Robert Coover - John's Wife

Hunger was making Pauline shaky, too, and though devastation was not on her mind (it never was, not even back when Daddy Duwayne tried to implant it there), something approximating it was already taking place in the studio as she blundered about desperately, looking for something to eat, knowing, even as she squeezed painfully through doorways and knocked things over in her clumsiness, that there was nothing to be found. When Otis left with the albums, he had promised to order up a dozen pizzas for her, but they hadn’t arrived and she really couldn’t wait much longer. She tried to call him again, but found it hard to work the little dials on Gordon’s old-fashioned rotary phones (had to turn them like bottle caps) and kept getting wrong numbers and busy signals. Putting two and two together was not what Pauline did best, but as she pressed her bulk through the doorway to check the downstairs refrigerator one more time (empty of course; on her last fruitful pass, she had found a withered lemon stuck to the back of the vegetable drawer by its own rot: she’d brushed it off on her thigh and eaten it whole like a piece of candy), it suddenly came to her with the force of a blow to the head, the sort of blow she was constantly giving herself now whenever she moved, that she was still growing and if she didn’t get out of here soon, she’d be trapped inside this building — already she couldn’t get up and down the stairs — and that would mean (two plus two) she’d probably starve to death. Even if they let her husband out of jail, Pauline knew she couldn’t count on him, he was so caught up in his work these days. But if she went outside, what would she wear? The one bedsheet she had wrapped around her was flimsier than underwear, and the other bedsheets and blankets were upstairs out of reach. She remembered the dusty old burgundy backdrop curtains in the portrait studio, and she squeezed back in there to (woops! — crash! — sorry about that) take them down, hoping Gordon wouldn’t be too mad about her borrowing them. She couldn’t get her big fingers around a safety pin, much less a needle, so, her stomach rumbling volcanically all the while she worked, she fashioned a kind of loose simple cloak (good old high school home ec!) and stapled it together with the stapler from the front-shop counter. Reaching through the bead curtains for it, she decided to take them along, too: “for dressing up,” as she thought of it, though mostly it was to belt the loose flaps in place. Leaving by the front door with bells jingling did not seem like a good idea, and anyway Otis had locked it when he left and the little catch would be too fidgety for her fingers to work from the inside. But the back door was too small, even sideways she kept getting snagged on something. Of course, it would help if the screen door weren’t there. How do these little hinge gizmos work? Never mind, it was off. Still couldn’t get through, though. She took off her new cloak and beads, lay down on her side and pushed her legs out into the alley and then (ouch!) her bottom, got up on her hands and knees and, jiggling back and forth, worked her top part out, dragging her new clothes with her. As she was still wiggling her shoulders through, she peeked through her flopping breasts and legs and saw a man watching her from across the alleyway, one hand clapped over an eye as though he were taking an eye test. She recognized him: Gordon’s insurance salesman. He couldn’t seem to stop staring, though the look on his face was different from most she’d suffered all her life. More like he was having a heart attack or had eaten something he shouldn’t have. Well, who could blame him, she probably was a sight. Pauline, being an incurious sort, did not stop to wonder what the man was doing there, nor why he didn’t at least come over and give her a helping hand, she figured most people would be put off, seeing her like this, and they would anyway suppose she was big enough to take care of herself. She pulled the cloak on over her head again and tied it with the beads, then went over to apologize to him and ask him where she might find something to eat — quickly! — but he just fell back into the rubbish there, still holding his eye and stammering something about his wife and the mayor. Well, too bad, but she had problems of her own, so, her growling stomach replying for her, she left him sitting there and made her way, knees bent and head ducked so as to cause as little alarm as possible, down the alley toward the Sixth Street Cafe.

Where Alf at the time was taking his midmorning coffee break, hunched over in front of the dusty plateglass window with his old friend Oxford and Oxford’s two youngest grandchildren, a pair of twins, not yet four, who had their father’s heart-shaped face and wispy blond hair but who, under their granddad’s patient tutelage, were already reading and doing their numbers. “It was like he felt he was locked out or something, and didn’t know how to get back in,” Alf said, gazing wearily out on the asphalt street which seemed to be sweating in the morning glare. He had been trying to describe his nighttime encounter with Oxford’s peculiar son Cornell in the back alley, but Oxford, fascinated by his grandchildren, excitedly filling in their dot-to-dot books at the table next to them (“It’s a lady! With a pointy hat on!”), seemed to be only half listening. The street was eerily empty. Civic center or no, the downtown was going to hell. The newspaper office across the street looked shut for the duration. No paper so far this week and no sign there’d ever be one again. Alf rubbed his eyes, wondered if he ought to look in on Ellsworth, make sure he was all right. “Still not sleeping well, I take it.” “No.” “Alcohol’s a clumsy sedative, Alf. Flurazepam’s better.” “Tried it.” “Methaqualones? There are some good ones out now.” “Hard on the liver.” “Especially when mixed with scotch, I suppose. You know, now that you mention it, Kate once said something amusing to me about doors. It was not long before she died, at the time they tore down the Pioneer Hotel. It was a sturdy old thing, that hotel, not unlike an ancient warrior, as Kate said, hard to bring to his knees.” “Mmm. Harriet and I stayed in that old warrior for a week or so when we came back after the war. From the smell, we must have been booked into the armpit.” “So John finally had to use dynamite—” “I remember. It was like a goddamn bomb had hit.” Brought it all back. Couldn’t sleep for a week after. It was the week when missing Harriet hit him hardest. “And when the dust cleared, all that was left standing was the big front door, completely intact, columns, architrave, and all. Majestic. Inviting. But opening onto nothing.” Alf remembered that standing door, remembered identifying with it in some way, but the memory seemed to be in black and white, so he didn’t know whether it was from actually seeing the thing itself or from the photo of it in the newspaper. If Alf had been asked, he would have said he never read the local rag, but now that it had not come out, he realized he was badly missing the silly thing. ‘“Mostly we build walls,’ Kate said then, ‘to separate the inner from the outer, the private from the public, the sacrosanct from the common, the known from the unknown. Doors are put in the walls to ceremonialize the crossing from one into another, which is sometimes a fulfillment and a delight and sometimes a frightening transgression.’” Oxford glanced over at his grandchildren. “Like in the story of the three little pigs: a ritual transgression of the sanctity of the home that takes place at the doorway.” “Always thought that was an oedipal fantasy,” Alf said, signaling for a coffee refill. Should get back. The preacher’s wife would be there by now. And there was that hysterical message on his answering machine this morning: “Help! That thing you took out! It’s back!” No clue who it was who’d called. “You know, the home as womb with Big Bad Daddy outside, trying to blow his way in.” “Maybe. Same thing. The door as a ‘magical threshold,’ as Kate called it, promising access to some mystery beyond or within. And what John had done, she said, was strip the door of all illusions, reminding us that all magic was nothing but sleight of hand, and thresholds were mere artifices in the middle of nowhere.” Oxford smiled wistfully, glancing over at his busy grandchildren. “And maybe you’re right about the three little pigs, Alf. Maybe poor Corny is just missing his mom.” John was back. Alf saw him emerge from the hardware store next door with a look on his face that said he’d either just fired old Floyd or given him a raise, with John you couldn’t tell which. Alf, glancing at his finger, remembered there was something he needed to talk over with John (what was worse, it seemed to be growing), but just then the waitress came over to say that he had an urgent phonecall. It was his nurse. An emergency. A man struck blind. Come quickly, she begged, the poor man was beside himself.