Robert Coover - John's Wife

A lesson that Trevor the accountant was learning, for though he had no one to blame but himself for where he was (this irrational pursuit of a phantom called delight, he must be mad!), what he discovered there was not of his doing, nor could he have foreseen it. His emergency was this: finding himself, a respected middle-aged accountant, married, alone in a motel room with a young girl in raggedy shorts whose name he didn’t even know and, lying on the floor in his own blood, a wounded man, more or less naked and possibly dead, a gun on the bed and clothing scattered about, ambulance and police cars pulling up outside, sirens screaming. “Gosh, I’m so scared!” gasped the girl, dropping what she was carrying and throwing herself into Trevor’s arms, the bare arms around his neck frightening him nearly as much as the body on the floor or the red and blue lights flashing against the window blinds. “Thank goodness I’m with someone who knows what to do in situations like this!” Trevor’s knees had turned to butter, his brains too, and he had to bite his cheeks to keep from crying. “You’re so cool, man! Just grinning like that!” The police were hammering on the door. “Hey! Who’s in there? What’s going on? Open up!” “Don’t let them know I’m here!” the girl cried, and grabbing up an armful of clothing again, she ducked into the bathroom, blowing him a last-second kiss, just as the door exploded inward and men in white jackets, others in gray and blue, some with their pistols drawn, came crashing into the room. “There he is!” The butter melted and he sank to the floor, but was soon hauled, roughly, to his feet again. “Shoot him if he moves!” “That your shotgun, killer?” “No!” he whimpered, as something hard and pointy bruised his ribs. “Ow!” His bladder gave way and a wet warmth spread to his knees. “It’s — it’s all a mistake! She—!” “She—? She, who?” “Wait a minute. Ain’t that John’s business manager?” “Trevor—?! What the hell are you doing here?” “I–I’m not, I don’t, it’s not what it— a client!” he gasped, churning up the head butter. “What—?!” “He, you know, a p-policy! Insurance! I, uh, I had to—!” “You’re tellin’ me you’re here to service a fucking insurance policy—?!” “I hope for old Dutch’s sake it’s a good one,” grunted one of the ambulance men lifting the motelkeeper onto a stretcher. “The poor bastard’s had the best part of him blown clean away!” “Yeah, pretty much tore his right hand off, too!” “Is he alive?” “Barely. He’s lost buckets.” “Lucky he had that two-way radio Otis give him, what with all the phonelines around here took out.” “Hey, this broken glass is weird! Look! One side’s like a mirror, but the other—” “Hold on, whose purple pants are these? These fruitbags yours, buddy?” “No!” “Anything in the pockets?” “Some golf tees. Keys. A pack of rubbers. No, wait! A billfold! Well, I’ll be goddamned!” “Who is it?” “These here are old Waldo’s pants!” “Jesus, you think he left without them?” “If he did, he shouldn’t be hard to find.” “Shit, John’s not gonna like this!” “No, but just the same we’ll have to get a warrant out.” “Yeah, well, later. We’re due over at the Tavern. Otis will be pissed if we don’t hustle our butts over there.” “What about all this shit?” “Grab it up and bring it along!” “Trevor, we oughta lock you up but we don’t have time. So, you go home and stay outa trouble now, goddamn it, and we’ll talk to you tomorrow, you hear?” He nodded bleakly, feeling the nausea rise again, and then he was alone in his wet pants on a bloodstained floor littered with broken mirror fragments, staring into the messy darkness of the little room beyond, which seemed to be reflecting his own dark messiness within. Alone, but not for long. Marge’s friend Lorraine poked her head around the door, then jumped inside and slapped the door shut with her hips. “Don’t look!” she shrieked, and only then did it register on him that she was wearing nothing but a shirt, tails tugged down between her thighs with both hands. She glanced around wildly, then loped leggily into the bathroom, high-stepping through the broken glass. “No! Stop!” he cried, but too late. Would this folly never end? He stumbled over, abashed, to explain what was beyond explanation, but when he looked there was no one in there but red-faced Lorraine, tying a towel on and screaming at him that he was a sick voyeuristic pervert, get the hell out! What was worse, she was right. She threw a toilet plunger at him and everything went black. Had he gone blind in the other eye as well? If so, so be it. Trevor had seen about all he ever wanted to see.

The Artist? The Model? Both gone, like vision itself: mere memories, and so illusions. His desire to see has cost him his sight. Blind in both eyes, and so pitiable, he gropes, utterly alone, through the pitch-black night in a forest he cannot even be sure is a forest, only his memory and his reason suggest this to him. That ever-deceptive memory. That foolish reason that led him into this doomed project in the first place. Who was he to use another to try to see into himself? Who was he to intrude upon Art’s sacred domain? Of course, if Art, as the Model suggested, is not the contemplation of beauty, but the encounter with its absence, then he should, encountering absence in its utmost purity, be in ecstasy, but he is not. Black on black is a metaphor, perhaps even a beautiful one, but it is not Art. But why blind? You may well ask. Probably it’s an allegorical blindness, curable only by allegorical means. No, I’m sick of all that. Then my fate is sealed, and your commitment to allegory is complete. Nonsense. Why can’t I simply restore your sight? There, you see? you have it back. No, sadly, I do not. Some things you can do, some you cannot. I don’t understand. Nor I: we are both intruders here. Tell me, then, what you in your blindness see. I see the fire raging through the forest. I thought I knew what it meant, but now I don’t. There was a fire, then? There might have been. If so, I think it expressed the terror of a world devoid of Art. Or of the void of Art? Who can say? What vanished was the Real. No, its mere Model: the Real remains, as you yourself, blind within it, must surely know. All I know is the unseen fire’s power to consume all in its path. In that respect it’s much like time, and so may represent a simpler terror. Against which Art stands. So you say; show me it. Alas, I lack the gift to do so, though I believe it to be so, and have had a glimpse, I think: There was a stone once, in the stream … But now it too is gone, the stream as well perhaps. What then can you do for me, left sightless and alone in this bleak forest, torched by your own uncertainties? Can you lead me out? Of course: give me your hand. Here: it is your own. Ah. Yes. As I feared. We cannot leave here then. No. The endless night to which you are condemned is mine as well? It is.

Waldo, so condemned, or so it seemed, and as blind as Ellsworth’s Stalker (couldn’t see a fucking thing), crashed ponderously through the thorny undergrowth, not in hopes of escaping it, but in desperate flight from the mosquitos that swarmed upon him whenever he stood still. “When the going gets tough,” he cried out into the empty black night, as he staggered through what felt like the gnarled claws of old hags, grasping vindictively at the offending flesh he now so liberally offered them, “the roughs get rougher!” But was Waldo, thus clawed and bit, repentant? No, if those radiant buns should reappear, he’d chase them all over again, but not to do them harm, oh no, prince of a fellow that he was, his heart was big and full of love, and life, so short, was sweet or else was wasted. Waldo paused to suck at the empty flask and the mosquitos whined around him. Had he heard something? Yes, a distant growling roar, not unlike a power mower. Hah! Kevin always said he liked to do the fairways at night! Rescue was at hand! Waldo plunged toward the sound like a castaway striding through heavy surf toward an unseen shore, and in due time stepped out upon a fairway. Ah! His bare toes reveled in the grassy carpet, giving him a pleasure comparable to a good massage, or the relief one’s buttocks felt when a paddling ended, fond memory of the fraternal past. He followed the sound of the motor down the fairway, toward which green he had no idea, nor had he any preference, confident old Kev would have a bottle out here with him, good scout that he was, and wondering only why he saw no light. Naught but a remote flicker of heat lightning in the west like a reminder that not all lands were lightless. But then was Kevin mowing in the dark? He was not, nor was it Kevin. It was (Waldo padded softly upon the spongy green, leaned close to make out the horsey bare-legged creature sprawled athwart the hole) old Mad Marge snoring! Christ, what a cannonade! Poor Triv had to live with that? Marge lay upon her back, limbs outflung, still clutching a seven-iron in one fist, jaw slack and vibrating with her resounding snores, her blouse open and skirt rolled up around her waist, flag tossed aside, the ball in the hole between her powerful thighs as though she’d shat it there. Imagining remarks to some such effect that he might mockingly make (and others that she might make to mock in turn his unadorned and inert condition, but what the hell, company was company), he gave her a firm barefooted kick in the side of her rump, but she didn’t even lose a beat in her steady drum-fire barrage, nor did successive kicks do the trick: Sleeping Beauty was utterly elsewhere, her big-boned bod abandoned. Well, well. He drew a putter out of her dropped bag, a pair of balls as well, which he tossed down at the edge of the green, facing her open fork, faintly illumined by the occasional glimmerings from the west. “Fore!” he hollered into the hollow night and crisply stroked the first: he could hear it as it whispered across the green, rattled around in her thighs like a roulette ball, and dropped— k-plunk! — into the hole. The second made a clocking sound, then bounced back out again like a pinball ejected from a scoring dimple. He went over to pick it up and to pluck the two from out the hole. His hand brushed her pantied crotch while reaching in and felt something rippling behind the cloth like a scurrying mouse. Curious, he pushed to one side the narrow strip of reinforced fabric and lost his fingers to wet fleshy lips that hotly sucked them in. Hey! Wow! Everything was on the move in there! That sucker was alive! And still she thundered on, lost to this world and to all others, her sonorous concert interrupted only when, with effort, he popped his ruminated fingers out. “John—?” she gasped. Waldo, reprising his famous Long John impersonation, rumbled: “Yeah, baby, I love ya,” and his Sarge Marge phobia momentarily overcome and putter cast aside, he leaned forward to work his wedgie in where his trailblazing fingers had gone before. Her raking snores returned as though to sanction his— yowee! — brave endeavors. From which no quick retreat: her limbs snapped round him and— woops! — clapped him to his task! Love: oh shit, it’s— hang on! — a real adventure!