John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  Many—Dutch, for example, or Waldo, Nevada, Bruce, or Daphne—would have dismissed these photographs that Otis was now so intently examining (later, he would take them with him as “material evidence,” though evidence of what he could not say) as mere pornography, butt and beaver shots intended to arouse the scopophile, disparaging perhaps the model, whose shape was generous and skin not without blemish, even while admiring the technical quality of the image, some—Bruce in particular—admiring as well the perversity of the image-taker, a profession Bruce likened favorably unto the sadist’s. Others, too—Trevor, Marge, Lorraine, Floyd—would have found these photographs perverse or worse, a cruel theft of sorts, a violent dispossession of the other, and wretched of purpose, but Ellsworth, with an understanding bred of lifelong friendship, would have perceived their profound lyrical intent and artistic integrity—and did in fact, for he had viewed them and most others in Gordon’s private albums, kept unaware of one series only, that which now had undone (his own undoing) the photographer and plunged him into such despair as well as trouble with the law. For this was a man, Ellsworth would have said, who loved less flesh than form, more pattern of light and dark than what tales or implied excitements those patterns might bespeak, one who sought to penetrate the visible contours of the restless world, ceaselessly dissolved by time, to capture the hidden image beyond, the elusive mystery masked by surface flux, and the name he gave that which he pursued was Beauty. When Ellsworth, for whom movement was all and the stasis that his friend coveted was not Beauty but Death, or both at best, complained about “the easy accident of an opened lens,” Gordon had insisted that “accident,” as he called it, was in fact the essential creative gift, defending his photographs in terms of found objects and aleatory music, about which he knew only what Ellsworth himself had told him when he came back, showing off a bit, from the outside world. To prove it, he gave Ellsworth a camera and told him to go take a hundred photos or so (Ellsworth was bored after a dozen) and they would judge them after as works of art, and of course none stood up as Gordon’s did, though Ellsworth was personally fond of a picture he took at a young war hero’s tomb during a visit by his family there with the French girl who later committed suicide (this little exercise happened a long time ago), simply because there was so much story concealed in it, however ill-managed the shot, and another of three middle-aged women, grinning stupidly at him, seated together on a park bench in the old city park (now vanished), only one of whom, themselves at the time in mourning for a lost friend, was still alive today, an innocent image of love and grief, emotionally enhanced by overexposure and poor focus. He published both (with byline) in The Town Crier, but took no other, for his friend was right, he was no photographer, nor a visual artist of any kind, appreciative of the real thing though he could be, and moreover he came to understand, in more than just a metaphoric sense, that things as well as people actively showed themselves to the photographer because of his gifts, country roads stretching out to display their longing to him, vistas unpeopling themselves to reveal their troubled depths, houses fluttering their starched lace curtains at him like flirtatious lashes, light entering their wide porches to open them into a broad friendly smile, their flower-bordered cement walks reaching out to the front sidewalk like firm proffered handshakes or decorated cleavage. Sometimes. Sometimes there was a darkness, withdrawal, implicit rebuff, threat. Gordon shot the town, Ellsworth often thought, as if it were a strange dream enacted, a dream dreamt by the dead in which the living were condemned to mythic servitude, Gordon as artist not their liberator but the revealer of their common condition which might yet lead to liberation if they would but look closely enough, something his own Artist once said in another way (a line now lost, or rather, perverted by the Stalker, in the novel’s sudden turnings) with respect to the mythology of the pose. For Ellsworth, much as he admired his friend’s talent and respected his quest, no single photo, no single painting or artifact of any sort, no matter how magisterial, could equal any of these things, however modest their quality, when linked together in telling pattern, and for that he often loved the photos Gordon himself most disdained. The family portraits, for example, trite compositions when singly seen, utterly trivial, artificial, and repetitive, but bearing in their austere and staged formality the power of tragedy when seen in temporal sequence, a record of loss and joined resistance to loss. If Gordon prized most that photo of laundry hung out to dry, crisp and stiff in the cold, or this of pale luminous buttocks, all detail burned away except at the perfect fork, or that of a gleaming black coffin held aloft in an overcast sky by four ropy hands as white as bone, Ellsworth loved more his own fat photo archives with their gas stations and orators and sliding Little Leaguers and humpback bridges and trailer parks and Rotary club meetings and pet graves in backyards and Bermuda-shorted duffers and candy-poled barbershops and dancing high schoolers and ginger-breaded bandstands and beaming trophy bearers all ajumble, like a million stories waiting to be told and a million more with every shuffle of the pack. He could appreciate Gordon’s fascination with an empty mall parking lot as a mysterious space, as though nothing had given birth to itself, but he got much more out of it in context with other photos of that mall at other times and of other malls besides. Here a photo of a since-dismantled fountain from an early mall in town, its cement belly adorned with scrawled graffiti (all that rich local culture, lost forever!), there one of the glittery escalator at the inauguration of the new highway mall, the six-screen cinema ads and opening day sales as oracular backdrop, both set beside this one of the steamy food court, filled with the downy young like chicks in an incubator, at yet another mall (though the viewer might commingle them), each enriched with faces and fashions and all the passing foolishness of their times, and add to these another of the bus station soda fountain and pinball machines, once locus of the courting rites of the young now no longer young, and yet another of the abandoned Night Sky Drive-In movie theater, sacrificed to the highway which gave birth to the newest mall, showing its desolation of spirit by the grass and weeds sprouting through the cracks in the cement ramps, the sagging fences, leaning screen, marred by the stones and bottles thrown at it, and then a worker standing in rubble, guiding a beam aloft, and a tennis-costumed woman and her leather-jacketed children in that parking lot before seen so deserted, now filled with gleaming vehicles of the latest models, and a stark empty-windowed downtown dime store closing down forever, and so the story grows: of the town, and of the viewer, and of the photographer, too.

  As they dragged the distraught photographer out of the fancy women’s-wear shop at the mall, his eyes filmy and unfocused and his knees giving way beneath him, what he kept blubbering over and over was: “It doesn’t matter, I didn’t have any film in the camera anyway,” a fact that seemed to be causing him more dismay than his arrest. They paraded the poor bewildered man down the corridor, through the busy cafe area, past the table where Opal sat alone, and on down the next corridor as though to prolong what perhaps they perceived as an entertainment for the shoppers, and from the grins she could see on people’s faces that was probably how it was taken. The young were openly laughing, pointing, making jokes. Opal was not entertained. Her own spirits were too low, her confidence in her own grip on the proprieties too shaken, to take pleasure in the humiliation of any fellow creature, especially one so harmless as the photographer, who was a bit idiosyncratic maybe, but a decent citizen and a loving son. Opal had known from church the man’s mother, a saint in her way, her husband killed on one or another of those beaches during the big war (Mitch had played his part on the home front in that one, as had her son in the lesser ones since then, for which she was grateful), the woman widowed so young and all but penniless with a son to raise, then in turn dutifully and tenderly cared for by that son when her own health and mind failed her, a fate that Opal hoped she would herself escape, but confident that her own son would be no less caring if such a calamity befell her. And what would her son say about her present troubles
? He would not be patient with them. Mother, he would say, let that addled old man be, there’s nothing you can do for him, just watch over my wife and children when I cannot, I’m depending on you. And now she’d let him down on all counts and, moreover, behaved in ways he would not believe, nor could she still, though she knew she had. The girls were gone, she’d looked everywhere, it was all her fault, she’d stayed too long, but she’d called and they weren’t home either, no one was except the cleaning lady, and now she could do nothing but sit in this rancid public parlor, feeling utterly estranged, surrounded by misbehaving children and that indecent racket they called music, waiting, hopefully yet fearfully, for her charges’ safe return. She had brought Clarissa and her friend Jennifer to the mall this morning, as she had often done, though much earlier than usual, and she knew by their twittery excitement that something was up (those thin little shorts they had on didn’t even cover their behinds and they were wearing their belly buttons out like brooches) and she should stay, but her visits to the retirement center had become more than mere duty or habit, rather something like a compulsion, something she had to do more for herself than for that stricken old man, who had become, in fact, not so much a family friend as an adversary. And one of a very peculiar sort. It had begun simply as a way of coping with the awkwardness of Barnaby’s befuddled mind, humoring him in his confusions rather than forever correcting him, a sort of kindness, really, and therapeutic, too—he seemed to speak more clearly than before—that was how she had thought of it when she’d started taking Audrey’s part in Barnaby’s imaginary dialogues. These were not genteel or affectionate conversations: Barnaby was an angry man, and Audrey, he was convinced, had with malice done him wrong. Opal was equally convinced that Barnaby was misjudging her, her mistakes, if any, innocent (John was a charmer), and besides the dead should be allowed to lie in peace, so she took it upon herself to defend a woman toward whom in life she’d never really felt a fondness, at first in her own voice and then, when that only seemed to stir up Barnaby’s rage, in Audrey’s. Audrey had been so different from Opal—vivacious, brassy, self-assured, dynamic, daring, proud—that what most amazed Opal was the ease with which she assumed her role, standing toe-to-toe with the irascible old fellow, silencing his pigheaded bluster finally with the force of her own irrefutable logic, her doughty good sense, exhibiting then her own anger at his mistrust, backing him up until he fell into a chair, apologizing: “But… Aud, I’ve felt… such pain …” “I know.” Then he’d lean his poor damaged head into her bosom or onto her shoulder and rest there a while, she stroking his age-freckled pate gently, consoling him as best she could, until he forgot and it all started up again. She took to cleaning up his room for him, straightening the bed, sorting his laundry, scolding him for bad habits (“Don’t walk around with your robe gaping like that, do you think people enjoy looking at an ugly old coot like you in his underwear?” “Too much trouble, tying and untying it, Aud, slows me down when I have to go to the bathroom …”), even helping him with his baths because he said he hated the bath lady who treated him like he was three years old. “She’s right, you are three years old, now stop picking at yourself like that and lean forward, let’s get this over with.” “Wish I could, Aud. Get it over with, I mean.” “You stop talking like that, you old buzzard! Who would I have to fight with if you quit on me?” Which did remind her to take the gun out of the little raggedy holster in his bathrobe while he was in the tub and hide it at the bottom of his laundry basket. Sometimes she prepared some food for him or cleaned his refrigerator or microwave, read old newspapers to him, gave him his medicines, clipped his toenails. “Now, Aud, we’ve got to do something about that damned will.” “It’s been done. I don’t want to hear another word about it. Give me the other foot.” He’d been especially difficult today, spilling his medicine, dirtying the bathroom, throwing his dirty clothes about, refusing his bath, getting in a rage about a “dawzer,” whatever that was, even trying to strike her with his cane, but she took the cane away from him, pushed him down into his rocker, cooled his heels with a smart dressing-down, and then, when he’d lapsed into a more melancholic mood, gave him a haircut. She noticed he was eyeing the scissors, so she teased him for a while, setting them down where he could almost reach them but not quite, then quite casually popping them in her handbag when she got ready to go. Sometimes, leaving Barnaby’s little apartment, a funny feeling would pass over her, as though she had to remember to be Opal again and might not be if she forgot, just a fleeting sensation, but enough to make her shiver. Today, though, the funny feeling, after what she saw in the main lobby, had not gone away, the shivering hadn’t. Passing by the visitors’ logbook, she had glanced to see if she had remembered to sign in and was startled to see Audrey’s name written there. More than once. But in Opal’s own handwriting. She felt confused and somehow threatened, almost as though there were a hand at her throat, and she reached for the pen to do something, but there were other people in the lobby, coming and going, she had to leave it. And she’d lost all track of time, she’d been gone too long from the girls, Clarissa so irresponsible of late, she had her father’s bold independent ways, but not always his good judgment, and that dangerous mall crowd—Opal was suddenly afraid, for the girls, for herself, for her whole family, and dazed and panicky, she went scurrying back, hunched over the steering wheel as though trying to push the car instead of drive it, arriving finally, still shaken, but more and more her old self, her old dowdy steadfast inept and timorous self, to find her fears confirmed, the girls nowhere in sight, and nothing to do after an anxious search and a call home, an embarrassed inquiry or two (where were those scamps? they’d hear it from Granny Opal when they got back!), but sit and wait. In this glossy marketplace her son had made, though certainly not for her (she was not eating or drinking anything, people wanted her table, the busboys were giving her impatient looks, but she would not, could not really, move), a setting that seemed to demonstrate something her friend Kate once told her, sitting in the city park and speaking then about the most recent achievements in outer space: “When the edge becomes the center, Opal,” she’d said, “then the center becomes the void.”

  Where were those two scamps? They were up in the air with Bruce and Nevada, not quite in outer space, but, as Clarissa put it: “Far out!” It had started as an ordinary highspeed joyride, but Clarissa had insisted Bruce put his sports jet through all its tricks, and so they’d climbed and rolled and looped and dived and then skimmed the whole next county in about ten seconds flat! It was unreal! Uncle Bruce and Nevada sat together up front, and it was easy to see how much in love they were, the way they couldn’t stop touching each other, Nevada especially—Bruce, who was dressed in silky soft army clothes, acted cool like he always did, but Nevada seemed crazy in love, and she and Jen were getting excited, just watching them. Uncle Bruce said you had to be careful, speed was a kind of addiction, “an escape from meat,” as a woman he once knew liked to say, she was so hooked on it, she came all apart each time she put her feet back on the ground again, she seemed constantly to be fluttering and spinning then like those little plastic whirligigs until she could get back up in motion again, just watching her in a closed room made you dizzy. “Was that Marie-Claire?” Clarissa asked, and Uncle Bruce smiled (sadly, she thought) and said: “Well, yes, I guess it was.” “But if you do get addicted,” Jen asked, “how do you stop?” “You learn its opposite,” said Bruce, almost as though he’d expected her question. “A sort of counter-addiction.” “Woo, sounds real Zen,” Jennifer said, making Bruce and Nevada laugh, though Clarissa knew it was just something she’d got from her mother. Bruce took them on a series of rolls then that made the earth whip round and round about them like he had it on a string. “Wowee! This is awesome!” shrieked Clarissa, and Jen agreed but said she was a little woozy. “Oh Jen!” Clarissa complained. “Don’t grinch us out! This is fun! More, Uncle Bruce!” “Well, if Jennifer’s not feeling well,” said Nevada, suddenly very concerned, and Un
cle Bruce eased up. “How are you doing, kid?” “I’m all right,” said Jen, though she didn’t sound like it. Was this a trick? They seemed to pay her a lot more attention now. “Maybe you’d like to work the controls,” Bruce suggested, and Clarissa jumped up and said “Oh yes!” and beat her to it; from the greenish look on Jen’s face, she was probably doing her a favor. “Daddy always lets me fly his plane, sitting on his lap,” she lied—her father was pretty strict about the rules, though he did promise to teach her someday—and she popped herself on Bruce’s silky lap as though she knew exactly what to do, and, more or less, she did, she’d been watching closely and she was a fast learner. She felt very cool and, though she didn’t attempt anything crazy, she didn’t just fly in a straight line either. Meanwhile, she was very much aware of where her bottom was and, though she had never thought of it as a tactile organ before, she used it now as a kind of fat clumsy cartoon hand, very thinly gloved, and as she put the plane through its swoops and turns, she squeezed and pinched and scooted back and forth, until Uncle Bruce said he thought that was enough, they’d better get Jennifer back on the ground again, and he seemed a little ticked off, but he did give her a friendly smack and then left his hand there as he lifted her off his silky lap, she pretending she was having too much fun flying to stop, almost like she was already getting an addiction, so as to keep his hand pressed there as long as possible, but then she made a mistake and turned them upside-down when she didn’t mean to and that ended it. But her bottom was still tingling with the dreamy memory of what it had been holding on to when Nevada dropped them off at the mall and they found Granny Opal all alone at a table inside, looking like she was not having the best time of her life. So she and Jen bought her a cherry mush and diet colas with lemon slices for themselves and explained that Uncle Bruce came by and gave them a drive in a super new rig he was trying out, it was really neat, and they elaborated on that to make it sound real, but they didn’t really have to, she didn’t even seem to notice they’d been gone, and then she told them about the photographer getting arrested and, though she didn’t tell it very well, she and Jen laughed at everything Granny Opal said and that seemed to cheer her up and she even ate some of her cherry mush.