John's Wife: A Novel

For Angela Carter, whose infamous illusionist Doctor Hoffman believed, like Ovid, that “the world exists only as a medium for our desires,” and that “Nothing … is ever completed; it only changes.”

And for Ovid:

“Those two, with so much else in common, were models for me, masters, examples to follow, and now my justification.”

—T
RISTIA,
B
OOK
II

Once, there was a man named John. John had money, family, power, good health, high regard, many friends. Though he worked hard for these things, he actually found it difficult not to succeed; though not easily satisfied, he was often satisfied, a man whose considerable resources matched his considerable desires. A fortunate man, John. He was a builder by trade: where he walked, the earth changed, because he wished it so, and, like as not, his wishes all came true. Closed doors opened to him and obstacles fell. His enthusiasms were legendary. He ate and drank heartily but not to excess, played a tough but jocular game of golf, roamed the world on extended business trips, collected guns and cars and exotic fishing tackle, had the pleasure of many women, flew airplanes, contemplated running for Congress just for the sport of it. In spite of all that happened to his wife and friends, John lived happily ever after, as though this were somehow his destiny and his due.

Floyd, less favored, worked for John. He managed John’s Main Street hardware business, envied John’s power, having none of his own, and coveted John’s wife. “Covet” was Floyd’s word, out of his respect for the Bible, and because he knew what an evil man he was. It embarrassed Floyd to speak of religion outside of Sunday school and at the bowling alley he swore his soul away to the dark powers with every split or spare he blew, but Floyd had come to this quiet prairie town on the run from a thieving and hell-raising past and had got the church between him and the forces—both vindictive and tempting—that pursued him, and so far it had served him well. He was thankful and taught the Bible to John’s children at Sunday school, his voice trembling as he ticked off the Ten Commandments, potent with consequence. Floyd bowled in the winter leagues, toured distant national parks with his wife Edna in the summers, and ran the best hardware store for miles around. Their nearest friend in town was old Stu the car dealer, the only person here they felt at home with, though they saw less of him after his first wife died. They never had a falling out, though, as Otis later claimed.

Now, Gordon was also attracted to John’s wife, though not quite in the same way as Floyd. “Covet” was not his word, nor exactly his inclination. What engaged Gordon’s attention were her fleeting glances and her subtle movements, somehow never quite complete. She seemed always to be at rest and not at rest at the same time. There was a stillness, a stateliness about her that gave her a kind of monumental grace—yet his photos of her, whether in the studio or out on the streets, never seemed quite able to capture this, no two alike, their infinite variety suggesting an elusive mystery that tested him and drew him on. Gordon sold film, albums, frames, and cameras in his photo shop, developed the snaps of others, took passport and wedding and news photos, and was locally famous for his studio portraits, but before all else, he was an artist. And John’s wife, whom he associated with the intrinsic indwelling truth of the town, its very suchness, so to speak, was—though she was not entirely aware of this—his principal subject. He longed to do a complete study of her, in all her public and private aspects. John’s wife stepping out of her car (he had this one). John’s wife trying on a hat. John’s wife dreaming. John’s wife teeing off, walking her dog (this, too), combing her daughter’s hair, combing her own hair, scratching an itch. He’d called her in the titles of his collection by many names but never her own—“Andromeda,” “Eunomia,” “Muse,” “Princess,” “Echo” (suggested to him by a story his friend Ellsworth had once told), “Beauty,” “Woman,” “Model,” “Desire,” “She”—but all of these names provoked private stirrings in him that he felt to be in conflict with his higher artistic aspirations, so in the end he chose the more professional and impersonal practice of considering his photos of her as subsets of his traditional studio family portraits and thence referred to her simply as “John’s Wife.” As in “John’s Wife Taking Communion” (now in his collection). “John’s Wife Pregnant” (missed it). “John’s Wife Emerging from the Morning Mist” (not yet). He wished to tour her as Floyd might a national park, to explore her intimately, exhaustively, hour by hour, inch by inch—John’s wife on the telephone, John’s wife at a PTA meeting, on a swing, at the movies, John’s wife writing a letter, John’s wife examining her underwear, John’s wife in the supermarket, at the doctor’s office, at a dance, in the rain, in ecstasy, in doubt—until there was nothing left to see. It might be said that Gordon—whose passion was to capture the private gesture, the hidden surface, the vanishing secrets of the race, freeing them from time’s ceaseless violence—coveted stasis.

Something like this could be said of Otis as well, though Otis was no photographer. He had bought a camera once, but had felt clumsy with the thing in his hand, cheated by the little paper pictures: his wife had fattened, his children grown to brats, these lost shapes meant nothing to him. Otis was a man of the present, it was the community, here and now, that held his interest. This community Otis saw as a closed system, no less fixed by custom and routine than by its boundaries on the map, a clocklike mechanism if not perfect in its parts and movements, then at least perfectly adequate. Nothing upset him more than disruptions to the pattern of the daily round. He thought people should go out of town to get drunk, and stay out until they were sober. Parties were for Saturday nights; noise on other nights made Otis nervous. He distrusted all intrusions, all changes, strangers, big ideas: why mess with a good thing? Even unseasonable weather disconcerted him. John’s grand projects did, admire him though he might. Newsman Ellsworth’s wacky getup, kids dragracing over the humpback bridge out by Settler’s Woods or out at the malls, that spooky photographer with his secret albums, loitering strangers and cars with out-of-state plates. Otis thought of himself as a kind of guardian warrior, one eye on the periphery, one eye on the center. At the center lived John’s wife, whom he loved.

Floyd, Gordon, Otis, then: all with this in common. And others, too: Kevin, for example, later known as Patch, his eye on her shifting hips and stiffened elbow, or the embittered Nerd with the hallowed garter in his pocket, dreamy Ellsworth and scheming Rex, her pastor Reverend (“Let it happen”) Lenny, wistful old Alf with his finger up her, Fish and Turtle (“Got the hots,” said Fish, and Turtle blushed and grinned and got them, too)—what male in town was
not
, one way or another, fascinated by John’s wife? John was not. An irony. Or perhaps this is often the case. John was a busy man who liked to make money, see the world, have a good time while it lasted, and as for women, he used them as freely and unreflectively as he did men. And with much less hope of making money off them, though he often did. He supposed they had their problems, who did not? But he had a big construction firm to run, lands to master, malls and suburbs to build, as well as Barnaby’s old lumberyard, a chain of stores, an airport and a budding cargo line, money in several national and local businesses and industries, everything from computer games and action toys to alarm systems and armaments, he had properties and ambitions (on his shortlist: a racetrack and a baseball team) and an appetite big as the prairie, and when he thought of his wife and children, he thought of them mainly as political and social assets, which he estimated once a year by means of Trevor’s tax returns and Gordon’s family portraits. Anyway, he disbelieved in love, at least between people. What John loved, as he told Nevada while doing a loop and roll at a thousand feet that made her wet her pants with excitement and terror, were the days of his life.

Gordon, gesture’s hunter, would have understood John’s view of love, though he didn’t know of it. As John loved life, Gordon loved form. People, intrinsically grotesque, were beautiful only (as he had put it many years ago, shocking his friend Ellsworth, who could not understand the photos he was taking of his mother) as shapes frozen in space. Beyond his photographs, life was disintegration and madness, a meaningless frenzied blur. Birth, death, labor, love: he looked, blinked, and out of his acid baths came a piece of time. Chosen by him, held by him. Forever his, while the world outside dissolved into obscene confusion, vaguely remembered, if at all. Some subjects—a child with its finger in its nose, a dead body, an empty swimming pool, crumpled metal, an intimate scar, reflections in a window—drew him toward a kind of interpretive engagement, in which the photographic forms seemed to hold on to something not visible on the surface of his print. Others (which he thought of as somehow nobler)—John’s wife, for example, uninhabited vistas, slanted light on bared flesh—released him from these worldly illusions into the freedom of pure but sensuous abstraction. Such moments, such photos, he could contemplate forever.

One day, Waldo and Lorraine walked into Gordon’s studio to order portraits of their two boys, and lying flat on the glass counter was a blowup of John’s wife, taken from a group shot at a country club dance. Lorraine, who distrusted John’s wife in the same way that she distrusted the heroines of all the novels she’d read, cast a suspicious glance at Gordon: who was this picture for? Couldn’t be for John, what did he care for photographs, much less of his wife? Lorraine’s husband Waldo said: “Hey! What a swell picture of John’s wife!” She could have strangled him. Fat Gordon flushed and pushed the photo aside: Lorraine saw this and wondered if there was some kind of hanky-panky going on. She had heard about some of this clown’s other photos. Lorraine had had a dream about him once in which he seemed to exist in or as a dirty puddle on the floor, and she’d awakened with the realization that there was something sinister about the photographer that generally went unrecognized. Waldo continued to beam happily, noticing nothing. Lorraine had married the most popular guy in college, but he was a complete corkhead, an imbecilic party boy—what she and the other girls used to call a windup talking dildo. John had brought her husband here as his Assistant VP, but, with his brain, he was more like an Assistant BB. Empty Wallets, they called him. When John asked her why she gave Waldo such a hard time, she’d replied: “Marry a prick with ears and soon all you’ve got left are the ears.” John had grinned his grin and she’d felt her spine lock up. “Haw,” said Waldo now as Gordon’s wife Pauline came in with her blouse half-buttoned and her hair uncombed, and while Waldo ogled the little frump, Gordon said: “Where the heck’s my schedule-book, Pauline?” She didn’t know.

Why would Lorraine suspect hanky-panky where John’s wife was concerned? Probably, her best friend Marge would say, because Lorraine was a constitutionally suspicious woman, made all the more so by her vulgar, butt-slapping, two-timing husband, and because, being a relative newcomer in town, Lorraine didn’t know John’s wife all that well. Marge could have told her: suspect John if you like, hanky-panky was that man’s middle name (she would have been telling Lorraine nothing new), but not his wife. It would be like suspecting that the cornflowers in John’s wife’s garden got up at night and went out chasing bees. Marge had grown up here, a year behind John in school, a year ahead of his wife, and in an isolated little prairie town like this one they were all like siblings. They’d gone to birthday parties together, church picnics, field trips, high school and country club dances. They were in National Honor Society together, they’d exchanged valentines and May baskets, played hide-and-seek, colored Easter eggs in each other’s kitchens, raced bicycles and had fights, popped one another’s blackheads. The world had changed over the years since then and everything in it, but not John’s wife, poor thing. Everybody’s favorite Homecoming Queen. Period. Marge felt pity for her, but at the same time hated her for being pitiable, just as she despised John but admired him for having the power to be despicable. Marge and John had fought since grade school, were still fighting, most recently over the brutal razing of the city park to build another of John’s tasteless eyesores, this time a concrete civic center and swimming pool, and most of the time John, more ruthless than she, and richer, too, had beat her, beat her badly. She’d never let that stop her, she had gone on standing up to him all her life, fighting back through defeat after defeat. Just as she was about to do again, so he’d better get ready. It was the only thing a man like that could respect, and truth to tell, Marge wanted that, John’s respect, and knew that she deserved it.