John's Wife: A Novel by Robert Coover Read Free Book Online

red boots, bearing a large plastic bowl of potato salad like the Holy Grail: she blinked at him as though in wonderment and smiled) liked to say. What amazed him was how everything worked; God—or the gods, any would do, Reverend Lenny was not a fundamentalist—was wonderful. Lennox found he could take any experience, news item, anecdote, whatever, abstract its essence (the fun part), link it metaphorically to some general aspect of the human condition (always plenty of opportunity for pathos, humor, compassion, rue), weave in any images that freely came to mind, toss in a Biblical passage or two (Second John, for example: “And now I beg you, lady, not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but the one we have had from the beginning, that we love one another … for he who abides in the doctrine of Christ has both the Father and the Son”: that one was so brilliant it had caused John’s lawyer cousin’s wife to faint dead away), speak with conviction, gravity, and intensity, and shazam! another brilliant spellbinding supersermon. So much fun was it, he soon found himself testing God’s limits, as it were, by attempting to convert the most unlikely material—a golf game, rock lyrics, a visit to the barbershop or a bellyflop at the country club pool, Saturday morning TV cartoons, dirty jokes, shopping at the malls, even the holes in doughnuts or the repairing of a clogged stool in the church basement—into Sunday morning classics of spiritual uplift and moral wisdom. Certainly he was uplifted if no one else was. It was nearly as good as turning on (and he had used that, too, only lightly veiled: John had winked at him from the front of the congregation). So, while John’s son was aping the town photographer at his parents’ Pioneers Day garden party, Lennox was doing what he always did at such events: gathering images. He had decided it was time to take advantage of the hot topic of the day and preach on the doctrinal meaning of a “civic center”: What was it and why was it (in theory) so significant to us all? What did it mean that the beloved park with all its natural Edenic beauty had to be sacrificed so that that center of our civility could be, not found, but fashioned? He envisioned a link to the great themes of the settling of this nation, the New Jerusalem dream and all that, and thus (his wife’s costume suddenly delighted him) to this weekend’s celebrations: hey, genius, right on! He watched John’s little boy with his taped-junk “camera,” bobbing about frenetically with a kind of despairing enthusiasm, a hopeful anguish, and thought: a paradigm for our piteous effort to focus upon the real, to find that center. What was the real, and why was it so elusive? As though in reply, John’s wife passed in her knee-length shorts and crisp cotton shirt, all eyes in the backyard upon her, and Lennox thought: whatever it is, it has substance. Form. Body. And bodily parts. For God so loved the world that he eschewed mere abstractions. But to accept the fleshly real (he was watching his old fraternity brother, once known as Loose Bruce, put his arms around his little pubescent daughter, Jennifer’s face flushed with puppy love) was to accept pain and (his son Philip—or his wife’s, anyway—and John’s daughter Clarissa came out of the garage together, looking guilty) paradox. Irony. Was that not, in point of fact, the very message of the Cross? Yes, it was taking shape, the main themes were all there. All it lacked was a little spark and pop, a final kicker, a quote from the Good Book maybe, something with which to say: “This, my friends, this, this is real!”
    When the firecrackers went off behind John’s screwy kid, Maynard II, he, whose wife had swooned during the preacher’s sermon, was just thinking about his cousin’s power and how, maybe, with old Barnaby’s help, he was about to trounce that contemptible cocksucker at last, so he was both startled (dropped his goddamned paper