John's Wife: A Novel (14 page)

Pauline had been with Corny not long before he left for Paris, though she had known Marie-Claire’s fiancé Yale as well, and Harvie, too, each in their own time. All the girls loved Yale’s zinger, it was just right, but his brothers’ were more like things you might see in a circus sideshow, and for opposite reasons. Harvard’s was the one best known around town, a giant thing, ghostly white, almost scary, with all its veins showing like Invisible Man. Because of it, all the kids called him Hard Yard, which was ironic, not because of its length, but because it was almost always limply adangle, half stiff at best until that stag party the night before John’s wedding, which Pauline also attended. Corny’s, contrarily, was like a tiny twig with only one testicle beneath it no bigger than a schoolyard aggie, but though it didn’t look like a real zinger, more like a plastic toy one, it was rigid as a fork tine all the time and popped and popped off all the time, as his trousers, even back then in high school and his mother Kate still alive to wash them, attested. After nine or ten quick ones one night, Pauline begged him to stop or he might hurt himself, and Corny only looked puzzled and, guiding her hand to the tip of it, spurted again. And then—thup!—again, each time firing well past her hip. Cornell liked most to have her reach under her thigh and squeeze his testicle, if she could find it, as, sometimes three or four times in quick succession, almost like hiccups, he spilled his seed in her, or more precisely into his rubber, stolen from his dad’s drugstore. These rubbers, of course, did not stay on, Pauline had to wear them like a kind of inner lining. Pushing them in there made her feel pretty silly, but fecund Gretchen later proved the wisdom of it, and feeling silly in boy-girl stuff was one thing that never bothered Pauline much. Everything changed that summer for both of them and many years would pass before they would become good friends again, though when it happened it would seem quite natural, even if by then nothing else did, but Pauline would never forget the last time she and Corny were together that summer. It was the night before Pauline went to Gordon’s studio to ask him to take her photograph for the men’s magazines. Cornell had come to the trailer with tears running down his smooth pink cheeks to tell her he was going to Paris and would not be seeing her again soon. “I love you,” he stammered, coming all over her bluejeans. No one had ever said that to Pauline before, nor would she soon hear it said again, and it left her feeling bewildered and, oddly, a bit sad. It made her think of her sister, the one Daddy Duwayne, looking down at his shoes, said ran away to find her mother.

“I love you”: so simple for some to say (for Daphne, it was as common as an expletive), so awkward for many, such as Otis, Snuffy, Marge, and Mitch, while for others—John, for example—so irrelevant, an artifice serving as a kind of functional code in songs and movies, sometimes useful in his lover-as-fool jokes though rarely as a punchline. When his fraternity brother Waldo, lover-as-fool personified, said “I love you,” it was no joke, he truly meant it, no matter who was with him, even if he’d won her in a raffle in the dark, because that was what love was, blind and brief and all that. Lorraine had heard him say it many times, sometimes even to her, and she knew that he meant it and that his meaning it meant nothing, the phrase having passed her own lips but once, then never more. It was often like that: if left unsaid too long the tongue felt clumsied by it. When, that same summer that Corny went to Paris, Harriet was dying, her husband Alf, grieving at her bedside, realized he hadn’t said it since the war years. It seemed to make sense back then, less now, though he found a way of saying it again before she died, pleasing her, he felt, by enclosing it, like John, in story: “Hey, do you remember when …?” John’s mother Opal, having like Alf lost the words somewhere, found them again when her grandchildren came along, but discovered within the phrase a heart-wrenching sorrow she’d not noticed before. When she told her friend Kate about this at Harriet’s funeral, which was shortly after Clarissa was born, what Kate said was: “Grief for ourselves is what makes love for others possible. And grievous. Wise love loves only the unchanging. But to love only the changeless and the eternal, Opal, is to love with a cold heart.” It was not exactly to a thing eternal that warmhearted Veronica avowed her love, though Second John could not be said to have changed much since first she said it, and grief, she’d be quick to agree, was part of it. Clarissa, now grown but untaught as yet in grief, had practiced the line over and over, but had yet to find its right moment, though she had in mind a target for it. She and her friend Jennifer often argued about the right time to say it, before or after, Clarissa usually insisting upon it as a statement of intent, otherwise it was just a corny way to say thank you, Jen wanting to know how you could really be sure until afterwards, wasn’t it more like a question before, and so a kind of tease? It was something that the Model said in Ellsworth’s novel-in-progress (if you’d have asked her the question Jennifer asked, she’d have replied: before or after what?), but not the Artist, who felt the integrity and purity of his art threatened by such irrational declarations: her saying so made his vision blur and his hands shake, such that weeks passed (in fictional time) before he felt he could attempt another drawing of her, and then only from behind her shoulder.

For Jennifer’s father, “I love you” was a call from earth to his tripping Trixie, guiding her home again. Though drugs were off the menu since their move into the manse, Beatrice still sometimes, involuntarily, revisited trips from the past, and though these episodes were never (so she said) an unpleasant experience, and could even be, as best she could remember, spiritually enlightening, they were not held by this community of skeptical prairie folk to be in any serious sense visionary, and so complicated at times Reverend Lenny’s ministerial career, even while enlivening his sermons. He would find her, for example, sprawled out in her socks and underpants on the cold linoleum floor of the church basement, her head pillowed perhaps (thanks to some good Christian) by her own cast-off clothing or the cushion from the piano stool, her eyes focused on some distant unnamed galaxy beyond the perforated plasterboard ceiling. He would kneel down beside her, put his mouth by her ear, and whisper to her his incantation of love as though sending a radio signal out into the cosmos, meanwhile thinking: How can I use this on Sunday morning? Thus, his famous “Sleeping Beauty” sermon: God awakening us with his love from life’s deep sleep. And his sermon on the efficacy of prayer: learning to whisper “I love you” into God’s cosmic ear. Sometimes it helped to reach inside her panties and stroke her there, pulling her back to this world by activitating her own magnetic field, as it were, and when she awoke, not knowing how she had got where she was, she would often say that his voice was like a call beyond a distant door, which his fingers were slowly opening. Lenny hadn’t figured out yet how to get finger-fucking into one of his sermons, but he knew it could be done. God was great.

Maynard Junior had said “I love you” in his head over and over, but like Lorraine, out loud only once in his life, and that time to a urinal. This was back at the time of his cousin John’s wedding. His dad was the mayor in those days, and he was then known to the locals as Mayo or Mayor Nerd, and more commonly, as simply the Nerd. Three years away in prelaw at Duke had not changed this. The Nerd was a man, in this town, iconocized and so condemned. As one of John’s groomsmen, Maynard felt obliged to paste a smile on his face that weekend and go along with everything like a good sport, even though he felt wrenched apart inside with fury, bitterness, and grief. During dessert at the rehearsal dinner down at the old Pioneer Hotel, someone made a lighthearted remark about the marriage bed, and the horrific image of his loathsome hairy-assed cousin assaulting the angelic thighs of his beloved, which he had managed to keep repressed all evening, rose suddenly and brought the night’s banquet up with it—he barely had time to lurch away from the table and hurl himself into the men’s room before it all roared out of him like a last violent goodbye. “
I love you!
” he bellowed as he geysered forth, though it was doubtful that the others heard anything but “woof” or “barf.” “The Nerd has very tender sensibilities,” someone was explaining to a roomful of laughter as he returned (even the bride had a smile on her precious face), and his weak damp-eyed rejoinder was, “That’s right, happens to me every time some damn fool gets married.” The party moved from the banquet room into the hotel bar where the drinks were on Uncle Mitch and the bawdy songs and stupid jokes courtesy of John’s drunken frat-rat brothers, the older men and even some of their wives joining in for a while, though most of the ladies understood they were no longer all that welcome. Though Maynard felt, not for the first or last time in his life, like the last frail bastion of sanity in a sickeningly mad world, he joined in as best he could and even contributed a verse to “Roll Your Leg Over” that won him a round of applause, redemption of sorts, though she who mattered was no longer there to witness it:

As the evening wore on, most of the old folks dropped off and, on a signal from Dutch, the men remaining grabbed up all the unemptied bottles and moved on out to a tavern and pool hall at the edge of town, where Dutch had set up poker tables, a bandstand with instruments for those who wanted to jam, and a screen and projector, for which he had rented a dozen old blue movies, or maybe he owned them. The jokes gradually got coarser, the noise louder, the stakes higher, the air thicker, the singing more like shouting. Two guys stripped down and got into a wrestling match, another started playing the drums and cymbals with his penis, the piano with his ass. All Maynard wanted was to go home, and when Dutch and John and a couple of the others tried to sneak away, just as some of the rest were proposing a farting contest, he tried to join them. They obviously didn’t want him along, the clubby bastards, but he insisted, his voice rising to an urgent squawk—he wasn’t going to get fucking left behind! He was nearly crying, and others out there were getting curious about what was going on, so finally, pissed off, they shushed him and gave in. He wished afterwards they hadn’t.

About the same time that helluva goddamn son-of-a-Mitch was slipping out of the Country Tavern with five of his pals for what they were calling “a prayer meeting,” his helluva goddamn father, fresh black stogie in his jowls, was drifting smugly, if somewhat boozily, out of the old Pioneer Hotel, having conducted a little communion service of his own, closing down the bar in there while closing a deal with some of his capitol pals, in town for tomorrow’s wedding, a deal that would route the new proposed highway across some twenty miles of his own land holdings, opening up hundreds of acres out there for development—this area was growing by leaps and bounds, and God bless the bounder who leapt first, amen. Mitch foresaw that the rest of his life would be spent in this enterprise and those that would follow naturally thereupon, and he was proud of it. What were the fucking pioneers themselves, after all, but early land developers? He was taking his place in the great national epic, and he felt like a goddamned hero, a saint, a giant among pygmies. He was feeling “high,” as the young folks liked to say nowadays (and he wasn’t so old himself, goddamn it), high and dry, too much so certainly to turn in just yet. His wife Opal was home already, driven there earlier by the bride’s parents, as were most of the locals past the age of twenty-five or so, and the younger ones were all out at the Country Tavern or else at parties of their own, so the prospect facing this giant among pygmies, standing legs apart out there on the sidewalk in front of the darkening Pioneer Hotel and weaving just a bit, was one of solitude and impenetrable shadows and deep tranquillity. In short, no fun at all. It was at moments like this that Mitch missed the big city. Always somewhere to go, something to do, someone to get to know, in a Biblical manner of speaking. Nothing doing here even if something
was
doing: to wit, his old maxims about taking your trade out of town, sowing wild oats in distant fields, keeping hair pie off the local menu, and so on, all of which Mitch equated with family values, which he vigorously championed and rigorously (more or less rigorously) adhered to, as he planned to now, unsteady though he was. He considered taking a quiet midnight stroll in the park, still lit up across the way with its old-fashioned postlamps, get his feet back under him, as it were, but he remembered he was carrying a lot of weekend cash in his pocket. This was the sort of town where you could park your car (it was John’s little souped-up silver Mustang awaiting him, he saw, John had taken the Continental for the night) with the motor running, leave your house wide open when you left town for a week, drop your wallet in the street and get it back intact, always had been since it first got settled over a hundred years ago, but times were changing, and there were a lot of strangers in town now. Besides, he might interrupt something over there, a kiddy orgy under the bandstand or crazed drug addicts in the bushes, he’d heard rumors. That was why they were beefing up the police force. Ever since they had found what they said was an illegal substance in the car of those kids who got killed playing chicken on the highway out by the trailer park. It was a fucking shame the way families were falling apart these days, failing their responsibilities, Mitch thought, unlocking the Mustang and stumbling a bit as he struggled with the door. Couldn’t remember walking over to the car, but here he was. He took a deep pull on his cigar, blew smoke up at the flickering streetlamp overhead, getting his bearings, then lowered himself inside. Fucking bucket seats. Got one leg in all right, had problems with the second one. Whoo, felt like he was grappling with some kind of prehistoric beast (“Bucking fuck-it seats!” he said out loud to the night crowding around him, hoping to make it back away a bit), or else he’d grown the leg of an elephant, and he suffered a sudden pang of longing for his beautiful old prewar Packard, the one with the running board. He could crawl in and out of that fantastic machine when he was so drunk he couldn’t walk, and whether or not the goddamned thing was standing still. The trouble today, he thought, as he dragged the rest of him in out of the menacing night at last, hauled the door shut with an echoey whump (that reassuring running board on his old Packard had somehow reminded him once more of family values), and then fumbled, grunting, for the keys which he’d dropped on the floor, was that there was too much self-centeredness, not enough thought for the other guy, and especially the young. What the hell was happening to this country? If Mitch had his way, every time a kid got in trouble, he’d clap his old man’s ass in jail until it was sorted out. Teach the egocentric sonuvabitch a little goddamned civic virtue. Something Mitch (there they were—but where was the cigar? Jesus) would never have to face: his boy was a fucking prince. Had a wild hair or two, of course, wouldn’t be Mitch’s son if he didn’t, but John was a great kid, straight as they come. And now, hell (he found the cigar, scuffed at the sparks on the floor with the clutched keys, planted the dead stub back in his jowls, straightened up confusedly: felt like he’d fallen down a well somewhere), the boy was getting married, hard to believe. It was like things were speeding up somehow, how did we get here so fucking fast? Next thing you knew, he’d be a grandfather, and then … shit… But not yet. Not yet, goddamn it. Mitch turned the ignition, revved up from a gentle purr to a low growl, and pulled out into the lonely night, jaws clamped defiantly around the cigar. Not yet! He was glad to see John marry, of course (that’s right, dumbo, turn on the damned lights), and a good choice, lovely girl, Audrey’s kid, Homecoming Queen and all that, and he believed marriage would help John understand him better, help him appreciate his old dad’s steadfast whaddayacallit, forgive him his trespasses. So, yes, he was in a celebrative mood all round, Mitch was, and he realized that, in this mood (he was thinking about Audrey, the old prewar Packard-vintage model, so wild and beautiful—and now they were to be in-laws, who could have foreseen such a thing?), he was headed out toward the stag party at the Country Tavern. Now, he knew the last thing those young studs wanted was some old fucker hanging around, looking over their shoulders, he’d been the first to point that out to his peers when the lads took off from the hotel hours earlier, he had no intention of going out there, hell no, won’t go, and yet, here he was, the nose of the silvery beast (he tapped the accelerator and felt it spring forward with a throaty snarl) pointed unerringly toward that place like a well-trained birddog with a bone-on and getting up speed. Well, what the heck, wouldn’t hurt to drop in for a beer, unload a joke or two, let them know he was one of the boys at heart, a good guy they could count on in the clutches, then buy them a final round and, duty beckoning the lonely hero, roar off, chin up, into the melancholic night.