John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  Reverend Lenny had seen the pharmacy van careening past in front of the doctor’s office, just before Beatrice’s friend Veronica came squealing around the corner from the other direction, jumping the curb as she hit the brakes and the parking meter, more or less at the same time, crumpling one fender and popping the back trunk ajar. She flung the door open and dashed pell-mell into the building in wild-eyed alarm as though something were chasing her, whereupon, closing her door and trunk for her, Lennox had begun to rethink the central theme of next Sunday’s sermon, which, though not yet fully fleshed out, had to do with the miracle of motherhood, an ancient Christian topic of great inspiration and solace. Rethinking it because, to tell the truth (he had just stepped out to the street from the bedlam of the doctor’s waiting room where his miracle-stunned wife sat glassy-eyed and estranged, benumbed by her prodigious burden), there was also something eerily unsettling about reproduction’s uncanny power over the reproducer, as though God were in the gamete not the gamers, His eye on, not the sparrow, but the sparrow’s sperm, not the rueful soul, but the ruthless seed. As the police passed by with the downcast photographer, about whom dreadful rumors now circulated, he had thought of his own past trials with the law and with his loins, and of those of his children now, Philip and Jennifer, with little Zoe no doubt soon to follow, and the unborn unnamed child as well, ensnared, as all within the animate world, in pleasure’s cruel deceptions, condemned as all to suffer love’s remorseless punishments. His sermon, he realized, was not to be a message of good cheer, God bless Mom and all that, but rather one provoking somber meditation upon the enigma of life itself. When, in all sincerity, we ask, “Who am I?,” is there an I to be asking and is it an impertinence, mere tools of purposes not our own, to assume so much as an attribute of who-ness? In short, what can we be sure of beyond the middle term of that inquiry, the is-ness of our immediate presence in the world, an is-ness which itself knows no person nor belongs to one? Across the street, the old pharmacist whose van he’d just seen roaring past emerged from the cafe with two of his blond-haired grandchildren and was greeted there in the bright midday sunlight by John’s mother, holding the hand of her little grandson Mikey, and Lennox’s sudden affliction of the heart was in some manner assuaged, this genial clasp across the generations somehow ameliorating the essential tragedy at the core, to which, momentarily, he had been a witness but for which he need not be a servile messenger, and at the same time providing him a consolatory homespun image for a sermon which had threatened to become a bit doleful, not a great idea in the summertime when attendance was anyway never at its best. Alf came down then with Veronica, his head bobbing lugubriously, to look at something in the trunk of her car (he seemed appalled, she horrified, but as far as Lenny could see there was nothing there), then the doctor, holding up his hands from which some dirty ooze dripped, shook his old gray head in disgust, rolled his eyes at Lenny as though begging for mercy, and returned to his office, while the hysterical woman, pointing at something in the street, left the car and went running back in the direction she’d originally come from, and Lenny thought: Without an I as God-given, we have to invent one with our thoughts, our passions, our actions, or ones we think of as “ours,” and this we offer up somewhat desperately as our humanity, though, alas, no one may be receiving, no one watching. Well, I am watching, Lenny thought, and I will testify to the nobility of their self-creations and the righteousness of their desires, and thus, in spite of everything, will celebrate motherhood after all. A rusty old pickup pulled up and two men unloaded a man from the back, incongruously dressed in pinstriped suit pants and a golf shirt. It was Veronica’s husband. “Is that my car—?!” he gasped faintly as they carted him inside. For wasn’t survival within the dark inscrutable heart of paradox (he was staring into the junk-laden rusted-out back end of the pickup as though the awesome mystery he was contemplating might be physically visible there) miracle enough? And wasn’t motherhood’s essence the perpetuation, in blind hope and wistful joy, of that impossible paradox, of that unquenchable faith in life’s invisible but ultimately discoverable meaning? Yes, he had his sermon! Lenny was halfway home before he remembered that he had left his wife back in the doctor’s office, so he turned back, hoping he wouldn’t forget the best lines, and when he pulled up to the curb the nurse was just coming out the door, looking outraged about something, her face flushed and eyes wincing in the sunlight. “You’d better go in there,” she snapped. “Your wife’s making a spectacle of herself!” And then she charged off down the street, her fat back squared, in fury and disgust. Inside, Beatrice lay swaddled in wide loops of paper on the floor, ecstatically entranced, serenading the world with one of her otherworldly hums, her outlandish belly rising above her as though it were something that had fallen upon her, pinning her there. He decided to take her home and visit the doctor another day, enlisting the help of the two good Samaritans from the pickup truck in getting her out to his car. It wasn’t easy. The paper swaddling came unwound, tripping them up, and Trixie was into one of her more energetic trips, tossing and twisting as though in the grip of wild cosmic forces, her pink belly bobbing in the sunlight like a buoy afloat on a violent sea. “Looks like she’s about to pop,” grunted one of his helpers, gazing uneasily into the very source of the mystery that was the intended subject of Lenny’s sermon, and the one supporting her bucking rump groaned: “Whoof! What’s she got in there, cannonballs?” An ambulance came whining up while Lenny, one arm locked in his wife’s armpits, was struggling with the door, and the driver jumped out to join them. “Is this the one? I thought we was to pick up an older dude with palpitations.” “Nah, he’s inside, mac. But give us a hand, for chrissake, before we drop her and crack her open!” She sang to him from the backseat all the way home, going silent only at the moment he pulled into the driveway, when he heard her say, quite distinctly: “But where, then, is the center?” “What?” he asked, turning round, but she was sound asleep. Not a bad line, though: he could use it. He left her there and went inside to draft his sermon, thinking: it’s in life’s quiet moments when the truth most clearly resounds. This enlightening stillness did not last, however: his little daughter Zoe, apparently left all alone in the manse, shattered it with her hysterical wailing as she came running down the stairs into his arms. “Daddy!” she sobbed. “I’m so scared!” “It’s all right, honey. We’re home now. Where’s Jennifer?” “I—I don’t know!” Her little chest was heaving, her eyes swimming, she could hardly speak so choked up with terror was she. “Calm down, sweetheart, there’s nothing to be afraid of now.” “Daddy!” she blubbered, gasping for breath and hugging him close. “There’s a … there’s a great big monster lady in the church!”

  While the preacher was searching for the Christian answer, or indeed any answer at all, to the dilemma posed by the unexpected encampment of the photographer’s monumental wife and all her attendant bags of garbage and heaped linens in the middle of what many in town held to be God’s house, or one of them anyway, old Stu the car dealer, butt of so many off-color jokes of late, was cutting a sweet deal with the son of the town’s leading pharmacist: they were taking his advice at last and turning in their antique van for a real delivery truck, big enough for heavy furniture removal, yet easy to hop around town in and no need for a special driver’s license, Stu’s only worry being whether, according to his calculations about car sales and life expectancy, he was about to sell one vehicle too many. Hadn’t old Win been flashing him the red light? He sent Cornell off on a test-drive while he thought about that and paid a visit to the gin bottle just to keep his mind clear and his morals clean. He saw his young mechanic taking a quick look-see at a possible transmission problem under an aging station wagon, which was being held up by a hastily placed hydraulic jack, thinking it probably wouldn’t need all that much to accidentally kick the jack out, but he wasn’t sure he could heave his freight all the way over there without a breakdown, and if he tried and blew it he’d probably rather have a fleet of station
wagons land on him than that rough and randy boy with a blown gasket. Who knew the kid would never return from the test-drive, he was stealing the fucking thing, any asshole could see that, and feeling like a kind of partner in this scene already, Rex nearly rolled out from under the wagon to quash the stupid deal, but held back, thinking: fuck it, I’ll collect the thing when the spread is mine, and punch the little shit’s eyes out while I’m at it. Whose wife had similar intentions and indeed, having got wind of the possibility that her hated rival might have been offered sanctuary at the church, was already on the way over there, armed with her own tubular steel walking stick, swearing she would beat both their brains out, and that damned preacher’s, too, her sister-in-law Columbia clinging to her arm and begging her not to let jealousy endanger their familial harmony and to ignore her deranged halfwit of a brother who didn’t know what he was doing. But who did know, full well, and who was racing back to the church now to pull Pauline out of there before she got too big for the double doors, figuring this truck would do them till they got out of town if they could get out of town, and after that they’d have to play it by ear—or, rather, by rear, which was the biggest part of her and pretty much set the conditions of their flight. Not just getting it in and out of things, but also having to fill it up and empty it out so often, it wasn’t easy to keep moving. Which Otis knew and set his tactics by, figuring sooner or later, so long as he kept them encircled, they’d have to stop running and turn themselves in, a residual affection toward his old friend from the trailer camp with whom he’d shared so much making him want to bring this chase (it was a chase now, no avoiding that, too much had been stolen, those two seemed to have no respect at all for private property) to a peaceful conclusion, though, under the circumstances, he couldn’t quite imagine what it would be. She’d have to be kept somewhere, that much was clear, and given her new dimensions, they’d never be able to wrestle her into captivity, she’d have to be coaxed into it voluntarily. Otis had to hope the affection he felt toward her was mutual and persuasive enough, doubting that her increasingly moony husband (Otis was reminded of some of his shellshocked buddies from the war) could manage it or would even take the responsibility or be able to imagine it as his own. Probably true, for Gordon was utterly absorbed now in his own artistic crisis, unable even to load his camera or change a lens without dropping it, it was as though all his gifts and skills had fled or been stolen away, and he felt like a pianist with severed hands or a scholar overtaken by senility’s dreadful erasures. Moreover, Pauline, in her departure and against her nature (but of course she was changing), had seemed to take determined revenge upon his studio, the place had been wrecked and much seemed to be missing (had others been here?), and Gordon, in his distress and confusion, felt that his own sanity—and, more importantly, his art—depended upon a minimal restoration of order. Yet this, too, like the principal subject of his lifelong quest, eluded him, it was as though some essential pattern had been broken, some code forgotten, and all he could do in the end, after turning round and round, picking things up and putting them down, was sit and stare in bewilderment at randomly shuffled piles of photographs gathered up from the floor, searching out her image. Which seemed always to be blurred or partially blocked or oddly cropped or fading from the print he held. He came across a good one of her in a Pioneers Day parade from a few years back, but though the image was crisp and bright, it was as though she were in disguise. Still, he set it aside to examine more closely, along with one taken more recently at the dedication ceremonies for the new civic center, in which, during the keynote address by John’s father, she was leaning toward her own stricken father who was being honored on this occasion (he looked like halves of two different people clumsily patched together, not a pretty sight), whispering something to him behind her program. Gordon could see only part of her face, of course, and that none too clearly, but her knees under the hem of her skirt as she pivoted toward her father, one slightly higher than the other, were in provocatively sharp focus and, indeed, dominated the photograph. He knew he had, somewhere, from years back, a shot of her in a gently thoughtful mood, seated in the second row (there were only two) of a Literary Society meeting at the public library, on a night when Ellsworth read from his one-character novel-then-in-progress, The Artist’s Ordeal, which Gordon thought sounded more like an essay than a story, and said so (“How can you have a story with just one character?”) when Ellsworth asked him his opinion, causing a brief hiatus in their friendship (Ellsworth called him a fatuous provincial illiterate); but the photo that turned up in the pile he was sifting through had been taken at the back of the room, over her shoulder, and she was simply a shadowy presence—though the light on her cheek like a tiny luminous parenthesis made him catch his breath when he discovered it—foregrounding the writer and the plump bespectacled librarian who had introduced him, a woman who had once told Gordon: “Photography is a kind of magic, plucking images out of the flux like phantom rabbits. In the real world, Gordon, the thing we reach for is already something else when we grasp it; the photograph exists in the real world and shares in its mutability, but the image on the photograph belongs to the imaginary world, which is the world of death and never changes.” And then she’d smiled. Perhaps the best picture in his lap was one taken in front of the altar at the famous wedding nearly two decades ago, in which she was just lifting her veil to bestow the nuptial kiss upon her newly plighted spouse, while the minister and the four proud parents looked on, a photo that seemed to capture in its charm and freshness and simplicity the very theme of the entire series and thus of his life’s work: the unveiling of the mystery, gesture stilled and made incarnate, possessed, the hidden radiantly revealed.

  When Barnaby gave the bride away that day, he confusedly answered for the groom as well: “I do!” At the reception banquet later on, during one of the many rounds of toasts, his wife Audrey, now dead these seven-some years, recalled that at their own wedding back before the war, when asked by the preacher “Do you take this woman,” Barnaby had tipped his head forward and asked: “Do I take what—?” “Well,” she added when the laughter subsided, “at least he didn’t say ‘which’ or ask how much!” But even when the father of the groom put his own two bits in, asking around his dead cigar whether it was true that on their wedding night Barnaby had taken the bed apart to show her how it was made and couldn’t get it back together again for want of the proper tool, Barnaby smiled through it all, feeling good about himself and about his life’s work, which, he felt, had reached a new level of grace and maturity: he was at his peak and enjoying it. And he was pleased, too, with his handsome new son-in-law and junior partner in the expanding family construction business, in spite of the boy’s unearned cockiness and the irony that he was Mitch’s son. The war that Barnaby had served in had been like a wall that had fallen between then and now, dividing one world from another in time as it was now divided in space, such that few present that day remembered or chose to remember that Mitch and Barnaby had once been rivals for Audrey’s hand, a grasshopper-and-ant story with Mitch the gregarious wisecracking ladies’ man, Barnaby the quiet but manly fellow with his nose pressed dutifully to the grindstone. While Mitch was up at State, playing the field with aggressive gusto, learning the rhumba and the shag, tooling around in Packards and LaSalles (once, until with a toot on he tried to drive it up a tree, he and the bank owned a flashy Cord convertible with a powerful V-8 engine and front-wheel drive which would do well over a hundred on a straight stretch, his ever-ready makeout special), mixing football and beer blasts with fraternity bull sessions, high-stakes bridge, and blanket parties, and cracking his econ and history books only when he had to (not often, the fraternity was usually able to steal the exams in advance), self-taught Barnaby was back home in the middle of a lingering Depression, turning the struggling family lumberyard into a successful construction company and honing, in deadly seriousness, his builder’s skills and vision. Barnaby was already constructing solid family homes of indisputab
le quality, testing out his innovative marriage of streamlined neoclassical designs with traditional American values of comfort and space, while Mitch was still swallowing goldfish and beetles and fondling his way drunkenly through Sorority Row. Barnaby owned a used Model A (in decent condition, though on dirt roads it was an embarrassment) which he drove when taking Audrey out on a date on those rare occasions when she was in town, otherwise he got around in the old lumberyard truck. No one gave young Barnaby (he was already, not yet thirty, known around town as Barnaby the Builder) much of a shot with Audrey, they all figured she’d end up with Mitch sooner or later, or some well-heeled party guy like him, wild as she was back then. It was said that, on a dare during a weekend fraternity party up at State while she was still in high school, Audrey had danced a fan dance, stark staring, just like at the World’s Fair. Mitch was there. Barnaby wasn’t. She had an hourglass figure back then, wore skintight molded dresses, mostly black, with pointy uplift bras and lots of gaudy costume jewelry, painted her lips and nails in matching carmine red, told naughty jokes with a gravelly voice, chain-smoked with intentionally provocative gestures. She was the first girl in town to wear a strapless gown to the senior prom and was known as a hot smoocher, fast and dangerous. Yet this was the young woman who, on the eve of the war, against everyone’s expectations, put on a white Victorian bridal dress and married in solemn ceremony old-shoe-common Barnaby the Builder, and who became, after the war anyway when everything settled down, his steadfast companion and business manager and caring and committed mother of their beloved daughter. Women, people would say (some of them), who can figure them? Not that that ended the rivalry between Barnaby and Mitch; perhaps it had never ended, even after the marriage of their children. Barnaby had been an old-fashioned prairie isolationist before the war, Mitch an outspoken interventionist (after all, there was money to be made), but Barnaby served throughout its duration as an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers, often on the front line and in both theaters, while Mitch managed to be classified 4-F and, through defense contracts and speculation, became one of the richest and most powerful men in the state. Though he married, Mitch went on living the life he’d always lived, and so, some said, did Audrey, as though, snazzy in her narrow-waisted, wide-shouldered suits and her hair swept up in the latest fashion, rehearsing for war widowhood. But Barnaby, whatever he might have suspected was going on back home, never regretted his war years, and in fact it was while moving along just behind the front in the Old World, witnessing all those devastated villages and thinking about their reconstruction, what he would keep and what take down and what changes he would like to impose, that he came upon his concept of “town planning,” an utterly original thought that continued to excite him even after he discovered it had been thought of by others, centuries back—you could even get a degree in it up at the university. It didn’t matter, his mind was on fire with it, and when, as a lieutenant colonel soon to receive his final promotion (he would be the town’s most distinguished returning war hero), he was granted a six-week furlough before transfer to the Pacific theater, he spent most of it walking his little town, block by block, going over survey maps at the registrar’s office, plotting out his intended transformations once the war was over, even getting the city, through Mitch’s connections, to purchase some of the land he wanted, and, only incidentally, as it were, but as an immediate consequence of the powerful creative energies that possessed him, impregnating Audrey, who gave birth to their daughter about three months before his release and return.