Robert Coover - John's Wife

Nevada lay smoking that night in the brazen young mechanic’s rustic one-room cabin in a prehistoric motel cluster halfway into the next county on what used to be the main road through here before the interstate link got built and all the action slid to the west and the dinosaurs died out. John was off on a business trip somewhere, Bruce due in tomorrow, but had left no messages, they both were together maybe, probably not. Cool jazz played on Rex’s old hi-fi system (the CD player she’d given him sat, gathering yellow prairie dust, on a kitchenette shelf), punctuated from time to time by a dull metallic clang as Rex’s elbows hit the rusty sides of the ancient shower stall. Paranoia drove Rex this far from where his daily bread got earned or otherwise acquired, his qualms about humanity in general augmented by his more particular mistrust of hicktown collusion, hypocrisy, and stupidity, and by, above all, his deep misgivings about John, misgivings nettled by seething rancor (Rex forgave no trespasses), something they could not talk too much about, since John was Nevada’s principal ticket, and had come to mean more to her than that really, and Rex knew it. Made his heart heavy, she knew, but he never complained, needing her, as was mutual. John kept a suite out at the new luxury motel on the interstate where he could come and go without notice, and Nevada stayed out there when in town, but whenever, as now, she was tensed up and had to mellow out, she came here. Rex gave her soothing body massages, a skill he’d picked up in one of his previous careers, and they had sex that was long, satisfying, and blissfully unpretentious. Sometimes they jogged together, or worked out a light set or two, and there was always some quality dope to do and stories to exchange from their respective workplaces. Tonight, for example, after a funny story about a kid she suspected might be little Jennifer’s brother, Rex had shown her the contract he’d got the car dealer’s wife to sign, to be postdated later, which gave Rex half the dealership and sole ownership of the service department, but which, by description, obliged him to marry the woman first. “She’s an old pig, I know, and drunk more than not, but she’s got what I want. You’re drifting away from me, baby, I can’t help that, but I want to be ready to do right by you when the show closes down and you come back to me.” She’d started to protest, thought better of it, agreed instead that she was indeed feeling somewhat adrift but had no clear idea, as he seemed to, which way the wind was blowing (she felt unlinked with John away and as though jobless, somehow endangered), and then had asked him how they were going to get the husband out of the picture. “I’ve worked it out,” was all he’d say, his reticence causing her some unease, since mostly he told her what was on his mind. Now, when he came out of the shower and sat on the bed, handing her the towel to dry his back, she told him about the operations she was running for John’s pal Bruce, including their plans to take John’s daughter and her little friend from the mall for a skyride in Bruce’s jet tomorrow, providing that soldier of fortune got back from his Caribbean fun and games and the girls could escape their babysitters. Just a preliminary step; next move more serious, and nothing she could do really to stop it. She might, no choice of her own, be moving on. “Bruce is a cool guy but, deep down, something of a psycho. It’s like he’s always walking along the edge of a cliff and can’t think of one good reason not to step off except for something like plain old animal hunger: he still wants more than he wants not to want. But if his appetite ever fails him, so long, brother, he’s gone.” Actually, she thought Bruce and Rex were a lot alike, but she knew Rex would resent her saying so, since it was always the old apples and oranges argument with Rex whenever it came to rich folks and poor. “That makes him an easy spender with other people’s lives, too,” she added, reaching around to towel Rex’s drum-tight abs, “life itself probably being the thing he has the least respect for. He thinks life was some kind of fundamental mistake the universe made back when it orgasmed and the less of it the better.” Rex got up to change the record, choosing something a bit more progressive and so more to his tastes, but not so far out as to chafe her gentled spirit. She lay back on the bed, gazing at his well-toned lats, firm butt, and dark muscular thighs, thinking: Bruce was right about one thing. Life was not, as some poetical types liked to claim, a dream, but being rooted in dreams (and dead ones at that) and more like them than not, if you were crazy enough to live life out, you might as well be crazy enough to live it as though it were a dream. It eased the suffering, and nothing more meaningless in a meaningless world than to suffer for nada. A spin on things, she noted, that gave you a lot of license. Rex rolled a fresh spliff and lit it, passed it down; she took a deep toke, then coiled smoke rings out at his semitumescent cock. “Straighten that muscle up,” she said, “and we’ll have a game of quoits.”

The bed was for some in town a playground, as it was for newcomers Rex and Nevada when not a platform for their business ventures; it was a platform of sorts for Gordon the photographer as well, an artistic prop like a chair, a bathtub, the street, while for his friend Ellsworth it was more like a patch of meadow in the tangled forest of his creative imagination (the Artist had his hand on the Model’s thigh again, lecturing the sardonic Stalker, hovering, unseen, nearby, on the higher morality of aesthetic truth); for many, like oldtimers Marge or Otis, the bed was simply a place to get some shut-eye; but for some it was nothing short of the rack, sheer hell on sheets. Try telling Veronica, for example, that sex was fun. It had a certain tickle, all right, but it was more like terminal athlete’s foot. Or hemorrhoids, more aptly, given her dearly beloved’s brutish fancies. For whom, the middle Maynard, no joy either. More like prosecuting a tough case, proving he could still do it, even if he hated it. Contrarily, Gretchen and Columbia, who were otherwise finding the town a bit shaky for them of late, were having a grand time there, playing with vibrators, ointments, penis extenders, and condoms, ribbed or pimpled, some even with ears and noses and little Martian antennae on them, which Gretchen had ordered through catalogues that arrived at the pharmacy and which kept them giggling throughout their evening recreation time, which was strictly limited, since they were both working women. Not that it was all just idle frolic, it was also quite educational, Columbia learning at last how men really worked when she took her turn strapping on a clear plastic penis with its inner anatomy showing through in bright colors and had a go for herself. For Alf, nurse Lumby’s dyspeptic boss and deliverer of Gretchen’s brood (an unusual case: he had to break her hymen to get the first ones out), a bed was where most people went to die, he attended them there and watched them go, his own true heart among them, and living alone now, he often avoided his own, wandering the streets at night or dropping off on the living room couch during consolingly banal TV reruns, pap against the dread. Even when Harriet was alive and they were still copulating (it was fun, they’d got a kick out of it for a while, in spite of their overawareness of its mechanics, but came quickly to think of it as kid stuff, and after the babies were born, turned to it only when in goofier moods, most often drunk or with others), they preferred any private place, in or out of the house, to the dreary bed, Harriet even more blunt than Alf about “crawling into the coffin” at night. “I’m pooped, I’m dead,” she’d say, leaving a party. “I’m going to go put the meat in the cooler before it goes off.” At a foreign-made piece of erotic fluff in the old Palace Theater one night, during a soft-focus view from the ceiling of lovers on a bed, the old army nurse had provoked an auditoriumful of irritable shushing by remarking, too loudly, that whenever she looked down on a bed like that, all she could think about was torn limbs, Alf adding laconically to turn the shushes to self-conscious laughter that he couldn’t be sure because of the fuzzy camera work, but he thought the actress (fuzzy camera work was his problem now: hard as he stared at his finger — there was a message on its tip, he knew, something about a patient: what was it? — he couldn’t bring it into focus) had a thyroid problem and recommended she get a checkup. Kate, who was there that night with Oxford, sitting beside them, and who in general had a benign view of beds (though, in the end, when it came, she refused to retire to one), pointed out that the white-sheeted bed viewed at that angle was a kind of screen-within-a-screen and that consequently the coupled lovers were not merely actors in a movie and thus nothing more than the ghostly illusions of a flickering light, but they were actors playing actors, and so had doubly lost their substance, as though to say that love itself was such an emptying out of emptiness, Oxford replying: “Or such a luminous density of layered sensations,” all of which was making the younger crowd in the theater wish these old farts, long past a good time, would shut up and stop spoiling it for others. Dutch had booked that film, the bed as theater being his own preferred use of that ubiquitous piece of furniture: gave him his jollies without aggravation or anxieties and no strings after. He missed the old Palace with its big screen and high ceilings, appreciating in his own way the remark Waldo had made recently during one of his motel junkie-fucks that the beds he kept crawling into seemed to be drifting farther and farther away from the center as though that center were somehow getting lost, fading from view, the emaciated kid with him replying that she didn’t know there ever was a center. “Sounds like you’re on some kinda guilt trip, man.” “Naw … haw!” For Floyd the hardware man, the bed was also a theater of sorts. He liked to take John’s wife there, grab her by the hair, tie her to the bedposts, and whip her with his red suspenders, which he called his “cat.” Then she’d moan and toss her head about and beg him to make love to her or kill her, she couldn’t stand the passion welling up in her. He’d let her kiss and suck at his johnnie, chastising her all the while with his whistling cat. Then she’d belch, and he’d do what he could to have some kind of orgasm, and get off. He tried to imagine whipping Edna with his suspenders, but it seemed incredibly silly.