Robert Coover: John's Wife

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.

By coincidence, on the day of Trevor’s funeral, Floyd called home. He wouldn’t say where he was. On the road somewhere down South. He had another truck which he’d got from a guy who suddenly didn’t want it anymore. And now a hitchhiker he’d picked up had just offered him a job running drugs up from the border with it. “You gonna do that?” “Heck, no. The sonuvabitch’ll pay dear for even askin’.” “Don’t do nothin’ wrong, Floyd.” “No. Where was you all day? I rung up earlier.” “To a funeral. You recall that feller we bought our house insurance from? He died.” Edna pressed her skirt down across her knees. “When you comin’ back, Floyd?” “Not for a time, I reckon. Who’s John got in the store?” “It’s shut down. I hear tell it’s gonna be a museum.” “Always was one. Did he find him some sucker yet to run his truckin’ racket?” “Looks like it. Some feller from outa town who useta live here oncet. His wife seems nice, she was at the funeral today. They say she used to be on TV. Anyways that’s what they wrote in the newspaper.” “What did they write about me in the newspaper?” “Nary a word. Was you expectin’ to be famous?” “You know what I mean. What did they say when Stu got killt? Who’d they say done it?” “They never did.” “It wasn’t me, Edna. I swear on the Bible. I never touched old Stu.” “Who said you did?” “There’s some thinkin’ it.” She really didn’t want to talk about all this. It was making her cry again. It was awful all the questions she had to answer when he left, all the things they told her. “Are you keepin’ warm, Floyd?” “Here where I am, keepin’ warm ain’t a problem. What’s a problem is I don’t have no money to send you. Not yet.” “It’s okay. I’m gonna have a job soon at the new pioneer museum.” “It ain’t okay. But nothin’ I can do. If I get some, though, I’ll drop it off with your half sister like always.” “I reckon she’ll be about as happy about that as she ever was.” “Just so she don’t turn me in. Did you talk to the bank about the mortgage?” “Yes.” Charity ticked Floyd off so, she figured it best not to tell him the rest. “It’s okay for now.” “How’s it okay?” “Just okay. Oh, a funny thing, Floyd. John’s wife come by not long after you went off. She brung me that little rug. You remember? She said she heard they’d been some mix-up and she was sorry and wanted me to have it.” “That damn rug!” “I told her I didn’t want it, thank you. I wouldn’t let her leave it. Finally, I just shut the door on her.” “You done right! Who does she think she is, anyhow? Uh-oh. Listen, I gotta go now, Edna.” Edna felt a sudden chill. It was like a cold wind had got inside her. What it was was a thought, plain and simple: Floyd wasn’t coming back. Not ever. It was like he’d died. All she’d have would be this voice. Maybe. “I’ll call again soon as I can. I miss you, Edna. You take care now, you hear?” “You, too,” she said back, her voice trembling, but by then the line was dead.

The forest had vanished. It was as though a door had closed. She searched for it but the landscape had changed. Wherever she walked, it was ever more desolate, as though it were dying from within. Like a failure of the imagination, she thought, having been taught to think this way. Her friend and teacher, too: gone, as if he’d never existed. She’d only meant to lead him out of the forest before it destroyed him, just as she’d said in the note she left behind, but as usual, he must have misread it, and now all she had left was his voice in her head, his fancy declarations about art and nature and truth and beauty and all that, his barked commands and the cruel criticisms that made her cry, his stormy impatience with failure, the groans that wracked him as he ripped up his drawings of her when he despaired of ever approximating his unattainable ideal. She loved him, perhaps simply because she had no other to love, but she learned not to say so for it made him distant and moody and caused his drawings to smudge and the paint to run on the canvas. To love and be loved was not what she was given to do. She might rather not do what she did, be what she was, but there seemed little choice, it was as though it were somehow her destiny and her due to pose forever, kneeling on a rock at the edge of a flowing river, that he might enact his noble pursuit and its attendant tragedy. But where now was that river? Where was that rock? And where the forest that framed them? Could she find it and resume her place, it might restore him to his and to his famous ordeal, but as she roamed the world in search of it, a forest seemed less and less likely. That which had created and sustained the forest had vanished with the forest’s vanishing. Now a cold wind blew, from which no cover. In the old days, he’d sometimes read to her, holding her hand, and she often dreamt now in her bleak wanderings of a fairytale rescue like those in the stories she’d heard then and heard now in his voice only, but her waking life knew no such dreams, for all those stories, she knew, had died when the forest died. A fire? She seemed to remember one, but perhaps it was not so dramatic as that. More like rot at the roots maybe. A withering away, a withdrawal, a subsidence, much as a fading memory sinks away and is gradually lost to recall, so too this forest so lost to sight one doubted that it ever was. But though astray and abandoned, she persisted in her search in spite of all that had happened, tracing and retracing her steps, for she was sure of it: there was a forest and she was there and a man was there. Once.