John's Wife: A Novel (48 page)

As his principal employer, kicking the monogrammed screen door open, came out on the back deck with bottles in his hands, Trevor, sporting his new black eyepatch, which had provoked considerable comment amongst the guests this afternoon, caught a one-eyed glimpse of his wife Marge standing in the kitchen in her business suit, looking drawn and defeated. No doubt John had been cruel to her once again. Yet she did seem always to bring it upon herself as though it were part of her exercise regimen, testing her virtue by stripping for a lecher, so to speak. Trevor tittered into his glass of iced gin, his third of the day, the doctor having told him a good snort now and then might be good for his circulation, preventive medicine against the sort of problem he was having. Traumatic neurosis was, Trevor believed, the technical term for it, but when he’d tried to explain to Alf what he now believed to be the true cause, heretofore repressed, of the first episode all those years ago, the doctor, harassed by a waiting room packed with distraught and clamorous patients—
im
-patients, more like it—had only half listened to his stammering confession, then had brushed it aside as poppycock, saying, as he wrote out a prescription, that as far as he was concerned all bodily disorders were ultimately electrochemical and should be treated as such, in kind. “As the main switching station of the central nervous system, the brain has too goddamned much to do to be able to handle all the incoming traffic and has to throw a lot of it out arbitrarily or shunt it off onto unused sidetracks. It makes mistakes, there are mixups, accidents, sometimes catastrophic wrecks, and then panic sets in. What we can try to do is correct the mistakes, clean up after the accidents, and by oiling the machinery, as we like to say, calm the panic. The rest, Trev, is just sentimental quackery.” After fitting him with his eyepatch today, Alf, grumbling that he was rusting up and suffering from catastrophic overload himself, had abruptly closed his office, shouting out over the protests of the other patients that if they didn’t leave now he’d lock them in until after the holidays, and then he’d offered Trevor a ride to the party. Party? The barbecue. Oh yes. So much had happened, he’d nearly forgotten. It was today, then? Before leaving downtown, Alf had stopped by the newspaper office to see if he could rouse the editor, but no luck. The editor had a life policy with Trevor and, having no heirs, had a complicated and whimsical list of beneficiaries (Trevor remembered the names and sums for each), including the library Literary Society, which no longer existed. He’d have to drop by soon and get the policy updated, at which time he would suggest a modest increase. This was the sort of knowledge Trevor carried around, the names and numbers that, boringly, filled his life and prevented him from living it. On the rest of the drive to John’s house, staring out the rolled-down car window with his one eye, Trevor had tried intently to see the town, to really see it, as perhaps the photographer saw it, without all the technicalities and computations and what in his business nowadays they called data processing that always blocked his view, concentrating now on its shapes (which were two-dimensional but somehow therefore more compelling as, flatly, they slid past one another), its summery hues and vivid midday contrasts of light and shade, the way most things flowed into everything else as though it was all of a piece, and yet the way certain objects stood apart, as though in a different dimension, displaying their peculiar contingency, a gleaming sky-blue tricycle in a shadowy front yard, for example, a porch swing rocking slightly in front of a broken window, a long-limbed dog sniffing at a dark wet trail that seemed smeared across Trevor’s flat framed view like an oil slick or gradeschool mucilage, a gleaming black funeral van parked incongruously in front of a gaily painted fire hydrant with a beer bottle perched on top. But it was no use. Even as he attempted, in effect, to control the incoming traffic and fill up the switchyard with enduring sensual evidence that he was
here
, in the
world
, that this was truly his life, his own singular and inimitable life, that was rolling by, never to roll by again, he realized he was still calculating, still beclouding his vision, halved as it now was (and if he wasn’t careful, he might lose the other one), with abstractions and doubts and sophistries, and that the life he was passing through would never really be lived, would never really be his own, he was not in the control tower but tied to the tracks, he hadn’t seen a thing, couldn’t recall it if he had. Even in his scrupulous surveillance of the photographer, which he now regretted, innocent as it was, or as he’d meant it to be, he had seen, and yet not seen. His wife’s friend Lorraine and her odious husband had arrived at the barbecue about the same time he had, he already drunk and noisy and slapping backsides (Trevor’s own got a swat in passing: “Hey, Triv, you ole pirate, bottoms up!”), she looking a bit more haggard than usual and, usually a beer drinker, moving straight in on the hard stuff, filling a tall beer glass with bourbon. Trevor had been, idly, wondering why as she went lumbering by on her way to the gazebo in the rose garden, evidently headed out there to get besotted all alone, and what she’d said, pointing to her head, was: “I’m trying to turn it off.” “That’s funny,” he’d replied without even thinking, “I’m trying to turn it on.” She’d paused for a moment to smile at that and he’d had the strange feeling that she understood him perfectly, might indeed be the only person in the world who did or ever could. And then she was gone, replaced by the banker and his wife, who wanted to know if he’d heard about the arrest of the photographer for exposing himself at the mall and about his wife who had left him and was said to be on some sort of wild crime spree. “They say she’s got big as a barn and has run off with the drugstore simpleton!” Trevor could add a pertinent tidbit or two, but it gave him a headache just thinking about what he’d done and what he’d seen, or thought he had (when was that?), and his good eye began to throb, so he tsk-tsked along with them, then excused himself (“Doctor’s orders, heh heh!”) to go fill up his gin glass again. When his wife Marge came out, she handed him a dollar bill and asked him to keep it for her but not to spend it, she had in mind making somebody eat it. She didn’t even seem to notice his eyepatch, she was in such a blind rage. And she looked drained, big wet patches in her armpits, her long face creased and sagging as though suddenly aged by a dozen years, fatigue attacking her like her appetites did, or like her enthusiasms did on better days, full frontally and without mercy. Lorraine came in from the rose garden and, after a moment during which she refilled her glass, she said: “But isn’t that blackmail, Marge?” “No, Lorraine,” Marge said grimly, “it’s politics.” Trevor didn’t know what they were talking about, but supposed it was bad news, and wondered if it was Lorraine who had put his wife up to this harebrained idea of running for mayor, but Lorraine glowered at him and said: “Are you kidding?” He topped up his glass, plunked in a cube, and went over to the grill where John, looking burly in his vest and jeans, his bronzed chest exhibiting a rich crop of curly white hair (Trevor was wondering about John’s wife: had no one else noticed?), was directing the caterers in broiling hamburgers, hotdogs, chops, and small steaks. Young Kevin, the burrheaded manager of the country club, had good-naturedly donned an oilcloth apron over his silvery blue golf shirt and lemon-colored pants to lend John a hand, and the busty gum-smacking blonde he’d brought (“Both she and the shirt are from our new line at the pro shop!” he’d grinned on introducing her) now turned to Trevor and said: “Hey! Cool! Eyepatches are so sexy! How did you lose it?” “Lose it?” “Your eye, silly!” “Ah, the first time?” “Sure, the first time. How many times can you lose an eye?” He hesitated. But she was gazing up at him with such sweet abandon, he found it was contagious. He smiled. “Oh, well, I killed someone.” “Yeah? No kidding! On purpose?” “Not exactly. Sort of. The possibility just presented itself and, not really thinking, I took it.” “Wow! That’s so romantic!” she sighed, and leaned against him, pulling a string of gum out from between her teeth and putting it back in again. Kevin, turning the meat on the grill with plastic-handled tongs, winked at him over his shoulder. Next, he thought, I will tell her about my career as a, well, a private eye. “Why is it always other people who have the groovy lives?”

Sweet abandon: perhaps it
was
contagious, certainly many of the crowd gathering in John’s backyard seemed to be catching it, or perhaps they were reaching for it as a defense against their doubts and trepidations, which mostly went unexpressed, Lorraine’s included, though it fell to her to be their reluctant collector and sorter, not easy, given the way people’s thoughts darted about so frivolously, especially when they’d had a couple. Or maybe it was the couple she’d had, and the couple after that, that had dimmed her cataloguing faculties, making it hard for her to screen out the static, which back in college was just a metaphor for academic bullshit, but now was real and made her head ache with its relentless buzz and crackle, worse when raw desire arose, as it always did at these come-and-get-it blowouts, and clotted the swarm of half-thoughts reaching her with its dense wet colors, making her head feel like it was filling up with hot soup as it all poured in. One disclosure that separated out was that, of those who’d noticed, none seemed surprised that John’s wife was not here, or was seemingly not here (there were two schools of thought, as in two schools of fish), nor for that matter was she herself surprised, though she could not account for this other than by way of the tautology that, were John’s wife here, things would be different, but they couldn’t be different because this was the real world and this was how things were, so she couldn’t be here. At the same time, none who’d noticed seemed to want to talk about it, or even to think about it, as though that tautology about the world might not hold if they did so, and instead they opted more or less unanimously for sweet abandon, or abandon certainly, sweet if could be. Similarly—but differently (what did John think? she didn’t know, she’d been steering clear of him after what Marge had asked of her)—there was the annual Pioneers Day parade and the local fair and soapbox oratory that traditionally followed on, which people
were
talking about, trading impressions of what they said they’d seen or heard, but which nobody was
thinking
about, or, rather, what thoughts they had came
after
what they said or what some other said. Lorraine heard so much of this chatter with all its visions and revisions that she, too, began to imagine the parade and fair, such that when the banker’s wife said she thought there were fewer pioneer costumes this year than last, Lorraine said, quite firmly: “No, there were more.” “Yes,” said the banker’s wife, “I think you are right.” Alf was standing there with them, his gray head bobbing out in front of him as though measuring a pulse rate, and what seemed most on his mind was a huge tumescence the size of a beach ball on the end of his finger or which his finger was palpating, though in fact the bony thing, twitching slightly as if with palsy, was encircling a sweating glass of cold whiskey. This seaside image gave way to something more like a ship in a bottle, though there was a slimy visceral quality about the squirming ship, as Beatrice, the preacher’s wife, waddled by in her red boots, looking like one of those bass drummers in a marching band, trying to keep her gargantuan belly from dragging through the grass. The loopy little pothead couldn’t put three words together in her noodle without getting one of them upside-down, but she did bring a little music into Lorraine’s own noise-bruised head as she passed, and for that she was grateful: a kind of sweet choral humming like a movie version of a band of angels. Sensuous, but not soupy: its ethereal tints more like light filtered through stained-glass windows. It was very nice, and Lorraine wondered if anyone here over fifteen had a joint, she could use a radical change of frequency. “We should get that poor girl a wheelbarrow,” she remarked after Trixie’d staggered on, and the banker’s wife said, “Yes, that’s a good idea, perhaps John has one,” and then went on to say, gazing dreamily about her (they were all standing there in a blazing sunlight, so ebullient it seemed almost unreal), how much she appreciated these long days of summer. Alf growled that this one seemed just a little longer than usual, and she agreed with that, too. “That’s how it is when you’re having a wonderful time.” Many thought as Alf did and as the banker’s wife said she did, but Lorraine overheard others marveling to themselves about how time flies and the way the day had just sort of rushed up on them, as though it couldn’t wait to get started, for fear of—what? No theories out there, though Lorraine’s own personal explanation for it was that she always collapsed into these timeless states when school was out, if it weren’t for Sundays and the midweekly newspaper she’d never know when anything was. And now the newspaper apparently was no more, maybe Sundays soon would follow, it might be bliss, if you could handle the surprises. At least she was luckier than poor Marge and had dressed appropriately for the day, her two boys having assisted her in this by heading out the door with some of her clean white linen in their grubby little paws. “Hey, where do you guys think you’re going with my sheets?” “To Mikey’s house. It’s for a play!” “To Mikey’s house?” She’d heard them thinking then about how slow and stupid she was: Really dumb, man, out of it! How did we get a mom like this? “Mo-om, you know! It’s the barbecue!” “Sure, I know that,” she’d lied. “But Mikey can provide his own props.” “He doesn’t want plops, Mom. He wants sheets!” Okay, okay, she’d let them go, she couldn’t stand to listen any longer to what the little buttbrains were thinking. So she’d changed into her backyard frolic rags and was just pulling the door shut when Waldo came back from the golf course looking baffled, an expression that suited him. “Nobody out there!” he’d exclaimed, shaking his corked head. “Even the bar was closed!” “They’re all over at John’s.” “John’s?” So she’d waited for him, and now he was over by the hotdog crematorium checking out Miss Sweet Abandon herself, pawing doggily at her dishabille, Trevor’s weak kidneys having temporarily lost him post position. Another half dozen gathering around the little gum-popper as well, admiring the rips in her cut-off cutoffs: Lorraine, drifting by on her way to the bourbon bottle, realized that the head-soup she’d been complaining about was really more like pooled drool. She poured and backstroked out of it, but more hormonic blushes invaded her head, now of a thinner bluish sort like ink and commingled with thesauric musings that brought back to mind her old freshman composition courses: she turned around and saw Beatrice’s husband Lennox with a big lump on his head, looking dazed, just stepping out on the deck behind her, and she knew at a glance his was another vote for the where-the-hell-did-this-day-come-from party.