John's Wife: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  The old Palace Theater that John suddenly erased from view one day was being, as time passed, erased from the communal memory as well, there was already a whole new generation in town for whom it was only a legend, remote as the fall of Rome, which had sometimes been witnessed there. John’s daughter Clarissa was just a toddler when the Palace came tumbling down, all movies were for her and her friends linked to the magic of the sunswept malls, and there were scores of people who had moved here since then who supposed that the bank and office buildings in that block had been there forever. Ask Kevin the golf pro out at the country club about the Palace, for example, and though he’d been in town for more than a decade and saw at least one movie every week, he would probably suppose it was a form of smalltown self-mockery of the sort he’d heard so much of here, or maybe a gibing way to refer to someone else’s fancy roost. Contrarily, his predecessor, a married man, had, while attending a predemolition festival there of big-screen epics, got blown in the back row, just under the projection booth, by the orthodontist’s daughter whom he later eloped with and whose own legend as a wild thing had itself achieved, in this town anyway, epic proportions. Both of them were long since gone, though, taking their memories with them. Floyd and Edna had also moved to town that year that Kevin came and so had never known the famous moviehouse, witnessing only the blocklong pile of rubble just up the street from the hardware store that Floyd managed, the rubble itself disappearing before they’d even got used to this new place and so by now forgotten as well. They’d even arrived too late for the auction of the appurtenances and decorations of the Palace and its near-neighbor, the even more famous Pioneer Hotel, though Edna did find at a junk dealer’s a pretty plaster of Paris statue from the moviehouse of a girl turning into a tree that she bought for the backyard for only three dollars on account of one arm was broken, but Floyd made her put it away in the basement because he said it was pagan and sinful, Floyd having become a (mostly) strict born-again Christian since coming here, even though, because of his new business position, they went to the rich folks’ church where the born-again notion was not very popular. The preacher at that church and his family had also come here after the downtown renovations and so knew nothing of all those old buildings that had once dominated the business center, though the reverend had once, tuning in to the memories of others and borrowing from archive photos published in The Town Crier, used the old Palace Theater in one of his sermons, his topic being the ephemerality of man’s brief gaudy show on earth compared to the simple grandeur of God’s theater of eternity, something like that, few could remember it afterwards any better than they could remember most of the movies they’d seen in the Palace. He did stir some tender memories, however, so his sermon, even if it didn’t make much sense, was, for some in his congregation, erotically stimulating, a fact that might have aroused old Floyd’s wrath, had he known of it, but not Reverend Lenny’s: God is love. And vice versa. The crippled lady at the pharmacy had come to town about the same time as the preacher and so had never been inside the Palace either, but her husband Cornell had rarely missed a movie there that he’d been allowed by the ratings to see, and his sister and brothers too had spent some of the most significant moments of their childhood and adolescence inside its ornate high-domed interior, their parents being themselves faithful customers, but one of Corny’s brothers was dead, the other had put on a dress and left town forever, and poor Corny himself either had no memories remaining or had no words with which to express them. Of the four children, only Columbia might have provided a significant recollection or two about the fantasy structure that was once the very heart of this community, though what she probably remembered best was the popcorn popper and candy counter.

  Town chronicler Ellsworth, determined to preserve some record of that great secular temple, which he had disdained as a youth but toward which he now felt increasingly sentimental (he used to take Barnaby’s little girl there on Saturday afternoons, they saw Bambi together), had, long before he’d “turned darkly inward” as his friend Gordon put it and become so reclusive, pressed at least a dozen people in town to write an “I Remember” column about the old Palace Theater, all of them agreeing with embarrassed laughter that there were sure a lot of stories they could tell about that place, but none so far had. Most, when asked, said they were “still thinking about it,” though Columbia’s and Cornell’s father Oxford, having little else to do these days except mind the grandchildren now that Gretchen had taken over the pharmacy, had managed to compose a number of discontinuous fragments and lacked only a theme that would unite them, a kind of bonding agent, as it were, which, the more he thought about it, was turning out to be his dead wife Kate. That half-blind Oxford should be the old moviehouse’s memoirist was ironic, of course, since he knew nothing of its fabulous decor except by hearsay and had witnessed its spectacles through a myopic haze; even the stirring posters in the lobby he had had to examine with his nose pressed against them, unstirred by what he could not wholly see. But courting options were few when earless Oxford courted Kate, earless not just because of his disability (Kate could drive and when, rarely, they could, she did) but because gas was being rationed in those days and tires could not always be replaced, and that being so, the Palace Theater was about the best they had to hand by foot, other than the library where Kate worked, which served them for some of their more private moments, especially conversations of the intimate sort. Though she never went to university, Kate was a great reader, the reader Oxford always wished to be but could not for the terrible weariness it cost him, Kate often reading to him in those courting days, and after marriage, too, when work and children gave them time alone, and so every invitation to the Palace was accompanied by his apology, Kate insisting in return that she loved the movies, and learned from them, too, much as she preferred to read. “To imagine something is to create it in our heads when it is not there before our senses, and that’s what we do when we read,” she said one night as they walked out of the Palace after watching the newsreel twice (there was war footage and Kate’s brother was headed for the European theater, as it was called, soon after would die there, not centerstage, but lost in the chorus as it were, unbilled and overlooked in the reviews). “I would rather imagine something than see it, and there is something wrong with that, I suppose. It’s why librarians are thought to be such eccentrics. But sometimes I think that seeing is only a kind of imagining and an impoverished and unreliable one at that, even though our eyes probably lie less than words do, or can do. We like film because we feel like it’s connecting us immediately somehow with the real world and with no words in between, or anyway no words you have to listen to. Turning on the image directly turns off the imagination maybe, but we are given an existential assurance about the world and ourselves in it, even if illusory and superficial, that books can never give us.” Moments like that made Oxford adore her and want to hug her, and sometimes he did, so his memories of the Palace Theater were in effect bound up in the same kind of romantic sentiments and vague nostalgic impressions that everyone else had. Without any real reason, except that he was next to his wise Kate, his arm around her in the dark, sharing in some manner the unfolding play of light and shadows up above their heads (for Oxford’s sake, they always sat down front), Oxford would break into tears, not just during their courting years but in all the years thereafter as well until, Kate herself dying, the old Palace disappeared; they went almost weekly to the movies back then, sometimes with the children or with friends like Alf and Harriet, often just the two of them together, even after television became all the rage and they were the only people in the theater past adolescence. Kate even liked to go to the commercial genre movies, the westerns and romances, the gangster movies, thrillers, screwball comedies, because she said it was like going in for a tune-up: they reset the basic patterns. Coming out of a monster movie one night, a movie Oxford loathed for its antirationalist advocacy of faith in antiquated belief-systems as a means of problem solving and its depic
tion of scientists as either villains or victims of their own unfortunate capacity to reason, Kate, responding, said: “That’s one way of looking at it. Folk art is always afraid of the new, which science represents, and that’s part of the fear of monsters. But it’s scary for everybody to imagine getting turned into something entirely different from what we think we are, even if we don’t much like what we are, just as it would frighten us to have the world we live in change its basic rules in incomprehensible ways all of a sudden. Start spinning in the other way or something. Monster movies are not about the resolutions, that’s just tacked on to make them palatable. They’re about the problem.” She paused and turned back to gaze up at the old Palace Theater. The marquee lights were off, and the heavyset young man who ran the theater was up on a ladder changing the titles for the following day. The next movie, as previewed, was about a dangerous and seemingly indestructible criminal who enters a peaceful community and terrorizes it, called The Intruder, or something like that. Probably a man of reason who makes all the wrong moves in that movie, too. “We like to think, even when we’re being reasonable, Oxford, that there are fixed boundaries—to our bodies, our essential being, our homes and families, our towns and nations—it’s how we know or think we know we have a self. But maybe it’s all a mad delusion, maybe there are no boundaries and no selves either, our conscious life just a way of hiding the real truth from us because, simply, it’s too much to live with. We have to stuff it back down in the pit where the creepies live, if we want to function at all, even if functioning, as we call it, is possibly the craziest thing we do. Art, even bad art like Hollywood horror movies, puts us in touch with that truth by breaking down the boundaries for a moment, producing monsters we secretly know to be more real than the good citizens who eventually subdue them.” “So what’s to save us from the abysmal monsters within,” Oxford sighed, “if faith’s not on and function we must?” She turned toward him with a smile, a smile he could not quite see but knew was there. “Irony,” she said, and took his arm to lead him down the dimly lamplit street. “And love. Which is also ironic.”

  Ah, the old Palace Theater, loved too by Dutch, that heavyset fellow whom Oxford saw up a ladder one night. He was standing, not far from the popcorn machine, in the grand lobby of the famous old moviehouse, breaking his own no-smoking rules and nodding at acquaintances amid the sellout crowd passing thickly through to the auditorium, John and his wife and kids among them, he was amused to note. A coup: Dutch had managed to book The Back Room, a rare underground flick using amateur talent, for its first-ever viewing on the big screen: “Where the Movies Are Still the Movies,” as the faded lobby banner said. In the projection booth, he found the film already strung up on the projector, surprised to see it was on thirty-five-mil instead of eight- or sixteen-, though how could he have shown it if it wasn’t? He’d watched the thing a thousand times, but he still wasn’t sure what he’d see when he started it up. Ah, yeah, that’s right: the old Getaway. But tarted up by Hollywood, hardly recognizable: glass panes on the windows instead of chair seats, a brass bed in place of the old sprung leatherette sofa, an electric lamp over the table in the middle—though the pennants, panties, and tattered calendar pinups on the walls looked genuine enough. The door opened, a real door with moldings and panels, not the tabletop John had mounted there, and the crowd pushed in, the same crowd he’d just seen in the lobby. They looked confused, turning round and round, taking the place in but not knowing what to do with it. Dutch could tell them, but not without spoiling the film. In fact, he realized now, he was part of the film, the projection room where he sat being separated from the cabin by a glass panel, a two-way mirror maybe since the others didn’t seem to see him, though he could see them and himself, too, if it was himself and not just an actor playing himself. Or vice versa, whatever that meant—Dutch by now was sharing the confusion of the others. He was there in the room with them, wandering around, feeling lost, maybe he didn’t know this film so well after all, and holding on to his dick as though if he let go of it he might lose it altogether—and, now that he thought about it, maybe that was how this movie came out, the shock ending, it was what made it so famous in the underground, wasn’t it? He looked around for John, but he saw that there was no one here he knew. He was frightened now and wished he’d never booked this film. He tried to find some way out, but the crowd was too thick and there was a strange damp chill in the air. At last he spied old Stu the car dealer, sitting at the bar, and made his way over to him, still holding on. Something he had to tell him, couldn’t think what, a joke he’d heard maybe, but at least it was someone familiar, he might find a way out of this movie before it was too late after all. But when Stu turned toward him he saw that his face flesh was moldy and dropping off the bone and his eye sockets were empty, just dark hollows: oh shit! that’s it! these people were all dead! Dutch shrank back in terror and awoke in the dark. Where the fuck was he? His groin was wet: had he peed himself? No, beer, he’d spilled his beer. He was in the Back Room, sitting sprawled out in his velvety movie seat, salvaged from the Palace demolition, he could feel it under him, his pants down around his thighs and also wet from spilled beer, his limp dick, too, which he was still holding as if he were fishing with it, the lights out in the room at the other side of the mirror. Jesus, must have been some show, whoever it was, he couldn’t remember, put him straight to sleep. He could hear soft snoring, couldn’t tell the sex of it, thought it might be a woman. He wanted to get up, reel it in, pull his soggy pants on, go to bed. But he couldn’t move. Too goddamned tired or something. Lead in his ass. Then, suddenly, the lights in the next room popped on, so startling him he nearly cried out. There were five or six guys in the room, all dressed in dark suits. One of them came over to the mirror to comb his hair, peering intently into it as though trying to see beyond it. Dutch, feeling looked at, pulled his pants up. I probably ought to give this shit up, he thought. The guy turned away (who was he? Dutch felt like he knew him), someone opened the door, and John’s wife came in, dressed like a bride. They peeled the wedding gown off her, which was all she was wearing, and laid her out on the bed, her legs spread. Dutch was hard again (this was something different!) and, pumping away, he leaned forward to see what he could see. Oddly, not much. It was like there was something wrong with the camera, a water bubble on the lens or something—or on the mirror: he wasn’t sure where he was anymore—but the less he could see, the more excited he got. He stood, his pants dropping to his ankles, trying to get a better angle, but the bubble moved where he moved. Didn’t matter, the cream was rising, the lid was about to blow! But then the guys all turned toward him. The woman—was it still John’s wife? he couldn’t tell—curled a finger and beckoned him. There was no mirror. Dutch wanted to run but couldn’t move, he was rooted to his dropped pants. The guys in the dark suits walked stiffly toward him with black grins on their horror-movie faces and he woke up again. In the dark as before. Still fishing with his dick, everything wet down there, etc. Didn’t know where he was. Or if he was really awake this time or still asleep, or, whichever, what was going to happen next. Except that he had no intention of moving a muscle until it got light again. Probably going to be a long fucking night. But he’d sit tight, wherever he was, hold the hand he had.

  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 creak
y 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, Kiwanis, 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” ac
tually 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?