John's Wife: A Novel (33 page)

The bed was for some in town a playground, as it was for newcomers Rex and Nevada when not a platform for their business ventures; it was a platform of sorts for Gordon the photographer as well, an artistic prop like a chair, a bathtub, the street, while for his friend Ellsworth it was more like a patch of meadow in the tangled forest of his creative imagination (the Artist had his hand on the Model’s thigh again, lecturing the sardonic Stalker, hovering, unseen, nearby, on the higher morality of aesthetic truth); for many, like oldtimers Marge or Otis, the bed was simply a place to get some shut-eye; but for some it was nothing short of the rack, sheer hell on sheets. Try telling Veronica, for example, that sex was fun. It had a certain tickle, all right, but it was more like terminal athlete’s foot. Or hemorrhoids, more aptly, given her dearly beloved’s brutish fancies. For whom, the middle Maynard, no joy either. More like prosecuting a tough case, proving he could still do it, even if he hated it. Contrarily, Gretchen and Columbia, who were otherwise finding the town a bit shaky for them of late, were having a grand time there, playing with vibrators, ointments, penis extenders, and condoms, ribbed or pimpled, some even with ears and noses and little Martian antennae on them, which Gretchen had ordered through catalogues that arrived at the pharmacy and which kept them giggling throughout their evening recreation time, which was strictly limited, since they were both working women. Not that it was all just idle frolic, it was also quite educational, Columbia learning at last how men really worked when she took her turn strapping on a clear plastic penis with its inner anatomy showing through in bright colors and had a go for herself. For Alf, nurse Lumby’s dyspeptic boss and deliverer of Gretchen’s brood (an unusual case: he had to break her hymen to get the first ones out), a bed was where most people went to die, he attended them there and watched them go, his own true heart among them, and living alone now, he often avoided his own, wandering the streets at night or dropping off on the living room couch during consolingly banal TV reruns, pap against the dread. Even when Harriet was alive and they were still copulating (it was fun, they’d got a kick out of it for a while, in spite of their overawareness of its mechanics, but came quickly to think of it as kid stuff, and after the babies were born, turned to it only when in goofier moods, most often drunk or with others), they preferred any private place, in or out of the house, to the dreary bed, Harriet even more blunt than Alf about “crawling into the coffin” at night. “I’m pooped, I’m dead,” she’d say, leaving a party. “I’m going to go put the meat in the cooler before it goes off.” At a foreign-made piece of erotic fluff in the old Palace Theater one night, during a soft-focus view from the ceiling of lovers on a bed, the old army nurse had provoked an auditoriumful of irritable shushing by remarking, too loudly, that whenever she looked down on a bed like that, all she could think about was torn limbs, Alf adding laconically to turn the shushes to self-conscious laughter that he couldn’t be sure because of the fuzzy camera work, but he thought the actress (fuzzy camera work was his problem now: hard as he stared at his finger—there was a message on its tip, he knew, something about a patient: what was it?—he couldn’t bring it into focus) had a thyroid problem and recommended she get a checkup. Kate, who was there that night with Oxford, sitting beside them, and who in general had a benign view of beds (though, in the end, when it came, she refused to retire to one), pointed out that the white-sheeted bed viewed at that angle was a kind of screen-within-a-screen and that consequently the coupled lovers were not merely actors in a movie and thus nothing more than the ghostly illusions of a flickering light, but they were actors
playing
actors, and so had doubly lost their substance, as though to say that love itself was such an emptying out of emptiness, Oxford replying: “Or such a luminous density of layered sensations,” all of which was making the younger crowd in the theater wish these old farts, long past a good time, would shut up and stop spoiling it for others. Dutch had booked that film, the bed as theater being his own preferred use of that ubiquitous piece of furniture: gave him his jollies without aggravation or anxieties and no strings after. He missed the old Palace with its big screen and high ceilings, appreciating in his own way the remark Waldo had made recently during one of his motel junkie-fucks that the beds he kept crawling into seemed to be drifting farther and farther away from the center as though that center were somehow getting lost, fading from view, the emaciated kid with him replying that she didn’t know there ever was a center. “Sounds like you’re on some kinda guilt trip, man.” “Naw … haw!” For Floyd the hardware man, the bed was also a theater of sorts. He liked to take John’s wife there, grab her by the hair, tie her to the bedposts, and whip her with his red suspenders, which he called his “cat.” Then she’d moan and toss her head about and beg him to make love to her or kill her, she couldn’t stand the passion welling up in her. He’d let her kiss and suck at his johnnie, chastising her all the while with his whistling cat. Then she’d belch, and he’d do what he could to have some kind of orgasm, and get off. He tried to imagine whipping Edna with his suspenders, but it seemed incredibly silly.

Why did Edna belch whenever she engaged in what a boy once called, inviting her to one, a mattress dance? She couldn’t rightly say, it just came like that when she did, if coming was what she truly did (for Edna, it was more like being very nervous about something, and then suddenly, blissfully, not being nervous anymore: she always popped straight off afterwards without so much as a blink), but it probably had something to do with her stepmother’s stern admonition that burping was the most wicked thing a body could do: just letting go like that, they lord, not giving a care. Maybe she was really talking about letting go out the other end, not being able to bring herself to say the word for that, but ever since, whenever Edna felt crazily reckless, like when a person had his thing in her, for example, up came the burps. Her stepmother also told her, on her wedding day, “I don’t know how you’re gonna cotton to what comes next, Edna, but wither you love it nor hate it, it won’t last long. When the lollygagging’s over, then love—if there sincerely be any—will come at you looking like something else again. If you recognize it and show you’re grateful for it, however contrary it is from what you’re customed to, then you’ll have love in all ways passable in this world of the mortal body, but if you get bitter about what you’ve lost, and losing is mostly what you’ll know, then, sure as you’re born to die, Edna, love’ll just dry up, and you’ll be left standing nekkid in the cold without nothing to keep your heart from freezing up and cracking on the spot.” Her stepmom did have a way with words. That “cracked heart” notion, which was associated in her mind with one winter so fearsome cold the windowpanes splintered, still caused Edna shortness of breath and made her press her hand to her breast to cozy it whenever she recalled it to mind. As to Edna’s views on beds, they were of a strictly practical sort, having to do with price and sturdiness of construction, the firmness of the innersprings, and how easy it was to keep the headboards clean and change the linens, which on Edna’s bed were mostly plain cotton (one color percale set for holidays), neatly covered with washable spreads and blankets, and always made up, first thing after breakfast. Fixing the bed up proper every morning was not just a housewifely habit. It was what most helped Edna to get on with each day, what with all the troubles Floyd got into through the years, the peculiar ways he had sometimes, not always nice, the loneliness she felt in this town, and the strange things happening in it of late. Strange things? Well, for example, there was the night their old friend Stu called, must have been about two in the morning, hadn’t heard from him in a month of Sundays, and he was blubbering something about seeing Winnie’s ghost. Of course, he was so besotted you couldn’t hardly understand him, maybe he was just trying to tell one of his jokes, and he surely didn’t remember it next day when Floyd took the car in to have the brakes relined, probably just an old drunk’s nightmare, Floyd said, but it was mighty peculiar all the same. And then they say that little boy who’s missing ran away, afraid of something terrible, but his parents won’t even admit he’s gone, like they know more than they can tell, or done something wrong they can’t admit to, she heard folks gabbing about it at the checkout line in the supermarket. And had anyone seen the photographer’s wife lately? someone asked. Edna hadn’t and so did not know what that was about, though the expression on people’s faces suggested that this was probably a story which went back aways, before hers and Floyd’s time here, and so rightly belonged to them but not to her, and so she wouldn’t know what to ask. Anyways, she was no gossip, though whether because of principles or shyness, she could not directly say, but if she were, she would have asked them, well, and what about John’s wife? Since that vexing night at the bridge table, Edna had seen her only once, setting with her children at church, wearing a red hat. But then she wasn’t setting with her children. She was singing in the choir. And no hat on neither. Edna thought she must have winked off for a moment without taking notice. She recognized that she was staring and from the choir John’s wife was staring back. Right smack into her eyes. First time she’d ever done that when she wasn’t just doling charity. Edna ducked her head and prayed for guidance, too flustered to look again. After the service, she stood around outside until Floyd got too antsy, but she never saw her come out and she hadn’t seen her since. Was she gone out of town? Or …or something else? It perplexed her deeply, like all the rest happening here of late, but Edna reckoned there were some things in this world she wasn’t meant to understand; she made the bed. She tucked the corners of the sheets and blankets neatly, fluffed the pillows, laid the pretty chenille spread with its pale blue tassels, and placed embroidered pillows on top of the sleeping ones, and when she was done, it was like a pretty little box with the lid on, her answer to her stepmother’s worries about “letting go.” Edna never burped in public.

That was one of Beans’s famous numbers. Good old Beans! Haw! Especially at the dinner table. You could count on him ripping one on nights (strange things going on in town? Waldo hadn’t noticed; strangest thing he’d seen was a greasy lug wrench tangled in black silk panties at the foot of the motel bed he used sometimes; he had passed it on to old Stu a night or so ago at the country club, asking if he could use it, and Stu said, sure he could, it was his, and they both elbowed each other and had a big laugh: you dirty dog!) when the fraternity had special guests like a rich alumnus or the dean of women, most often just when someone was about to make a speech, Waldo himself a frequent victim: “Now, brothers, we should all feel free to say exactly what we think.”
Wurrrr-RRP!
It was that or else honking his nose in a filthy rag if not the tablecloth itself or letting a thunderous fart, Beans won all the farting contests, too. The Wind Machine. Foghorn. Beans hated all ceremony—“People not acting like people,” he’d say, eructating consummately for emphasis—and his vulgar gestures, which he called “elocutionary,” were all meant, quite simply, to let the hot air out. Waldo sometimes imitated him, even to this day, much to the annoyance of Lorraine, who now crawled into bed beside him, and often as not to that purpose. Beans was a funny guy. He was adept at falling down stairs or off chairs, often grabbing, as though desperately, at some girl’s skirt as he fell, and he carried stickers around with him saying things like
EAT ME
and
BACK OFF!
I JUST CUT THE CHEESE!
to slap on the backs of professors, BMOCs, and housemothers. He always kept a shirt at the bottom of the laundry basket for anyone who came in asking to borrow one for a big date, and he sometimes wore it himself to crowded classes or sorority parties, you couldn’t get within a mile of him. At an all-university symposium, hosted by the dean of students, on the topic of what his fraternity brothers knew as tomcatting and the rest of the world called rape, Beans turned up with a couple of old prosthetic limbs (or maybe they came off an amputeed mannequin) tucked into a sleeve and a pantleg, his limbs doubled away inside his clothes, and when some gangly man-eater started railing madly against what she called geeks and frat-brats, Beans leaned toward the audience and made an impassioned confession, colorfully detailed, of all his sins against womankind (back at the house, it became known as “Brother Beans’s Hymenbuster Address”), concluding with a promise to clap his offending organ in red-hot irons if it did not mind its p’s, q’s, and arse when appearing in public. “Just the same, hot stuff,” he added, turning to the rabid fraternophobe (could this have been Marge? Waldo wasn’t sure, but she was up there at State at the same time, politically gadflying as usual, though he didn’t know her then, not his field; which was, in a word, partying; in turn, not Marge’s), “I’d give an arm and a leg to get into your pants!” Whereupon, he ripped his leg out from his trousers, his arm from his shirt, and tossed them across the stage at the woman who looked like she was about to shit a brick from purple rage and terror. Applause, laughter, boos, and for beamish Beans another semester on probation, which he understood as his natural lot, prospering therein. At the reception party before John’s wedding, Beans got up and proposed a toast to the families of the bride and groom with his fly gaping, one of his favorite gags and always good for laughs, because even if you were in on it, the fun then was watching the others trying to decide where to look or how to get him to sit down. “Now, I want to be completely open about my true feelings here,” he would slur drunkenly, bending forward so as to spread the zippered doors more widely agape. “We are always so buttoned up about how we feel about one another. What’s there to hide? Nothing! Or almost nothing. So tonight, and especially for all you ladies, I’m going to reveal something I’ve never revealed before …” He was a riot out at the stag party, too, a one-man band, using all his appendages, even his prick and his nose and not excluding his butt, for percussion, himself as a wind instrument, or, rather, a whole wind section. Waldo could hardly wait to see what stunt he’d pull at the wedding itself, but, best he could remember, he never showed up. Too hungover maybe, or maybe John, for his own sake, or his bride’s, had him stowed away somewhere. Dear old Brother Beans. Hadn’t seen him since. Loved that sucker once. Now it was like he never was. Feeling sentimental, Waldo rolled over on his side and, nighty-nighting Lollie, popped a three-stage cracker in memory of his long-lost fraternity brother and of bygone days. Life, my love: funniest, saddest circus in town.