certain books and magazines in his father’s collection that he said were attempts to depict what really got God mad at Sodom and Gomorrah. Nowadays, according to his dad, God was more understanding, humans were only humans, after all, so what the heck, let it happen. Fish often had interesting things to say, not just about girls and what made them tick (“—and tuck,” Fish would always add and pump his fist), but also about God and cars and drugs and computer games and what happened to you when you died, lots of things. He taught Little how to skateboard, how to roll a joint and smoke it, how to tell real rock from pop music (which he called “poop music”), how to play poker and chess and do tricks with matches, how to sneak into the swimming pool without paying, and how to tell if a girl was a virgin or not. He promised to show him how to drive when he got his own license and gave Turtle to understand that all his worldly wisdom was at his young friend’s beck and call. A born teacher, he was. The only thing Turtle couldn’t understand about Fish was that he had his eye on Turtle’s bitchy cousin Clarissa, a total pain in the neck if ever there was one, though it was true, she was more Fish’s age, and she did seem, in her tight jeans and torn shirt or in her string bikini at the new pool, as Fish put it, “hot to twot.” Or something like that. He’d seen her naked, or almost naked, Fish said, and when Turtle asked him if she was a virgin, he said he hadn’t been able to test her out yet, but he thought she was. Fish’s sister Jen was her best friend and so she hung out at the manse a lot, sleeping over sometimes, the two of them listening to music, girl-talking, drinking diet pop or sometimes beers, smoking dope when Fish’s folks weren’t around, and often on hot days when they were high, or even sometimes when they weren’t, they liked to goof around in their underwear. The reason Fish thought Clarissa was still a virgin was because he heard her complaining about it to Jen in her bedroom one night while he was watching them through the keyhole. He said she said she couldn’t wait to do it. It? Fish told him. Turtle also had to admit he didn’t know exactly what a keyhole was, not if you could see through it, but when Fish showed him one (their manse was much older than Turtle’s house, and more interesting in lots of ways) he could see how it might be useful.

  Clarissa knew that Jennifer’s creepy goggle-eyed big brother was lurking outside the door that night, as he did most nights she stayed over. She didn’t know how a girl as cool as Jennifer could even have a jerky brother like that, but then who was she to talk, what with the retard she was stuck with? At least Philip wasn’t still wetting the bed. “Oh yes, he is,” Jennifer giggled. “Every night! Only with different stuff!” Clarissa thought Philip, better known at school as Fish, had got his nickname from his stupid bug-eyed buck-toothed look, but when Jennifer told her that she’d given him that nickname when she was a baby, he’d had it forever, Clarissa was not surprised. People grow into their names, she believed that, just as she was growing into hers. “Marie-Claire once had a lover she walked like a dog,” she told Jennifer, always a good listener. They were lying around in their underwear, listening to some new CDs. “With a leash and a chain and everything. She took him to the park and made him do tricks for her and spanked him in public with a rolled-up newspaper.” She had to fill in some of the details, but the main points of the story were all true, she’d overheard her daddy tell it. Up in an airplane with Uncle Bruce. “Well, one night he went wild and started frothing at the mouth and he attacked her and tried to bite her in her, you know, between the legs. Hard!” “Boy! Talk about getting eaten out!” “It wasn’t funny, Jen! He was trying to kill her, but Marie-Claire strangled him with her legs until he quit. After that, she wouldn’t let him be her dog anymore, but he never got over it. All the rest of his life he walked around on all fours, until one day a car hit him.” Jennifer thought it was a great story and said she’d turn all her lovers into aardvarks because of how long their tongues were, a fact she’d picked up from a silly poem in a children’s book. Jennifer seemed obsessed about tongues lately. “Or else Bambi’s father,” she sighed dreamily, running her fingers inside her briefs. Philip wandered in then, trying to look bored. “Mom’s coming home soon with Zoe,” he said. Clarissa didn’t mind other people’s moms, just her own. Whom she seemed to see less and less of these days, so it wasn’t too bad. Her mother was useful, but deep down Clarissa wished she’d go away and leave her alone. And take dumb Mikey with her. She pulled down her bra cup to poke at her nipple as though she might have a mosquito bite there, then peered up at Philip to watch him redden. She tried to think of what Marie-Claire might say, and then she thought of it: “You look like a fish out of water,” she said. “Why don’t you flop on out of here, Popeye, and go suck air someplace else?” And as Jennifer spluttered with laughter and hugged her thighs, he ducked out. This was the woman Clarissa was growing up to be. Because of her name. It was—she had just recently learned the word for it—her destiny. Knowing what was coming, what was really coming, was pretty scary, but it gave her an edge. She liked it. Whatever she did, it would come out the same, so there was nothing she couldn’t do. No one could intimidate her, not even teachers or her parents’ friends or the parents of her own. Certainly not the local police goons: during the bust at the mall, she’d collected everybody’s stash, walked it coolly right through the assault lines. She owned the school corridors and lunchroom, was queen-elect of the mall rats and pool punks, would meet any dare. At the new downtown civ
ic center pool that her daddy built, she hung around all day in a string bikini that drove the guys bananas. But if they tried to touch her, she’d scratch their eyes out. Not too close, Creep. Danger, High Voltage. This is what love was. It was great. Totally intense.

  Gordon had photos of the new pool, the old one as well and the one at the country club, but no bikini shots. Not even of Pauline. He did have a black-and-white picture of Clarissa’s mother, taken years ago at the country club pool, but in a modest one-piece swimsuit, tied at the neck and open at the back, not a bikini. Cheesecake, as it was called when he was a boy, was not Gordon’s fancy, not his artistic métier. Intimacy was. Sensuous intensity. Intimations of timelessness. And purity of line. In the photo of John’s wife, one of his favorites in an ongoing sequence begun nearly a quarter of a century ago, she is pulling herself up out of the pool near the low diving board, her bare back to the camera, one foot up on the concrete ledge, the other still in the water. Her hair is hidden inside a rubber bathing cap. Perhaps only Gordon would know who the swimmer was, but this very anonymity of his subject gratified him: an intricate arrangement of soft rounded glistening shapes, pure and clean and ultimately non-objective, unnameable, set against a severe geometry. Blowups of isolated fragments of this photo shared these qualities and recalled for him his earliest painterly pursuits, his speculative juxtapositions of hard and soft, line and texture, edge and surface. The pale dimpled membrane of the bathing cap, backgrounded by dark hedges and the chainlink fence at the pool’s outer border, provided impressions, when enlarged, of erotic moonscapes, set against an ominous cosmic grid, just as the potentially prurient and distracting crotch region, barely visible above the waterline and here at full stretch, lent itself with ease to tastefully harmonious studies in textural contrast, of which he had successfully attempted several. Gordon’s favorite area of the photo, however, was the bare back, and especially the glowing expanse of tensed wet flesh from braced right shoulder to lower left rib. He had explored this section inch by inch through long, infinitely pleasurable darkroom nights, emerging with a series of finished prints as near to his artistic ideals as any he had been able to achieve with a camera. In most of his pool photos, however, old and new, at least those mounted in his “Uninhabited Vistas” albums with their panoramic views of abandoned fields, empty parking lots, derelict drive-in movie theaters, windowed reflections of blank skies, and desolate dawn streets dampened with rain, there are no swimmers, and often as not there is no water either.

  In another country club photograph, taken more recently, John’s wife, wearing a pale silk blouse later that evening to be dampened with gin, is receiving a lesson from the young golf pro on the proper way to grip a seven-iron. Her instructor is standing behind her, reaching around with both hands on hers and peering over her shoulder at the golf club she is holding, or at least down in that general direction. To get this shot, roughly three-quarters frontal, the photographer placed himself inside the caddy shack, just down the hill a hundred yards or so, and used a telephoto lens while focusing through an open window. Well, “placed himself” was perhaps misleading. He hid himself there. It was a surprisingly swift and covert maneuver. Trevor, watching discreetly from within the clubhouse lounge, almost missed it, remarking to himself, and not for the first time, that for a big man, outwardly clumsy, the photographer could move nimbly enough when he wanted to. Gordon, not a member, was a rare visitor to the club, here on this occasion ostensibly to photograph the new fleet of electric carts for the weekly newspaper, the old caddy shack now serving primarily as a garage for these vehicles, and his presence was odd enough that it caught Trevor’s attention, especially with John’s wife in the vicinity. So, with his own wife still out on the course somewhere, Trevor amused himself by keeping his eye on (“tailing” was the word, was it not?) the furtive cameraman. What possessed him to do this? Was it the same compulsion that gripped the photographer? Trevor didn’t think so, though they did hold in common the desire to see without being seen, and he thought Gordon might be struggling with something like his own wandering actuarial graph point. The difference between their quests was that between object and subject, outer and inner, visible behavior and hidden motive. There was something baldly suggestive about the way muscular young Kevin in his burgundy red golf shirt and yellow pants was embracing John’s wife from the rear, but Trevor doubted that Gordon saw in Kevin anything more than a visual irritant, an obstruction to an unimpeded view of the main target of his camera lens. Or anyway, this would be in accord with the general artistic principles expressed by Gordon in a Town Crier interview with his friend Ellsworth some years ago, principles and ideals that appealed to Trevor, for whom beauty and number were essentially synonymous, even as he doubted those ideals’ validity. Or even their possibility. It was that doubt now, he believed, that compelled him to shadow the photographer, as though the photographer were offering himself up as an arena for the display of the paradoxical inner drama of a necessarily conflicted soul in pursuit of an impossible ideal. Surface eruptions were inevitable, and Trevor, his own inner drama developing apace, would be their witness.

  Curiously, there was, though he had no knowledge of Trevor’s pursuits and little enough of his friend Gordon’s, a character much like this in Ellsworth’s current novel-in-progress, The Artist and His Model: a mysterious unnamed personage, known simply at this point as the Stalker. Ellsworth had not invited him in, he had intruded upon the text unbidden. He was, so far, albeit deeply disturbing, no more than a minor figure, having made appearances only in one brief scene (which could get cut), a few unconnected fragments (in one, he asks the disconcerting question: How much does the child know?) and a handful of loose marginal notes, but he already posed a profound menace, not merely to the other characters in the novel (to wit, the Artist, his Model), but to the original plot as well, threatening it now with a total restructuring. Ellsworth had been seriously engaged with this book for over a decade, ever since words had failed him in the obituary of the car dealer’s wife, killed in an accident, and at one stage he had well over thirty pages which he considered “polished.” He had even had them set on the backshop linotype so as to contemplate them in printed form. Yes, they were fine. More than fine: classic. Then the Stalker crept in and, just by lurking obscurely at the edges, erased nearly half of them, and the twenty pages or so that remained, even if unchanged, no longer remotely resembled the twenty pages or so he had originally written. What did it mean, for example, to say that “The Artist, pondering the relationship between formal idealism and geometrical optics as he touched pen to paper, recognized that the triangle formed by his penpoint, the Model, sitting ten yards away, and his inner eye was in fact an equilateral one, but that when his stroke was untrue, or ink was spilled, or the Model started picking her nose, as she was doing now, it was not the equilaterality that was affected, but the triangle’s planeness,” when, suddenly, there was this other pair of eyes skulking about somewhere in the neighborhood? A debacle, as the great masters would say, but what could he do about it? When the Stalker first appeared and half his novel decomposed before his very eyes, Ellsworth panicked and, using all his authorial powers, forcibly threw the intruder out, restored the lost pages, and then added a few more (a productive period, though it proved illusory) as a kind of security fence around what he mistakenly thought of as his own private property, but all (he could have predicted this) to no avail. The Stalker was still there, inside the fence, which, far from keeping him out, served to encourage his interlopings, opening new pathways for him to explore, while yet hiding him from view. His Artist-character’s remark, responding to the naiveté of his overly admiring Model, that “artists do not ‘make’ art, my dear, but are made by it,” which Ellsworth had rejected as being overly melodramatic, now came back, in the person of the ineradicable Stalker, to haunt him.

  Over the recent years, while a haunted Ellsworth, unbeknownst to the public at large, wrestled daily with a novel-once-in-progress now seriously imperi
led by the Stalker’s trespass, a few discerning readers (his friend Gordon, for example) might have noticed a gradual decline in the quality of The Town Crier, but most in town, like the Artist’s admiring Model in the novel, were so in awe of anyone who could put two words together and spell them right that they found their old hometown rag, as they called it, not only as delightful as ever, but actually improving. In part, this was the Stalker’s doing, for Ellsworth, increasingly engrossed in his narrative dilemmas, had come to rely more and more upon other contributors to keep the weekly newspaper going, and they in turn had each their own fans, most especially their own immediate families. Thus, the high school journalism students, in addition to their traditional scholastic and athletic reporting, now provided regular book, movie, and music reviews (which amused their elders, even as they shook their heads at the dubious tastes of this new and noisy generation: The Teen Choir, some wryly called the paper now), the Chamber of Commerce secretary turned in a weekly business notes column called “You Can Bank On It!,” the meaning of life was explored, mostly by members of the Ministerial Association, in a back-page box entitled “Afterthoughts,” and just about everybody, sooner or later, wrote up something for the popular guest column, “I Remember.” Some of these recollections were quite frivolous, such as those having to do with past fashions, dead pets or prewar prices, vanished landmarks, grandma’s favorite recipes, and Halloween pranks in the days of outdoor privies, but others, such as Veronica’s description of overcoming asthma to become a high school cheerleader, or Otis’s as-told-to account of learning about his father’s self-inflicted death while lying wounded in a jungle hospital, or the nurse Columbia’s loving tribute to her dead brother Yale, were deeply moving and often clipped and kept by the townsfolk. Tributes to those who had passed away were a common theme of course in the “I Remember” column—the librarian Kate’s elegant remembrance, for example, only shortly before her own death, of her friend Harriet, the doctor’s wife, whom she called “one of those great humane readers, impatient with grandeur and pretense, who profoundly transform the simplest work, utterly and for all time, merely by the act of reading it with an open heart,” or John’s wife’s simple tribute to her Parisian friend, who on her visits to the town had won the hearts of all who knew her, or the editor Ellsworth’s own sentimental memorial to the long-suffering mother of his good friend Gordon the photographer—but there was room for the other emotions, too, everything from humor to horror. Beatrice the preacher’s wife recalled that day, just after they’d arrived in town, when she locked herself out of the manse by mistake with little Zoe inside and yelling her head off while her husband Lennox with the only other key was out making pastoral calls, so zealous in those early days that he didn’t come home until ten at night, and then without the car which he had apparently left somewhere that he couldn’t remember. “It was a real trip,” she said in her typed draft, which the editor altered to “a real experience.” She also said that what most impressed her about the place was that it was “a flat town, good for pushing babies around in,” and that it was so friendly that “God Himself would feel right at home here just like we do.” Trevor, the accountant and insurance broker, on the other hand, told of the horrific day he came upon the crushed body of the little six-year-old boy, killed on his bicycle by an unknown hit-and-run driver in a back alley behind the accountant’s offices. Trevor, as he explained in his graphic yet delicate “I Remember” column, was so traumatized by the experience that he lost the sight of one eye for a time, as though the eye could not bear to see what it was seeing, Alf explaining that what he had had was a sort of minor stroke and that it might eventually clear up, allowing him to drive again. As, over time, happened. Trevor had offered a personal five-thousand-dollar reward (he reaffirmed this offer in his “I Remember” column) for any information leading to the arrest of the guilty driver, but so far this had not been collected.