John's Wife: A Novel (13 page)

What Trevor thought about John he could not, on that occasion, say, but what John thought about his schoolchum Marge was that she was a horsey, aggressive meddler, a knee-jerk belligerent, cold and flaky as canned tuna. He admired her competitiveness, especially out on the course, she was the perennial women’s club champion, but she was too impatient to be fun to play with, striding leggily down the fairway ahead of everyone, head bulled forward, furious with frivolous delay, which, for most people out there, was the whole point of the game. She set a lot of people’s teeth on edge, had done since a kid. Waldo, who ran John’s paint and wallpaper business and was frivolity personified, despised the woman, calling her, though rarely to her face, Butch and Sarge and Herr Marge, and referring to her prissy linen-suited husband Trevor (whom he called Triv) as “that little Dutchman with his finger in the dyke.” One night at the club, in front of everybody, Waldo told Kevin the bartender not to put any of those boxy pieces of ice with holes in their bottoms in his drink, because he’d had enough of those for one day. Marge had outplayed him once again that afternoon in a mixed-doubles foursome, snorting scornfully whenever he misjudged an approach shot or blew a putt, and asking him on the sixteenth, after he’d failed to get out of a sandtrap in spite of three mighty but impotent swings, if he’d like her to bring him a little bucket and shovel. His icy wisecrack later back at the clubhouse got him half a laugh, but cost him his night out, his wife Lollie doing her usual drag-bigmouth-Waldo-home act after that. John appreciated Waldo’s feelings, but, except when Marge interfered with his construction projects, was himself more discreet. She was his wife’s friend, for one thing, but more than that: Marge was a mobilizer, presiding over just about every club and charity in town, always collecting for one damned thing or another, a woman for whom no task was too daunting, no neighborhood too strange, no door exempt from the good cause’s knock; she would be useful to him if he ever ran for Congress.

Though such an alliance might indeed have been negotiable, in spite of all the wars they had waged from the playground on, John’s forced politeness in truth wounded Marge more than any dumb salesman’s nasty cuts. She felt ill understood by John, though not surprised by this, John’s grasp of character being purely pragmatic and about as subtle as his taste in women, which ran, as far as she could tell, to busty party girls and ambitious little roundheeled gum-snappers. She felt sorry for his wife, her friend since grade school, but was angered by her, too, for letting herself be used so, and for letting John live a life so little challenged, exaggerating his power when she should have been testing it, honing it, making it count for something, instead of letting him wreck the town with it. Marge felt her own womanly powers wasted by such waste, but what could she do? His wife was the closest she could get to him except in a fight. Though she’d towered over most of the high school boys in town, runts still at that age, Marge in her college days had been merely tall, a lean handsome blonde, as she thought of herself, a little long in the legs maybe, a bit flat and broad in the hips and bony in the chest, but trim and fit, bright, engaged, a political force on a campus where women typically weren’t, a terrific conversationalist, more guys should have been interested. But somehow she always turned them off. She knew why. They felt threatened. It was her power, but she couldn’t switch it off, so it was also her weakness. Only Trev was not turned off, though turned on was not exactly what he was either.

Waldo’s wife Lorraine had a theory about Marge. Marge was maybe her best friend in town, in spite of Waldo’s constant sabotage and Marge’s bossy ways. They played golf and tennis together, Lorraine served on Marge’s many committees and espoused her causes, showed up at her club meetings, cut the weed habit with her help, listened sympathetically to her harsh views on men, they had a lot in common and Lorraine felt she knew her well. Knew what made her melt a bit, what bored her, what drove her up the wall. She could tell almost to the hour, for example, when Marge’s period came on, though for that matter so could just about anyone else, Marge suffering periods powerful and sudden as a maddened mare’s. Her appetites were like that, too, hunger hitting her like a blow to the midriff, thirst suddenly taking her voice away, making her hands shake as she grabbed up the iced tea. The two had met while up at State together, though were not real friends there. Lollie, over the protests of many of her sorority sisters, had tried to pledge the ungainly girl after getting beat out by her for president of the Pep Club, but Marge had turned her down flat, letting her know at the time what she thought of the Geek Societies, as she called them, they’d had a pretty nasty scrap over it. Lollie, snubbed and sore, had not returned Marge’s waves and halloos thereafter, until Marge, running for student council president against a fraternity man, came by to seek the sorority’s support. And against all odds, got it, too, and Lollie’s renewed admiration as well, having mixed feelings by that time about fraternity men herself. But their real friendship had begun, a partial consolation for Lorraine, when fate unkindly brought her to this godforsaken town. Without Marge, she would have gone crazy here, and maybe vice versa, too. So Lorraine knew her well. And her theory about her was that, although inside her crusty shell a sensuous woman lay dormant, in spite of her long marriage to Trevor and all her tough brave talk, Marge was still a virgin.

The night Lorraine dragged Waldo home from the club for insulting Mad Marge with his half-iced ass-cube crack was neither the first nor the last time she’d taken him by the scruff and made him look a pussywhipped fool, but though it burned his butt and made him want to hit the road, never to see the ugly uptight bitch again, he knew he couldn’t get by without her. She managed the finances, fed them all, kept the house in order and the cars repaired, shepherded the kids about, covered for all his fuckups and weathered his suicidal binges, she was a goddamn saint in her way. But like most saints she tended to take the fun out of everything. And what the hell else was there? Good thing she wasn’t with him the first time he came to this town to usher at Long John’s wedding. He and Lollie were more or less engaged already, screwing implying that in those ancient purblind times, but he came alone, knowing all the brothers would be here, wanting the freedom of that. Anyway, Lollie never cared much for John. It was only for a weekend, but shit, man, it was one helluva great party. What he could remember of it. A kind of grand faretheewool to college daze. They’d all met up the day before the wedding at the old Pioneer Hotel. Majestic old place, full of polished wood and etched glass and crystal chandeliers, gone now, a piece of history. The long bar in the Old Wagon Wheel Cocktail Lounge was made of ancient weathered railway ties, most beautiful goddamn piece of furniture he ever saw. Dutch now had it out in his motel bar, the Getaway, but it didn’t look the same there, cut down and crowded in. Waldo had arrived and propped himself at it like the castle warden and called for a bottle of the best fucking sour-mash in the house and the party had begun. By noon the place was packed. Political and business pals of the fathers of the bride and groom were also there, an older generation, but they could hold their own, and they seemed to love being around the college boys and did a lot of the setting up. Food was ordered up, but he couldn’t remember if he ate any of it or not, didn’t matter, he was feeling great, young and powerful and ready for anything that happened. Lots did. First, though, they hit the course for a round of golf, bottles in the bags and ice and mix in the carts, and though he seemed to recall slashing around in the rough quite a bit, he ended up with a decent score and they took some coins off the old boys, maybe somebody fudged. After that there was the wedding rehearsal, good for plenty of laughs, then a big feast back at the hotel, jester Beans doing his famous open-fly gag during the toasts, and finally the real party began. Old Dutch had rigged it all. Maybe the best goddamn blowout he was ever at. Or maybe not, but he sure as hell hadn’t seen its equal since. It was like a piece of theater, each new act better than the last. Ended at dawn with him and Hard Yard and Loose Bruce, what was left of the Dirty Six, serenading the bride on old Barnaby’s lawn like battle-weary but triumphant cocks crowing the fucking sun up. Beautiful! Oh my Christ, where did it all go?

Daphne, the maid of honor at that historic wedding, was available after the rehearsal dinner and ready for anything that happened, too, open flies not excluded, but she had less luck that night than Waldo. The boys, it seemed, had other things to do. She had been paired—by wedding protocol, but also, she’d felt, as a kind of so-long-kid gift from John—with the best man, a handsome smoothie from John’s fraternity named Bruce, obviously loaded, an altogether consoling consolation prize, had the prize been hers. But juicy Brucie, polite and attentive though he was, had his eye on another. Daphne was the bride’s best and oldest friend, she knew absolutely everything about her, or supposed she did, but she never was able to figure out where the hell that French penpal came from. Probably the two of them had met on one of those trips Audrey, always full of fancypants improvement schemes for her daughter, had taken her on. Whatever, from wherever, Marie-Claire was a veritable apparition, she had all the guys gaga, Breast Man Brucie-boy among them, it was like they’d never seen a girl before. Ringlets and baby teeth and big dark eyes—hey, she was cute, but not that cute. Maybe it was her goddamned accent. Or maybe she knew some French tricks American girls were not privy to. Later that night, abandoned by the guys and bored with each other, Daphne and Ronnie and some of the girls decided to crash the stag party out at the Country Tavern, or at least to go have a peek and see what lurid depravity the unsociable assholes were up to. It was a pretty depressing scene: a porno flick running on all by itself in a darkened corner, a dozen or so fagged-out yo-yos playing cards or pool or throwing it down sullenly at the bar, one of her ex-steadies out cold, wearing nothing but an ashtray for a codpiece, sad songs on the antique jukebox. Some party. Daphne would have gone in there and livened it up for them, but neither Bruce nor John was there, this lot was dead and gone, beyond reprieve. She figured the rest of the guys were with, damn her eyes, the penpal.

The groomsman officially paired with the French bridesmaid at John’s wedding (though he was not in the Country Tavern that night Daphne and her friends peeked in either, nor was he with Marie-Claire) was Harvard, oldest son of Oxford the druggist and his librarian wife Kate, brother to Yale, Columbia, and Cornell, and known as Harvie in the family, Hard Yard to intimates, of whom John, with whom he’d cocaptained the high school track team their senior year, was one. Harvard, a shy, gentle, and dutiful fellow, a good athlete in spite of what Coach Snuffy called his “handicap” (“Tie a knot in that nasty thing, son, before you catch it on the bar going over and damage the equipment!”) and pride of the showerroom but not quite the scholar his father had hoped for, was a chemistry major at a West Coast surfers’ college at the time of the wedding, showing few signs of graduating soon, if ever, but demonstrating a talent, widely esteemed among scientists, for experimentation, a talent that contributed spectacularly to the revels of the final night of his friend John’s bachelorhood, revels that in turn, maturing into revelation as yard, mind, and soul all came and came together, changed Harvie’s life forever, John’s ass theatrically marked by this sudden transformation. Thus, it might be said that Harvie, unlike most people in this town, created, as though in obedience to the slogan on an old calendar down at his father’s drugstore, “A Better Life Through Chemistry,” his own destiny. Years later, returning here for his mother’s funeral, for whose sake he wore a suit instead of a dress, he told his baby brother Cornell that “out there” it doesn’t matter what you’ve got but how you use it. In a small town like this everybody is always measuring. Out there, there are too many, measuring makes no sense. This generous message was meant to console and uplift little Corny, though it probably missed its mark.

Harvie’s baby brother was at that time a biology student up at State, not a very good one, but by then the only member of the family still in school, their sister Columbia having dropped out to be near her cancer-stricken mother in her final months and seemingly destined, now a doctor’s practical nurse, never to return. Cornell would not last long either. In fact, though he would return to college after his mother’s funeral, he would never, no matter how his father pleaded, scolded, reasoned, wept, attend another class. He became a haggard, unkempt quadrangle hangabout, notorious only for his monosyllabic mewlings, his runny nose and spotted pants, the latter something of a campus legend, likened unto an aerial map of a free-fire zone, a mess of curdled gravy, the abode of the damned, a laminated spunk husks exhibit, the rag used to clean out the cafeteria food trays (itself known as “Grandma’s diaper”), Flocculus Rex, a poison puffball bed, the chitinous scutum of something unspeakably inhuman (an alien resident perhaps of that ghastly fork if not the freaked-out host himself), trampled cowflop, the Milky Way, a spermatazoic Field of Armageddon, and, simply, a zippered scumbag. Poor unwashed unlaundered Corny, who went to Paris to become a man and saw such a thing as to make manhood no place to go and boyhood no place he could return to. “Ondress me,” she said, and then, when, in a magical trance (he was thinking of a certain set of four strange comicbooks, thereafter discontinued, that he owned), he did, she said: “Merci, mon petit! Now ronn down to ze delicatesse be-low and breeng for us a bott-ell of Beaujolais nouveau, and we weell make l’amour nouveau, ze new true love of ze heart and blood!” Oh boy. Sounded great. He left her standing there, eyes wide open, looking startled with wanting, thin legs apart and both hands between them, kneading and wringing what was there as though trying to tear it out and give it to him, and ran down the four dark flights of stairs and out into the spicy street, his heart fluttering in his chest like a trapped moth in a glass jar, explosions already erupting stickily between his own skinny thighs. With his clumsy high school French, it took Corny too long a while, racing from shop to shop and bar to bar, to come to understand that, on Midsummer’s Eve, Beaujolais nouveau was not something he was likely to find. Well. He paused, staring bleakly at a swarthy rat-faced shopkeeper, as the truth sank in. Such cruel teasing was nothing new in Corny’s life. Usually he merely turned away from it. But in this nightmarish place, so far from home, where could he go? The smirking shopkeeper seemed to be recommending, in his threatening foreign tongue, another wine with the word “Love” in its name. This confused Corny and made his face hot, but, hastily, he bought it and, homesick now for his friend Pauline, and for his faithful games and toys which never deceived him, turned his steps back toward Marie-Claire’s studio, fearing further humiliations, but keeping faint hopes alive—why not? as his father would say, it’s perfectly reasonable—for a pleasant surprise.