Robert Coover - John's Wife

The Creep’s mother, also Jennifer’s and little Zoe’s, once known as Trixie the go-go dancer and now as Beatrice the preacher’s wife, had arrived at that party straight from church choir practice, feeling exhilarated. The singing had been unusually harmonious that afternoon, as though God had got inside them all and made his presence felt, an experience that always had an agreeably erotic effect on Beatrice. After everyone had left, many to get dressed for John’s party, Beatrice, wishing to prolong this sweet musical communion, had stayed on to practice the organ for a while, letting the sacred melodies flow through her and into the organ pipes like the pumping of God’s blood, feeling at one with herself and with the universe. And with the organ, she becoming its adjunct, the instrument’s instrument, the pedals and keys her feet’s and fingers’ very reason for being, their raisin-something, as a teacher, one of her many teachers, once put it, and the same could be said for score and eyes, bench and bottom, music and mind — all of a piece, like some kind of magic! How happy she was! She’d never played better! Or been played better! As the music throbbed through her expanded body, her heart beating, her pipes resonating, in time to the turning of the spheres, tears of gratitude and intense well-being came to her eyes — and were still there, in the corners of her eyes, giving them an appealing twinkle, when she arrived at John’s party just before sundown, still a bit breathless and full of nameless joy. John squeezed her hand with both of his when she came in, gave her a hug; her husband smiled at her from across the room; her smallest child, dressed in a sweater miles too big for her, one of Mikey’s mother’s, came to ask for her help in tying a kerchief in her hair; someone brought her a glass of bubbly wine. It was as though Beatrice had foreseen all of this before she entered the house, perhaps during choir practice or while playing the organ, and it was all very beautiful. Her husband was beautiful, John’s house was beautiful, her friends were beautiful, her daughter was beautiful as she stepped into the luminous center of everyone’s attention. Beatrice loved this town, these people, this moment in her life. Things weren’t perfect, but Beatrice hoped they’d never change, not at least until she got to heaven. But of course they were already changing. That’s how the world was, you couldn’t stop it, harmony was unnatural to it, constancy was. A sudden presentiment of disaster sent a shiver down Beatrices spine and deep into that core of her which till now had been the seat of such holy ecstasy. She set her glass down, her eyes beginning to mist over. Her daughter had faded from sight somehow, even as she was watching her, her husband, too, though she was not. Something violent and irreversible was about to happen. Or had already happened but was about to be made manifest. Beatrice couldn’t see it, blind to everything at that moment except her own panic and despair (where was John’s wife?), but she could feel it. “Yipes!” she yelped when the blocks flew, and shrinking back, reached down with both hands to touch her tummy. Oh no, she thought. It can’t be. I’m pregnant again.

Beatrice’s apprehension of change, both imminent and immanent, was shared by many at that time, even at that moment, but not by all in town, lulled as they were by the walls around them, the immutable routines their lives were locked in, the regularity of their bowel movements. Even among those who acknowledged what Ellsworth called in his fortieth-birthday poem “the ever-whirling Wheel of Change” (which he sought “in vain to rearrange”), a poem published in The Town Crier a bit too close upon the automobile death of old Stu’s first wife Winnie and Stu’s snap remarriage to escape a dark joke or two at the time, many would have argued that change, too, was unchangeable, that like the heavenly bodies, it, too, had its enduring rhythms and routines, such that the very party at which Beatrice suffered her sudden perception of permutation-in-progress was itself a predesigned shaper and container of that change, and in its way unchangeable, in the way that the face of a clock, while never recording the same time twice, remained itself always the same. For some, this was terrifying, for others reassuring, just as these festivities, by which John and his wife solemnized for the town duration’s ticks and tocks, were for some a grim challenge, and for others a welcome release, tedium’s reprieve if not its remedy, and for not a few a taste of what might be but wasn’t. Waldo lived for John’s blowouts, whatever the hell they were or weren’t, Lennox surrendered to them with a passive smile admirers called beatific, Marge wished them over before they ever began, feeling herself dragged into a smug self-congratulating sacrament she didn’t believe in. John’s parties worried Otis the town guardian some, head counter and clock watcher that he was, amused Audrey in her time, provoked whimsical aphorisms from Kate (“The collective effervescence of these gatherings,” the late lamented librarian once remarked, “is like that of cheap champagne — it goes straight to your head, dissolving moral boundaries and separating self from body neat as an alchemical reaction, then awakens you, bloated and headachy, to an earthbound morning utterly without consolation …”), and whetted Veronica’s acquisitive appetites, those appetites that enraged her breadwinner Maynard so. What Veronica saw in John’s house, she sought to replicate in her own, even to the color of the bath towels and toilet paper, and by doing so thought of herself as a woman of taste. Well, no further worries for Maynard on that score: he and Ronnie had been permanently struck from the guest list since the recent company scandal, and had new things to fret and fume about: the wrecking of Maynard’s career in town since Barnaby’s stroke, for which he’d been largely blamed, their ostracization down on Main Street and out at the club, the disappearance of their son Little who had apparently run away from home when the scandal broke (Maynard, when gripped by his recurrent paranoia, could not escape the suspicion that his hard-assed cousin, in retribution, might have had the boy kidnapped), the bitterness dividing them as their social life withered and left them facing only one another. For Floyd the hardware man, who loathed every minute of John’s parties but hated it more when not invited, more and more the case with the passing years, they provided a stage for his imagined dramas of retribution, involving often as not some violation of the willing or unwilling hostess: on top of the rec room piano or the buffet-laden dining table, for example, or out on the croquet pitch in the middle of the Pioneers Day barbecue, her limbs pinned by wickets, steaks sizzling and beercaps popping. Is it the Christmas open house to which this year they had not been invited? Floyd saw himself unwrapping her beneath the decorated eight-foot tree with all the rip-it-off impatience of a kid on Christmas morning, then, the little brass bells overhead ringing acclamatorily — are you watching, John? — pumping sperm into her like great gouts of eggnog. Fantasies about banging John’s wife often enhanced Floyd’s nights with Edna, bringing a little fire and brimstone to their homespun copulations — at least at the outset, before Edna gave herself away with an airy rumble as she always did and reminded him where he was: his wife always belched when she fornicated, as though it gave her indigestion. Or cured her of it. Once, he had loved this: her vulnerability. Now it was just a part of her like her fallen arches or the fuzz on her upper lip; her chenille bedspreads, the paintings of flowers and dogs she hung on her plain papered walls.

Of course, taste like John and his wife had, that cost money: what chance did Edna have, really? Edna’s painted dogs cost five dollars each, frames included, John’s Early American portraits and cowboy pictures thousands. Nevertheless, though she greatly admired John’s house, and in fact considered it the most beautiful house she’d ever been in, more beautiful even than the ones they showed in all the magazines in the doctor’s office, Edna (perhaps unique in this respect) did not envy John’s wife and would not have liked to live in her house. Veronica might drive her husband to bankruptcy trying to duplicate it and Marge might be so embittered by all that inaccessible beauty that she had to punish herself with a kind of spiteful austerity, but not Edna. Edna was a simple woman who liked simple practical things, and John’s house was just too grand, too intimidating. She and Floyd would go to a cocktail party there or a company get-together such as the one in which their little boy put on that funny little show with his hardhat and building blocks, or maybe to wander down through all that sprawling multileveled space to the oak-paneled rec room with its upright piano and drum set and hi-fi, its antique barroom spittoons and standing ashtrays and modern Greek throw rugs, to watch (Edna by now feeling oddly transported to one of those tunnel-of-love carnival rides) home movies or a football game, or perhaps to play bridge for an evening up on the main level in front of the monumental open-hearth fireplace with its old Dutch tiles and heavy brass implements, and she’d come out feeling six inches smaller. “What’re you fidgeting about?” Floyd would ask her on the way home. “I don’t rightly know, Floyd. My girdle feels like it’s gone loose on me or something.” Sometimes Edna had the impression that John’s wife felt the same way about the house she did, that it made her feel lost and sad and small, and she understood (though not in the same sarcastic way) Marge’s cruel remark that John’s wife went well with the gold carpets: she did sometimes seem to melt right into them. In a manner of speaking, of course. Or, well, not entirely in a manner of speaking: one night playing bridge, for example, Edna had looked up from laying down her dummy hand (she’d just carried John’s wife’s opening bid to four hearts and was a trifle unsure about it) and John’s wife was not there. Or seemed not to be. Maybe she’s went to the bathroom, Edna had thought, and had glanced in that direction, but when she’d looked back, John’s wife was smartly finessing the king of hearts with a jack from the board. Edna had mentioned this to Floyd afterwards, but all he’d said was: “She was lucky to make it, you overbid the hand.” Maybe I should ought to have my spectacles checked, she’d thought, not knowing that Marge herself had had something like the selfsame experience, though at dinner, not at bridge.