John's Wife: A Novel (36 page)

The old Palace Theater that John suddenly erased from view one day was being, as time passed, erased from the communal memory as well, there was already a whole new generation in town for whom it was only a legend, remote as the fall of Rome, which had sometimes been witnessed there. John’s daughter Clarissa was just a toddler when the Palace came tumbling down, all movies were for her and her friends linked to the magic of the sunswept malls, and there were scores of people who had moved here since then who supposed that the bank and office buildings in that block had been there forever. Ask Kevin the golf pro out at the country club about the Palace, for example, and though he’d been in town for more than a decade and saw at least one movie every week, he would probably suppose it was a form of smalltown self-mockery of the sort he’d heard so much of here, or maybe a gibing way to refer to someone else’s fancy roost. Contrarily, his predecessor, a married man, had, while attending a predemolition festival there of big-screen epics, got blown in the back row, just under the projection booth, by the orthodontist’s daughter whom he later eloped with and whose own legend as a wild thing had itself achieved, in this town anyway, epic proportions. Both of them were long since gone, though, taking their memories with them. Floyd and Edna had also moved to town that year that Kevin came and so had never known the famous moviehouse, witnessing only the blocklong pile of rubble just up the street from the hardware store that Floyd managed, the rubble itself disappearing before they’d even got used to this new place and so by now forgotten as well. They’d even arrived too late for the auction of the appurtenances and decorations of the Palace and its near-neighbor, the even more famous Pioneer Hotel, though Edna did find at a junk dealer’s a pretty plaster of Paris statue from the moviehouse of a girl turning into a tree that she bought for the backyard for only three dollars on account of one arm was broken, but Floyd made her put it away in the basement because he said it was pagan and sinful, Floyd having become a (mostly) strict born-again Christian since coming here, even though, because of his new business position, they went to the rich folks’ church where the born-again notion was not very popular. The preacher at that church and his family had also come here after the downtown renovations and so knew nothing of all those old buildings that had once dominated the business center, though the reverend had once, tuning in to the memories of others and borrowing from archive photos published in
The Town Crier
, used the old Palace Theater in one of his sermons, his topic being the ephemerality of man’s brief gaudy show on earth compared to the simple grandeur of God’s theater of eternity, something like that, few could remember it afterwards any better than they could remember most of the movies they’d seen in the Palace. He did stir some tender memories, however, so his sermon, even if it didn’t make much sense, was, for some in his congregation, erotically stimulating, a fact that might have aroused old Floyd’s wrath, had he known of it, but not Reverend Lenny’s: God is love. And vice versa. The crippled lady at the pharmacy had come to town about the same time as the preacher and so had never been inside the Palace either, but her husband Cornell had rarely missed a movie there that he’d been allowed by the ratings to see, and his sister and brothers too had spent some of the most significant moments of their childhood and adolescence inside its ornate high-domed interior, their parents being themselves faithful customers, but one of Corny’s brothers was dead, the other had put on a dress and left town forever, and poor Corny himself either had no memories remaining or had no words with which to express them. Of the four children, only Columbia might have provided a significant recollection or two about the fantasy structure that was once the very heart of this community, though what she probably remembered best was the popcorn popper and candy counter.

Town chronicler Ellsworth, determined to preserve some record of that great secular temple, which he had disdained as a youth but toward which he now felt increasingly sentimental (he used to take Barnaby’s little girl there on Saturday afternoons, they saw
Bambi
together), had, long before he’d “turned darkly inward” as his friend Gordon put it and become so reclusive, pressed at least a dozen people in town to write an “I Remember” column about the old Palace Theater, all of them agreeing with embarrassed laughter that there were sure a lot of stories they could tell about that place, but none so far had. Most, when asked, said they were “still thinking about it,” though Columbia’s and Cornell’s father Oxford, having little else to do these days except mind the grandchildren now that Gretchen had taken over the pharmacy, had managed to compose a number of discontinuous fragments and lacked only a theme that would unite them, a kind of bonding agent, as it were, which, the more he thought about it, was turning out to be his dead wife Kate. That half-blind Oxford should be the old moviehouse’s memoirist was ironic, of course, since he knew nothing of its fabulous decor except by hearsay and had witnessed its spectacles through a myopic haze; even the stirring posters in the lobby he had had to examine with his nose pressed against them, unstirred by what he could not wholly see. But courting options were few when earless Oxford courted Kate, earless not just because of his disability (Kate could drive and when, rarely, they could, she did) but because gas was being rationed in those days and tires could not always be replaced, and that being so, the Palace Theater was about the best they had to hand by foot, other than the library where Kate worked, which served them for some of their more private moments, especially conversations of the intimate sort. Though she never went to university, Kate was a great reader, the reader Oxford always wished to be but could not for the terrible weariness it cost him, Kate often reading to him in those courting days, and after marriage, too, when work and children gave them time alone, and so every invitation to the Palace was accompanied by his apology, Kate insisting in return that she loved the movies, and learned from them, too, much as she preferred to read. “To imagine something is to create it in our heads when it is not there before our senses, and that’s what we do when we read,” she said one night as they walked out of the Palace after watching the newsreel twice (there was war footage and Kate’s brother was headed for the European theater, as it was called, soon after would die there, not centerstage, but lost in the chorus as it were, unbilled and overlooked in the reviews). “I would rather imagine something than see it, and there is something wrong with that, I suppose. It’s why librarians are thought to be such eccentrics. But sometimes I think that seeing is only a kind of imagining and an impoverished and unreliable one at that, even though our eyes probably lie less than words do, or can do. We like film because we feel like it’s connecting us immediately somehow with the real world and with no words in between, or anyway no words you have to listen to. Turning on the image directly turns off the imagination maybe, but we are given an existential assurance about the world and ourselves in it, even if illusory and superficial, that books can never give us.” Moments like that made Oxford adore her and want to hug her, and sometimes he did, so his memories of the Palace Theater were in effect bound up in the same kind of romantic sentiments and vague nostalgic impressions that everyone else had. Without any real reason, except that he was next to his wise Kate, his arm around her in the dark, sharing in some manner the unfolding play of light and shadows up above their heads (for Oxford’s sake, they always sat down front), Oxford would break into tears, not just during their courting years but in all the years thereafter as well until, Kate herself dying, the old Palace disappeared; they went almost weekly to the movies back then, sometimes with the children or with friends like Alf and Harriet, often just the two of them together, even after television became all the rage and they were the only people in the theater past adolescence. Kate even liked to go to the commercial genre movies, the westerns and romances, the gangster movies, thrillers, screwball comedies, because she said it was like going in for a tune-up: they reset the basic patterns. Coming out of a monster movie one night, a movie Oxford loathed for its antirationalist advocacy of faith in antiquated belief-systems as a means of problem solving and its depiction of scientists as either villains or victims of their own unfortunate capacity to reason, Kate, responding, said: “That’s one way of looking at it. Folk art is always afraid of the new, which science represents, and that’s part of the fear of monsters. But it’s scary for everybody to imagine getting turned into something entirely different from what we think we are, even if we don’t much like what we are, just as it would frighten us to have the world we live in change its basic rules in incomprehensible ways all of a sudden. Start spinning in the other way or something. Monster movies are not about the resolutions, that’s just tacked on to make them palatable. They’re about the problem.” She paused and turned back to gaze up at the old Palace Theater. The marquee lights were off, and the heavyset young man who ran the theater was up on a ladder changing the titles for the following day. The next movie, as previewed, was about a dangerous and seemingly indestructible criminal who enters a peaceful community and terrorizes it, called
The Intruder
, or something like that. Probably a man of reason who makes all the wrong moves in that movie, too. “We like to think, even when we’re being reasonable, Oxford, that there are fixed boundaries—to our bodies, our essential being, our homes and families, our towns and nations—it’s how we know or think we know we have a self. But maybe it’s all a mad delusion, maybe there are no boundaries and no selves either, our conscious life just a way of hiding the real truth from us because, simply, it’s too much to live with. We have to stuff it back down in the pit where the creepies live, if we want to function at all, even if functioning, as we call it, is possibly the craziest thing we do. Art, even bad art like Hollywood horror movies, puts us in touch with that truth by breaking down the boundaries for a moment, producing monsters we secretly know to be more real than the good citizens who eventually subdue them.” “So what’s to save us from the abysmal monsters within,” Oxford sighed, “if faith’s not on and function we must?” She turned toward him with a smile, a smile he could not quite see but knew was there. “Irony,” she said, and took his arm to lead him down the dimly lamplit street. “And love. Which is also ironic.”

Ah, the old Palace Theater, loved too by Dutch, that heavyset fellow whom Oxford saw up a ladder one night. He was standing, not far from the popcorn machine, in the grand lobby of the famous old moviehouse, breaking his own no-smoking rules and nodding at acquaintances amid the sellout crowd passing thickly through to the auditorium, John and his wife and kids among them, he was amused to note. A coup: Dutch had managed to book
The Back Room
, a rare underground flick using amateur talent, for its first-ever viewing on the big screen: “Where the Movies Are Still the Movies,” as the faded lobby banner said. In the projection booth, he found the film already strung up on the projector, surprised to see it was on thirty-five-mil instead of eight- or sixteen-, though how could he have shown it if it wasn’t? He’d watched the thing a thousand times, but he still wasn’t sure what he’d see when he started it up. Ah, yeah, that’s right: the old Getaway. But tarted up by Hollywood, hardly recognizable: glass panes on the windows instead of chair seats, a brass bed in place of the old sprung leatherette sofa, an electric lamp over the table in the middle—though the pennants, panties, and tattered calendar pinups on the walls looked genuine enough. The door opened, a real door with moldings and panels, not the tabletop John had mounted there, and the crowd pushed in, the same crowd he’d just seen in the lobby. They looked confused, turning round and round, taking the place in but not knowing what to do with it. Dutch could tell them, but not without spoiling the film. In fact, he realized now, he was part of the film, the projection room where he sat being separated from the cabin by a glass panel, a two-way mirror maybe since the others didn’t seem to see him, though he could see them and himself, too, if it was himself and not just an actor playing himself. Or vice versa, whatever that meant—Dutch by now was sharing the confusion of the others. He was there in the room with them, wandering around, feeling lost, maybe he didn’t know this film so well after all, and holding on to his dick as though if he let go of it he might lose it altogether—and, now that he thought about it, maybe that
was
how this movie came out, the shock ending, it was what made it so famous in the underground, wasn’t it? He looked around for John, but he saw that there was no one here he knew. He was frightened now and wished he’d never booked this film. He tried to find some way out, but the crowd was too thick and there was a strange damp chill in the air. At last he spied old Stu the car dealer, sitting at the bar, and made his way over to him, still holding on. Something he had to tell him, couldn’t think what, a joke he’d heard maybe, but at least it was someone familiar, he might find a way out of this movie before it was too late after all. But when Stu turned toward him he saw that his face flesh was moldy and dropping off the bone and his eye sockets were empty, just dark hollows: oh shit! that’s it!
these people were all dead!
Dutch shrank back in terror and awoke in the dark. Where the fuck was he? His groin was wet: had he peed himself? No, beer, he’d spilled his beer. He was in the Back Room, sitting sprawled out in his velvety movie seat, salvaged from the Palace demolition, he could feel it under him, his pants down around his thighs and also wet from spilled beer, his limp dick, too, which he was still holding as if he were fishing with it, the lights out in the room at the other side of the mirror. Jesus, must have been some show, whoever it was, he couldn’t remember, put him straight to sleep. He could hear soft snoring, couldn’t tell the sex of it, thought it might be a woman. He wanted to get up, reel it in, pull his soggy pants on, go to bed. But he couldn’t move. Too goddamned tired or something. Lead in his ass. Then, suddenly, the lights in the next room popped on, so startling him he nearly cried out. There were five or six guys in the room, all dressed in dark suits. One of them came over to the mirror to comb his hair, peering intently into it as though trying to see beyond it. Dutch, feeling looked at, pulled his pants up. I probably ought to give this shit up, he thought. The guy turned away (who was he? Dutch felt like he knew him), someone opened the door, and John’s wife came in, dressed like a bride. They peeled the wedding gown off her, which was all she was wearing, and laid her out on the bed, her legs spread. Dutch was hard again (this was something different!) and, pumping away, he leaned forward to see what he could see. Oddly, not much. It was like there was something wrong with the camera, a water bubble on the lens or something—or on the mirror: he wasn’t sure where he was anymore—but the less he could see, the more excited he got. He stood, his pants dropping to his ankles, trying to get a better angle, but the bubble moved where he moved. Didn’t matter, the cream was rising, the lid was about to blow! But then the guys all turned toward him. The woman—was it still John’s wife? he couldn’t tell—curled a finger and beckoned him. There was no mirror. Dutch wanted to run but couldn’t move, he was rooted to his dropped pants. The guys in the dark suits walked stiffly toward him with black grins on their horror-movie faces and he woke up again. In the dark as before. Still fishing with his dick, everything wet down there, etc. Didn’t know where he was. Or if he was really awake this time or still asleep, or, whichever, what was going to happen next. Except that he had no intention of moving a muscle until it got light again. Probably going to be a long fucking night. But he’d sit tight, wherever he was, hold the hand he had.