John's Wife

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The bed was for some in town a playground, as it was for newcomers Rex and Nevada when not a platform for their business ventures; it was a platform of sorts for Gordon the photographer as well, an artistic prop like a chair, a bathtub, the street, while for his friend Ellsworth it was more like a patch of meadow in the tangled forest of his creative imagination (the Artist had his hand on the Model’s thigh again, lecturing the sardonic Stalker, hovering, unseen, nearby, on the higher morality of aesthetic truth); for many, like oldtimers Marge or Otis, the bed was simply a place to get some shut-eye; but for some it was nothing short of the rack, sheer hell on sheets. Try telling Veronica, for example, that sex was fun. It had a certain tickle, all right, but it was more like terminal athlete’s foot. Or hemorrhoids, more aptly, given her dearly beloved’s brutish fancies. For whom, the middle Maynard, no joy either. More like prosecuting a tough case, proving he could still do it, even if he hated it. Contrarily, Gretchen and Columbia, who were otherwise finding the town a bit shaky for them of late, were having a grand time there, playing with vibrators, ointments, penis extenders, and condoms, ribbed or pimpled, some even with ears and noses and little Martian antennae on them, which Gretchen had ordered through catalogues that arrived at the pharmacy and which kept them giggling throughout their evening recreation time, which was strictly limited, since they were both working women. Not that it was all just idle frolic, it was also quite educational, Columbia learning at last how men really worked when she took her turn strapping on a clear plastic penis with its inner anatomy showing through in bright colors and had a go for herself. For Alf, nurse Lumby’s dyspeptic boss and deliverer of Gretchen’s brood (an unusual case: he had to break her hymen to get the first ones out), a bed was where most people went to die, he attended them there and watched them go, his own true heart among them, and living alone now, he often avoided his own, wandering the streets at night or dropping off on the living room couch during consolingly banal TV reruns, pap against the dread. Even when Harriet was alive and they were still copulating (it was fun, they’d got a kick out of it for a while, in spite of their overawareness of its mechanics, but came quickly to think of it as kid stuff, and after the babies were born, turned to it only when in goofier moods, most often drunk or with others), they preferred any private place, in or out of the house, to the dreary bed, Harriet even more blunt than Alf about “crawling into the coffin” at night. “I’m pooped, I’m dead,” she’d say, leaving a party. “I’m going to go put the meat in the cooler before it goes off.” At a foreign-made piece of erotic fluff in the old Palace Theater one night, during a soft-focus view from the ceiling of lovers on a bed, the old army nurse had provoked an auditoriumful of irritable shushing by remarking, too loudly, that whenever she looked down on a bed like that, all she could think about was torn limbs, Alf adding laconically to turn the shushes to self-conscious laughter that he couldn’t be sure because of the fuzzy camera work, but he thought the actress (fuzzy camera work was his problem now: hard as he stared at his finger — there was a message on its tip, he knew, something about a patient: what was it? — he couldn’t bring it into focus) had a thyroid problem and recommended she get a checkup. Kate, who was there that night with Oxford, sitting beside them, and who in general had a benign view of beds (though, in the end, when it came, she refused to retire to one), pointed out that the white-sheeted bed viewed at that angle was a kind of screen-within-a-screen and that consequently the coupled lovers were not merely actors in a movie and thus nothing more than the ghostly illusions of a flickering light, but they were actors playing actors, and so had doubly lost their substance, as though to say that love itself was such an emptying out of emptiness, Oxford replying: “Or such a luminous density of layered sensations,” all of which was making the younger crowd in the theater wish these old farts, long past a good time, would shut up and stop spoiling it for others. Dutch had booked that film, the bed as theater being his own preferred use of that ubiquitous piece of furniture: gave him his jollies without aggravation or anxieties and no strings after. He missed the old Palace with its big screen and high ceilings, appreciating in his own way the remark Waldo had made recently during one of his motel junkie-fucks that the beds he kept crawling into seemed to be drifting farther and farther away from the center as though that center were somehow getting lost, fading from view, the emaciated kid with him replying that she didn’t know there ever was a center. “Sounds like you’re on some kinda guilt trip, man.” “Naw … haw!” For Floyd the hardware man, the bed was also a theater of sorts. He liked to take John’s wife there, grab her by the hair, tie her to the bedposts, and whip her with his red suspenders, which he called his “cat.” Then she’d moan and toss her head about and beg him to make love to her or kill her, she couldn’t stand the passion welling up in her. He’d let her kiss and suck at his johnnie, chastising her all the while with his whistling cat. Then she’d belch, and he’d do what he could to have some kind of orgasm, and get off. He tried to imagine whipping Edna with his suspenders, but it seemed incredibly silly.

Why did Edna belch whenever she engaged in what a boy once called, inviting her to one, a mattress dance? She couldn’t rightly say, it just came like that when she did, if coming was what she truly did (for Edna, it was more like being very nervous about something, and then suddenly, blissfully, not being nervous anymore: she always popped straight off afterwards without so much as a blink), but it probably had something to do with her stepmother’s stern admonition that burping was the most wicked thing a body could do: just letting go like that, they lord, not giving a care. Maybe she was really talking about letting go out the other end, not being able to bring herself to say the word for that, but ever since, whenever Edna felt crazily reckless, like when a person had his thing in her, for example, up came the burps. Her stepmother also told her, on her wedding day, “I don’t know how you’re gonna cotton to what comes next, Edna, but wither you love it nor hate it, it won’t last long. When the lollygagging’s over, then love — if there sincerely be any — will come at you looking like something else again. If you recognize it and show you’re grateful for it, however contrary it is from what you’re customed to, then you’ll have love in all ways passable in this world of the mortal body, but if you get bitter about what you’ve lost, and losing is mostly what you’ll know, then, sure as you’re born to die, Edna, love’ll just dry up, and you’ll be left standing nekkid in the cold without nothing to keep your heart from freezing up and cracking on the spot.” Her stepmom did have a way with words. That “cracked heart” notion, which was associated in her mind with one winter so fearsome cold the windowpanes splintered, still caused Edna shortness of breath and made her press her hand to her breast to cozy it whenever she recalled it to mind. As to Edna’s views on beds, they were of a strictly practical sort, having to do with price and sturdiness of construction, the firmness of the innersprings, and how easy it was to keep the headboards clean and change the linens, which on Edna’s bed were mostly plain cotton (one color percale set for holidays), neatly covered with washable spreads and blankets, and always made up, first thing after breakfast. Fixing the bed up proper every morning was not just a housewifely habit. It was what most helped Edna to get on with each day, what with all the troubles Floyd got into through the years, the peculiar ways he had sometimes, not always nice, the loneliness she felt in this town, and the strange things happening in it of late. Strange things? Well, for example, there was the night their old friend Stu called, must have been about two in the morning, hadn’t heard from him in a month of Sundays, and he was blubbering something about seeing Winnie’s ghost. Of course, he was so besotted you couldn’t hardly understand him, maybe he was just trying to tell one of his jokes, and he surely didn’t remember it next day when Floyd took the car in to have the brakes relined, probably just an old drunk’s nightmare, Floyd said, but it was mighty peculiar all the same. And then they say that little boy who’s missing ran away, afraid of something terrible, but his parents won’t even admit he’s gone, like they know more than they can tell, or done something wrong they can’t admit to, she heard folks gabbing about it at the checkout line in the supermarket. And had anyone seen the photographer’s wife lately? someone asked. Edna hadn’t and so did not know what that was about, though the expression on people’s faces suggested that this was probably a story which went back aways, before hers and Floyd’s time here, and so rightly belonged to them but not to her, and so she wouldn’t know what to ask. Anyways, she was no gossip, though whether because of principles or shyness, she could not directly say, but if she were, she would have asked them, well, and what about John’s wife? Since that vexing night at the bridge table, Edna had seen her only once, setting with her children at church, wearing a red hat. But then she wasn’t setting with her children. She was singing in the choir. And no hat on neither. Edna thought she must have winked off for a moment without taking notice. She recognized that she was staring and from the choir John’s wife was staring back. Right smack into her eyes. First time she’d ever done that when she wasn’t just doling charity. Edna ducked her head and prayed for guidance, too flustered to look again. After the service, she stood around outside until Floyd got too antsy, but she never saw her come out and she hadn’t seen her since. Was she gone out of town? Or …or something else? It perplexed her deeply, like all the rest happening here of late, but Edna reckoned there were some things in this world she wasn’t meant to understand; she made the bed. She tucked the corners of the sheets and blankets neatly, fluffed the pillows, laid the pretty chenille spread with its pale blue tassels, and placed embroidered pillows on top of the sleeping ones, and when she was done, it was like a pretty little box with the lid on, her answer to her stepmother’s worries about “letting go.” Edna never burped in public.