John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  Old Stu the car dealer’s little tootsie (otherwise known as his little peach among the lemons), who would have agreed with Ellsworth’s Artist about the radical sensuousness of beauty (and/or the beauty of radical sensuousness) and also about the self-consuming allure of the unattainable ideal (e.g., why did she have cock on her mind all the time, it was driving her crazy), and who certainly was not lacking in pluck and audacity, was also—while dancing about naked after her morning bath with her hand between her legs and enjoying a snort (not the day’s first) of Amazing Grace—celebrating a creative turning point in her life: to wit, imminent liberation from the impotent old lush who was her legal mate in exchange for a gorgeous and obedient hunk who was the very embodiment of animal lust with an ever-ready giggle stick that would put a studhorse to shame, without at the same time liberating herself from the old soon-to-be-(alas)-late lush’s considerable wealth. Stu had taken all the risks for her a decade ago, and now Rex, who’d be by for her soon (in full sunlight, not caring who saw, the brazen boy) was doing the same again for her, she must have something after all. Yes, that old red red robin was throbbin’ and bobbin’ once again (must remember to give her best friend a call later and cheer her up), and so was she, her voluptuous parts—her still-youthful bosom, the cheeks of her abundant ass which her loverboy called “her funky rock-and-roll fin-tailed fanny,” her trimmed-down but still plush and velvety belly—rising and falling massively with each gladsome bounce and making her feel very much inside her body, her body as body, which she now loved more than she’d ever loved it. The doorbell rang—why didn’t the sweetie just come on in?—and Daphne went, lighting the trip fantastic (a joke from the motel, where they’d arranged all the lamps in the room around the bed like theater spotlights to set their bodies ablaze as they fucked, stoned, in front of the mirrors), to the door to let him in. Only it wasn’t Rex, it was some kid, vaguely familiar but not quite placeable in the lacy mid-morning haze of Amazing Grace. He stood there gaping at her, eyes half-crossed and hangdog jaw adroop, as though she were some sort of otherworldly apparition, reminding her of looks she used to get back in her high school days, long past, some sweet, some not, and when she asked him what he wanted, all she could make out through his spellbound stammer was something about mowing her sidewalks. Wait a minute. Wasn’t this Reverend Lenny’s oldest kid? Daphne grinned, staring down at the rise in his pants. Like father, like son, as it said in the Bible, though as she recalled it was the father who had all the fun in that story and the son who took the licking. “All right, all right,” she said, pushing the door open and stepping back, “but come on in, honey, don’t make me stand out here in front of all the neighbors!” Which was how it was that, one thing leading to another in the usual ash-hauling way, she was lying asprawl on her unmade bed with the bareassed boy kneeling, tallow-faced, between her thighs, clearly scared shitless but glassy-eyed with rampant desire, when Rex turned up, not bothering to knock or ring the bell, as she had anticipated in the first place. “Well, well, what the fuck have we here?” bellowed the grease-stained mechanic, grabbing the thunderstruck kid (whose name, she had learned in one of his few audible declarations, was Philip) by the back of his shirt and raising him a couple of inches off the bed. “The naughty boy was trying to rape me, Rex,” Daphne said languidly, and put her hand between her legs again. “No shit,” said Rex. “Hell, I’ve torn motherfuckers’ cocks out by the root and made them eat them for less than that.” Daphne grinned. The boy’s little bird had shriveled so, Rex would have a hard time finding it, much less getting a grip on it. His eyes were beginning to roll back as though he might be about to faint. “It’s the preacher’s kid,” she said, feeling very hot and not wanting to put this off much longer. “Why don’t we just make him pray for forgiveness of his sins?” Rex grinned down at her. God, he was beautiful! He pushed the terrified boy face down on the bed between her knees and yanked off his stylishly ragged jeans, which were still tangled around his ankles, then, after whipping the belt out, used the jeans to tie the kid’s ankles to the foot of the bed. He grabbed young Philip by the scruff, still wielding the belt, and propped him up on his knees again, set his dingy white underpants on top of his head like a nun’s bonnet. “All right, you know the chant to the Lord’s Prayer, jive-ass?” The kid nodded bleakly, his eyes tearing under the limp waistband of his shorts. “Well, then, give me a lick, my man! Take it away!” “Our… our Father…” “Louder! Lemme hear you blow!” “Our Father—” “Louder, damn you!” roared Rex with a wink at her over the kid’s shoulder and he laid the belt across the boy’s backside with a resounding whop that sent him with a yelp face-first into the bedding between Daphne’s legs again. “I said louder, I mean louder! Drive it!” Rex thundered, hauling the boy back up on his knees again. “Our … our … our …” And Rex cracked his butt again. Jesus, she was sopping wet, this was one of the best fucks she’d ever had and it hadn’t even begun yet. “P-please,” the kid whim pered. “I-I only—a j-job—” “You got a job, you miserable piece of pimpled rat-shit! It’s your break, you dig? Now, come on! I want you to wail! Punch it out!” In seeming fury, Rex took another mighty backswing, the leather whooshing fearsomely through the air above her, making her gasp, and a sudden spurt of pee rainbowed out between the boy’s legs and trickled warmly down her knees. “Now, look what you’ve made him do!” Daphne whooped, and Rex grinned, pushing the kid’s face into his own pee and snapping the belt smartly across his upraised fanny one more time for good measure, before stripping off his own greasy overalls: “Fucking goofball! What you call third stream! But he better keep ringing the changes on that tune, loud and clear, or the cat’ll pay for his goddamned clams with a shredded ass!” Nothing on under the overalls: Rex said he liked the rough feel of the denim on his bare body, helped him keep his edge when everything else was bringing him down. Not down now. Lo and behold! The sight of that glorious love-cannon brought tears of joy and gratitude to Daphne’s eyes: to get her bell rung like this at her age! Where did he come from? Hell, who cared? The important thing was not to wake up. “On earth as it is in heaven!” the kid was squawking through his tears. “Fuckin’ A!” laughed Rex. “And you better pinch that piccolo tight, junior! Anyone pisses on me, he’s a dead man!” Surely, the poor boy got an eyeful. She lost complete control of herself, they tore the bed up. Rex, stretching it out, so timed his climax as to coincide with one repetition or another of “Thy Kingdom come,” but Daphne had been coming since they began, maybe before, she’d never been so transported, so inutterably possessed. “Amen, amen, amen, goddamn it, amen!” she gasped when Rex exploded in her, her whole body coming in wave after wave from her ears to her toes. Holy shit, what a miraculous fuck. On and on. “Deep down, I realize,” she groaned (she would tell her best friend this, or anyway her best friend’s answering machine, that girl having gone into a deep fade of late, all but lost to sight), still gripping with both hands her sweet lover’s powerful ass, hallowed be its name, one of her legs curled over the back of his hairy one and toes stroking the skinny thigh of their supplicating witness, “I’m a very religious woman.” Her foot, creeping up the boy’s leg (she was feeling passionately motherly in her newfound piety), now found something there. She stroked it with her big toe, taking its measure, while writing her ineffable name, over and over, with her long painted nails on Rex’s firm glossy cheeks, which she knew from long devotion to be paler than the rest of him, creamy in color and hairless, except for a little black tuft at the bottom of his spine like the stub of a recessive tail. “Take a look at his wee-wee, Rex! Stiff as a pencil! What’ll we do with it?” “I don’t know,” said Rex, rolling off to the floor, the terrible abyss within her yawning for a moment as he pulled the plug. This was terrible. She needed it more now than she did ten minutes ago. Rex untied the boy, who was still timorously Our Fathering though no longer shouting. “But I think it’s bigger than both of us, Daph. Let’s share this scene with the neighbors.” And before you could say “Thy will be done,�
�� young Philip was out in the front yard draped over the cute little sign with the brass-framed license plate that said DAPHNE AND STU with the company motto underneath, and his jeans and underpants were up on the porch roof, Rex himself, throughout all this neighborly sharing, in the devil-may-care altogether. (Had she asked him, while thrashing about: What about Stu? She had. And what, staggered among his own breathless grunts and snorts and in and around the squeaky “as we forgive others” and the “give us this days” of their little deacon, he’d said was: “Don’t worry about it, baby. Just go out and buy yourself something cool to wear at the funeral.”)

  By the time Jennifer reached the mall with Clarissa for their date with Nevada, who was becoming one of their best friends, it seemed like everyone in town knew about her brother’s exhibition of himself and at least half of them claimed to have seen the show in living color; his scrawny butt was famous and she had to deal with a lot of tiresome wisecracks about it, which she did with as much of her customary good humor as she could manage, under the circumstances. Just how it had all happened was not very clear, but there were a lot of rumors, some of them pretty wild, the jerk might actually get some mileage out of this in the long run, though for the moment he’d run for cover. In a way it had been a break for Jennifer because her mom, who was now big as a barn and more spaced out than ever, had earlier talked her into taking Zoe to the mall for the afternoon, but then her dad had agreed that Zoe shouldn’t be exposed to all the inevitable dirty talk out there aimed at their own family, so she’d got out of it. One glance at her baby sister and Nevada might have withdrawn her invitation to Jen to go flying with Bruce the next day and Clarissa would have been able to go all by herself, something that would have really got up Jen’s nose. So thanks to the Creep for that if for little else in her life. (Already Clarissa was calling him the Croup; wouldn’t she!) Not to complain: Nevada had made her day, which otherwise had been turning pretty weird, what with her airhead mother and her brother and all the rest that was happening. Just coming out here to the mall, for example. Clarissa’s mom had brought them, instead of her grandmother doing it, which was unusual by itself nowadays, but it got more unusual. Clarissa had been painting Jen’s nails with a new black vampire polish so she hadn’t been paying much attention, but she had a funny feeling when they pulled into the parking lot that there was no one driving the car. Just a feeling: when she looked up, Clarissa’s mother was still there. But then, when they got out of the car, Jen turned back to look and she wasn’t. The car was empty, so was the parking lot all around. She tried to say something about this to Clarissa, but Clarissa was too pumped to listen: “Come on, Jen, for pete’s sake! Stop ruining things! We’ll be late!” Jennifer saw that this business with Bruce and Nevada was putting a strain on their friendship, and she was sorry about that, but now that it was happening, there was nothing to do but let it, just like her dad always said. Of course they weren’t late. They had to wait almost an hour, an hour filled mostly with explicit accounts of Philip up on the Ford dealer’s roof with his pants off and the dumb jokes that went with it. At least it helped Clarissa relax, so they were in a pretty good mood when Nevada finally arrived and told them that Bruce was definitely flying in from Florida the next day to give them the ride he’d promised. Nevada had seemed especially interested that Jen was coming along, as though the whole thing depended on her, which brought Clarissa’s fangs out again, but only for a moment because then Nevada turned her whole attention to Clarissa for a while, and said she loved the nail polish, whose idea was it, and so on, though once she winked quickly at Jennifer, making her feel suddenly ten years more grown up. About that time they all saw that fat photographer streaking through the mall with some kind of frilly nightshirt on over his street clothes. Nevada laughed and said: “Do you think he’s stealing it?” “That’s just old Gordo,” Clarissa said dismissively. “He’s pretty squirrely.” “This whole town is,” Jen said, then took a chance: “I only hope I get out of it before it drives me nuts, too.” And Nevada smiled.