Robert Coover - John's Wife

Love as an adventure was not one of the subtopics of Reverend Lenny’s sermon-in-progress, but perhaps only because he had not yet thought of it, for love in the larger sense, he’d decided, watching his wife Trixie feed the new baby by candlelight (the power had gone out, not just in the manse, the whole block seemed dark), was to be its central theme. The love of one’s fellows and maternal and marital love and love as the ultimate sanctuary and love as a miracle and as the true source of all meaning, or at least such as we’re granted in this paradox-ridden universe of ours, bereft of certainties as it was. In the expression “I love you,” neither subject nor object could be identified or be proven to exist, only the verb was beyond dispute, the only indispensable verb in the language perhaps, centering all others. The event that had brought all his scattered thoughts to focus was the birth, in a spectacle of birth, of his spectacular son. Were there comic aspects to his abrupt arrival on this lonely planet? Well, so much the better, for such was the nature of the human condition within which it participated, Lenny’s theme embracing as well the cosmic joke of love. “But where, then, is the center?” Beatrice had mysteriously asked earlier (she did not now remember this and he but barely did; fortunately, as he was doing now, he’d taken notes), and the answer was: in love as incarnated in their little Adam, so named by Beatrice in awe, not shared by Lennox, of his conception, which she associated with a fugue by Bach. “It was like all the organ pipes had got stuffed up inside me, one by one,” she said, “each one resonating with its own special pitch and tone, filling me up with such ecstatic music I almost couldn’t stand it!” Mind, spirit, and body as a musical instrument, love as the well-struck chord: he took a note by the flickering candle (it felt like the world had emptied itself out, even his other children had been swallowed up by the night, and only they three remained, huddled around the last of the light like the nucleus of a new adventure: yes, he was thinking now about the adventure of love), while Beatrice, giving breast, quietly chatted away. “Look at his pretty little mouth, Lenny, how it curls around my nipple, he’s not just sucking at it, he’s licking it, nosing it, playing with it, such a sexy little baby! All the time I was carrying him I had the feeling inside me, not of a baby, but of a passionate lover, one who’d found all the places that made me hot but from the inside out: my nipples would suddenly get hard, my throat would flush, my thighs would drip, and all my senses would turn inward and I wouldn’t know where I was! Once he got the hiccups, and I nearly died from pleasure! Where did he come from, Lenny, this strange little boy?” Lenny didn’t know, didn’t care. Things happened. That was not what mattered. What mattered was the message that was being transmitted, a message that was always the same and never the same message twice, easily read, yet impossible to decipher, though the attempt to do so was his life’s work and privilege. “Maybe,” he said, “he came from the desire to resist the indifference of the universe. Maybe we still haven’t settled down, Trixie. Maybe we’re still on the run, still rebelling.” “Oh dear,” she sighed, and hugged the baby. “I hope not.”

Mother love, to be celebrated in Lennox’s forthcoming Sunday sermon, was also what roused Veronica at last from her backyard stupor and sent her out alone into the dark unfriendly night in search of her, well, her son, so to speak, her bad-penny Second John: slimy, hideous, mindless, but pathetic, too, utterly helpless, needing her, his only mom, how could she have wanted to hit him with an ironing board? Everyone at the party had been complaining about the slime trail, most of them blaming it on the monster woman, so even at night it was easy to find and then to follow, not from east to west but from dry to wet. Some streetlamps still burned but most were out and she walked through patches of absolute darkness where the power seemed to have failed with only the slime trail itself, faintly phosphorescent, to show her the way. It led eventually into a noisy bar, one she’d never been in before, a saloon more like, with a big bar made out of railway ties, the only thing vaguely familiar, and sawdust on the wooden floor and gaslamps hanging over wooden tables where loud drinking men played cards and broke into brawls and vulgar songs and laughter. She saw him in a corner, on the floor, still swaddled and hooded loosely in the dirty sheet he’d been wrapped in, the little mendicant with the big head and shriveled limbs, her boy, sort of, her Second John. The men were teasing him, flicking their ash and flinging their beer dregs at him, spitting on him, kicking him, and ridiculing in despicable ways his tendency to suck at anything that neared his hooded face. Veronica braced herself (why did this remind her of some of her most awful moments in high school?), then marched over to stand between them and her son, remembering only after she’d got there and they’d all rudely reminded her with roars of laughter that the borrowed linen dress she was wearing was split up the back. She scolded them in a high-pitched voice she could not quite control for being cruel to a handicapped person who could not defend himself and who wasn’t even a child yet. This sent them all into howls of finger-pointing laughter, spilling their beer and tipping tables over. “You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” she shouted, and knelt to give the poor thing, wet and squishy though she knew he was, a motherly hug, feeling herself poke out the back of the dress as she squatted, giving them all something fresh to whoop about. “You’re nothing but a bunch of bullies!” she cried. “That’s tellin’ ‘em, Ma!” Second John exclaimed, suddenly tossing back the cowl, as though peeling off a disguise. He stood before them, just a head above her doubled knees, bald and diapered and smoking a big black cigar. She gasped. “Why, you’re the—!” He spat and laughed and whipped a pistol out of his diapers and shot the hats off three or four of the men, all of whom were now diving for cover, then slapped Veronica on her exposed backside and, waving his pistol about, said: “You’re a real pal, Ma! Whaddaya say we sow a few wild oats here and teach these bums a lesson in family values?” “I–I don’t want any violence—!” she begged. “Who’s talking about violence?” he laughed. The bartender in his white shirt with sleeve garters rose up behind the bar with a twelve-gauge shotgun, Ronnie screamed, her son blew the gun out of his hands and then blasted away a row of bottles over the quaking barkeep’s head. “All I want’s a little tit!” “What—?!” “Ma, I’m your little baby!” “But I–I don’t have any milk!” she gasped. “That’s okay, I’m not hungry, I just need a little comfort,” he said with a sly affectionate grin, tonguing the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. He reached inside her linen dress and popped a bare breast out. “You’ve kept me waiting, Ma! All these years! It wasn’t fair!” “Darling, please—!” She felt sorry for him and what had happened, but much as she loved him, she wished he’d put her breast back. She seemed unable to do it herself or even to rise from her vulnerable squat, it was like she was paralyzed with shame and remorse. “They tell me the old man comes here from time to time on the arm of one floozy or another,” he whispered, “and next time we’ll be waiting for him, right, Ma? Blam, blam, blam!” He popped the other one out. Such a strong-willed child. It was not easy being a mother. In a far corner some men started laughing and singing “The Little Milkmaid” and her son whirled and shot the overhanging lamp off its chain, sending it crashing to their table with a fiery explosion like a fireworks display. “Hey, wow! That’s neat!” Second John exclaimed around his tattered wet cigar and shot another lamp down, and then another, jumping up and down and shouting with childish glee. “This is fun, Ma!” Just a little boy at heart, though he scared her with the games he played. He paused, peered inside his diapers. “Uh-oh. Help, Ma! It’s number two, I think.”