John's Wife: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

in over two hundred carefully maintained and catalogued albums shelved in the back room were, Gordon knew, his greatest achievements, but in the way that all artists are misunderstood (the ironies neither escaped him nor embittered him), what he was best known for in town were his commercial studio portraits. In the spring there were school class, club, and team photos, then graduation, first communions, and weddings in June, the Pioneers Day costumes, birthdays and anniversaries and new babies all year round, Christmas card family portraits in the autumn, club and company year-end galas to follow. There was hardly a household in town without at least one of his photographs, the only thing on most of their walls, buffets, or pianos resembling original art, and all the record most had of family history. Of course, Gordon was good at them as at everything else in what others called his job: they were sharply focused, majestically lit, elegantly composed, ultimately flattering. They were even, for occasions so inherently formal, unusually expressive, something one might not have expected, knowing Gordon, a notoriously timid and solitary man, severe even and cold. Weird, some said. No “Hey there sourpuss watch the little say cheese birdie” from Gordon. But no matter how banal the occasion, he was determined to get each composition just right and his broad pantomimic gestures as he tacked and bobbed behind his lights and camera, demonstrating the attitudes he wished his subjects to assume as they posed there on his little curtained stage, always brought a kind of theatrical gaiety to the otherwise awkward occasion. They loved him suddenly, not knowing why, nor did he understand this either, but it was the love one felt (Pauline understood this) for a clown, and it showed in their faces.
    The photographer’s circussy style was not lost on John’s young son Mikey, who used it for one of his famous wordless monodramas at his parents’ annual Pioneers Day barbecue the summer of the civic center controversy, an awkward occasion for Trevor whose wife Marge was leading the opposition to the building of the annoying thing, having even managed that very week to get a temporary restraining order (soon to be overturned, of course, no stopping John) to prevent the plowing up of the city park, and who, even at the barbecue, had trouble keeping her mouth shut. Well, nothing new there. Trevor was John’s personal accountant and a corporation officer, Marge the town’s most intransigent gadfly, there’d been embarrassing parties like this before. Fortunately John was a tolerant man with a good sense of humor, maybe he even got a kick out of Marge’s quixotic activism, they’d been at it since grade school after all, and—until now anyway—she’d not put Trevor’s business relationship with John at any serious risk. Trevor sipped his spring water and knocked on what he hoped was wood: John was about ninety percent of all the business relationships he had. Little Mikey had roped a pillow around his tummy, buttoned on one of his father’s trenchcoats, its tails dragging the ground, and rigged a fanciful camera out of a video cassette, toilet paper tubes, plastic dishware from a child’s tea set, and a penlight which his sister Clarissa complained he’d stolen from her bedroom. Now he bobbed and waddled through the lawn party, taking everyone’s photo by switching the penlight on and off, organizing “family portraits” with broad ludicrous gestures, and, whenever she hove into sight, chasing his mother about with his peculiar apparatus, click-click-clicking away as though demonically possessed. Not everyone got the point of Mikey’s act, especially this last part, even if they knew who was being mocked, but Trevor knew, he’d seen the photographer up to his tricks before. The first time, he’d been sitting in the Sixth Street Cafe on a crisp autumn day with a client, a farmer for whom he was setting up an improved health