by John Barth
But it would not be fair to suggest that Ebenezer was entirely responsible for his impasse. There were a few occasions during the first year when he managed to do his work satisfactorily, even intelligently, for several weeks running, and yet no mention was made of transferring him to the promised post. Only once did he muster courage enough to inquire about it: Mr. Paggen made him a vague reply which he accepted eagerly, in order to terminate the interview, and never spoke of it again. Actually, except for infrequent twinges of conscience, Ebenezer was quite content to languish among the junior apprentices: he had learned the job and was frightened at the prospect of learning another. Moreover, he found the city suited to his languor; his free hours he spent with his friends in the coffee-houses, taverns, or theaters. Now and again he devoted a Sunday, without much success, to his writing-desk. And in general he came quite to forget what it was he was supposed to be doing in London.
It was withal a curious time in his life. If not actually satisfying, the routine was at any rate in no way unpleasant, and Ebenezer floated along in it like a fitful sleeper in a warm wash of dreams. Often, chameleonlike, he was but a reflection of his situation: were his companions boasting the tenuousness of their positions he might declare, in a burst of camaraderie, “Should old Andy discover my situation, ’twould be off to Maryland with me, sirs, and no mistake!” As often he went out of his way to differ with them, and half-yearned for the bracing life of the plantations. Still other times he’d sit like a stuffed stork all the afternoon without a word. So, one day cocksure, one day timorous; one day fearless, one craven; now the natty courtier, now the rumpled poet—and devil the hue that momently colored him, he’d look a-fidget at the rest of the spectrum. What’s red to a rainbow?
All of which is to say, if you wish, that insofar as to be is to be in essence the Johnny-come-Friday that was John o’ Thursday, why, this Ebenezer Cooke was no man at all. As for Andrew, he must have been incurious about his boy’s life in London, or else believed that A good post is worth a long wait. The idyl lasted not for one, but for five or six years, or until 1694—in the March of which, when a disastrous wager brought it to a sudden end, our story begins.
6
The Momentous Wager Between Ebenezer and Ben Oliver, and Its Uncommon Result
PIMP IN EBENEZER’S CIRCLE was one wiry, red-haired, befreckled ex-Dubliner named John McEvoy, twenty-one years old and devoid of school education, as long in energy and resourcefulness as short in money and stature, who spent his days abed, his evenings pimping for his privileged companions, and the greater part of his nights composing airs for the lute and flute, and who from the world of things that men have valued prized none but three: his mistress Joan Toast (who, whore as well, was both his love and his living), his music, and his liberty. No one-crown frisker Joan, but a two-guinea hen well worth the gold to bed her, as knew every man among them but Ebenezer; she loved her John for all he was her pimp, and he her truly too for all she was his whore—for no man was ever just a pimp, nor any woman merely whore. They seemed, in fact, a devoted couple, and jealous.
All spirit, imagination, and brave brown eyes, small-framed, large-breasted, and tight-skinned (though truly somewhat coarse-pored, and stringy in the hair, and with teeth none of the best), this Joan Toast was his for the night who’d two guineas to take her for, and indignify her as he would, she’d give him his gold’s worth and more, for she took that pleasure in her work as were she the buyer and he the vendor; but come morning she was cold as a fish and back to her Johnny McEvoy, and should her lover of the night past so much as wink eye at her in the light of day, there was no more Joan Toast for him at any price.
Ebenezer had of course observed her for some years as she and his companions came and went in their harlotry, and from the talk in the coffee-house had got to know about her in great detail at second hand a number of things that his personal disorganization precluded learning at first. When in manly moments he thought of her at all it was merely as a tart whom, should he one day find himself single-minded enough, it might be sweet to hire to initiate him at long last into the mysteries. For it happened that, though near thirty, Ebenezer was yet a virgin, and this for the reason explained in the previous chapters, that he was no person at all: he could picture any kind of man taking a woman—the bold as well as the bashful, the clean green boy and the dottering gray lecher—and work out in his mind the speeches appropriate to each under any of several sorts of circumstances. But because he felt himself no more one of these than another and admired all, when a situation presented itself he could never choose one role to play over all the rest he knew, and so always ended up either turning down the chance or, what was more usually the case, retreating gracelessly and in confusion, if not always embarrassment. Generally, therefore, women did not give him a second glance, not because he was uncomely—he had marked well that some of the greatest seducers have the faces of goats and the manner of lizards—but because, a woman having taken in his ungainly physique, there remained no other thing for her to notice.
Indeed he might have gone virgin to his grave—for there are urgencies that will be heeded if not one way then perforce another, and that same knuckly hand that penned him his couplets took no wooing to make his quick mistress—but on this March night in 1694 he was noticed by Joan Toast, in the following manner: the gallants were sitting in a ring at Locket’s, as was their custom, drinking wine, gossiping, and boasting their conquests, both of the muse and of lesser wenches. There were Dick Merriweather, Tom Trent, and Ben Oliver already well wined, Johnny McEvoy and Joan Toast out for a customer, and Ebenezer incommunicado.
“Heigh-ho!” sighed Dick at a lull in their talk. “ ’Twere a world one could live in did wealth follow wit, for gold’s the best bait to snare sweet conies with, and then we poets were fearsome trappers all!”
“No need gold,” replied Ben, “did God but give women half an eye for their interests. What makes your good lover, if not fire and fancy? And for whom if not us poets are fire and fancy the very stock in trade? From which ’tis clear, that of all men the poet is most to be desired as a lover: if his mistress have beauty, his is the eye will most be gladdened by’t; if she have it not, his is the imagination that best can mask its lack. If she displease him, and he slough her off shortly, she hath at least had for a time the best that woman can get; if she please him, he will haply fix her beauty for good and all in verse, where neither age nor pox can spoil it. And as poets as a class are to be desired in this respect over other sorts of fellows, so should the best poet prove the best lover; were women wise to their interests they’d make seeking him out their life-work, and finding him would straight lay their favors a-quiver in his lap—nay, upon his very writing-desk—and beg him to look on ’em kindly!”
“Out on’t, then!” said Dick to Joan Toast. “Ben speaks truly, and ’tis you shall pay me two guineas this night! Marry, and were’t not that I am poor as any church mouse this week and have not long to live, you’d not buy immortality so cheap! My counsel is to snatch the bargain while it lasts, for a poet cannot long abide this world.”
To which Joan rejoined without heat, “Fogh! Could any man of ye rhyme as light as talk, or swive grand as swagger, why, your verse’d be on every lip in London and your arse in every bed, I swear! But Talk pays no toll: I look to pacify nor ear nor bum with aught o’ ye but my sweet John, who struts not a strut nor brags no brags, but saves words for his melodies and strength for the bed.”
“Hi!” applauded Ben. “Well put!”
“If ill timed,” John McEvoy added, frowning lightly upon her. “Let no such sentiments come ’twixt thee and two guineas this night, love, or thy sweet John’ll have nor strength nor song, but a mere nimbly gut to bed ye with on the morrow.”
“ ’Sblood!” remarked Tom Trent without emotion. “If Lady Joan reason rightly, there’s one among us who far more merits her favor than you, McEvoy, for as you speak one word to our two, so speak you ten to his one: I mean yon Ebenezer,
who for lack of words should be chiefest poet and cocksman in this or any winehouse—John Milton and Don Juan Tenorio in a single skin!”
“Indeed he may be,” vowed Joan, who, being by chance seated next to Ebenezer, gave him a pat on the hand.
“At any rate,” smiled McEvoy, “having heard not a line of his making, I’ve no evidence he’s not a poet.”
“Nor I he’s not that other,” Joan added smartly, “and ’tis more praise on both counts than I can praise the rest o’ ye.” Then she colored somewhat and added: “I must own I’ve heard it said, Marry fat but love lean, for as how your fat fellow is most often a jolly and patient husband, but your bony lank is long all over and springy in the bed. Howbeit, I’ve no proof of the thing.”
“Then ’sdeath, you shall have it!” cried Ben Oliver, “for there’s more to extension than simple length. When the subject in hand’s the tool of love, prithee give weight to the matter of diameter, for diameter’s what gives weight to love’s tool—whether ’tis in hand or in the subject, for that matter! Nay, lass, I’ll stick by my fat, as’t hath stuck by me. A plump cock’s the very devil of the hen house, so they say: he treads ’em with authority!”
“ ’Tis too weighty a question to leave unsettled,” declared McEvoy. “What think you, Tom?”
“I take no interest in affairs of the flesh,” said Tom, “but I have e’er observed that women, like men, have chiefest relish in things forbidden, and prize no conquest like that of a priest or saint. ’Tis my guess, moreover, that they find their trophy doubly sweet, inasmuch as ’tis hard come by to begin with, and when got ’tis fresh and potent as vintage brandy, for having been so long bottled and corked.”
“Dick?”
“I see no sense in it,” Merriweather said. “ ’Tis not a man’s weight, but his circumstances, that make him a lover. The sweetest lover of all, I should think, is the man about to end his life, who would by the act of love bid his adieu to this world, and at the moment of greatest heat pass on the next.”
“Well, now,” McEvoy said, “ye owe it to England to put an answer to’t. What I propose is this, that ye put each your best foot forward, so to speak, this same night, and let Joan take eight guinea from him she names loser. Thus the winner gets glory for him and his kind and a swiving to boot; the losers get still a swiving—ay, a double swiving!—and my good woman and I get chops instead of chitterlings for a day. Done?”
“Not I,” said Tom. “ ’Tis a sorry sport, is lust, that makes man a slavering animal on embracing his mistress and a dolorous vegetable after.”
“Nor I,” said Dick, “for had I eight guineas I’d hire three trollops and a bottle of Madeira for one final debauch ere I end my life.”
“Mary, ’tis done for all ‘o’ me,” said Ben, “and heartily, too, for your Joan’s had none of old Ben these two months past.”
“Nor shall I more,” swore Joan cheerfully, “for thou’rt a sweatbox and a stinkard, sir. My memory of our last will serve as your performance, when I came away bruised and abused as a spaniel bitch from a boar’s pen and had need of a course of liniments to drive out the aches and a course of hot baths to carry off the smell. For the rest of the wager, ’tis Mr. Cooke’s to yea or nay.”
“So be’t,” shrugged Ben, “though had I known at the time ’twas that studding I’d be judged by, you’d have found me more bull than boar and haply have a Minotaur to show for’t. What say you, Ebenezer?”
Now Ebenezer had followed this raillery intently and would have joined in it, perhaps, but that from his overstocked wardrobe no particular style came readily to hand. Then, when Joan Toast touched him, the hand she touched tingled as if galvanized, and on the instant Ebenezer felt his soul rise up in answer. Had not Boyle shown, and Burlingame taught, that electrical attraction takes place in a vacuum? Well, here was Boyle figured in the empty poet: the pert girl worked some queer attraction in him, called forth a spark from the vacuum of his character, and set him all suddenly a-burn and a-buzz.
But did this prick-up afford the man identity? On the contrary: as he saw the direction the twitting took and heard McEvoy give birth to the wager, he but buzzed and burned the more; his mind ran madly to no end like a rat in a race and could not engage the situation. His sensibility all erected, he could feel the moment coming when the eyes of all would swing to bear on him with some question which he’d be expected to answer. It was the wait for it, together with the tingle of Joan Toast’s touch and the rush to find a face to meet the wager with, that made him sick when his ears heard Ben’s “What say you, Ebenezer?” and his two eyes saw ten look to him for reply.
What say? What say? His windpipe glotted with a surfeit of alternatives; but did he urge one up like a low-pressured belch, the suck of the rest ungassed it. Eyes grew quizzical; smiles changed character. Ebenezer reddened, not from embarrassment but from internal pressure.
“What ails ye, friend?” McEvoy.
“Speak up, man!” Ben Oliver.
“Swounds! He’ll pop!” Dick Merriweather.
One Cooke eyebrow fluttered. A mouth-corner ticked. He closed and unclosed his hands and his mouth, and the strain near retched him, but it was all a dry heave, a false labor: no person issued from it. He gaped and sweated.
“Gah,” he said.
“ ’Sblood!” Tom Trent. “He’s ill! ’Tis the vapors! The fellow wants a clyster!”
“Gah,” said Ebenezer again, and then froze tight and said no more, nor moved a single muscle.
By this time his behavior had been noticed by the other patrons of the winehouse, and a number of the curious gathered round him where he sat, now rigid as a statue.
“Hi, there, throw’t off!” demanded one fellow, snapping his fingers directly before Ebenezer’s face.
“ ’Tis the wine has dagged him, belike,” a wag suggested, and tweaked the poet’s nose, also without effect. “Aye,” he affirmed, “the lad’s bepickled himself with’t. Mark ye, ’tis the fate awaits us all!”
“As you please,” declared Ben Oliver with a grin; “I say ’tis a plain case of the staggering fearfuls, and I claim the victory by default, and there’s an end on’t.”
“Aye, but what doth it profit you?” Dick Merriweather asked.
“What else but Joan Toast this night?” laughed Ben, slapping three guineas onto the table. “Upon your honor as judge, John McEvoy, will you refuse me? Test my coins, fellow: they’ll ring true as the next man’s, and there’s three of ’em.”
McEvoy shrugged his shoulders and looked inquiringly at his Joan.
“Not in a pig’s arse,” she sniffed. She flounced from her chair and with a wink at the company flung her arms around Ebenezer’s neck and caressed his cheek.
“Ah, me ducky, me dove!” she cooed. “Will ye leave me to the mercies of yon tub o’ suet, to lard like any poor partridge? Save me, sir!”
But Ebenezer sat unmoved and unmoving.
“ ’Tis no lardoon thou’rt in for,” Ben said. “ ’Tis the very spit!”
“Ah! Ah!” cried Joan as though terrified and, clambering onto Ebenezer’s lap, hid her face in his neck. “I shake and I shiver!”
The company shouted with delight. Joan grasped one of Ebenezer’s large ears in each hand and drew his face nose to nose with her own.
“Carry me off!” she implored him.
“To the spit with her!” urged an onlooker. “Baste the hussy!”