John's Wife: A Novel (41 page)

As they dragged the distraught photographer out of the fancy women’s-wear shop at the mall, his eyes filmy and unfocused and his knees giving way beneath him, what he kept blubbering over and over was: “It doesn’t matter, I didn’t have any film in the camera anyway,” a fact that seemed to be causing him more dismay than his arrest. They paraded the poor bewildered man down the corridor, through the busy cafe area, past the table where Opal sat alone, and on down the next corridor as though to prolong what perhaps they perceived as an entertainment for the shoppers, and from the grins she could see on people’s faces that was probably how it was taken. The young were openly laughing, pointing, making jokes. Opal was not entertained. Her own spirits were too low, her confidence in her own grip on the proprieties too shaken, to take pleasure in the humiliation of any fellow creature, especially one so harmless as the photographer, who was a bit idiosyncratic maybe, but a decent citizen and a loving son. Opal had known from church the man’s mother, a saint in her way, her husband killed on one or another of those beaches during the big war (Mitch had played his part on the home front in that one, as had her son in the lesser ones since then, for which she was grateful), the woman widowed so young and all but penniless with a son to raise, then in turn dutifully and tenderly cared for by that son when her own health and mind failed her, a fate that Opal hoped she would herself escape, but confident that her own son would be no less caring if such a calamity befell her. And what would her son say about her present troubles? He would not be patient with them. Mother, he would say, let that addled old man be, there’s nothing you can do for him, just watch over my wife and children when I cannot, I’m depending on you. And now she’d let him down on all counts and, moreover, behaved in ways he would not believe, nor could she still, though she knew she had. The girls were gone, she’d looked everywhere, it was all her fault, she’d stayed too long, but she’d called and they weren’t home either, no one was except the cleaning lady, and now she could do nothing but sit in this rancid public parlor, feeling utterly estranged, surrounded by misbehaving children and that indecent racket they called music, waiting, hopefully yet fearfully, for her charges’ safe return. She had brought Clarissa and her friend Jennifer to the mall this morning, as she had often done, though much earlier than usual, and she knew by their twittery excitement that something was up (those thin little shorts they had on didn’t even cover their behinds and they were wearing their belly buttons out like brooches) and she should stay, but her visits to the retirement center had become more than mere duty or habit, rather something like a compulsion, something she had to do more for herself than for that stricken old man, who had become, in fact, not so much a family friend as an adversary. And one of a very peculiar sort. It had begun simply as a way of coping with the awkwardness of Barnaby’s befuddled mind, humoring him in his confusions rather than forever correcting him, a sort of kindness, really, and therapeutic, too—he seemed to speak more clearly than before—that was how she had thought of it when she’d started taking Audrey’s part in Barnaby’s imaginary dialogues. These were not genteel or affectionate conversations: Barnaby was an angry man, and Audrey, he was convinced, had with malice done him wrong. Opal was equally convinced that Barnaby was misjudging her, her mistakes, if any, innocent (John
was
a charmer), and besides the dead should be allowed to lie in peace, so she took it upon herself to defend a woman toward whom in life she’d never really felt a fondness, at first in her own voice and then, when that only seemed to stir up Barnaby’s rage, in Audrey’s. Audrey had been so different from Opal—vivacious, brassy, self-assured, dynamic, daring, proud—that what most amazed Opal was the ease with which she assumed her role, standing toe-to-toe with the irascible old fellow, silencing his pigheaded bluster finally with the force of her own irrefutable logic, her doughty good sense, exhibiting then her own anger at his mistrust, backing him up until he fell into a chair, apologizing: “But… Aud, I’ve felt… such pain …” “I know.” Then he’d lean his poor damaged head into her bosom or onto her shoulder and rest there a while, she stroking his age-freckled pate gently, consoling him as best she could, until he forgot and it all started up again. She took to cleaning up his room for him, straightening the bed, sorting his laundry, scolding him for bad habits (“Don’t walk around with your robe gaping like that, do you think people enjoy looking at an ugly old coot like you in his underwear?” “Too much trouble, tying and untying it, Aud, slows me down when I have to go to the bathroom …”), even helping him with his baths because he said he hated the bath lady who treated him like he was three years old. “She’s right, you are three years old, now stop picking at yourself like that and lean forward, let’s get this over with.” “Wish I could, Aud. Get it over with, I mean.” “You stop talking like that, you old buzzard! Who would I have to fight with if you quit on me?” Which did remind her to take the gun out of the little raggedy holster in his bathrobe while he was in the tub and hide it at the bottom of his laundry basket. Sometimes she prepared some food for him or cleaned his refrigerator or microwave, read old newspapers to him, gave him his medicines, clipped his toenails. “Now, Aud, we’ve got to do something about that damned will.” “It’s been done. I don’t want to hear another word about it. Give me the other foot.” He’d been especially difficult today, spilling his medicine, dirtying the bathroom, throwing his dirty clothes about, refusing his bath, getting in a rage about a “dawzer,” whatever that was, even trying to strike her with his cane, but she took the cane away from him, pushed him down into his rocker, cooled his heels with a smart dressing-down, and then, when he’d lapsed into a more melancholic mood, gave him a haircut. She noticed he was eyeing the scissors, so she teased him for a while, setting them down where he could almost reach them but not quite, then quite casually popping them in her handbag when she got ready to go. Sometimes, leaving Barnaby’s little apartment, a funny feeling would pass over her, as though she had to remember to be Opal again and might not be if she forgot, just a fleeting sensation, but enough to make her shiver. Today, though, the funny feeling, after what she saw in the main lobby, had not gone away, the shivering hadn’t. Passing by the visitors’ logbook, she had glanced to see if she had remembered to sign in and was startled to see Audrey’s name written there. More than once. But in Opal’s own handwriting. She felt confused and somehow threatened, almost as though there were a hand at her throat, and she reached for the pen to do something, but there were other people in the lobby, coming and going, she had to leave it. And she’d lost all track of time, she’d been gone too long from the girls, Clarissa so irresponsible of late, she had her father’s bold independent ways, but not always his good judgment, and that dangerous mall crowd—Opal was suddenly afraid, for the girls, for herself, for her whole family, and dazed and panicky, she went scurrying back, hunched over the steering wheel as though trying to push the car instead of drive it, arriving finally, still shaken, but more and more her old self, her old dowdy steadfast inept and timorous self, to find her fears confirmed, the girls nowhere in sight, and nothing to do after an anxious search and a call home, an embarrassed inquiry or two (where
were
those scamps? they’d hear it from Granny Opal when they got back!), but sit and wait. In this glossy marketplace her son had made, though certainly not for her (she was not eating or drinking anything, people wanted her table, the busboys were giving her impatient looks, but she would not, could not really, move), a setting that seemed to demonstrate something her friend Kate once told her, sitting in the city park and speaking then about the most recent achievements in outer space: “When the edge
becomes
the center, Opal,” she’d said, “then the center becomes the void.”

Where were those two scamps? They were up in the air with Bruce and Nevada, not quite in outer space, but, as Clarissa put it: “Far out!” It had started as an ordinary highspeed joyride, but Clarissa had insisted Bruce put his sports jet through all its tricks, and so they’d climbed and rolled and looped and dived and then skimmed the whole next county in about ten seconds flat! It was unreal! Uncle Bruce and Nevada sat together up front, and it was easy to see how much in love they were, the way they couldn’t stop touching each other, Nevada especially—Bruce, who was dressed in silky soft army clothes, acted cool like he always did, but Nevada seemed crazy in love, and she and Jen were getting excited, just watching them. Uncle Bruce said you had to be careful, speed was a kind of addiction, “an escape from meat,” as a woman he once knew liked to say, she was so hooked on it, she came all apart each time she put her feet back on the ground again, she seemed constantly to be fluttering and spinning then like those little plastic whirligigs until she could get back up in motion again, just watching her in a closed room made you dizzy. “Was that Marie-Claire?” Clarissa asked, and Uncle Bruce smiled (sadly, she thought) and said: “Well, yes, I guess it was.” “But if you do get addicted,” Jen asked, “how do you stop?” “You learn its opposite,” said Bruce, almost as though he’d expected her question. “A sort of counter-addiction.” “Woo, sounds real Zen,” Jennifer said, making Bruce and Nevada laugh, though Clarissa knew it was just something she’d got from her mother. Bruce took them on a series of rolls then that made the earth whip round and round about them like he had it on a string. “Wowee! This is awesome!” shrieked Clarissa, and Jen agreed but said she was a little woozy. “Oh Jen!” Clarissa complained. “Don’t grinch us out! This is fun! More, Uncle Bruce!” “Well, if Jennifer’s not feeling well,” said Nevada, suddenly very concerned, and Uncle Bruce eased up. “How are you doing, kid?” “I’m all right,” said Jen, though she didn’t sound like it. Was this a trick? They seemed to pay her a lot more attention now. “Maybe you’d like to work the controls,” Bruce suggested, and Clarissa jumped up and said “Oh yes!” and beat her to it; from the greenish look on Jen’s face, she was probably doing her a favor. “Daddy always lets me fly his plane, sitting on his lap,” she lied—her father was pretty strict about the rules, though he did promise to teach her someday—and she popped herself on Bruce’s silky lap as though she knew exactly what to do, and, more or less, she did, she’d been watching closely and she was a fast learner. She felt very cool and, though she didn’t attempt anything crazy, she didn’t just fly in a straight line either. Meanwhile, she was very much aware of where her bottom was and, though she had never thought of it as a tactile organ before, she used it now as a kind of fat clumsy cartoon hand, very thinly gloved, and as she put the plane through its swoops and turns, she squeezed and pinched and scooted back and forth, until Uncle Bruce said he thought that was enough, they’d better get Jennifer back on the ground again, and he seemed a little ticked off, but he did give her a friendly smack and then left his hand there as he lifted her off his silky lap, she pretending she was having too much fun flying to stop, almost like she was already getting an addiction, so as to keep his hand pressed there as long as possible, but then she made a mistake and turned them upside-down when she didn’t mean to and that ended it. But her bottom was still tingling with the dreamy memory of what it had been holding on to when Nevada dropped them off at the mall and they found Granny Opal all alone at a table inside, looking like she was not having the best time of her life. So she and Jen bought her a cherry mush and diet colas with lemon slices for themselves and explained that Uncle Bruce came by and gave them a drive in a super new rig he was trying out, it was really neat, and they elaborated on that to make it sound real, but they didn’t really have to, she didn’t even seem to notice they’d been gone, and then she told them about the photographer getting arrested and, though she didn’t tell it very well, she and Jen laughed at everything Granny Opal said and that seemed to cheer her up and she even ate some of her cherry mush.

When from his second-floor office window in the bank building Trevor saw the rubber-kneed photographer being taken into custody down at the police station, he who had never known delight (this thought had remained with him, steady as pulse) suddenly experienced, like a brief foretaste of that which eluded him, a strange mixture of anguish and exhilaration, both emotions arising from the same realization: He had done this! He who had changed so little had, irreversibly, changed a man’s life, and maybe the lives of everyone in this town! Of course, Gordon had helped, but this scene transpiring in the street below was, in a real sense, Trevor’s own doing, his own, as it were, personal work of art. And his burden: Gordon seemed all but lifeless, as though his spirit had fled, and Trevor’s own heart sank when he saw the state the man was in. Trevor had, on returning yesterday from the spectacle at the mall, determined to end his mad clandestine pursuit of the photographer, but at the same time he had tried to understand what it was he had really been doing. He had been, in some sense, seeking after truth, yes, but of what kind? And to what end? He recalled an economics theory professor he had back at university who held that the central principle of all human interaction was simple raw power, he laced all his lectures with reminders that economics, history, life itself could not be understood without remembering that. He said it was the basis not merely of community order, but also of religious faith, science, and the search for truth, and of course of love, friendship, marriage, and family. There were jokes about the man’s home life and some pointed out he didn’t have tenure yet so no wonder his brain was a bit maggoty on the topic and it was popular to dismiss his lectures by saying that what little power
those
had was got by jacking directly into Machiavelli (an obscene image was often used to express this), but Trevor found the argument compelling and wondered often at his own powerlessness, which the accretion of knowledge by itself did not seem to overcome. His fascination with the professor came to an end when someone posed the question of the disinterested artist: his answer was along the same lines, but far less convincing, dismissing disinterest as though it were a silly myth, suddenly broadening his definition of power to include things other than the manipulation of other people, and refusing arbitrarily (“Let me teach you something about power,” he joked) to take any more questions on the subject. And now Gordon had, in effect, posed the question again. That question, or its answer, seemed to touch on this matter of delight, as had Gordon himself in an interview published a few years ago in
The Town Crier
(Trevor had clipped this interview, kept it in his office desk drawer, second down on the right, he was looking at it now): When asked why it was he had taken up the photographic profession, he’d replied, the profession to make a living, the vocation to devote himself to art. But then why not one of the fine arts, painting or sculpture? He was a poor man, his options were few; but his goal remained the same: the pursuit of beauty. But of what use, the interviewer had pressed on, playing the devil’s advocate, is beauty? None at all, the photographer had responded. Nor is there any use for the ecstasy that accompanies its contemplation … Had Gordon known such ecstasy? Trevor did not know, but he did believe that Gordon had chosen a life that made access to that sensation possible, even if it might mean you sometimes ended up running around in pink nightshirts and arousing the displeasure of the police. You could see intimations of it when Gordon worked: it was as though he were unaware of his own being in the world, transforming himself into a mere prism through which the beauty of the world might pass. This intensity: it was something Trevor felt he could never achieve, except perhaps through someone like Gordon, though he had not, when he’d begun this pursuit, foreseen his own active role in shaping its direction. At the time, he was simply fascinated with Gordon’s own covert pursuit of John’s wife—and that was another thing, John’s wife. Had anyone besides himself noticed that she seemed to be vanishing, not as when someone leaves town, but as an image might fade from a photographic print? If so, they were not mentioning it, and Trevor himself was reluctant to bring it up and risk looking the fool, but his old problem of being unable to register her features after seeing them had worsened: he could no longer register them
while
seeing them. He’d tried to come to some understanding of this by locating and replotting her point on his actuarial graphs, but her point had vanished, too, and he began to wonder if perhaps her disappearance might not have something to do with Gordon’s photographs of her, as though he might, so to speak, be stealing her image. Or was he, aware as Trevor was of her vanishing, trying to preserve it? His pursuit of Gordon had therefore acquired the additional motive—essentially altruistic, but not without its own links to power, beauty, delight—of watching over John’s wife, or at least of trying to understand what was happening to her, and it now occurred to him that the key to that understanding, and perhaps to his entire quest, might well lie in the photographs Gordon had taken of her. Was this the moment, with Gordon under arrest, to have a look at them? He put the interview away, checked his tie, blew on his hat and donned it. He might have accomplished more than he thought with those phone calls! Hastily, he dropped down to the police station to inquire about his friend whom he had seen in some distress, did he need any help, and was told he was only being held until the chief got back, it was no big deal, he’d be home by suppertime. He thanked them, exchanging pleasantries, and left, trying to move without undue haste, but heading straight for the studio; just as he drew near, however, the chief of police came backing out of it, his gray shirt dark with sweat, some books or albums under one arm, keys out to lock the door, so Trevor made an abrupt right turn and took a hopefully casual-seeming stroll around the block, cutting through an alley to shorten the circuit, getting lost briefly (it was as though they’d turned the block around on him—he was overexcited), his own back perspiring by the time he had finally returned. He peered into a display window (toys: perhaps he had a nephew) that reflected the street, having observed the way they did it on TV, and when he’d caught his breath and it seemed safe, he straightened his hat, dropped over (if anyone asked, he was ordering up a photo for Marge’s surprise mayoral campaign, to be announced today), and rang the bell. What would he tell Gordon’s wife? That he’d been taken on as her husband’s legal aide perhaps, she was pretty simple, probably didn’t know an accountant from an attorney, and under the circumstances she would no doubt appreciate any help at all. Just investigating the allegations, ma’am, and I thought it might be a good idea to look at a few photos. No answer. He rang again. Maybe she was down at the station, another break, he tried the door though he knew it was locked, he’d have the place to himself if he could just get in, but he’d have to hurry. There must be other doors. He’d try at the back. But whoa, inspector, walk, don’t run. And stop giggling.