John's Wife: A Novel (39 page)

That woman whose name was Gretchen lay in Lumby’s bed longer than usual that night, clearly troubled, and not just because they’d broken the plastic penis while trying out some new positions Gretchen had found in a marital manual which were a bit beyond their athletic abilities. They had both pretty much worn themselves out playing with all those things and now they were in a more reflective mood. And what was troubling Gretchen, as she said, was her marriage. Well, it would trouble anyone, that was what Lumby replied, unable to come up with anything more humorous, feeling too contented and exhausted and also a little bit sore here and there, and having heard Gretchen’s complaints about her mentally defective brother Cornell many times before. Tonight, though, Gretchen seemed to have something else on her mind, and Lumby waited, half-dozing, for her to spit it out. They could hear one of the children crying, a nightmare or a wet bed or something, but they could also hear Granddad shuffling down the hall to take care of it. We haven’t had any more babies for over three years now, Gretchen said, not since the second twins, and Columbia, who felt that the eight that came the first five or six years were already eight too many, much as she enjoyed playing Auntie Lum, said she thought that was because of the IUD which she’d helped her put in, but Gretchen said no, she took it out almost the same day, it made her too twitchy, like it was all the time humming or buzzing or something. But what I mean, she went on, is he keeps avoiding me all the time, oh, I know, Cornell’s not exactly what you’d call an attentive husband—but, well, in a way that’s just the point, he used to pay me no mind at all except when I crawled into his bed, and then for only a second or two, which was enough for me, given the mess his pajamas and linens are always in, but now whenever I go over to his bed, he either pulls the sheet over his head, or else he jumps up and runs out, and during the day he won’t even stay in the same room with me or let me give him his baths any more, and you know what kind of baths he gives himself. Lumby still couldn’t see where all this was going, and she was starting to drift off, dreaming awake, sort of, about playing doctor with her little brother (she had to play nurse in just a few hours, she should try to get some sleep), and he asking her what she heard when she put her stethoscope to his weewee, she replying music because she’d once heard it called an organ. But then she woke up again, because what she heard Gretchen say was, I think there’s another woman. Corny? Columbia felt like laughing, but was careful and didn’t. Come on, Gretchen, who’d have the little pest? I don’t know, maybe someone before he met me? Before he met you, the only girls he knew were in comicbooks. Except for Marie-Claire. Who scared the pants off him. Do you think she did? Gretchen asked. You know, get the pants off him? Are you kidding? Lumby said. She was Yale’s girlfriend. Do you think she’d go for a basket case like Corny? I did, said Gretchen simply, and Lumby, sorry now she’d put it that way, realized that there was a real problem here. Her sister-in-law was truly and helplessly in the grip of the green-eyed monster, and if she was jealous even of a dead girl, making jokes would not release her. So instead she said: I’ll keep an eye on the little dimwit for a few days and let you know what I think. That seemed to make things better for Gretchen somehow and she snuggled up against Lumby as though in loving gratitude and when, in anticipation of her father’s wake-up knock, dawn cast its dim glow through the curtains like a movie on a screen, Gretchen, smiling in her sleep, was still there beside her.

The dawn movie on Veronica’s screen was more like a horror flick, or the fluttering tails of one, it was still ripping through her consciousness, shredding her sleep, leaving her too shocked and exhausted even to pry open her eyelids, which were mucky from crying all night. Everything was mucky, her whole body felt covered in slime from the awful thing. It seemed so real! She’d come across it while cleaning house, or dreaming that she was cleaning house. It was hunched down in the dirty place behind the refrigerator, where sometimes she was frightened by mice. She pulled out the ironing board and there it was with its large eyeless head like a cowled mendicant and bent shriveled limbs with little clawlike hands and feet. Veronica knew immediately who it was, of course: “What are
you
doing here?!” she’d screamed, holding the folded ironing board in front of her like a shield. No reply, just a wet raspy breathing as it huddled there in the dim niche, all curled up, throbbing faintly. Her first impulse was to throw the ironing board at it, but she was too terrified to move, her limbs were like stones, her heart, too, and she felt something hurting down deep behind her navel somewhere. She wished Maynard were home to shoot it (where
was
he?), but at the same time she was relieved he hadn’t seen it. Not yet anyway. He’d been in such a rage of late, this thing could make him dangerous. Yes, she had to get rid of it before he came back, but how? She realized that this was a question she had asked before, in real life, and all the guilt and pain of that came rushing back and made her scream again:
“No! I didn’t mean it!”
The thing in the corner cocked its high-domed head like it was trying to hear through the puckery hole in the side of it. Snot dripped from its nose and when it breathed it made a bubbly sound as if it were breathing underwater. She heaved the ironing board up against the space between the wall and the refrigerator so it couldn’t escape and went scrambling for the phone to call the doctor at his home. He wasn’t in; she left a message on his answering machine, still screaming, she couldn’t stop herself. She was afraid to go back to the kitchen, she needed help, she couldn’t face this alone. Help came. Ringing the door chimes. A miracle! “
Yes! I’m coming!”
she screamed. It was what’s-her-name, John’s wife. She used to be one of her best friends, probably still was, she told her all about it. About what was behind the refrigerator, about where it came from and how she got her bottom smacked in the motel shower after, about everything. Even about how she celebrated what would have been Second John’s birthday every year.
“He would have been seventeen in March!”
she cried.
“The same age I was that night at the drive-in!”
The drive-in? She told her about that, too, it all came shrieking out, high-pitched and delirious, like something had burst inside, even Ronnie didn’t know what she was saying half the time. “
I was so scared!”
John’s wife was very understanding. She said she was there to help. On behalf of the PTA, she said. Okay. Ronnie began to calm down. But she was still screaming.
“Come, look! It’s horrible!”
She ran into the kitchen to show her, but it wasn’t there any more. The ironing board had been pushed aside and there was a gleaming viscous trail from the refrigerator to the head of the basement stairs.
“Oh no!”
It was lying in a squishy heap on the concrete floor at the foot of the stairs. But it was still breathing. Sort of. John’s wife explained that it would be all right, its bones were too soft to break. This was not a consolation. Veronica wanted to smash it with something and put it out in the garbage, but instead she had to help John’s wife carry the slippery mess back up the stairs between them. Yeuck! It was oozing gunk and it got all over her. John’s wife wrapped it in a sheet (had she taken it off the bed upstairs? was that where Maynard was?) and together they took it out to a supermarket shopping cart John’s wife seemed to have brought along for the purpose. The swaddled creature’s wet strangled wheezing was terrifying and pitiable at the same time. Veronica felt like crying she was so sorry for it, but she also felt like throwing up. Then John’s wife told her something very important, so important Veronica stopped crying and carrying on and just watched, stunned, as the woman disappeared down the street, pushing the shopping cart with Ronnie’s unborn son in it. But when she woke, she could not remember what it was John’s wife had said. She lay there with her eyes closed, listening to Maynard’s bubbly wheezing beside her, trying to remember. It was so important! Something about—uh-oh. Wait a minute. Bubbly wheezing? Maynard—? Oh no …! It can’t end this way! she thought confusedly, trying to go back to sleep, or else to wake up again. She could hear the thing snorting and whuffing as it cuddled closer, blindly reaching out its slimy monkey’s paw. Oh my god! Was it trying to suck her breast—?! She screamed and, her eyes still glued shut, leapt from the bed.

Barnaby’s eyes were wide open. He had never been more lucid. It often happened this way at the dewy end of a night. The two halves of his cracked brain slid together like train cars coupling, and he could see clearly, if only for a short time, about as long as it took the dew to rise, what a fucked-up old ruin he was. In these dawn moments he had no confusions, understood everything: how Audrey, dying too soon, had undone him utterly with her bastardized will, how John had pushed him to the edge, then over, imprisoning him here in this cheap pre-cremation motel after the stroke, how his beloved daughter, literally all he had left in this world, had drifted away from him, probably blaming him for everything that had happened, how even his old friend Alf had lost interest (and, hell, who wouldn’t?), patronizing him at best and leaving him pretty much in the hands of that dotty old lady who liked to pretend she was Audrey. Alf at least took his side on the civic center controversy, even if he supposed Barnaby wasn’t listening when he talked to him about it, and, living in one of Barnaby’s houses, praised his craft in his dour taciturn way: “You built things to last, Barn. Trouble is, that scares people. Nowadays, they need things around them that wear out faster than they do.” Sanctuaries of the family, that was what Barnaby was building—solid foundations, rational structures you could trust, tasteful neighborly details, a principle of restraint and comfort and proportion throughout—but people didn’t have families in the old way anymore. If they ever did. Just an illusion maybe, a mere veneer. Look at his own. A damned catastrophe and heart irreparably broken after. Figuring out the real world made you want to kill yourself—in fact, come to think of it, he’d meant to, he had rescued his old handgun for the purpose, holstering it under his armpit so he wouldn’t forget where it was, but it wasn’t there anymore. John’s sponge-brained mother must have hidden it; maybe her son had told her to. He was as good as dead anyway, why not prolong the agony? Watch the old boy twitch and wobble, have a few laughs. So why hadn’t he shot himself when he had the gun in hand? Because he’d wanted to explain himself to his daughter before he died. Warn her about what was happening. Tell her how much he loved her. He no longer believed he was able to do that. Even in these sounder moments, the words that came out were not the ones he was thinking. Dying was about all he was able to do now, and that wouldn’t be easy. Barnaby had come to understand that dying was not acquiescence to something inevitable, quite the contrary—life was what was passive. The body could go on forever, or nearly; to die it had to be instructed. This was the function of what men called spirit, nihilism was after all man’s truest instinct, this was the ultimate message of his acids: turn it off. His own self-destruct switch had been flicked, the instructions had been passed, but the circuits had shorted out. At this rate of staticky disintegration it could take forever. So where the hell had that stupid old woman hidden the goddamned thing? Probably in the bottom of the laundry basket, said his daughter. Right. Good idea. The laundry basket. He sidled, dragging his dead leg, toward the bathroom door. This was hard work. He felt like he was struggling against strange impersonal forces. Like the sort that ran the town now. Used to be one big family. No longer. What John had done, in effect, was take the roof off. Neighbors and strangers were the same thing. Locks on all the doors now. Burglar alarm systems. Even though no one stayed home. He poked around, found a shirt he’d been looking for. Here all the time. Not why he’d come in here, though. He struggled to pee and dribbled on his bedroom slippers. Just a trickle, didn’t really need to go. So that wasn’t it either. His medicine maybe. He fumbled with the cap on the plastic vial. When it finally popped off, everything spilled into the sink and on the floor. To hell with it. Wouldn’t kill him to do without until Audrey came, and if it did, he’d have done himself a favor. Where was the old bag anyway? It was getting light outside. The birds were going at it. Was his daughter just here? Had he been able to tell her anything? Why was there all this dirty laundry all over the floor?

The early light of day found Barnaby’s lawyer and fellow plotter Maynard in the woods at the edge of town, kicking irritably through the dew-drenched undergrowth. He didn’t remember coming out here; rage must have brought him. The birds had their dawn chorus cranked up full throttle, the shrieking little shit-factories—he wished he had his gun along to shut the fuckers up. He must have dressed in the dark: red-and-orange golf shirt with the green monogrammed pocket now containing the house keys, chafing his left nipple, the shirt tucked into black pinstripe suit pants belted high over his pot, tennis shoes without socks. In the past when he’d stormed away on sleepless nights, Veronica had sometimes locked him out. She could never explain herself afterwards. Maybe she wanted him to hit her, needing the attention. She often hit him back or threw stuff at him. It was about their only way of talking to each other; the rest was mostly just senseless screaming. The only thing in his pants pockets was the ancient garter, always with him, frayed and limp from so much fondling over the years. Maynard fondled it now. It was dark in here and damp, but beyond the leaves a pale violet light was spreading across the sky like a morbid stain. It was probably going to be what some would call a beautiful morning. Maynard hacked up a gob and spat contemptuously. Beauty. Only humans in their egomaniacal perversity could dream up such a sick idea. Warped everything. One night out at the club he’d heard old Alf argue that intimations of beauty were nothing more than the old pleasure/pain principle in operation, and Maynard could go along with that but not with the association of beauty with pleasure. He came on a patch of wild bluebells poking up in the dim light, stepped on them. That’s it, he told himself. Fuck everything. Christ! He loathed—bitterly, deeply, and intimately—this town and everyone in it, loathed his wealth, his career, his family, his past, his future, life itself. What would have happened, he often wondered, had he not been born a Maynard between Maynards? What if he had been free to leave town for good when he left high school as so many did? As apparently his brat of a son had done, a Maynard or no? Same thing probably. And (he twisted the garter around his fingers) fleeing this shithole was just not on, not for him, not for the moony lovesick Nerd. Whom he loathed above all others. Ahead of him, like secret writing in the dark forest, loomed a stand of young birch trees, ghostly in the dawn glow, inviting his admiration. He turned away in disgust, found himself at the edge of a small thorny ravine. Recognized it. A grin spread painfully across his bristly face, couldn’t stop it. The little guttersnipe’s baptism that wretched night had been his as well. In commemoration of the sickening occasion, he took his prick out to pee and was just letting go when his true love came riding by on her bicycle, dressed in her white tennis costume. She waved and smiled, but he could not wave back, both hands busy trying to stop what he was doing and get covered up without pissing all over himself. And then (he was beardy and rumpled, unwashed, smelled bad, was dressed for the circus with his widdling weenie on view, no wonder she didn’t stop) she was gone. He staggered down through the ravine and up to the road, thought he could see her pedaling around the turn just up ahead, a flash of pure white like a bird in flight, and hitching up his pin-striped pants, Maynard II went stumbling after.