John's Wife: A Novel (64 page)

Outside the saloon a storm was raging, echoing the turbulence within as Veronica, changing Second John’s dirty diapers on a wooden cardtable, got set upon by all the barroom rowdies offended by her little boy’s childish antics with his pistol. They were both sprayed with beer and pelted with cigar butts and peanut shells and candy wrappers and lashed with a thunderous barrage of uncouth insults, mostly having to do with the contents of his diaper but some calling his origins into question and others deriding her exposed backside, which she couldn’t help. It wasn’t fair. “If I had an ass like that, I’d sell advertising space!” “The last time I saw an ass like that, it was pulling a plow!” That didn’t stop them from attacking it, she could feel them crowding up behind to make painful use of it as Maynard so often did, and she certainly didn’t like it, but what could she do, she had both hands full and open safety pins in her mouth and her baby was crying: “I been caught with my diapers down, Ma! You gotta hold them off any way you can!” The few gas lamps he hadn’t shot down were swinging on their chains as though buffeted within by the storm without, sending shadows flying about like wheeling bats, and tables and chairs were crashing as the men clambered forward, their vile threats and humorless laughter like a hot beery breath on the back of her neck. Though she shielded her son from the worst of it, they were both being drenched in buckets of beer, her backside their last line of defense, all too easily breached. There was nothing to do finally but pick the baby up, dirty bottom or no, and make a run for it. But she could find no way out. All the exits were blocked. The men surrounded them, brandishing hard penises and baring their tobacco-stained teeth as they closed in. The saloon seemed on fire from the dancing light of the swinging lamps. “We’re done for, Ma!” Second John cried, clinging painfully to her breasts. “Do something!” He was slippery and getting heavy, she almost couldn’t hold him, and the smoke from his cigar was making her nose sting and her eyes water. Then, just as she was about to collapse from exhaustion and despair, First John’s wife came in with a fresh diaper, made the men put their penises back and return to their tables, settled the lamps down, took the baby’s cigar away and threw it into a cuspidor, cleaned his bottom, gave him a change, and wrapped him up in a towel the barman gave her. “Come on, now, let’s send him back where he came from,” she smiled, and led Veronica out the door to a windy railway platform, where a train was just pulling in through the thunderstorm. “I didn’t know the train still came through here,” Ronnie said, putting her breasts back inside. “You have to know where to find it.” Her friend handed the baby to the conductor, who tossed it behind him, and the train pulled out, seeming to pull the storm away with it as it went, and Ronnie started to cry. “It’s all right now,” her old classmate said gently, helping her up out of the lawnchair. “It’s letting up. You can go home now.” “I’m sorry,” she sniffled. “I’m afraid I split the seat …” “It’s not your fault. It’s been left out too many times in the rain.” “No, I meant—” “Here, you’re completely soaked, poor thing. I’ve brought you your nightgown, which is dry at least.” She took off the ruined linen dress and dried herself with the towel offered her and pulled on the nightgown and thanked her hostess for the lovely party, begging her pardon for having stayed so late, then stumbled out by way of the darkened driveway and headed wearily home through the wet streets in the lightless early dawn.

Though there was no sign in the sky that the black stormy night had ended, Barnaby, sitting alone by his window watching the wet orange glow that had taken his daughter away get swallowed up in the darkness, knew by his own knowing that dawn had arrived. All night, she’d been at his bedside, listening to his bitter tale of duplicity and betrayal, but then the glow had appeared which, even in his crackbrain confusions, he knew to be a fire, though he’d thought it was his own house burning, the one they’d all lived in when she was a little girl and Audrey was young and beautiful. He’d worried aloud about Audrey’s safety, her life might be in danger, and his daughter had said, yes, she’d better go see, but not to worry, she’d be back soon, get some rest. “Be careful!” he’d rasped as she left, though he couldn’t be sure she’d heard him. “I love you!” Had it really been his daughter? Maybe, maybe not. In retrospect, she’d looked a little like the resident nurse, at least when she departed, if not when she arrived. He’d staggered to his chair by the rain-lashed window to watch the lightning explode and the rain whip past like crashing tides and the fire slowly die and to wait for his daughter’s return, though now he no longer expected her. What a night. He was a crazy old buzzard, like the lady said. Thought he could change what could not be changed, a delusion he shared with builders the world over. He’d found the gun he’d intended for saner purposes and shot up the place, lucky not to have killed someone. Or unlucky. Though he now knew that the woman who had left with Mitch last night was not Audrey, he still felt deceived, certain now that the heart of the woman whose hand he’d won had never been won at all. That silly woman who’d pretended to be her knew more than she knew. Audrey, too, had only pretended to be Audrey, or at least the Audrey who’d lived with him. The knowledge saddened him and added to the sorrow and emptiness that engulfed him in these rare dawn moments of lucidity, but he knew it was more his fault than hers. He the builder who had not built well. That house deserved to burn. The only light on the horizon, now gone, too. He imagined the charred ruins: his hopes. His daughter wandering through them, grieving: his legacy. He wandered there, too—tottered and shambled, rather, all grace vanished—and he tried to speak to her but could not. Though he could almost reach out and touch her, there was a distance between them that could not be bridged, as between past and present, or between part and whole. He shuffled through a door, thinking about his burning lumberyard. The waste, the waste! He looked at his image in a mirror and was not surprised to find it broken up into ill-fitting fragments. He had more than two eyes, which accounted for his lack of focus, a mouth whose parts did not all join up. Of course, it was the mirror that was broken, though it cast back a truer image than when it was whole. He leaned forward, bracing himself on the sink. It was crunched in the middle with cracks radiating outwards like a spiderweb. Had he tried to drive a nail in it? Or had Audrey?

Across town, Audrey—or Opal, rather: that dangerous game was over—had also, as though in mirror image of that broken man, been sitting sleeplessly by the window, watching the glow of the fire fade in the sudden crashing downpour, the downpour itself slowing fading as though dying with the fire. It was dawn, but a dawn that shed no light. The only light shed had been shed within and that in the blackest depths of the night when that old fool, who was her annoying husband and also an old family friend she hardly knew, started shooting at her while she was sitting on the toilet. As Audrey, she knew then that, as Opal, she had been her disappointed husband’s second choice, not merely when he’d married her, but for all the years thereafter while Audrey was still alive. Had she and Mitch consummated their affair? Even as Audrey, whose memories of her past romances were suspiciously dim, she could not be sure, although, as Opal, she was certain they had had a fling of some kind even if nothing came of it, Audrey being, for all her harsh banter, something of a tease and more insecure than Opal had ever supposed. But it didn’t matter what they’d actually done. Audrey had married Barnaby, perhaps to avenge an imagined wrong, or a real wrong, for Mitch had always shamelessly played the field (he had?), and Mitch had replied in kind, their marriages a private dialogue between them, their partners little more than analogues of spite. So shattering had this revelation been, so complex and disturbing her feelings about it, she’d not even been able at first to rise from the stool when Mitch turned up at Barnaby’s door. For, as Audrey, she now loved Mitch in a way that, as Opal, she never could nor ever would, while, as Opal, she resented his intrusion upon this revelatory drama, still unfolding, and at the same time was grateful to him for his timely rescue from a crazed old man. With whom, however, she now felt a deep bond not unlike that of an understanding lover, or at least the best of friends, and for whom she feared more than for her would-be rescuer when the gun went off. Which startled her and made her jump up off the seat, for, as Opal, she was embarrassed to be caught so compromised, even though she somehow felt it was she who was catching Mitch with Audrey, who wished to be caught in dishabille, so to speak, by an impetuous lover whom she would rebuke even as he burst in and laid eyes upon her, refusing his advances in spite of the gallantry for which Opal was so grateful, while gazing directly in his eyes as she slowly pulled her panties on, letting him know clearly what it was she was refusing him, even as Opal pulled them on with modest haste, too flustered even to remember to flush. All of which made her start to cry, whether as Opal or Audrey, she wasn’t sure, and when she opened the bathroom door and saw them both standing there, her husbands, or her lovers, one of them with a gun in his hand, the other one tottering as though he’d been shot, it was all so mixed up that she was suddenly terror-stricken, and all atremble, ran over to embrace one of them, but she didn’t know which until Mitch opened up his arms (“You all right, hon?”) and then, thank goodness, she had no choice. Mitch had wanted to call the police, but she’d dissuaded him, saying, since no one was hurt, they should let John handle it, and she’d begged him to take her home (to Opal’s home), she couldn’t bear to see another soul tonight, if he wanted to go back to the party he could go without her if he liked, and then, looking as though she’d just rebuffed him (who had he thought she was?), he’d done just that, or gone somewhere, at dawn gone still.

Maynard’s fright was of a similar order: confusion, exposure, and imminent danger. When he’d awoken he’d not known where he was. He was in a darkened bedroom, not his own, fully dressed, even to his shoes, and curled up around the backside of a sleeping woman, his hands cupping a soft smooth bottom under a silken nightie’s hem, his face in her loosened hair. His wife’s? No. Then—? This sweetness … His whole body had gone rigid as though suffering a seizure when the truth hit him, and he’d nearly swallowed his tongue stifling the cry that rose to his throat. He’d lain there in a kind of ecstasy of terror, not knowing what to do, but not wanting to let go of the greatest joy he’d ever had in life, had literally in his grasp. That bottom! Hers! The piece of silk between his cheek and pillow, dampened by his tears, had then been freshly dampened, but now by tears of incredulous bliss, his hands suddenly aware of their being in the world in a way no part of him had ever been before. He’d longed to press beyond where now he touched, but had been afraid to break a spell that held him as much as her in thrall. She’d stirred slightly, and Maynard had felt a fury at his chest that it would not stop heaving, and at the noisome breath he breathed and at the scratchy beard that roughed his cheeks, the clothes that walled him off from her, the odors of his unwashed body which rose now to thwart all hopes of declaring, even by the gentlest gesture, the desperate love that so consumed him and made him tremble, head to foot, this trembling angering and frightening him as well. He prayed to let this moment last forever, but it couldn’t, he knew, no moment could, something had to happen and something did: a car pulled into the drive below, startling him so, he jerked his hands away, and then, the damage done, no way to put them back. Nor had he time or liberty: he heard the car door slam and knew he was a dead man if John should catch him here. He slipped out of the bed (she sighed and rolled over, making his stuttering heart race the faster, his stomach turn) and crept from the room, trying desperately not to fart until he reached the hall, and succeeding only so far as the door. “John—?” she murmured sleepily. John was coming in the door downstairs, which one, the back? The side door by the drive? Maynard had forgotten the precious garment soaked by his lovesick tears, but too late now. He heard steps below and ducked into a room where a child with two heads stared at him from under a blanket on the floor. “Nighty-night,” he whispered, terribly confused, and again his gut betrayed him, making the two heads giggle and whisper. This was worrying. He slipped out, listened from the head of the stairs: John was in the kitchen opening the refrigerator door, popping a beercan, shushing the dogs. That’s right, the dogs, he had forgotten about the dogs. What could he do? Crawl out a window and jump from the roof? Hide in a closet with all his gases until John had slept and gone again? Cut his throat? Finally, what in a blind funk he did was take off his shoes and, muffling the stuttering put-put from his treacherous behind as best he could, he’d tiptoed barefoot down the stairs, through the hall, past dining room and living room, and on out the front door into the soggy dawn. It worked! Or nearly. John called out from inside the house just as he reached the front sidewalk and knelt to put his shoes back on: “Call me later on today, Maynard! I’ve got a proposition!”

“John—?” “Yes.” “Something terrible! Clarissa—!” “I know. I saw the woods smoldering when I flew over and stopped off there. They told me.” “I was with her until now. She was so brave—” “So they tell me. She was pretty well sedated by the time I got there.” He set his tumbler of whiskey beside her earrings on the night table, sat down on the edge of the bed to work his boots off. “She’ll be in traction awhile and have a sexy scar or two, but she’ll be okay.” “What-what’s all that?” “Some flowers for you.” “Oh. That’s very nice, John. It was sweet of you to remember.” “I dropped some off at the hospital, too. A lot of people got hurt at the fire. Did you know Dutch got shot?” “I’d heard.” He stripped off his leather vest and jeans, his shorts, tossed aside the panties lying on his pillow, and stretched out beside his sleepy wife to finish off his whiskey. Remember what? Had he missed their anniversary? “When I find out how she got the keys to the Porsche, somebody’s going to eat them.” “There was some man with her.” “I know. A guy who used to work for me.” “They say she was—” “My guess is they both were.” He’d been found in sweats, but the pants were on backwards. “It was just lucky your secretary was driving past.” “Yes, luck or something.” “She pulled Clarissa out of the creek and gave her the kiss of life. The doctor said she would have died.” Flying back, he’d traced out the series of Nevada’s double crosses, of himself, of Bruce, of everyone, Lenny’s boy included. He’d concluded that Clarissa never was a target, not of Bruce anyway, and so he’d probably punched Jennifer’s brother for the wrong reason, though the kid no doubt deserved it for something all the same. And now, it was just too convenient that Nevada was at the wreck at almost the same time it happened. Had Clarissa been a target after all? Was that why he’d been lured out of town? “Is Bruce all right?” his wife murmured. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” “I’m very sorry, dear.” Sleepily, she curled into his outstretched arm. “It was all just a joke to him,” he said, setting his glass down, and rolling over between her thighs. She lifted her knees, adjusting to his weight, hooking one foot atop his butt. “A joke?” “Life. His problem was, he couldn’t wait for the punchline.” Watching his town seem to sink away and vanish into the shadowy earth as he lifted away on his wild Bruce chase, he’d felt that something was being taken away from him, something valuable he could not afford to lose, though he could not quite name it, and the feeling had stayed with him all through the night, even as he labored to cleanse the cabin of all evidence of that ruthless overweening motherfucker’s violations, indeed of his very existence (had the puffed-up asshole greased himself? good riddance!), an inner purging matching the outer one, and that feeling of some impending but ineffable loss had pursued him until his return at dawn when once again his town had risen up out of the misty soil below him, its resurrection signaled by the dying flames and smoke from Settler’s Woods, sent up like a beacon in the disintegrating night as the violent storm which he’d had to skirt sheathed its weapons and withdrew. She kissed his shoulder as he rolled away, picked up his glass again. Loose Bruce was gone, like a joke when it’s been told, and like a joke, once heard, you really didn’t want to hear it again. But. “I feel like some part of me has died,” he admitted. “Oh, that reminds me,” she said with a sleepy yawn. “Stu’s dead.” “Stu?” “He was killed. And they ruined all his old records.” “But wasn’t he here at the barbecue?” “He never turned up. I tried to call Daphne, but her phone was off the hook.” Why did that old jug-head’s death make him think of Marie-Claire? John didn’t know, but now he knew what had been missing up at the cabin, that feeling of unnameable loss that he couldn’t put his finger on. Bruce had taken away with him Marie-Claire’s slashed canvas.