John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  Veronica was minding John’s paint and wallpaper store that day, most everyone else in town having gone off to the funeral of poor Harriet whom she hardly knew. Not one for funerals anyway, really. Old Alf, Harriet’s husband, she knew better; he’d done her a favor once. She sent him a nice card, expressing her deepest sympathy, but was happy to oblige when John asked her to watch the store. Veronica had returned home a year earlier after the failure of her first marriage, needing, for therapy as much as money, some kind of job, and John’s wife, a former high school classmate, had helped her get on at the paint store, in those days still downtown, she remembering that Veronica had once wanted to be an interior decorator, or perhaps it was Veronica who had reminded her of that. They had never been all that close, since Veronica never got along with her best friend Daphne, still didn’t, but she didn’t mind using what little influence she had because, anyway, she felt, John owed her one, that whole family did. Life had not been kind to Veronica. Braces, migraines, anemia, tonsilitis, asthma, she’d had it all as a kid. Then, once she got to high school, things were a little better, she was a cheerleader and a member of the choral society and popular enough, everybody calling her Ronnie back then, but though she was generous with her person (too generous, she always thought), she didn’t believe in going all the way, not yet, she was too idealistic, and so she got a P.T. reputation, ridiculed the more, the more she gave. Daphne, especially, was cruel to her, and one day at the country club pool, in front of all the boys, asked her if she thought orgasms were more fun to have alone or in company, and Veronica, who wasn’t really sure at that time what an orgasm was exactly (though when she did find out, she realized she had been having them all along, no big deal), could only turn red and stammer out something stupid about believing that was something one didn’t talk about in public. “Aha! Just as I thought!” laughed Daphne and all the boys started laughing with her. “Alone!” And then, finally, when she did start going all the way, the worst possible thing happened, and that was when she got Alf to do that favor, if a favor was really what it was, she still had nightmares about it (or him: she had named the thing as though thereby to put it to eternal rest, but rest it, or he, would not), and worried, to the extent that she believed in such things, that she might have condemned herself to everlasting hell. She was scared after that, and ran into marriage the first offer that came along, an older guy she met in college and hardly knew before they were suddenly man and wife, and again she was too idealistic, but he wasn’t, and when she couldn’t take any more, she came back home and hired Maynard and his father and got a divorce, which dragged on and was very messy and depressing and left her feeling old and used up when it was over. But, never say die, she joined the choir at church and the Literary Society at the library and got a job at the paint and wallpaper store and started going out some with Maynard, who had just recently graduated from law school, but already looked forty. Maynard had also gone through a wretched first marriage and divorce, and like Veronica, had suffered from name-calling and undeserved ridicule all his life, and he probably hated Daphne, whom he called his old ball-breaker, even more than she did, so at least they had something in common. Just the same, even though she sympathized with him, he was in many ways still the Nerd he had always been, at least everybody in town seemed to think so, the only difference being that he now had a permanent five o’clock shadow, and so, whenever he brought up the subject of marriage, always seeming to have some kind of nasty grimace on his face, like it was a dirty joke or something, she always said she wasn’t ready. That was until the day that crazy man came crashing into the store just as she had started to doze off, making her fall off her chair and nearly swallow her tongue. She couldn’t see anything for a moment—blinded with panic was what she was, she suddenly knew what that meant—and when finally her focus came back again, there he was, pointing a gun at her face and demanding the keys to the panel truck outside. She had no idea where they were, so he started shooting at all the cans of paint. She was crying and praying and trying not to have an asthma attack, not knowing what to do and hating John for leaving her in a mess like this, not for the first time. Finally, in desperation, she opened up the cash register to give him all the money, and there were the keys. When he was gone, she decided, collapsed to the floor under a dripping paint can, where they found her later, somewhat out of touch and spackled all over with Provincial Blue, that maybe the working world was not for her after all, and two months later, when she’d got her breath back, she and Maynard were married.

  “Ronnie and the Nerd! Perfect! Hell on earth! I can’t think of any two assholes who deserve it more!” was what Daphne, on the telephone with her best friend and, as usual, doing most of the talking, said of the engagement news. Daphne had once been married to Maynard, it had lasted less than a year, a miserable time spent away at law school in a grad student flat, far from home, drunk most of the time or fucking around helplessly while that drudge hit—and hit and hit—the books. Later she would marry Nikko the golf pro, the one who ran away a few months later with the orthodontist’s teenage daughter in her psychedelic warpaint, and after that it would be old Stu the car dealer, whom Daphne generously called Old Stud, at least for a while. But back at the time of Harriet’s death and Duwayne’s deranged assault on the paint store, Daphne’s “current steady,” as she called her second husband when she wasn’t calling him Eric the Ready, the Rude, or the Rod, was the town’s new surgeon and resident oncologist, caught by her before he’d even got his bags unpacked. “Speaking of which, honey—assholes, I mean—I hope Ronnie’s isn’t as tight as it used to be, it’s in for some heavy drilling. Mange likes the back door, you know. Did I ever tell you about his enema routines? Talk about sloppy sex! Peeyoo!” The person on the other end of the line, the mother of a one-year-old by then (which had aroused strong but ambivalent feelings in Daphne, who longed to have children only so long as she did not have to be a mother), was probably not interested in this intelligence, there was some other reason Daphne had called her, but for the moment it had flown her mind, which in truth caged very little, even when soberer than she was now. “Still, it was about the only time old misery-guts ever let himself go, so to speak. That’s not Eric’s problem. You couldn’t ask for a more relaxed guy, so relaxed he’s asleep most of the time. Honest to God, I greet him in nothing but a dab of perfume when he comes home from the hospital, and all he does is give me this sweet sad smile and fold up like dropped pants. Hey, I know they’re working him too hard out there, but they’re not working that part of him, are they? Well, let’s face it, they probably are, it’s the only answer, isn’t it? He’s out there taking the temperature of all those hotpants nurses all day, dip-sticking himself to exhaustion, poor boy, nothing left for his house calls. They do the scoring, I get the snoring. So what’s a girl gonna do? Well, Colt was back in town a couple of weeks ago, that bastard, you know, for his aunt Harriet’s funeral. This is just between you and me, honey, not a word now—but Eric had the duty that day, so Colt and I skipped the burial part afterwards and went to have a drink together at the downtown hotel where he was staying. We sat there at that old wooden bar, not saying much, feeling nostalgic about that old place now that they say it’s going to be torn down, and while we were in that mood, he suggested we go to his room and get laid just for old times’ sake. What—?! Old times was a goddamned rape, for Christ’s sake, was he crazy? That’s what I told him. Still, forgive and forget, water under the britches and all that, right? Besides, he was looking pretty good, now that his hair was long. And he did say he was sorry, he was just a dumb little shit back then who didn’t know any better, he said, so I asked him what it was worth to him, now that he was a grownup shit. He kind of sneered and said, ‘You doing it for money now, Daph?’ and I said, ‘No, come on, you prick, you abused the hell out of me when I was just an innocent kid and now you come back here and I’m a happily married woman and you think you can just have me for a shot of gin or two? How cheap do you think I am?
’ He studied me for a moment, and then he grinned and said, ‘Okay, how much?’ I didn’t blink an eye, honey. I just grinned right back at him and said: ‘A thousand bucks, sweetie. In cash. It’ll buy me my cherry back.’ I clinked his glass with mine, he stared at me for a minute, then he shrugged, winked, went off to the bank. And let me tell you. The sonuvabitch got his money’s worth. So did I. I’d forgotten it could be so good. Not since—well… Never mind.” She was about to say, not since the red, red robin came bob, bob, bobbin’, but having almost no friends left in this town, decided against it, a rare moment of prudence. “When it was over, I gave him half his money back. No kidding. Sheer gratitude. It was in small bills, so he flung it onto the bed and we fucked on that, pardon the French, it was like being a kid again and rolling around in autumn leaves. Except you don’t get dust up your nose. Oh, speaking of the French—hello? are you there, honey? yes?” Daphne asked, recalling at last the reason she had phoned. “That was terrible news about your friend, Marie-what’s-her-name, so sudden and all. I’m really sorry. No, really. I noticed she was looking a little green around the gills when she was visiting here last month, but who would have guessed, hunh? It’s crazy! What a world! How is John taking it? I mean, they’d got pretty close, hadn’t they? Speaking loosely, I mean, her love of flying, and all that. Well, hell, good old unflappable John, straight up as always, no doubt. What do you suppose it was that made her do it? Still carrying the torch for Yale, you think? Or …? Hello—?”

  News of the sudden violent death of the French penpal, the one who had upstaged and jinxed Daphne at the wedding four years before, reached town by way of Oxford’s boy Cornell, back home from his educational graduation trip abroad in a state bordering on severe shell shock, such that the news itself was rather minimal and had to be imagined, or as Ellsworth, whose task it was to accomplish this feat week after week for the readers of The Town Crier would say, recreated. Selectively recreated, for there was news, intriguing as it might be in oral form, that did not suit the printed pages of the town’s weekly newspaper, the widely rumored events out at the Country Tavern during Marie-Claire’s visit to town the month before just one example, an episode referred to only obliquely in her obituary a few weeks later when Ellsworth wrote that the deceased was known for her “passionate zest for life and happiness, so typical of the natives of that great enlightened nation, and not always understood by simpler, more straightforward prairie folk.” That got him in a bit of trouble with the locals actually, but Ellsworth brushed it aside in his usual lofty manner, remarking to his friend Gordon, who had mentioned some of the complaints he had heard, that, suffocating as he was in the bloated provincial crassitude of this bumpkin town, he felt obliged to put the needle in from time to time, simply to survive. Ellsworth’s sympathies were perhaps affected by the fact that he was at this time hoping to season his own existence with a touch of French zest, his ancient dreams of the bohemian life having been revived that summer when his photographer friend suddenly took in a live model, a pretty little uninhibited gamine from the trailer camp. Ellsworth, foreseeing the delightful possibility of an old-fashioned beaux-arts ménage à trois, as Marie-Claire herself might have put it, once again took to wearing his beret and a kerchief tied round his neck (it was still too hot for the cape) and began paying regular visits to Gordon’s studio, having assisted in previous photo sessions and, for the sake of art and friendship, offering to do so again. Gordon, however, was less generous with Pauline than he had been with his mother, may she rest in peace, and did not seem enthusiastic about Ellsworth’s suggested new arrangements, which caused a certain distance to grow up between the two men for a time, though Gordon did show Ellsworth a few of his photos of the girl and asked him to witness his marriage to her the following year. About all Ellsworth got out of the whole affair was a paragraph for his novel-in-progress (at that time, several years before the crisis provoked by the death of the car dealer’s wife, a novel with only one character and as yet untitled, though perhaps to be called The Artist’s Ordeal), an aesthetic meditation on the teleology of models, which he read aloud at a meeting of the Literary Society at the public library (only John’s wife understood in the least his artistic intentions, he read for her alone) and then abandoned, the larger project as well, and not for the first time. At times, Ellsworth stepped forth onto the international stage to accept the world’s accolades for his innovatively designed yet classically structured masterpiece of creative fiction, and at other times he recognized that he had only managed to write about fourteen pages and probably only three of those were keepers, and gave it up. His journalistic recreation of the final hours of the French artist-friend of John and his wife, his primary sources being either incoherent or inaccessible, he also abandoned, limiting himself in the end to a brief obituary which remarked on the “shock and sorrow that rippled throughout our community when the tragic news, like a thrown stone, fell upon it,” and an “I Remember” column supplied graciously by John’s wife and published a few months later.

  The suicide of Marie-Claire surprised many in town, perhaps even his wife, but not John. Marie-Claire was not strung together for a long life, John knew, something was bound to snap. He knew, too, he had had a part in it, he and hinky-dinky, but as usual John, whom some blessed and some did not, had no regrets. It would be like regretting the way the cosmos worked. If anything, he felt a vague sense of relief. Sex with Marie-Claire was like grappling with a wild thing: there could not be two survivors, something had to die. And, finally, John being who he was, it was her turn. Which was Bruce’s take on it as well, she having become their paradigmatic heroine of all such stories. One of Marie-Claire’s lovers, a young art student she’d known prior to Yale, had thrown himself under the Metro before her very eyes, and she had driven a married man, a friend of her father’s, completely mad. A psychiatrist, if the story could be entirely believed, not always the case, for even melodrama Marie-Claire melodramatized. These were the ones he knew about, no doubt there were other casualties in Marie-Claire’s passion wars, not including the ones he and Bruce had made up. Even Yale’s death, apparently so remote, seemed to John linked somehow to the way love and death got fused in that crazy furnace inside her, and indeed Yale’s last letters, sent from the combat zone, hinted at his own awareness of such a connection. He spoke not of “death’s embrace,” but of “embracing death,” as though it were some sort of compulsion (though his imperfect French might have been at fault here), and he described his army patrol’s search-and-destroy missions into the jungle’s “perilously erotic hot green thighs” as “lustful plunges into sweet extinction.” Of course, Yale always did relish the double entendre, all that may have been, even if a bit dark, just a joke. As was hinky-dinky at first. Apparently, at their wedding reception, the old Ford dealer had recited some verses from “Mademoiselle from Armentières” to Marie-Claire. Probably his idea of being friendly to a foreign visitor. All she could remember, as she told John and his wife one night in a Paris bistro during their second honeymoon three years later (they had just come from watching a troupe of “Troglodytes” perform a “Scène d’amour” in the airless underground cabaret beneath their garret flat), was something about four wheels and a truck—John could easily supply the missing rhyme—and the refrain line which, she said, had been puzzling her ever since. “Wut ees hainqui-dainqui?” she asked, smiling her mischievous smile. “Ees like hainqui-painqui?” “It’s the same thing,” laughed John, squeezing his wife’s hand beside him, “only you use your dinky, not your pinky.” Two days later, his wife went shopping for presents for their two sets of parents back home, planning to meet Marie-Claire at a gallery cafe in Saint-Germain-des-Prés for lunch, and an hour before that luncheon date, Marie-Claire turned up at the garret, where John, in his briefs, was shaving at the paint-stained sink. This in itself was not unusual. Marie-Claire often turned up, unannounced, at odd moments. Whenever she did, she always seemed to need to use the facilities, squatting quickly there behind the
refrigerator, chattering gaily all the while over the splash of her pee, her head peeking out around the refrigerator door, telling them about things that had happened to her on the way over, a bit earthy, yet quite delicate, too, something John knew he could never carry off, he was very impressed. On this occasion, however, she stepped up behind him at the sink, ran her hands into his briefs as though crawling into the cellar, and, her smoldering dark eyes reflected in the scalloped mirror over his bare shoulder, whispered: “I am so lonely, dear Zhahn. Yell, he ees so far. May you help me? I am so much needing ze … ze hainqui-dainqui… Parlez-vous?” And so it became a kind of gentle joke between them, and a kind of bond, and when the news came through a couple of days later about Yale’s death in action, that bond was, in tears and frenzy, hotly yet somehow mournfully sealed, and thus Marie-Claire’s unhappy fate as well, forging thereby in John’s mind an indelible link between horror and compassion, compassion and horror.

  Things were quiet in town that early summer, so many years ago, of the second honeymoon in Paris, almost like in the old days, for the place seemed to have a way of slowing down when John and his wife were gone. Or maybe it was just the warm season, school out, business slow, a time for taking it easy. And it wasn’t completely lifeless. The two cinemas, the Palace downtown and the Night Sky drive-in, both destined soon to disappear, still drew good crowds, the country club links and pool were busy, likewise the gun club and the driving range, beer sales were up, youngsters gathered as always at the bus station pinball machines, there was Little League baseball and softball for the fathers and the highway was slowly getting built, you couldn’t say nothing was happening. The town was growing, too, or so they said. But it was just quieter somehow, Opal thought, more easygoing, gentler, more like times past when this town was all there was and could set its own pace, and except for the turnover of births and deaths, the people within it were always the same. The war had changed all that, and then airplanes, TV, the new highways, the atom bomb, her restless son had. But the TVs, with the networks into their summer reruns and full of little else but depressing war news anyway, were mostly turned off now, the new war itself was far away, the streets and skies were quiet, her son and his young wife were on the other side of an ocean: it felt… it felt like those lazy summer days, not so long ago, when John was away at camp, Mitch frequently off at the same time on some trip or another, fishing or business or politics, and she was free to drift quietly for a couple of weeks through a life of her own, read a book from the library maybe, clean out John’s bedroom, sun awhile on a park bench as she was doing now, have lunch with friends (she was waiting for Kate and Harriet) and nothing she had to rush home for, nothing she had to think about. These last three years since the wedding had not been easy for Opal, adjusting to the life of an older in-law. Her son, toughened into manhood, was still recognizably her son, yet she felt increasingly estranged from him, and even from her memories of him as a boy, and that made her feel edgy all the time. She was fond of Barnaby’s daughter, always had been, steady as they come, that child, but she seemed to know her less well now than she had before the marriage. Fond of Barnaby, too, though as for Audrey, the less said the better. Certainly, give her credit, Audrey had adjusted to in-lawhood better than Opal had, she and John couldn’t be cozier. Free with her money, that always made a big impression on John, free with her flattery, too. Audrey seemed to share in the young couple’s lives as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Opal always felt intrusive if she stopped by to visit them, uncaring if she didn’t, she never knew what to do. And always when she visited, she couldn’t put her finger on it, but always she sensed there was something missing in that house. John’s room maybe. That house had been Barnaby’s house, still was really, she could feel her son’s discomfort there, so meanwhile, Mitch ridiculing her for it, she kept John’s old room at her house just as he’d last lived in it, not having any other use for it anyway. She sighed, distressed that she was spoiling this nice day with such thoughts (though she had once written an “I Remember” column for Ellsworth’s paper about the park, which she had always loved, saying that it was a place where one could bring one’s heavy thoughts and leave them behind, like an old newspaper left on a bench), and nodded politely at the young police officer who had tipped his hat at her, passing by on the park path. One of John’s school-friends probably. Oh yes, the one whose father… A disturbed family, as was true of so many of the poor. One wondered if it was wise to make policemen out of them. She started to point out to him the obscenity of the cast-off man’s sheath lying like a squashed grubworm by the steps of the bandstand, but thought better of it. He might think it vulgar of her to know what it was. On the other hand, as uninhibited as the young were nowadays, it might have been part of a public performance, she would just reveal, once again, what an old fuddy-duddy she was. It was true, she was, and she was proud of it. It wasn’t that she thought that people shouldn’t use such things, only that they shouldn’t display them rudely. She had always been a permissive mother, had she not, yet she had insisted always on a certain public decency. How can we bear one another without it? When Oxford, who sold those items openly in his drugstore, had proclaimed loudly one night out at the country club that dispensers of the things ought to be as common as gumball machines, she had responded that she had been pleased to notice that gumball machines were in fact disappearing and that soon therefore she might be able to agree with him, a reply that had earned her general approval, and even John seemed favorably amused. It was hard to tell what his wife thought, but of course that was always the case. She saw Harriet, all alone, coming down the leafy path from the direction of the library, where Kate worked. She didn’t look well. The rumors, alas, were probably true. Harriet and Alf had had three children, all of whom had long since flown the coop, at least Opal could be grateful that John had decided to make his life here at home. There were grandchildren, too, their latest photos an obligatory lunchtime ritual. Maybe that, she thought, not for the first time, was what was missing in her son’s house: three years and still waiting. Harriet seemed paler than usual and, as she drew nearer, Opal saw that she was crying. Oh dear. Opal rose in alarm and anticipation, smoothing down her skirt, mustering that reassuring stoic reserve for which she was, justly, so well known and appreciated.