The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Peter Sagamore sips, says nothing, but is impressed, though he sees what’s coming.

  Both my hero and I developed the habit of wearing our boinas at the typewriter, Frank Talbott continues. Just about when the novel got stuck, the marriage came unglued and our Spanish trip blew up. The author came home, got divorced, and joined the Company as a report writer under Doug Townshend, who laid much the same trip on me as he did on you. An early practice run.

  The trouble with that novel, obviously, is that it wasn’t fiction: It too was an early practice run, for KUBARK. But the point of this story is that the chap in that novel loses his boina at a certain point in his story and then gets it back in a way that changes his life. He loses it in the old city of Ronda, on the Ponte Nuevo; the wind blows it into the canyon under the bridge. You know the Tajo de Ronda? Never mind how he gets it back: The point is that that was almost the only invented action in the book, and not long after I invented it, something like it happened to me. My then wife flew home to Washington with our little daughter: trial separation. I stayed on in Madrid for another month to try to finish the book, but that book was finished before it started. Then I got word from Rick that Pat was filing for divorce—his lines of communication were faster than the post office—and I flew home in a hurry, leaving a lot of stuff behind for one reason or another. My books and typewriter and such I intended to retrieve eventually. The novel I left behind deliberately: didn’t have the heart to just throw it out. The boina I thought I had with me and then found I didn’t; I assumed it was lost, and I’d got so used to wearing it while I worked that I missed it surprisingly. I almost grieved for it, believe it or not.

  When the smoke cleared a bit, Rick shipped my things home in three cartons aboard an Air Force transport from our base at Torrejón. The plane crashed on takeoff, and most of its cargo was lost, along with most of the crew. The only package salvaged with my name on it was a typing-paper box containing my manuscript and my boina. The manuscript was badly damaged by fire and chemical foam, and utterly ruined by failure of imagination: I chucked it for real this time, got divorced, and joined the Company. The boina was okay.

  He takes it off. This isn’t it.

  Kate snaps her fingers:

  SHIT: THERE GOES MY STORY.

  Says Franklin Key Talbott with his crinkly smile Not necessarily. This hat here is the lineal successor to that one. He frisbees it over to her. If the boina fits, wear it.

  She does, just long enough to say You wrote that SEX EDUCATION play!

  A better hand at projecting plots than at intuiting situations, Peter Sagamore is startled. But he sees Lee Talbott smiling furrow-browed at her husband. Says Katherine to the pair of them After you tell us why in the world you packed it off in those two canisters with that scarf and this hat, I’ll tell you why finding Act One was a turnaround moment in our story-in-progress. But even as she hands the boina back to Frank Talbott, she thinks Uh-oh: I guess I can guess why this hat was in there.

  But Frank Talbott passes the thing along to his wife. She touches it to her lips, but doesn’t put it on. You should hear Carla B Silver on the subject of sperm and ova, she tells us quietly. Ma says that no sexual animals actually reproduce their own kind, and our children are actually our grandchildren.

  Oh?

  What Ma means is that our sperms and eggs are our true children, and what we think are our children are really their children. To Peter she adds, surprisingly, It’s the same with writers and readers, wouldn’t you say? You generate your stories, and your stories generate your readers. Frank and I are your grandchildren.

  Says Peter carefully, who is not always bad at intuiting situations, Nope:

  A STORY IS NOT A CHILD,

  and vice versa. But if stories were children, their readers wouldn’t be their children; they’d be one of their parents, and the author the other. The Mother and Father of Invention. He gestures at the Alert-and-Locate canister. For God’s sake, tell.

  Frank Talbott seconds that motion.

  Still turning the weathered boina in her hands, handsome, brown Lee Talbott allows as how she’s not as sure as her husband is that his little heart attack last March was not a warning from his ex-colleagues not to do a sequel to KUBARK. Three nots. Anyhow, for her it is enough that it could have been: She hates the shit we’re involved in—she means the U.S. us.

  Me too.

  Me too.

  Me too.

  Lifting it by its top-tab, she plops the boina onto her head. When Frank and Pat had Peggy back in Nineteen Fifty-two, Joe McCarthy was riding high and the cold war was red hot, but the Doomsday Factor hadn’t really sunk in. Now it’s worn us all out. I can’t even look at a chart of the Chesapeake without tightening up: Edgewood Arsenal, the Norfolk Navy Yard, the fucking Pentagon. But let’s don’t talk apocalypse.

  I got pregnant about six a.m. off the Club Med spiral pier in Buccaneer Creek in Martinique because I didn’t think I was ovulating yet and we’d had a good time ashore and when we came back aboard after midnight I fell asleep in about thirty seconds without diaphragming or mentioning that I hadn’t, and when Frank got up to pee at sunrise and came back to bed all horny, neither of us remembered. When I missed my period, we were working our way up the Windward Islands, and I didn’t mention it because the subject was touchy because we’d pretty much decided that we weren’t having children, but we hadn’t quite upped and said so. That was one of the things this boat ride was supposed to clear up and didn’t. Frank has done his bit in that line and has this terrific grown daughter and doesn’t want to go through it all again even though he wishes I had kids. I want kids more than anything in the world but happen to believe I’d be a less than terrific mother for various reasons and that he’d be a grandfather instead of a father, so I’m not interested. I warned you I’d get personal.

  Invites Peter Don’t worry: I’ll change all the names. Frank Talbott says never mind the names; he wishes he could change some of the facts.

  When I missed my second period, we were standing watches on our first long ocean passage, from Saint John up to Bermuda and Chesapeake Bay, and I’d got to thinking doomsday thoughts about the world in general and Frank’s myocardial infarct in particular. Plus I knew he half suspected what was up when I faked two periods and he didn’t call me on it. Can you imagine trying to fake menstruation on a sailboat?

  Nope.

  Nope.

  Then, when we finally clear the Virginia capes after this humongous storm such as I hope never to see at sea again, and we drag our tushes over to York River and put the anchor down for the first time since Cruz Bay Saint John, and we patch into Ma Bell to call Ma Silver up in Fells Point, the first thing we hear is that Doug Townshend has just dropped dead over Sydney, Australia, of a ruptured aneurysm. Remember, we were wrecked already when we started this cruise; it was supposed to unwreck us!

  So we pop the champagne that was meant to celebrate our safe return, but what’s to celebrate, and the stuff is world-temperature anyhow ‘cause we’re long out of ice, and we’re crying about Doug, and it occurs to me that just up the York River from where we’re anchored is this place called ISOLATION, where Frank did his junior-officer training in the CIA before we were us, and I think Welcome home, Mister and Missus Talbott. Mind you, this was two weeks ago? It seems like a semester already! So after we’ve both gone through the Kleenex and the warm champagne over poor Doug, we pop over the side to take our first swim since the Caribbean and say hello to dear Chesapeake Bay, and something bumps my arm and I give a holler, thinking it’s a skate or some Chesapeake version of a nipplefish—Did you ever swim topless in the Caribbean, she asks Kath, and get your nipples nipped by a certain little fish that Frank and I call nipplefish? No? Anyhow, it was a half-submerged orange flare canister that turned out to have nothing in it but some seawater and that paisley scarf there. Now, I’m a professional professor of literature, but I’m on leave, okay, and Frank is a real writer despite the stor
y he just told you about not being one, but we must have both been on autopilot after that storm and the bad news about Doug, because after we finished wondering What the hell and went to sleep, I wore that scarf all the next day before either one of us made the paisley/Paisley association. By that time we’d sailed past the spot where Brillig went aground, and we were coming into the Patuxent past Solomons Island where one of the Company’s safe houses used to be, and I was ready to turn Reprise around and head back to the B.V.I. Talk about spooky!

  Talk about reprises, murmurs sympathetic Kath.

  Says Lee Talbott You got it. We were back where we started last June, all the wounds still open, plus now Doug dead; all the big questions still open, too. So when we got up to Baltimore at last and Frank went down to Langley for the memorial service, I went and got myself vacuum-aspirated over in Cross Keys. In my opinion there were two distinct shlups: Drew and Lexie down the tubes. My gynecologist tells me it’s a little-known fact that maybe as many as seventy percent of human conceptions are originally twins, but one of them normally dies fast, and nobody ever knows it was there. The Vanished Twin. He also tells me that some astronomers think our sun has a vanished twin—our s-u-n sun. It loops back our way once every twenty-six million years and knocks a few comets in our direction. Sibling rivalry. Its last visit caused the Precambrian Great Death, and its return is overdue right now, as a matter of fact, like the next big action along the San Andreas Fault. What time is it?

  The woman is a coiled spring. Her husband touches her lean thigh-top; she flinches, then relaxes a bit.

  TIME TO PASS THE HAT,

  Frank Talbott says gently. She removes and kisses it; puts it on his head; fishes out a tissue to wipe her eyes with. On our side of the cockpit, Katherine squeezes Peter’s hand.

  KUBARK, Frank Talbott says, made us a little money and a lot of enemies and some friends. It also got me a literary agent (same one as yours, she tells me) and a trade editor in New York—though my real editor is my friend Lee Allan Silver. So last May, while we were going crazy over Rick’s disappearance and Jon Silver Talbott’s disappearance and Marian Silver’s various problems, and planning our big cruise to collect our heads, I set to work on another novel. It was mainly about wyes.

  Whys like the question? Wise as in wisdom?

  Wyes like the wye in Wye Island and Wye River, which is just the letter before z spelled out in English.

  Kath groans Jesus: I’m a damn librarian, and I never made that connection. She asks Peter Did you? He shrugs.

  What I had in mind, Frank Talbott goes on, was forks and confluences in people’s lives. The man has an unpresumptuous candor, innocent but not glib, in speaking of these things to Peter Sagamore, which pleases us. Like when the tide runs up the Wye River, he explains, one thing divides into two, your Front Wye and your Back Wye, and when it runs out, two things become one. Lee and I first bumped into each other at the literal fork of the Wye River, right down the road there, but that’s another story.

  At least I wanted it to be another story. What I was really thinking of was the way people grow apart, like Lee and her sister or me and my brother, and the way they sometimes come together, like Lee and me.

  Sperm and ovum, Katherine Sherritt murmurs.

  Murmurs Peter Sagamore Vanished twins.

  And forks in the road, Frank Talbott says, where things can go either way in people’s lives. So I made notes and outlines and maps, and I tinkered and diddled and fussed with the idea all the way down the Intracoastal and across the Gulf of Mexico and down to the Bay Islands and Belize, in between sailing.

  We Sagamores squeeze hands and sigh: That has been our house daydream for years. Some season, in a bigger boat than Story . . . But professional Peter doubts he’d get real work done amid such flower-girt adventure—a hollow doubt, lately!—and professional Kate would have to quit a job she much enjoys and has shaped to her liking; and now we have a family, so forget it. In the year 2000, maybe, or 2010. Those dates will be here before we know it, no? If they get here at all. And after that we’re dead, if not before, so On with the story.

  Frank Talbott says Our understanding was that Lee wouldn’t look at the manuscript till somewhere down the line, when I was ready for her reaction. At the risk of throwing good money after bad, I didn’t want to nip the thing in the bud.

  Excuse the mixed metaphor, says his editor, says Lee Talbott.

  Yeah. The first major decision, believe it or not, was whether to wear this boina while I wrote. On the one hand, there was what happened in Madrid. On the other hand there was KUBARK: I wore the boina every day while I was writing it, to exorcise the demon, and once I’d done my homework that book practically wrote itself. So I put on the hat.

  Peter nods but has his doubts: The art of the nonfiction expose is not the art of the novel.

  By Key West, Frank Talbott says, I was already in trouble, and by Cozumel I’d written myself into a hole as deep as the one Don Quixote went down into.

  Montesinos, says Professor Leah Allan Silver Talbott. Professor Peter Sagamore squeezes the hand of his favorite library scientist, who says wistfully Cozumel.

  I turned Rick Talbott into “Manfred Turner,” because Doug Townshend called him the Prince of Darkness after Byron’s Count Manfred. Lee and I were “Fenwick Turner” and “Susan Seckler.” He smiles at her. Black-eyed Susan, right? My idea of the art of fiction was to make her and “Mimi” twin sisters and Fenn and Manfred twin brothers. You’re supposed to nudge your neighbor and say, “Fen as in marshland, et cetera.” Carla B Silver became “Carmen B. Seckler,” for reasons even I am too embarrassed to tell.

  Peter’s done stuff like that too, Kath offers consolingly. Admits Peter Yup.

  But your stories are made up. I even had Jack Paisley in mine, under his real name, and the story was actually just the log of our cruise: two people going down and coming back, trying to get their heads straight and make some hard calls at certain forks in the channel. Get this: My working title was Reprise. . . .

  Sounds okay so far, encourages Katherine; I know a man who wrote a story with a boat in it named Story. Peter says nothing. F. K. Talbott says It wasn’t okay; what it was was long-faced confessional melodrama. For example, would you put a spiel like this one into a novel? Of course you wouldn’t.

  Peter shrugs his eyebrows.

  So after the Bay Islands I put the thing away while we did some hard passagemaking over to Jamaica, dead to windward: the most serious sailing we’d ever done. Then we shipped the boat by freighter from Kingston to Tobago while we flew on ahead for a week of R-and-R before starting north up the Windward Islands toward home.

  Complains envious Peter Boyoboy.

  Yeah, well. Anyhow, I was ready to pack it in again as a novelist, except for that Y business. You’ve seen Reprise’s hailport on his transom.

  Lee Talbott explains that their cutter is male. Peter won’t do the she thing either, Katherine says, except when Story’s in certain moods. Lee says Frank won’t say “Hard alee” or “Ahoy” or “Gybe-ho.” It makes him feel like Lionel Barrymore in Captains Courageous. We just say “Coming about, okay?”

  Wyes and forks and reprises, Pete prompts Franklin Key Talbott, who passes a brown hand over his brown forehead.

  Right. Choices and retracements. And conceiving children: sperm swimming up, ova floating down. Two things becoming one thing, which is both of them and neither of them.

  Says Peter SEX EDUCATION: Play.

  Sure. It came together one afternoon in Arnos Vale, in Tobago, while we were snorkeling naked and I was wishing that I wanted to be a father again so Lee could be a mother. I dived down deep to pick up a shell for her and looked up and saw her floating on her back, twenty feet above me.

  Voilà, says Katherine Sherritt: Blam. Blooey.

  Voilà indeed—all but writing it. The idea was to get as far from the other stuff as possible: nothing about us and Doomsday Factors and the CIA.


  Hear hear.

  Without telling Lee, I’m sorry to say, I dumped the Reprise manuscript into an ashcan in Scarborough, Tobago. But this time I kept the boina, because I was determined to write that play. Trouble was, I don’t know squat about writing plays.

  Among American novelists, Peter Sagamore reminds him, that ignorance is the great tradition. But it’s not an advantage.

  All the same, Frank Talbott tells us, while off-watch and during their stopovers in the Grenadines, Barbados, St. Lucia, Martinique, Dominica, Guadeloupe, St. Kitts, St. Croix, he drafted Act One of SEX EDUCATION: Play in longhand, and through his long solo watches en route home, while Reprise steered himself north by windvane, he revised and edited that draft. Given his inexperience of imaginative writing in general and playwriting in particular, he really had no idea whether he was onto something admirable or was perpetrating a soft-porn version of a girls-school senior class play. His wife, he knew, would know; but for reasons at once as obvious and mysterious to him as hers in not acknowledging her pregnancy, he did not tell her specifically what he was up to, much less show her the draft of Act One. On the contrary: He pretended to be plugging away at the novel Reprise—coming along satisfactorily, he reported to her, just as she reported to him two menstruations which in fact she did not have. That neither questioned the other’s reports, while they lived week after week in the unprivate space of a midsize cruising sailboat, argues that each was more or less aware of the other’s secret. Unprecedented dissembling!