John's Wife: A Novel (54 page)

Philip’s friend Turtle, who perhaps would once more have to be called Maynard III now that Philip was no longer Fish, was also learning something about suffering as a sequel to celestial bliss. His amazing adventures, begun in some long ago time now forgotten, were, he realized, coming to an end in the very immediate present. And it wasn’t the happy end that he’d imagined. No, forget bliss, boy, forget beatitude, forget the land of glory, Little was back in hell again: his dimensionless paradise now had very serious dimensions, the Christmas tree lights were going out, the hidden angel choirs were screaming bloody murder, and what the sensuous writing of all those tidal floods of color, now mostly a horrible red, were saying was: get your butt
outa
here, man! And that was what he was trying to do, kicking and punching, but it was getting too cramped to swing and there seemed to be less and less of any place to go! All those vibrant new constellations in all of heaven’s hues which his exploding weenie had helped to make had suddenly started to clot together like they were magnetized and they were bulking up and closing in on him, crowding him for space. Once intimately stroked by all those chromatic ebbs and flows, he now felt intimately pummeled by them. It was awful. The kaleidoscopic colors were burning his flesh, especially the tender bits, a stench like tangible fog was suffocating him through all his orifices, and his malleable body, once majestically stretched out over the whole ecstatic universe, was now getting squashed down into a miserable wet lump. He struck out with all his might at the rubbery walls contracting around him, but it was like punching an old beanbag chair. It was getting dark and hot, he could hardly breathe, and he was afraid that this might be the terrible apocalypse, sinners beware, that Old Hoot ‘n’ Holler was always on about. Our Father which art in heaven, Little began to pray, but he couldn’t remember the next line, he was too choked up, all he could think of was forgive us this day our hallowed bread which didn’t sound right, so he just shouted out: “Please, God! Mom! Dad!
Help!”
Couldn’t even hear himself. It was like he was underwater or something. It was pitch-dark now, he couldn’t see his knees in front of his nose, which was where it felt like they were, but he had the definite impression, as a clammy hand clawed at his face, then snatched him by the hair, that he wasn’t alone. There was somebody else in here with him!

Mikey’s grand rabbit-from-the-hat finale was, by general consensus, the best act he’d ever done, though for many present it was the first they’d ever seen, for, as Oxford had noted, this sunny backyard pack-up was dense with strangers, strangers to him at any rate, most of whom when asked had said they worked for John. Of course, Oxford had been out of touch with the town since Gretchen took over the drugstore, the community had grown up around him while he’d been fascinated with the growth of his own little family, eight of whom were with him today. Somewhere. They had learned early how to escape the narrow circle of their grandfather’s myopia, finding him again only when they needed him, and in principle, if sometimes with a doubting heart, he approved of this independence. The three who stayed closest to him were the ones who, alas, had inherited his and their mother’s disability, one fate his own four children had escaped, if other fates had, also alas, ensnared them. It was the curiosity of these three, their little hands tugging at his, that had drawn them all close to Mikey’s, well, hat, so to speak: the lady on the table. She had something between her legs, they wanted to see it, could he lift them up? Mikey meanwhile was being rewarded with well-earned applause and laughter for his uncanny imitation of Oxford’s old friend Alf with his bent-backed slouch and his drooping lower lip where a cigarette always used to hang until Harriet’s cancer when he gave the habit up, and capturing exactly the way Alf’s bony gray head seemed to fall forward off his shoulders as though spring-loaded, bobbing to a heartlike beat. Not everyone here knew Alf, but fingers pointed and smiles broke out when he shambled out onto the back deck with some fellow peeking out past a faceful of bandage, Lennox and Beatrice’s boy maybe, hard to tell from here. Earlier, Alf had talked with Oxford briefly about Beatrice’s interesting condition, saying it seemed premature but he thought she was about ready to pop, if in fact she was really pregnant, then went on, in the confidential manner they’d fallen into over their decades together as doctor and druggist, to describe other recent cases that were puzzling him (“Trevor seems to be under the strange delusion, you know, that somewhere in the past he might have killed somebody …”), foremost his own sensation of something like a soft insistent pressure at the tip of his finger—he’d lifted his finger, the one, Oxford knew, that Alf used to palpate the inner recesses, to let Oxford examine it through his thick spectacles and certainly the pad was spread flat, but, as he was a spatulate-fingered man, they all looked much the same—which Alf believed to be the physical manifestation of a half-remembered missed diagnosis: “A tumor, I think. But the sonuvabitch keeps growing.” He stared at it in some wonderment. “It’s bigger than a goddamned melon now, Oxford, that blimp of a belly over there couldn’t contain it.” “Give Eric a call, see what he thinks.” “He’d think I was senile.” Mikey had also picked up on Alf’s obsession with his finger in his own ingenuous way, miming the frantic effort to get something off it that wouldn’t go away, scrubbing it on his clothes, on other people’s clothes, shaking it, sucking it and spitting, shooting it with a toy pistol, finally pretending to hack it off, put the severed bit on a skewer, cook it over the coals until it caught on fire, douse it in Alf’s own glass of whiskey, then, with a beaming smile of success, head still bobbing like an old turkey’s, put it back on again, holding it up, only a bit smudged, for all to see. Then, with Beatrice’s little daughter Zoe trailing along as a nurse with a pillowed tummy (no doubt Oxford’s own daughter Columbia was this parody’s target, she out on some wild-goose chase after her mindless brother this afternoon, best Oxford could tell from her weepy telephone calls from all over town), Mikey slouched over to the minister’s wife, twisting and groaning on the picnic table, and threw a wrinkled sheet over her, Oxford pulling his grandchild out from between her legs just before the tenting fell. Beatrice was beginning to pitch and yell as the spasms hit and Oxford wondered if he should interfere, but he supposed that Alf, nearby, knew best—“No, let him go ahead,” Alf laughed, “he’s doing a good job!”—and instead allowed the woman to grab his hand and squeeze it, his grandchildren clambering up on the bench for a closer look, the other five by now having joined them, along with dozens of other children pressing round, adults, too, drawn by the spectacle and Beatrice’s wild yelps. Mikey pulled on a pair of yellow rubber dishwashing gloves and, lower lip adroop, probed beneath the bouncing sheet. Beatrice reared up off the table suddenly, crying out in alarm, and—
schluuu-POP!
—out came Maynard and Veronica’s long-lost runaway son, yanked by his hair, wet and naked and sputtering helplessly as one rescued from drowning. Everyone whooped and cheered. “That was really cute,” someone behind Oxford giggled. “How’d he do that?” Little Maynard gulped, blinked, looked at the crowds around him, and crawled back under the sheet to look for something. While his sparkling bare behind was in the air, Mikey gave it a newborn’s smack and then all the other children, shrieking with laughter and fighting each other for position, had a turn. The grown-ups would probably have joined in, but the boy was already out of there and down off the table, frantically hauling on the soggy clothes he had just retrieved, while everyone laughed and applauded John’s comical son. Everyone except little Maynard’s parents. His father strode over and boxed his boy’s ears soundly—“Jeez, Dad, what did I do—?!” the child whimpered as his father swatted him again, then dragged him away, still pulling his pants up, Beatrice letting go of Oxford’s hand at last and rising up on one elbow to gasp: “He didn’t mean any harm!”—while his mother Veronica, hysterical until now, just collapsed wearily into a lawn chair, splitting either the chair or the zipper on her dress or both, and said: “Oh, hell, I don’t care.” Beatrice cried out and arched her back again, and her daughter Zoe, her nurse’s cap hanging down over one eye now and tummy pillow fallen between her knees, waddled anxiously over to grab Alf’s hand and pull him back to the table, where Lennox was also waiting now, and that was how Adam was born, but not before Oxford, his memory triggered perhaps by the sudden descent of twilight (time to get the grandchildren home and into bed), recalled something Kate had once written for Ellsworth’s newspaper on the theme of the imagination vis-à-vis the real world, which was always changing, she observed, while the imagination, our defense against the abyssal truth of the subconscious, tried to hold it still. In real life, which she called “crepuscular” (“We are born into a dying of the light…”), everything we try to grasp is already something else; art, she wrote, floods itself with light, or with darkness, which is another kind of light, so as to shield us from the dusky terrors of the flux and feed the appetite for hope. She was speaking about the movies actually, especially the black-and-white ones—this was around the time when films “in living color” were coming to dominate the Palace Theater programs—and how, with their “real” yet chiaroscuro images, they confused art and reality, absorbing them into one another, each, in consequence, destroying each, which, she said, was what made them “beautiful.” Ellsworth added a disclaimer, saying that the views expressed by the author were not necessarily those of the editor, and that he himself believed the only terror that life held was its enduring dullness, which art and the imagination gratefully relieved.

The Stalker has returned but without the Model. The Artist has not foreseen this, no one has. There is an inadmissible question that seems to rise like mist around the Artist’s ankles, and then, pulling his heart down with it, to sink again. The forest has not been burned, but it has been charred here and there, as though scarred by the Artist’s pain. It is not resignation he feels so much as emotional exhaustion. The jaded expression on the Stalker’s face suggests that he has depleted himself with cruel pleasures, a suggestion he does nothing to deny. “Ah yes,” he sighs, touching a dirty fingertip to the nipple of a childish breast in a drawing lying at the Artist’s feet, then tracing a sinuous line down across her navel, over her pale little belly, twisted in anguish, and into the hidden crevice between her clenched thighs, “a pure delight!” The Artist wishes, not merely to smash his face in for this vile profanation, but utterly to destroy him, to eradicate the depraved monster from the face of the earth, but grief has sapped his strength and will, and he feels that it is he who is being slowly but inexorably erased. Like the rock beside the river-bank on which she once had knelt: vanished now, as though dissolved into the stream, itself diminished to a trickle like drying tears, ever more diminishing. “I know what you have done,” he says bitterly, indicating with disdain all the drawings scattered loosely on the barren ground about him. “You see, I have imagined it all.” The Stalker studies the drawings with an undisguised admiration that borders upon awe. “An extraordinary likeness!” he exclaims, picking up a drawing of himself, reared high in wild-eyed revel behind the Model’s upraised buttocks, his hands tightening the studded chains around her throat as he slakes his savage appetite, and he holds the drawing up before his face as though gazing into a mirror. “It is as though you have violated the border between art and reality!” “Art neither contemplates nor intrudes upon the real,” the Artist replies dispiritedly. “It
is
the real, upon which all else intrudes.” The Stalker shuffles through the drawings, spreading them about, selecting this one, then that one, for closer scrutiny. “Yes, you have seen everything,” he acknowledges, stroking the Model’s outflung thigh in a particularly barbarous sketch as though to ease her terrible pain, or to recall it. He tosses the drawing aside. “And you have seen nothing.” The Artist has feared just this rebuke. He is a sensitive and decent man, he knows, and no doubt there are depths of depravity his imagination, which in his pride he likes to think of as boundless, cannot plumb. “In truth,” sighs the Stalker, “I do not know where she is, nor have I seen her since she left you.” “But you both disappeared at the same—!” “I was searching for her. Perhaps to do with her as you have fancied. But to no avail. She’s gone.” The Artist, stunned by this revelation, if it is one and not just another cruel deception, stares down at his drawings, which he believed to be passionate and intransigent pursuits of imaginative truth when he made them, but which now seem little more than feverish bunglings of a corrupt and pornographic soul, cartoons from hell. “All I found was this,” the Stalker says, reaching into a ragged shirt pocket and handing the Artist a scrap of paper which he recognizes as a corner torn from one of his own drawings. On it is written: “Art’s true source is not in the seen, but in the longing for the not-seen.” In her handwriting, of course, the naive evenly looped script of an innocent child. The Artist’s hands are trembling. “Do you think she might come back?” “It seems like a farewell message,” says the Stalker. “It is, I suppose, her way of continuing as your Model.” He smiles wistfully. “A lot less fun, though, isn’t it?” The Artist stands, feeling a bit shaky. How much time has passed? When he looks around, the Stalker has gone. He is alone in his darkening forest. He leaves his materials and drawings behind and steps into it, as a way of stepping out of it: what has a center must somewhere have an edge.

What makes a man step out of himself and into some no-man’s-land of the spirit? What is it that turns the healthy courting of danger within the rules of the game—games like mountain climbing, say, or skydiving or war—into a self-annihilating urge to dissolve the borders of the game itself and defy its rules as one might defy gravity or number or the passage of time? John did not understand this urge but he knew what it felt like, having found himself, more than once in his life and often as not in Bruce’s company, poised on that frontier and tugged toward its fatal breaching. It had the aura of a joke, a final joke shared between friends, and as that larger self they created between them laughingly dared to assail the edges, so they each dared, too, feeling a part of something that compelled them to deny their lesser mortal selves. Admittedly, he got a passing buzz out of it. But John, unlike his city friend, had played too many team sports to be seduced by these commonplace delusions of the almighty group self, nor did he suppose that concerted derring-do would give them any sort of magical freedom from the inexorable laws of the game, as Bruce in his restless transgressions sometimes seemed to. In fact, John loved the rules, for he was, as always, team captain, and the rules empowered him and defined the limits by which he tested himself and moved and judged others. John’s game was life, Bruce’s death, but he understood that Bruce therefore lived closer to the truth than he did, was in reality another side of
himself
, one he could not finally bring himself to embrace, except by proxy in the person of his nihilistic friend. And now, as though to taunt John for his pussyfooting ways in the face of the Great Fucking Mystery, as Bruce would say, the walls that Bruce had assaulted with his abduction of Knucksie’s little girl were in effect the very ones between them, or at least those built by John: his community and (if Nevada was to be trusted, as of course she wasn’t) his own family. Nevada’s note had said that Bruce, who seemed “very violent, very suicidal,” had apparently used the girl’s big brother Philip as go-between to lure both Jennifer and Clarissa to the airport. She thought he was headed up to the cabin and that he had something “very ugly” in mind. “I think he’s checking out and trying to take the world with him.” She’d found out about the plot too late to save Jennifer, but she’d managed to “distract” (her quotes) the kid from his Clarissa mission and get false word to Bruce that the boy had chickened out so that he’d leave with only half his prey. The meaning of that wistful high five that Bruce had given him during their two-on-three the last time they were together up at the cabin was transparent to him now: So long, buddy. Catch me if you can. The dark-souled sonuvabitch. John loved him, but he wasn’t sure, as he rolled down the runway and lifted up into the gathering twilight, a rifle in the seat beside him (not the one he wanted, which for some reason seemed to be missing), if he was headed up there to rescue Bruce from himself or to kill him. Light filled the plane as he rose into it, but the land below, as he banked to the north, was cast in shadow and the unlit town looked small and vulnerable, lost on the vast prairie, diminishing, as though it might not be there when he returned.