John's Wife: A Novel (34 page)

Funny maybe. Sad certainly. But off the wall sometimes as well, her own freak show exhibit one. What more Lorraine knew about strange goings-on than did her corkhead hubby was that people were having trouble these days keeping John’s bride, so long in the middle of things here, within their field of vision. She sort of was there, like always, and she sort of wasn’t. At least that was what Lollie was picking up around town—picking up, that is, as in picking up a radio station when spinning the dial or punching the scan button. No one was
talking
about John’s wife’s tendency these days to come and go without actually coming or going, almost as though to mention it might bring bad luck, some sort of taboo or something, but they were thinking a lot about her and it, and of late, ever since that weird night at the club when Maynard had barked out his love inside her head, Lorraine had found herself, though she didn’t know why and on the whole didn’t like it, increasingly privy to their unspoken speculations. Which at first she’d thought
were
being spoken, making the mistake of asking, “What? Beg your pardon?” and getting sharp squinty gazes in return, irritable thought-motes sifting through that were anything but generous toward her person. Not that she was served much better when she kept her mouth shut. Some things you just didn’t want to know. That line about wishing to see ourselves as others see us was a crock of shit. So fearful was Lorraine of what her last best friend Marge might really think of her, in fact, she’d been avoiding her recently, even though Marge had called her twice now to tell her she was making a very big decision and she needed—
please!
—Lorraine’s help, but she did run into her milquetoast husband out at the country club one afternoon when Marge was out on the course, and learned, tuning in while he stared absently out at the practice green, that, one, watching John’s wife walk her clubs to the first tee a while ago, Trevor had been able to see only isolated bodily parts shifting along, never the whole person, and, two, her point on his “action aerialgraphs” (had Lorraine heard him right?) had vanished altogether, whatever that meant. Stopping in at the little downtown drugstore for her summer supply of antifungal cream and foot powder, Band-Aids, calamine and sunburn lotion, antibiotic ointment, bug spray, antacids, moisturizing cream, and an over-the-counter hemorrhoid treatment that Lorraine hoped the crippled pharmacist in there with the Coke-bottle lenses who always looked like she had a cob up her ass would think was for Waldo (she did), she overheard, so to speak, an account of how someone (had to be John’s wife from what she could “see” of her) came in earlier, stepped up onto the old penny weighing machine Oxford had installed in there half a century ago, and then, more or less abruptly, wasn’t there anymore—but the machine still registered her weight as though she were. This was supposedly similar to something that had happened when she “lumbered into the doctor’s office”(?) a few days ago. Certainly old Alf seemed worried about her (there was a squishy tactile image that meant nothing to Lollie, though it made her shudder when she flashed on it, or it on her, a night ago out at the club), the police chief did, the woman’s hairdresser, her odd son’s teacher likewise. Beatrice had a story about her from church choir practice (Lorraine could hear her thin and thinning voice, but could not see her, not quite aware that this was also Beatrice’s own sensation), though it only leaked in fragments through Trixie’s overwhelming preoccupation these days with the unfathomable mystery of her pregnancy, which Lorraine gathered was more than mere uncertainty about who the father might be. And so on around town, Veronica, Daphne, even John’s mother, a pattern emerging, fading, reassembling itself, much like the subject of that pattern herself. But what to make of it? Lollie didn’t know, knew even less what to make of this newfound gift of hers, call it that, more like a collapse of some part of her immune system, in truth, and capable, she knew, of driving her batty. Did she truly want to know about Brother Beans’s obnoxious performance at a stag party eighteen years ago? No, she did not. Her boys had got into a fight at bedtime and, breaking it up, she’d discovered she knew everything that was boiling up in their hateful little minds, including their intimate loathing of her just at that moment, thanks a lot, guys. Too much. Peace, please. And, so beseeching, Lollie had quietly slipped into bed beside her dreamless spouse, who, having saluted her fulsomely from beneath his big tent, now snored peacefully beside her (nothing but utter darkness there when she turned in—damn him for his unearned peace of mind!), wishing she’d brought some matches to bed with her so that she might light up one of his salutes and give his butt something to think about even if he remained impenetrable between the eats.

Fire! The forest is on fire! Oh my God!
All is lost!
Where’s my—? No, no, the Artist (author) was just dreaming, it’s all right, calm down, get a drink of water. Ellsworth staggered from cot to sink and ran the cold tap full blast as though to douse the still vivid flames, his heart pounding. It was so
real!
The Artist, too, terrified, his heart pounding, lying there on the riverbank where he’s thrown himself: he plunges his head in the water (the whole damned forest was ablaze!), thinking: The Stalker’s not the truly dangerous one. I am. He stroked his face. In the dull silvered mirror over the sink, Ellsworth saw the suffering writer, eyes hollow and cheeks unshaven, thready hair unwashed and tangled, and he was reassured. What day was it? Night, rather. He didn’t know. Next issue of the
Crier
probably due. Or overdue. He’d rerun an old one. Remember when. What did it matter, always the same news anyway, they’d probably not even notice. Well, the new brides would. The newly promoted and the newly bereaved, damn their black relentless souls, their pride of names. And there was the one-man mayoral race, heading into its silly season now with Pioneers Day just around the corner, and pool hours to be announced, Little League box scores, the repaving of Sixth Street to report. Now Ellsworth saw the abused writer above his sink, the unappreciated one, the one forced to hack out his miserable worldly pittance at the expense of his art, a more tragic character than the suffering one, though not as appealing. He gave the abused writer a sympathetic nod, the suffering one an ironic smile, turned to his old painted kitchen table whereon his gathering opus lay, and saw in an instant that the Model had vanished. This was the meaning of the dream of raging fire, and the panic it had stirred in the Artist’s heart. Had he really wished to destroy it all? Just because she’d—because she wasn’t—because he can’t find her? But she might still be here, after all, just hiding, playing a game, as in the old days. There were old days? He hadn’t thought about them, but probably there were. Now the Artist rolls over on his back, there at the bank of the dark glittering river where he’s flung himself, and he sweeps the wet hair out of his face, gazes up through the branches of his forest at the vast and vaulted sky above, where all is nameless and nothing is. His fate without her. Perhaps she’s vanished to remind him that there
were
old days, that there is an ancient bond between them that he, in his intransigent pursuit of beauty, has tended to forget, or ignore, and that he must recover these lost connections, these buried feelings, if he is to plumb his true creative depths. That’s assuming the child left freely, of course, and on her own. He holds his breath and listens for the Stalker’s vile laughter. His insinuating wheeze, his sinister steps, any sign would do. Silence. A terrible emptiness all around. He seems to remember now her desperate cries, muffled by a ruthless hand clapped to her tender mouth, her bare limbs flailing through the undergrowth. What then? Well, he must rescue her! His art depends on it! The Artist lies sprawled on his back by the rippling stream under the scattered stars, considering the heroics that face him on the morrow and contemplating meanwhile, as he prepares to drift off for a bit so as to refresh himself for the coming ordeal, the unspeakable things the blackhearted Stalker is no doubt doing now with and to the captured child. Ah! No! The villain …!

Who, in this town and on this night, might by most be held to be Maynard II, alias the Nerd, he whose unremitting acrimony concealed a single kernel of burning love like a kidney stone that would not pass, and who, presently, found himself reliving old days and bitter bonds, unearthing rages best left buried. He was back in law school terrified again by exams he could never pass, his head thick with torts and writs and penal codes, which, as he did, suffered from cruel aliases and so were better known as tarts and half-writs and penile codes. Beyond the open bathroom door of their barren student rooms, his wife of the moment was in the red tub on her knees, sucking off some guy whose face was hidden by a flounce of shower curtain. Even with her mouth full, she was telling the asshole (who was it? the jock she was jazzing across the hall? big bad John? his law professor? the cunt-crazy kid out at the country club? the anonymous buttocks she clutched told him nothing) all about Maynard’s failings as a lover: “His sperm tastes like toe-cheese,” she said. The words in the law book he was studying kept blurring and changing before his eyes, but he did make out “jus naturale,” which (the guy in the tub was either coming or vilely laughing) he suddenly understood clearly for the first time. Right! So when Daphne started to reveal his secret love—“You know who the Mange’s really got the hots for? You’ll never believe this!”—he rose up and turned on the heat, he really let the bitch have it, with pleasure watched her sizzle and pop (the guy was gone like he was never there), bouncing about in the charred tub (scorched the red paint right off the fucking thing) as though hot-wired. He felt powerful and pressed up against the ceiling in exhilaration as he fired away, then left her flopping helplessly there below in her dark bathwater stew and flew out the window, stretching his limbs joyfully as he soared above the empty streets and sidewalks of his mean little town, now groveling contritely at his feet. He saw or heard (or was somehow aware of, as though she might be the town itself) Veronica crying (“What are
you
doing here?” he seemed to hear her gasp or maybe scream), and that reminded him that the reason he was out here was because he was searching for their runaway son. The little smartass: he’d tan his cocky hide, but good! Maynard spied the patch of woods at the edge of town, crotched between the highway and the road to the airport, and losing altitude, went looking there.

Oddly, his absent son, wherever he was (strange place), was at that same moment, if not exactly flying, at least getting about in some manner different from walking, more like swimming maybe, only not through water but through something like thick warm air. He felt, though unencumbered by those clumsy suits, like an astronaut on a space walk. Little, as his family called him so as to mark one Maynard from another, was a long way from where he’d started on his trip, and nowhere to go but on, having no idea, if he did try to turn back, where “back” might be, nor any desire to do so. Here down below, no mean empty streets, no patch of woods nor country club, just, wherever he looked: People. Doing it. A sea, a tumultuous sea, of people, of naked people, all coupled up and going at it, in all the ways Fish had shown him in those books from his father’s library, and in lots more ways besides. Wow! There must be thousands of them! Millions! No one that Little knew down there, or knew for sure. They
sort
of looked like people from his hometown, but they sort of didn’t, too. The heavy air was resonant with a distant thumping music like the kind made by an organ and heard in church, but more insistent, as though egging on the people below. It was like a giant noisy mall with just one thing for sale. Why, sure, this must be hell, Little thought, and he noticed then something like a whiff of brimstone in the air, or else eggs gone off. And so what was he doing here? Was he just making a discovery or did he have a job to do? Little felt privileged, afloat above this panorama of fornicating bodies (that Bible stuff now suddenly made real and vivid in his expanding mind), but he felt left out, too. As though he were reading about it instead of really living it, something between him and what was going on down there not unlike tracing paper or maybe more like plastic wrap. His own cool maybe. “Cool is cool,” Fish once told him rather mysteriously, “but too cool, Turtle, and you miss it all.” Even if that missed “all” was hell, which maybe—hell, that is—was not so awful after all. So, wait, Little/Turtle had wanted to know when Fish told him that, was
God
too cool and, so, you know, also out of touch? Was that it? Fish didn’t think so. Not a fornicator either, of course, how could He be? More like a pud puller, Fish had said and grinned, and both had flushed, then ducked the unsent bolt and laughed. Little wished his best friend Fish were with him now, he’d know what next to do. Lots of Fish-like types down below, but none he seemed to know or who knew him, though most were too far gone in what was either infernal torment or else the rapture (that word he’d got from the preacher’s books, now dazzlingly illustrated) to see past their noses (yes, they all had very noticeable noses, bobbing in the air to the organ beat like birds’ beaks at the feeder) even if they did know him. Which gave him, who wished to do but wished first to see before he did, encouragement: if he did get closer for a better look they’d hardly notice, so what the heck. He could almost hear it, like a divine command: let it happen. And so, like his father airborne in some other realm, through the pungent throbbing element, Little drifted down.

Though Little Maynard, aka Turtle, could not know it, his best pal Fish, having let it happen, had now, in consequential deep chagrin (he too wished for a friend nearby), confined himself to his own room, unwilling to leave it even to eat or watch a baseball game on TV, his sisters giggling and pointing whenever he had to step out to duck into the toilet (“Where can you see the full moon in broad daylight?” Jen called out, probably a joke she’d heard out at the mall), much worse, he knew, awaiting him outside the house, so fuck it, fuck them all. His father, made privy to the scene his tearful bare-arsed child had made climbing up on the car dealer’s roof to get his jeans down (he’d drawn a crowd, including a busload of summer campers from Lennox’s own church, stopped in the street to take in the glowing spectacle), had at last this evening been able to invade his son’s dark unkempt retreat, and now knew more than he wished to know. Behind the boy’s humiliation: dire events afoot. Or seemingly so. Lenny knew the woman rather too well, one of the first people he’d gotten to know here, and he doubted there was anything she was incapable of. Should he speak to the authorities or warn old Stu? Probably. But not really in Lenny’s nature. And so he stretched out beside his sleeping Trixie, restless in her new discomfort, and letting slumber draw him nigh, as with ease it always did, he played with the images his son’s story had provoked, searching for his Sunday sermon. The clothing of nakedness, Adam’s need to, e.g. Not in modesty: what did the dumb animals care who watched or even know of what they saw? But to symbolize the putting on of manhood. Of humanhood. No, too easy, ho-hum, they’d tune him out. To close an era, then. Not of innocence but of dumb abjectness. To dress is to speak. To assert dominion, self-dominion. And the pain of that, the terror, the loss of the father and all that. Okay, but to be naked is also to be without guile. Another view, so to speak, of those turned cheeks. Thus, Jesus naked, whipped, and naked on the cross. Could he do that? No: over the top. And too many would see the legend writ there where nailed up:
DAPHNE AND STU: BEST DEAL IN TOWN
. Jesus, too, was ridiculed of course.
KING OF THE JEWS:
just another piece of bumper sticker kitsch, meant to amuse while committing murder. And was it that? Or about to be? His son was understandably agitated, he seemed literally to be choking as he spat it all out, and the poor boy was desperate to bend the world’s burning gaze away from himself, point at anyone or anything in his agony, so who could say for sure? Ah well. “Suffer little children to come unto me,” said Jesus, “with their pants down.” Lenny laughed. Jesus, that great consoler, knew how to take the sting out. World-weary, though, you could see it in his face. Same old stories, always sad, over and over, stacked in the blood and reshuffled through time, the human comedy so-called, no way out. So, what was the answer? “Love,” said Jesus (another joke maybe, but maybe not) and, putting his arm around Lenny, led him over to where the disciples were gathered, drinking beer and singing bawdy party songs. There were some women, too, dressed in togas and singing along, John’s wife among them, whom he could hear but couldn’t see, and his own wife Trixie, silent but in full view, full-bellied, dancing. “Our little Salome,” said Jesus at his side, if it was still Jesus (more like John), “always good for a little head.” Which indeed she was giving, without losing a beat, the singing disciples having clambered up on tables and stools and raised their robes, Lennox thinking, at least she won’t get pregnant that way, though of course she already was. There were three clear knocks at the door. “Hey, Knucksie,” the disciples called, hustling Trixie out of sight. “Fresh blood! Bring the suckers in!” Right, his old job, how did it go? “Who is it knocks at the door of the hallowéd temple of brotherhood?” Something like that. “A lowly neophyte, master, begging he be granted entry, that he might pledge himself to grow in wisdom and in love!” “Enter in due reverence, neophyte, upon your hands and knees!” It was his son Philip, Lennox saw, who was to be initiated. They were alone on a barren hillside, overlooking the little town below. He could see the civic center, the golf course, the airport, the malls, the disciples in a distant faceless cluster at the hill’s foot. In his hands he held a wooden paddle bearing the fraternity coat of arms, and he felt old and betrayed by the callous ways of the world, misused, unfit for the tasks imposed upon him. Who was he to be so tested by God or by John or by anyone else? Who was he, easygoing Lenny, to play the patriarch? It wasn’t fair. His son knelt at a stone altar, charred with the fires of picnickers or maybe bums or gypsies, and he pitied him. “Don’t worry, son,” he said. “We’re only characters in an old story.” “It’s okay, Dad,” Philip whispered from his position of mortification across the altar. “Let it happen.”