John's Wife: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  John‘s suburban development of Settler’s Woods where Garth and Imogen later lived provoked the usual knee-jerk protest from Marge, who accused the mayor and his police of doing John’s work for him by torching the woods on purpose, then clearing it for him at the city’s expense, but most noticed that Mad Marge’s heart no longer seemed in it. John, as Garth was to discover on the golf course, was tenacious and hell to beat, so maybe she’d finally just given up, her strong will worn down at last by a will yet stronger. Which John was famous for, along with his cool daring, his unbending loyalty, his attention to detail, his appetites, his broken nose, his generosity, his killer instincts, his love of the bruising battle. To which list he would add, though others might demur (Maynard, for example, in spite of all that John had done for him to get his sentence reduced and take care of his family in his absence), his compassion. Edna was one who would agree that he was a compassionate man, even though she’d not been directly told who’d paid off her mortgage when Floyd disappeared from town, and Dutch was another, a survivor in spite of himself, who’d been well compensated by John for the loss of his motel and distracted finally from his other deprivations by their codevelopment of Getaway Stadium, a new ballpark and sports facility built on the site of the old motel, originally for summer youth programs and Little League baseball, but large enough that they were eventually able to lure to town a minor league farm club, one that Dutch, owning a piece of it, later helped to run. Nevada, the popular aerobics instructor who took over the new health club at the expanded civic center, would never have described her former boss as a compassionate man (no such thing, she would have said), but she knew him to be flexible in his negotiations and not without feelings: like Otis, John had lost his best friend, and though he never mentioned it, Nevada knew he was hurting. Maybe it was the only serious loss that fortunate man had ever suffered, and as there was nothing he could do about it, his grief, like hers, could be ignored but never wholly assuaged, though his basic principle—“Caring too much for another is a bad investment”—helped. “Everyone and everything’s expendable, including yourself,” he liked to say. “The important thing is to keep your eye on the game.” An expression his wife had never heard, though she had heard him instruct her to keep her eye on the ball. Did she believe him to be a compassionate person? Who could say? She was never asked the question nor ever volunteered an opinion, though she herself was judged to be, as Ellsworth put it in an article on her many charitable activities following the devastating fire at Settler’s Woods, “the very paragon of compassion, grace, and civic virtue,” a woman loved by all no less than John was by all esteemed.

  When Ellsworth dropped by Gordon’s studio to ask for a recent photo of John and his wife to accompany the article and to schedule a shoot of the charred and spectral woods, where bulldozers were already rumbling in like robotic predators, eating up the historical moment, he found his friend much changed. Gordon was suddenly an old grizzled fat man, stooped and broken like the ancient humpback bridge they were tearing down out there, and Ellsworth wondered if he himself seemed as changed in Gordon’s eyes. The shutdown photo shop was a shambles. Ellsworth had never thought of Pauline as much of a housekeeper or business manager, but her absence was clearly being felt. Photographs and curling negatives littered the floor, albums lay open on chairs and countertops, the bead curtains had been torn away, the portrait studio was a wreck, and there was dust and clutter everywhere, yet Gordon, poking lugubriously about, seemed hardly to notice. His sagging jowls were covered by a dirty gray stubble and his eyes were filmy and unfocused. Ellsworth commiserated with him on his bereavement, remarked that his place looked about as chaotic as his own Crier offices (“storm-tossed” was the word that came to mind), and expressed his indignation at Gordon’s unjust treatment at the hands of the police, which he said he intended to write an editorial about. “Artists are always misunderstood.” “Jail,” Gordon said dully. “I’d never been there. But I recognized it. It had the smell of death in it. It was my own darkroom.” He picked up a photo from a pile, studied it, set it down again. Ellsworth saw that it was a picture of John’s wife in the Pioneers Day parade, one he might use, but that Gordon had been looking at it upside down. “I felt terribly wise and terribly stupid at the same time. And very much alone. I kept hoping you might come by.” “I’m sorry. I only just found out. At the time, I was, well, somewhere else. Some time else. It was, I don’t know, like I was locked into a certain day, if that was what it was, one I thought would never end.” Ellsworth meant to say no more, but realized that what he’d just said made no sense. “I was writing a novel.” Gordon seemed surprised by this and a glimmer of his old self returned. “You mean The Artist’s Ordeal? Is it finished?” He hesitated. “I don’t know. I think so. But I can’t find it.” He’d returned from the grim desolation of smoldering Settler’s Woods to the grimmer desolation of his own offices, shocked afresh by what had met him there. His shelves and file drawers were all spilled out and he’d evidently ripped up the sole remaining archival copies of the precious wedding issues, among many others. Perhaps, he’d thought, he was mistaken about the importance of the official chronicler to the keeping of the communal memory, but he’d shaken off his doubts and set about putting his and the town’s lives back together again. He’d just been pasting up the scraps as best he could when, around noon, she came in. While sitting all night at the hospital bedside of her child, she’d composed a little essay for his paper on “The Kiss of Life,” she’d said, looking up at him as she used to look up at him when they were children, adding with an apologetic smile that she hoped it was not too badly written. Suddenly, he’d wished to hold her hand and read to her as he used to do, this time from his own work, and she’d seemed pleased when he’d suggested it. But when he’d gone looking for the novel, it wasn’t there. Only traces. A sheet or two. Scrawled notes. A few mad ravings tossed helter-skelter. “I guess I burned it after all.” He glanced again at the photograph on the top of the pile, but saw now that it was of Gordon’s dying mother. Gordon must have shuffled them about. The old lady seemed to be staring accusingly up at him, her flesh sunken, toothless mouth agape. A shriveled breast scissored between her gnarled fingers. In his novel, he had written about “the unspeakable things” the Stalker was doing with the Model, but, no, wrong, everything was speakable. “What did you want from her?” Gordon asked suddenly. He’d picked up a soupy grayish photo that seemed to have no image on it at all. “Her?” “You know.” “I-I’m not sure.” His friend’s sorrowful gaze dropped to the murky photograph. “Nor I.”

  The return of The Town Crier was greeted by the usual disparaging wisecracks, but even its severest critics were relieved to find it each week on their front porches again. Things had been happening during its absence, but now it was as though they were really happening, and even those events that had gone unreported had been rescued from oblivion by Ellsworth’s reconstruction of them, in the same way that the more ancient past had been recovered through his innovative “I Remember” columns. A popular former town librarian, who had passed on some years back, had written in an “I Remember” contribution of her own that “Memory is all we have to keep time from taking everything away from us,” and not only did most townsfolk agree with her, but many had that column clipped and pinned up somewhere or tucked in a cookbook or the Bible so they wouldn’t forget it. For Marge, the weekly newspaper was less significant as history (she had her scorecards for that, sharing her husband’s respect for numbers as about all the history one could count on) than as a bully pulpit, she having been a frequent contributor to its letters page, though less so now than in the past. Had she lost her crusading zeal? Had John finally worn her down? Not exactly. For dreamless Marge had had at last a dream. Where she’d had it, she wasn’t sure. She remembered being out on the darkening golf course, feeling very tired, and stumbling toward the seventeenth green, which looked very soft and cushy. She’d just holed out and the last thing she recalled was bending ov
er to look in the hole for her ball. Then she woke up at home. But in between. She’d tried to tell Lollie about it, but though she’d had to listen to countless dreams from Lorraine over the years, her friend had refused to listen to the only one Marge had ever had. “I was dancing with … somebody,” she’d said. “Then suddenly it was more than dancing.” “I don’t want to hear about it, Marge!” Was Lorraine reading her mind? No, that was over and even her memory of what she’d heard had dimmed. Lorraine was just being selfish. The dream had begun in the basement of John’s fraternity house where Marge learned that she’d just been elected. They prodded her forward and, because the issue was zoning problems, she took off her clothes or maybe they were already off for the same reason. Likewise her partner, who told her it was time to start straddling the issue, and that was when the slamdance began. Body contact, he grunted bruisingly. I love it! Though it was the only dream Marge had ever had, the amazing thing was, she was still having it, though most of the preliminaries had long since dropped away. No complaints. It was a pretty good dream, even if there was not much to tell anymore, were there anyone to tell it to. Certainly not to Trevor who was too tired even to talk most of the time and who got terribly flustered whenever she even mentioned the bed, not to speak of sleep and dreams. So, in effect, she’d been subverted from within, knew it, didn’t care: dancing John could do what he liked, or almost. When she learned of John’s plans to develop Settler’s Woods after the fire, she had written to The Town Crier about it, accusing the city of sinister collusion, but her letter had appeared the same week that they dug up some old human remains out there, including a skull with the middle of the face missing, Ellsworth heading the story, “Grisly Find in Settler’s Woods,” and flaunting his rhetoric in an editorial on the need to clean up that dangerous area, so her message did not get through. No matter. Back to beddy-bye. To speak in the philosophizing manner. Besides, Settler’s Woods was one of John’s most graceful developments and popular with the community. He preserved most of the surviving trees, mature timber enhancing property value these days, carved the area into interesting odd-shaped lots following the old creek bed (Marge and Trevor bought one), and built a pretty little park with a children’s playground around a small grove in the center that had somehow escaped the fire, John thus, ironically, becoming celebrated, like his fondly remembered father-in-law before him, as a builder of city parks.

  Opal was proud of her son and loved the park he built, wishing her grandchildren were still small so she could bring them to it, as she used to take them to the old one and her own little boy before them. Oh so long ago. The statue of the Old Pioneer had been rescued from the civic center parking lot and given a nice new pedestal and, though you had to crane your neck to look up at it, it was like having an old lost friend back home again. She missed the old bandstand and the performances there and the family picnics and the summertime speeches her handsome brother used to give, but her husband Mitch, at her urging, had donated a dozen benches in memory of members of the family and old political friends, and they were not as comfortable as the old ones perhaps, but they made her very happy. She liked to sit in them, half dozing in the sun, and watch the children play, letting the past wash over her like a loving embrace, and she often found herself being asked to mind this one or that one for a moment while their mothers dashed off on errands, something she was pleased to do, for it made her feel wanted again. It was so much nicer than the malls, which had no trees or benches at all and no neighborliness either, whatever Kate might say. One day, she found herself sitting on one of the roomier contoured benches of the old city park with that dear friend and with Harriet, too, one on each side. It seemed that Audrey had recently died and they were talking about this, Opal understanding that her friends were really congratulating her on the Audrey inside her having died, since if they were still alive Audrey must be, too. Nonsense! snorted Harriet, and Kate said that, yes, life was, that was what made it so sad. And so beautiful. They saw the young stringy-haired newspaper editor coming their way with a camera, looking sheepish, and Opal exclaimed: All this has happened before! Kate smiled and said, Yes, no doubt, probably everything has. Harriet smiled her own ironic smile and said that the one thing she had no doubts about was that nothing ever happened twice. Opal realized that this conundrum her friends had posed on either side of her and the distinctive smiles on their two lovely faces there in the dappled sunlight were the last things she would see or know before she died, and she felt a pang of grief, and a pang of love.

  Ah well, grief, love, sometimes it was hard to tell them apart, so profoundly bound up in one another were they, for no mortal love was free from death nor death’s grief from a grievous love of self. When Yale was killed in the war, Oxford, though paralyzed with a sudden despair that dropped him to his knees, realized that he’d been suffering the loss of his beloved son from the day he was born, and that he’d cherished that suffering. In her suicide note three years later, his cancer-stricken wife Kate wrote: “Why we turn against reason, Oxford, is because it tells us we can never have the one deathless thing we most desire and that all our lesser loves must end in sorrow. It’s almost unreasonable to be reasonable. I love you, Oxford, but can express this now only by inflicting grief upon you, which, alas, I find I would do with pleasure. And so I deny my love and mourn only myself. My own grief satisfies me and, as you are no longer loved—indeed, you no longer even exist for me—you are freed from all mournful thought of me, who certainly does not exist, unless grieving gives you joy.” He’d thought it a cruel letter at the time, but had come to understand that wise Kate had loved him with a rare transcendental love and had found a way, while dying, to express it, and then the tears had come afresh, self-pitying tears, of course, at what he’d lost. For Kate’s friend Harriet, who’d died a couple of years earlier, tears were nothing but a sales hook for the entertainment racket, though she’d happily shed plenty over books and in the movies, if seldom in life. “Meat’s meat,” she always said dismissively. “It has its needs, but you can’t take them seriously,” and her husband Alf, whose hands were daily busied by needful flesh, agreed—until he held her trembling hands in his (“Hey, do you remember when …?” he’d murmured awkwardly) and felt the life go out and knew then that what he’d loved, though rooted in the self, was not the self. Over the years since then, Alf had found some consolation in the healing of others, or at least in the easing of pain, his own included, bourbon being his usual self-prescription, just as Oxford had consoled himself with his multitudinous grandchildren (at least two more now on the way), the two men meeting most mornings for coffee in the Sixth Street Cafe to exchange thoughts on such topics as love and grief and also the news of the day, which on this particular occasion had to do with the building of the new racetrack (“Coming Soon: The Sport of Kings!” was the headline in the Crier), the old bones found out at Settler’s Woods which Alf had been asked to examine, the return of Alf’s nephew, a high school classmate of John’s, to run John’s new international transport firm, recent rumors about the hardware store next door, closed since Old Hoot fled town (there was a business associate of John’s visiting from the West Coast this week, she said to be a high-tech hotshot), the surprise marriage announcement of old Stu’s widow, and the decision of Oxford’s daughter, who was also Alf’s nurse, to go back to school and complete her degree, which Alf, generously, offered to help pay for. John’s wife, walking her dogs, passed by the cafe window just then, reminding Alf to tell Oxford about the strange sensation he’d had at the tip of his finger and how it had vanished, but before he could get to it, Trevor the insurance agent came limping in and joined them briefly with a cup of soup which he spooned up hastily with quaking hands, and then as quickly got up to go. There were dark bags under his eye and eyepatch and what looked like bruises on his face and neck. “Are you all right, Trevor?” Alf asked. “I-I’m not sleeping well.” “I’ll give you a prescription.” “No. It won’t help.” He ducked his head, tugging at the cuffs
of his linen suit. “It’s all right,” he said. He squinted at them with his good eye, then leaned closer. “It’s a lucky life to have known delight,” he whispered, his soft lips quivering. “Isn’t it?” “He’s suffering from delusions,” Alf explained when Trevor left, as though that explained anything at all.

  “Oh, I know, honey, I was just kidding myself, it was a big mistake, but he said he loved me and that big booger between his legs was as hard as brass and all mine, so how could I help it? I’m basically a nice person, you know that, but it was all I could think about, it was driving me crazy and I did crazy things. I still think about it, all the time, but now I have to help him find it. It’s awful, but what can I do? He owns half the garage, I can’t get out of it, I can only hope to hell the pathetic sonuvabitch falls out of his bed and dies. That fitness freak you’re so crazy about who gave him the kiss of life can kiss my ass, goddamn her. Why couldn’t she leave well enough alone? Isn’t that Brucieboy’s girlfriend? If so, I wish to hell he’d come back and claim her. She knows Rex from somewhere and keeps butting in, watching over him like he’s her kid brother or something, it really gets my goat. The chilly bitch says she doesn’t trust me, and when he comes home from the hospital, I’m afraid she’s going to move in on us. Do you think she’s trying to get a piece of the action? Probably, hunh? What a mess. And he’s so mean to me! Honest to God, it’s the worst thing that’s happened to me since back during my first marriage when I was playing around and got that infected lovebite on the ass. You remember? Thought I’d die. Why the hell was Rex driving John’s car anyway? Oh, I don’t blame your daughter, poor thing, she’s suffered enough. No, it was Winnie’s fault, I’m sure of it. The old ghoul was just getting her own back out at the humpback bridge where she bought it herself. I’m glad they’re tearing the fucking thing down, scares the pants off me every time I have to drive over it. Winnie’s nailed old Stu, and me, too, in her witchy way, sticking me with this murderous basket case, maybe the old battle-ax’ll go away now and leave me alone. What’s worse, I have to admit, honey, I miss old Stu. His hillbilly music, his dumb jokes, his sneezing and farting, all of it. And I don’t have anyone to get swacked with now. It’s so boring tying one on alone! At least you’re back, sugar. I’m so glad, I was lost without you! I’ve got so much to—hey, did I tell you? I ran into Colt again. Why didn’t you warn me John was bringing him back here? It was terrible. He didn’t even recognize me. When I told him who I was, the dickhead just stared at me and said, No shit. Really! It was disgust at first sight. I couldn’t blame him. I’m such an ugly old bag now, who’d want to recognize me, even if they did? Looking in a mirror makes me puke. It’s all over, it really is. Oh God, I’m crying and I can’t stop! The good times are gone, sweetie! I’ll never know hard dick again! I’m so scared! How am I going to get through the rest of it?”