John's Wife: A Novel (68 page)

One day, long before that happened, when John had to make a trip up to the state capital for a meeting his father had arranged with members of the state gaming commission, Nevada said she knew someone up there John should visit. She was a professional, but she’d buy him his ticket and it would be worth his time. John doubted this and distrusted Nevada still, but took the phone number along. Before leaving, he stopped by the police station to talk with the troubled chief and suggest a career change, but learned that Otis had left for Settler’s Woods where they might have found their missing prisoner at last. Not so. “These have been here some while,” Otis said, kicking at the bones. Bulldozers, clearing the charred stumps, had turned them up at the edge of a ravine. Otis was disappointed and worried, looking edgily over his shoulder, and so was receptive to John’s proposal. He said he’d think on it and let him know when John got back. John, in turn, was sobered by the bones, and realized he’d not yet shaken off the emotional garbage of Bruce’s suicidal betrayal. Something in him still wanted the old days back, but the loss of his old friend, he knew, was permanent. The miserable asshole was either dead, which was highly likely, or, if John ever ran into him again, he’d have to kill him. Grief for John was an appetite like any other and, a man of many appetites, John believed in feeding one with another. Thus it was that the idea of an exotic fuck in the old style appealed to him as both wake and exorcism, so after the meeting, which did not go well (luckily, he’d made sure that nothing was in his own name), he called and booked an hour before dinner, figuring he could return later if she was good and he wanted a nightcap. He expected her to surprise him and she did. Not the sex. She was young, skilled, limber, thoughtful, even contemplative, better with her vagina than her mouth (she’d had a good teacher), but, except for her expressionless mask and Goldilocks wig, conventional. She fucked by the numbers, almost as though out of a manual. Probably the most exciting thing about her was her aura of terrible vulnerability: she was, whore or no, intensely virginal. She was literally trembling as he entered her. But that wasn’t the surprise either.

When Clarissa got out of traction and was able to travel, albeit with a back and neck brace and crutches, she went up to the capital for the first of the plastic surgery her father had scheduled (nothing but the best, as always), and, though she did not know her father had preceded her nor ever found out, Clarissa also paid a visit, arranged by Nevada on the promise that it was a secret between them, to her old friend Jennifer. It was a cold wintry day, and Jen’s flat was dark and chilly. The living room and bedroom looked like shutdown movie sets, very posh and with lots of soft beautiful fabrics, even on the walls, but they sat at a plain wooden table in the dismal little kitchen at the back, Jen in a droopy housecoat and close-cropped hair, drinking Diet Cokes together. It was an awkward meeting, around noontime, before Jen’s working day began, and although, thanks to Nevada, each knew a lot about what had happened to the other, they found it hard to start talking about it. It wasn’t that Jen was unhappy, really, but she was different. Or something was different between them. For one thing, Jen had taken up smoking. But more than that. She seemed thinner, more hollow cheeked, still pretty in an angular sort of way, but older, her faded complexion showing traces of creamed-off makeup. Clarissa had suggested in her phonecall that they meet for a taco or a hamburger somewhere, but Jen said she never went out anymore, so now Clarissa asked her why not, and she said she just didn’t like it out there, it was too confusing, a big meaningless blur. “In here, I know what’s what,” she said, turning her Coke glass round and round in its own sweat ring on the table. Clarissa filled Jennifer in on all the family news (“The Creep came to see me every day …”) and told her how Nevada pulled her out of the wreck and gave her the kiss of life, and Jennifer, stubbing out her cigarette in the jar lid that served as an ashtray and lighting up another, said that she and Nevada were lovers now. “Sort of. It’s more like being sisters maybe, but it’s what we have that’s steady. The men just come and go.” Clarissa was shocked but tried not to show it. Jen asked her why Rex was in her car that night and Clarissa told her. “I was really pissed off that you’d gone off with Bruce alone. I got stoned and went completely out of my skull.” “Probably they were just trying to protect you. It wasn’t very nice. I think maybe he meant to kill me and changed his mind.” She stood up, cigarette dangling in the corner of her mouth, and dropped her housecoat and Clarissa, blinking, saw slanted light on scarred flesh, and then Jen was sitting again, the housecoat wrapped around her. “It was beautiful, though. The whole cabin was full of flowers. It was like a dream I’d had.” Clarissa, trying to stay cool, said: “Well, my scars are worse, and there was nothing beautiful about it.” Jennifer nodded, stubbed her butt out in the heaped jar lid. “I’m awfully sorry.” “Except for one moment maybe, when I felt wildly free. But I can only vaguely remember it.” Clarissa went to use the bathroom, Jen helping her as far as the door, and when she came back she asked about the ruined painting hanging in there. “Marie-Claire did it. It was the only thing he gave me afterwards. A kind of souvenir. While he had me strapped down, he said he believed Marie-Claire had found a kind of final ecstasy through pure form before she died, and he wanted to use me the same way she had used her canvas. It was pretty scary.” They both agreed that Bruce was a totally screwed-up guy, though Jennifer said she still loved him, even if he was dead. Maybe that was what was different about her. When Clarissa got up to go, Jen started to cry. She apologized, and what she said, wiping her eyes on her housecoat sleeve, was: “I can never fall in love again.” “Who knows?” Clarissa said, leaning on her crutches. She was feeling strangely jealous of Jennifer, and she was ashamed of it. “Anyway, Jen, once was better than nothing.”

Like sister, like brother. Jennifer’s brother Philip, too, carried the torch for a lost love well past all hope of reciprocation and past even his desire for it. Years later, married and with children of his own, teaching at a small college not unlike the one his father taught at when Philip was in kindergarten, enjoying an affair with a young biology colleague (hey, let it happen) and popular with the students of both sexes (his philosophy, taught him in his father’s own study by the beautiful schemer who changed his life: if you can’t send the soul to heaven, lover, at least, hallowed be thy kingly come, send the body …), he still suffered a kind of wistful flush whenever Clarissa came to mind or was brought to mind by news from home sent by Zoe. As when she first got elected to the state legislature, for example: he could hardly recognize her from the newspaper photo, but what he saw when he stared at that strong handsome woman standing by her private jet in her business suit was the vulnerable little teenager in her hospital bed, utterly locked up in casts and braces, but fiery-eyed and taunting him still, even as she asked a favor of him, demanded it, rather, an image that provoked in him an almost unbearable longing which, as an educated man, he supposed was at heart a longing for a lost innocence. Got the hots, as he and Turtle used to say, but the hots he got these days were not for sex but for the wonderful all-consuming glow that used to accompany its anticipation while it itself was still largely unknown, a glow he could only experience secondhand now by way of the occasional undergraduate or, glimmeringly, by reliving his passion for Clarissa. His friend Maynard had also gone the grad school route in time and had even visited Philip’s college when Philip managed to get him short-listed during a search in what passed for a philosophy department there, but Maynard was too weird even for this lot. He lectured from his thesis-in-progress which espoused the theory that the big bang theory of an exploding and contracting universe was nothing more than a residual memory from the womb—but nothing less either, for who was to say that we did not, in each of our cells, reenact the entire history of the universe? That might have gone down without a blink had he not defended his thesis with a wild mix of evangelical religious metaphors and research based largely on his ritual visits to porn parlors, Maynard being evidently another trying to recapture a lost delight, but about as crazy as his poor mother who, last time Philip saw her, screamed every time someone opened a door or she had to turn a corner. Of course, loopy as his own folks were, Philip was not really one to talk. Maynard’s embittered father, who had whipped the boy for things as insignificant as a dirty wristband found in the woods or a childish question about angels and orgasms, did a bit of prison time eventually, caught out in some irregularities at the racetrack, and since Philip was off to college by then, Maynard was taken in by his own folks and given Philip’s old room. Which always made Philip feel uneasy in a way he could not quite pin down, though Maynard became more like family to him than his own family did, except for Zoe. Philip had drifted away from his parents over the years, or they from him, never did get used to baby Adam, who always seemed a bit scary to him, nor ever saw Jennifer again, though he knew she was alive somewhere because Clarissa told him so. He’d gone to visit his love every day after the accident while she was in the hospital, enduring her bitter invective, responding abjectly to her least demand, mostly in silence, never once professing his love, nor replying in kind to her humiliating ridicule, often with an audience of other friends about. Then one day, when no one else was around and she seemed particularly angry and restless inside all her bindings and apparatuses, Clarissa asked him to reach under her bedclothes and jerk her off, not being able to use her hands was driving her crazy, come on, Creep, make yourself useful. And so, breathless with terror and excitement, his eye on her braced hips and rigid cast-locked elbows, his broken nose tingling inside its own plaster mask, he slid his damp trembling hand into that tender crevice he had so long coveted and, with his finger up her at last, felt all thought dissolve into pure sensation, like a hot brain bath, what his mother would have called beatitude or an ecstasy attack, a sensation which lingered in the memory to this day, though he no longer remembered what his finger felt, if in fact, stunned as he was, it felt anything at all. Her own pleasure engulfed him and he came in his own pants, not knowing how it happened. Okay, I owe you one, Creep, she said afterwards. Now get lost. Never did collect. Never hoped to. Dreamt of it, though. All the days of his life.

Otis owed one to the Virgin and she did collect. After retiring from the police force and before taking over the management and security operations of the municipal airport, a vacancy created by the election of Mayor Snuffy, Otis went on the religious retreat he had solemnly promised her, withdrawing from friends, family, and all worldly obligations to a small rustic cabin at the edge of a summer camp run by the church. Except for attending Mass in the little chapel in the woods, he kept himself apart from the children and the staff and the other people on retreat, eating alone, reading the literature provided, taking long silent walks, praying and meditating and reflecting upon the cross and images of the Virgin and of Pauline. These latter he kept out of sight nor did he even mention them in the confessional, for, though he had the Virgin’s own permission to study them and attached no sinfulness to them, others might not have understood that his interest in these little paper blowups of the creases and dimples and hairy bits of naked flesh was not prurient but contemplative: Otis, in short, thumbing through the photos, was seeking something like the mystical hot brain bath that had benchmarked the emotional life of young Fish. That fateful night in the woods in Pauline’s lap, pressed up under the tender overhang of her monumental breast, illumined only by the stuttering radiance of the turbulent skies, Otis had felt himself as close to a true religious experience as he’d ever known, but one interrupted by his sudden untimely and painful fall between her thighs (he could remember, as he hit the ground, glancing up in panic at her massive craglike buns for fear she might sit down before he could get to his feet and scramble out of there), and his desire now was to recapture that visionary moment just before, wherein, as he now recalled, his whole life as Officer Otis the guardian warrior had been revealed as a mockery, a self-delusion: what did his lifelong obsession with order and disorder have to do with this turbulent, radiant, and tender world which knew, at heart, no such distinction? Oh ye of little faith! her belly had seemed to murmur into his pressed ear. What measures you take to conceal the truth from view! Yes, he had been ready at last to shed all artifice—to be a man merely of the here and now was to be a man closed out from eternity!—and to embrace, if it could be said to be embraceable, the legendary abyss, which seemed to lie just beyond the warm undulant flesh to which, before he fell, he clung. But then, suddenly, he was on the ground again and, with gunfire crackling, it was back to business as usual. Except he was dead tired, hadn’t slept for what seemed like weeks, so the rest of that night was like a walking nightmare—the madness of the fire, the exhausting storm, her weight, the confusion, the mud at the landfill, his terrible weariness—and he remembered little of it, dependent upon these photos to bring it back to mind. Which they did but dimly, referring, like most criminal evidence, more to themselves than to anything else. But then, one twilit evening, he was staring, his thoughts elsewhere, at a shot apparently taken in the rain, or perhaps in the bath, and he suddenly seemed to see behind Pauline’s twinkling pubes a faint second image peeking through: a pure white presence, like a tunic, flowing beside its ghostly twin as though shadowed by its own reflection. What? He peered closer. No. Nothing more. A photographic flaw perhaps. No, wait! There, up by the appendectomy scar: a gaze—that gaze! He gasped and fell to his knees, felt a tingling on the back of his neck. It was she! The Virgin! A miracle!

Gordon, the town photographer who had taken the photos that so engaged the attention of the former police chief on his religious retreat, received in time an unexpected bequest when Trevor the insurance agent suddenly fell victim to time’s ceaseless violence and wasted away and died. There was no explanation in the will, only the proviso that it be used to further the legatee’s artistic endeavors. Not quite a miracle perhaps, but certainly a surprise. In an article in
The Town Crier
, editor Ellsworth praised the deceased for his generous support of the arts in the community and pointed out that the recipient of his beneficence, recently widowered, had devoted his life to serious artistic endeavors, both public and private, which had heretofore gone largely unrecognized. When interviewed, the photographer was reported to have said that he hoped to accomplish a complete study of the town, exploring it exhaustively, block by block, to unlock its elusive secrets and reveal its hidden surfaces. What Gordon really told Ellsworth was that he was through with photography, there was nothing left to see worth seeing, it was his inclination to return now to drawing and painting, and to portraiture in particular, which he proceeded to do, though with the help of photography, copying directly from his studio shots and sometimes, for variety, from photos taken out on the streets, or even from magazines. A bit mechanical maybe, but everyone seemed to love them and to think of him thereafter as the town artist. Ellsworth objected privately (Gordon, gazing at him as one might at a prospective model, was shocked to notice how gray his thin stringy hair had become, how deep the bags beneath his eyes, and wondered where those photos were he took when they were young), but without conviction, for he himself, shrugging his shoulders when asked what had happened to
The Artist’s Ordeal
, had launched a new novel about his grandfather, an itinerant printer who had made his living passing through villages such as this one, producing commercial handbills and selling how-to-do-it and children’s books, and who here met a widow who wrote poetry for weddings and funerals and married her and settled down. He would
not
call it
The Artist and His Muse
, he said when Gordon suggested it. Something more like:
I Remember: The Story of My Grandfather
. Gordon offered to provide illustrations for it. The studio reopened, but by appointment only. Disenchanted with his former pursuits, Gordon no longer sold or developed film, accepted news photo assignments for the
Crier
, added to or even refiled his backshop collections (though many of the prints were useful to him in his new career), nor took school, club, wedding, anniversary, team, or any other personal, social, or group photos away from the shop, but he did put up new hangings and reactivate his old studio, the portraits taken there often serving as the basis for his higher artistic aspirations, and thus he continued to contribute to the town’s pictorial history, if not so extensively as before.