John's Wife: A Novel Read Free

keep the green steady under his feet, and with a clean crisp stroke caromed his ball into hers, croquet-style, while she was still bent over it, sending it off into a sand trap, a brilliant shot that was widely admired at the nineteenth hole afterwards by just about everyone except Mad Marge and his own unloving wife Lorraine, who dragged him away, the mean old grouch, before he’d reaped his full rewards.
    Well, they were new in town that summer and wholly dependent on the beneficence of good brother John, whose wife was close to that woman, or said to be, so Waldo’s wife had her reasons for jerking the reins, but as to love, it was true, there was none of it in her heart, for—even though she had once guided her life by it, due, she now believed, to bad reading habits—Lorraine, like Gordon and John, disbelieved in love. A sales hook for the entertainment racket, meaningful as “lite” on diet foods, that was her opinion. Waldo, who had had few reading habits, good or bad, still did believe in love, even if he couldn’t say what it was. He knew, though, it could get you in trouble, and if it could, would. This view of love as an irresistible but chastising force would have been shared by many in town—by Veronica, for example, another schoolchum of John’s wife and much chastised by that emotion to which she nevertheless wistfully clung—or by Otis, upholder of order, for whom love was more or less the same thing as grace, though one could sometimes make you hot and foolish, while the other usually did not—or by Beatrice, the preacher’s wife, who believed that all love came from the Creator, like her husband Lennox said on Sunday mornings, but that the Lord sometimes moved in mysteriously distressing ways. As now, for example: how was it possible, dear God, her present plight? Kate the town librarian, referring to this sweet-joy/wild-woe power of love to overwhelm, delight, and then undo, liked to say that humankind’s apprehensions of the divine and of the diabolical were equally love’s delusions, while goodness, truth, and beauty, without love, were fantasies, idle fictions of a mind turned in on itself and meaningful as chicken scratchings. That is to say, Kate, assenting but without illusions, also believed, much loved herself so long as she lived, in love. As did Dutch the motelkeeper, who nightly watched what he called meat fever erupt and die beyond his magic mirrors but scrupulously kept his distance from a force he thought of as anything but benign. And likewise Alf, he of the inquiring finger, for whom love was, unreasonably, reason’s sedative, else best understood as a chemical reaction to certain neural stimuli, sometimes locally pleasurable, generally overrated. His nurse Columbia sympathized with this latter opinion, though more or less, with but one exception, in the abstract, but did not trust her widowered colleague’s pose of bemused detachment, especially with John’s wife in the stirrups. For Clarissa, it was just great, love was. “Intense” was her word for it. Like, wow. But for her granddad, Barnaby the builder, it only led to despair, pinning you to the earth and gnawing your heart out, without letting you die. If one could stop loving, there would be peace and death. Barnaby being yet another who, inconsolably, loved John’s wife.
    Ah well, love: a profound subject. Back in his mayoral days, giving the traditional bandstand speech at the climax of the annual Pioneers Day parade one hot summer, John’s wife still just a schoolkid then, Barnaby’s old lawyer friend Maynard, thumbs hooked in the sleeveholes of his vest, speculated that it was love that had made and mapped the town: the original pioneers’ love of adventure that brought them out here, the settlers’ love of the land that caused them to stay and put down roots, the love of the early town planners for order and progress and the entrepreneurial spirit, those qualities that caused this great town center to rise