John's Wife: A Novel (31 page)

Old Stu the car dealer’s little tootsie (otherwise known as his little peach among the lemons), who would have agreed with Ellsworth’s Artist about the radical sensuousness of beauty (and/or the beauty of radical sensuousness) and also about the self-consuming allure of the unattainable ideal (e.g., why did she have cock on her mind all the time, it was driving her crazy), and who certainly was not lacking in pluck and audacity, was also—while dancing about naked after her morning bath with her hand between her legs and enjoying a snort (not the day’s first) of Amazing Grace—celebrating a creative turning point in her life: to wit, imminent liberation from the impotent old lush who was her legal mate in exchange for a gorgeous and obedient hunk who was the very embodiment of animal lust with an ever-ready giggle stick that would put a studhorse to shame, without at the same time liberating herself from the old soon-to-be-(alas)-late lush’s considerable wealth. Stu had taken all the risks for her a decade ago, and now Rex, who’d be by for her soon (in full sunlight, not caring who saw, the brazen boy) was doing the same again for her, she must have something after all. Yes, that old red red robin was throbbin’ and bobbin’ once again (must remember to give her best friend a call later and cheer her up), and so was she, her voluptuous parts—her still-youthful bosom, the cheeks of her abundant ass which her loverboy called “her funky rock-and-roll fin-tailed fanny,” her trimmed-down but still plush and velvety belly—rising and falling massively with each gladsome bounce and making her feel very much inside her body, her body
as
body, which she now loved more than she’d ever loved it. The doorbell rang—why didn’t the sweetie just come on in?—and Daphne went, lighting the trip fantastic (a joke from the motel, where they’d arranged all the lamps in the room around the bed like theater spotlights to set their bodies ablaze as they fucked, stoned, in front of the mirrors), to the door to let him in. Only it wasn’t Rex, it was some kid, vaguely familiar but not quite placeable in the lacy mid-morning haze of Amazing Grace. He stood there gaping at her, eyes half-crossed and hangdog jaw adroop, as though she were some sort of otherworldly apparition, reminding her of looks she used to get back in her high school days, long past, some sweet, some not, and when she asked him what he wanted, all she could make out through his spellbound stammer was something about mowing her sidewalks. Wait a minute. Wasn’t this Reverend Lenny’s oldest kid? Daphne grinned, staring down at the rise in his pants. Like father, like son, as it said in the Bible, though as she recalled it was the father who had all the fun in that story and the son who took the licking. “All right, all right,” she said, pushing the door open and stepping back, “but come on in, honey, don’t make me stand out here in front of all the neighbors!” Which was how it was that, one thing leading to another in the usual ash-hauling way, she was lying asprawl on her unmade bed with the bareassed boy kneeling, tallow-faced, between her thighs, clearly scared shitless but glassy-eyed with rampant desire, when Rex turned up, not bothering to knock or ring the bell, as she had anticipated in the first place. “Well, well, what the fuck have we here?” bellowed the grease-stained mechanic, grabbing the thunderstruck kid (whose name, she had learned in one of his few audible declarations, was Philip) by the back of his shirt and raising him a couple of inches off the bed. “The naughty boy was trying to rape me, Rex,” Daphne said languidly, and put her hand between her legs again. “No shit,” said Rex. “Hell, I’ve torn motherfuckers’ cocks out by the root and made them eat them for less than that.” Daphne grinned. The boy’s little bird had shriveled so, Rex would have a hard time finding it, much less getting a grip on it. His eyes were beginning to roll back as though he might be about to faint. “It’s the preacher’s kid,” she said, feeling very hot and not wanting to put this off much longer. “Why don’t we just make him pray for forgiveness of his sins?” Rex grinned down at her. God, he was beautiful! He pushed the terrified boy face down on the bed between her knees and yanked off his stylishly ragged jeans, which were still tangled around his ankles, then, after whipping the belt out, used the jeans to tie the kid’s ankles to the foot of the bed. He grabbed young Philip by the scruff, still wielding the belt, and propped him up on his knees again, set his dingy white underpants on top of his head like a nun’s bonnet. “All right, you know the chant to the Lord’s Prayer, jive-ass?” The kid nodded bleakly, his eyes tearing under the limp waistband of his shorts. “Well, then, give me a lick, my man! Take it away!” “Our… our Father…”
“Louder!
Lemme hear you
blow!”
“Our Father—”
“Louder, damn you!”
roared Rex with a wink at her over the kid’s shoulder and he laid the belt across the boy’s backside with a resounding whop that sent him with a yelp face-first into the bedding between Daphne’s legs again.
“I said louder, I mean louder! Drive it!”
Rex thundered, hauling the boy back up on his knees again. “Our … our … our …” And Rex cracked his butt again. Jesus, she was sopping wet, this was one of the best fucks she’d ever had and it hadn’t even begun yet. “P-please,” the kid whim pered. “I-I only—a j-job—” “You got a job, you miserable piece of pimpled rat-shit! It’s your break, you dig? Now, come on! I want you to wail!
Punch it out!”
In seeming fury, Rex took another mighty backswing, the leather whooshing fearsomely through the air above her, making her gasp, and a sudden spurt of pee rainbowed out between the boy’s legs and trickled warmly down her knees. “Now, look what you’ve made him do!” Daphne whooped, and Rex grinned, pushing the kid’s face into his own pee and snapping the belt smartly across his upraised fanny one more time for good measure, before stripping off his own greasy overalls: “Fucking goofball! What you call third stream! But he better keep ringing the changes on that tune, loud and clear, or the cat’ll pay for his goddamned clams with a shredded ass!” Nothing on under the overalls: Rex said he liked the rough feel of the denim on his bare body, helped him keep his edge when everything else was bringing him down. Not down now. Lo and behold! The sight of that glorious love-cannon brought tears of joy and gratitude to Daphne’s eyes: to get her bell rung like this at her age! Where did he come from? Hell, who cared? The important thing was not to wake up. “On earth as it is in heaven!” the kid was squawking through his tears. “Fuckin’ A!” laughed Rex. “And you better pinch that piccolo tight, junior! Anyone pisses on me, he’s a dead man!” Surely, the poor boy got an eyeful. She lost complete control of herself, they tore the bed up. Rex, stretching it out, so timed his climax as to coincide with one repetition or another of “Thy Kingdom come,” but Daphne had been coming since they began, maybe before, she’d never been so transported, so inutterably possessed. “Amen, amen, amen, goddamn it,
amen!
” she gasped when Rex exploded in her, her whole body coming in wave after wave from her ears to her toes. Holy shit, what a miraculous fuck. On and on. “Deep down, I realize,” she groaned (she would tell her best friend this, or anyway her best friend’s answering machine, that girl having gone into a deep fade of late, all but lost to sight), still gripping with both hands her sweet lover’s powerful ass, hallowed be its name, one of her legs curled over the back of his hairy one and toes stroking the skinny thigh of their supplicating witness, “I’m a very religious woman.” Her foot, creeping up the boy’s leg (she was feeling passionately motherly in her newfound piety), now found something there. She stroked it with her big toe, taking its measure, while writing her ineffable name, over and over, with her long painted nails on Rex’s firm glossy cheeks, which she knew from long devotion to be paler than the rest of him, creamy in color and hairless, except for a little black tuft at the bottom of his spine like the stub of a recessive tail. “Take a look at his wee-wee, Rex! Stiff as a pencil! What’ll we do with it?” “I don’t know,” said Rex, rolling off to the floor, the terrible abyss within her yawning for a moment as he pulled the plug. This was terrible. She needed it more now than she did ten minutes ago. Rex untied the boy, who was still timorously Our Fathering though no longer shouting. “But I think it’s bigger than both of us, Daph. Let’s share this scene with the neighbors.” And before you could say “Thy will be done,” young Philip was out in the front yard draped over the cute little sign with the brass-framed license plate that said DAPHNE AND STU with the company motto underneath, and his jeans and underpants were up on the porch roof, Rex himself, throughout all this neighborly sharing, in the devil-may-care altogether. (Had she asked him, while thrashing about: What about Stu? She had. And what, staggered among his own breathless grunts and snorts and in and around the squeaky “as we forgive others” and the “give us this days” of their little deacon, he’d said was: “Don’t worry about it, baby. Just go out and buy yourself something cool to wear at the funeral.”)

By the time Jennifer reached the mall with Clarissa for their date with Nevada, who was becoming one of their best friends, it seemed like everyone in town knew about her brother’s exhibition of himself and at least half of them claimed to have seen the show in living color; his scrawny butt was famous and she had to deal with a lot of tiresome wisecracks about it, which she did with as much of her customary good humor as she could manage, under the circumstances. Just how it had all happened was not very clear, but there were a lot of rumors, some of them pretty wild, the jerk might actually get some mileage out of this in the long run, though for the moment he’d run for cover. In a way it had been a break for Jennifer because her mom, who was now big as a barn and more spaced out than ever, had earlier talked her into taking Zoe to the mall for the afternoon, but then her dad had agreed that Zoe shouldn’t be exposed to all the inevitable dirty talk out there aimed at their own family, so she’d got out of it. One glance at her baby sister and Nevada might have withdrawn her invitation to Jen to go flying with Bruce the next day and Clarissa would have been able to go all by herself, something that would have really got up Jen’s nose. So thanks to the Creep for that if for little else in her life. (Already Clarissa was calling him the Croup; wouldn’t she!) Not to complain: Nevada had made her day, which otherwise had been turning pretty weird, what with her airhead mother and her brother and all the rest that was happening. Just coming out here to the mall, for example. Clarissa’s mom had brought them, instead of her grandmother doing it, which was unusual by itself nowadays, but it got more unusual. Clarissa had been painting Jen’s nails with a new black vampire polish so she hadn’t been paying much attention, but she had a funny feeling when they pulled into the parking lot that there was no one driving the car. Just a feeling: when she looked up, Clarissa’s mother was still there. But then, when they got out of the car, Jen turned back to look and she wasn’t. The car was empty, so was the parking lot all around. She tried to say something about this to Clarissa, but Clarissa was too pumped to listen: “Come on, Jen, for pete’s sake! Stop ruining things! We’ll be late!” Jennifer saw that this business with Bruce and Nevada was putting a strain on their friendship, and she was sorry about that, but now that it was happening, there was nothing to do but let it, just like her dad always said. Of course they weren’t late. They had to wait almost an hour, an hour filled mostly with explicit accounts of Philip up on the Ford dealer’s roof with his pants off and the dumb jokes that went with it. At least it helped Clarissa relax, so they were in a pretty good mood when Nevada finally arrived and told them that Bruce was definitely flying in from Florida the next day to give them the ride he’d promised. Nevada had seemed especially interested that Jen was coming along, as though the whole thing depended on her, which brought Clarissa’s fangs out again, but only for a moment because then Nevada turned her whole attention to Clarissa for a while, and said she loved the nail polish, whose idea was it, and so on, though once she winked quickly at Jennifer, making her feel suddenly ten years more grown up. About that time they all saw that fat photographer streaking through the mall with some kind of frilly nightshirt on over his street clothes. Nevada laughed and said: “Do you think he’s stealing it?” “That’s just old Gordo,” Clarissa said dismissively. “He’s pretty squirrely.” “This whole town is,” Jen said, then took a chance: “I only hope I get out of it before it drives me nuts, too.” And Nevada smiled.

When Trevor saw Gordon come careening out of the ladies’-wear shop like a foundering old tanker, blowing steam and wearing a pink nightie as regalia, he went immediately to a payphone in the restrooms corridor of the mall and called the police to leave an anonymous complaint together with the name of the shop where they could get confirmation of this bizarre behavior. He did not know why he did this. He did not even know why he was out here. He had been having a late lunch in the Sixth Street Cafe, his usual, a cup of soup (beef noodle today) and a chicken salad sandwich on whole wheat, with a slice of lemon meringue pie for dessert, no coffee, and he was still thinking about his wife Marge’s latest insurrectionary venture and what problems it might cause him with John, when John’s mother came in with her little grandson to buy him a chocolate icecream cone, followed almost immediately by Gordon and his camera, and they posed for pictures which Gordon said were for the newspaper, the chef, who was also the owner, coming out from the kitchen to get in them. Gordon had seemed to be in a hurry when he popped in, his mind elsewhere, but the moment he began the photo-taking session, frivolous though the occasion was, he became completely absorbed in his work and Trevor found himself becoming equally absorbed watching him. Gordon shifted his big hips about fluidly, searching out the best light, the right angle, moved a table and chairs, pulled down a sign taped to the counter near the cash register, took lightmeter readings with and without flash, switched lenses and filters, all in a matter of seconds, and before the icecream was even being scooped, he was already snapping away, bobbing, leaning, rearing, crouching, and it slowly dawned on Trevor that Gordon was not photographing the people at all, he probably didn’t even see them: his focus was on the cone, passing from hand to hand and hand to mouth. Where it went, his lens went, and as it did, Gordon asked the little boy where his sister was. Opal said she thought she was out at the mall, “Mikey, how did you get chocolate on your nose?,” and before she could scrub it away with a licked paper napkin, Gordon, without apology, was gone. The pie came, a house specialty, the meringue almost four inches high and light as air, but Trevor only poked at it. He was still thinking about the photographer, his amazing intensity, and the thought that came to him then, which he did not understand at all, or even quite believe to be true (there was the pie in front of him, for example), but which remained with him for all the rest of that day, was:
I have never known delight
. He knew of course where Gordon had gone, he’d made the same calculations Gordon had. Trevor paid his check, received an inquiry about his appetite, and went to pick up his car in the lot behind the bank building. He took his time, driving cautiously as he always did. At the mall, he spied John’s daughter at a table with a couple of friends, but did not find Gordon until he came flying out of the ladies’-apparel store in his pink gown, though Trevor had peeked in there earlier as he made his rounds. Alarmed, almost as though in self-defense, then, he put in that panicky call to the police, regretting it as soon as he had done it, he hadn’t even disguised his voice properly. This was not the first time, he had reported Gordon twice before, but those times only for fun. One day when, from his office window in the bank building, he had seen Gordon sidle swiftly into the card shop and travel agency across the street and, from behind the scenic posters of beaches and hill towns, aim his telephoto lens at the bank door (Trevor knew why of course: John’s wife’s car was parked at the curb below), he called, also anonymously (“a worried bank customer”), to report the “suspicious behavior” of a person “lurking secretively” near the bank entrance, last seen peeking out from inside the travel agents’ across the way. He was still giggling about it that night, it was the first time he’d ever done anything like that, and when Marge asked him what was so funny he fumbled for a moment in confusion and then said that John had taken out another half million of insurance and he was still feeling giddy. Then there was the even funnier time he’d called the police and in a high-pitched voice accused the photographer of sneaking around outside the women’s changing room at the civic center swimming pool, a complete fabrication, since Trevor himself had never even seen the pool in operation, his only visit to it being before the dedication ceremony when the retractable roof was being demonstrated. Though he had thought of that call as only a kind of practical joke, he nevertheless felt more or less justified because of things he’d seen the photographer up to elsewhere, and he told himself it was even possible he’d guessed at a truth. Not likely, though. Gordon was not an ordinary voyeur, any more than Trevor was. It could even be said that he and Gordon were both searching for the same thing, Gordon more directly, fully aware of what he was doing and why, Trevor more speculatively, but more prudently. Though he had begun this little game as a mere lark, Trevor had come to believe that if he took it seriously enough, something, he didn’t know what, would be revealed. It was as though Gordon and his camera were leading him, unwittingly, to buried treasure, and if he reported him mischievously to the police now and then it was only to remind himself that it was just a game, a harmless amusement. It was different today, though. He was frightened, he didn’t know why. Was it because of Gordon’s mad lumbering flight through the crowded mall, the disturbing impropriety of it, or had he suddenly become appalled at his own improper fascination with such madness? He ducked into the men’s room after the call, afraid of being seen near a telephone (had anyone recognized him?), and was shocked when he peered in a mirror and saw the panic in his face, his rumpled clothing. And was that a floccule of meringue on his lapel? Trevor was known for his cool aplomb, his tidy dispassionate composure—something was terribly wrong! “The trouble is,” he said to himself, dabbing at the sweat on his brow (he had sweat on his brow?), “you don’t know who you are.” “Who does?” asked some voice in one of the stalls, and Trevor, now thoroughly flustered, fled again.