John's Wife

  One of these slashed paintings, the only one known to have survived the artist (big money alone rescued this one from her tight-lipped parents’ conflagration), found its way eventually to a back corner of John’s and Bruce’s fishing cabin, where Bruce was able to study it at his leisure, and his impression, after taking it down from the wall and folding its tatters back into place, was that it had not been slashed randomly: there was a pattern to the violence, as to the painting that preceded it. The original image on the canvas had been produced by the flinging of paint, from a can perhaps, or a loaded brush, maybe just by fistfuls (two parallel smudged fingerprints in a patch of green suggested this, a swipe at the ground itself as though to scar it), but there were powerful intimations in these blots and streaks and splotches of a life-crazed universe, utterly mad and made more so by the erotic urge, suggested by the vibrant untempered colors and their sensuous but frenzied encounters on the raw canvas, itself pale as bloodless flesh. The instrument Marie-Claire had used to rip up this cosmorama had been razor sharp, and she had blitzed it from the outside in, circling round in her offensive as though to entrap her prey before annihilating it. Her slashing, then, for all its daffy passion, appeared as a kind of hopeful, rational, and moral act, a defiant assault upon the heedless force that disturbed the universe at its core, seeding it with impossible dreams, and that deluded and destroyed its bearers incarnate. Of which, Bruce one: Marie-Claire had clearly been a kindred spirit, a pity he never knew her. He’d nearly had that pleasure. John had called him a few weeks before she died, asking him to come down and take her off his hands. She had returned to John’s town, it seemed, to pay respects at her ex-soldierboy’s tomb and attend the christening of her goddaughter, and, these pious rites accomplished, had progressed to more ecstatic ones, John the object now of her devotions. And thus his call to Bruce, committed at that moment, regrettably, to a high-risk Caribbean business deal and unable to rush to his old pal’s rescue, delightful though that task appeared. Clothing had become a nuisance that week to Marie-Claire, an encumbrance to be cast off that the spirit might soar (the skin would have to go, too, of course, Bruce foresaw that in his kindredness), and since the spirit might launch itself abruptly from any street corner or market aisle, taking her out anywhere was risky, while keeping her at home made home a wacky and sometimes dangerous place, John’s wife recovering still from the difficult birth, so somewhat remote and difficult even to focus upon (even more so nowadays for reasons Bruce did not understand) in the presence of that vivid dark-ringleted beauty, wet from the bath, say, dancing wildly through the house while singing “Mademoiselle from Armentières” in a schoolgirl’s sweet and vulnerable voice, and dressed only in bright silk scarves (the famous Marie-Claire palette) knotted round her thighs and throat. John, seeking escape and release as well, made the mistake of taking this manic creature up in his private skymobile: a glorious feast (quoth John), but she painted the landscape below with her flimsy things and might have flung her flimsy self out at that hard canvas as well had not John, his ardor cooled and flying one-handed, restrained her with a desperate fingerlock deep within her nether canals. He’d had to sneak her home that afternoon in greasy airport coveralls, plotting the while her quick return to Paris.

  Accomplished, but not before further indiscretions, the most spectacular being the night the uninhibited young mam’selle danced bare-assed and -foot on broken glass out at the Country Tavern at the edge of Settler’s Woods, giving those old boys out there a vision that the next day they’d only half-believe, she having run away from John’s house in anger after receiving no encouraging reply to her demand, issued in their master bedroom where John was just stepping into pajamas and his wife was feeding the insatiable baby: “Wut ees happen to ze hainqui-dainqui—?!” The young rookie cop on the beat that night was Otis, recently returned war hero and onetime Tavern regular, and fortunately, when called out (“Get your ass out here, Otis! On the double! She’s smashing up the fucking place!”), he recognized the freaky girl from previous sightings around town and called up John, who called in Alf, who sedated her on a beer-stained table out there with a shot in her tight little fanny, Otis remarking to himself as he helped hold the wild thing down that this was the same table on which he’d carved the confession of his secret love many years before. Still in high school then, football over for the year, beer season begun. Yes, there it was, near the edge, much scarred over now with other hatchmarks and obscenities (a comically bespectacled cock-and-balls, for example, borrowing the V for one egg and poking erectly through the O of LOVE) and the accumulative hammerings of fists and bottles, and darkened with grease and beer and spit and sweat, but visible still and in fact grown more distinctive with age, he’d scored it deep. He hoped John, gripping the mad quivering girl on the other side, didn’t see it, though he wouldn’t know who’d cut it there even if he did. Could have been anyone, Otis had no monopoly on his love, any more than he had a monopoly on his religion or his patriotism, much as they may have defined him. And he was glad it was there, glad he’d done it, even if it was the sort of crime against property he was now paid to punish. He felt that for once in his life, he’d made a statement, definitive and true, a pledge of sorts that would ever guide him, and all the better only he could read it.

  The interlacing of caricaturesque cock with Otis’s solemn declaration on the tavern table, rediscovered by the young police officer the night of Marie-Claire’s demented dance, had been accomplished four years earlier during the stag party the night before John’s wedding, Otis then away at war, the innovative artist one of John’s visiting fraternity brothers, known to all as Beans. The caricature, given away by the horn-rimmed specs: that of his best mate Brains, not, alas, in attendance at this historic occasion, being summer-scholared off to Oxford, thence no doubt to worlds beyond that bonehead Beans would never know, and so, sad times ahead. That anyway was Beans’s doleful mood the night he ravished Otis’s chaste troth on the tavern table with his own loving tribute to his friend. As Bruce to John, so Beans to Brains, pals inseparable, or so it had seemed to Beans until that fateful night. Or morning: the hour was uncertain. Beans sat in a stupor so thick it had evidently stopped his watch as well. Music played still on the old relic of a jukebox, a twangy stuff that scratched at Beans’s inner ear with the persistence of a gnawing rodent, while drunken cardplayers growled and snorted fitfully in a cigar haze nearby, and on the far wall blue movies flickered silently, bare botties humping away with the dull regularity of waves breaking on a rocky beach. On a drizzly day. Staring at them, Beans thought: nothing ever changes. The old bump and grind: all there is, and all there’ll ever be. Over by the ancient upright piano, a naked ex-wrestler, bruised and grimy, snored peacefully, his privates lidded with an overturned ashtray. Someone had tied his big toe to the tripodded cymbals: that hope that springs eternal going for one last moment of whoopee. Too late. It had been a glorious day full of song and laughter and world-class inebriants—in the hotel bar, on the golf course, at the wedding rehearsal and the dinner after (where Beans had stolen the show, he wished old Brains had been there to see it), and then out here at the Country Tavern, where, among his many feats of elocutionary prowess and athletic skill, he’d won with customary style the farting contest—but now the party was over. His fraternity brothers were all gone, and most everyone else as well. Did he see them go? Couldn’t remember. It was like they were here, and then they weren’t here. Like old Brains himself: it almost seemed like he never was. Beans was alone at table with his Swiss Army knife and a bucket of stale beer and a sorrowful heart, his future—dull, lonely, and utterly predictable—spread out before him like those rolling landscapes of cleft flesh on the far wall: pale fugitive routes to a black and bottomless pit.

  It was the announcement of the farting contest, at which Beans was soon to excel, that finally drove an appalled and long-suffering Maynard out of the Country Tavern that night, but had he known the consequences of that hasty retreat, he would have been
glad to stay and blow the fucking Ninth Symphony out his ass, and throw in the “Hallelujah Chorus” for an encore. He’d hated every minute of the night as he was to hate every minute of the wedding day to follow, and all he wanted at the time was to get the hell out of there and go home. So when he got in the way of John and his asshole buddies trying to sneak out of the place and insisted they take him along, he’d thought he was just catching a ride into town. He was so goddamned upset he was nearly bawling, so they’d finally given in, not out of charity or palhood, but so as not to draw attention to themselves, the chickenshits. And that was how Maynard, condemned to Nerdhood and member all his life of little else, became a member of the Dirty Six and, in the end, maybe the dirtiest of the bunch. Certainly the stupidest. How had he let it happen? If he hadn’t been keeping his distance from his insufferable cousin all night he might have noticed how weird they were all acting, and shown a bit more caution. Harvie the druggist’s son had apparently concocted some kind of hallucinogenic brew they’d been throwing down and they’d all blown their fucking gourds. When they tried to force some of the crap on Maynard on the way to the clubhouse, he pretended to drink it but didn’t. Later, though, when they’d pulled his pants down and got him between the legs of the girl, they’d shot it up his ass like an enema, using an old mosquito spray gun that hung on the wall out there and a lot of brute force. The gangbang was one thing, a helluva way to lose your cherry, but worse was to happen. For one thing, although everything suddenly had become lucidly clear to Maynard as though he’d just been given a total vision of the way the whole goddamned world worked, he found he’d lost control of his emotions. When he felt like crying or screaming, he heard himself laughing like a freaking maniac. When Harvie, testing the limits of the young kid’s womb with his impossible broompole during their climactic six-on-one (Maynard was in her right hand), leaned down deliriously in mid-orgasm toward John’s hairy ass, bucking away in front of his face, and took an ecstatic bite, Maynard, in horror and revulsion, let out an ecstatic yahoo of his own and blew jism all over what might be called the trysting place, coming for the first time really all night, though in truth it hurt like hell and gave him the peculiar impression for a moment that he was vomiting between his eyes. He loathed his cousin with all his heart, but when, over the little glassy-eyed guttersnipe’s exhausted body, greasy with sweat and cum, Dutch proposed a toast, in all fucking seriousness, to John’s bride of the morrow, Maynard found himself falling between John’s bare arms and weeping like a baby with loving gratitude. Gratitude—?! It was terrible. And the worse it was, the more he seemed to be enjoying himself. He was overswept by a mortifying shame, being a man who never let himself go in public, but hated it when he had to put his clothes back on, singing them all an Indian war-song while dancing around buck-naked, wearing his shorts on his head like a chieftain’s feathers. They had to wrestle him back into his clothes just as they’d wrestled him out of them. At Dutch’s insistence, they took up a collection to pay the little tramp, whom they’d just learned was only fourteen years old, though she looked too out of it to care one way or the other about money. Dutch started it by tossing two twenties and a ten down on her bare belly, John raised him twenty on her glistening pubes, Dutch matched him up her privates with a grin. That got everyone into it, and in the end they all emptied out their pockets on or in her anatomy, which seemed to be rolling and heaving like a storm-tossed sea. Maynard was only carrying about fifteen or so, but he threw in everything he had, slapping it down in the sticky place between her undulating breasts where John had been as though spreading a royal flush. He felt like he was being robbed and, god, it was wonderful. Sheer bliss. John cut out then with heartfelt well wishes and blown kisses from all and Dutch said he’d take the little jailbait home to the trailer park; he asked Maynard to come along: she was dead meat and he’d need help. Nothing Maynard wanted more than to spring his wretched ass out of that reeling hellhole, but he couldn’t move. Couldn’t leave his old pals Harvie and what’s-his-name and the other guy, could he? Christ, Dutch! Have a fucking heart! He was taking his clothes off again, but he had tears in his eyes. “Hey, buddy,” Dutch whispered in his ear, one heavy arm wrapped around his shoulder as though clapping him in irons, “the best is yet to come! C’mon, now, let go your dick and give me a hand.”

  The dress Pauline wore to John’s bachelor party, torn and stained though it was after, lasted her all through high school; nowadays, her clothes didn’t seem to last her a week. She had been carhopping at a rootbeer drive-in that spring (Daddy Duwayne turned up sometime before Memorial Day, drunk and dangerous, and lost her her job), so when the fat boy invited her to the party, she used up all she’d saved to buy a sleeveless princess dress, a see-through bra, and new panties with a little lace fringe all round. She didn’t have enough left over for new shoes or tights, so she had to go in her old school shoes and socks, the ones with the school colors at the tops. These, one shoe, and the dress were all she got home with, the dress in bad shape already and even worse after Daddy Duwayne got done with her, but she mended it and washed it and went on wearing it right up until the time she moved into Gordon’s studio—in fact, it was still in the trailer when she and Otis went there after Daddy Duwayne’s arrest, only Daddy Duwayne had hung it up in the toilet and shot it full of holes. For three or four years after that, she and Otis were close friends and visited the trailer together a lot, until something happened, she never figured out what (when she went to the police station and asked him, Otis turned red and wouldn’t even look at her and said in his barking way that “that case was solved,” or something like that), and they didn’t become really good friends again for several years. In the meantime, though, the city cleaned up the trailer park and condemned Daddy Duwayne’s trailer and hauled it away, and Otis got them to give her compensation for it, which she appreciated, since Gordon was nice to her but never gave her any money to spend. She bought some new designer jeans, a quilted anorak, some pretty blouses and a beaded vest, new pantyhose and underwear, a slinky sweater, a pair of ankle boots and some wedgies, popular back then, and three new dresses, including one with screenprint reproductions of the World’s Fair, which was her favorite, and she was still wearing almost all these things seven or eight years later—really, right up until the last couple of weeks, when suddenly nothing seemed to fit anymore, not even the boots. Well, age was catching up with her, she supposed, you can’t stay in kid sizes forever, and she made a trip out to one of the malls to buy a few new things, using money from the cash register that Gordon never missed. She’d hardly got used to her new clothes, however, when they no longer seemed to fit either. She split the new pantyhose trying to get them on, the jeans seemed to have shrunk before they’d even been washed, she couldn’t get the nice sloppy sweater with silver tears and glitter on over her head, and her new full skirt suddenly wasn’t full anymore. So, in pinned skirt, bedroom slippers, and one of Gordon’s cardigans, she went hurrying out there again. As she passed through the food court with its delicious smells, she felt a terrible urge to stop for pancakes or a hamburger or maybe several, but she was afraid if she did she might not make it to the fashion shops in time. The safety pin popped on the skirt even as she ran past the video arcade. She not only needed new clothes, she needed them right away.

  Clarissa, Jennifer, and Nevada were sitting at a table near the taco bar when Pauline went galumphing by, but only Nevada noticed her, the girls too absorbed with Uncle Bruce’s beautiful girlfriend, whom both supposed to be at least a famous model and maybe even a singer or a movie star. It was amazing running into her out here, and they were both flattered that Nevada recognized them and actually took time to sit down with them and have a smoke and a diet cola with a lemon slice in it. This was hardly Hollywood or the Riviera, and Clarissa suddenly felt embarrassed about this place that she and Jennifer loved so, but when she tried to apologize for it, Nevada waved at her own smoke and said very emphatically, “Your father’s a great builder,” and that
made it all right again. Clarissa knew that everyone sitting around them was watching them, and she wished her dad had not made her promise not to take up cigarettes because she felt it would be really cool now to share one with Nevada. When Clarissa asked if Uncle Bruce was in town, Nevada exhaled with pursed lips, smiled, and said: “Well, he’s been in … and out…” When she smiled, you realized she wasn’t quite so young after all, but the little lines that appeared, Clarissa thought, made her more beautiful than ever in a kind of wicked and knowing way. It was how Marie-Claire must have looked. She could see why Uncle Bruce would be crazy about her, at least for a while, but she wasn’t at all jealous, or anyway not very. Jennifer was the real problem. When Nevada asked her where her mother was, Clarissa said she was pretty busy these days and didn’t seem to be around much (busy at what? Clarissa didn’t know), maybe she was on a trip somewhere, and Jen said, “My mom’s always on a trip somewhere,” which made Nevada smile again. Clarissa started to say that Granny Opal, who had brought them out here, had gone to the nursing home to visit her granddad who’d had a stroke, but thought better of it in the nick of time, and instead, pushing her hands into her leather jacket, she asked: “Did Uncle Bruce fly here in his own plane?” “Yes, we both did. He has a new one, you know, a jet. A real dream. Would you two like to go up with us sometime?” “Oh yes!” they both exclaimed at once, and Nevada smiled again, but this time more at Jennifer than at Clarissa, and this gave Clarissa a very unpleasant feeling. What was worse, she could see Granny Opal coming through the door at the far end with that dippy old-lady smile on her face, which for some reason made her want to hit Jennifer. Maybe Bruce’s girlfriend saw her, too, or saw it all in Clarissa’s face, because she stubbed out her smoke, tossed some money on the table (way too much, it was very flamboyant and showed the kinds of places she was used to), and rising in a very smart way that was almost like from a TV commercial, said: “Hey, it’s been cool, team. I like this place. It’s funky and real.” Was she making fun? It didn’t seem like it. Certainly Nevada seemed very sincere when she smiled down at them and added: “I’ll catch you here again sometime soon.”