John's Wife: A Novel (20 page)

This was Rex. He’d blown into town a year or so earlier with Nevada, and it was true, as Maynard supposed, he’d worked for John for a time, sitting in as an apprentice joiner with John’s construction company, then driving a truck for the lumberyard for a while. John had taken a liking to him, or so it seemed, soon moving him out to his private airport as a kind of janitor and handyman, not the worst gig Rex had ever had. John met a lot of women out at that airport, Nevada among them, and Rex had the idea he staffed the place with trusties who kept their traps shut about his fucking around. Okay by him. Though he was no pimp, Rex was cool about Nevada’s operations, she had what she had, her own bod her ax, and she did what she could with it, professional as a dentist or a computer programmer, he respected that and helped her unwind when she came back from one of her hustles, all stained and rumpled and wired from the tension of it. She needed him then, or said she did, and so she took him along with her wherever she went, and he needed that, needed the needing, it got him up like nothing else did, except maybe a wailing horn, and made more bearable what he’d come to call the daily grunt, stealing the line from somewhere, a tabloid or a music mag probably, the least of his thefts. So being in the neighborhood when an old guy nearly twice his age was punching out his woman didn’t bother him, far from it—go to it, kid, pump the sucker dry, then come on home and lay your weary little chassis next to mine—no, what burned Rex’s ass was the way John yelled at him one day when he caught him tinkering around inside one of his private planes. Wasn’t even trying to steal anything, just trying to see how the fucking thing worked, trying to improve himself, as you might say, no call for John to get on his high horse like that, bawling him out and swatting at him with a rolled-up operator’s manual when he crawled down out of there, like you’d do to a dog that had just shat on your rug. Right in front of old Snuffy the schnozz, Rex’s windbag boss, and a bunch of the other dudes, grinning like fucking monkeys with grease guns up their butts. So then Rex did steal something after all: he copped some keys. And gave John the finger, went off to work as a mechanic in Stu’s Ford garage, where he soon found himself servicing more than the old juicehead’s cars.

That airport was John’s own special baby, literally his pride and joy, loved more than his offspring, no surprise he was touchy about it. It was the first thing he ever built on his own without Barnaby interfering, just a cleared sod strip on a piece of his dad’s land at first, not far from the new highway then being built, an arc of corrugated roofing tin added to an old collapsing barn for a hangar and a couple of construction trailers parked about, but as beautiful as anything he’d ever made before or since. Bruce had taken him up for the first time in his own Piper Cherokee a year or so before and, in midair, had handed him the controls, and John had experienced a rush unlike anything he’d ever felt before. This was on a visit to his old friend and fraternity brother up in the city, ostensibly a business trip, their first weekend together since John’s recent wedding, and though Bruce had laid on a lot of entertainments, including a crazy party at the mansion of a young porno entrepreneur, featuring a glass-walled bar below pool level with naked nymphets swimming by, a hot new British band out on the terrace, and a contortionist in the upstairs lounge who could lie on her back, put her knees by her ears, and finger a tune on a flute blown by her ass while smoking a cigarette with her cunt, nothing could top that morning in the air. By the time of Bruce’s first marriage a few months later, John had his first plane, a Sky-hawk bought secondhand with Bruce’s advice, Bruce joking that since he’d bought a secondhand bride with John’s advice, their consultancy fees canceled each other out, and so John and his wife were able to fly up to the wedding, Audrey and Barnaby fit to be tied of course, their only daughter put at such risk, John telling them not to worry, he’d stay out of the war zone. He wanted to fly all the way to Paris for their second honeymoon not long after that, but Audrey nixed it, buying him off with money for an electricity generator for the airstrip and a proper hangar with a paved apron. Over the years, she herself began to fly with him, and liked it, even took some lessons before she died, though she continued to beg John to leave her daughter on the ground.

Gordon had one photo of John’s wife taken at the airport, long ago, a chance opportunity. He’d thought, on the day, he’d got more, but when the developing was done, one was all he had. He had gone out there on a routine
Crier
assignment from Ellsworth to get shots of the new generator and the laying of the concrete foundations for the hangar being built, John agreeing to meet him there at noon to show him about. Ellsworth was giving him a lot of work for little pay in those days, but he was an old friend and Gordon did not complain. Must have been mid-February or so, the fields barren, but the day bright enough and not too cold. Not much to shoot at, even for a man who favored bleak abstractions, the new airport just another ugly scratch in a much-scarred landscape, but the occasion turned out to be a family event of sorts, Barnaby the only in-law missing, Mitch with a chewed-up unlit black cigar in his jowls, strolling about with his thumbs in his belt, admiring the premises, Opal and Audrey hovering maternally around John’s wife, heavy then with her first child, and Gordon was able to convince them that a kind of family portrait out there in front of John’s plane was in order. John’s wife protested shyly, placing her hands lightly on her belly as though restraining a balloon about to fly away (Gordon, to his deep regret, did not get this photo, his unloaded camera hanging heavily at his side), but all the grandparents-to-be laughed her protests away, insisting they’d never seen her more beautiful. Indeed, she was almost childlike in her beauty, Gordon thought, though perhaps he was only seeing in her the beautiful child he once knew and, back in those days as a tagalong at the games his schoolpal Ellsworth played with her, drew. Once, somewhat frivolously, with a pregnant tummy, a secret sketch. There was a young man helping John with the hangar construction, a greasy-haired beer-bellied fellow famous for his Saturday night binges called Norbert or Norman, who got drafted not long after, went into the army engineers and stayed in, never looked back, gone like so many from this town for good, and together he and John rolled the plane out of the old hangar, which was little more than a tin canopy attached to an ancient gray barn whose roof was caving in (piece of history, that barn, gone three weeks later), and moved it over beside the new hangar-to-be’s freshly spread concrete floor, still too wet to walk on. (Audrey had got them all to leave their handprints in the fresh cement, another photo Gordon had missed, having arrived too late, though he did photograph the handprint, the one he believed to be hers, many times over.) Gordon set about lining them up beneath one sleek white wing, worried a bit about the possible glare from the slanting sun off the shiny fuselage and trying to coax John’s wife out from behind the others. He’d just got something like the pose he wanted when the whole session was interrupted by another airplane swooping by, a racier model, wagging its strutless wings, then circling around for a landing, everyone in John’s party laughing and running out onto the packed-dirt airstrip to meet it, Gordon left with no one to photograph except the greasy-haired assistant, who stood alone beside the tail smirking stupidly. The new arrival, stepping dashingly out of his plane with a fistful of champagne bottles and a picnic basket, was one of John’s rowdy university friends, Gordon recognized him from the wedding. He also had a woman with him who, unlike John’s wife, wanted to be, front and center, in every photo Gordon tried to take, such that in the one photo he managed to get of John and his wife, there she was, throwing her arms around John and kicking one leg back, flapper-style, John’s wife a shadowy blur, vaguely smiling, behind her. Later, John and his friend went up for a spin with the young woman, John’s expectant wife declining, at the rather sharp bidding of her mother, the invitation to join them, giving Gordon hope that he might have her alone to his lens at last. But while, at their whooping insistence, he was photographing the three young people clambering up into the plane, the friend’s hand playfully cupping the woman’s behind, her mouth in a theatrical
O
, eyebrows bobbing and eyes crossed, the other two laughing back over their shoulders and waving champagne bottles at Gordon, the rest of the party made their exit: all he saw when he turned around was Mitch’s car pulling up off the dirt shoulder onto the road into town. Well. His camera was loaded. He photographed the barn. The handprints in the wet cement.

In the end, Ellsworth printed one of the barn photos: “
UNSIGHTLY LANDMARK TO VANISH SOON.
” But in the photo it was not unsightly. Gordon’s lens had so intimately caressed the structure’s ancient decrepitude one felt a compelling attachment to it, as though only now, in the fullest realization of its potential for rot and purposelessness, had it achieved its true beauty, its true meaning. The ruined barn lay, agonizing, against the white sky, Ellsworth realized with horror and fascination, like a dying body on a bed, like Gordon’s own mother, her mind long gone, empty as the loft of that dusty old barn, dying alone in her room above the photo shop that early spring under the steady morose gaze of Gordon’s cameras and lamps, the very reason Ellsworth was trying to keep his friend busy and out of the studio so much of the time. Ellsworth did not understand these photos Gordon was taking of his mother, now little more than a pathetic defecating vegetable. Gordon’s father had died in the war, she had raised him, had been all Gordon had of family. “Didn’t you love her?” he would ask. He remembered how, timidly, she would interrupt their play with cold milk and a tray of cookies, freshly baked. “Of course I loved her. I still do.” Gordon was photographing the poor addled creature, head to foot, back to front, over and over again through the months and days of her progressive decline, contorting her shriveled limbs into bizarre attitudes as though in bitter mockery of the classic poses (he insisted no mockery of any kind was intended), but focusing mostly on her collapsing face, her gaping mouth, her blankly staring eyes. Ellsworth had sat through one of these sessions, but only one, he could take no more. The theme of the day seemed to be armpits. His own, as he watched his ponderous friend, eye locked to viewfinder, bear relentlessly down, felt moldy and perishable. The woman was diapered and her legs were covered with a sheet, so at least he didn’t have to look at the bottom part, what he saw was sickening enough. Her breathing was shallow and raspy, punctuated by little snorts and grunts, but apparently unrelated to the awkward posturings her son was subjecting her to, just little mechanical tics and toes, like the creaks and knocks one heard in an old house. Or an old barn. Ellsworth proudly eschewed the moral position in art and life alike, especially around Gordon, so he could not openly say what was truly disturbing him, could not even admit it wholly to himself, and instead deflected his acute distress into an argument about artistic principles. This, damn it, was not beautiful. “Maybe not,” shrugged Gordon, framing armpit, chin, and nostrils, one shrunken breast, “but it might be. And if it can’t be, then beauty can’t be either. That’s all. Now do me a favor, Ell, and hold her arm up beside her cheek like this, see—come on, just take hold of the wrist here and hold it straight up, so that—Ell—? Where are you going?”

These photos, taken some time before she had met her photographer husband, were among those Pauline showed to Otis many years later, long after her own first modeling experience and Duwayne’s ruckus and arrest and her marriage, long after their periodic visits to the old trailer that followed over the years like a strange recurrent dream, interrupted finally by the death of the car dealer’s wife and Otis’s solemn promise to the Virgin, a promise he managed to keep for over three years, and then did not really break, not at first anyway, he and Pauline becoming friends again but only that, meeting for coffee now and then, enjoying relaxed comfortable chats like an old couple who had got used to each other. Otis was vaguely tempted at times maybe, his cock stirring faintly inside his stiff gray gabardines as though it had a memory of its own, a wayward thought it was trying fitfully to express, but he was able to keep things under control, and anyway Pauline, pushing thirty, was not quite the looker she used to be, especially in the midmorning glare coming through the plateglass window of the old Sixth Street Cafe, where they usually sat. No, he now saw Pauline from time to time, but he could still look the Virgin in the eye. Pauline had told him a lot of stories during these talks, some pretty disturbing ones, given the kind of life she’d had, poor kid, one in particular about the night before John’s wedding, back when Otis was away at war, that Otis didn’t know whether he should believe or not, and she had mentioned the photos several times before Otis finally realized that there was something about them that frightened her, a woman not easily frightened, and that he should maybe have a look. So, one morning when Gordon was busy all day at the high school taking senior class portraits, Pauline led Otis into the back of the shop and opened up the locked cabinets. There were hundreds of albums back there, an amazing sight (of course, he was a dogged fellow, her husband, turning up everywhere with his shoulderbag of fancy gear and rolls upon rolls of film, and he’d been at it for a quarter of a century, after all), but she went straight for the ones she wanted him to see. The pornographic photographs of the naked old lady Pauline showed him were pretty disgusting, all right, especially when Otis realized that the old thing was still more or less alive and must have been posing for that fruitcake, or been made to, but they were not, by themselves, what had upset Pauline. Pauline had told him about Gordon’s early photo sessions with her, how she had explained what she wanted but how Gordon didn’t seem to hear, how he wouldn’t even let her take her clothes off at first, but insisted on shooting nothing but her face, and how she had to admit later he had found a kind of quizzical beauty on a face she had never been all that proud of, but then how he had slowly begun to undress her, literally ripping her summer frock off strip by strip at first, as though unwrapping a present or peeling an apple (what she was worried about at the time, she said, was how she was going to get home after, and what Daddy Duwayne would say when he saw her), making her put some underwear on when he reached that part—she had come without any, but he had found an old yellowed bra somewhere, a petticoat, and some of those thick silky panties from the war years you sometimes saw at a rummage sale—and then working these things off her, inch by inch, photographing every step of the strip from every angle, favoring the close-up of course, yet never touching her, just
pah-click, pah-click, pah-click
with that camera until she had begun to feel something crawling over her, a real physical presence of some kind sliding over her body, exciting in a way, but scary too, and then how he had begun posing her on a bed in a room upstairs in all these odd positions, getting around at last, or so she thought, to those photos she had come asking him for in the first place, yet somehow not as sexy as she had hoped, weird even sometimes, like when he shot up into her nostrils or focused on her feet or on her Sodom-and-Gomorrah or her armpits. Now she showed Otis those photos, mostly huge blowups that turned her body into a kind of vast rolling landscape, gigantic in scale yet minute in its details, distant and dreamy as desert dunes yet intimate as a pubic freckle, a wet nipple, an anal pucker. And the point was, they were, many of them, exact positional replicas of his photos of the old lady. It was spooky. It was as though, you know, as though … But Otis by now was only half listening. He could not get his eyes off the giant enlargements of Pauline’s intimate parts. It was like some kind of magical voyage. He felt transported back to his childhood, until this moment all but forgotten, and to the stories of Merlin and Buck Rogers from the comicbooks, Sinbad and Plastic Man. So, when Pauline unzipped him, Otis knew he’d have to let the Virgin down.