John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  The night was going to be a long one for Ellsworth, too, nor did he have a hand to hold, that was just the problem, empty-handed before the abyss was what he was. He’d made something out of nothing before, but did he have the strength to do so now, at this hellish hour, his spirit so depleted? After dozing and waking, dozing and waking more times than he could count, he’d stumbled down out of what he called his garret over the printing plant and Crier offices, intending to go home and fix himself something warm to eat, microwave a frozen soup or something, he was making himself ill with his obsessive work habits (pity the cafe across the street wasn’t open twenty-four hours, this town just wasn’t civilized enough for writers), when he had finally realized, pausing at the foot of the creaky old stairs to gaze blearily at the local wall calendar printed in the back shop each year for Trevor to provide to his clients at Christmastime, that the next issue of The Town Crier was indeed due out on the morrow, or later today as the case might be and undoubtably was, and he had not even started to put it together. For a long time, he didn’t know how long, he was still half asleep, he just leaned there, unmoving, in front of the calendar, thinking the unthinkable: that, for the first time in over twenty-three years, he might skip an issue, or even (the one thought seemed to follow inevitably upon the other) cease publishing altogether. After his forest fire nightmare, shared as it happened with the Artist, Ellsworth had tried to put himself back to sleep with fantasies (the Artist’s) of rescuing the captive Model from the nefarious Stalker once he was rested up enough to undertake it. But what was the Stalker doing to her? He had to imagine the Stalker’s fantasies before he could imagine the Artist’s, and this he found both more exciting and more disturbing, especially since the Model did not seem as upset about her treatment as he did. He or the Artist, he wasn’t sure now. Half asleep or half awake, it all tended to get blurred and come and go in odd ways, such that at one point he found himself dreaming about the time, or else remembering it, that he took Gordon and Pauline to the movies, this was when he was still trying to recapture the bohemian life, hoping to blend art, friendship, and free love in one exemplary contemporary relationship, perhaps even a legendary one, and Gordon pushed Pauline ahead of him into the row of seats and followed her in, leaving Ellsworth stuck on the outside; only in his dream, if that’s what it was, instead of Pauline it was a little girl and Gordon was still between them. Was he drawing her picture? What was he doing? When he shook off this confused and irritating image, he discovered that there was another buried beneath it, something he had in some way been envisioning all along: the devastated forest, stripped bare and charred to the roots, as far as you could see, no sign of life except for the Artist, alone and broken in the terrible black-stumped desolation, a man with nothing more to live for, more dead than alive, weeping silently as Ellsworth was weeping. Enough. (She was gone! Not a trace!) Time to take a break. This month’s town photo, the one at which he was now so bleakly staring here at the foot of the stairs, a photo taken by Gordon like all of the others in the calendar, was of some Pioneers Day parade of the past, John’s wife in a frontier costume waving distantly from an open convertible, as she did every year when she was not waving from a float. Must have been taken fairly recently, given the car models, but she looked like a child in the photograph. The child Ellsworth had once big-brothered. He knew that she was a faithful reader of the Crier and that if it did not appear she would be disappointed. Whenever duty called, as it was doing now, often as not it bore her cadences like an echo. “Tell me a story …” He checked the piles of unopened mail in the front office, hoping for hard copy, and there was some, but not enough. School was out, the high schoolers he’d come to depend on so heavily had other things to do, and even the contribution from the ministerial association was missing. There was an anonymous “I Remember” submission that he couldn’t use, all names deleted, about a “prominent local businessman” who had made “an innocent young kid” pregnant and forced a “fetal murder” upon her that had cast “a hopeless black cloud” over her whole life, which did not seem to have been a short one. Some rather dreary photos in the weekly packet from Gordon: a tulip bed in bloom, an unidentified pole-vaulter going over the bar, a wide-angle shot of young people in the food court of some mall, John’s daughter among them, a men’s-club luncheon meeting, vacant tennis courts with puddles of standing water, a group of leached-out old people at the nursing home, also looking vacant. Ellsworth wondered if the author of the “I Remember” love story was among them. Gordon seemed to be raiding his archives, too. He hadn’t even photographed the street repairs out front. But Ellsworth couldn’t fault him, he himself had not gathered the usual local sports and club news, called the police station, courthouse, hospital, checked with John and other community newsmakers, interviewed the lone mayoral candidate, had not even, until now, sorted his week’s mail—in short, Ellsworth had done none of the ordinary things necessary for putting out a responsible newspaper, he had no one but himself (and the Stalker) to blame. Too late now, though. Nothing to do but follow Gordon’s lead and load up with thefts from the past. He went through the old bound issues of the Crier, checking the June editions, every five years back, for in-this-month items, struck on the heroic death in battle fifteen years ago of the son of the local pharmacist, a death that had shaken Ellsworth in ways quite different from the rest of the community, triggering the commencement of his loss of faith in the very notion of keeping a human chronicle, an abandoned line in his work-in-progress once marking the moment. He remembered asking himself: Who was this young man, so loved, it seemed, by all in town (though Ellsworth hardly knew him), and what his untold, now untellable, story? Fragments he had, a few witnesses, personal tributes: all surfaces. Concealments of a sort. What did it signify that Yale’s real story, like those of countless others, was lost forever, replaced by a ceremonious invention? Or did it matter? Was that what all stories were, all lives? Yale had been a child here. There were Little League box scores. Boy Scout rosters. There were cast lists of school plays and class photos. John’s wife was in them, too, they were classmates. They went to movies together. This was not in the obit folder, but Ellsworth had seen them in the lobby of the Palace when he first came back to town. Shocked him at the time. How did that fit? The Palace lobby alone was so full of crossed trajectories it made your head spin. And the Eastern university, the French girl, the distant war that killed him, suddenly the whole world was crowding into this sad little town, his file cabinet couldn’t hold it all, his mind couldn’t. So he catalogued dates and achievements and listed the bereaved and quoted the official military report and announced the memorial service and scribbled a “30” at the bottom and, pretending he had not been defeated, closed the drawer, telephoned the hospital to see who’d been born that day. Since then: hundreds of editions, thousands of spurious stories, as though trying to paper over the flux, believing in none of it, but faithfully doing his duty as though there were a point to it. The image of the Artist in the charred forest came back to mind, and he knew that, inappropriate though it was for the novel (the Model would be found, he’d see to that), it was true for him. To beat back the crowding despair (hopeless black clouds piling up everywhere), he decided to reach back to a happier time, some three years before Yale’s death: the wedding. Not just to cheer himself up, but to reconnect with a more purposeful self, one who might see him through this dark night’s desperate task. He dragged the tall volume, more fingered than most, down from the shelf, opened it to his big photo spread the week after the nuptials: already he was feeling better. A few hundred words on some remember-when theme, he supposed, together with four or five photos, a couple of ads (if they hadn’t come in, he’d give them away), and another page was history, even if history it wasn’t quite. Might even find some unused wedding snaps in the archives, if they were still orderly enough to find anything in them at all. Or, better: a look back at the old Pioneer Hotel. A couple of postcard views, mug shots of past owners, mixed with Rotary, Kiwani
s, and BPW meetings held there, that convention of regional state highway commissioners that had changed the map, high school team dinners, birthday parties and weddings, John’s included, Gordon’s moving portrait of the door left standing when all the rest came down. A good story for Pioneers Day and all that. The hopeless clouds were breaking up. He could do this. Then he noticed, for the first time, that in the group photo of the rehearsal dinner in the Pioneer Hotel banquet room the night before John’s wedding there was a young man in the front row with his fly agape, his white underwear, hopefully underwear, plainly showing through. Ellsworth had used and reused this photo countless times—how had he not seen this before—!? There was a typo in the caption he’d missed, too, “weekend festivities” actually reading “weakened festivities,” though that kind of a slip was more understandable, rare as it was. No, wait, it wasn’t “weakened,” it was “weakneed.” As was, double-k’d, Ellsworth. He slumped into a chair. What was happening?

  A question much like the one the young man in the photo with the open fly asked when someone in a tracksuit thrust a rifle into his hands and said: “This way. Come on. She’s in the ravine.” Before Beans could get an answer to the inquiry he then posed, however, that rough gent was gone like he never was. Beans joined the hunting party creeping through the trees ahead of him for fear of getting shot at by mistake if he didn’t, but stayed to the rear, out of the flicking beams of their flashlights, which were like death rays to his throbbing head. A squat cop in sweaty shirtsleeves and suspenders and an old guy with a long snout led them. Toward what, Beans could not guess or even imagine, but he understood that it was very big. Crikey. Step out to take an innocent piss, and look what happens. Beans had awakened, still clutching his Swiss Army knife, in a closed-up Country Tavern, eerily empty, illuminated faintly by a bluish light filtering through the grimy windows, his face pasted to the table (must have passed out in spilled beer), his head cracking at the seams, and his bladder set to burst. The pornflicks were off, the jukebox dark. He’d pushed himself to his feet, feeling stiff and achey, pocketed the knife, picked up a fallen drumstick near his feet, and given the cymbals a sharp crack just to break the ponderous silence, scared himself doing it and sent a painful rip through what would be his brain if he had any. Dust had risen from the cymbals like a visible form of clatter, there was dust and dirt everywhere, stamped-on butts and food wrappers, bottles lying about in the gloom like spent artillery shells, unemptied ashtrays and dirty glasses, a veritable shithole. Beans thought about brother John entering on the morrow into the wedded life and wondered about the nature of this transformation: did it really bring an end to such joys as these? He shuffled creakily through the slough of disport to the door (tried the switch, the lights were dead) and stepped out into the moonless night. A few heavy mechanical hulks lay strewn about in the lot and ditch as though after a stockcar race, and there was roadkill at his feet, but across the way in yonder copse, he could see lights dancing in the branches, other trucks and cars pulled up on the side of the road. So, he was not alone in the world, after all, as he had feared. Not hoped? Was it human company at last, then, that misanthropic Beans sought? No, something far more precious at this hour, whichever hour it was: a hitch, a ride, a lift for heart and body, back in to the hotel where he might shed these fulsome rags and pillow his suffering head. First, however, he turned back and lifted his stream against the smutty flyblown windows of the Country Tavern, bringing the promise of light where heretofore there was none, as was always his virtuous wont. It was a record-setting pee, pity old Brains wasn’t there to time it, yet another momentous historical event that would escape the world’s capricious attention, and when he was done the lights in the woods he’d noticed earlier were gone. He crossed over, passing between the parked vehicles—a sporty lot, on the whole, models he’d not seen before, though on the wee side—and heard their voices deep within, saw a distant nervous glimmering like that of fireflies. He thought of curling up in a truckbed until they returned, but there was lightning behind the tavern and an unpleasant chill in the night air and uncurling later might prove an agony worse than the nocturnal nature stroll that was its present alternative. Beans walked into the woods. He was wondering how he might introduce himself if these were not members of the wedding party, but no introductions seemed necessary when he caught up with them, he was armed without a welcoming word, merely a brief instruction: “This way.” All right. Sure. Distantly, he caught a glimpse in the shadows of someone who looked like he’d just escaped a mummy’s-revenge horror movie: Beans, trailing at the rear, closed ranks. Was this a test? He was reminded of the fraternity scavenger hunt he went on as a pledge. That ordeal ended with a beer blast. He hoped no such revels were part of tonight’s program. He also hoped the rifle wasn’t loaded. Beans was the sort of fellow, he knew this all too well, who tended, no matter who or what he might be aiming at, to shoot his own foot off, and then be thankful after that was the worst he’d done. “We’ve lost her,” someone said. This was good news. But then a cantankerous old buzzard in cuffs and leg irons and wearing a ballcap backwards spat through gaps in his teeth and, nodding his head at something down in the gully, said: “Nah. There’s her scat. Still steamin’.” “How do you know it’s hers?” a younger burrheaded guy in yellow golf pants and a windbreaker of some kind wanted to know; Beans perceived immediately this whinging fellow had as much appetite for this exercise as he did and could be a useful ally. “By the size of it, buckethead,” said the old geezer flatly, and spat again. “Anyway,” said the stubby cop, “if he don’t know, who does?” This seemed to satisfy everybody unfortunately, and they all moved on, following their prey’s evacuations, pressing deeper into the treacherous undergrowth. Beans tagged along, having no choice, the way back by now beyond recall. His head was splitting. A puke loomed on the near horizon. Speaking metaphorically of course out here in the pitch-dark forest, as in: just around the corner. He sidled up to the burrheaded guy in the glow-in-the-dark arse-bags, who was now sneaking a suck from a hip flask, and said: “Some picnic, hunh?” The guy winced, offered him the hip flask, Beans took a swig without thinking, felt his stomach turn over when it hit. “I forgot,” he said, handing it back. “I’m a teetotaler.” “Yeah, me too.” And then they saw it. Her. Shit. Beans set his rifle down against a tree and backed off. He was at the wrong fucking party. He’d find his own way out of here.

  Nocturnal nature strolls had been part of Alf’s insomniac routine ever since Harriet’s death nearly a decade and a half ago, though, if still nocturnal, largely deprived of nature now that the old city park was gone, he missed it sorely. The new civic center, if only tolerable by day, was a downright blight by night, a pale dead thing heaped up hugely in the murky half-light that hung around it like a disease. A “sleeping giant,” someone called it, though it reminded Alf more of certain lethal structures he’d seen during the war. He avoided it when he could, preferring the suspended stillness of dormant Main Street or the older prewar sections of town like the one in which he lived, though sometimes habit drew him back to where the old park had once lain waiting for him with its amusing wooden bandstand and its meandering paths lit by amber postlamps, welcoming as sleep itself. Used to walk with Harriet there in the evening, back when walking in the park was still something one did in a town like this, and after her death, while it was still there, he liked to wander in it at night, alone, feeling, not her presence, but the calm that used to accompany him when they strolled there together, which, sex apart, Alf took to be all he’d ever know of love, and maybe all there was to know. Alf believed hysteria to be the only reasonable response to the human condition, love, or whatever it was he was calling love, its unreasonable antidote which let you sleep at night (what wouldn’t let him sleep tonight, for all the drinking he’d done, the humorless TV sitcom reruns he’d surrendered to when he got back from the club, was a memory of some kind, it seemed to lurk at the end of one of his fingers, like the imprint of a switch that had to be toggled: as h
e passed under an intersection streetlamp, he stared at it, trying to see what it saw, but all he could make out was something like the pad of his own finger, softly mirrored: a compress? the bulb of an eyedropper?). Not that he’d forgotten that lean, vivacious, wisecracking, freckle-nosed nurse he’d met in the field hospital while taking some poor forgotten matchmaker’s shattered leg off, still gave him pleasure to think of her and the way she grinned at him back then, but that part of love he knew to be even more of an illusion than the soporific part, a kind of instinctive response to buried genetic coding, as most forms of pleasure were, and usually brief as appetite and its slaking, repeatable but not sustainable. Of course … there were, as Oxford would say, the grandchildren… Alf smiled to himself, ambling along there in the dim-lit dark, enjoying momentarily the joke he was in, was in a sense the butt of, or a butt, one among the multitudes, hearing Harriet say, looking up from one of her novels, You think too goddamn much, Alf, it’s going to give you nosebleed. Ellsworth, he saw, was working late again, his printshop windows all ablaze, the man himself pacing around inside, unkempt and frenetic, a scene Alf had witnessed walking past here in the wee hours before, usually about once a week. Another way to provoke a peaceful sleep, one that used to work for him: set yourself a task, no matter how pointless, and complete it. How much of the lives people thought they were living here were in fact invented by Ellsworth and his weekly (most called it “weakly”) Town Crier! Well, somebody had to do it, else they’d all be left without identities, no matter how spurious. His own included. Alf had always thought of his doctoring as somehow intrinsically meaningful, but given his perspective on life as a kind of horror show not meant to be consciously witnessed, it probably made less sense even than Ellsworth’s obsessive scribbling. Around the corner, the photographer’s lights were on, too: a busy night. Perhaps his wife was unwell and keeping him up, some sort of organic or possibly glandular disorder that Gordon had mentioned nervously to him a couple of days ago outside the Sixth Street Cafe. Behaving a bit strangely of late, that fellow, more strangely than usual, there was talk about him out at the club tonight, in and around the burlesque misadventures of the minister’s son (who had an acne problem Alf was treating, as well as the worst case of athlete’s foot he’d ever seen), some of it funny, some less so. Maybe his wife’s illness had something to do with it. The woman seemed unwilling to come see Alf, he should probably visit them one day soon. If he could find the time. Alf had stopped taking on new patients years ago, but the ones he still had, aging as he was aging, had more problems than they used to, and he could not easily refuse their many offspring (John’s daughter had just been in to seen him, for example, birth control pills she’d wanted, he’d said no, she wasn’t old enough, she’d thrown a tantrum and said he was out of touch, he’d agreed, let her have them), if anything his workload was getting worse. People he used to see once a year, he now saw every week. Gave up house calls a decade or so after the war, except for invalids and people in nursing homes—which, more and more, his patients now were. Poor old Barnaby, for example (the civic center, though a block and a half down the street he was crossing, had just made its dreary presence felt: Barnaby had built the park that it displaced), who’d told him when he’d stopped in at the retirement center to see him a day or two ago that he’d been having problems with Audrey lately, she’d changed his pills or something, it was hard to understand half of what he was saying, the words tumbling like chunky gravel out of the side of his mouth. Earlier, Alf would have gently reminded his old friend that his wife had passed away some years ago; now he merely said he’d talk to her about it, see what he could do, and Barnaby just shook his old grizzled head and pulled on his ear and said it wouldn’t do any good, her damned mind was set. The town was full of the ghosts of dead wives these days: out at the club tonight, old Stu had heaved his arm around Alf, leaned boozily against him, and rumbled into his near ear that Winnie was back, bedeviling him like she always used to do, he had to have a sleeping pill strong enough to stop the old girl from pestering him to death, can you help me, Doc? Alf had smiled but it hadn’t seemed to be a joke: old Stu’s damp red eyes were full of pain. Drop by, he’d said, I’ll see what I can do. “Nothin’ in your pocket? No? Shit, Doc, then I’m in deep trouble …” And then, for an alarming moment, the old doc feared he might be in deep trouble, too. He was just passing an unlighted alleyway (he’d been thinking: that memory at the tip of his finger: could it be of a tumor?), when he noticed there was someone skulking about in the shadows. It flashed to his mind what a dangerous place the world had become, he was a damned fool, people didn’t walk alone at night anymore, could he yell loud enough that Ellsworth or Gordon or someone would hear him, but then he saw who it was: Oxford’s odd boy Cornell. He was scrabbling about in there, feeling the walls, trying the doors, peering through the darkened windows. The family pharmacy backed onto this alley, a couple of doors down. “Corny? Are you all right?” The boy froze, pressed up in a tight little crouch against the small concrete loading platform at the back of the corner five-and-ten. A child still, though he’d fathered eight, at least eight, no doubt more to come, no sign of it stopping. “Hey, Corny, didn’t mean to take you by surprise. It’s just old Doc here, son. Come here a minute.” Corny hesitated, then abruptly obliged to the extent of taking up a position against a telephone pole a few feet away, moving toward it in his usual herky-jerky way, then slouching against it as though he’d never been elsewhere. His wispy blond hair, oddly luminous in the darkened alley, fluttered down over his heart-shaped face like dry weeds, giving him the appearance of a startled rodent peeking out from its nest in the straw. “Couldn’t sleep for some damn reason, so I was out taking a walk. Glad to find some company. How are you doing, Corny?” Corny shrugged: “Same old shit,” he said in a voice that was little more than a hiss. Alf smiled, approached him slowly, hands in pockets. “Listen, what are you looking for?” Cornell tensed, but stayed where he was. “You want to tell me, son? I saw you hunting about there. Maybe I can help.” Cornell looked doubtful, shrugged again, looked away, his skittish eyes scanning the alleyway. Alf thought: John’s wife! Was that it? He glanced at his finger, startled by his insight: was it possible? “What?” he asked, hearing Cornell mutter something under his breath. He leaned closer to the strange boy. “The door,” whispered Cornell.