Robert Coover - John's Wife

Ronnie, like old Alf and Harriet, actually heard humming aircraft and exploding bombs, Cherry-Going, as it were, to the sounds of war, but this happened, long after the real war, out at the old drive-in movie theater where later the interstate link cut through, erasing, so to speak, the scene of the crime. It was following a high school football game and she still had her cheerleading clothes on, which made it both easier and harder. Easier because there were almost no preliminaries to be got through, harder because the underpants were tight and made of heavy lined material like a swimming suit, so there was no going in past the legband, like some guys had tried to do before with flimsier stuff there. Veronica had made up her mind to go all the way some time before, but most of the boys she was going out with seemed to know even less about it than she did, though they’d never admit it, and she just couldn’t trust them. Then, suddenly, the perfect opportunity arose, so quickly it almost took her breath away, when John, home from college, turned up unexpectedly at a weekend football game and, after coming over to josh around with Coach Snuffy and the boys at halftime, turned and asked her what she was doing later on. Ronnie had gone out with him once before, long ago, but he was too fast for her then. Now she was ready, or thought she was, and she said, “I don’t know, you got any good ideas?” It should have been wonderful. It wasn’t. She bled and bled, she just couldn’t stop. She always was unlucky. Up on the screen, they were cursing and yelling and stabbing each other with bayonets, but at the time she didn’t see the humor in this. Neither did John, who was really mad about what she had done and was still doing to the backseat of his father’s car. He jammed his underpants and hers between her legs and drove her home, dropped her off, she sobbing her apologies, at the curb. As she waddled up the walk, she heard the car door slam and, glancing back, saw him coming up the walk behind her. He was smiling: was he laughing at her? Maybe he wanted his underpants back. Confused and frightened and sick with shame, she threw them at him and ran away, as best she could run, hands between her legs, and left him standing back there like that guy in the movies, alone on a battlefield of corpses. She cried for three days after. Bled more, too, had to see the doctor. She hated sex then, though later she got used to it. Whereupon worse things happened.

Others might have had similar tales to tell — Trixie, for example, now known as Beatrice, the preacher’s wife, or poor ill-fated Marie-Claire, the Paris penpal, even perhaps (who knows?) John’s wife — but Nevada, a generation younger, was not one of these. Nevada was a career woman, skillful, charming, industrious, worldly wise, discreet. She had met John a year or so ago while working in a private plane and boat show in Denver, a gig she’d picked up for a mouthful of cum in Houston. John was there with an associate from Chicago, shopping for a little hedgehopper of his own, as he called it, but he was scouting companies, too, a man, she judged, of vision and expanding fortunes, well worth a deeper acquaintance. His wife? An abstraction, absent, not yet a nuisance. Like all the women at the show, Nevada had a prepared resume with her, which she showed to John in bed that night over a restorative whiskey, while a pornographic film played silently on the hotel TV, solemn and unheeded as a church service. The resume indicated that she was unmarried, could type and had some familiarity with word processors, enjoyed travel, and was accustomed to flexible work-hours. When John asked her about her ambitions, she smiled, pressed the sweating whiskey glass against a perky young breast, just under the erecting nipple at the lip as though to milk it, or to let it dip its beak to drink, and said she hoped to get into personnel management. He was impressed (his generous laughter told her so) and took her on, remarking that her first assignment was a bit of stiff committee work: to wit, taking the starch out of an incorrigibly hard-headed standing member.

John bought a plane in Denver that week, not his first, and a company, too, together with Bruce, a joint venture — again, not their first. It was Bruce perhaps to whom John felt the closest ties. From the time they met up at State, pledge brothers at the fraternity their freshman year, they held most things in common, including money, clothes, textbooks, and women. They even sat exams for one another, laughing their way through business management, education’s biggest joke, partnered each other for bridge, cross-country drives, and tennis, cocaptained the golf team their senior year, drinking together from the trophies they won. Bruce best man at his postgraduation wedding, John best-manned Bruces then in turn, at least the first of them, this one with a woman John had shared with Bruce for a time, filling in when Bruce had other thighs or hands to spread. If Bruce had had John’s wife, John would not have begrudged him this, though if he’d had her he would in any case not have remembered it, for though, like John, he had a head for names, figures, products, profit margins, even radio frequencies and phone numbers, when it came to glory ‘oles, as he reverentially called them, they were all the same to Bruce, love them as he did. No, to wallow in the memory of a great fuck was for Bruce little better than self-abuse, a kind of impotence really. Every day was a great fuck, potentially anyhow, or you shot yourself, and John, though less radically, shared Bruce’s views in this. In business, too, views and money often shared, Bruce again the long-shot gambler, plunging into entertainment and oil futures, heavy arms and high-risk third world ventures, steady John amassing his portfolio around transport, banking, and property development, partnering each other when their interests or holdings crossed, as they often did. Bruce had taught John how to fly and they had bought a rustic fishing cabin up at the lakes together, laid down a landing strip, went there over the years to fish, shoot ducks and geese in season, take women not their wives, Bruce frequently the provider, though John, too, had gifts to bring from time to time, Nevada but a recent example, joint venture of another kidney. Their cabin became what Bruce, through all his schemes, adventures, wives, and sprees, thought of as home, quite unlike John in this, the basic difference between them being that John was a builder, Loose Bruce was not.

John the builder had added a simple but elegant A-frame lounge of cedar and glass to the fishing cabin, with a big fireplace at one end and views through the trees out over the lake, had improved the septic system, installed an oil-fueled generator, and put in showers and sauna and extra bedrooms, but the furnishings were plain and functional, the decorations few, the general aroma of the place that of pine, mud, and men. Once the airstrip was down, John had blocked off the main entry road with trees and boulders, though he’d left a lesser-known back route open for the man with snowplow and mower he’d hired to keep the airstrip cleared. The first time Dutch saw the place, flown up there by John in a late-summer fishing party (no women on these hometown group occasions, often as not no Bruce either), he was reminded immediately of the clubhouse they’d built as high school seniors on his old man’s property at the edge of Settler’s Woods. He divined at once therefore the full range of activities the cabin had been designed — or redesigned — for, and was not surprised to find a bidet in one of the bathrooms, which John shrugged off as a fancy of the previous owner. Even the cabin’s lone piece of art, a splotched and ripped-up canvas, hanging in shreds like something spilling from an open fly (people were crazy, what they paid money for these days), was not unlike their clubhouse’s tattered pinups clipped or torn from old magazines. For most of the men in the fishing party, if not for Dutch, it was a time up here for escaping their women and the prescripted town-bound lives those women had made for them, a time for virile reflection in the wild to which they all felt they’d been born, but from which somehow mysteriously expelled, a time to shoot and hook and kill and to eat the killed and, unnagged, drink their fill, a time to tell stories not elsewhere tellable and to test one another in all the half-forgotten ways of old. Thus, pissing, shooting, angling, and drinking contests, all-night high-stakes poker, manhood-challenging wisecracks and shower baiting. Again, Dutch thought, so like the days of the “getaway,” as they’d called their old clubhouse (and as Dutch now called his motel bar, located on the clubhouse site), except that women, still a novelty, were more important to them then, a female body, most often human, frequently the arena for their manly competitions. John, unrivaled cherry-picker with his own vast resources, was a rare participant in those gangshags of old — or “club sandwiches,” as they were called back then — though when caught up in one, as at the climax of his own stag party, an event arranged by Dutch as a wedding gift to his former Little League battery mate, he never shied from joining in, firm and upright clubman that he always was.