Stu himself liked to tell this joke when John was not around, occasionally substituting a Chevy or a Toyota for the Ford, though for some reason the joke had a way of stalling out on him when he did that. Another joke he liked to tell, one of his favorites, was the one about the oldtimer who, hollering out, “Mind if I play through, boys?” goes skipping past the young fellows on the golf course, whacking out his long straight drives, then drinks them all under the table back at the clubhouse after, prompting one of them to ask: “Whoo! You still in such fine whack in everything you do, old man?” “Aw, hell no,” he confesses, lighting up a nine-inch stogie. “Old age is a bitch, son. Take last night, for example. Woke my little darlin’ up about midnight and asked her how about it, and she says: ‘How about what? You just had it at ten o’clock and eleven o’clock, you old goat!’ That’s the trouble, see — goddamn memory’s goin’!” Stu’s little darlin’ was Daphne, and although she was a newer model, she was already, like her loving hubby and the principal heroes of his jokes, a pretty heavy guzzler, had been since their cheatin’ days, as Stu liked to call them, it was partly what brought them together, that and her ability to rouse back then his anesthetized pecker. Until recently, Stu was about the only one who ever saw the dear girl sober, and then he was usually soused to the eyeballs himself, which was just as well, since it could be a pretty demoralizing experience, being around Daphne when she didn’t have a healthy toot on, something more common of late, sad to say, have to remember to fire that young mechanic. Stu and Daphne laced their breakfast juice with gin every morning (Daphne called the drink “Amazing Grace,” Stu his day’s choke start) and sometimes never got around to supper at all. During weekdays Stu had his Ford-Mercury car lot to keep him busy, Daphne her phonecalls, but there was always a bottle reassuringly to hand for each of them, a comfortable old habit that helped to make their evenings mellow if not altogether coherent or easy to recollect after. Goddamn memory, as Stu would rumble with a grin, elbow sliding on the bar, trying to remember what it was he had to remember to do.
Daphne, once briefly John’s little darlin’, had also been, more or less at the same time, John’s wife’s best friend and so maid of honor at her wedding, the day that her present ginwinner reckoned as Day One of the romance that brought him back from the living dead, though years were to transpire before she could get around to that little bit of prestidigitation, having to get fucked over first by a passing parade of other nameless pricks, so she was nearly thirty when she started solacing old Stu, he not yet a widower but soon to be. The first thing she ever did for him was to help him back up when he fell off his barstool, a favor he returned more than once, they were made for each other. Not, however, that she supposed so at John’s wedding ten years earlier, when, sick of the old redneck’s drooling half-witticisms at her side while she was trying, with an infuriating lack of success, to get the best man’s fickle attention, she whopped old Stu in the chops with a piece of cake, an event now part of the family legend. That still didn’t shut the relentless sonuvabitch up, and when, as a mimed punchline to some slurred dumb-ass hillbilly joke, he poked his long florid nose in her cleavage, yuk-yukking in his plate after, she coolly dipped her hand in the soupy bowl of strawberries and cream, turned, and licking his weedy ear to distract him, grabbed him in the crotch, leaving a vivid handprint that he apparently, falling in love (so he told her years later), never noticed, though everyone else did, not least that old warhorse he was married to: his colorful forced exit was admired by all, Daphne’s lone triumph of the day. Centuries later, she still thought of John’s wife as her best friend, and though what with her daily excursions into oblivion it could hardly be said that, besides old Stu, Daphne had any real friends anymore, in a way it remained true, because when Daphne went into orbit she often got into long gossipy telephone chats with John’s wife, just like in the old days, the only difference being that now John’s wife was not always on the other end of the line.
Though most of the townsfolk who knew her would have agreed that Stu’s first wife, whom Daphne called a warhorse when not worse, must have been pretty hard to live with, not everyone would have blamed Winnie, that blowhard crapulous car dealer of hers being no bargain either (Stu would cheerfully admit this with a crooked grin, blinking his pale reddish lashes as though amazed at the wisdom of it, then tell the one about the old fleabag who swallowed a razor blade), and few, even among those who loved her least and laughed most at the jokes about her, would have painted her so blackly as did Stu and Daphne, who seemed sometimes almost to be trying to ward off her lingering presence by ridicule and invective even a decade after she was dead. Trevor’s wife Marge in particular was quick to leap to Winnie’s defense, both before and after the deplorable accident out at the old humpback bridge (an accident that changed Otis’s life, at least for a time), speaking of her as an essentially noble and principled woman, driven to a kind of impotent rage by the town’s antiquated and oppressive mores, of which her husband Stu was the perfect bonehead sexist exemplar. A woman of culture who had married a hick and a boor. Of course, Marge was said to be something of a dragon herself, and Winnie was her aunt. Ellsworth’s account of Winnie’s “tragic untimely death” in The Town Crier spoke of “her many cultural, civic, and religious activities” and of “this great inestimable loss to the community,” but in truth he hardly knew the woman, or her husband either for that matter, being a nondriver, nor a golfer either, it was a jaded cliché-ridden obituary, could have been about anybody. More than announcing a woman’s accidental death, it announced that something had died in him. Obits of course were a newsman’s ceaseless charge. Sooner or later, all, all pass away and, passing, exact their column inches no less than their graveyard footage. Ellsworth kept a file cabinet stuffed with bios ready to be plucked for print when a citizen fell, but truth to tell he was never ready when it actually happened, as surprised by others’ deaths as he would one day be by his own. That file cabinet, once his refuge, now made his heart sink when his eye fell on it and caused him to doubt the folly of his having cast himself as the town historian, he who could gather all the stuff of stories but could no longer find any story in the stuff, an apostle of the word fallen from grace, a deserter trapped in the trenches. More than anything it was the mind-numbing volume of mazy detail, the surfeit of story, life’s disorderly overabundance not death’s neat closure, that defeated him. That filing cabinet had no rear paneclass="underline" it opened out upon infinity. When he reached into one of its crammed drawers he was reaching toward the abyss, and so toward madness. At the time of Winnie’s death, he had been back in this town for a dozen years and his fortieth birthday, no matter which way he turned, was staring him baldly in the face. Probably his best line in the obit in fact was when he compared her death to that of an infant: “Her life, at forty, barely begun, was, like innocence abused, abruptly and cruelly ended when …” Ellsworth decided to dig out his old novel-in-progress, which he was now calling The Artist and His Model, and start working on it again.