John's Wife: A Novel (28 page)

An impersonation of his cloven grandfather was the centerpiece of one of little Mikey’s wordless plays, one of the more awesome nights in John’s house, of which Lorraine had seen a few when John’s wide-eyed deadpan boy took center-stage. Not all those present understood what he was doing, but those like Lollie who did, did not know whether to laugh or scream. He’d put on the old man’s famous barn-red hardhat, a toybox acquisition since the stroke, and with wooden blocks had nimbly built with Barnaby’s stubborn caution a fanciful village, intricate and solid. He’d taken measurements and stroked his chin and ordered up a toy earthmover to shift a block an inch and scratched his neck and perched a pediment on high and pulled his ear and smiled the old builder’s dry manly smile to see what he had done. Trixie’s little girl, meanwhile, stood by with kerchiefed hair and John’s wife’s nubbly autumn sweater falling to her ankles, an admiring gap-toothed smile pasted flatly on her freckled face, the object of her mimicry missing the performance. Where was she? Preoccupied maybe with caterers in the kitchen. Lorraine felt like something was slipping away, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. It wasn’t John. He passed through, big as ever, clapping backs and squeezing hands, harvesting congratulations for the recent acquisitions which had inspired the night’s festivities, a company party of sorts in honor of the expanding empire. He seemed distantly amused by his son’s show, watching it with one eye only, until he was dragged away by his father Mitch, who, back turned on his odd little namesake, gruffly asked him for another drink. Lorraine’s own kid came in then with a golf club, John’s visored golf cap down round his doggy ears, and Trixie’s girl, smile stuck on her face still like a sign on a door, stepped back. Lorraine, too, glimpsing the horror of what was yet to come: she stepped back, her own face rigidly rictus-gaped as though aping little Zoe. As her boy teed up and Mikey/Barnaby, looking like he’d got his sneaker caught under a railway tie with the night express bearing down, sought frantically to wall round his town with alphabet blocks, many at the party laughed and cheered and Waldo (“Don’t
do
that!” Lorraine was rasping, heart stopped, voice snagged in her throat: “You’ll
break
something!”) yelled out:
“Chin down and elbow straight, son! That’s it! Now swat that sucker!”
He did, grinning under the golf cap like a moronic pinhead, a blow that sent blocks splattering every which direction, causing the guests to whoop and duck, Waldo hollering
“Fore!”
and falling backwards on the sofa where John’s mother Opal in all her prissy dignity sat, insouciant as the storm’s dead eye, even as that dumb clunk crashed hooting down on her. A terrifying clatter as the blocks flew, but, miraculously, nothing seemed to be broken after. Except the little builder. He rose from the rubble, his hardhat cockeyed, stumbling confusedly like one of those malfunctioning movie monsters, dragging his dead foot like a sack of concrete, one arm seemingly shriveled, the clawlike hand trembling at his belt, his face so contorted that one half somehow hung lower than the other. Mikey opened one side of his mouth and, faintly, spoke the only word he spoke all night. Most present probably heard only an animal-like grunt, but spellbound Lorraine knew what word it was: Goodbye. Marge had told her all about it. Including the part her husband Waldo, that indispensable Asst. Veep for Sales (which Lorraine pronounced, “asswipe for sale”), had played in bringing the old fellow down. “Haw! Ain’t that cute!” that corkhead snorted now, lifting himself off Opal’s lap with a stupid wink and grin, as John’s boy slowly took his crippled twitching exit, applause polite but widely scattered, most witnesses frozen where they stood like Lollie. Little Zoe, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen, her part not so much a walk-on, it seemed, as a walk-off.

Little Zoe’s big brother Philip missed his sister’s turn, putting on a show of his own at about the same time in the downstairs toilet at the back of the house, very embarrassing. And now he had a story to tell, not about his performance (forget that), but about how it happened he was in there in the first place and what happened afterwards, a weird story but nobody he could trust enough to tell it to, now that Turtle and his family were no longer invited to this house and Turtle anyway nowhere to be found, the dumb kid’s touchy parents just barking at him when Philip dropped by asking for him. Had they locked him in his room? Wouldn’t be the first time, Turtle’s dad could get pretty mean. Zoe said she’d heard he’d run away. Fish couldn’t blame him if he had, he’d thought about it plenty of times himself, but he was surprised and, if it was true, a little hurt that Turtle hadn’t asked him along. Not that he’d have gone. No? So what was keeping such a big fish here in this little puddle? Well, in a word, Clarissa. Philip couldn’t help himself, he lusted after her sweet bod day and night. It was hopeless, she hated him, but then, he had the consoling impression she hated everybody, everybody but herself, he wasn’t the only recipient of Ms. P. T. Big Head’s icy jabs. But someday she’d need him, or need someone, and he’d be there at her elbow, and then she’d love him for the good and faithful soldier that he was. This was the centerpiece of his intensest fantasies: repentant Clarissa melting in his arms. Meanwhile, though: whatever he could get wherever he could find it, young or old, of which in this town no shortage, or such was the story he told. The truth was a bit different, sorry to say, for though he laid claim to at least a dozen girls from school, all of whom had conveniently graduated or moved elsewhere, and had lots of stories about older broads in town whose lawns he’d mowed or sidewalks shoveled, Fish in point of fact had yet to score and wondered if he was the only guy his age in the Western world whose hand was all he knew of that great mystery. Such a mystery was not even on his mind, though, when that ugly old fart with the meaty honker walked in on him in the john a few minutes ago and started upbraiding him for weakening all his manly faculties with self-abuse. That dickhead was running for mayor? What a town. All Fish was trying to do at the time was pee through a hard-on. So how come he had a hard-on? For starters, because he always had one, or anyhow almost always, the main exceptions being in gym class showers, on trips to the dentist, and during his old man’s Sunday sermons. But also in this instance because of, one, Clarissa’s underwear drawer (he’d been pawing around in there while everyone else had headed into the living room to catch the kiddy mime show) and, two, Clarissa’s mom, who had smiled at him when he stepped out of Clarissa’s room with his hands deep in his pockets before she disappeared into the bathroom. That smile: it was weird, she’d never even looked at him before, his occasional brags notwithstanding. But now, wow … He’d waited there in the hall for a while, all alone, holding the hot pole between his legs as though, not to raise it, but to plant it, and when time passed and she did not come out he took a chance, walked over, and tried the door. It opened. As he entered, trying to seem casual while unzipping his pants (oops, sorry, didn’t know anyone was in here), he realized that his mouth was hanging open, something he always tried to stop himself from doing, since he knew it was not his most flattering expression. He closed it and the door, blinked: the room was empty. He glanced into the shower stall, the towel cupboard, did a slow three-sixty: how had he missed her? Well. Not the first time opportunity had slipped away as though it never existed. His pants were open, his rod poking partway out: he decided he might as well go ahead and do what he’d pretended to come in here to do. In case, he found himself thinking, he needed an alibi. Which is when the old fart who was running for mayor blundered in, glowered at what he was holding, and laid into him for betraying his own body, sapping its vital juices and turning red corpuscles white. “You’ll be old and dead before your time, son. Now put that little stick away before you break it, go wash your hands, and get your damned sissified butt outa here!” Fish was only too glad to oblige. Jesus. Didn’t bother to wash his hands either, just ducked his head and shot out of there, headed for the twilit backyard, pausing only long enough in the empty kitchen to glance back at the toilet door in time to see Clarissa’s mom come out of it, she smiling at him when she noticed him gawping there. Which was the strange yet true story he had to tell, but couldn’t, the middle of it being the difficult part to explain. He saw Jennifer and Clarissa back in the shadows of the rose garden gazebo, also giving little Mikey’s dumbshow a miss. He could tell by the way they were hunched over they were doing lines of coke. He approached them hopefully, trying to remember to keep his jaw closed, even though he knew they didn’t want him around and would only insult him. But what could he do? Could he help it if he was madly in love with the little fast-track queen of the mall rats? “Hey,” he said, drifting up. “Hey, it’s the Creep,” said his ladylove. “Get lost, asshole.”

The Creep’s mother, also Jennifer’s and little Zoe’s, once known as Trixie the go-go dancer and now as Beatrice the preacher’s wife, had arrived at that party straight from church choir practice, feeling exhilarated. The singing had been unusually harmonious that afternoon, as though God had got inside them all and made his presence felt, an experience that always had an agreeably erotic effect on Beatrice. After everyone had left, many to get dressed for John’s party, Beatrice, wishing to prolong this sweet musical communion, had stayed on to practice the organ for a while, letting the sacred melodies flow through her and into the organ pipes like the pumping of God’s blood, feeling at one with herself and with the universe. And with the organ, she becoming its adjunct, the instrument’s instrument, the pedals and keys her feet’s and fingers’ very reason for being, their raisin-something, as a teacher, one of her many teachers, once put it, and the same could be said for score and eyes, bench and bottom, music and mind—all of a piece, like some kind of magic! How happy she was! She’d never played better! Or been played better! As the music throbbed through her expanded body, her heart beating, her pipes resonating, in time to the turning of the spheres, tears of gratitude and intense well-being came to her eyes—and were still there, in the corners of her eyes, giving them an appealing twinkle, when she arrived at John’s party just before sundown, still a bit breathless and full of nameless joy. John squeezed her hand with both of his when she came in, gave her a hug; her husband smiled at her from across the room; her smallest child, dressed in a sweater miles too big for her, one of Mikey’s mother’s, came to ask for her help in tying a kerchief in her hair; someone brought her a glass of bubbly wine. It was as though Beatrice had foreseen all of this before she entered the house, perhaps during choir practice or while playing the organ, and it was all very beautiful. Her husband was beautiful, John’s house was beautiful, her friends were beautiful, her daughter was beautiful as she stepped into the luminous center of everyone’s attention. Beatrice loved this town, these people, this moment in her life. Things weren’t perfect, but Beatrice hoped they’d never change, not at least until she got to heaven. But of course they were already changing. That’s how the world was, you couldn’t stop it, harmony was unnatural to it, constancy was. A sudden presentiment of disaster sent a shiver down Beatrices spine and deep into that core of her which till now had been the seat of such holy ecstasy. She set her glass down, her eyes beginning to mist over. Her daughter had faded from sight somehow, even as she was watching her, her husband, too, though she was not. Something violent and irreversible was about to happen. Or had already happened but was about to be made manifest. Beatrice couldn’t see it, blind to everything at that moment except her own panic and despair (where was John’s wife?), but she could feel it. “Yipes!” she yelped when the blocks flew, and shrinking back, reached down with both hands to touch her tummy. Oh no, she thought. It can’t be. I’m pregnant again.

Beatrice’s apprehension of change, both imminent and immanent, was shared by many at that time, even at that moment, but not by all in town, lulled as they were by the walls around them, the immutable routines their lives were locked in, the regularity of their bowel movements. Even among those who acknowledged what Ellsworth called in his fortieth-birthday poem “the ever-whirling Wheel of Change” (which he sought “in vain to rearrange”), a poem published in
The Town Crier
a bit too close upon the automobile death of old Stu’s first wife Winnie and Stu’s snap remarriage to escape a dark joke or two at the time, many would have argued that change, too, was unchangeable, that like the heavenly bodies, it, too, had its enduring rhythms and routines, such that the very party at which Beatrice suffered her sudden perception of permutation-in-progress was itself a predesigned shaper and container of that change, and in its way unchangeable, in the way that the face of a clock, while never recording the same time twice, remained itself always the same. For some, this was terrifying, for others reassuring, just as these festivities, by which John and his wife solemnized for the town duration’s ticks and tocks, were for some a grim challenge, and for others a welcome release, tedium’s reprieve if not its remedy, and for not a few a taste of what might be but wasn’t. Waldo lived for John’s blowouts, whatever the hell they were or weren’t, Lennox surrendered to them with a passive smile admirers called beatific, Marge wished them over before they ever began, feeling herself dragged into a smug self-congratulating sacrament she didn’t believe in. John’s parties worried Otis the town guardian some, head counter and clock watcher that he was, amused Audrey in her time, provoked whimsical aphorisms from Kate (“The collective effervescence of these gatherings,” the late lamented librarian once remarked, “is like that of cheap champagne—it goes straight to your head, dissolving moral boundaries and separating self from body neat as an alchemical reaction, then awakens you, bloated and headachy, to an earthbound morning utterly without consolation …”), and whetted Veronica’s acquisitive appetites, those appetites that enraged her breadwinner Maynard so. What Veronica saw in John’s house, she sought to replicate in her own, even to the color of the bath towels and toilet paper, and by doing so thought of herself as a woman of taste. Well, no further worries for Maynard on that score: he and Ronnie had been permanently struck from the guest list since the recent company scandal, and had new things to fret and fume about: the wrecking of Maynard’s career in town since Barnaby’s stroke, for which he’d been largely blamed, their ostracization down on Main Street and out at the club, the disappearance of their son Little who had apparently run away from home when the scandal broke (Maynard, when gripped by his recurrent paranoia, could not escape the suspicion that his hard-assed cousin, in retribution, might have had the boy kidnapped), the bitterness dividing them as their social life withered and left them facing only one another. For Floyd the hardware man, who loathed every minute of John’s parties but hated it more when not invited, more and more the case with the passing years, they provided a stage for his imagined dramas of retribution, involving often as not some violation of the willing or unwilling hostess: on top of the rec room piano or the buffet-laden dining table, for example, or out on the croquet pitch in the middle of the Pioneers Day barbecue, her limbs pinned by wickets, steaks sizzling and beercaps popping. Is it the Christmas open house to which this year they had not been invited? Floyd saw himself unwrapping her beneath the decorated eight-foot tree with all the rip-it-off impatience of a kid on Christmas morning, then, the little brass bells overhead ringing acclamatorily—are you watching, John?—pumping sperm into her like great gouts of eggnog. Fantasies about banging John’s wife often enhanced Floyd’s nights with Edna, bringing a little fire and brimstone to their homespun copulations—at least at the outset, before Edna gave herself away with an airy rumble as she always did and reminded him where he was: his wife always belched when she fornicated, as though it gave her indigestion. Or cured her of it. Once, he had loved this: her vulnerability. Now it was just a part of her like her fallen arches or the fuzz on her upper lip; her chenille bedspreads, the paintings of flowers and dogs she hung on her plain papered walls.