John's Wife: A Novel (6 page)

Her mother’s freaky ways embarrassed Jennifer, but intrigued her, too: grownup life might not be as boring as it mostly seemed in this nowhere place. Everything was so desperately flat and common here, you knew just what was going to happen every minute—even out at the malls and the pool, the only halfway exciting places around, you could guess what people were going to say as soon as they opened their mouths, it was like they were all in a play or something, just reading their lines, it was very depressing—but it didn’t need to be that way, and her unpredictable mother was at least, spooky as she was, a case in point. Bruce was another and a more reassuring one than her mixed-up mom. He flew in and out at will, this town having no claim on him, nor any other either, he was as free as the wind like everyone should be, like Jennifer would be when she got out of here, she could hardly wait. Bruce seemed to know and do or have done everything, he was very wild and very wise at the same time, and yet somehow tragic, too, like those beautiful guys in the movies who always died young, though Bruce would not die young, he was already too old for that, and a good thing, too, because Jennifer loved him madly and wanted him around when she was ready to escape this dump, before or after she finished high school, she really didn’t care, what was all that junk good for anyway? Bruce had lots of lovers, Jennifer knew that, but unlike her best friend Clarissa who, when she wanted something, wanted all or nothing, Jennifer did not mind sharing. Clarissa was a real problem. Bruce was a college friend of both their fathers, Clarissa having always called him Uncle Bruce, though they weren’t related, which Jennifer thought was childish, especially now after she’d got her period, but for Clarissa it was a way of trying to own him somehow, and teasing her about it only tended to make it worse. She and Clarissa were the closest of friends, they went everywhere together, planned to leave here together, too—bosom pals, they once joked when they went to buy their first bras together, and in truth, no joke, they were—but because of Clarissa’s possessive attitude, Bruce stood between them. That afternoon at the barbecue, for example, when she and Bruce posed for Clarissa’s little brother’s make-believe camera and Bruce was hugging her in a way that sent a tingling all the way to her toes, she knew it was making Clarissa mad as all get-out and Jennifer was sorry about that, but she just couldn’t help it. She could only hope he wouldn’t let go, it was magic.

John’s friend Bruce, who so willingly joined in little Mikey’s play that day, was perhaps the only person out there who did not know who was being caricatured, and so missed half the point, or more, but then no one got it all, not even Trevor who knew what no others present knew but who had never, it being against his wife Marge’s principles, posed for a family portrait, much nuance thus lost on him as well, this being, as Gordon himself would say, the fate of all art, even of the amateur backyard variety: to become, stripped of nuance, a caricature of itself. Gordon’s wife Pauline, who knew what Trevor knew but was not so curious about it (that lady was the main attraction around here, why shouldn’t Gordon take her picture?), but who was not present in John’s backyard on that day, or on any other day for that matter, would not have known what nuance was, though she would have enjoyed the little boy’s portrait of her portraitist husband as clown and taken it in whole, feeling flattered that something of her private world had been so publicly noticed. But then: had Pauline fallen in love with a clown? No, nor, whatever others might think, married one either, though that was another story. Love was for heroes, giants, and wizards, of whom she’d had some in her mouth maybe, between her breasts even, and up her Sodom-and-Gomorrah, as Daddy Duwayne called it, but none in her life, that strange thing that went on outside the holes in her body. When it came to romance, that old true-love lottery, Pauline had drawn the short straw: suck
that
, kid! as her fairy godfather was wont to put it in his pedagogical sessions on the floor of their filthy trailer. Where, many years ago, in the scattered iconography ripped from stolen magazines that aroused her crazy tutor’s red-eyed zeal, she had glimpsed a way out. She was nineteen when she finally approached old Gordon and asked him to help her. She knew him only by his shop window with all the glitzy photographs of make-believe families and fairytale weddings, his moony face in the dim shadows behind it, but she assumed he had a swollen spunk-sack that needed relief like any other man and they could strike a deal. Her best years were over, had been since her sixteenth birthday, she knew that—reality-training was one deprivation Pauline had not suffered—but she felt she had one last chance to make her fortune, or the nearest thing to it she could ever hope for, before she turned twenty and it was all over. Her body was ripe enough if a bit beat up (you could brush that out) and she had no pride, but she needed a photographer and Gordon was the only one in town. So she put her best summery dress on over nothing, hid behind the sunglasses a boy had bought her the year before at the Pioneers Day fair, all the wages she had got on that occasion, and screwing up her courage, pushed in, jangling bells, and announced she wanted her picture taken. “Hey, Pauline! Whatcha doin?!” someone yelped as though goosed. It was that little high school boy Corny. She hadn’t noticed there were other people in there. Her sunglasses maybe. Or just too nervous. Corny was with his dad, who was wearing his crisp white jacket from the drugstore, shiny black pens periscoping out of the breast pocket like secret cameras. And there was a girl there, too, thin and pale, dressed mostly in black, with her hair in tight dark ringlets around her parchmenty ears and funny little teeth in her smiling mouth like rows of tiny white corn kernels. She didn’t look all that well. “This is Pauline, Dad! From school! We’re getting passport photos, Pauline—Dad’s sending me to Paris! For graduation!” Big surprise. Corny’s heart-shaped face under its wispy blond cap was pink as a valentine, poor boy. His father stared at her through his thick lenses as though examining her through a microscope, gripping the lapels of his white jacket in a pose she recognized from the family photo in the window out front. Pauline stared back, but wished now she had her underwear on. The bells over the door still seemed to be ringing, but they probably weren’t. “So, uh, how’s it goin’, Pauline, for gosh sake? Where ya been?”

Where Cornell had been the night before, made manifest by his tin-whistle squeak and telltale flush—and, had anyone noticed, the little hickey on her neck—was with Pauline. Tears of farewell before being sent off to Paris, declarations of love, and all that. He supposed his father did not know, a supposition only partly correct: prophylactics had gone missing at the drugstore over the past year, a pattern made familiar in their own time by Oxford’s other two sons. Discovering this had brought tears to his eyes: Ah, little Corny … He was the baby of the family and had seemed till now as though spellbound by childhood: finishing high school and still reading comicbooks, playing with games and toys. Oxford, worried about him, had thought this graduation trip to Europe might somehow work a sea change—might disenchant the boy, so to speak—and he’d trusted the strange frail woman beside him as his dear departed Yale once did, yet feared for poor Cornell and for himself: he had lost so much and this was his last son, Paris was so far away, he could not bear more sadness. He had peered searchingly at the bold girl standing there before them in that gloomy photo shop with her sunglasses on and her toes pointed in—what had Corny called her? Pauline?—but though ready to grasp at any straw, he’d found nothing that might give him hope. A certain wide-browed full-lipped generosity maybe, nothing more. She was probably just using Corny, as so many others did. Of course the light was bad, his eyesight weak, his concentration undermined by grief, he might have missed something. No rash prejudgments. He’d keep the drawer of condom packets replenished and see what happened.

What happened, or seemed to happen—all this was a decade and a half ago—was that Corny, mortified by his public denial of Pauline, went to Paris that summer without seeing her again, and when, after chastening adventures quite different from those his father had envisioned for him, he returned, Pauline was no longer available. He entered university, though not the one that he’d been named for, as a pharmacy student, and some four years later fulfilled at last his father’s lifelong dream, though yet again not in the way he had imagined. Oxford, a staunch rationalist in a town where such a faith was held by few, was such a devotee of the great institutions of higher learning that he had named his children after four of them—Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Cornell—hoping each might go then where appointed. None did. Only Yale came close, attending Princeton, and then to study French, not pharmacy. It was Cornell finally who, if only up at State, pursued at least (a promise to his mother Kate, the town librarian, then gravely ill) his father’s trade, renewing Oxford’s faded hopes that a son might yet return, solace and companion to his autumn years, to carry on what he had here established. These hopes were dashed a few months later when his mother killed herself and Corny suddenly took on Harvie’s errant ways, let the scraggly hairs on his face grow down, burned his library card, dropped out, and in that paradoxical idiom of the times, “turned on,” but then were unexpectedly revived once more when, without advertisement, the boy shaved all but his upper lip and wed a sober northern girl named Gretchen, a pharmacy major more industrious than brilliant maybe, but fully aware of her limitations, which included a withered leg and myopia as severe as Oxford’s. Though Corny dreamed perhaps of grander things, Gretchen brought him home.

Gretchen in innocence once had dreamed her leg was whole, or could be made so, but came to accept instead, finding a father-in-law she’d never dreamed to have, an orthopedic correction and partial interest in a pharmacy one day to be made a whole one in a way her leg could never be. She was a satisfied woman who never showed this with a smile, except sometimes alone with her sister-in-law Lumby, her public face one of pained intensity like that of a long-distance runner about to hit the wall: the goal in sight but dreadful hazards on the route. When, a few years later, John built his newest mall out by the highway, he offered them bright spacious quarters there, which excited Cornell, restless in the dull downtown, duller by the day, but which Oxford feared as a threat to his own dreams of continuity and meaning. As the expense of such a move and broad expansion would have required a partnership with John, Gretchen unhesitatingly sided with her father-in-law and against her whining husband, putting her lame foot down resolutely like the banging of a wooden gavel, and thus began, shaped by frustrated dreams, that family’s slow decline.

In such manner the entire town might be said to have been shaped, its streets laid out by what, though against all probability, might yet be, its daily dialogue sustained by what had not, as though it might have done, come true—though John, again, was an exception. He got always, as if a rule unto himself, more or less what he dreamt of. Perhaps John dreamt wiser dreams, asking from others only what he knew they could give, or taking from them only what he knew they could not refuse him: a kind of magic formula by which John prospered and took his considerable pleasure. Buildings, parks, whole neighborhoods disappeared, and in their place rose banks and malls and housing clusters with lawns where grass had never grown, and simply because John willed it so and other wills were weaker. He endured trials, true, the intrafamilial battle over his new downtown civic center and swimming pool being but the latest, but he relished these trials, as he once had relished the goalline plunge and the raised bar, contests that quickened him, full of risk and body contact, bruising sometimes, exhausting, but never fatal, or almost never, and concluded always, win or lose, with celebrations—celebrations often at John’s expense, for John was also, as all were witness, a generous man, free of rancor and loyal to a fault. Friends from boyhood, school, teams, companies or clubs were friends for life—ask Dutch, a pal since Little League, Loose Bruce or Lennox from fraternity, his old coach Snuffy, Waldo, Otis, Kevin, Trev, they owed him much—and women, too, enjoying John’s beneficence and care long after having given so little, unless they erred and thought it much. Women loved John, most of them did, though he never asked for this, not even from his wife, demanding only a fair exchange, love poor coin, he believed, in such transactions.

Not all women understood this well, and so suffered injured hearts and bouts of self-abasement when their own love declarations were not matched by John or seemingly even heard. Thus, Lollie, as she was known in those days: self-styled sorority archetype, fun-loving, smart, and virgin, parting her thighs at last with elegant simplicity one night down in the games and chapter room of John’s fraternity while a party raged above, her heart racing, her mind a new erogenous zone stroked with prospects and announcements, love bubbling up on her lips like water pumped from a well, from which John appreciatively drank his fill, groaning, “Yes, yes!,” suddenly configuring thereby her shapeless life with narrative thrust and plot and conversion to the future perfect—or so she thought until the heartless knave turned up at the sorority house a few evenings later to pick up one of the younger girls for an all-night pool party and, bumping into a startled Lollie, laughingly gave her a hug that iced her spine. Never thawed. Still couldn’t touch her goddamn toes.

Well, the first time, it had its pleasures, it had its bite, not easily forgotten, nor easily retold. Ellsworth’s “I Remember” column had been running in the town newspaper for years, yet no such tale had surfaced there, though Harriet’s frank account of her wartime experiences as an army nurse in Britain did not exclude her bombshelter snuggle with a handsome surgeon whose name she never knew until they met and married eight months later. The meeting took place over an amputation, the wedding in a vicar’s cottage beside a bombed-out church. Legendary times, those romantic war years, envied by most, their own rites celebrated in less glamorous circumstances, even when in marriage beds, more often in car seats and cheap motels, school toilets and darkened rec rooms, listening not for the buzzing hum of approaching aircraft or the whistle of the fateful bomb, but for a creak on the stairs, approaching bushwhackers, authority’s freezing knock or opened door. The sound in Daphne’s ears when it happened was the whine of a mosquito, that and the rusty squeak of cot springs beneath the bare mattress whereon she struggled. There were smells of leaf rot and sawdust and stale beer and old tennis shoes. The guy with her had her arms pinned behind her with one hand and was ripping her panties off with the other while she pitched and kicked, and what she was thinking while she tried to fight him off (she still remembered this) was that, if he got her panties down, that damned mosquito was going to bite her on her bare butt. And it did, too. Edna heard water dripping that first time, trucks grinding by, Opal her brother’s whisper not to tell, Harvard a prostitute’s wry complaints, the sniggering of his pals outside the door. What teenaged Lenny heard was the congregation on the floor above singing “O Zion, Haste Thy Mission High Fulfilling,” as his geography teacher and friend of his mother took him inside her on top of the stainless steel worktable down in the church kitchen, whimpering, “Oh, yes, sweet Jesus! sweet Jesus!,” while for Pauline it was her Daddy Duwayne in his cidery jacket, unbuckling his old jeans and rumbling, “C’mere now, you little harlot, let’s see what we can do about knockin’ down that wicked ole wall of Jericho!” She was seven years old and thought that Cherry-Go might be an icecream flavor.