John's Wife: A Novel Read online

  Where Cornell had been the night before, made manifest by his tin-whistle squeak and telltale flush—and, had anyone noticed, the little hickey on her neck—was with Pauline. Tears of farewell before being sent off to Paris, declarations of love, and all that. He supposed his father did not know, a supposition only partly correct: prophylactics had gone missing at the drugstore over the past year, a pattern made familiar in their own time by Oxford’s other two sons. Discovering this had brought tears to his eyes: Ah, little Corny … He was the baby of the family and had seemed till now as though spellbound by childhood: finishing high school and still reading comicbooks, playing with games and toys. Oxford, worried about him, had thought this graduation trip to Europe might somehow work a sea change—might disenchant the boy, so to speak—and he’d trusted the strange frail woman beside him as his dear departed Yale once did, yet feared for poor Cornell and for himself: he had lost so much and this was his last son, Paris was so far away, he could not bear more sadness. He had peered searchingly at the bold girl standing there before them in that gloomy photo shop with her sunglasses on and her toes pointed in—what had Corny called her? Pauline?—but though ready to grasp at any straw, he’d found nothing that might give him hope. A certain wide-browed full-lipped generosity maybe, nothing more. She was probably just using Corny, as so many others did. Of course the light was bad, his eyesight weak, his concentration undermined by grief, he might have missed something. No rash prejudgments. He’d keep the drawer of condom packets replenished and see what happened.

  What happened, or seemed to happen—all this was a decade and a half ago—was that Corny, mortified by his public denial of Pauline, went to Paris that summer without seeing her again, and when, after chastening adventures quite different from those his father had envisioned for him, he returned, Pauline was no longer available. He entered university, though not the one that he’d been named for, as a pharmacy student, and some four years later fulfilled at last his father’s lifelong dream, though yet again not in the way he had imagined. Oxford, a staunch rationalist in a town where such a faith was held by few, was such a devotee of the great institutions of higher learning that he had named his children after four of them—Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Cornell—hoping each might go then where appointed. None did. Only Yale came close, attending Princeton, and then to study French, not pharmacy. It was Cornell finally who, if only up at State, pursued at least (a promise to his mother Kate, the town librarian, then gravely ill) his father’s trade, renewing Oxford’s faded hopes that a son might yet return, solace and companion to his autumn years, to carry on what he had here established. These hopes were dashed a few months later when his mother killed herself and Corny suddenly took on Harvie’s errant ways, let the scraggly hairs on his face grow down, burned his library card, dropped out, and in that paradoxical idiom of the times, “turned on,” but then were unexpectedly revived once more when, without advertisement, the boy shaved all but his upper lip and wed a sober northern girl named Gretchen, a pharmacy major more industrious than brilliant maybe, but fully aware of her limitations, which included a withered leg and myopia as severe as Oxford’s. Though Corny dreamed perhaps of grander things, Gretchen brought him home.

  Gretchen in innocence once had dreamed her leg was whole, or could be made so, but came to accept instead, finding a father-in-law she’d never dreamed to have, an orthopedic correction and partial interest in a pharmacy one day to be made a whole one in a way her leg could never be. She was a satisfied woman who never showed this with a smile, except sometimes alone with her sister-in-law Lumby, her public face one of pained intensity like that of a long-distance runner about to hit the wall: the goal in sight but dreadful hazards on the route. When, a few years later, John built his newest mall out by the highway, he offered them bright spacious quarters there, which excited Cornell, restless in the dull downtown, duller by the day, but which Oxford feared as a threat to his own dreams of continuity and meaning. As the expense of such a move and broad expansion would have required a partnership with John, Gretchen unhesitatingly sided with her father-in-law and against her whining husband, putting her lame foot down resolutely like the banging of a wooden gavel, and thus began, shaped by frustrated dreams, that family’s slow decline.

  In such manner the entire town might be said to have been shaped, its streets laid out by what, though against all probability, might yet be, its daily dialogue sustained by what had not, as though it might have done, come true—though John, again, was an exception. He got always, as if a rule unto himself, more or less what he dreamt of. Perhaps John dreamt wiser dreams, asking from others only what he knew they could give, or taking from them only what he knew they could not refuse him: a kind of magic formula by which John prospered and took his considerable pleasure. Buildings, parks, whole neighborhoods disappeared, and in their place rose banks and malls and housing clusters with lawns where grass had never grown, and simply because John willed it so and other wills were weaker. He endured trials, true, the intrafamilial battle over his new downtown civic center and swimming pool being but the latest, but he relished these trials, as he once had relished the goalline plunge and the raised bar, contests that quickened him, full of risk and body contact, bruising sometimes, exhausting, but never fatal, or almost never, and concluded always, win or lose, with celebrations—celebrations often at John’s expense, for John was also, as all were witness, a generous man, free of rancor and loyal to a fault. Friends from boyhood, school, teams, companies or clubs were friends for life—ask Dutch, a pal since Little League, Loose Bruce or Lennox from fraternity, his old coach Snuffy, Waldo, Otis, Kevin, Trev, they owed him much—and women, too, enjoying John’s beneficence and care long after having given so little, unless they erred and thought it much. Women loved John, most of them did, though he never asked for this, not even from his wife, demanding only a fair exchange, love poor coin, he believed, in such transactions.

  Not all women understood this well, and so suffered injured hearts and bouts of self-abasement when their own love declarations were not matched by John or seemingly even heard. Thus, Lollie, as she was known in those days: self-styled sorority archetype, fun-loving, smart, and virgin, parting her thighs at last with elegant simplicity one night down in the games and chapter room of John’s fraternity while a party raged above, her heart racing, her mind a new erogenous zone stroked with prospects and announcements, love bubbling up on her lips like water pumped from a well, from which John appreciatively drank his fill, groaning, “Yes, yes!,” suddenly configuring thereby her shapeless life with narrative thrust and plot and conversion to the future perfect—or so she thought until the heartless knave turned up at the sorority house a few evenings later to pick up one of the younger girls for an all-night pool party and, bumping into a startled Lollie, laughingly gave her a hug that iced her spine. Never thawed. Still couldn’t touch her goddamn toes.

  Well, the first time, it had its pleasures, it had its bite, not easily forgotten, nor easily retold. Ellsworth’s “I Remember” column had been running in the town newspaper for years, yet no such tale had surfaced there, though Harriet’s frank account of her wartime experiences as an army nurse in Britain did not exclude her bombshelter snuggle with a handsome surgeon whose name she never knew until they met and married eight months later. The meeting took place over an amputation, the wedding in a vicar’s cottage beside a bombed-out church. Legendary times, those romantic war years, envied by most, their own rites celebrated in less glamorous circumstances, even when in marriage beds, more often in car seats and cheap motels, school toilets and darkened rec rooms, listening not for the buzzing hum of approaching aircraft or the whistle of the fateful bomb, but for a creak on the stairs, approaching bushwhackers, authority’s freezing knock or opened door. The sound in Daphne’s ears when it happened was the whine of a mosquito, that and the rusty squeak of cot springs beneath the bare mattress whereon she struggled. There were smells of leaf rot and sawdust and stale beer and
old tennis shoes. The guy with her had her arms pinned behind her with one hand and was ripping her panties off with the other while she pitched and kicked, and what she was thinking while she tried to fight him off (she still remembered this) was that, if he got her panties down, that damned mosquito was going to bite her on her bare butt. And it did, too. Edna heard water dripping that first time, trucks grinding by, Opal her brother’s whisper not to tell, Harvard a prostitute’s wry complaints, the sniggering of his pals outside the door. What teenaged Lenny heard was the congregation on the floor above singing “O Zion, Haste Thy Mission High Fulfilling,” as his geography teacher and friend of his mother took him inside her on top of the stainless steel worktable down in the church kitchen, whimpering, “Oh, yes, sweet Jesus! sweet Jesus!,” while for Pauline it was her Daddy Duwayne in his cidery jacket, unbuckling his old jeans and rumbling, “C’mere now, you little harlot, let’s see what we can do about knockin’ down that wicked ole wall of Jericho!” She was seven years old and thought that Cherry-Go might be an icecream flavor.

  Ronnie, like old Alf and Harriet, actually heard humming aircraft and exploding bombs, Cherry-Going, as it were, to the sounds of war, but this happened, long after the real war, out at the old drive-in movie theater where later the interstate link cut through, erasing, so to speak, the scene of the crime. It was following a high school football game and she still had her cheerleading clothes on, which made it both easier and harder. Easier because there were almost no preliminaries to be got through, harder because the underpants were tight and made of heavy lined material like a swimming suit, so there was no going in past the legband, like some guys had tried to do before with flimsier stuff there. Veronica had made up her mind to go all the way some time before, but most of the boys she was going out with seemed to know even less about it than she did, though they’d never admit it, and she just couldn’t trust them. Then, suddenly, the perfect opportunity arose, so quickly it almost took her breath away, when John, home from college, turned up unexpectedly at a weekend football game and, after coming over to josh around with Coach Snuffy and the boys at halftime, turned and asked her what she was doing later on. Ronnie had gone out with him once before, long ago, but he was too fast for her then. Now she was ready, or thought she was, and she said, “I don’t know, you got any good ideas?” It should have been wonderful. It wasn’t. She bled and bled, she just couldn’t stop. She always was unlucky. Up on the screen, they were cursing and yelling and stabbing each other with bayonets, but at the time she didn’t see the humor in this. Neither did John, who was really mad about what she had done and was still doing to the backseat of his father’s car. He jammed his underpants and hers between her legs and drove her home, dropped her off, she sobbing her apologies, at the curb. As she waddled up the walk, she heard the car door slam and, glancing back, saw him coming up the walk behind her. He was smiling: was he laughing at her? Maybe he wanted his underpants back. Confused and frightened and sick with shame, she threw them at him and ran away, as best she could run, hands between her legs, and left him standing back there like that guy in the movies, alone on a battlefield of corpses. She cried for three days after. Bled more, too, had to see the doctor. She hated sex then, though later she got used to it. Whereupon worse things happened.

  Others might have had similar tales to tell—Trixie, for example, now known as Beatrice, the preacher’s wife, or poor ill-fated Marie-Claire, the Paris penpal, even perhaps (who knows?) John’s wife—but Nevada, a generation younger, was not one of these. Nevada was a career woman, skillful, charming, industrious, worldly wise, discreet. She had met John a year or so ago while working in a private plane and boat show in Denver, a gig she’d picked up for a mouthful of cum in Houston. John was there with an associate from Chicago, shopping for a little hedgehopper of his own, as he called it, but he was scouting companies, too, a man, she judged, of vision and expanding fortunes, well worth a deeper acquaintance. His wife? An abstraction, absent, not yet a nuisance. Like all the women at the show, Nevada had a prepared resume with her, which she showed to John in bed that night over a restorative whiskey, while a pornographic film played silently on the hotel TV, solemn and unheeded as a church service. The resume indicated that she was unmarried, could type and had some familiarity with word processors, enjoyed travel, and was accustomed to flexible work-hours. When John asked her about her ambitions, she smiled, pressed the sweating whiskey glass against a perky young breast, just under the erecting nipple at the lip as though to milk it, or to let it dip its beak to drink, and said she hoped to get into personnel management. He was impressed (his generous laughter told her so) and took her on, remarking that her first assignment was a bit of stiff committee work: to wit, taking the starch out of an incorrigibly hard-headed standing member.

  John bought a plane in Denver that week, not his first, and a company, too, together with Bruce, a joint venture—again, not their first. It was Bruce perhaps to whom John felt the closest ties. From the time they met up at State, pledge brothers at the fraternity their freshman year, they held most things in common, including money, clothes, textbooks, and women. They even sat exams for one another, laughing their way through business management, education’s biggest joke, partnered each other for bridge, cross-country drives, and tennis, cocaptained the golf team their senior year, drinking together from the trophies they won. Bruce best man at his postgraduation wedding, John best-manned Bruces then in turn, at least the first of them, this one with a woman John had shared with Bruce for a time, filling in when Bruce had other thighs or hands to spread. If Bruce had had John’s wife, John would not have begrudged him this, though if he’d had her he would in any case not have remembered it, for though, like John, he had a head for names, figures, products, profit margins, even radio frequencies and phone numbers, when it came to glory ‘oles, as he reverentially called them, they were all the same to Bruce, love them as he did. No, to wallow in the memory of a great fuck was for Bruce little better than self-abuse, a kind of impotence really. Every day was a great fuck, potentially anyhow, or you shot yourself, and John, though less radically, shared Bruce’s views in this. In business, too, views and money often shared, Bruce again the long-shot gambler, plunging into entertainment and oil futures, heavy arms and high-risk third world ventures, steady John amassing his portfolio around transport, banking, and property development, partnering each other when their interests or holdings crossed, as they often did. Bruce had taught John how to fly and they had bought a rustic fishing cabin up at the lakes together, laid down a landing strip, went there over the years to fish, shoot ducks and geese in season, take women not their wives, Bruce frequently the provider, though John, too, had gifts to bring from time to time, Nevada but a recent example, joint venture of another kidney. Their cabin became what Bruce, through all his schemes, adventures, wives, and sprees, thought of as home, quite unlike John in this, the basic difference between them being that John was a builder, Loose Bruce was not.