John's Wife

  The Artist? The Model? Both gone, like vision itself: mere memories, and so illusions. His desire to see has cost him his sight. Blind in both eyes, and so pitiable, he gropes, utterly alone, through the pitch-black night in a forest he cannot even be sure is a forest, only his memory and his reason suggest this to him. That ever-deceptive memory. That foolish reason that led him into this doomed project in the first place. Who was he to use another to try to see into himself? Who was he to intrude upon Art’s sacred domain? Of course, if Art, as the Model suggested, is not the contemplation of beauty, but the encounter with its absence, then he should, encountering absence in its utmost purity, be in ecstasy, but he is not. Black on black is a metaphor, perhaps even a beautiful one, but it is not Art. But why blind? You may well ask. Probably it’s an allegorical blindness, curable only by allegorical means. No, I’m sick of all that. Then my fate is sealed, and your commitment to allegory is complete. Nonsense. Why can’t I simply restore your sight? There, you see? you have it back. No, sadly, I do not. Some things you can do, some you cannot. I don’t understand. Nor I: we are both intruders here. Tell me, then, what you in your blindness see. I see the fire raging through the forest. I thought I knew what it meant, but now I don’t. There was a fire, then? There might have been. If so, I think it expressed the terror of a world devoid of Art. Or of the void of Art? Who can say? What vanished was the Real. No, its mere Model: the Real remains, as you yourself, blind within it, must surely know. All I know is the unseen fire’s power to consume all in its path. In that respect it’s much like time, and so may represent a simpler terror. Against which Art stands. So you say; show me it. Alas, I lack the gift to do so, though I believe it to be so, and have had a glimpse, I think: There was a stone once, in the stream … But now it too is gone, the stream as well perhaps. What then can you do for me, left sightless and alone in this bleak forest, torched by your own uncertainties? Can you lead me out? Of course: give me your hand. Here: it is your own. Ah. Yes. As I feared. We cannot leave here then. No. The endless night to which you are condemned is mine as well? It is.

  Waldo, so condemned, or so it seemed, and as blind as Ellsworth’s Stalker (couldn’t see a fucking thing), crashed ponderously through the thorny undergrowth, not in hopes of escaping it, but in desperate flight from the mosquitos that swarmed upon him whenever he stood still. “When the going gets tough,” he cried out into the empty black night, as he staggered through what felt like the gnarled claws of old hags, grasping vindictively at the offending flesh he now so liberally offered them, “the roughs get rougher!” But was Waldo, thus clawed and bit, repentant? No, if those radiant buns should reappear, he’d chase them all over again, but not to do them harm, oh no, prince of a fellow that he was, his heart was big and full of love, and life, so short, was sweet or else was wasted. Waldo paused to suck at the empty flask and the mosquitos whined around him. Had he heard something? Yes, a distant growling roar, not unlike a power mower. Hah! Kevin always said he liked to do the fairways at night! Rescue was at hand! Waldo plunged toward the sound like a castaway striding through heavy surf toward an unseen shore, and in due time stepped out upon a fairway. Ah! His bare toes reveled in the grassy carpet, giving him a pleasure comparable to a good massage, or the relief one’s buttocks felt when a paddling ended, fond memory of the fraternal past. He followed the sound of the motor down the fairway, toward which green he had no idea, nor had he any preference, confident old Kev would have a bottle out here with him, good scout that he was, and wondering only why he saw no light. Naught but a remote flicker of heat lightning in the west like a reminder that not all lands were lightless. But then was Kevin mowing in the dark? He was not, nor was it Kevin. It was (Waldo padded softly upon the spongy green, leaned close to make out the horsey bare-legged creature sprawled athwart the hole) old Mad Marge snoring! Christ, what a cannonade! Poor Triv had to live with that? Marge lay upon her back, limbs outflung, still clutching a seven-iron in one fist, jaw slack and vibrating with her resounding snores, her blouse open and skirt rolled up around her waist, flag tossed aside, the ball in the hole between her powerful thighs as though she’d shat it there. Imagining remarks to some such effect that he might mockingly make (and others that she might make to mock in turn his unadorned and inert condition, but what the hell, company was company), he gave her a firm barefooted kick in the side of her rump, but she didn’t even lose a beat in her steady drum-fire barrage, nor did successive kicks do the trick: Sleeping Beauty was utterly elsewhere, her big-boned bod abandoned. Well, well. He drew a putter out of her dropped bag, a pair of balls as well, which he tossed down at the edge of the green, facing her open fork, faintly illumined by the occasional glimmerings from the west. “Fore!” he hollered into the hollow night and crisply stroked the first: he could hear it as it whispered across the green, rattled around in her thighs like a roulette ball, and dropped—k-plunk!—into the hole. The second made a clocking sound, then bounced back out again like a pinball ejected from a scoring dimple. He went over to pick it up and to pluck the two from out the hole. His hand brushed her pantied crotch while reaching in and felt something rippling behind the cloth like a scurrying mouse. Curious, he pushed to one side the narrow strip of reinforced fabric and lost his fingers to wet fleshy lips that hotly sucked them in. Hey! Wow! Everything was on the move in there! That sucker was alive! And still she thundered on, lost to this world and to all others, her sonorous concert interrupted only when, with effort, he popped his ruminated fingers out. “John—?” she gasped. Waldo, reprising his famous Long John impersonation, rumbled: “Yeah, baby, I love ya,” and his Sarge Marge phobia momentarily overcome and putter cast aside, he leaned forward to work his wedgie in where his trailblazing fingers had gone before. Her raking snores returned as though to sanction his—yowee!—brave endeavors. From which no quick retreat: her limbs snapped round him and—woops!—clapped him to his task! Love: oh shit, it’s—hang on!—a real adventure!

  Love as an adventure was not one of the subtopics of Reverend Lenny’s sermon-in-progress, but perhaps only because he had not yet thought of it, for love in the larger sense, he’d decided, watching his wife Trixie feed the new baby by candlelight (the power had gone out, not just in the manse, the whole block seemed dark), was to be its central theme. The love of one’s fellows and maternal and marital love and love as the ultimate sanctuary and love as a miracle and as the true source of all meaning, or at least such as we’re granted in this paradox-ridden universe of ours, bereft of certainties as it was. In the expression “I love you,” neither subject nor object could be identified or be proven to exist, only the verb was beyond dispute, the only indispensable verb in the language perhaps, centering all others. The event that had brought all his scattered thoughts to focus was the birth, in a spectacle of birth, of his spectacular son. Were there comic aspects to his abrupt arrival on this lonely planet? Well, so much the better, for such was the nature of the human condition within which it participated, Lenny’s theme embracing as well the cosmic joke of love. “But where, then, is the center?” Beatrice had mysteriously asked earlier (she did not now remember this and he but barely did; fortunately, as he was doing now, he’d taken notes), and the answer was: in love as incarnated in their little Adam, so named by Beatrice in awe, not shared by Lennox, of his conception, which she associated with a fugue by Bach. “It was like all the organ pipes had got stuffed up inside me, one by one,” she said, “each one resonating with its own special pitch and tone, filling me up with such ecstatic music I almost couldn’t stand it!” Mind, spirit, and body as a musical instrument, love as the well-struck chord: he took a note by the flickering candle (it felt like the world had emptied itself out, even his other children had been swallowed up by the night, and only they three remained, huddled around the last of the light like the nucleus of a new adventure: yes, he was thinking now about the adventure of love), while Beatrice, giving breast, quietly chatted away. “Look at his pretty little mouth, Lenny, how it curls around my ni
pple, he’s not just sucking at it, he’s licking it, nosing it, playing with it, such a sexy little baby! All the time I was carrying him I had the feeling inside me, not of a baby, but of a passionate lover, one who’d found all the places that made me hot but from the inside out: my nipples would suddenly get hard, my throat would flush, my thighs would drip, and all my senses would turn inward and I wouldn’t know where I was! Once he got the hiccups, and I nearly died from pleasure! Where did he come from, Lenny, this strange little boy?” Lenny didn’t know, didn’t care. Things happened. That was not what mattered. What mattered was the message that was being transmitted, a message that was always the same and never the same message twice, easily read, yet impossible to decipher, though the attempt to do so was his life’s work and privilege. “Maybe,” he said, “he came from the desire to resist the indifference of the universe. Maybe we still haven’t settled down, Trixie. Maybe we’re still on the run, still rebelling.” “Oh dear,” she sighed, and hugged the baby. “I hope not.”

  Mother love, to be celebrated in Lennox’s forthcoming Sunday sermon, was also what roused Veronica at last from her backyard stupor and sent her out alone into the dark unfriendly night in search of her, well, her son, so to speak, her bad-penny Second John: slimy, hideous, mindless, but pathetic, too, utterly helpless, needing her, his only mom, how could she have wanted to hit him with an ironing board? Everyone at the party had been complaining about the slime trail, most of them blaming it on the monster woman, so even at night it was easy to find and then to follow, not from east to west but from dry to wet. Some streetlamps still burned but most were out and she walked through patches of absolute darkness where the power seemed to have failed with only the slime trail itself, faintly phosphorescent, to show her the way. It led eventually into a noisy bar, one she’d never been in before, a saloon more like, with a big bar made out of railway ties, the only thing vaguely familiar, and sawdust on the wooden floor and gaslamps hanging over wooden tables where loud drinking men played cards and broke into brawls and vulgar songs and laughter. She saw him in a corner, on the floor, still swaddled and hooded loosely in the dirty sheet he’d been wrapped in, the little mendicant with the big head and shriveled limbs, her boy, sort of, her Second John. The men were teasing him, flicking their ash and flinging their beer dregs at him, spitting on him, kicking him, and ridiculing in despicable ways his tendency to suck at anything that neared his hooded face. Veronica braced herself (why did this remind her of some of her most awful moments in high school?), then marched over to stand between them and her son, remembering only after she’d got there and they’d all rudely reminded her with roars of laughter that the borrowed linen dress she was wearing was split up the back. She scolded them in a high-pitched voice she could not quite control for being cruel to a handicapped person who could not defend himself and who wasn’t even a child yet. This sent them all into howls of finger-pointing laughter, spilling their beer and tipping tables over. “You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” she shouted, and knelt to give the poor thing, wet and squishy though she knew he was, a motherly hug, feeling herself poke out the back of the dress as she squatted, giving them all something fresh to whoop about. “You’re nothing but a bunch of bullies!” she cried. “That’s tellin’ ‘em, Ma!” Second John exclaimed, suddenly tossing back the cowl, as though peeling off a disguise. He stood before them, just a head above her doubled knees, bald and diapered and smoking a big black cigar. She gasped. “Why, you’re the—!” He spat and laughed and whipped a pistol out of his diapers and shot the hats off three or four of the men, all of whom were now diving for cover, then slapped Veronica on her exposed backside and, waving his pistol about, said: “You’re a real pal, Ma! Whaddaya say we sow a few wild oats here and teach these bums a lesson in family values?” “I-I don’t want any violence—!” she begged. “Who’s talking about violence?” he laughed. The bartender in his white shirt with sleeve garters rose up behind the bar with a twelve-gauge shotgun, Ronnie screamed, her son blew the gun out of his hands and then blasted away a row of bottles over the quaking barkeep’s head. “All I want’s a little tit!” “What—?!” “Ma, I’m your little baby!” “But I-I don’t have any milk!” she gasped. “That’s okay, I’m not hungry, I just need a little comfort,” he said with a sly affectionate grin, tonguing the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. He reached inside her linen dress and popped a bare breast out. “You’ve kept me waiting, Ma! All these years! It wasn’t fair!” “Darling, please—!” She felt sorry for him and what had happened, but much as she loved him, she wished he’d put her breast back. She seemed unable to do it herself or even to rise from her vulnerable squat, it was like she was paralyzed with shame and remorse. “They tell me the old man comes here from time to time on the arm of one floozy or another,” he whispered, “and next time we’ll be waiting for him, right, Ma? Blam, blam, blam!” He popped the other one out. Such a strong-willed child. It was not easy being a mother. In a far corner some men started laughing and singing “The Little Milkmaid” and her son whirled and shot the overhanging lamp off its chain, sending it crashing to their table with a fiery explosion like a fireworks display. “Hey, wow! That’s neat!” Second John exclaimed around his tattered wet cigar and shot another lamp down, and then another, jumping up and down and shouting with childish glee. “This is fun, Ma!” Just a little boy at heart, though he scared her with the games he played. He paused, peered inside his diapers. “Uh-oh. Help, Ma! It’s number two, I think.”

  Accustomed to the games Bruce played and prepared for the worst though John (the first one) was, he was still taken aback by the scene that confronted him up at the cabin when he finally arrived. The worst that he’d prepared for? That he’d find them dead. Nevada had suggested that Bruce could be thinking about “checking out,” and might take the kid with him. She’d also held off telling him about Bruce’s departure with Lenny’s child until he’d had a several-hour head start and in his new jet to boot, so whatever John found up there, he figured, would have to be old news. Unless it was all just an elaborate scheme, using a preacher’s daughter as bait, to mock John’s smalltown proprieties and lure him out of secular duty into holy play, a lesson Bruce never tired of trying to teach him. “At heart a religious man,” Bruce called him in his farewell note, “who sometimes lost his way.” Farewell? Yes. No bodies maybe, but John had no reason to suppose they were still alive, and Bruce’s final instructions gave him every reason to suppose that they were not or soon would not be. Why had he come up here then? To try to stop it, to save his friend from himself and so save a friendship he did not want to lose. John had been guilty of few futile gestures in his life, but this was one of them. Bruce’s plane was nowhere to be seen when he flew in, but the cabin, ablaze with florid light in the dark night (his landing beacon), was as though inhabited by a menacing presence, and John entered it with his cocked rifle gripped in both hands, by now supposing that Bruce had the rifle that was missing from his gun case. The cabin had been transformed into a kind of hothouse, brimming with flowers, piles and piles of them, heaped up so high one had to crawl through special wickerwork tunnels to move from place to place. It was like a kid’s back-garden fantasy house, except that there were niches along the way with pornographic photographs mounted in them, lit from behind, some little more than marriage manual posturings, others more exotic and violent. John himself was in one of them, that bastard. How’d he get that shot? Here and there: a shoe, a sock, a ribbon. In a mirrored niche, a pair of panties, a spot of dark blood in a bed of white petals. It was all a bit suffocating and John was glad to leave the flowers behind and emerge at last in the main bedroom, which felt like an amphitheater after the claustrophobic tunnels. He was less glad about what he found there: ropes tied around the bedposts, cuffs, whips, including ragged twists of thorny long-stemmed roses and a horse crop, blood-soaked sheets and towels, here and there other stains, more excremental. A flayed summer dress, once white, lay in grisly shreds on the f
loor and, in a corner, like a proxy for its former owner, a little overnight bag, lifelessly agape, its contents spilled out and crushed underfoot. On the chest of drawers: a sheaf of documents with Bruce’s personal cover note, anticipating John’s arrival, though perhaps in Nevada’s company and not so soon, for it spoke at length about the revised handwritten will, attached, and accompanying power of attorney forms and notarized instructions to be used as authority while the will, for probable lack of a corpus delicti, was contested. All of which clearly enriched their busy little troubleshooter. There was even an envelope of cash for Nevada which, Bruce suggested, should best be laundered before using. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” he wrote, continuing the religious theme introduced in the opening lines: “As a religious man, dear John, you will appreciate what you see here as a sacramental act of extreme devotion and exaltation, and will accept it as guide and precept on your own irresolute route to sainthood. Many years ago, on the eve of your disappointing compromise with the profane world, in that wayside chapel known as the Country Tavern, you effected my own conversion, doubting Thomas that I was, by announcing that what was about to follow was in reality a church service in a holy sanctuary, and indeed it was, one of many such revelations I’ve been granted in your company. I have ever since been the voice of one crying in the wilderness, calling you back to your true vocation, your existence in nonexistence, your authentic life beyond the edge.” The nihilistic wiseass was insufferable, but the “Goodbye, John” at the end still hurt. John scanned the documents: many of Bruce’s women were rewarded but Jennifer was not, so probably bad news. Not much he could do about it. Nor about this place either. Finished. Should just burn it down, but he was too practical a man for that, he’d have to put it up for sale. Needed a good purging first, though, and John had a lot of tensions to work off, so he built a fire out in the incinerator, starting with the bedding, clothing, photos, overnight bag, and Bruce’s revised will. The flowers and all the rest would follow. He figured he’d be done in time to get home by dawn.