Robert Coover - John's Wife

Bruce, best man when John, constructing story, married the builder’s daughter, was also at the stag party the night before, a reassuring event for Bruce, faced with the disturbing prospect of John’s seemingly straight-faced plunge into the wedded condition and the consequent loss of his one true companion in this ludicrous shithole of a world. Bruce, a city boy, albeit less of urb than sub, approached this remote hog wallow that day with trepidation, a stranger to its hobnail country ways, except so far as John had acridly portrayed them on their college drinking bouts, visions dancing in his booze-bruised head of desensitized TV zombies dangerously adrift on potholed junker-lined streets, of blue laws, Bible Belters, and bottle flies, and of ersatz icecream parlors crawling with pimply beauty queens and noisome brats. When asked what was the principal activity of his hometown, John had once replied: “Ass scratching. Two-handed.” John had given the real world up for this? Well, John had added: “Like every other place I know,” it’s true. It was Bruce’s world still strewn with antique values. A “diseased romantic,” John had called him once, or someone had and John had laughed, Bruce, too, admitting it was so, and adding that it was a glory ‘ole that had corrupted him — cuntamination, he called it — the first he ever knew: “Birth robbed me, buddy, of my fetal hopes and innocence, it’s been downhill ever since I slid that fucking tube.” Arrival was by rented car, John’s airport not yet built back then of course, a numbing passage through vast treeless fields and desolate commercial strips as alien to human life as anything Bruce’s grim misgivings might have led him to imagine. Yes, the worst he’d feared was true. But then, a small creek once crossed over, the humpback bridge nearly pitching him through the roof when he hit it, a little wooded patch rose up on the far shore as if conjured from the weedy soil, and on the other side of that the town appeared and showed a bit of grace: smooth tree-shaded streets with wide-porched houses sitting landscaped lawns, brightly bordered with the seasonal flower show, this followed by a cool green park leading to the town center where young women smiled at him as he passed by, the streets here lined with Lincolns, Caddies, and a Mercedes-Benz or two that put his scrap of rented tin to happy shame. The Pioneer Hotel was a musty relic with frayed linens and prewar plumbing, but all the gang were there, the antediluvian bar and lobby dust astir with their sudden booming talk and laughter. A few bolts of aged sour-mash poured by brother Waldo and an afternoon round of golf on what turned out to be inventive sunswept fairways and well-kept greens revived Bruce wholly, and after the obligatory rehearsal dinner, enlivened by brother Beans rising to toast the bride’s family with his fly vividly agape, the stag party that followed restored his faith in the human comedy and in his old boonfellow John, wired though he may have been.

That park Bruce passed, no longer there, once hosted Sunday Sousa bands, political campaigners, homemade carnivals, and horseshoes tournaments, as well as the famous Pioneers Day pageants, at one of which, a child still, princesslike in white organdy and lace, John’s wife had starred as The Spirit of Enterprise. This pageant, third and last to be penned by school bard Ellsworth, graduating senior about to flee these rustic precincts for what he called the center stage, was a centennial paean to creation, prairie-style, and so eulogized the century’s builders, not least old Barnaby, wee Enterprise’s very father, whose beloved city park now served as his encomium’s mise-en-scène and shaded him where he proudly sat. In time, his son-in-law’s civic center, newest proof of initiative’s power to transform, would concretely rise in Barnaby’s name where John’s wife once performed, its all-weather Olympic pool become her bikini’d daughter’s rock-scripted stage for performances of a more speculative sort, but on that long-ago day the old park seemed ageless, eternal, some sort of sacred site, mother to them all, even the oldtimers forgetting for the moment that it had not always been there, but Barnaby had built it. How sweet his daughter was that day as she recited, in Ellsworth’s accents, Ellsworth’s lines about the builder’s Olympian power to sow his seed upon e’en the thornéd and rocky waysides of the world and see whole cities rise defiantly like living parables of imagination’s potency, untrammeled reason’s finest crops!

Here in Reason’s beauteous grove we stand,

Its glory being: ‘Twas made by human hand!

Though most that leafy sunswept day applauded, enchanted by the pretty child, angelically aglow in the dappled light, and moved by the tears in her father’s eyes (a rich man, yes, a pillar and a patron, but old-shoe common, one of us), some grumbled that that oddball boy who wrote the thing had courted blasphemy with his foolishness, messing with the Good Book like that, then had compounded his sin by the use of an innocent child for his impieties’ transmission. They were not far from wrong, though only Gordon, privy to the throes of composition, knew to what extent his irreverent friend had with his Olympish wordplays mocked the town: the seed of the city fathers, whom Ellsworth slyly, in a rhyme with “creators,” compared to “master painters,” not so much sown as spilled, this town, he said to Gordon, a hand-job made by, of all trades, the jack-ofs. Not for me, twiddle-dee! Kiss my bum, twiddle-dum! This grinningly declaimed while sprawled in the nude, wearing a top hat and smoking a long cigar, Gordon at the easel, frustrated with the impossible translation of light on flesh into oily smears on canvas-board, saddened by his boyhood friend’s announced departure, and musing the while on the aesthetic ugliness of the dark lumpy dangle between men’s legs, as though something that should be inside had grotesquely fallen out, Gordon’s an abstract ideal of pure unblemished form, wartless, headless, hairless, truth expressed best when least expressed (the poet’s line, though it was Gordon who, in other words, first said it). Because he was leaving town forever, Ellsworth allowed his friend to photograph his poses that the paintings might someday (they both believed in art) get done, these taken with a borrowed camera, Gordon’s first essays on film, including one of a laughing Ellsworth dressed only in his high school drum major’s hat, looking back over his bony white shoulder, baton raised on high, other hand hidden, but somewhere between his hairy legs: See ya later, master painter!

Of course, he returned, the silly man, though not with tail between his legs, where it belonged, as most had hoped, but cocky still and weird as ever, only a monkish bald spot on his crown marking his seven years away, no other signs of the misfortunes which all felt must befall so unrepentant a wiseass in the world. Well, concealed perhaps, the bruises, for return at least he did, and after nose-thumbing farewells that had seemed irrevocable, all ties severed, bridges burnt. So what brought him back? Filial duty, Ellsworth would explain with a flick of a wrist as though brushing away a fly, that and the need, he would add with a weary condescending smile from beneath his jaunty black beret, for a quiet out-of-the-way place to finish his novel-in-progress. As for the alleged novel, who could say, but it was true that his enfeebled father, though he’d bitterly disowned his eccentric son, could no longer run the old family printshop alone, it was Ellsworth saved it, perhaps not beyond redemption after all. This certainly was Barnaby’s view, had been all along. Barnaby was close to that family, Ellsworth’s parents his parents’ friends and his in turn, he’d known the strange boy since his awkward birth twenty years too late and had half-adopted him when the gawky child’s aged mother died, and so it was Barnaby who, remembering the little hand-drawn and — lettered newspapers the boy would entertain his infant daughter with, had located him and, with offers to back a weekly newspaper if Ellsworth would print and edit it, brought him home again. And thus began The Town Crier , successor to The Daily Patriot , which had died in Ellsworth’s absence, nothing but an oral record left of all the time between, the which and more Ellsworth now collected — grist, it was suspected, for his novel-if-a-novel’s mill — in his guest column “I Remember.”