Robert Coover - John's Wife

The groomsman officially paired with the French bridesmaid at John’s wedding (though he was not in the Country Tavern that night Daphne and her friends peeked in either, nor was he with Marie-Claire) was Harvard, oldest son of Oxford the druggist and his librarian wife Kate, brother to Yale, Columbia, and Cornell, and known as Harvie in the family, Hard Yard to intimates, of whom John, with whom he’d cocaptained the high school track team their senior year, was one. Harvard, a shy, gentle, and dutiful fellow, a good athlete in spite of what Coach Snuffy called his “handicap” (“Tie a knot in that nasty thing, son, before you catch it on the bar going over and damage the equipment!”) and pride of the showerroom but not quite the scholar his father had hoped for, was a chemistry major at a West Coast surfers’ college at the time of the wedding, showing few signs of graduating soon, if ever, but demonstrating a talent, widely esteemed among scientists, for experimentation, a talent that contributed spectacularly to the revels of the final night of his friend John’s bachelorhood, revels that in turn, maturing into revelation as yard, mind, and soul all came and came together, changed Harvie’s life forever, John’s ass theatrically marked by this sudden transformation. Thus, it might be said that Harvie, unlike most people in this town, created, as though in obedience to the slogan on an old calendar down at his father’s drugstore, “A Better Life Through Chemistry,” his own destiny. Years later, returning here for his mother’s funeral, for whose sake he wore a suit instead of a dress, he told his baby brother Cornell that “out there” it doesn’t matter what you’ve got but how you use it. In a small town like this everybody is always measuring. Out there, there are too many, measuring makes no sense. This generous message was meant to console and uplift little Corny, though it probably missed its mark.

Harvie’s baby brother was at that time a biology student up at State, not a very good one, but by then the only member of the family still in school, their sister Columbia having dropped out to be near her cancer-stricken mother in her final months and seemingly destined, now a doctor’s practical nurse, never to return. Cornell would not last long either. In fact, though he would return to college after his mother’s funeral, he would never, no matter how his father pleaded, scolded, reasoned, wept, attend another class. He became a haggard, unkempt quadrangle hangabout, notorious only for his monosyllabic mewlings, his runny nose and spotted pants, the latter something of a campus legend, likened unto an aerial map of a free-fire zone, a mess of curdled gravy, the abode of the damned, a laminated spunk husks exhibit, the rag used to clean out the cafeteria food trays (itself known as “Grandma’s diaper”), Flocculus Rex, a poison puffball bed, the chitinous scutum of something unspeakably inhuman (an alien resident perhaps of that ghastly fork if not the freaked-out host himself), trampled cowflop, the Milky Way, a spermatazoic Field of Armageddon, and, simply, a zippered scumbag. Poor unwashed unlaundered Corny, who went to Paris to become a man and saw such a thing as to make manhood no place to go and boyhood no place he could return to. “Ondress me,” she said, and then, when, in a magical trance (he was thinking of a certain set of four strange comicbooks, thereafter discontinued, that he owned), he did, she said: “Merci, mon petit! Now ronn down to ze delicatesse be-low and breeng for us a bott-ell of Beaujolais nouveau, and we weell make l’amour nouveau, ze new true love of ze heart and blood!” Oh boy. Sounded great. He left her standing there, eyes wide open, looking startled with wanting, thin legs apart and both hands between them, kneading and wringing what was there as though trying to tear it out and give it to him, and ran down the four dark flights of stairs and out into the spicy street, his heart fluttering in his chest like a trapped moth in a glass jar, explosions already erupting stickily between his own skinny thighs. With his clumsy high school French, it took Corny too long a while, racing from shop to shop and bar to bar, to come to understand that, on Midsummer’s Eve, Beaujolais nouveau was not something he was likely to find. Well. He paused, staring bleakly at a swarthy rat-faced shopkeeper, as the truth sank in. Such cruel teasing was nothing new in Corny’s life. Usually he merely turned away from it. But in this nightmarish place, so far from home, where could he go? The smirking shopkeeper seemed to be recommending, in his threatening foreign tongue, another wine with the word “Love” in its name. This confused Corny and made his face hot, but, hastily, he bought it and, homesick now for his friend Pauline, and for his faithful games and toys which never deceived him, turned his steps back toward Marie-Claire’s studio, fearing further humiliations, but keeping faint hopes alive — why not? as his father would say, it’s perfectly reasonable — for a pleasant surprise.

Pauline had been with Corny not long before he left for Paris, though she had known Marie-Claire’s fiancé Yale as well, and Harvie, too, each in their own time. All the girls loved Yale’s zinger, it was just right, but his brothers’ were more like things you might see in a circus sideshow, and for opposite reasons. Harvard’s was the one best known around town, a giant thing, ghostly white, almost scary, with all its veins showing like Invisible Man. Because of it, all the kids called him Hard Yard, which was ironic, not because of its length, but because it was almost always limply adangle, half stiff at best until that stag party the night before John’s wedding, which Pauline also attended. Corny’s, contrarily, was like a tiny twig with only one testicle beneath it no bigger than a schoolyard aggie, but though it didn’t look like a real zinger, more like a plastic toy one, it was rigid as a fork tine all the time and popped and popped off all the time, as his trousers, even back then in high school and his mother Kate still alive to wash them, attested. After nine or ten quick ones one night, Pauline begged him to stop or he might hurt himself, and Corny only looked puzzled and, guiding her hand to the tip of it, spurted again. And then — thup! — again, each time firing well past her hip. Cornell liked most to have her reach under her thigh and squeeze his testicle, if she could find it, as, sometimes three or four times in quick succession, almost like hiccups, he spilled his seed in her, or more precisely into his rubber, stolen from his dad’s drugstore. These rubbers, of course, did not stay on, Pauline had to wear them like a kind of inner lining. Pushing them in there made her feel pretty silly, but fecund Gretchen later proved the wisdom of it, and feeling silly in boy-girl stuff was one thing that never bothered Pauline much. Everything changed that summer for both of them and many years would pass before they would become good friends again, though when it happened it would seem quite natural, even if by then nothing else did, but Pauline would never forget the last time she and Corny were together that summer. It was the night before Pauline went to Gordon’s studio to ask him to take her photograph for the men’s magazines. Cornell had come to the trailer with tears running down his smooth pink cheeks to tell her he was going to Paris and would not be seeing her again soon. “I love you,” he stammered, coming all over her bluejeans. No one had ever said that to Pauline before, nor would she soon hear it said again, and it left her feeling bewildered and, oddly, a bit sad. It made her think of her sister, the one Daddy Duwayne, looking down at his shoes, said ran away to find her mother.

“I love you”: so simple for some to say (for Daphne, it was as common as an expletive), so awkward for many, such as Otis, Snuffy, Marge, and Mitch, while for others — John, for example — so irrelevant, an artifice serving as a kind of functional code in songs and movies, sometimes useful in his lover-as-fool jokes though rarely as a punchline. When his fraternity brother Waldo, lover-as-fool personified, said “I love you,” it was no joke, he truly meant it, no matter who was with him, even if he’d won her in a raffle in the dark, because that was what love was, blind and brief and all that. Lorraine had heard him say it many times, sometimes even to her, and she knew that he meant it and that his meaning it meant nothing, the phrase having passed her own lips but once, then never more. It was often like that: if left unsaid too long the tongue felt clumsied by it. When, that same summer that Corny went to Paris, Harriet was dying, her husband Alf, grieving at her bedside, realized he hadn’t said it since the war years. It seemed to make sense back then, less now, though he found a way of saying it again before she died, pleasing her, he felt, by enclosing it, like John, in story: “Hey, do you remember when …?” John’s mother Opal, having like Alf lost the words somewhere, found them again when her grandchildren came along, but discovered within the phrase a heart-wrenching sorrow she’d not noticed before. When she told her friend Kate about this at Harriet’s funeral, which was shortly after Clarissa was born, what Kate said was: “Grief for ourselves is what makes love for others possible. And grievous. Wise love loves only the unchanging. But to love only the changeless and the eternal, Opal, is to love with a cold heart.” It was not exactly to a thing eternal that warmhearted Veronica avowed her love, though Second John could not be said to have changed much since first she said it, and grief, she’d be quick to agree, was part of it. Clarissa, now grown but untaught as yet in grief, had practiced the line over and over, but had yet to find its right moment, though she had in mind a target for it. She and her friend Jennifer often argued about the right time to say it, before or after, Clarissa usually insisting upon it as a statement of intent, otherwise it was just a corny way to say thank you, Jen wanting to know how you could really be sure until afterwards, wasn’t it more like a question before, and so a kind of tease? It was something that the Model said in Ellsworth’s novel-in-progress (if you’d have asked her the question Jennifer asked, she’d have replied: before or after what?), but not the Artist, who felt the integrity and purity of his art threatened by such irrational declarations: her saying so made his vision blur and his hands shake, such that weeks passed (in fictional time) before he felt he could attempt another drawing of her, and then only from behind her shoulder.