Robert Coover - John's Wife

Nurse Lumby’s quaint expression, used figuratively to describe her hysterical patient (to whom, on the doctor’s orders, she was now administering a mild sedative, with some pleasure, by injection), would have been understood more literally by her brother Cornell who had become more and more convinced that there was not one of him but two. It was as though there were a parenthetical Corny inside the outward one (or containing it), or as if he were carrying a shadow around that did not always move as he moved, and from time to time he would spin around to see if he could catch the shadow out, or if not the shadow, then, in whatever form, that other self. He had to be careful not to do this when the woman called Gretchen was around, because she cut him off from his video games whenever she caught him at it (this morning, for example: he thought he felt something, like — what? — like a tap on his shoulder, he spun around — and there she was, scowling at him through her bottle-glass lenses; she clumped over like a movie monster, pulled the plug on the one drugstore machine that still worked, slapped his head when he tried to protest) on the grounds that the games were making him battier than he already was, though from his perspective, if not from his shadow’s (he couldn’t speak for that other self who seemed, incredibly, to be married to that peg-legged freak and to be the father of more children by her than he could count, never mind learn their names), she was the one who was crazy. Sometimes the whole world seemed crazy, but this did not worry Cornell, his mother always said that most right thoughts were, when first thought, thoughts of one lonely person — most crazy thoughts, too, of course — but the point was, it was cool to be different. Which he was, really was, and she always said she loved him because of it. Now, deprived of his only compensatory pleasure in this upside-down world (or was it inside out?), Corny curled up in a niche behind the drugstore publication racks and thumbed gloomily through the magazines, exploding in his pants whenever he glimpsed plump bosoms or inviting nests of pubic hair or even sometimes just pictures of round juicy things with creases in them, but otherwise inconsolably bored and depressed. A bummer, man, it truly was. Life, everything. Maybe later, when fish-eyes wasn’t looking, he’d steal a pocketful of coins and the keys to the store van and sneak out to the mall arcade, in spite of the ridicule he often suffered out there from the teen-meanies — the zit-snits, as he used to call them in at least one of his lives. He was staring dejectedly at a picture of a nun, dressed only in her wimple and white stockings, being ogled by a priest hiding behind a cathedral gargoyle (it was the hideous gargoyle that most fascinated Cornell even as he popped off at the sight of the nun’s naked bottom with the thorned heart of Jesus tattooed on one cheek: when would this nightmare end, he wondered?), in a photo feature called “Les Girls de Paris,” when a woman standing near the racks peered over his shoulder and asked him if he was planning to travel to France this summer. He recognized her. Though she was married and rich and famous now, he remembered her mostly as Yale’s girlfriend in high school. He used to follow them around, especially in the house or at the movies, to see what they did together. What they did was hold hands a lot, though once Yale kissed her, and that was the first time that thing happened in Corny’s pants when he wasn’t asleep or at least in bed. Her remark now might have been meant as a joke, but she didn’t appear to be making fun. She seemed more like his mother when he brought stuff home from school, like, you know, really interested, and when he mumbled he could never go back there, she asked him why, and he (he was afraid the woman with the stubby leg would come over and tell him to keep his wackiness to himself, but she didn’t even seem to be listening) told her all about it. What door? she asked when he’d finished. So he led her out into the alley and took her, step-by-step, through his midnight searches, though everything looked different in the daytime. More ordinary. A plain old dirty alley, that’s all it was, it was embarrassing, man. He began to see himself as Gretchen saw him — a pathetic loony with messy pants — and he was sorry now he’d brought the lady out here. But then, in a dark place out of the sun, he saw the trash cans again: KEEP OUR TOWN BEAUTIFUL, they said. And he knew, if he turned around (why were his knees shaking? why was he hesitating? what was he afraid of?), the door would be there. But when, screwing up his courage, he did, it wasn’t. Nor was the lady. What was there was a great huge womanish thing hunkered down behind a pickup (she was so big she was only half hidden by it), snorting and whuffing like a wild animal as she pawed ravenously through the garbage of the Sixth Street Cafe. She looked up at him (or down, really) through her uncombed hair, a blob of meringue on her nose and wilted lettuce leaves hanging off her lower lip. His heart skipped a beat. But not from fear. “Corny?” she whispered. “Is that you?”

The old Ford pickup Pauline was crouching behind belonged to the hardware store on the corner, a family enterprise operated by John, run by his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him, and before that John’s great-great-grandfather, the famous pioneer horse-trough maker who first set up shop here where, on the rolling prairie, there was then no corner, thus, as though drawing an X on the ground, creating it and all that followed, or in some such mythic language had Ellsworth once put it in a popular Town Crier article years ago about “Dreamers and Builders.” The historic two-story brick structure was one of the few downtown businesses left intact, more or less intact, from the old days, though not the old days of the great-great-grandfather. Why had John spared it and so little else? Some said that it showed a sentimental streak in John, others that he’d cynically set out to enhance its value by destroying its more beautiful competitors; most, though, thought he just hadn’t got around to it yet. For the past dozen years or so, John had entrusted the day-to-day management of the old family business to an out-of-towner named Floyd, a former trucker and traveling salesman who happened to be passing through when the manager’s position was vacant. Floyd was not a hunter or a golfer, was not a social drinker, and had not flown nor would he ever, but he was a good bowler and his past life had afforded him opportunities to play a lot of cards (he had earned John’s respect as a bridge partner), to read the Bible through and through, and to pick up several manual skills of the sort taught in such places, which he had used to good effect since coming to town. And the store he managed, in spite of the competition of the malls, most of it created by John himself, had managed always to show a small profit from year to year, a tribute to Floyd’s nuts-and-bolts know-how and his tenacity. So while Alf, next door at the Sixth Street Cafe, might have surmised that John, emerging from the hardware store with that icy grin on his face, had just fired old Floyd (good riddance if he did, he was an irascible old sonuvabitch, and something of a religious kook, nobody liked him), the truth was that John, who knew how to use the talent he found, had just promoted Floyd out of the hardware store at last, doubled his salary, and put him in charge locally of the new national trucking line he had acquired on his most recent business trip out West, a company he intended to link, as he explained to Floyd, with his air cargo operations. Which was why the hardware store manager, more emotional than most in town supposed, could now be found down on his white-overalled knees in the do-it-yourself section, next to the wind chimes and redwood twin-lounge kits, giving tearful and vehement thanks to his divinity: Redemption! Sweet Jesus! It was really possible! All his dark and tortured past seemed to fade away like a dissolving nightmare and he bellowed out his rapturous joy (the high school kid who worked for him, alarmed by his employer’s hysterical rant, ducked out the back door: whoo, Old Hoot’s gone off the deep end again, time for a joint) as God’s grace descended upon him like light filling a room or water a bucket — Praise the Lord! He was saved! Saved at last! And, so saved, once-covetous Floyd, gripped by a love of the world now sublime and pure, coveted no more.