Robert Coover: John's Wife

Gordon, gesture’s hunter, would have understood John’s view of love, though he didn’t know of it. As John loved life, Gordon loved form. People, intrinsically grotesque, were beautiful only (as he had put it many years ago, shocking his friend Ellsworth, who could not understand the photos he was taking of his mother) as shapes frozen in space. Beyond his photographs, life was disintegration and madness, a meaningless frenzied blur. Birth, death, labor, love: he looked, blinked, and out of his acid baths came a piece of time. Chosen by him, held by him. Forever his, while the world outside dissolved into obscene confusion, vaguely remembered, if at all. Some subjects — a child with its finger in its nose, a dead body, an empty swimming pool, crumpled metal, an intimate scar, reflections in a window — drew him toward a kind of interpretive engagement, in which the photographic forms seemed to hold on to something not visible on the surface of his print. Others (which he thought of as somehow nobler) — John’s wife, for example, uninhabited vistas, slanted light on bared flesh — released him from these worldly illusions into the freedom of pure but sensuous abstraction. Such moments, such photos, he could contemplate forever.

One day, Waldo and Lorraine walked into Gordon’s studio to order portraits of their two boys, and lying flat on the glass counter was a blowup of John’s wife, taken from a group shot at a country club dance. Lorraine, who distrusted John’s wife in the same way that she distrusted the heroines of all the novels she’d read, cast a suspicious glance at Gordon: who was this picture for? Couldn’t be for John, what did he care for photographs, much less of his wife? Lorraine’s husband Waldo said: “Hey! What a swell picture of John’s wife!” She could have strangled him. Fat Gordon flushed and pushed the photo aside: Lorraine saw this and wondered if there was some kind of hanky-panky going on. She had heard about some of this clown’s other photos. Lorraine had had a dream about him once in which he seemed to exist in or as a dirty puddle on the floor, and she’d awakened with the realization that there was something sinister about the photographer that generally went unrecognized. Waldo continued to beam happily, noticing nothing. Lorraine had married the most popular guy in college, but he was a complete corkhead, an imbecilic party boy — what she and the other girls used to call a windup talking dildo. John had brought her husband here as his Assistant VP, but, with his brain, he was more like an Assistant BB. Empty Wallets, they called him. When John asked her why she gave Waldo such a hard time, she’d replied: “Marry a prick with ears and soon all you’ve got left are the ears.” John had grinned his grin and she’d felt her spine lock up. “Haw,” said Waldo now as Gordon’s wife Pauline came in with her blouse half-buttoned and her hair uncombed, and while Waldo ogled the little frump, Gordon said: “Where the heck’s my schedule-book, Pauline?” She didn’t know.

Why would Lorraine suspect hanky-panky where John’s wife was concerned? Probably, her best friend Marge would say, because Lorraine was a constitutionally suspicious woman, made all the more so by her vulgar, butt-slapping, two-timing husband, and because, being a relative newcomer in town, Lorraine didn’t know John’s wife all that well. Marge could have told her: suspect John if you like, hanky-panky was that man’s middle name (she would have been telling Lorraine nothing new), but not his wife. It would be like suspecting that the cornflowers in John’s wife’s garden got up at night and went out chasing bees. Marge had grown up here, a year behind John in school, a year ahead of his wife, and in an isolated little prairie town like this one they were all like siblings. They’d gone to birthday parties together, church picnics, field trips, high school and country club dances. They were in National Honor Society together, they’d exchanged valentines and May baskets, played hide-and-seek, colored Easter eggs in each other’s kitchens, raced bicycles and had fights, popped one another’s blackheads. The world had changed over the years since then and everything in it, but not John’s wife, poor thing. Everybody’s favorite Homecoming Queen. Period. Marge felt pity for her, but at the same time hated her for being pitiable, just as she despised John but admired him for having the power to be despicable. Marge and John had fought since grade school, were still fighting, most recently over the brutal razing of the city park to build another of John’s tasteless eyesores, this time a concrete civic center and swimming pool, and most of the time John, more ruthless than she, and richer, too, had beat her, beat her badly. She’d never let that stop her, she had gone on standing up to him all her life, fighting back through defeat after defeat. Just as she was about to do again, so he’d better get ready. It was the only thing a man like that could respect, and truth to tell, Marge wanted that, John’s respect, and knew that she deserved it.

The trouble was, she went about it backassward, and with an ass as ugly as hers, this was a big mistake, or anyway that was Lorraine’s husband Waldo’s opinion. Marge was a tedious busybody (“pissy-potty” was how Waldo pronounced it, never softly), a piece of cold “pushy” with an old axe to battle, a butt like a stop sign, and for tits nothing but knuckled nipples, hard as brass. It was her husband Trevor (Triv was Waldo’s name for him, short for Trivial Trev) who wore the panties in that family, Waldo always said. He called Marge Herr Marge, sometimes Hairy Marge or Butch, Mad Marge when she had her dander up, which was most of the time when Waldo was around, he gave her little peace. Nor she him, it was disgust at first sight. When he and Lollie first came to town some years ago, thanks to his good old college pal and true-blue fraternity brother, Long John, Waldo had got paired up with Marge in a mixed-twosomes tourney at the club, and not only had she outscored him, he’d been too crocked on the back nine to do anything but slash wildly at his approach shots, or even, what the hell, to see the goddamn greens he was supposedly aiming at, and so had blown their chances for the trophy, which she was apparently used to winning. Most of the time, she’d had to help him find his ball, which seemed always to be miles away from where he’d last seen it, and in ever worsening circumstances, which for some reason tickled his funnybone. “Hoo-boy! Gone again! Go fetch, Marge!” The one time when he found it before she did, he stood on it, drinking from his pocket flask, and let her keep looking until she was frothing at the mouth, his stifled laughter pumping out an obstreperous rat-a-tat, itself not unlike stifled laughter, from the other end of his wind machine. Herr Marge didn’t think it was at all funny when he finally “discovered” the ball underneath his alligator golf shoe (“So that’s what it was! Sumbitch! Thought my corns was acting up!”), but Waldo was having a terrific time. On the last hole, he just couldn’t sink his putt, the goddamned green kept tipping and yawing on him, so after six or seven goofy tries, one from between his legs with the handle of the putter, the business end hooked in the fly of his checkered lavender golf pants, he just laid back and swatted the little booger out of sight, maxing out on that hole as a kind of fitting climax to a wonderful day. His partner, determinedly lining up her own putt, was muttering bitterly about his obnoxious drunken behavior, his boring vulgarity, and his basic inability to play this game, so he tossed down another ball, turned sober long enough to keep the green steady under his feet, and with a clean crisp stroke caromed his ball into hers, croquet-style, while she was still bent over it, sending it off into a sand trap, a brilliant shot that was widely admired at the nineteenth hole afterwards by just about everyone except Mad Marge and his own unloving wife Lorraine, who dragged him away, the mean old grouch, before he’d reaped his full rewards.