John's Wife: A Novel Read online

  Ah well, love: a profound subject. Back in his mayoral days, giving the traditional bandstand speech at the climax of the annual Pioneers Day parade one hot summer, John’s wife still just a schoolkid then, Barnaby’s old lawyer friend Maynard, thumbs hooked in the sleeveholes of his vest, speculated that it was love that had made and mapped the town: the original pioneers’ love of adventure that brought them out here, the settlers’ love of the land that caused them to stay and put down roots, the love of the early town planners for order and progress and the entrepreneurial spirit, those qualities that caused this great town center to rise so gloriously where nothing larger than teepees had ever been seen before, and the love of all those present for justice and prosperity and the good life and for one another. And also for God, he was quick to add. He evoked the time when the only sounds you would hear in these streets would be the clip-clop of horses in the dirt and mud, the lazy drone of bees and locusts, the clink of chopped ice in the lemonade pitchers and the creaking of porch swings, and he said that these were the sounds of love. He spoke of the town as their common mother, the town limits as her loving embrace, and he compared the crisscross grid of the streets to the quilting of a mattress on which, he said, we were all one big loving family, causing his sister Opal, John’s mother, to pick up her paper fan and wave it in front of her face, perhaps finding this one metaphor too many and wishing to remind her brother it was time to have the preacher bless them all and sit down. This Maynard was the father of John’s garter-clutching cousin Maynard Junior, sometimes known as the Mange or the Nerd, for whom love was a singular obsession, otherwise a kind of dirty joke, and he in turn in time became the father of Maynard III, also called Turtle, who thought love was for wimps until his buddy Fish gave him a couple of new ideas a few weeks ago, which were exciting but not very clear.

  Old silver-tongued Grandpa Maynard might still be around, but the city park and its quaint gazebo-like bandstand where he flaunted his rhetoric were forever gone, just a dimming memory now like the now-dimming ex-mayor’s fondly remembered clinks, creaks, and clip-clops, public speaking of the all-community sort being performed in more recent times inside the new civic center or else, until John created Peapatch Park, on temporary staging erected in the asphalt parking lot outside, depending on the weather and the occasion. This starkly modern new edifice, named in honor of old Barnaby the builder and built by his son-in-law, was generally held to be, though controversial, the town’s major new construction of the decade, perhaps (some said) of the century, its most popular architectural innovation being its Olympic-sized swimming pool with retractable roof, famous throughout the state and written up in all the metropolitan Sunday papers. You could always count on John to make things happen. His old football, wrestling, and track coach Snuffy, one of the city councilmen most responsible for pushing the project through all its legal and political obstacles (always some soreheads opposed to progress), became, with John’s blessing, the unopposed candidate for the mayoralty and was himself a public speaker of some renown, plain-talking but inspirational in his gruff straight-from-the-shoulder cut-the-crap way. Old Snuffy, as the townsfolk liked to put it, knew how to kick butt. Starting with his own teams. More than one young wiseass in this town had got used in practice as a live tackling dummy until the message got through that when Snuffy talked about giving your all for the team, son, he meant all. Ever do two hundred push-ups with a foot in your back? In the mud? In full uniform? After a game? About love, though, this inveterate bachelor had little to say. He was better on grit and hustle and hanging tough. Had Snuffy known women in his time? Sure, plenty. And all kinds, too, from two-bit to fancy. But love, which he believed in like everybody else, was never a head-to-head body slam with some woman, or man or boy either, it was more abstract than that, more like an ideal form, to speak in the philosophizing manner, as in “I love this game!” or “Body contact! I love it!” To love was to play hard, and to be loved was to win.

  God-fearing Floyd, who managed John’s downtown hardware store and was a lifelong expert on butt kicking, mostly from the receiving end, had a more down-to-earth, one-on-one notion of what love was, having once loved his own wife Edna, and that was how he knew that what he now felt for John’s wife was covetousness. He did not want to give himself to her, did not want to embrace her, care for her, adore her, live with her. He did not even want to make love to her. He wanted to throw her down on her fantastic ass and fuck the bejesus out of her. Praise the Lord, this had not yet happened. “Thou shalt not!” he roared at the giggling brats in Sunday school, his voice quaking with the conflict in his heart. He often imagined taking her right there, among the choir robes, something about the glossy feel of them, the range of murky body odors, the cheap lockerroom challenge of the church’s damp back chambers with their un-painted cement walls, cold tile floors. Or else over a counter of carpet tacks, flare nuts, and auger bits down at the store on Main Street. On top of the lead float in the Pioneers Day parade. On the fancy lime green toilet in John’s house between bridge hands (the toilet in Floyd’s house was white with a pink terrycloth seat cover and a loose handle). Or, shoot, why not trump her right on the cardtable itself, frigging grand slam! Maybe his feelings toward John were mixed up in these stormy desires. Whenever the four of them played bridge or had dinner together, which was about once every three or four months, depending on John’s sullen sense of duty (Floyd sensed this and it embittered him), Floyd contrived to sit so as to have his knee pressed against John’s wife’s knee. This recklessness: was it just another effort to emulate John?

  John was a man often emulated, Floyd was not alone in this. Some men emulated his style, others his vocabulary, some his aggressiveness or his laugh. Alf emulated his golf swing, not that it did him any good, old Stu the car dealer his jokes and Hard Yard his derring-do, Lennox his cool acceptance of the way things were. When Lennox told his wife Beatrice, his children, his students, his congregation, and most of all himself, “Let it happen,” he was emulating John. For John’s old high school coach Snuffy, entering politics, it was not so much the boy’s fierce team loyalties that he emulated (these Snuffy shared and who knows but engendered) as his strategic use of them in others. In short, it was John’s smarts he sought to emulate, just as for Dutch it was his friend’s killer instincts, and for Marge’s husband Trevor, aka Trivial Trev, his employer’s respect for numbers, for statistics. “There’s no such thing as money, Trev,” John used to tell him, his reading spectacles halfway down his broken nose making him look mockingly professorial, “only the counting of it.” Trevor also emulated John’s attention to detail, his caution with money, his staying power, but he may have been misreading John, seeing what he wanted to see. As all do. Lorraine’s cork-head husband Waldo emulated everything about John, some even thought he was making fun of John, but in actuality Waldo thought John was emulating him. Perhaps Waldo was right, partly right anyway, they had been buddies since college, it was a question of which came first, as Waldo liked to say: the chigger or the leg. Though they had often shared women in the past, Waldo even emulated John’s attitude toward John’s wife: utter disinterest. Anything else would have seemed like incest to him.

  Otis, who emulated John’s quiet force, something he had picked up from John back when they had played football here together, had been in love with John’s wife since high school, though she was surely unaware of it. He had never gone out with her, hardly dreamed of it (in this respect, there was no emulating John, not for Otis), had rarely even spoken to her, but they had met a couple of times at high school parties, and one night at one of them she had taught him how to dance. He could still see, as though in a dream, their four feet shuffling about below them, crisscrossing on the shiny hardwood floor of the school gym, their toes bumping, could still feel her soft hand on the back of his neck as she led him about. Though he was now married with four children and never danced, the warm proximity and generosity of her young body that night in the high school gym was still his bes
t and most magical knowledge of womanhood. Whenever Otis, self-styled guardian warrior, thought of the Virgin Mary, he thought of John’s wife.

  Whenever Pauline the photographer’s wife thought of Otis, she thought of the way he cried the first time she sucked him off. She thought he should play James Cagney in the movies. Whenever she thought of Otis’s cleft-chinned high school football coach Snuffy, she thought of a cartoon character in a dirty comicbook who wore his impotence on his face. Not surprising that her husband Gordon’s campaign poster headshot of the squinty old geezer with the sausage nose had attracted so much graffiti. Whenever she thought of her husband, she thought of some kind of fat robot with a big glass eye and an exploding forehead. Once he had got the floodlamps so close to her thighs, he had burned them. This shot (what did he think he’d see?) had not turned out. Whenever Pauline thought of the three brothers from the drugstore, Harvard, Yale, and Cornell, she thought of a story about eating and bedding down she’d been told in the first grade. Would her life have been different had she been born with golden locks? It was not a question Pauline would ever have asked. Here’s another: What is love? If pressed, she’d probably have said that it was something that ran over you like a devil train or a wild mule, knocking down all the walls, for that was pretty much what she thought of whenever she thought of love. Whenever Pauline thought of John’s friend Waldo, she thought of a guy in a carnival who invited people in to see the loving couple two feet tall. His wife punched the tickets. With her teeth. Whenever she thought of John, she thought of a young magician (though he was no longer young) with his shadowed face ablaze at the edges with unnatural fire and his pants stuffed full of writhing copperheads. What a night that was. Or must have been: it was like a dream or an old movie. Whenever she thought of John’s wife, she thought of her dead sister coming to her in a nightmare: she was taller than the doorframe, ten years old, wore a ragged white nightdress, and her breasts were dripping blood.

  Why did Otis cry when Pauline sucked him off that first time? Otis was a hard man, one of the hardest around. And Pauline was in her day the sweetest cock-sucker in high school, maybe the best the town had ever had. A cynic might suppose it was because John had married the girl that hard man loved. A romantic might say there was something wrong with him. Otis knew better than either: he cried, he knew, for the loss of his freedom. He had taken this experience into his life, and now it would never let him go. He knew, even before he came, lying there in the back of the old panel truck in the Country Tavern parking lot, his knotted-up ass beginning to slap the cold metal floor, that there would be many nights in the years to come when he would need Pauline’s mouth again, when he would roam the streets in a fever, unable to work, unable to go home to his wife and children, unable even to think clearly. As for John marrying the girl he loved, well, she was from a good family in town, Otis from a poor one, if you could even call it a family, and he was younger than she was, he couldn’t blame her for failing to notice him, for marrying a guy who had everything like John, which anyway happened when he was far away at war, and in fact he wished them both well. He became, though at some distance, their friend and protector. John could leave home at any time and know that his wife would be safe. Yet, often, more often even than for Pauline’s warm wet mouth around his cock, Otis the lawman longed for the touch of John’s wife’s hand on the back of his neck again.

  Thus, the men of the town revealed themselves through their longings, Otis, Maynard, Floyd, and all the others. Women, too, Lorraine, Marge, Veronica, Beatrice, but in a different way: they were holding something together out here in this vast emptiness, themselves perhaps. The men were more audacious, risked more in their fantasies, as though they perceived this as a birthright. Death was the province of the women, and wisdom, and paradox—garbage left them by the men perhaps, but useful to them as they plotted out the terms of their survival after the cataclysm. Men ventured, but women prepared the field, spreading their skirts out over what ground they could hold (Lollie’s image; her friend Marge, whom Waldo called Mad Marge, rarely wore skirts, saw it differently). The attention of John’s wife, however momentary and enigmatic, was one of the laurels the town’s men competed for, while the women, contrarily, often felt threatened by John’s wife, yet protected by her at the same time. Lorraine, having lost much, sometimes felt she hated her, yet had to admit she needed her as she needed Waldo’s idiocy: one had to live with these strange forces. John’s wife often called forth these ambivalent responses from the women around her. Trevor’s wife Marge envied John’s wife, pitied her. Little Clarissa felt a kind of sentimental rage toward her, Opal a jealous affection, Lumby an erotic disgust. Old Stu’s wife Daphne loved her, more than anyone in the world really, but she could have expressed this better if John’s wife were dead. Floyd’s wife Edna watched her as one watched a cloud: perhaps it would rain; it didn’t matter.

  Daphne watched everything these days as one watched a cloud. Seeing and not seeing. John’s wife was her best friend, had been, maybe still was, who could say? Things were pretty vague. Her memories, too, about as cloudy as the rest of it, thanks to Amazing Grace, but she could still recall sitting in the cold concrete stands of a university football game with John, drinking whiskey from a pocket flask. He had invited her up for a Thanksgiving weekend and she had brought her best friend from high school along, John fixing her up with one of his fraternity brothers. Daphne and John were under a blanket and he had his free hand in her pants and she felt very good. As she felt now, with her own hand in her pants, lacking any available other: funny how entangled the present was with the past, hard to tell them apart sometimes. Daphne’s friend was there at the game that day with a comedian named Val or Vern, whatever happened to that guy, he had a missing molar he could whistle through and he sang like a tinny prewar radio crooner, you could even hear the static. How vivid it all was! She should write this up for Elsie’s newspaper: “I Remember.” The guy’s favorite number was “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along,” and while he warbled away, John thrummed her clitoris like a tuning fork. Magic. Like another dimension. It was cold. The sky was blue. The team they were cheering won. Later, in some other memory, might have been the same weekend, more likely not (Christmas? Easter? some time that stank of festering happiness), her best friend had her head on John’s shoulder in the front seat of John’s new silver Mustang, while Daphne was getting mauled on the cramped bucket seats on the floor in the back by a guy with a flat-top haircut and a boil on his nose, feeling not so good. Sort of like, she thought then, thought now, sniffing her fingers, a runner in a relay race, passing on the baton, not because she was ready to let go of it—not Daphne, hell’s bells, are you kidding? give me that sucker!—but because she was supposed to. No wonder she’d been maid of honor at their wedding.

  A remarkable event, that wedding, the best the town had seen in years and nothing like it in the nearly two decades since. As one might expect, of course, when Mitch’s son married the builder’s daughter, so dazzlingly beautiful on the day, people said the sight of her made their eyes smart. Her mother, too, was a looker in her day, as many present were reminded when the bride glided into view, though there was a mischievous fiery-eyed edge to Audrey’s darker beauty that her gentle and radiant daughter, beloved by all who knew her as Audrey was not, did not possess. The church was wall-to-wall that memorable day with political bigwigs from the state capital and visiting business cronies of the two family patriarchs, together with all the schoolfriends of the bride, including a penpal all the way from Paris, France, a complementary pack of John’s fraternity brothers down from the university, whooping it up like puppies, Waldo among them, still unmarried then, a multitude of family, friends, and employees, and a great congregation of ordinary townsfolk, young and old, enthralled witnesses to this grand and extravagant event, so full, it seemed, of meaning for them all. Kate the librarian, a thoughtful soul, remarked to her friend Harriet on the occasion (Harriet had just expressed her disappoint
ment that Oxford’s and Kate’s son Yale was not after all the groom, adding with a regretful sigh that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and this wedding just proved it) that, yes, great ingatherings of this kind did indeed confirm the community’s traditional view of itself, but confirmation was also a kind of transformation: this town, unchanging, would never be the same again. On the day, few would have read any but auspicious omens in such an oracle. Daphne, as the maid of honor, was paired with John’s handsome fraternity brother Bruce, his best man: lucky sidekicks, everyone thought, headed for a Hollywood ending. Daphne thought so, too, and it might have happened, were it not, she supposed, for the penpal, and had Daphne behaved herself, too much perhaps to ask. Instead, it was John’s cousin Maynard Junior who, aching rather for the leg that wore it, caught the bridal garter and paid the piper, a day he remembered as the morning after the last day of his life. Full of regret, Maynard. But years, wives, lives later: he still had the garter.

  Daphne’s fourth and most recent husband, old Stu, golfing buddy of the groom’s father, supplier of Ford trucks to the bride’s, and so an honored guest at the wedding, remembered it as a day of destiny, helped along in this remembering, never good at it by himself, by one of Gordon’s strangely prophetic photographs, the yellowed eighteen-year-old clipping of which from The Town Crier he kept as long as he lived, framed, on his office desk down at the car lot: “LET HIM EAT CAKE!” it said. “MAID OF HONOR NOURISHES WEDDING GUEST.” That was at the reception, whiskey by then having eased his allergic reaction to the airless church, or anyhow made his suffering seem more remote. It was a real cattleyard in that church, to put a plain word on it, a perfumed crowd so thick you couldn’t breathe, and where there weren’t people there were flowers, heaps of them everywhere, so piled up the brick walls seemed to fall away behind them, a delight to the eye maybe but not to Stu’s tender passages: he had to load up on the antihistamines to keep from wrecking the service with his explosive country-boy sneezing, and even so spent half the ceremony with his head ducked, his wife Winnie, his wife back then, tut-tutting scornfully at his side while down in his lap he quaked and wheezed like an old hounddog with a bone in his throat. There were more flowers at the reception, too, bombing him afresh with their fragrant rot, Audrey must have bought out the whole damned county, but ice-cold whiskey now as well to wash down the antihistamines and scour out the rust—a dangerous chemistry maybe, but by then Stu badly needed both and cared not a goose’s fart for the consequences nor for tedious Winnie’s whiny scolding, ever the backseat driver. Crowds like these were typically just so many potential car buyers for Stu, and he had imagined, as he always did, moving at least half his inventory in such a happy free-spending pack-up—mostly upmarket Lincoln-and-Merc trade at that, a real high-class sale barn—but he couldn’t even see their goddamn faces. When he did finally make a pitch he found himself pushing a four-wheel-drive farm truck on the little girl from France who seemed to think he was telling her a naughty joke. She was peering up at him, all smiles, waiting for the punchline, so he shifted gears, leaned close, and rumbled melodically in her frail papery ear: “Hinky-dinky, par-lee-ffoo!” He winked, roared his big laugh, punched her softly in the shoulder, and thinking, well, the French they are a funny race, drifted off into the noisy blur, looking for the self-service pump: and the next thing he knew, Daphne’s hand was on the throttle and her tongue was in his ear.