Robert Coover: John's Wife

Well, they were new in town that summer and wholly dependent on the beneficence of good brother John, whose wife was close to that woman, or said to be, so Waldo’s wife had her reasons for jerking the reins, but as to love, it was true, there was none of it in her heart, for — even though she had once guided her life by it, due, she now believed, to bad reading habits — Lorraine, like Gordon and John, disbelieved in love. A sales hook for the entertainment racket, meaningful as “lite” on diet foods, that was her opinion. Waldo, who had had few reading habits, good or bad, still did believe in love, even if he couldn’t say what it was. He knew, though, it could get you in trouble, and if it could, would. This view of love as an irresistible but chastising force would have been shared by many in town — by Veronica, for example, another schoolchum of John’s wife and much chastised by that emotion to which she nevertheless wistfully clung — or by Otis, upholder of order, for whom love was more or less the same thing as grace, though one could sometimes make you hot and foolish, while the other usually did not — or by Beatrice, the preacher’s wife, who believed that all love came from the Creator, like her husband Lennox said on Sunday mornings, but that the Lord sometimes moved in mysteriously distressing ways. As now, for example: how was it possible, dear God, her present plight? Kate the town librarian, referring to this sweet-joy/wild-woe power of love to overwhelm, delight, and then undo, liked to say that humankind’s apprehensions of the divine and of the diabolical were equally love’s delusions, while goodness, truth, and beauty, without love, were fantasies, idle fictions of a mind turned in on itself and meaningful as chicken scratchings. That is to say, Kate, assenting but without illusions, also believed, much loved herself so long as she lived, in love. As did Dutch the motelkeeper, who nightly watched what he called meat fever erupt and die beyond his magic mirrors but scrupulously kept his distance from a force he thought of as anything but benign. And likewise Alf, he of the inquiring finger, for whom love was, unreasonably, reason’s sedative, else best understood as a chemical reaction to certain neural stimuli, sometimes locally pleasurable, generally overrated. His nurse Columbia sympathized with this latter opinion, though more or less, with but one exception, in the abstract, but did not trust her widowered colleague’s pose of bemused detachment, especially with John’s wife in the stirrups. For Clarissa, it was just great, love was. “Intense” was her word for it. Like, wow. But for her granddad, Barnaby the builder, it only led to despair, pinning you to the earth and gnawing your heart out, without letting you die. If one could stop loving, there would be peace and death. Barnaby being yet another who, inconsolably, loved John’s wife.

Ah well, love: a profound subject. Back in his mayoral days, giving the traditional bandstand speech at the climax of the annual Pioneers Day parade one hot summer, John’s wife still just a schoolkid then, Barnaby’s old lawyer friend Maynard, thumbs hooked in the sleeveholes of his vest, speculated that it was love that had made and mapped the town: the original pioneers’ love of adventure that brought them out here, the settlers’ love of the land that caused them to stay and put down roots, the love of the early town planners for order and progress and the entrepreneurial spirit, those qualities that caused this great town center to rise so gloriously where nothing larger than teepees had ever been seen before, and the love of all those present for justice and prosperity and the good life and for one another. And also for God, he was quick to add. He evoked the time when the only sounds you would hear in these streets would be the clip-clop of horses in the dirt and mud, the lazy drone of bees and locusts, the clink of chopped ice in the lemonade pitchers and the creaking of porch swings, and he said that these were the sounds of love. He spoke of the town as their common mother, the town limits as her loving embrace, and he compared the crisscross grid of the streets to the quilting of a mattress on which, he said, we were all one big loving family, causing his sister Opal, John’s mother, to pick up her paper fan and wave it in front of her face, perhaps finding this one metaphor too many and wishing to remind her brother it was time to have the preacher bless them all and sit down. This Maynard was the father of John’s garter-clutching cousin Maynard Junior, sometimes known as the Mange or the Nerd, for whom love was a singular obsession, otherwise a kind of dirty joke, and he in turn in time became the father of Maynard III, also called Turtle, who thought love was for wimps until his buddy Fish gave him a couple of new ideas a few weeks ago, which were exciting but not very clear.

Old silver-tongued Grandpa Maynard might still be around, but the city park and its quaint gazebo-like bandstand where he flaunted his rhetoric were forever gone, just a dimming memory now like the now-dimming ex-mayor’s fondly remembered clinks, creaks, and clip-clops, public speaking of the all-community sort being performed in more recent times inside the new civic center or else, until John created Peapatch Park, on temporary staging erected in the asphalt parking lot outside, depending on the weather and the occasion. This starkly modern new edifice, named in honor of old Barnaby the builder and built by his son-in-law, was generally held to be, though controversial, the town’s major new construction of the decade, perhaps (some said) of the century, its most popular architectural innovation being its Olympic-sized swimming pool with retractable roof, famous throughout the state and written up in all the metropolitan Sunday papers. You could always count on John to make things happen. His old football, wrestling, and track coach Snuffy, one of the city councilmen most responsible for pushing the project through all its legal and political obstacles (always some soreheads opposed to progress), became, with John’s blessing, the unopposed candidate for the mayoralty and was himself a public speaker of some renown, plain-talking but inspirational in his gruff straight-from-the-shoulder cut-the-crap way. Old Snuffy, as the townsfolk liked to put it, knew how to kick butt. Starting with his own teams. More than one young wiseass in this town had got used in practice as a live tackling dummy until the message got through that when Snuffy talked about giving your all for the team, son, he meant all . Ever do two hundred push-ups with a foot in your back? In the mud? In full uniform? After a game? About love, though, this inveterate bachelor had little to say. He was better on grit and hustle and hanging tough. Had Snuffy known women in his time? Sure, plenty. And all kinds, too, from two-bit to fancy. But love, which he believed in like everybody else, was never a head-to-head body slam with some woman, or man or boy either, it was more abstract than that, more like an ideal form, to speak in the philosophizing manner, as in “I love this game!” or “Body contact! I love it!” To love was to play hard, and to be loved was to win.

God-fearing Floyd, who managed John’s downtown hardware store and was a lifelong expert on butt kicking, mostly from the receiving end, had a more down-to-earth, one-on-one notion of what love was, having once loved his own wife Edna, and that was how he knew that what he now felt for John’s wife was covetousness. He did not want to give himself to her, did not want to embrace her, care for her, adore her, live with her. He did not even want to make love to her. He wanted to throw her down on her fantastic ass and fuck the bejesus out of her. Praise the Lord, this had not yet happened. “Thou shalt not!” he roared at the giggling brats in Sunday school, his voice quaking with the conflict in his heart. He often imagined taking her right there, among the choir robes, something about the glossy feel of them, the range of murky body odors, the cheap lockerroom challenge of the church’s damp back chambers with their un-painted cement walls, cold tile floors. Or else over a counter of carpet tacks, flare nuts, and auger bits down at the store on Main Street. On top of the lead float in the Pioneers Day parade. On the fancy lime green toilet in John’s house between bridge hands (the toilet in Floyd’s house was white with a pink terrycloth seat cover and a loose handle). Or, shoot, why not trump her right on the cardtable itself, frigging grand slam! Maybe his feelings toward John were mixed up in these stormy desires. Whenever the four of them played bridge or had dinner together, which was about once every three or four months, depending on John’s sullen sense of duty (Floyd sensed this and it embittered him), Floyd contrived to sit so as to have his knee pressed against John’s wife’s knee. This recklessness: was it just another effort to emulate John?