Robert Coover - John's Wife

Well, she’d tried. She could do no more. One story ending, another revving up. Her life seemed full of them. She used to be the nice girl next door, back when the idea of excitement was a school field trip to a dairy farm; now she was not so nice but it was more interesting. So was she. Obviously. She ached to be home in bed, but not alone. Had to time it right. Alibi and all that. So she lingered, killing time and bottle dregs, keeping up her hellos and excuses, so all could say: I remember Daphne. More and more, not hellos but goodbyes: the joint was emptying out. The fuzz had wrecked the party. She watched as the preacher and his otherworldly wife packed up their new baby and cuddled it off into the night, thinking that, hell, she wasn’t too old to get one of those things. That hunk could make her a beauty that’d knock the pants off all the other babies in town. But what would she do with it after she got it? Hard to imagine. Reverend Lenny’s older boy, with his nose broken and face in plaster, had not seemed all that ecstatic about the new arrival. Or arrivals: that act was pretty funny, even if young what’s-his-name, pencil-peter, he of his father’s Our Fathering vocation, didn’t think so. He’d fled the scene his mommy’d made, either in chagrin or else to go gawk at the famous desperados with the rest of the tourists. Maynard’s repopped brat, star of Mikey’s magic show, had seemingly taken off, too, though his parents were still here. Twat of Twit and Twat was sleeping with her eyes open down by the barbecue pit (poor thing, she’d got so ugly it was heartbreaking); Twit, as Daphne discovered when she went for a pee, was in the master bedroom fondling someone’s panties. Guess whose. The Mange still had the hots for her after all these years. Daphne might have gone in there and taunted the snarfing sleazebag, as was her wont, but she saw that he was crying and figured the shitheel had suffered enough humiliation for one night, let him be, especially since she was in such a celebrative mood, or should be. Wasn’t she? What was wrong? Why these flashes of the blues? Well. She was at heart a good woman who wished everyone could live forever. She didn’t want one story to have to cancel another. Something like that. And also, give him credit, she’d miss the jokes. Of course, there were compensations, one big one in particular, but she’d been without it for a while, would be at least a night longer, and badly hooked, she was hurting: didn’t junkies get the blues? So she wanted her steady fix but she wanted it to be painless. Had it already happened? It was a pity one had to live all these stories in tandem instead of all at the same time. Why couldn’t life be spread out like memory was, with past and present all interwoven and dissolving into one another, so you could drift from story to story whenever the mood struck and no one really hurt by it? Instead: out of the old and into the new. Get ready to gasp and cry. Could she do it? Could and would. She looked around but found no one who belonged here to say goodnight to except little Mikey, who was busy rehearsing a new number with a little girl who looked like the youngest of Lenny and Trixie. They must have forgot her. Mikey was staggering around clumsily with his hand in the underpants of a Raggedy Ann doll, and the little girl was coming after him with some kind of plastic space cannon, firing table tennis balls. Who was that supposed to be?

She burst into the room, shotgun at her shoulder, slapped the lights on, and shouted: “Okay, asshole, say your prayers!” But the room was empty. Should have known better than to read a corkhead’s mind. Or maybe Dutch tipped them off after all. Probably. Room looked used. But the bed, though indented here and there, was still made. Lorraine sniffed the air. A certain sweaty aura maybe, but no clues. Had she really intended to shoot him? Or just scare the pants off him? Most likely, if his pants had already been off, to shoot him. She looked under the pillows and found a packet of fancy imported rubbers. Unopened. She pocketed them as evidence. Evidence of what? Thwarted intentions. Ditto, the girlie magazine in the wastebasket, the toothbrush in the bathroom. Though she didn’t recognize it. The tub was dry, but one of the hand-towels had been used and tossed on the floor. There was a glass that had had whiskey in it. What kind? No idea. In the little plastic wastebasket by the stool, there was a thick wad of chewed gum. She left it. Some evidence she didn’t need. The inside bathroom wall, she saw, could be rolled back, half of it sliding into the other half, making the bathroom in effect part of the bedroom. Cute. This was a real little lovenest. Overheads with dimmers, adult video channel on the TV, an abundance of directional lamps, mirrors, speakers, soft polymorphous furniture, odd suggestive knickknacks. Maybe there were always condoms under the pillows, porno mags “left” in the bins. But, wait. What did she mean, “suggestive”? Well, just that: objects that at first glance meant nothing to her at all, when looked at individually, seemed, almost literally, to suggest another use, inevitably sexy. For example, a little twist of silken cords with knots at the ends, like something cut from old-fashioned curtains and sprayed on a tabletop as a decoration: pretty, she thought, until another thought reached her, as though from the cords themselves: a whip. A chest of drawers drew her attention next, the bottom drawer: in it she found a vibrator. She’d never had one, never even seen one, but she knew, as if it were telling her so, that was what it was. She turned it on (she knew where to turn it on!), just to check the batteries. Well, why not? She kicked off her shoes, hauled down her slacks and panties, then thought it might be a good idea to wash it first. While she was soaping it up in the bathroom, she had the peculiar sensation of observing her own broad sagging backside; not used to bathrooms with open walls, made her self-conscious, she clearly wasn’t meant for the erotic life. You’re an ugly old cow, she heard herself saying, but what the hell, live it up! She had a sudden hunch, opened the medicine cabinet, found a jar of skin lotion, and understood its purpose immediately, took it back to the bed with her, where the shotgun lay like a discarded lover. She lathered the vibrator with the lotion and watched herself in the mirror as she inserted it and turned it on. Wow! Pretty good! She lay back on the bed, raised her feet, and let her rip. It was weird, but the whole room seemed to be encouraging her, and what she was thinking as she came was, yeah, terrific, the power of visual metaphor! When it was over, it wasn’t over. She still felt restless. She washed the vibrator and put it back, but she didn’t feel like putting her pants on. It was weird, but it was like the room was talking to her. And what it seemed to be saying was: how about the shotgun? That would be something different. It had a little ridge at the top of the barrel for sighting and it felt good to rub that against her clitoris. It was already pretty oily, but she applied a little more lotion and worked it in. How deep can it go? she seemed to be asking herself. How big a one can you handle? She pushed it in, watching herself in the mirror, inch in, half inch out; inch in, imagining the stud who would be hung with something like this. Whoo, this was even better than the vibrator, slower but reaching deeper, just the madness of it was turning her on, and she could feel an orgasm coming unlike any she’d ever known, oh fuck, she whimpered, and the whole room seemed to be feeling it, too, it was like she was fucking the room as she shoved the shotgun in, or the room was fucking her, deeper and deeper, it was savage and delicious, and the thought came to her as though out of nowhere, this is it, it’s never going to get any better, go for it, take all of it you can, then blast away! Yes, yes, she was gasping, and she reached for the trigger, but as she did so she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and, even as she was coming, what she saw instead of a scene of pure ecstasy was her own ugly puss, puffy with rut, her fat misshapen ass and flabby thighs, and something very alien stabbing her vagina. She whipped it out, mortified and angry, and blasted away her mirrored image, registering, just before she pulled the trigger, a sudden wild panic in her image she didn’t feel in herself.