John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  Where Veronica was headed (she wasn’t trying to run John down, she didn’t even see him, she’d have flattened anything in her path, blind with terror as she was, and the source of it just behind her like hot breath on her neck) was the doctor’s office: she burst in screaming something about John having come back, or some John, as though there might be several of them, she had him in the trunk of her car, she claimed, he was all covered with a wet sticky stuff, you’ve got to come see, I don’t know what to do with the thing, help me for god’s sake, she was totally incoherent, the poor woman, still in her housecoat and pajamas, and, like the insurance man before her, she had to be sedated—urgently, the doctor snapped, a kind of unpleasant rage overtaking him as it sometimes did on busy days, though restraining this one needed his help, so completely out of control was she. “There, there, Veronica, easy now …” Columbia, trying to be soothingly understanding while punching her with the needle, said she was really sorry about her son, and the woman shrieked out: “How did you know—?!” “Well, I think everyone—” “Everyone—?! Oh my god!” “You haven’t heard a thing since he ran away?” “Ran away? What—? Oh, that son! No, no, I guess I forgot, sorry, I’m so confused …” Columbia, too, popping the needle out past the cotton swab, was feeling a bit woozy from it all, this whole town was going around the bend and dragging her with it, really, it was too much. The waiting room had been filling up all morning and the phone ringing itself off the wall with people suffering from nothing worse than apparitions or odd premonitions, with itchy children who wouldn’t keep their clothes on and tired parents needing pep pills and people who just couldn’t remember what day it was and wondered if they’d come down with Alzheimer’s. She’d chased most of them away on the false grounds that the doctor was in surgery all day (in reality he was in one of his bitter-old-man days, drifting off groggily for coffee just when things were at their worst), but some were too desperate and hysterical to be put off so easily, the insurance man, for example, who had been struck partly blind and kept blubbering something crazy about a giant woman and a dead child (“It was my fault! I was the one!”), and who was now lying in his underpants, one hand clapped to his dead eye, on the examining table in the room where the doctor performed small surgeries, like removing boils, adenoids, or ingrown toenails. He was still attached to the electrocardiograph suction cups, she hadn’t had time to disconnect him, but anyway they kept him from thrashing about. Columbia had a policy with this man, her sister-in-law as beneficiary, she knew him well, and he’d always been such a reserved gentleman, so composed, it was a shock to see him in such a state. “Hello? No, the doctor can’t come now, he’s got a waiting room full of sick people, you’ll have to come here if you want to see him. But if it can wait until tomorrow, I’d suggest—all right, all right, I’m not deaf, I was just trying to help, there’s a long line but, if you must, come ahead!” The only one out there who had a scheduled appointment was the minister’s pregnant wife, fortunately a patient woman who was somehow able to smile benignly through all the pandemonium, in spite of the enormous weight she was carrying around, bigger than she was it almost seemed, while one lunatic after another came piling in, demanding the doctor’s immediate attention, which on this day was in short supply, even for real emergencies. One being the lawyer’s maniac wife, who had finally succeeded in dragging the doctor down to the street to look in the trunk of her car, threatening to throw herself out the window if he didn’t, and they didn’t doubt it. On top of it all, the only person in town whom Lumby felt she could count on was consumed by an insane jealousy and had been on the phone to her every fifteen minutes, in and around all the other calls, wanting to know if she’d been keeping an eye on her shifty brother as she’d promised, she couldn’t find him anywhere. While the doctor was gone, the minister’s wife suddenly started singing at the top of her voice, then stiffened up and skidded out of her chair onto the floor. She lay there on her back, limbs asprawl, obscenely exposed, her thin cotton dress rucked up over her naked body, eyes open but staring at nothing, a strange smile on her cracked lips, out of which a kind of whispery hum emerged as though from the back of her throat or below that even. Lumby tore off a few yards of paper sheeting from an examining room table and tossed it over her (the phone was ringing again), though most eyes in the room were on, not the poor woman’s private parts, but that great sleek quivering mound that rose high above her with a protruding navel on top like the knotted end of a balloon or the fuse of a bomb. The doctor returned just as Lumby was hanging up (this day was going to be endless, already it seemed like it ought to be over and it had hardly begun), holding his dripping hands out in front of him, barely glancing at the woman on the floor or those around her as he stumbled through, headed irritably for the restroom: “Nothing in the damned thing of course, just some mucous gunk like oily snot all over the floor! Remind me to take next week off!” Whereupon Gretchen phoned again in a panic: “Corny’s run off! With another woman! You said you’d watch him! You promised!” “What do you mean, run off?” “He’s stolen the van! And all the money from the store! And now the police are coming! Please! Help me!” The humming in the waiting room had risen to a wild whimpering whine, the sort that sometimes escaped Gretchen during their games together, and people were banging on the reception window, complaining about it. “And, Lumby?” “Yes?” “Lumby, who’s Pauline?” “Pauline?” “It’s his heart!” someone was shouting from the waiting room. They were carrying in an unshaven man in pinstriped pants and a gaudy summer shirt who seemed to be foaming at the mouth. She recognized him: the lawyer married to the hysterical woman with something nasty in the trunk of her car. “Get him out of here!” she cried. “Take him to the hospital!” She was nearly screaming. The phone started to ring again, she’d hardly put it down. The doctor came out of the restroom, scrubbing his hands with a paper towel, wanting to know why the hell that man was still attached to the EKG, and Columbia replied flatly, brooking no objection: “I have to make a run to the pharmacy.” Enough was enough, she was out of there, pressing through the madhouse of the waiting room, so dense with commotion and distress (behind her, the phone was pitilessly sending forth its demented appeal) it was like tearing through layers of unspooled gauze.

  “Hello, honey—? Me again. Hey, where the hell are you? I ask, nobody seems to know. I hope at least you’re listening to your messages. I need somebody to talk to, sweetie, things are so weird now, you’re the last best friend I’ve got, and all I get’s your damned answering machine. And, believe me, I mean batshit weird—like, Winnie’s back? Living with us? I know, I know, there’s the old guilt trip crap, and I drink too much, we both do, and mostly it’s Stu who sees her or thinks he does, what’s left of his red hair standing right up on end, just like in the comic strips, but I saw her one night, too, when Stu woke me up with his goddamned country-boy snoring. Standing there, right at the foot of the bed, all lit up, big as life and twice as mean. And you know what I thought of when I saw her? It probably made her mad, but I couldn’t help it. You remember Harvie, you know, Yale’s brother, the one we called Hard Yard and King Dong? The one who’s carrying that monstrous thing around in girls’ panties now? Well, maybe you never saw it, goody-goody that you were, but it was not only long as your arm, it had a very peculiar color, or rather lack of color, pale and waxen from the root all the way to the end of it like all the blood had got sucked out, and faintly peachy in tone the way they paint up dead bodies, very spooky, at least in the dark. I never saw it in daylight. Maybe they were shining a light through it, I can’t remember. But even when it was soft, which I guess was most of the time, the end of it was a kind of see-through blue like it was bruised somewhere deep below the surface, the opening of it just a gray metallic slit—it looked like it had been stapled at the tip. Well, that’s what Winnie’s mouth looked like, a thin gray staple in her bluish face, and the rest of her, too: opaque like Harvie’s cock and waxy and sort of glowing from inside but pale and bloodless except for her eyes
which were red-hot, just like Stu had said they were. Made me laugh, sort of, what I was thinking, but she scared the shit out of me, too. Almost literally—I mean, I was loose for a week, and I’m still not back to anything regular. Which is why I’ve been thinking about calling the whole thing off. What whole thing? You see why I need to talk to you? What’s the matter, honey? Are you ticked off at me because of what the useless asshole I’m married to did to you out at the club that night? Listen, forget it. Forget him. Remember that photo he keeps on his desk, the one from your wedding party? Well, just between you and me, old Stu-pot’s about to get a whop in the chops with another fucking piece of cake. Just desserts, as you might say, and none too soon either. How do I know? Amazing Grace told me, honey. Beats tea leaves any day. Jesus, I can’t believe I’ve let that limp-noodled hayseed sonuvabitch rob me of a whole damned decade of my life—my best decade—how did it happen? Life’s funny sometimes. Funny like a toothache’s funny, I mean. Over all those lost years, I’d almost forgotten what real fucking was like. Maybe I never knew, not until Rexboy came along. Not even John—well, you know, I shouldn’t even have mentioned it—but, wham bam, ma’m, and all that, and anyway it’s been ages, I’m sure you knew, and I’m sorry if you didn’t, but oh well… Anyway, Rex is different. He’s there for me all the time. He says he’s in love. That’s hard to believe, but what the hell, I believe it. And now all I can think of is hard dick, his hard dick, I’m thinking about it right now, I’m—ah!—excuse me, honey, I—ah! oh …! Whoo … Hang on, sweetie. Be right back … Hello? You there? No …? Sometimes I almost think you’re only… But where was I? Oh yeah, hard dick. How could I forget? Remember that knock-knock joke we used to tell as kids? Knock knock. Who’s there? Wilma. Wilma who? Will ma fingers do until… Well, I’m here to tell you they won’t do. But, t.s., baby, as my lover man would say, they’ll have to: he’s turned off the spigot, stopcocked the mains. Only until after the barbecue at your house. But that seems like forever. He wants to keep a low profile, he said. Hell, I said, you better keep it, your low profile’s the one I like best. It’s all yours, he said. After the barbecue. I can’t wait. Literally. I’m so fucking horny, honey, I can’t think straight. But happy, too, happy and horny, I can’t tell you how happy I am. But also confused. Worried. Mixed up. Scared. What are we doing? I don’t know what’s right and wrong anymore. The fucking I’m getting is so powerful, so real, everything else is just a dream, and in a dream what’s right and wrong, right? Somebody dies, who cares? It’s just a dream anyway. Speaking of which. Had a weird one last night. I think. Sort of last night. Rex and I had been having it off out at the motel on his midafternoon break—what Rex calls his tea break: t for tail—and we’d decided to go into the Getaway for a drink, we were both parched, drained of all our bodily fluids, I mean tears, too, it was our farewell fuck until, well, until later, and I was very emotional on top of being so randy I could hardly walk without leaving a snail trail between my legs. We didn’t bother to dress, I pulled on my raincoat, Rex his overalls, we planned on coming back to the room. But the bar when we got there was different. It was more like that old clubhouse that the senior boys built when we were in high school, you know, the place where I lost my cherry. Dutch, who was Dutch just like he is now, said that the old cabin, which had once been just where the new bar is now, had grown back overnight, there was nothing he could do. The place was full of sniggering nerds in baseball caps and pimpled burrheaded nosepickers wearing letter sweaters, which was how I knew I was in a nightmare. A couple of girls in white dresses with their black- and lime-colored underwear showing through were sitting at a table, chewing gum with their mouths open. A guy in pegged pants and a Hawaiian shirt came by, leaned over and kissed one of them, and when he raised up he was chewing her gum. I felt like I knew these characters but I didn’t know them. Rex was gone. I understood this. This was some other time and he wasn’t around yet. Somebody was playing ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ on the jukebox, and I said that’s a laugh, and some guy with a ducktail and leather jacket over a tee shirt said what is, hot pants? He sat down next to me and then a bunch of other guys did, too, and they started playing around, undoing the buttons on my raincoat, popping my tits out and laughing at them, shoving their hands inside to grab at the rest of me, I was beginning to get scared, not only of them, but of myself, too. I hated what these little shits were doing, but I was too damned excited to make them stop. That was when you came along. In a ponytail and a cashmere sweater and pleated skirt and honest-to-god bobby sox. You smiled and sat down and put your books on the table and the guys all apologized and left. You’d just saved my fat ass, I don’t know how you did it, it was like a miracle, but, what can I say, I didn’t feel all that appreciative. There was somebody I wanted but I couldn’t remember who. I thought it might be John, but then he came in with Ronnie in her cheerleading rig with her bare tum ballooning out between the sweater and little skirt for everyone to see and admire. I started telling you about the time I put itching powder on her tampon just before the Homecoming float parade when she was your Maid of Honor—do you remember how she jumped around up there? you probably thought Ronnie was just trying to steal the show—but you weren’t there any more. I realized those guys must have come back and dragged you over to the filthy old cot they had in there. I could hear the springs going somewhere out of sight. I knew you needed me now, more than ever, but instead of coming over to help, I pulled the raincoat around me and walked out the door. On the way I passed Ronnie, and I said, I’m sorry about your missing kid. No problem, she said, sneering down her beak at me, always more where he came from. The smart-ass. All right. So, here comes the really freaky part, honey. Like I promised. It was dark outside, I knew Rex was gone, the car keys were in my raincoat pocket, so I got in the car and drove home, had a couple of shots of gin, said nighty-night to a snoring Stu, fell asleep, and woke up here at home this morning, still in my raincoat. So, tell me. When did I leave the motel room? Have I left it yet? Did I say goodbye to Rex if I did? Are you listening …? Where am I, sweetie? What time is it? What day is it? And why, feeling so good, do I feel so bad? Honey …?”

  Ronnie’s missing kid had also long since lost, though no loss by him was felt, all sense of time and place, such coordinates being of little consequence to him in this dimensionless paradise wherein now, in joy, he drifted. He was in—he understood the meaning of this mysterious word now and he would not forget it—he was in ecstasy, pleasured in the mind and in the heart and in the body tip to toe. His journey to this blessed condition had been long and not without its false turnings, lured first as he’d been to other enticements, other anticipations. Foremost: fulfillment of all the implicit promises of those books that Fish had shown him, their images of enchanted couplings spread out below him in a panorama of such congested diversity as to dizzy the mind, even while prickling the weenie, drawing him downward, the better, he’d imagined, to see, and then, if he could, to do. But the view had not improved as, through an ever denser medium, he’d descended, and in some ways it had lost its clarity, as when a book is brought too close to the nose, becoming blurred and grainy and distorted. An effect, he’d supposed, of the strange atmosphere which, once passed through, would vanish like a mist, the way that the mind clears when full knowing is achieved, and he’d understood then, or had thought he understood, that he had seen all that could be seen by eye alone and that one must now do to see what was as yet unseen. Okay. I get it. So: ready or not… He’d braced himself for this manly test and, letting his clothes go as had seemed to be their own desire, he had thrust valiantly against that which was keeping him out, but try as he might, he had not been able to progress, feeling as he sometimes felt in bed at night, pressing against his sheets and pillows, barred from some unimaginable delights just beyond his ken. Then, as he’d pushed and fumbled, groping for flesh and contour where there were none to be found, he’d come upon a tiny rift in what he’d suddenly realized was something more like a movie screen, contai
ning all these images but only as an illusion on its vast curved surface: he’d thrust one hand into the small gap and then the other, there’d been a soft crisp ripping sound as of discovery, and the scrim had suddenly split apart like drawn curtains, vanishing into the distance and carrying all those busy fornicators with it, leaving Little afloat in a luminous infinity decorated with brilliant-hued galaxies in the way that a Christmas tree might be hung with colored lights. Bright blue and scarlet comets and golden falling stars, and emerald, flashed across the depths like sensuous writing and there was an intensely beautiful murmur in the air as of hidden angel choirs that seemed not so much to strike upon his eardrums as to caress them and the rest of him as well. The colors of this spectacular cosmos did not remain constant, but slid through hue’s inexhaustible spectrum as if color were a kind of liquid, washing through it in tidal floods, and he felt intimately stroked, within and without, by these chromatic ebbs and flows. Delicate aromas floated upon the ether like edible fog in celestial icecream flavors, entering him through all his orifices, and he felt his body stretch out like modeling clay as though to offer more territory for their invasion. As the gentle murmur rose to a rhythmic hum, embracing him all over and penetrating him to the core with its rich hydraulic beat, he ceased to wonder where he was and instead surrendered to a bliss he knew to be—so many meanings this voyage had revealed to him!—beatitude itself. He was—his mind knew this, his heart felt it to be so, and his body, fondled by sound and color and fragrance as though these things were animate beings, ardently attentive upon his person, responded by raising his stiffened weenie like a quivering flagpole—in the land of glory. It was going to happen! It was really going to happen! No! It was already happening! He gazed down upon his resplendent weenie—no, not a weenie, but a penis—no, not a penis, but a prick, a dick, a what? a cock!—which now, so had he grown, seemed half a universe away, its bold head haloed by its own dazzling radiance and vibrating in the cosmic wind like a crawling thing’s antenna. It seemed to be trying to uproot itself—he could see the roots which were spreading their green tentacles through the tropical heat of his vast glowing body, as though reaching for securer moorings in anticipation of the brewing storm—and he felt a desperate and delicious tugging, not only in his thighs and bowels, but throughout his trembling frame, in his head and chest and even in his fingers and his toes. And then, as the kaleidoscopic colors burned in hotter hue and the air grew redolently spicy and the angelic chorus gave way to piercing trumpets, his whole body suddenly shrank into itself and then gloriously exploded, scattering itself majestically throughout the throbbing cosmic space to form vibrant new constellations in all of heaven’s hues, scintillant as sugar crystals, and Turtle, overpowered, overjoyed, at one with the universe and with himself, suffering still the honied aftershocks, gratefully wept, thinking: Wow. Cool. I like it.