by John Barth
Wonders Katherine warmly When does Frank get his hat back? He’s got it back, says Peter; I just haven’t given it to him yet.
She squeezes his hand. Soon, okay?
Very soon.
Should I return this scarf to Lee, or keep it? I kind of like it, and she gave it to me in Queenstown Creek.
P considers. Neither. We’ll see.
Without bothering to change into a swimsuit, Marian Silver now joins the bathers. Carla B Silver goes by, en route to Rocinante IV to have a little chat with Captain Donald Quicksoat.
Simon Silver’s stomach’s sore. He has gone below, on Reprise. His Aunt Leah presently comes down to check on him; finds him lying in a settee berth, facing its back. She can’t at first get anything out of him. To discourage bugs, the cabin is lit by a single citronella candle in a netted orange glass container. She leans over him in the flickering light, sees he’s wearing his reflector sunglasses and turning the copper bracelet on his wrist.
Sy?
He sniffs. She touches his forehead. You okay, honey? The boy lets go a weeping caterwaul; rolls over like an anguished manatee and desperately flings his arms around her waist; buries wail and wet face together in her shirt.
Frank says he’s got the goods on Willy and Poon, Peter tells Katherine. What I’ve heard so far is pretty amazing. How’re you doing?
We’re back aboard Story now, just the pair-plus of us, holding hands in our cockpit and admiring the pocked moon. I’m fine, she says. I’ve got so much stuff to tell you! What’s that sound?
We shall be another fortnight sorting all these conversations out, and that night’s subsequent several dreams. Just now Leah Talbott sticks her head through Reprise’s companionway and says across to us Kath? Peter? Ask Ma to come over, would you? We’ve got ourselves a little problem here.
SPECTACLES TESTICLES WALLET AND WATCH,
Peter remarks through Story’s moonlit cabin to Andrew Christopher Sherritt maybe three hours later, when the three of us, at least, are at last in bed.
What?
In her berth up forward, though her heart still stings with sympathy for Simon Silver and May Jump—for poor flakey Marian Silver too, for that matter—Katherine giggles.
It’s about four minutes and thirty-seven seconds after midnight, Peter says from his aft quarterberth. Today is Birthday, Chipperino; no time to waste.
K agrees: Got to get the plot-chestnuts out of the old fire.
Repeats P Spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch.
Chip gives up, though testicles reminds him of some of the extraordinary things he has heard Simon Silver say.
Convert? said the rabbi to the priest, Katherine prompts: What do you mean, convert?
Chip tries harder to concentrate, but doesn’t get it.
Peter says I could swear, said the priest to the rabbi, that when they pulled the two of us from that wrecked airplane, I saw you cross yourself. Good night, all.
Nighty-night, says Kath. What an evening.
After a silent while, Andy Sherritt says I almost get it.
On behalf of offended rabbis everywhere, Katherine Sherritt murmurs Cross shmoss, replied the rabbi: I was just taking inventory. So’s Peter. Cross yourself once, Chipper, while you say the punch line.
She is asleep already when sleepless Peter, his motor still racing upon (among other fuels) poor Simon’s outburst and May Jump’s new unfinished Scheherazade story, hears sleepless Andrew whisper aft Do all Jewish rabbis wear pocket watches and carry their billfolds in their coat pockets? Or only Conservative ones?
Everything in its place, P whispers back.
What an evening indeed; but all seems well enough now. Khomeini censures Iranian government for softness on hostage issue. U.S. to rush tanks to Thailand. Texas heat wave breaks at last; leaves twenty-one dead. Jewish rabbis is redundant, he reminds Chip softly; but the boy is asleep.
We are ready.
DAY 14:
ORDINARY POINT
Port to starboard through the raft, fore to aft aboard each vessel, in Sunday’s small hours, 29 June ‘80,
ALL HANDS DREAM.
Laid out for singlehanded passagemaking, Rocinante IV has but two berths: an ample portside foldout double, to which Captain Donald treats himself at anchor, and, for use at sea, a narrow starboard settee with attachable lee-cloth to prevent his rolling out. In the double, Carla B Silver sleeps alone, conversing with Frederick Mansfield Talbott and Short Jon Silver. Upstream through her lower reaches, into which their generator Capn Don introduced them not long since, millions of spermatozoa thrash purposefully to no purpose. Their sleeping hostess, safely past the menopause, lets them paddle undisturbed and unobstructed toward their deaths. Through the four-decades-plus of her sexual life, these have been preceded by tens of billions of their fellows, intromitted by perhaps three dozen men in various circumstances. Of those tens of billions, just three individual sperm achieved their biological Cathay. Each of C.B S.’s twin ovaries, in the years between her menarche and her menopause, faithfully in turn launched an ovum every second lunar month: four hundred plus between them. All went the way of those tens of billions of hapless swimmers—save one who, on D Day afternoon, met and chose a spermatozoon of Al Silver’s with whom to become Leah Allan Silver; a second who did likewise not long after to coauthor sister Marian; and a third who, years later, took unto herself one of Frederick Talbott’s doughty swimmers to the end of forming Short Jon Silver.
So go the stupendous odds, Jon explains now to his mother, against anything’* happening the way it does at all. Yet the world proceeds. He and his father, though dripping wet, are at their ease, like Franklin Key Talbott and Peter Sagamore in Reprise’s cockpit a few hours past, just after their retrieval of Simon Silver from the Sassafras. They smell of brine and cold sea-wrack; they are drowned men. But in death there is a living peace between them such as never was in their lives’ last years. Not even the cruel marks of the torturers on Jonathan’s sturdy naked corpse dismay; his mother views them with the gentle pain of parents registering old scars upon the precious bodies of their children. It is to comfort Carla B Silver that her men have swum together into her sleep. The tale they tell her is not true: that, for complicated Prince-of-Darkness reasons, Fred Talbott faked his Paisleylike disappearance from Reprise in order to work his covert way clear down to the Straits of Magellan and effect the spectacular rescue of his son from one of General Pinochet’s prisons—on Dawson Island, Ma, laughs Jon, in Tierra Fucking del Fuego!—only to drown with him and two others when their little launch capsized in stormy night waters en route back to Punta Arenas. The facts are that Frederick Mansfield Talbott committed calm suicide in the mouth of the placid Wye upon learning from Douglas Townshend that Jonathan’s DIN A torturers (some of them trained at a CIA establishment on the Chesapeake) had accidentally killed him sooner than they meant to in the course of “yellow-submarining” him: holding his head down in a toilet bowl full of urine and feces. He never even reached the Dawson Island internment center. How do we know? We know.
The fiction does its job. It is tisk-tisky, Carla’s men acknowledge, that, of the products of her three successful ova and the Ishmael sperm they coupled with, one (Rick Talbott’s only one) will carry the line no farther; that another did, but inadvertently, via rape, and with problematical issue; and that the third—a sterling Silver indeed, mated to a better Talbott—saw fit to pluck and chuck their union’s fruit before harvest time. But the tale’s not done, they tell her, smiling: Even as she sleeps, the avant-garde of Frank Talbott’s recentest have attained Lee Silver’s newest. Before this sentence ends, the biochemical election will have been made; he and she become we. And this time, unless the world go bang, John Frederick Silver Talbott will ensue. Rest therefore from your labors, mother and wife! Neither mourn us any longer nor rush to join us. One of us feeds the earth; one the water. But we’re together; can wait; shall embrace you soon enough. Sleep.
Carla
wakes. Remembers where she is; understands that she’s alone in the double berth though not in the moonlit cabin. She is grateful to her lank companion for having moved to the lean settee, where she hears him breathe: They’re done with each other, but will part friends. Now the dream surfaces, at first to scald her eyes and heart, then to commence its calming work. True or not, what they said soothes through; her tears are of a sweeter flavor, and presently put by. She’s glad she let old Quicksoat in after all; made her little peace with him as she has made her large one now with Frederick Mansfield Talbott. She’s glad for this whole weekend, poor Sy’s outburst notwithstanding.
Men: God knows she’s loved them. Beloved bastard Rick. Bullheaded darling Jon.
She guesses she’ll go pee.
May Jump is camping out with her son along an empty stretch of barrier beach above Hatteras; just the pair of them in a sky-blue pop-tent with a nylon fly for shade. He’s, oh, four and blond, brown and sturdy, a downright edible kid, eager for the world. May shows him knobbed and channeled whelks, how to recognize their egg cases on the beach, like necklaces of dried sponge, and the black hooked hardened ones of skates, called mermaids’ purses. These are ghost crabs, Mackie; those are sand-diggers. Nothing here will hurt you.
Now the Outer Banks become Maryland’s end of Assateague Island. A solitary gaunt white horse—one particularly poor specimen of the wild Assateague pony herd—plods into sight far down the beach, just at the water’s edge, walking head-down toward them through the spume. Sandpipers comically advance and retreat with the surf, but the ancient nag is heedless of the waves that now and then foam her fetlocks. On and on she comes, and at first May’s son is excited, and then he’s amused, she’s such a plodding old Rocinante, and then he grows just a touch afraid, so inexorably does that bag of bones come on. May hunkers on a beach blanket in a square of shade before the tent, where the pair of them have been building a fantastic castle. The lad leaves off working on his parapet, stands beside her for reassurance, puts a sandy arm across her shoulders. That is one tired old horse there, Mackie boy, she tells him: a candidate for the glue factory.
At last the animal passes, thirty feet in front of them, never giving them a glance. Remarkably, she pauses just there, for the first time since she hove into sight. She lifts her tail; she pisses and pisses and pisses! May watches her son’s reaction. The boy is wide-eyed, almost shocked. He looks to her to see whether it’s all right to laugh; sees it is, and lets go that wonderful belly-laugh of his, one of God’s dear sounds upon the earth. The antique mare plods off.
Where in heaven, May wonders when she wakes, did that one come from? “Mackie”?! Her eyes well up; she can almost smell the Coppertone on that little boy’s sweet brown body. A far cry from Simple Simon Silver! Well: Poor Sy is what she’s got, or had, and he’s going to take some bringing around. She and Carla will manage it somehow.
But what the damn hell is she talking about? Her friendship with Marian’s ma is real enough: one mensch of a woman appreciating another. She felt a true bond with Carla B Silver through the evening past, when Sy went over the edge and Marian flaked out altogether; it was that felt bond that encouraged her, for the sake of the general peace, to leave Reprise after Simon’s rescue and accept Captain Donald’s invitation to join Rocinante’s crew for the night. But when she bid the couple good night and lingered up in the cockpit to sort out her thoughts re Marian (that little affair was done with, clearly and alas), she’d heard them having quiet sex below; and not long after, when Capn Don had come up and urged her to turn in, declaring his preference for the cockpit on summer nights, she had actually smelled their heterosexual juices in the cabin.
So what on earth is she talking about? Now she realizes, amused, that Carla B Silver is using the toilet. Dreams: boyoboy!
No auditory privacy on a small sailboat. After pumping the thing as quietly as she can, Carla steps out of the head compartment in a caftanlike nightgown and makes her way down the space, no more than eighteen inches wide, between the two berths. Impulsively, May reaches both arms up to her in the faint light. Seeing who it is, Carla chuckles and takes her hands, interlacing her strong fingers with May’s; squeezes them firmly for some moments; bends over to kiss just the tops of both her thumbs.
So, she says.
Despite his having lately fired a flaccid charge into his recent employer and weekend shipmate (he is after all on the far side of sixty, and has made love with her both that morning and the night before), wiry Captain Donald Quicksoat gamely soixante-neufs a very young woman in a large wet T-shirt and not a stitch else: a young woman not unlike Marian Silver, who has followed through on her earlier, pretty obvious flirtation. Crazy or not, she is her own woman, and he’s his own man, no? With both hands in her strangely cut, strangely colored hair, he guides her head down on him. Her thighs and hams, two inches from his eyes, are goose-pimpled, sea-wet, lean; he thrusts his face into them as into a basin of cold salt water, and at once the situation changes from oral sex to foul weather at sea, with which in fact he has had more considerable experience. He is where he knows he is, in Rocinante’s cockpit, in black and heavy though not frigid going. He must back the staysail, harden the mizzensheet, and lash the helm down so that the boat will heave to and he can ride out the blow under the battered spray-dodger. It is not a particularly frightening storm; just routinely life-threatening. He has neither need nor wish to make headway, only to survive at minimal cost to himself and Rocinante. He proceeds with his customary care: Missteps mildly serious for other sailors can be fatal for singlehanders, especially at his age. But his left sleeve snags on something that won’t let go; the mizzensheet has got itself fouled in a winch override that he can’t unjam with his one free hand; and there’s a new sound in the darkness to leeward that could be surf breaking over Johnson’s Reef, just above Trunk Bay on St. John in the U.S. Virgins.
As he has done dozens, maybe hundreds of times while passagemaking alone, he prudently wakes himself at this point instead of waiting for the kitchen timer to awaken him. He’s wet with dew and perspiration in his old single bedroll on Rocinante’s port cockpit seat, where he has spent many a mild night in many a harbor. The anchorage is quiet. He is of course relieved not to be in the pickle he was dreaming; all the same, he wouldn’t mind finding himself in Trunk or Caneel Bay again instead of the Chesapeake. Rocinante rides secure and motionless under the white moon descending now over Ordinary Point; it is a serene and splendid Maryland midsummer night. His left arm’s numb, ah, from his having pinned it against the coaming in his sleep. Now it tingles back into feeling. His weathered penis, standing piss-proud like Quixote’s lance, reminds him of the earlier portion of his dream. He chuckles to himself and shivers; chastizes his old tool en español for not having risen as well to reality as it has done to dream.
An all-right weekend, anyhow, this, and there’s a moral to it: He and good Carla B are done. Back to singlehanding for C.D.Q., and the odd windfall in Rocinante’s double, if there are any. No more daydreams of putting down roots or taking a permanent mate aboard. May they part friends.
He hauls up to whiz over the portside lifeline and winds up whacking off as well, surprised at himself, but nowise displeased. Hi ho, Mim Silver, who was certainly sending signals his way earlier that night, till her ma barber-hauled the pair of them and young Simon made his move. He spurts through Marian’s clothesless image into the Sassafras. Small fish rise to the droplets; his sparse spermatozoa are straightway swallowed.
How do we know? We know.
At the nurses’ station on Floor Three of the Union Memorial Hospital on Thirty-third Street in Baltimore, to which she frequently returns in sleep, Joan Evans’s shift is done. She is too bone-weary to look forward to her 2:00 a.m. Thanksgiving dinner date with the new obstetrical resident, who has promised or threatened a rabbit stew of Wasserman-test sacrifices in his Calvert Street basement apartment. It is past midnight already, and she has yet to get back to her own place t
o shower and change, if she’s really going to dinner. But her replacement is late, and the forty-one-year-old in 312 who on Monday delivered a Down’s-syndrome daughter is shrieking again. Damn you, Schneider, Joan sighs to herself, swearing not at the luckless patient but at the tardy relief-nurse, and relapses into deep sleep. When she wakes some hours hence in the ample forward cabin of Katydid IV, she’ll remember Suzie’s name with pleasure; it has been maybe twenty years since she last thought of the colleague who almost scotched her first date with her future husband. But Obstetrics was not on Three, and that poor Down’s-syndrome mother who suffocated her baby was in Easton Memorial just after the war, not Union Memorial in ‘41. Dreams get things wrong.
Suzanne Schneider!
Doctor Jack, beside his wife, steams toward the Coral Sea aboard the doomed aircraft carrier Yorktown. In a ship’s officers’ lounge which is also somehow the Fleet Reserve Club in Annapolis, he plays bridge with Rear Admiral Arthur A. Ageton, author of the Navy’s sight-reduction tables for celestial navigation, and argues amiably with him and two other former midshipmen the relative merits of sundry Chesapeake yacht harbors. A fellow medical officer, trained like Bass in gynecology and obstetrics, remarks apropos of nothing that the nearest human vagina is probably some 300 nautical miles to the east, in the New Hebrides. The admiral, whose declared postwar intention is to retire to Annapolis and write a novel or two based on his wartime experiences, jokingly requests permission to record that observation. Fuck vaginas, says Jack Bass, arranging his hand. What’s trump?