John's Wife: A Novel (42 page)

The announcement of Marge’s candidacy for mayor did not, after all, appear as scheduled, inasmuch as its vehicle,
The Town Crier
, for the first time in its long history, did not itself appear on its scheduled day, and though most people in town did not even notice this until it was pointed out to them, Marge certainly did. She went immediately to the
Crier
offices to complain, but found them closed and dark, nor could she rouse anyone when she banged on the door, though she was sure Ellsworth was in there somewhere. She called Trevor from a payphone in the Sixth Street Cafe across the street (Oxford, sitting in there with two of his grandchildren, said he hadn’t seen him today, but then he couldn’t see her either, so what did that prove?) to ask him what she should do, but got only his answering machine. Everywhere she looked, there were giant posters pasted up with her would-be opponent’s goonish mug on them, and she felt ganged up on. What she needed was a friend, but Lorraine had been so evasive of late, Marge decided just to go over to her house and confront her directly: was she on her side or not? When Lorraine came to the door, she looked startled and confused, but she invited Marge in, in her clumsy way (Marge was thinking: even if she’s with me, is this sloppy awkward woman a useful ally or a liability?), and Marge, in spite of her momentary doubts (already she was thinking: if she’s with me, she’s beautiful, but she wondered still why she seemed so standoffish), was so grateful to see a friend in this moment of crisis that she wanted to give her a hug and only held back because so many contrary emotions were flickering across Lorraine’s face (the trouble with this woman is that she’s never grown up, Marge was thinking, somewhat contemptuously, she’s a silly cow who just lets the world run over her) and she was afraid of doing something (but she’s nevertheless the smartest woman in this town of dummies, Marge herself excepted, and she has to struggle against so much more than Marge does, starting with the lout she’s married to, she deserves nothing less than the unconditional love and admiration which she is now feeling for her) that might confuse her all the more. The poor woman seemed about to cry. Was she ill, Marge wondered? “Well, yes and no,” Lorraine said, her voice quavering. “Yes and no what?” “It’s sort of like an illness.” “What is?” It’s odd, Marge was thinking, it’s almost like she was reading my mind. “It’s not really like reading, it’s more like, well, just listening.” “What? You hear everything I’m thinking?” “A lot anyway. It comes and goes. And not just you. Everybody.” Though Lorraine was starting to cry, Marge suddenly felt like the vulnerable one: how do you turn this thing in the head off so you don’t give everything away? “You can’t. I can’t either. It’s very tiring. You were wondering why I’ve been avoiding you lately.” “Because you didn’t want to know what I was thinking?” “Are you reading my mind now?” “No, just guessing.” “I was afraid to find out what you really—well, you know, that you might—and now you’re wondering if I’ve always been doing this or if it just started up.” “Something like that.” “It began one night out at the club. That night John’s wife got the drink spilled down her front—” “I remember. I was there.” She recalled how silly Trevor had got that night, staring at those wet breasts. “He wasn’t the only one.” No. But this was terrible! “You don’t know the half of it, Marge, it’s a living nightmare!” gasped Lorraine, dabbing at her eyes with her blouse tails. “I’m sorry,” she added, responding to something unflattering that Marge was thinking, and tucking in her blouse, went into the kitchen, returning with a box of tissues. She blew her nose and said: “Oh, Marge, I’ve so needed someone to talk to!” Marge, who was not one to express her feelings aloud, was therefore relieved that the genuine warmth she was feeling toward her friend Lorraine at this moment did not need further expression, and instead she said, having just thought of it again: “Lorraine, I came to tell you, I’m running for mayor.” “Really?!” exclaimed Lorraine, her face lighting up with the surprise of it, with the surprise of
being
surprised. “That’s wonderful! I had no idea!”

Marge had been right. Ellsworth had been in the
Crier
offices when she knocked, still was. Or, rather, he was on the floor above them in what he liked to call, as a struggling artist, his garret, but which was today just his old dusty workroom above the shop. He’d been dozing fitfully on the cot, exhausted but too disturbed to sleep. He had not, for the first time since he undertook the task, kept today the record, he knew that, but the record he
had
kept all these years, or thought he’d kept, was now, he’d found, dissolving on him, as though to teach him what he had always known—that words were not, as he liked to pretend, the stubborn monitors of time, adamant and fixed as number, but were time’s recombinatory toys and about as hard as water—and so to taunt him with the futility of his record-keeping mission. Or so it seemed last night: he allowed he was not well, his tired mind too lost to imaginary realms to keep its grip on real ones as firmly as a good reporter’s must. Specimen: the caption he had written for the famous cake-in-the-face wedding photo so many years ago, which, when in his most panicky moment last night he’d looked, had seemed to read: “
MAID OF HONOR NOURISHES WEDDING GHOST
”—but which had resolved itself to “
GUEST
” once more when, merely, he had rubbed his eyes and taken a deep breath. In short: the word had not lost its stability, his perception of it had. Was this a consolation? That, in effect, this book—the Stalker!—was driving him mad? Not much of one, nor was the less hazardous notion, which he could not quite believe, that what the word had faithfully kept he had simply remembered wrongly: the bride’s dress, for example, or the year the Pioneer Hotel came down. Dates were dates, places places, and that special wedding section was too well thumbed for him to find himself reading, for the first time, a paragraph deep in the story that began: “On the night before the exchange of vows, the groom bade farewell to the solitary life at a well-rounded entertainment provided by his many staunch friends …” Ellsworthian, no doubt, he could not deny it, but he knew he had not written it, or if he had he had not printed it, and if he had he no longer knew what he had done his whole life long. A possibility, of course; another: that he’d somehow nightmared himself into such an hallucinatory state last night that in his fevered eyes, no boundaries were secure. He’d half-reasoned so, half of reason being all he’d left to work with, and so, as history melted and mutated before him, he’d shaken his head, slapped his cheeks, stomped about the room, and looked again, often to good effect. What finally defeated him, however, and deprived this day the town of its weekly self-portrait was what he found in the celebrated photo of John and his bride dashing for the limousine under a shower of rice. This photo was one of his favorites, for it seemed to capture in its communal seed-burst gaiety the great promise of that historic occasion—only now the unanimity of that good cheer was marred by a single solemn face, staring ominously out through the cloud of falling rice, straight at the camera, and when Ellsworth saw that face he knew in an instant who it was: the Stalker! He was sure of it, even though he didn’t really know what the Stalker looked like. And as Ellsworth in dismay stared back, the Stalker’s eyes seemed to widen and his cheeks to tremble (though perhaps it was only Ellsworth’s hands trembling) as if suppressing laughter: Ellsworth fled. And up here remained in full retreat, thinking, somewhat foggily: the book must go. The burning of the forest was not a nightmare, it was a kind of prescription. He rose from the cot, feeling shaky, stared gloomily at the heaps of manuscript pages scattered about the room: on chairs, the table, in shelves, on the floor. A great devastation loomed; probably he should eat something before he commenced it. He picked up a sheet off a nearby chair, read: Art emerges, not from what is seen, but from the longing for what is not seen. Did he write this? He didn’t remember. Who said it? The Artist, consoling himself now for his loss? No, he was inconsolable. But not really the sardonic Stalker’s style. Then—? Good grief! The Model!

Hunger was making Pauline shaky, too, and though devastation was not on her mind (it never was, not even back when Daddy Duwayne tried to implant it there), something approximating it was already taking place in the studio as she blundered about desperately, looking for something to eat, knowing, even as she squeezed painfully through doorways and knocked things over in her clumsiness, that there was nothing to be found. When Otis left with the albums, he had promised to order up a dozen pizzas for her, but they hadn’t arrived and she really couldn’t wait much longer. She tried to call him again, but found it hard to work the little dials on Gordon’s old-fashioned rotary phones (had to turn them like bottle caps) and kept getting wrong numbers and busy signals. Putting two and two together was not what Pauline did best, but as she pressed her bulk through the doorway to check the downstairs refrigerator one more time (empty of course; on her last fruitful pass, she had found a withered lemon stuck to the back of the vegetable drawer by its own rot: she’d brushed it off on her thigh and eaten it whole like a piece of candy), it suddenly came to her with the force of a blow to the head, the sort of blow she was constantly giving herself now whenever she moved, that she was still growing and if she didn’t get out of here soon, she’d be trapped inside this building—already she couldn’t get up and down the stairs—and that would mean (two plus two) she’d probably starve to death. Even if they let her husband out of jail, Pauline knew she couldn’t count on him, he was so caught up in his work these days. But if she went outside, what would she wear? The one bedsheet she had wrapped around her was flimsier than underwear, and the other bedsheets and blankets were upstairs out of reach. She remembered the dusty old burgundy backdrop curtains in the portrait studio, and she squeezed back in there to (woops!—
crash!
—sorry about that) take them down, hoping Gordon wouldn’t be too mad about her borrowing them. She couldn’t get her big fingers around a safety pin, much less a needle, so, her stomach rumbling volcanically all the while she worked, she fashioned a kind of loose simple cloak (good old high school home ec!) and stapled it together with the stapler from the front-shop counter. Reaching through the bead curtains for it, she decided to take them along, too: “for dressing up,” as she thought of it, though mostly it was to belt the loose flaps in place. Leaving by the front door with bells jingling did not seem like a good idea, and anyway Otis had locked it when he left and the little catch would be too fidgety for her fingers to work from the inside. But the back door was too small, even sideways she kept getting snagged on something. Of course, it would help if the screen door weren’t there. How do these little hinge gizmos work? Never mind, it was off. Still couldn’t get through, though. She took off her new cloak and beads, lay down on her side and pushed her legs out into the alley and then (ouch!) her bottom, got up on her hands and knees and, jiggling back and forth, worked her top part out, dragging her new clothes with her. As she was still wiggling her shoulders through, she peeked through her flopping breasts and legs and saw a man watching her from across the alleyway, one hand clapped over an eye as though he were taking an eye test. She recognized him: Gordon’s insurance salesman. He couldn’t seem to stop staring, though the look on his face was different from most she’d suffered all her life. More like he was having a heart attack or had eaten something he shouldn’t have. Well, who could blame him, she probably was a sight. Pauline, being an incurious sort, did not stop to wonder what the man was doing there, nor why he didn’t at least come over and give her a helping hand, she figured most people would be put off, seeing her like this, and they would anyway suppose she was big enough to take care of herself. She pulled the cloak on over her head again and tied it with the beads, then went over to apologize to him and ask him where she might find something to eat—quickly!—but he just fell back into the rubbish there, still holding his eye and stammering something about his wife and the mayor. Well, too bad, but she had problems of her own, so, her growling stomach replying for her, she left him sitting there and made her way, knees bent and head ducked so as to cause as little alarm as possible, down the alley toward the Sixth Street Cafe.

Where Alf at the time was taking his midmorning coffee break, hunched over in front of the dusty plateglass window with his old friend Oxford and Oxford’s two youngest grandchildren, a pair of twins, not yet four, who had their father’s heart-shaped face and wispy blond hair but who, under their granddad’s patient tutelage, were already reading and doing their numbers. “It was like he felt he was locked out or something, and didn’t know how to get back in,” Alf said, gazing wearily out on the asphalt street which seemed to be sweating in the morning glare. He had been trying to describe his nighttime encounter with Oxford’s peculiar son Cornell in the back alley, but Oxford, fascinated by his grandchildren, excitedly filling in their dot-to-dot books at the table next to them (“It’s a lady! With a pointy hat on!”), seemed to be only half listening. The street was eerily empty. Civic center or no, the downtown was going to hell. The newspaper office across the street looked shut for the duration. No paper so far this week and no sign there’d ever be one again. Alf rubbed his eyes, wondered if he ought to look in on Ellsworth, make sure he was all right. “Still not sleeping well, I take it.” “No.” “Alcohol’s a clumsy sedative, Alf. Flurazepam’s better.” “Tried it.” “Methaqualones? There are some good ones out now.” “Hard on the liver.” “Especially when mixed with scotch, I suppose. You know, now that you mention it, Kate once said something amusing to me about doors. It was not long before she died, at the time they tore down the Pioneer Hotel. It was a sturdy old thing, that hotel, not unlike an ancient warrior, as Kate said, hard to bring to his knees.” “Mmm. Harriet and I stayed in that old warrior for a week or so when we came back after the war. From the smell, we must have been booked into the armpit.” “So John finally had to use dynamite—” “I remember. It was like a goddamn bomb had hit.” Brought it all back. Couldn’t sleep for a week after. It was the week when missing Harriet hit him hardest. “And when the dust cleared, all that was left standing was the big front door, completely intact, columns, architrave, and all. Majestic. Inviting. But opening onto nothing.” Alf remembered that standing door, remembered identifying with it in some way, but the memory seemed to be in black and white, so he didn’t know whether it was from actually seeing the thing itself or from the photo of it in the newspaper. If Alf had been asked, he would have said he never read the local rag, but now that it had not come out, he realized he was badly missing the silly thing. ‘“Mostly we build walls,’ Kate said then, ‘to separate the inner from the outer, the private from the public, the sacrosanct from the common, the known from the unknown. Doors are put in the walls to ceremonialize the crossing from one into another, which is sometimes a fulfillment and a delight and sometimes a frightening transgression.’” Oxford glanced over at his grandchildren. “Like in the story of the three little pigs: a ritual transgression of the sanctity of the home that takes place at the doorway.” “Always thought that was an oedipal fantasy,” Alf said, signaling for a coffee refill. Should get back. The preacher’s wife would be there by now. And there was that hysterical message on his answering machine this morning: “Help! That thing you took out! It’s back!” No clue who it was who’d called. “You know, the home as womb with Big Bad Daddy outside, trying to blow his way in.” “Maybe. Same thing. The door as a ‘magical threshold,’ as Kate called it, promising access to some mystery beyond or within. And what John had done, she said, was strip the door of all illusions, reminding us that all magic was nothing but sleight of hand, and thresholds were mere artifices in the middle of nowhere.” Oxford smiled wistfully, glancing over at his busy grandchildren. “And maybe you’re right about the three little pigs, Alf. Maybe poor Corny is just missing his mom.” John was back. Alf saw him emerge from the hardware store next door with a look on his face that said he’d either just fired old Floyd or given him a raise, with John you couldn’t tell which. Alf, glancing at his finger, remembered there was something he needed to talk over with John (what was worse, it seemed to be growing), but just then the waitress came over to say that he had an urgent phonecall. It was his nurse. An emergency. A man struck blind. Come quickly, she begged, the poor man was beside himself.