John's Wife: A Novel Read online

  As it was, alas, for Kate the librarian, who, had she still been alive at the time of little Mikey’s miming of the town photographer at John’s Pioneers Day barbecue that summer, might have remarked on the way that parody and performance focus the attention in a way that the everyday realities of existence cannot. “One drifts through daily life as in a dream,” she once remarked to her friend Harriet, also, sad to say, deceased, “waking up only when things turn nightmarish, otherwise being carried along on a free association of images, faintly erotic maybe, faintly fearful, all of it blurring into a half-remembered past that’s more like an imaginary space than some aspect of time.” She had made this remark while sitting with Harriet and John’s mother Opal on a bench in the old city park, not yet razed back then, and Opal remembered it to this day for precisely the reason that it did seem to parody the very moment in which they sat, dappled by the sunlight filtering through the leafy branches above as though sprinkled by that gold dust they sometimes used in the movies to indicate a magical moment isolated from the implacable flow of time. Since Opal was not one much given to such flights of fancy, she supposed the image had popped into her head because of Harriet’s earlier remark that “Sometimes I feel more alive at the movies or in the middle of a good novel than I do on the streets of this damned town.” Harriet had had a romantic past, she was probably just feeling restless as she often did, her restlessness making her the insatiable moviegoer and devourer of popular novels that she was. Kate now went on to say that while all novels lied about the past, simply by being things whose pages turned in sequence, life, as kept more loosely in the memory, was not a random shuffle either, but more like a subtle interweaving of mysteriously linked moments whose buried significance in effect defined the rememberer. Poor dear Kate, ever the one for the mind-boggling aphorism. She once, while at one of John’s parties, described them as “cyclic rituals whose purpose was to deny the incorruptible innocence of time,” though what Kate meant by that Opal could not even guess. Opal thought of her son’s parties as themselves altogether innocent, not to say generous and spontaneous and celebrative, and she always looked forward to them, but she did understand how much more went on at them than any one person could know, each person’s experience of such tangly gatherings being so different from all the others, until someone like little Mikey came along to give them all something at the center to share, even if that something was so frivolous as the playacting of a child.

  For Reverend Lenny, another witness of Mikey’s masque that afternoon in John’s backyard, nothing in the world was frivolous, least of all a child’s enactment of the adult world, or else it all was, which he also accepted of course as a strong possibility. Lenny, yet another member of John’s old college fraternity present that day and better known to his brothers up at State as Knucksie, sometimes Ob-knucks or Noxious to the pledges he mastered in those long-gone days, mostly happy, give or take a toga party and beer bust or two he’d rather not think about, and rarely did, had come here with his family—his wife Beatrice and their children Philip, Jennifer, and Zoe—nearly a decade ago, thanks to brother John’s timely intervention, and, though not without some adjustment difficulties and unremitting ambivalence and self-doubt, Lennox had over the years come to accept his new vocation as a moral and spiritual leader of the community, and indeed to embrace it. When he first arrived and took up his new mission among, except for John, these total strangers, nothing was easy, but what was hardest were the Sunday sermons. It was like writing term papers all over again, something Lennox had always hated and rarely managed to accomplish without a little help from his friends. Now, suddenly, he had to do one every week, no friends at hand, and for a while he fell back pretty heavily on stuff he stole out of books. Eventually, though, once he discovered that no one was grading him, or even for the most part listening, it became his favorite task. His own special thing, as his wife Beatrice (who strode past now in her fringed leather jacket, pleated skirt, and bright red boots, bearing a large plastic bowl of potato salad like the Holy Grail: she blinked at him as though in wonderment and smiled) liked to say. What amazed him was how everything worked; God—or the gods, any would do, Reverend Lenny was not a fundamentalist—was wonderful. Lennox found he could take any experience, news item, anecdote, whatever, abstract its essence (the fun part), link it metaphorically to some general aspect of the human condition (always plenty of opportunity for pathos, humor, compassion, rue), weave in any images that freely came to mind, toss in a Biblical passage or two (Second John, for example: “And now I beg you, lady, not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but the one we have had from the beginning, that we love one another … for he who abides in the doctrine of Christ has both the Father and the Son”: that one was so brilliant it had caused John’s lawyer cousin’s wife to faint dead away), speak with conviction, gravity, and intensity, and shazam! another brilliant spellbinding supersermon. So much fun was it, he soon found himself testing God’s limits, as it were, by attempting to convert the most unlikely material—a golf game, rock lyrics, a visit to the barbershop or a bellyflop at the country club pool, Saturday morning TV cartoons, dirty jokes, shopping at the malls, even the holes in doughnuts or the repairing of a clogged stool in the church basement—into Sunday morning classics of spiritual uplift and moral wisdom. Certainly he was uplifted if no one else was. It was nearly as good as turning on (and he had used that, too, only lightly veiled: John had winked at him from the front of the congregation). So, while John’s son was aping the town photographer at his parents’ Pioneers Day garden party, Lennox was doing what he always did at such events: gathering images. He had decided it was time to take advantage of the hot topic of the day and preach on the doctrinal meaning of a “civic center”: What was it and why was it (in theory) so significant to us all? What did it mean that the beloved park with all its natural Edenic beauty had to be sacrificed so that that center of our civility could be, not found, but fashioned? He envisioned a link to the great themes of the settling of this nation, the New Jerusalem dream and all that, and thus (his wife’s costume suddenly delighted him) to this weekend’s celebrations: hey, genius, right on! He watched John’s little boy with his taped-junk “camera,” bobbing about frenetically with a kind of despairing enthusiasm, a hopeful anguish, and thought: a paradigm for our piteous effort to focus upon the real, to find that center. What was the real, and why was it so elusive? As though in reply, John’s wife passed in her knee-length shorts and crisp cotton shirt, all eyes in the backyard upon her, and Lennox thought: whatever it is, it has substance. Form. Body. And bodily parts. For God so loved the world that he eschewed mere abstractions. But to accept the fleshly real (he was watching his old fraternity brother, once known as Loose Bruce, put his arms around his little pubescent daughter, Jennifer’s face flushed with puppy love) was to accept pain and (his son Philip—or his wife’s, anyway—and John’s daughter Clarissa came out of the garage together, looking guilty) paradox. Irony. Was that not, in point of fact, the very message of the Cross? Yes, it was taking shape, the main themes were all there. All it lacked was a little spark and pop, a final kicker, a quote from the Good Book maybe, something with which to say: “This, my friends, this, this is real!”

  When the firecrackers went off behind John’s screwy kid, Maynard II, he, whose wife had swooned during the preacher’s sermon, was just thinking about his cousin’s power and how, maybe, with old Barnaby’s help, he was about to trounce that contemptible cocksucker at last, so he was both startled (dropped his goddamned paper plate of barbecue right down the front of his pants) and at the same time felt somehow confirmed in his hopes, as though that sudden explosive racket was in celebration (a sympathetic glance at his pants from John’s wife, looking down upon him from the back deck, added to his feeling of triumph; although, ever the languishing fool for love, he wished for more, she did send one of the kitchen help out with a wet towel) of his ineluctable and unprecedented win. Yet another fucking illusion, as he was to find o
ut soon enough, but at the time that summer it looked like a sure thing, so when wild applause followed the fireworks, Maynard embraced it as though it were for him, gave a whoop himself and winked across the lawn at his wife Veronica, who dropped her jaw and returned him a sneering hawk-nosed what-the-hell’s-the-matter-with-you-scumbag? look. A joy to be around, that girl. Should have sobered Maynard up, but it didn’t. He was feeling too damned cocky. Old Barnaby, pissed at the way his son-in-law had fucked him over and in a fit over the civic center outrage (and it was an outrage), had come to Maynard’s law firm with a sweet plan, well-funded, and Maynard had put the final touches to it, it was beautiful. John’s ass was grass, he was sure of it. Not that that would be the end of it. His cuz was tough in the clinches and could play mean and dirty. You could sometimes take a point off him, but it was hard to win the game, Maynard knew that. When they were kids, their families used to do Thanksgivings together, and in and around the ritual gut-stuffing they’d get up all-day Monopoly games, which John always won, even if in the end he had to use strong-arm tactics. Everyone cheated of course, but it was Maynard who always got caught. One day John spied him palming an extra house onto Marvin Gardens and decided to call a kangaroo court. It was one of Maynard’s earliest and most enduring lessons in the way the law worked. He was introduced into the dock as “greasy Mayo Nerd” and his defense was met with wet Bronx cheers, especially from the younger shits, getting back at him with John’s protection. He was found guilty of course and his fine was that he had to wear his clothes backward and make a loud vomiting noise every time someone mentioned mincemeat pie. Aunt Opal, John’s mother, had brought the mincemeat pie that year so he took a terrific cuffing from his old man the first time he made that noise, John always getting someone else to do the dirty work for him. Maynard’s dad was the mayor back then and quick with his law-and-order swats across the side of his head, Maynard was always scared of him. Now the rheumy-eyed old fart was his law partner and pretty much did as he was told.

  The real reason that day for the burst of enthusiastic lawn-wide applause, which whooping Maynard in his willing self-delusion accepted as celebration of his own imminent victory, was the spectacular conclusion to little Mikey’s mimed performance, a bit of improvisational showmanship that even Lorraine, once a serious student of such matters and no fan of John’s youngest brat (the little weirdo clearly had a serious oedipal problem, for one thing), had to admire. Lorraine, whose dopey husband Waldo, he of the corked head and wayward prick, was one of those who did John’s dirty work nowadays in his grown-up Monopoly games, had, like the lawyer Maynard, been thinking other thoughts when the firecrackers went off: to wit, where have all the flowers gone? How had Sweet Lorraine, the fraternity world’s favorite party girl and teacher’s petted pet of the English department, got transformed into this shapeless old bag drinking beer from a can in the backyard of a hick town bullyboy, standing in crushed buns and dogshit and wondering what griefs the dolts she was living with had in store for her next? Her helpmeet Waldo was drunkenly hustling one of the local housewives while the bimbo’s husband snarled nearby, Lollie’s halfwit sons were getting dragged around by John’s boy like trained bears, and she herself, watching John’s wife temporarily distract attention from her own son’s popular dumb show (the kid’s act was easy, that crazy photographer was a clown, and like all clowns, no joke) simply by passing by, felt near to tears. Damn it, it wasn’t fair! They’d promised her a happy ending! Whereupon, Mikey’s bitchy big sister Clarissa snuck up behind him while he was concentrating on trying to balance his goofy apparatus on a tripod made of three golfclubs and lit a tin bucket full of firecrackers at his feet. Everyone jumped when they went off, even Lorraine who had seen it coming, everyone except Mikey, who merely pointed his “camera” in different directions and pushed the penlight button as though each pop were the taking of a shot. He dropped the contraption to his side when the explosions stopped, then slowly lifted it again as though guessing there must be more to come, or maybe he peeked. He pivoted, pointed the toilet-roll tube lens at his shocked sister, and—POP! POP!—snapped her turning on her heel in frustration and rage and stomping away. It was a sensation. Lorraine felt, just for a moment (much worse was to happen, she knew that), reconciled to the goddamned world once more, and even laughed and applauded with the others as the little photographer-clown took his waddling exit by chasing his mother up onto the deck and into the house again.

  Beatrice’s perspective on this Pioneers Day barbecue in John’s backyard, not sharing Lorraine’s chronic vexation, was that smalltown life out here on the prairie was pretty crazy (a couple of years later it would be her turn back here, no hosts but the children—what curious times lay ahead!—to be, popping her own cracker, the star attraction), but what the heck, God was good and a generous know-it-all who cared for the little sparrow even, so, as her husband would say, chirp chirp, Trix, let it all happen. After the fireworks (where did John get those things? it was fun but was it legal? or did it, John being who he was, even matter? not to Trixie did it), Lenny was looking positively beatific, and that made Beatrice, who was cheerful by nature, even more cheerful, for in truth she worshiped her goofy husband, only wishing that he, like she, might have some notion of what worship might be. She would watch him in the pulpit on Sunday mornings, delivering his famous sermons, everybody talked about them, and she would know, even if no one else did, that he was just pretending, like with everything else. He pretended to be a preacher, a father, a friend, a lover, the cosmos as unreal to him as a B movie, but he was a good pretender, so what difference did it make? Well, one. Beatrice felt certain that Lenny’d never had, though he’d pretended to, a really great orgasm, and this made her feel somehow inadequate and caused her to wonder sometimes what it was they really shared. Beatrice believed, with all her heart, in the mystical power of the orgasm, it was what linked you to everything else in the whole universe, and she surrendered to it wherever and whenever it came upon her just as a saint would do when God called, for that was exactly how she saw it, and no matter what it might cost her, sometimes quite a lot. But saints suffered, too, didn’t they? Just look at Jesus: he had it about as rough as it could get, but in the end he ascended, an experience Beatrice herself had enjoyed, it was great. As a little girl, she got off all the time on Jesus, just thinking about him and his spacey life, so weird and beautiful, and she still could and did, though she no longer needed him or anybody else, she was directly wired now, she could turn ecstasy on like flipping a light switch, and maybe it was just as well that cool Lenny was there to switch it off when she’d been gone too long and lovingly bring her home again.

  Her mother’s freaky ways embarrassed Jennifer, but intrigued her, too: grownup life might not be as boring as it mostly seemed in this nowhere place. Everything was so desperately flat and common here, you knew just what was going to happen every minute—even out at the malls and the pool, the only halfway exciting places around, you could guess what people were going to say as soon as they opened their mouths, it was like they were all in a play or something, just reading their lines, it was very depressing—but it didn’t need to be that way, and her unpredictable mother was at least, spooky as she was, a case in point. Bruce was another and a more reassuring one than her mixed-up mom. He flew in and out at will, this town having no claim on him, nor any other either, he was as free as the wind like everyone should be, like Jennifer would be when she got out of here, she could hardly wait. Bruce seemed to know and do or have done everything, he was very wild and very wise at the same time, and yet somehow tragic, too, like those beautiful guys in the movies who always died young, though Bruce would not die young, he was already too old for that, and a good thing, too, because Jennifer loved him madly and wanted him around when she was ready to escape this dump, before or after she finished high school, she really didn’t care, what was all that junk good for anyway? Bruce had lots of lovers, Jennifer knew that, but unlike her best friend Clarissa who, when she wanted so
mething, wanted all or nothing, Jennifer did not mind sharing. Clarissa was a real problem. Bruce was a college friend of both their fathers, Clarissa having always called him Uncle Bruce, though they weren’t related, which Jennifer thought was childish, especially now after she’d got her period, but for Clarissa it was a way of trying to own him somehow, and teasing her about it only tended to make it worse. She and Clarissa were the closest of friends, they went everywhere together, planned to leave here together, too—bosom pals, they once joked when they went to buy their first bras together, and in truth, no joke, they were—but because of Clarissa’s possessive attitude, Bruce stood between them. That afternoon at the barbecue, for example, when she and Bruce posed for Clarissa’s little brother’s make-believe camera and Bruce was hugging her in a way that sent a tingling all the way to her toes, she knew it was making Clarissa mad as all get-out and Jennifer was sorry about that, but she just couldn’t help it. She could only hope he wouldn’t let go, it was magic.

  John’s friend Bruce, who so willingly joined in little Mikey’s play that day, was perhaps the only person out there who did not know who was being caricatured, and so missed half the point, or more, but then no one got it all, not even Trevor who knew what no others present knew but who had never, it being against his wife Marge’s principles, posed for a family portrait, much nuance thus lost on him as well, this being, as Gordon himself would say, the fate of all art, even of the amateur backyard variety: to become, stripped of nuance, a caricature of itself. Gordon’s wife Pauline, who knew what Trevor knew but was not so curious about it (that lady was the main attraction around here, why shouldn’t Gordon take her picture?), but who was not present in John’s backyard on that day, or on any other day for that matter, would not have known what nuance was, though she would have enjoyed the little boy’s portrait of her portraitist husband as clown and taken it in whole, feeling flattered that something of her private world had been so publicly noticed. But then: had Pauline fallen in love with a clown? No, nor, whatever others might think, married one either, though that was another story. Love was for heroes, giants, and wizards, of whom she’d had some in her mouth maybe, between her breasts even, and up her Sodom-and-Gomorrah, as Daddy Duwayne called it, but none in her life, that strange thing that went on outside the holes in her body. When it came to romance, that old true-love lottery, Pauline had drawn the short straw: suck that, kid! as her fairy godfather was wont to put it in his pedagogical sessions on the floor of their filthy trailer. Where, many years ago, in the scattered iconography ripped from stolen magazines that aroused her crazy tutor’s red-eyed zeal, she had glimpsed a way out. She was nineteen when she finally approached old Gordon and asked him to help her. She knew him only by his shop window with all the glitzy photographs of make-believe families and fairytale weddings, his moony face in the dim shadows behind it, but she assumed he had a swollen spunk-sack that needed relief like any other man and they could strike a deal. Her best years were over, had been since her sixteenth birthday, she knew that—reality-training was one deprivation Pauline had not suffered—but she felt she had one last chance to make her fortune, or the nearest thing to it she could ever hope for, before she turned twenty and it was all over. Her body was ripe enough if a bit beat up (you could brush that out) and she had no pride, but she needed a photographer and Gordon was the only one in town. So she put her best summery dress on over nothing, hid behind the sunglasses a boy had bought her the year before at the Pioneers Day fair, all the wages she had got on that occasion, and screwing up her courage, pushed in, jangling bells, and announced she wanted her picture taken. “Hey, Pauline! Whatcha doin?!” someone yelped as though goosed. It was that little high school boy Corny. She hadn’t noticed there were other people in there. Her sunglasses maybe. Or just too nervous. Corny was with his dad, who was wearing his crisp white jacket from the drugstore, shiny black pens periscoping out of the breast pocket like secret cameras. And there was a girl there, too, thin and pale, dressed mostly in black, with her hair in tight dark ringlets around her parchmenty ears and funny little teeth in her smiling mouth like rows of tiny white corn kernels. She didn’t look all that well. “This is Pauline, Dad! From school! We’re getting passport photos, Pauline—Dad’s sending me to Paris! For graduation!” Big surprise. Corny’s heart-shaped face under its wispy blond cap was pink as a valentine, poor boy. His father stared at her through his thick lenses as though examining her through a microscope, gripping the lapels of his white jacket in a pose she recognized from the family photo in the window out front. Pauline stared back, but wished now she had her underwear on. The bells over the door still seemed to be ringing, but they probably weren’t. “So, uh, how’s it goin’, Pauline, for gosh sake? Where ya been?”