John's Wife: A Novel (38 page)

Nocturnal nature strolls had been part of Alf’s insomniac routine ever since Harriet’s death nearly a decade and a half ago, though, if still nocturnal, largely deprived of nature now that the old city park was gone, he missed it sorely. The new civic center, if only tolerable by day, was a downright blight by night, a pale dead thing heaped up hugely in the murky half-light that hung around it like a disease. A “sleeping giant,” someone called it, though it reminded Alf more of certain lethal structures he’d seen during the war. He avoided it when he could, preferring the suspended stillness of dormant Main Street or the older prewar sections of town like the one in which he lived, though sometimes habit drew him back to where the old park had once lain waiting for him with its amusing wooden bandstand and its meandering paths lit by amber postlamps, welcoming as sleep itself. Used to walk with Harriet there in the evening, back when walking in the park was still something one did in a town like this, and after her death, while it was still there, he liked to wander in it at night, alone, feeling, not her presence, but the calm that used to accompany him when they strolled there together, which, sex apart, Alf took to be all he’d ever know of love, and maybe all there was to know. Alf believed hysteria to be the only reasonable response to the human condition, love, or whatever it was he was calling love, its unreasonable antidote which let you sleep at night (what wouldn’t let him sleep tonight, for all the drinking he’d done, the humorless TV sitcom reruns he’d surrendered to when he got back from the club, was a memory of some kind, it seemed to lurk at the end of one of his fingers, like the imprint of a switch that had to be toggled: as he passed under an intersection streetlamp, he stared at it, trying to see what it saw, but all he could make out was something like the pad of his own finger, softly mirrored: a compress? the bulb of an eyedropper?). Not that he’d forgotten that lean, vivacious, wisecracking, freckle-nosed nurse he’d met in the field hospital while taking some poor forgotten matchmaker’s shattered leg off, still gave him pleasure to think of her and the way she grinned at him back then, but that part of love he knew to be even more of an illusion than the soporific part, a kind of instinctive response to buried genetic coding, as most forms of pleasure were, and usually brief as appetite and its slaking, repeatable but not sustainable. Of course … there were, as Oxford would say, the grandchildren… Alf smiled to himself, ambling along there in the dim-lit dark, enjoying momentarily the joke he was in, was in a sense the butt of, or
a
butt, one among the multitudes, hearing Harriet say, looking up from one of her novels, You think too goddamn much, Alf, it’s going to give you nosebleed. Ellsworth, he saw, was working late again, his printshop windows all ablaze, the man himself pacing around inside, unkempt and frenetic, a scene Alf had witnessed walking past here in the wee hours before, usually about once a week. Another way to provoke a peaceful sleep, one that used to work for him: set yourself a task, no matter how pointless, and complete it. How much of the lives people thought they were living here were in fact invented by Ellsworth and his weekly (most called it “weakly”)
Town Crier!
Well, somebody had to do it, else they’d all be left without identities, no matter how spurious. His own included. Alf had always thought of his doctoring as somehow intrinsically meaningful, but given his perspective on life as a kind of horror show not meant to be consciously witnessed, it probably made less sense even than Ellsworth’s obsessive scribbling. Around the corner, the photographer’s lights were on, too: a busy night. Perhaps his wife was unwell and keeping him up, some sort of organic or possibly glandular disorder that Gordon had mentioned nervously to him a couple of days ago outside the Sixth Street Cafe. Behaving a bit strangely of late, that fellow, more strangely than usual, there was talk about him out at the club tonight, in and around the burlesque misadventures of the minister’s son (who had an acne problem Alf was treating, as well as the worst case of athlete’s foot he’d ever seen), some of it funny, some less so. Maybe his wife’s illness had something to do with it. The woman seemed unwilling to come see Alf, he should probably visit them one day soon. If he could find the time. Alf had stopped taking on new patients years ago, but the ones he still had, aging as he was aging, had more problems than they used to, and he could not easily refuse their many offspring (John’s daughter had just been in to seen him, for example, birth control pills she’d wanted, he’d said no, she wasn’t old enough, she’d thrown a tantrum and said he was out of touch, he’d agreed, let her have them), if anything his workload was getting worse. People he used to see once a year, he now saw every week. Gave up house calls a decade or so after the war, except for invalids and people in nursing homes—which, more and more, his patients now were. Poor old Barnaby, for example (the civic center, though a block and a half down the street he was crossing, had just made its dreary presence felt: Barnaby had built the park that it displaced), who’d told him when he’d stopped in at the retirement center to see him a day or two ago that he’d been having problems with Audrey lately, she’d changed his pills or something, it was hard to understand half of what he was saying, the words tumbling like chunky gravel out of the side of his mouth. Earlier, Alf would have gently reminded his old friend that his wife had passed away some years ago; now he merely said he’d talk to her about it, see what he could do, and Barnaby just shook his old grizzled head and pulled on his ear and said it wouldn’t do any good, her damned mind was set. The town was full of the ghosts of dead wives these days: out at the club tonight, old Stu had heaved his arm around Alf, leaned boozily against him, and rumbled into his near ear that Winnie was back, bedeviling him like she always used to do, he had to have a sleeping pill strong enough to stop the old girl from pestering him to death, can you help me, Doc? Alf had smiled but it hadn’t seemed to be a joke: old Stu’s damp red eyes were full of pain. Drop by, he’d said, I’ll see what I can do. “Nothin’ in your pocket? No? Shit, Doc, then I’m in deep trouble …” And then, for an alarming moment, the old doc feared he might be in deep trouble, too. He was just passing an unlighted alleyway (he’d been thinking: that memory at the tip of his finger: could it be of a tumor?), when he noticed there was someone skulking about in the shadows. It flashed to his mind what a dangerous place the world had become, he was a damned fool, people didn’t walk alone at night anymore, could he yell loud enough that Ellsworth or Gordon or someone would hear him, but then he saw who it was: Oxford’s odd boy Cornell. He was scrabbling about in there, feeling the walls, trying the doors, peering through the darkened windows. The family pharmacy backed onto this alley, a couple of doors down. “Corny? Are you all right?” The boy froze, pressed up in a tight little crouch against the small concrete loading platform at the back of the corner five-and-ten. A child still, though he’d fathered eight, at least eight, no doubt more to come, no sign of it stopping. “Hey, Corny, didn’t mean to take you by surprise. It’s just old Doc here, son. Come here a minute.” Corny hesitated, then abruptly obliged to the extent of taking up a position against a telephone pole a few feet away, moving toward it in his usual herky-jerky way, then slouching against it as though he’d never been elsewhere. His wispy blond hair, oddly luminous in the darkened alley, fluttered down over his heart-shaped face like dry weeds, giving him the appearance of a startled rodent peeking out from its nest in the straw. “Couldn’t sleep for some damn reason, so I was out taking a walk. Glad to find some company. How are you doing, Corny?” Corny shrugged: “Same old shit,” he said in a voice that was little more than a hiss. Alf smiled, approached him slowly, hands in pockets. “Listen, what are you looking for?” Cornell tensed, but stayed where he was. “You want to tell me, son? I saw you hunting about there. Maybe I can help.” Cornell looked doubtful, shrugged again, looked away, his skittish eyes scanning the alleyway. Alf thought: John’s wife! Was that it? He glanced at his finger, startled by his insight: was it possible? “What?” he asked, hearing Cornell mutter something under his breath. He leaned closer to the strange boy. “The door,” whispered Cornell.

Cornell didn’t think the old fart would help him, and he didn’t. He said to come see him at his office. Sure, man. See you around. Like many in town, Cornell was plagued by an elemental question about life, only his was not so much “Why am I here?” as “How did I get here?” He used to live here, back when his family was still all together, and then, for a time which he thought was going to be forever, he didn’t, and then suddenly he did again. The first part was the best part, being taken around by his big brothers, playing with his sister, being read to by his mom, and his dad still liked him then, even if he was always on his case about hanging around the house too much, playing with games and toys, you’re a big fellow now. Then he went away. It was his dad’s idea. His brother had got killed and now Cornell got sent away with his brother’s girlfriend. Who was nice to him at first and even let him take her clothes off, he could see why his brother liked her, but who then did a terrible thing. And Cornell had to admit that he probably didn’t make the coolest move when he saw what she’d done, he could hear his dad chewing him out for not using his old noodle, why don’t you grow up, Corny, and all that: he ran. Not smart but he was scared. He didn’t know anyone in that faraway place. He didn’t even know how to speak the stupid language they spoke, though he’d had a year of it in high school, it was all slurred when they talked it, like they were trying to hide what they were really saying. They were unpleasant to him and he was afraid they might blame him somehow for what had happened to Marie-Claire. So he ran, and the more he ran, the more scared he got. He’d left all his clothes and things behind, all he had was a little bit of money and the bottle of wine. He pulled his shirt over his head when he passed the wine shop where he’d bought it. There was something about “Love” on the label, he was afraid it might give him away, so he got rid of it in a street bin, or what he hoped was a street bin, it might have been a mailbox. He spied the big church he could see the top of from up in Marie-Claire’s flat, the one on all the posters, and headed for it, but suddenly there were a lot of police everywhere, so, in a panic, he turned and ran the other way. It was late, after nine o’clock, but the streets were lit up like the downtown back home at Christmastime and full of scowling people with cigarettes hanging in their mouths. He tried to stop running, he was just drawing attention to himself, but he couldn’t, he kept breaking into nervous little trots, stopping, running again, everyone was looking at him, and there were police here, too. Then he saw a sign with some steps down into a hole under the street, and though he didn’t know what the sign meant in French, from what he could remember of his high school Latin, he felt he would be safe there, so he ducked down the stairs. There was some kind of underground railroad at the bottom. He bought himself a ticket (should he give a tip? he didn’t know, but just to be safe, he did) and for a while he rode around, trying to think what he should do next. He didn’t know how long this went on but someone in a uniform woke him up when he fell asleep once and he had to get off. He pretended to leave the place where the trains came and went but he didn’t. He snuck down one of the tunnels. It was dark and smelled bad and he was afraid, but he was even more afraid to go back up on the streets again. There were little pockets in the walls he could squeeze into when the trains came by, which they did less and less. He found a tunnel that had no tracks and he went down it, a shortcut to other tracks, he figured, but he never found them. One tunnel led to another and he got completely lost. There were people living down there, he discovered, they were like half-dead and slept in newspapers and plastic bags and they spoke the same language as the people on top but they didn’t seem as bad somehow. None of them at least were police, he was pretty sure. He pretended to be deaf and dumb and they gave him something to eat sort of like tough baby chickens in a soup that smelled like bad breath, but he was hungry and ate it. Time passed like this, he didn’t know how much, seemed like forever, but he couldn’t tell because there weren’t days and nights down there, and his watch was gone, must have lost it, or maybe he gave it to somebody, until eventually he began to forget why he was down there and started looking for a way out. He had always avoided the tunnels that stank the most, but now he thought those must be the sewers and maybe he could get out that way. So he held his nose and plunged in. He was right, but it was pretty sickening. By the time he saw some metal stairs leading up into the roof, he was a soaking mess and feeling dizzy from trying to hold his breath all the time. He thought he’d have to crawl out a hole when he got to the top, but instead he found a door up there. He opened it, and stepped out, the light blinding him at first; he held his hands over his eyes and peeped out through his fingers: didn’t seem to be anyone around. He glimpsed a shady place and crept over to it, huddling there behind a trashcan until he could get used to the daylight and figure out where he was and what to do next. And that was when he noticed that the sign on the trashcan read KEEP OUR TOWN BEAUTIFUL. He
could
read it, this was not French. He peeked around the side of the can. Some things seemed different, but he recognized where he was. He was in the alleyway behind his father’s drugstore. He felt like crying, he was so happy. He ran in to say hello to everybody and an ugly old woman with thick glasses and a clubfoot started yelling at him, saying he smelled like rotten fish. She closed the place down, banging about furiously on her clubfoot, dragged him back out into the alley and into the old pharmacy delivery van, and took him home (it
was
his home, but it was like she owned it and it was full of crying babies) and gave him a bath. There was nothing fun about this bath, she was very rough with him, though the usual happened a couple of times when she touched him there, and she smacked him for it. It turned out he was married to her and all those kids were his. Of course, by now he figured he was only dreaming and went along with everything the way you do in a dream, it was anyway better than a French sewer, which was where he supposed he really was and where he’d be again when he woke up. Only he never did. Or at least he hadn’t so far. Was this normal? That’s what he would have asked old Doc, if he’d got the chance. That bossy crippled lady who said she was his wife wouldn’t listen either. She only boxed his ears when he tried to tell her about it and sent him out to play pinball machines or video games, which were maybe the dream’s most interesting new things. His mom would have listened but she wasn’t in this dream. But what if it wasn’t a dream? He went back out in the alley and looked for the door he’d come through, but he couldn’t find it. If only he’d been paying more attention when he stepped out. He didn’t want to go back down there, he just wanted to know where it was so he could show it to that woman who wouldn’t let go of his ear (her name was Gretchen), and get his mixed-up life sorted out.