John's Wife: A Novel (4 page)

Though this poem was a great success, both in performance and in print, Gordon disdained it. Indeed, it saddened him. Ellsworth was full of himself, proud of his worldly travels and his quirky bohemian ways, but it was Gordon who had kept alive, though he no longer painted, their youthful artistic principles. They had been pals since the days of toy soldiers and model airplanes, Ellsworth great with the stories that dramatized their play, creating trajectory, Gordon a stickler for the detail that gave it its intensity, its
body
, as it were. Gordon could not remember when they “grew up,” if ever they did, it was more like their playing simply ripened into something more profound somehow, all by itself, as though what was serious about it was there all along, down inside, just waiting to be revealed, but however it happened, they found themselves suddenly so much
older
than anyone around them, even the grown-ups, and certainly light-years beyond their classmates, fashion freaks and sexual athletes maybe, but mentally still in diapers, penned up like driveling toddlers in the world’s frivolous illusions. What Ellsworth liked to call “the show,” a coining from their feverish years. Ellsworth was careful with his words then, respecting their shape and gravity.
“The show I know,”
he wrote in one of his rhyming aphorisms, they were just high school sophomores at the time, reading passionately, painting and writing, showing each other their best and worst efforts, laying plans deep into the night for their escape together,
“the real I feel.”
The poet and the artist: they were inseparable. Until Ellsworth went off into the world to become famous and live the wandering minstrel’s life, leaving Gordon behind to care for his invalid mother. Couldn’t do that with a paintbrush, not in this town. He took up photography.

They were a pair, all right, Gordo and Elsie, as some folks called them, flamboyant but shy at the same time, always out in the middle of things but never part of them—they hardly seemed like real people at times—but one accepted them as one accepted a nervous tic or a sixth toe, as much part of the body politic in their loony way as John and his wife, and here as sure as warts, as Officer Otis liked to say, to stay. Okay, a bit off the wall maybe—Ellsworth in his cape and beret and long black hair hanging threadily from his bald patch, Gordon bobbing and waddling like a sweaty circus animal in his mute goggle-eyed search for the right angle—but harmless: they never gave Otis any trouble, except for the way they poked their noses into everything, and they had always treated him with respect even though he was a lot younger than they were. Otis had barely begun high school when he first started turning up in the pages of
The Town Crier
as a freshman lineman on probably the best football team the school had ever had, the one that John captained, and for the Thanksgiving game he even got interviewed and Coach Snuffy introduced him as “a battling bulwark” and old fat Gordon took his photograph. Even Otis’s old man was impressed and came to a game after that. Looking back, he now knew that that was the first year of that newspaper’s existence, Ellsworth having just come back to town, but at the time Otis had had the feeling it was history itself and had been there forever, even before God, and that he was stepping out of nowhere into its pages, into its light, like one chosen, one touched by a sudden grace. There were more photographs and more interviews in the years that followed, but the coverage became more ordinary, or felt that way—of course the team without John and the rest of that great class of seniors was more ordinary, too: the light had dimmed. But had not gone out: the reporter and his photographer recorded his team captaincy, his graduation, his Purple Heart and then his marriage when he got out, his appointment to the force, his children, his investigations and arrests, his promotions, his attendance at civic functions, his league bowling scores. They missed a few things—like his fucking of the photographer’s wife, for example—but Otis understood as well as did Ellsworth that some things were properly historical and some were not. Not all the photographer’s photos, for example, had made the pages of
The Town Crier
, nor should they, and some perhaps, including those Pauline had been telling Otis about, squirreled away at the back of the studio, should never have been taken.

These photographs that lay concealed from public view in over two hundred carefully maintained and catalogued albums shelved in the back room were, Gordon knew, his greatest achievements, but in the way that all artists are misunderstood (the ironies neither escaped him nor embittered him), what he was best known for in town were his commercial studio portraits. In the spring there were school class, club, and team photos, then graduation, first communions, and weddings in June, the Pioneers Day costumes, birthdays and anniversaries and new babies all year round, Christmas card family portraits in the autumn, club and company year-end galas to follow. There was hardly a household in town without at least one of his photographs, the only thing on most of their walls, buffets, or pianos resembling original art, and all the record most had of family history. Of course, Gordon was good at them as at everything else in what others called his job: they were sharply focused, majestically lit, elegantly composed, ultimately flattering. They were even, for occasions so inherently formal, unusually expressive, something one might not have expected, knowing Gordon, a notoriously timid and solitary man, severe even and cold. Weird, some said. No “Hey there sourpuss watch the little say cheese birdie” from Gordon. But no matter how banal the occasion, he was determined to get each composition just right and his broad pantomimic gestures as he tacked and bobbed behind his lights and camera, demonstrating the attitudes he wished his subjects to assume as they posed there on his little curtained stage, always brought a kind of theatrical gaiety to the otherwise awkward occasion. They loved him suddenly, not knowing why, nor did he understand this either, but it was the love one felt (Pauline understood this) for a clown, and it showed in their faces.

The photographer’s circussy style was not lost on John’s young son Mikey, who used it for one of his famous wordless monodramas at his parents’ annual Pioneers Day barbecue the summer of the civic center controversy, an awkward occasion for Trevor whose wife Marge was leading the opposition to the building of the annoying thing, having even managed that very week to get a temporary restraining order (soon to be overturned, of course, no stopping John) to prevent the plowing up of the city park, and who, even at the barbecue, had trouble keeping her mouth shut. Well, nothing new there. Trevor was John’s personal accountant and a corporation officer, Marge the town’s most intransigent gadfly, there’d been embarrassing parties like this before. Fortunately John was a tolerant man with a good sense of humor, maybe he even got a kick out of Marge’s quixotic activism, they’d been at it since grade school after all, and—until now anyway—she’d not put Trevor’s business relationship with John at any serious risk. Trevor sipped his spring water and knocked on what he hoped was wood: John was about ninety percent of all the business relationships he had. Little Mikey had roped a pillow around his tummy, buttoned on one of his father’s trenchcoats, its tails dragging the ground, and rigged a fanciful camera out of a video cassette, toilet paper tubes, plastic dishware from a child’s tea set, and a penlight which his sister Clarissa complained he’d stolen from her bedroom. Now he bobbed and waddled through the lawn party, taking everyone’s photo by switching the penlight on and off, organizing “family portraits” with broad ludicrous gestures, and, whenever she hove into sight, chasing his mother about with his peculiar apparatus, click-click-clicking away as though demonically possessed. Not everyone got the point of Mikey’s act, especially this last part, even if they knew who was being mocked, but Trevor knew, he’d seen the photographer up to his tricks before. The first time, he’d been sitting in the Sixth Street Cafe on a crisp autumn day with a client, a farmer for whom he was setting up an improved health insurance policy with term life attached, when the photographer had come galumphing past the plateglass window, apparently on his way into the cafe. Suddenly, he’d pulled up short, his lashless eyes bulging, and then had hurried in his walrussy way across the street to the newspaper office and printshop and had ducked inside, reappearing behind the window over there a few seconds later, now hidden behind a camera with a long gleaming lens. He’d seemed to be aiming straight at Trevor, which had made him pull back a bit into the shadows, mildly alarmed. But then the true target of Gordon’s photographic attentions had come by, walking her dog. The dog had caught the food odors from the cafe and brought her to an abrupt stop, blocking Trevor’s view of the window across the street. When she had passed, the window was empty. Since then, more than once, he’d seen the fat photographer in timid clandestine pursuit, and in turn, inexplicably amused, had begun quietly to pursue the pursuer.

Here is one of Gordon’s photos on the same theme, though not the one John’s personal accountant saw being taken: A slender woman in a white tennis costume, having emerged from the driver’s seat of a Lincoln Town Car, is leaning back in to retrieve something from the front seat, her purse perhaps. The car is parked among many others in a vast blacktop lot in the middle of a modern shopping mall, and indeed the photo seems to have been taken from inside another car parked not far away. Has she surprised two young vandals? Dressed in studded leather jackets, printed tee shirts, and torn jeans, they seem to be fleeing from the far side of the Town Car as though to escape capture. Or, more likely, confinement: one of the two girls has her arm extended behind her as though she might have just pushed the backseat door shut, even as she rushes away. In the background, near the mock-arcade entrance to the mall with its automatic glass doors and rows of nested wire shopping carts, young out-of-focus dressalikes can be seen in studied poses—slouching, smoking, waving—vaguely reminiscent of smalltown photographs from generations past. Slanted sunlight falls on the driver’s white tennis shorts, creating a kind of blurry nimbus or halo around her hips (the impression is that of having been stared at too hard and long), a seeming photographic flaw that was perhaps, through darkroom manipulation, intentional.

Clarissa, one of the secondary subjects in Gordon’s parking lot photo of the radiant tennis shorts (part of a continuing series), was not at all happy with her stupid little brother’s impersonation of the town photographer that afternoon at her daddy’s annual summer barbecue, refusing to take part with the other kids in his pseudo family portraits and determined to find some way of sabotaging the little showboat. It was especially disgusting the way Mikey went scuttling after their mom with that dumb thingamajig every time she came outside—why did everyone think it was so funny? When Clarissa complained that he was going to use up her penlight batteries, they all just laughed. Even Uncle Bruce, who had flown in just for the day and on whom both she and Jennifer had a tremendous crush that summer, seemed amused by the little sicko, it was unbelievable. Uncle Bruce was not really her uncle, as she had to keep reminding Jennifer all the time, Jennifer wanting Bruce all for herself and accusing Clarissa of what she called incestual madness. He and her father had both been in the same fraternity at college, and her father had told Clarissa years and years ago that since he called him “brother Bruce,” she could call him uncle. Of course, Jen’s father had also been in their fraternity, but that was different. Clarissa had dibs. Uncle Bruce was very sexy for an older man and tons of fun and Clarissa had made him promise a long time ago that when she grew up he would marry her, and she still meant it whether he did or not: she’d had it engraved in secret code on her love-slave ankle bracelet just to prove it. So, when Uncle Bruce not only let Mikey drag him into one of his ridiculous imitation studio photos, and one making fun maybe of her own family at that, but even with a big laugh and a hug pulled Jennifer along with him to be his pretend wife (Jen was really eating it up: come on! this was her best friend?), it was too much. She went looking for Jennifer’s nerdy brother Fish, found him hiding in the garage, sucking on a snitched can of beer. “Hey, Creep, where are those firecrackers you told me you brought?”

These annual Pioneers Day barbecues were part of a year-round parade of social affairs lavishly hosted by John and his wife, including everything from bridge foursomes, cocktail parties, and stag poker nights to bowl game gatherings, formal dinners, and kids’ birthday parties, a festal sequence that gave incident and body to the evanescent flow, configuring the town’s present as Ellsworth’s weekly paper and Gordon’s family portraits recomposed and fixed the past. The Christmas season did not really begin until their annual open house, the presidents’ midwinter birthdays gave way to John’s between, and their backyard barbecues were famous throughout the state, such wealth and power gathering there on those long summer days as to tickle all the senses: one could smell it suddenly in the rich sweet smoke, see it in the rugged smile of the handsome host, striding through the fresh-mown grass in his tooled boots and brushed denims, taste it on the quickened palate, hear it in the squat tumblers of golden whiskey wherein ice tinkled like pockets full of fairy coins. Brother Bruce, rare guest and ever rarer, called them milestones to oblivion, but was always cheerful when he said so, often donning the chef’s apron and pitching in, entertaining Clarissa with elephant jokes and funny riddles, showing Mikey magic tricks. Out-of-towners like Bruce were frequent guests, business cronies and college friends, clients, investors, politicians, all those who peopled John’s wider world beyond, dropping into town to join the local cast of characters as though from out the clouds, sometimes literally so by way of John’s airport, manifestations incarnate of the community’s global connections and beaming witnesses to its calendric revels, as celebrated at the home of John and his wife, that consummate hostess. As Waldo, another of John’s fraternity brothers and at the time his Assistant Vice President in Charge of Sales, put it that afternoon while John’s funny kid was into his fat photogoofer number, clinking glasses in a toast to the pioneer spirit of exploration and new discoveries with a beautiful young woman whose name he couldn’t remember (didn’t matter, at this point in a party all young women were beautiful and had the same name): “Only thing wrong with John’s parties, baby, is that, like life itself, they’re fucking beautiful but they’re too fucking short.” He threw his arm around the woman and raised his glass to Mikey and hollered “Haw!” as the kid passed by, pointing his crazy gizmo at them, and the way her head bounced off his shoulder he definitely had the impression that she was at least as drunk as he was or else stoned, which meant she was quite possibly as much in love with him at that moment as he was with her, whoever the hell she was. “You gotta move fast, know what I mean? or before you can even get your ass into the swing of things, shit, baby, the show’s over.”