Robert Coover - John's Wife

John‘s suburban development of Settler’s Woods where Garth and Imogen later lived provoked the usual knee-jerk protest from Marge, who accused the mayor and his police of doing John’s work for him by torching the woods on purpose, then clearing it for him at the city’s expense, but most noticed that Mad Marge’s heart no longer seemed in it. John, as Garth was to discover on the golf course, was tenacious and hell to beat, so maybe she’d finally just given up, her strong will worn down at last by a will yet stronger. Which John was famous for, along with his cool daring, his unbending loyalty, his attention to detail, his appetites, his broken nose, his generosity, his killer instincts, his love of the bruising battle. To which list he would add, though others might demur (Maynard, for example, in spite of all that John had done for him to get his sentence reduced and take care of his family in his absence), his compassion. Edna was one who would agree that he was a compassionate man, even though she’d not been directly told who’d paid off her mortgage when Floyd disappeared from town, and Dutch was another, a survivor in spite of himself, who’d been well compensated by John for the loss of his motel and distracted finally from his other deprivations by their codevelopment of Getaway Stadium, a new ballpark and sports facility built on the site of the old motel, originally for summer youth programs and Little League baseball, but large enough that they were eventually able to lure to town a minor league farm club, one that Dutch, owning a piece of it, later helped to run. Nevada, the popular aerobics instructor who took over the new health club at the expanded civic center, would never have described her former boss as a compassionate man (no such thing, she would have said), but she knew him to be flexible in his negotiations and not without feelings: like Otis, John had lost his best friend, and though he never mentioned it, Nevada knew he was hurting. Maybe it was the only serious loss that fortunate man had ever suffered, and as there was nothing he could do about it, his grief, like hers, could be ignored but never wholly assuaged, though his basic principle—“Caring too much for another is a bad investment”—helped. “Everyone and everything’s expendable, including yourself,” he liked to say. “The important thing is to keep your eye on the game.” An expression his wife had never heard, though she had heard him instruct her to keep her eye on the ball. Did she believe him to be a compassionate person? Who could say? She was never asked the question nor ever volunteered an opinion, though she herself was judged to be, as Ellsworth put it in an article on her many charitable activities following the devastating fire at Settler’s Woods, “the very paragon of compassion, grace, and civic virtue,” a woman loved by all no less than John was by all esteemed.

When Ellsworth dropped by Gordon’s studio to ask for a recent photo of John and his wife to accompany the article and to schedule a shoot of the charred and spectral woods, where bulldozers were already rumbling in like robotic predators, eating up the historical moment, he found his friend much changed. Gordon was suddenly an old grizzled fat man, stooped and broken like the ancient humpback bridge they were tearing down out there, and Ellsworth wondered if he himself seemed as changed in Gordon’s eyes. The shutdown photo shop was a shambles. Ellsworth had never thought of Pauline as much of a housekeeper or business manager, but her absence was clearly being felt. Photographs and curling negatives littered the floor, albums lay open on chairs and countertops, the bead curtains had been torn away, the portrait studio was a wreck, and there was dust and clutter everywhere, yet Gordon, poking lugubriously about, seemed hardly to notice. His sagging jowls were covered by a dirty gray stubble and his eyes were filmy and unfocused. Ellsworth commiserated with him on his bereavement, remarked that his place looked about as chaotic as his own Crier offices (“storm-tossed” was the word that came to mind), and expressed his indignation at Gordon’s unjust treatment at the hands of the police, which he said he intended to write an editorial about. “Artists are always misunderstood.” “Jail,” Gordon said dully. “I’d never been there. But I recognized it. It had the smell of death in it. It was my own darkroom.” He picked up a photo from a pile, studied it, set it down again. Ellsworth saw that it was a picture of John’s wife in the Pioneers Day parade, one he might use, but that Gordon had been looking at it upside down. “I felt terribly wise and terribly stupid at the same time. And very much alone. I kept hoping you might come by.” “I’m sorry. I only just found out. At the time, I was, well, somewhere else. Some time else. It was, I don’t know, like I was locked into a certain day, if that was what it was, one I thought would never end.” Ellsworth meant to say no more, but realized that what he’d just said made no sense. “I was writing a novel.” Gordon seemed surprised by this and a glimmer of his old self returned. “You mean The Artist’s Ordeal? Is it finished?” He hesitated. “I don’t know. I think so. But I can’t find it.” He’d returned from the grim desolation of smoldering Settler’s Woods to the grimmer desolation of his own offices, shocked afresh by what had met him there. His shelves and file drawers were all spilled out and he’d evidently ripped up the sole remaining archival copies of the precious wedding issues, among many others. Perhaps, he’d thought, he was mistaken about the importance of the official chronicler to the keeping of the communal memory, but he’d shaken off his doubts and set about putting his and the town’s lives back together again. He’d just been pasting up the scraps as best he could when, around noon, she came in. While sitting all night at the hospital bedside of her child, she’d composed a little essay for his paper on “The Kiss of Life,” she’d said, looking up at him as she used to look up at him when they were children, adding with an apologetic smile that she hoped it was not too badly written. Suddenly, he’d wished to hold her hand and read to her as he used to do, this time from his own work, and she’d seemed pleased when he’d suggested it. But when he’d gone looking for the novel, it wasn’t there. Only traces. A sheet or two. Scrawled notes. A few mad ravings tossed helter-skelter. “I guess I burned it after all.” He glanced again at the photograph on the top of the pile, but saw now that it was of Gordon’s dying mother. Gordon must have shuffled them about. The old lady seemed to be staring accusingly up at him, her flesh sunken, toothless mouth agape. A shriveled breast scissored between her gnarled fingers. In his novel, he had written about “the unspeakable things” the Stalker was doing with the Model, but, no, wrong, everything was speakable. “What did you want from her?” Gordon asked suddenly. He’d picked up a soupy grayish photo that seemed to have no image on it at all. “Her?” “You know.” “I–I’m not sure.” His friend’s sorrowful gaze dropped to the murky photograph. “Nor I.”

The return of The Town Crier was greeted by the usual disparaging wisecracks, but even its severest critics were relieved to find it each week on their front porches again. Things had been happening during its absence, but now it was as though they were really happening, and even those events that had gone unreported had been rescued from oblivion by Ellsworth’s reconstruction of them, in the same way that the more ancient past had been recovered through his innovative “I Remember” columns. A popular former town librarian, who had passed on some years back, had written in an “I Remember” contribution of her own that “Memory is all we have to keep time from taking everything away from us,” and not only did most townsfolk agree with her, but many had that column clipped and pinned up somewhere or tucked in a cookbook or the Bible so they wouldn’t forget it. For Marge, the weekly newspaper was less significant as history (she had her scorecards for that, sharing her husband’s respect for numbers as about all the history one could count on) than as a bully pulpit, she having been a frequent contributor to its letters page, though less so now than in the past. Had she lost her crusading zeal? Had John finally worn her down? Not exactly. For dreamless Marge had had at last a dream. Where she’d had it, she wasn’t sure. She remembered being out on the darkening golf course, feeling very tired, and stumbling toward the seventeenth green, which looked very soft and cushy. She’d just holed out and the last thing she recalled was bending over to look in the hole for her ball. Then she woke up at home. But in between. She’d tried to tell Lollie about it, but though she’d had to listen to countless dreams from Lorraine over the years, her friend had refused to listen to the only one Marge had ever had. “I was dancing with … somebody,” she’d said. “Then suddenly it was more than dancing.” “I don’t want to hear about it, Marge!” Was Lorraine reading her mind? No, that was over and even her memory of what she’d heard had dimmed. Lorraine was just being selfish. The dream had begun in the basement of John’s fraternity house where Marge learned that she’d just been elected. They prodded her forward and, because the issue was zoning problems, she took off her clothes or maybe they were already off for the same reason. Likewise her partner, who told her it was time to start straddling the issue, and that was when the slamdance began. Body contact, he grunted bruisingly. I love it! Though it was the only dream Marge had ever had, the amazing thing was, she was still having it, though most of the preliminaries had long since dropped away. No complaints. It was a pretty good dream, even if there was not much to tell anymore, were there anyone to tell it to. Certainly not to Trevor who was too tired even to talk most of the time and who got terribly flustered whenever she even mentioned the bed, not to speak of sleep and dreams. So, in effect, she’d been subverted from within, knew it, didn’t care: dancing John could do what he liked, or almost. When she learned of John’s plans to develop Settler’s Woods after the fire, she had written to The Town Crier about it, accusing the city of sinister collusion, but her letter had appeared the same week that they dug up some old human remains out there, including a skull with the middle of the face missing, Ellsworth heading the story, “Grisly Find in Settler’s Woods,” and flaunting his rhetoric in an editorial on the need to clean up that dangerous area, so her message did not get through. No matter. Back to beddy-bye. To speak in the philosophizing manner. Besides, Settler’s Woods was one of John’s most graceful developments and popular with the community. He preserved most of the surviving trees, mature timber enhancing property value these days, carved the area into interesting odd-shaped lots following the old creek bed (Marge and Trevor bought one), and built a pretty little park with a children’s playground around a small grove in the center that had somehow escaped the fire, John thus, ironically, becoming celebrated, like his fondly remembered father-in-law before him, as a builder of city parks.