Robert Coover: John's Wife

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!