John's Wife: A Novel Read Free Page B

that was how he knew that what he now felt for John’s wife was covetousness. He did not want to give himself to her, did not want to embrace her, care for her, adore her, live with her. He did not even want to make love to her. He wanted to throw her down on her fantastic ass and fuck the bejesus out of her. Praise the Lord, this had not yet happened. “Thou shalt not!” he roared at the giggling brats in Sunday school, his voice quaking with the conflict in his heart. He often imagined taking her right there, among the choir robes, something about the glossy feel of them, the range of murky body odors, the cheap lockerroom challenge of the church’s damp back chambers with their un-painted cement walls, cold tile floors. Or else over a counter of carpet tacks, flare nuts, and auger bits down at the store on Main Street. On top of the lead float in the Pioneers Day parade. On the fancy lime green toilet in John’s house between bridge hands (the toilet in Floyd’s house was white with a pink terrycloth seat cover and a loose handle). Or, shoot, why not trump her right on the cardtable itself, frigging grand slam! Maybe his feelings toward John were mixed up in these stormy desires. Whenever the four of them played bridge or had dinner together, which was about once every three or four months, depending on John’s sullen sense of duty (Floyd sensed this and it embittered him), Floyd contrived to sit so as to have his knee pressed against John’s wife’s knee. This recklessness: was it just another effort to emulate John?
    John was a man often emulated, Floyd was not alone in this. Some men emulated his style, others his vocabulary, some his aggressiveness or his laugh. Alf emulated his golf swing, not that it did him any good, old Stu the car dealer his jokes and Hard Yard his derring-do, Lennox his cool acceptance of the way things were. When Lennox told his wife Beatrice, his children, his students, his congregation, and most of all himself, “Let it happen,” he was emulating John. For John’s old high school coach Snuffy, entering politics, it was not so much the boy’s fierce team loyalties that he emulated (these Snuffy shared and who knows but engendered) as his strategic use of them in others. In short, it was John’s smarts he sought to emulate, just as for Dutch it was his friend’s killer instincts, and for Marge’s husband Trevor, aka Trivial Trev, his employer’s respect for numbers, for statistics. “There’s no such thing as money, Trev,” John used to tell him, his reading spectacles halfway down his broken nose making him look mockingly professorial, “only the counting of it.” Trevor also emulated John’s attention to detail, his caution with money, his staying power, but he may have been misreading John, seeing what he wanted to see. As all do. Lorraine’s cork-head husband Waldo emulated everything about John, some even thought he was making fun of John, but in actuality Waldo thought John was emulating him . Perhaps Waldo was right, partly right anyway, they had been buddies since college, it was a question of which came first, as Waldo liked to say: the chigger or the leg. Though they had often shared women in the past, Waldo even emulated John’s attitude toward John’s wife: utter disinterest. Anything else would have seemed like incest to him.
    Otis, who emulated John’s quiet force, something he had picked up from John back when they had played football here together, had been in love with John’s wife since high school, though she was surely unaware of it. He had never gone out with her, hardly dreamed of it (in this respect, there was no emulating John, not for Otis), had rarely even spoken to her, but they had met a couple of times at high school parties, and one night at one of them she had taught him how to dance. He could still see, as though in a dream, their four feet shuffling about below them, crisscrossing on the shiny hardwood floor of the school gym, their