John's Wife: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

of his neck again.
    Thus, the men of the town revealed themselves through their longings, Otis, Maynard, Floyd, and all the others. Women, too, Lorraine, Marge, Veronica, Beatrice, but in a different way: they were holding something together out here in this vast emptiness, themselves perhaps. The men were more audacious, risked more in their fantasies, as though they perceived this as a birthright. Death was the province of the women, and wisdom, and paradox—garbage left them by the men perhaps, but useful to them as they plotted out the terms of their survival after the cataclysm. Men ventured, but women prepared the field, spreading their skirts out over what ground they could hold (Lollie’s image; her friend Marge, whom Waldo called Mad Marge, rarely wore skirts, saw it differently). The attention of John’s wife, however momentary and enigmatic, was one of the laurels the town’s men competed for, while the women, contrarily, often felt threatened by John’s wife, yet protected by her at the same time. Lorraine, having lost much, sometimes felt she hated her, yet had to admit she needed her as she needed Waldo’s idiocy: one had to live with these strange forces. John’s wife often called forth these ambivalent responses from the women around her. Trevor’s wife Marge envied John’s wife, pitied her. Little Clarissa felt a kind of sentimental rage toward her, Opal a jealous affection, Lumby an erotic disgust. Old Stu’s wife Daphne loved her, more than anyone in the world really, but she could have expressed this better if John’s wife were dead. Floyd’s wife Edna watched her as one watched a cloud: perhaps it would rain; it didn’t matter.
    Daphne watched everything these days as one watched a cloud. Seeing and not seeing. John’s wife was her best friend, had been, maybe still was, who could say? Things were pretty vague. Her memories, too, about as cloudy as the rest of it, thanks to Amazing Grace, but she could still recall sitting in the cold concrete stands of a university football game with John, drinking whiskey from a pocket flask. He had invited her up for a Thanksgiving weekend and she had brought her best friend from high school along, John fixing her up with one of his fraternity brothers. Daphne and John were under a blanket and he had his free hand in her pants and she felt very good. As she felt now, with her own hand in her pants, lacking any available other: funny how entangled the present was with the past, hard to tell them apart sometimes. Daphne’s friend was there at the game that day with a comedian named Val or Vern, whatever happened to that guy, he had a missing molar he could whistle through and he sang like a tinny prewar radio crooner, you could even hear the static. How vivid it all was! She should write this up for Elsie’s newspaper: “I Remember.” The guy’s favorite number was “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along,” and while he warbled away, John thrummed her clitoris like a tuning fork. Magic. Like another dimension. It was cold. The sky was blue. The team they were cheering won. Later, in some other memory, might have been the same weekend, more likely not (Christmas? Easter? some time that stank of festering happiness), her best friend had her head on John’s shoulder in the front seat of John’s new silver Mustang, while Daphne was getting mauled on the cramped bucket seats on the floor in the back by a guy with a flat-top haircut and a boil on his nose, feeling not so good. Sort of like, she thought then, thought now, sniffing her fingers, a runner in a relay race, passing on the baton, not because she was ready to let go of it—not Daphne, hell’s bells, are you kidding? give me that sucker!—but because she was supposed to. No wonder she’d been maid of honor at their wedding.
    A remarkable event, that wedding, the best the town had seen in years and nothing like it in the nearly two decades since. As one might expect, of