Robert Coover - John's Wife

There was a hollow knock at the master bedroom door in the house of the BEST DEAL IN TOWN, but the knocker entered without opening the door and not on her hands and knees, maybe not even on her feet, spectral as she was, her wet hair plastered darkly to her luminous skull and her eyes literally ablaze with a raging fire within. Her thin mouth gaped like a puppet’s and something like a windy sigh emerged and the whole bedroom turned ice-cold. Brrr. Never could keep her damned mouth shut, that woman. Perhaps it was just a drunken dream, Stu’s maybe, or else Daphne’s, or maybe somehow they were sharing the same shivery nightmare, or thought they were, hoped they were, how could you live with such a thing in the real world? Have to cut back on the joyjuice. Starting tomorrow, swear on the blue book. Though Winnie had never been short on self-expression, she had nothing to say on this occasion or others like them (too many of late), no need to, just her cold breath was nag enough, her fiery eyes were. The only voice in the room was old Stu’s, itself a sepulchral wheeze, broken up by snorts and hacks and toneless drowsy mumbles: “Oh, I do remember, Win, you old howler, remember it like yesterday — done you wrong, I know, and myself little enough good as well, though I did appreciate the silence after and, old head-blown junker that I was, felt souped up for a time. After all them years rustin’ on the blocks, shit, but it felt good. But what would you know about that, eh, Win? Born out of your time, you were. You could whip a drayhorse, but didn’t know an ignition switch from a handbrake, you had me runnin’ on no cylinders at all, I was due for a trade-in, damn your lamps — stop that! you’ll just smoke up your chimney! I told you I remember, how could I forget? Leaky old brainpan’s got more holes in it than a shot muffler, can’t deny it, but I can’t burn that night out of it, hard as I try. So, sure, I’m sorry. Sorry I looked back, for one thing. Damn near spoiled the good times. And of course, the joyride couldn’t last, beautiful as it was, too many potholes like always, I knew I’d throw a rod sooner or later and wind up in the crusher, but, hell, who don’t? It’s your time on the road that counts, not the boneyard you end up in, right? Ah, that stirred the embers, didn’t it? Can’t wait, can you, you old boat? So how’m I gonna get it, whaddaya got in store? Eh, Win? What’s it gonna cost me?” “Maybe if we’d offer her a drink,” Daphne said, or seemed to say (it was only a dream, wasn’t it?), and the flames in Winnie’s eye sockets blazed up again, her hissing exhalation frosted the room. “It’s you, li’l darlin’,” Stu rumbled (in his sleep, or in hers). “That’s what the old bird’s tryin’ to say. And behind you … I can see … someone else …”

So could red-eyed Gordon. He wished he was dreaming but he was not. He was in his darkroom, crying in his acid-stained sleeves. He hadn’t made an amateur mistake like this since he took up photography, and now, just now—! Outside his darkroom door, his wife Pauline was crying, too, he could hear her, a kind of dumb doggy whimpering. He’d forgotten to bring her any new clothes, except for the nightshirt which had had to be ripped at the neck and did not even cover her hips, and she was hungry (she was always hungry), nothing open until morning, but her problems seemed inconsequential compared to his own. How was it possible? Gordon had rushed home from the mall, trembling with excitement (nearly went right through the Main Street light, gave a giggly wave to the police chief as he hit the brakes that must have looked downright maniacal), and after splitting the new nightshirt hauling it impatiently over Pauline’s big weepy head and punching open their last ham for her, which she’d wolfed down nearly as soon as he’d wrestled it out of the can, he’d made straight for the darkroom, promising Pauline that as soon as he’d finished his first set of prints—“This is it, Pauline! The greatest artistic achievement of my life!”—he’d go out to the steak house on the highway and bring her back a quadruple Surf ‘n’ Turf special with extra potatoes and a whole Dutch apple pie for dessert. “With chocolate-marshmallow icecream and butterscotch sauce!” And then: the terrible discovery. Which he’d refused to accept. Of course he’d seen the dark muddled appearance of the negatives as soon as they’d come out of the developer, but no. Out of the question. Under the enlarger he’d seen it, too, and as the prints accumulated their emergent shadows in the acid bath, but not until, in his frenzy, he’d begun the third set of prints had Gordon finally come to acknowledge the impossible truth: he had somehow reused film on which he had taken pictures of Pauline standing in the tub. What was that used film doing in his camera bag? This had never happened before, and Gordon did not see how it could have happened now. But he could no longer deny it. The evidence of his unpardonable folly hung from nylon lines in the soupy red light above his head like freshly polished guillotine blades. On all of them, Pauline’s vast expanses of flesh, that flesh itself washed out and spectral, now bore spectral double impressions of another person who, so faint were the features, could be any person, the subject’s legendary radiance contributing to the evaporation of her image. In one double exposure, slightly less burned out than the others, perhaps because of the darkness of the cubicle he was aiming at or because there was a large patch of Pauline’s wet pubic hair in the original shot, he seemed to be able to make out John’s wife’s back, the linen tunic over her head and arms raised, and he worked desperately on that photo through several prints, isolating the area from shoulders to hips and carefully filtering out the hairy background, or foreground, which looked like a kind of beaded gauze curtain, but all he ended up with was something that looked more vegetable than human. The double exposures, had they been planned out, using Pauline’s monumental flanks, for example, as a shaped screen on which to cast the image of John’s wife striding through diaphanous clouds, etc., might have been beautiful, but opening the shutter fully twice over as he’d done had erased all the detail, all sense of a tactile surface, ruined, ruined, his chance of a lifetime. Gordon sat slumped in despair against the old metal high-stool in there, hot tears streaming down his cheeks, listening to the wistful whining of his poor grotesque wife curled up outside the door, and remembering something the woman at the library, the wife of the druggist, had once told him when he was still a young man and all afire with his highminded artistic ideals. Integrity, discipline, dedication, talent, faith in yourself, these are all very good things, Gordon, she’d said, and certainly you cannot be an artist without them, but they will not be enough. There’s something else needed, too, something much less easy to name or define. Call it, well, a mystery. The mystery. From which, at this moment, Gordon felt utterly closed out.

Rex also felt closed out, but not from any supposed mystery (though he would have agreed with Kate: the musicians he loved called it soul), rather just from the piece he wanted. The keys he’d stolen when he’d blown off the job out here at the airport had got him into the main building all right, but John had apparently changed the lock on the door to his private office, the suspicious bastard. The room, Rex remembered, had big steel-framed industrial windows that looked out on the loading ramps and runways but didn’t open. This cheapshit door would be easy to force, of course, or just to punch a hole in, but he couldn’t do that. His idea was to remove one of the rifles in the gun case, unnoticed, then return it the same way before anyone knew it was missing, no prints on it but John’s. Kill two birds, as they say, revenge the tune in Rex’s head even more than murder. He’d left Nevada sleeping fitfully, told her he was feeling edgy, had to go for a jog, back soon. She’d mentioned earlier that John was out of town for a couple of days, this was the moment. Would the sonuvabitch then, the evidence all against him, really take the rap in a town he owned? Nah, but it might at least cause the arrogant cocksucker a little discomfort, and cost him a night or two of sleep wondering who the fuck it was who could walk freely around inside his pants like that. So how was he going to get in to the goddamned place? Well, try turning the handle, numbnuts: wide open. Hah. It had been a while since Rex had worked out here, and he’d only been in John’s office a couple of times, but the big windows let in enough light from the parking and loading areas outside for him to make his way easily across to the big glass case that housed some of John’s famous gun collection. These keys worked. Smooth as silk. He had the glass doors open and his gloved hand on the piece of hardware he wanted when he realized there was someone else in the room. Sitting in the padded swivel chair behind John’s desk. Might be John of course. But probably wasn’t. Ice tinked softly against glass like chopsticks on a deadened cymbal: a lonely drinker. In the dark. Not John’s style. Rex was playing all this in his head with his hand on the rifle, just above the stock. He took the rifle down out of the case, turned, and aimed it at the figure behind the desk. “Turn on the light, mister,” he said. If it was John, of course, he was dead. The rifle probably wasn’t even loaded. “And don’t try anything funny.” He heard the ice again as the guy took a drink, set the glass down with a sigh, then reached forward and turned the little switch on the desk lamp. It was John’s sideman, the one Nevada described as a babyfucking psycho. Dressed in what looked like designer jungle fatigues. Was he waiting here for John? “Planning to kill someone?” the guy asked, his voice slurring slightly, and took up his drink again. “I heard someone prowling around,” Rex said, taking in the scene. “Thought I’d better arm myself just in case. So, what’s your story?” “Short on other options in this greasy little pit stop, my friend, I’m getting pleasantly fried, how about yourself?” Rex lowered the rifle, sat back against a butt-high filing cabinet, lit up. “I recognize you now. The hotshot in the sports jet. John’s buddy.” “His partner. Help yourself.” He gestured vaguely toward the bottle, staring at Rex’s gloved hands, seemingly amused. There was a picture of John’s wife and kids on the desk, an ashtray, the bottle, the brass lamp. And something else: handcuffs and a horse crop. “Don’t drink on the job. But you should let people know when you’re going to hang out here, General. Surprising nervous types like me can get you messed up.” “Work here, do you?” “Part-time.” “No shit.” Rex had the feeling he was not fooling this sneering wiseass with his jive and began to wonder if he’d have to waste him. Somehow he didn’t think so. It was like he was too cool to give a shit about anything, murder included. About that, he now said, as though tuning in to Rex’s head: “Ever kill anybody?” “No.” “Thought about it, though, I bet.” “Maybe.” “Sure you have. Natural as sex. We’d all kill if we could get away with it. Always somebody we’d like to have out of the way. Who’s in your way?” “Fat dudes. Like you.” The guy smiled, peered up at him over his whiskey glass, his face spookily half-lit by by the green-shaded desk lamp, his smirk luminous, his eyes, though gleaming, set in deep shadows. “How about John?” Rex was taken aback, took a quick drag on his butt. This cat was truly weird. Outside. “What about him?” “Well, he’s certainly rich. Big man, John. What do you think? Would you like to kill him?” Rex knew his hesitation had given him away, so he said: “Yeah, I think I’ll go look for him now, get it over with. Hang around here much longer and I’ll take out the wrong dumb motherfucker.” He pushed off from the filing cabinet, strolled to the door, rifle in hand, flicked his cigarette out into the corridor, then turned back. “If you need anything, pops, look for me down at the night watchman’s crib by the main hangar.” “Sure. You bet. So long, killer.”