Robert Coover - John's Wife

As they dragged the distraught photographer out of the fancy women’s-wear shop at the mall, his eyes filmy and unfocused and his knees giving way beneath him, what he kept blubbering over and over was: “It doesn’t matter, I didn’t have any film in the camera anyway,” a fact that seemed to be causing him more dismay than his arrest. They paraded the poor bewildered man down the corridor, through the busy cafe area, past the table where Opal sat alone, and on down the next corridor as though to prolong what perhaps they perceived as an entertainment for the shoppers, and from the grins she could see on people’s faces that was probably how it was taken. The young were openly laughing, pointing, making jokes. Opal was not entertained. Her own spirits were too low, her confidence in her own grip on the proprieties too shaken, to take pleasure in the humiliation of any fellow creature, especially one so harmless as the photographer, who was a bit idiosyncratic maybe, but a decent citizen and a loving son. Opal had known from church the man’s mother, a saint in her way, her husband killed on one or another of those beaches during the big war (Mitch had played his part on the home front in that one, as had her son in the lesser ones since then, for which she was grateful), the woman widowed so young and all but penniless with a son to raise, then in turn dutifully and tenderly cared for by that son when her own health and mind failed her, a fate that Opal hoped she would herself escape, but confident that her own son would be no less caring if such a calamity befell her. And what would her son say about her present troubles? He would not be patient with them. Mother, he would say, let that addled old man be, there’s nothing you can do for him, just watch over my wife and children when I cannot, I’m depending on you. And now she’d let him down on all counts and, moreover, behaved in ways he would not believe, nor could she still, though she knew she had. The girls were gone, she’d looked everywhere, it was all her fault, she’d stayed too long, but she’d called and they weren’t home either, no one was except the cleaning lady, and now she could do nothing but sit in this rancid public parlor, feeling utterly estranged, surrounded by misbehaving children and that indecent racket they called music, waiting, hopefully yet fearfully, for her charges’ safe return. She had brought Clarissa and her friend Jennifer to the mall this morning, as she had often done, though much earlier than usual, and she knew by their twittery excitement that something was up (those thin little shorts they had on didn’t even cover their behinds and they were wearing their belly buttons out like brooches) and she should stay, but her visits to the retirement center had become more than mere duty or habit, rather something like a compulsion, something she had to do more for herself than for that stricken old man, who had become, in fact, not so much a family friend as an adversary. And one of a very peculiar sort. It had begun simply as a way of coping with the awkwardness of Barnaby’s befuddled mind, humoring him in his confusions rather than forever correcting him, a sort of kindness, really, and therapeutic, too — he seemed to speak more clearly than before — that was how she had thought of it when she’d started taking Audrey’s part in Barnaby’s imaginary dialogues. These were not genteel or affectionate conversations: Barnaby was an angry man, and Audrey, he was convinced, had with malice done him wrong. Opal was equally convinced that Barnaby was misjudging her, her mistakes, if any, innocent (John was a charmer), and besides the dead should be allowed to lie in peace, so she took it upon herself to defend a woman toward whom in life she’d never really felt a fondness, at first in her own voice and then, when that only seemed to stir up Barnaby’s rage, in Audrey’s. Audrey had been so different from Opal — vivacious, brassy, self-assured, dynamic, daring, proud — that what most amazed Opal was the ease with which she assumed her role, standing toe-to-toe with the irascible old fellow, silencing his pigheaded bluster finally with the force of her own irrefutable logic, her doughty good sense, exhibiting then her own anger at his mistrust, backing him up until he fell into a chair, apologizing: “But… Aud, I’ve felt… such pain …” “I know.” Then he’d lean his poor damaged head into her bosom or onto her shoulder and rest there a while, she stroking his age-freckled pate gently, consoling him as best she could, until he forgot and it all started up again. She took to cleaning up his room for him, straightening the bed, sorting his laundry, scolding him for bad habits (“Don’t walk around with your robe gaping like that, do you think people enjoy looking at an ugly old coot like you in his underwear?” “Too much trouble, tying and untying it, Aud, slows me down when I have to go to the bathroom …”), even helping him with his baths because he said he hated the bath lady who treated him like he was three years old. “She’s right, you are three years old, now stop picking at yourself like that and lean forward, let’s get this over with.” “Wish I could, Aud. Get it over with, I mean.” “You stop talking like that, you old buzzard! Who would I have to fight with if you quit on me?” Which did remind her to take the gun out of the little raggedy holster in his bathrobe while he was in the tub and hide it at the bottom of his laundry basket. Sometimes she prepared some food for him or cleaned his refrigerator or microwave, read old newspapers to him, gave him his medicines, clipped his toenails. “Now, Aud, we’ve got to do something about that damned will.” “It’s been done. I don’t want to hear another word about it. Give me the other foot.” He’d been especially difficult today, spilling his medicine, dirtying the bathroom, throwing his dirty clothes about, refusing his bath, getting in a rage about a “dawzer,” whatever that was, even trying to strike her with his cane, but she took the cane away from him, pushed him down into his rocker, cooled his heels with a smart dressing-down, and then, when he’d lapsed into a more melancholic mood, gave him a haircut. She noticed he was eyeing the scissors, so she teased him for a while, setting them down where he could almost reach them but not quite, then quite casually popping them in her handbag when she got ready to go. Sometimes, leaving Barnaby’s little apartment, a funny feeling would pass over her, as though she had to remember to be Opal again and might not be if she forgot, just a fleeting sensation, but enough to make her shiver. Today, though, the funny feeling, after what she saw in the main lobby, had not gone away, the shivering hadn’t. Passing by the visitors’ logbook, she had glanced to see if she had remembered to sign in and was startled to see Audrey’s name written there. More than once. But in Opal’s own handwriting. She felt confused and somehow threatened, almost as though there were a hand at her throat, and she reached for the pen to do something, but there were other people in the lobby, coming and going, she had to leave it. And she’d lost all track of time, she’d been gone too long from the girls, Clarissa so irresponsible of late, she had her father’s bold independent ways, but not always his good judgment, and that dangerous mall crowd — Opal was suddenly afraid, for the girls, for herself, for her whole family, and dazed and panicky, she went scurrying back, hunched over the steering wheel as though trying to push the car instead of drive it, arriving finally, still shaken, but more and more her old self, her old dowdy steadfast inept and timorous self, to find her fears confirmed, the girls nowhere in sight, and nothing to do after an anxious search and a call home, an embarrassed inquiry or two (where were those scamps? they’d hear it from Granny Opal when they got back!), but sit and wait. In this glossy marketplace her son had made, though certainly not for her (she was not eating or drinking anything, people wanted her table, the busboys were giving her impatient looks, but she would not, could not really, move), a setting that seemed to demonstrate something her friend Kate once told her, sitting in the city park and speaking then about the most recent achievements in outer space: “When the edge becomes the center, Opal,” she’d said, “then the center becomes the void.”