Free John's Wife: A Novel by Robert Coover Page B

declaimed while sprawled in the nude, wearing a top hat and smoking a long cigar, Gordon at the easel, frustrated with the impossible translation of light on flesh into oily smears on canvas-board, saddened by his boyhood friend’s announced departure, and musing the while on the aesthetic ugliness of the dark lumpy dangle between men’s legs, as though something that should be inside had grotesquely fallen out, Gordon’s an abstract ideal of pure unblemished form, wartless, headless, hairless, truth expressed best when least expressed (the poet’s line, though it was Gordon who, in other words, first said it). Because he was leaving town forever, Ellsworth allowed his friend to photograph his poses that the paintings might someday (they both believed in art) get done, these taken with a borrowed camera, Gordon’s first essays on film, including one of a laughing Ellsworth dressed only in his high school drum major’s hat, looking back over his bony white shoulder, baton raised on high, other hand hidden, but somewhere between his hairy legs: See ya later, master painter!
    Of course, he returned, the silly man, though not with tail between his legs, where it belonged, as most had hoped, but cocky still and weird as ever, only a monkish bald spot on his crown marking his seven years away, no other signs of the misfortunes which all felt must befall so unrepentant a wiseass in the world. Well, concealed perhaps, the bruises, for return at least he did, and after nose-thumbing farewells that had seemed irrevocable, all ties severed, bridges burnt. So what brought him back? Filial duty, Ellsworth would explain with a flick of a wrist as though brushing away a fly, that and the need, he would add with a weary condescending smile from beneath his jaunty black beret, for a quiet out-of-the-way place to finish his novel-in-progress. As for the alleged novel, who could say, but it was true that his enfeebled father, though he’d bitterly disowned his eccentric son, could no longer run the old family printshop alone, it was Ellsworth saved it, perhaps not beyond redemption after all. This certainly was Barnaby’s view, had been all along. Barnaby was close to that family, Ellsworth’s parents his parents’ friends and his in turn, he’d known the strange boy since his awkward birth twenty years too late and had half-adopted him when the gawky child’s aged mother died, and so it was Barnaby who, remembering the little hand-drawn and -lettered newspapers the boy would entertain his infant daughter with, had located him and, with offers to back a weekly newspaper if Ellsworth would print and edit it, brought him home again. And thus began The Town Crier , successor to The Daily Patriot , which had died in Ellsworth’s absence, nothing but an oral record left of all the time between, the which and more Ellsworth now collected—grist, it was suspected, for his novel-if-a-novel’s mill—in his guest column “I Remember.”
    “Quiet! This place? Is old Elsie kidding?” Daphne had hooted when her best friend told her what that longhaired geek, a relative of sorts and once upon a time her friend’s babysitter, had said that summer he first came back. She’d blown a bubble with her gum, sucked it in, and snapped it with her bright white teeth: Oh, what a smile she had back then! Everybody said so! “Honey, this town is jumping!” This was out at the country club pool, it was the summer before their sophomore year in high school, and Daphne was ready for anything and everything, though she had only the dimmest notion, got mostly from the movies and the hit parade, what everything might be. That is to say, as she put it years later on the telephone to her best friend (still wed to John, though Daphne by then was, as she liked to put it, under her fourth), she knew everything in those days about sexual intercourse, but nothing at all about fucking. She had a crush that summer on the lifeguard at the pool, an older guy named