The Floating Opera

by John Barth

  For one thing, it made me appear mysterious, standing aloof in a bay window, smoking a cigarette with an air of quiet wisdom while all around me the party screamed and giggled. Some quite pleasant people, Harrison Mack among them, reasoned that I must have answers that they lacked, and sought me out; women thought me charmingly shy, and sometimes stopped at nothing to “penetrate the disdainful shell of my fear,” as one of their number put it. Often as not, it was they who got penetrated.

  On the night of this particular party I found myself being made friends with by a great handsome fellow who came over to my window, introduced himself as Harrison Mack, and stared out beside me for nearly an hour without speaking: some time afterwards I observed that Harrison involuntarily adopts, to a great extent, the mood and manner of whomever he happens to be with—a tendency I admire in him, for it implies that he has no characteristic mood or manner of his own. We talked after a while, brusquely, of several things: the working class, prohibition, law, the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, and Maryland. Harrison, it turned out, was well off; his father, Harrison Mack Senior, was president of a pickle company. Since the cucumbers that were ultimately transmogrified into Mack’s Pickles were grown on the Eastern Shore, whence they were carried as whole pickles to the Baltimore plant for fancy processing, the Macks had summer homes sprinkled about the peninsula, and Harrison was no stranger to the haunts of my youth. We talked aloofly of pickles and wealth.

  Harrison—a fine, muscular, sun-bronzed, gentle-eyed, patrician-nosed, steak-fed, Gilman-Schooled, soft-spoken, well-tailored aristocrat—to his family’s understandable alarm was a communist at the time. Not a parlor communist, either: an out-and-out leaflet-writing revolutionary who had sold his speedboat, his Stutz automobile, and God knows what else, to live on when his father disinherited him; who spent ten hours a day writing and distributing party-line penny dreadfuls among factory workers, including the employees of the Mack Pickle factories; who took his lumps with the rest when strikebreakers or other kinds of bullies—including certain salaried employees of the Mack Pickle factories—objected to his activities; who was at the moment engaged to marry the woolliest-looking specimen of intellectual Bolshevism I’ve ever laid unbelieving eyes upon, because she was ideologically pure; and whose only remaining streak of good sense, as far as I could see that night, was his refusal to become actually a dues-paying member of the Party, for fear it might prove a liability to the execution of his schemes.

  As it happened, Harrison did precisely, if accidentally, the only thing that could possibly have induced me to like him that night: he made it obvious from the beginning that he liked me a great deal. He was an engaging fellow, still is, and I saw nothing amiss in a saint’s having one friend. The sheer oppositeness of his enthusiasm from anything I myself could conceivably have been enthusiastic about at that time—though I had been interested enough in social reform not too long before—drew me to him, and, as I learned later, he was attracted by my “transcendent rejection” (his term) of the thing that meant life to him. In short, we were soon friends, and walked blindly to my rooms at dawn for more drink, singing the Internationale in French through the mansioned and junipered roads of Guilford.

  I knew him well for the next year, or until my graduation from law school. I was a saint throughout the whole period—indeed, that mask endured for four more years—and although we argued sometimes for days, neither of us was rational enough to be convinced of the other’s position. I say this because I know for certain that all the major mind changes in my life have been the result not of deliberate, creative thinking on my part, but rather of pure accidents—events outside myself impinging forcibly upon my attention—which I afterwards rationalized into new masks. And I suspect that Harrison simply assumes, in time, the intellectual as well as the manneristic color of his surroundings.

  For example, when we said goodbye in 1926—I to set up practice in Cambridge, he to assist a Party press in Detroit—I thought I detected an ideologically impure attitude in him toward his leaflet-writing colleagues. He had, in fact, come to loathe them, and, it seemed to me, had begun to prefer refuting the Mensheviki with me in my room to supporting the Bolsheviki with them in some dirty factory. He was not at all enthusiastic about his new assignment, and I think he would have washed his hands of the whole business, but that such a defection would have given his arguments for universal brotherhood a hollow ring. Our separation upset Harrison more than me, whose nirvana could hardly be ruffled by such a mundane circumstance as losing a friend.

  I saw him next in 1932, under quite different circumstances. I had been admitted as a partner in the firm of Andrews & Bishop, and throughout 1927 and 1928 I enriched myself and the firm at the rate of perhaps forty dollars a month—the folks of Cambridge very wisely trust no new doctors or lawyers, even fifth-generation natives of the county. I was living with my father, a widower, in his house in East Cambridge. In 1929 Dad lost all his savings and property on the stock market, and the next year he hanged himself with his belt from a floor joist in the basement. After that I made more money from the firm, despite the depression, since Dad’s clients more or less inherited me as their lawyer, and when the family house and lot, a summer cottage at Fenwick Island, Delaware, and one or two timber properties down the county had been sold toward meeting Dad’s debts, I moved into Room 307 of the Dorset Hotel, where I’ve lived ever since.

  And I became a cosmic cynic, although I didn’t bother to mention the fact to Harrison when I saw him again, any more than I’d told him before, in so many words, that I was a saint.

  He walked into my office in Lawyers’ Row, next to the courthouse, one afternoon, very solemnly, and put a bottle of gin on my desk. He had grown stouter and a bit tired-looking, but was still bronzed and handsome.

  “I’m back,” he said, indicating the gin, and for the rest of the afternoon we drank tepid gin and walked the several streets of Cambridge, renewing our friendship.

  “What happened to your revolution in Detroit?” I asked him once. “I notice they’re still making cars out there.”

  “Ah,” he shrugged, “I got fed up with the fuzzy bastards.”

  “And the brotherhood of man?” I asked him later.

  “To hell with the brotherhood of man!” he replied. “I wouldn’t want those guys for field hands, much less brothers.”

  “What about Miss Moscow?” I asked later yet, referring to his fiancee of 1926.

  “Free lover,” he snorted. “I believed all men were brothers; she thought all men were husbands. I gave the whole mess up.”

  And so he had, for it became apparent, as he talked, that he was in fact a saint these days, of the sort I’d been earlier. He was having little to do with the world’s problems any more.

  “Social justice?” I asked him.

  “Impossible to achieve, irrelevant if achieved,” he answered, and went on to explain that men aren’t worth saving from their capitalist exploiters.

  “They’d be just as bad if they were on top,” he declared. “Worse, in fact: we present capitalists are gentlemanly beasts, and my comrades were beastly beasts.”

  It was the “inner harmony” of the “whole man,” he told me, that mattered. The real revolution must be in the soul and spirit of the individual, and collective materialistic enthusiasms only distracted one from the disorder of his own soul.

  “Marxism,” he said, “is the opiate of the people.”

  He insisted I come to his house for dinner.

  “To Baltimore?” I exclaimed. “Tonight?”

  He blushed. “I’m living here now, Toddy.” He explained that upon his recanting the Marxist heresy, his father had reinstated him in the Mack family’s good graces and excellent credit ratings, and put him in charge of all the cucumber patches and raw processing plants on the Shore.

  “We bought a house in East Cambridge,” he said, “on the water. Just moved in. Come help us warm it.”

  “Us?”

  “I’m married,” he said,
blushing again. “Loveliest thing you ever saw. Janie. Ruxton and Gibson Island, you know, but sensible. You’ll love each other.”

  Well. I went to Harrison’s house that evening, when we were good and drunk, and I recall saying “For pity’s sake!” when I found that he’d bought Dad’s old house—the one in which I was born and raised, and which I’d abandoned in disgust.

  “Didn’t know it was your family’s place till I’d bought it and searched the title,” Harrison claimed, beaming. He was happy about the whole thing: he’d heard since about Dad’s debts and the fact that I’d lost the house along with the other property, and it gave him pleasure to have rescued it, so to speak, from unclean hands, and to be able to invite me to make it my home as often as I wished. I thanked him, and without much appetite followed him inside.

  Jane, perhaps twenty-six at the time, met us at the door with an indulgent smile, and we were introduced. She was indeed “Ruxton and Gibson Island,” a combination of beauty and athleticism. She wore a starched sundress and looked as if she’d just stepped from a shower after a swim. Her dark brown hair, almost black, was dried by the sun, as was her skin. That night she kept reminding me of sailboats, and has ever since. I think of her as perched on the windward washboard of a racing sailboat, a Hampton or a Star, perhaps tending the jib sheet, but certainly squinting against the sun in a brilliant blue world—a sun that heats the excellent timber beneath her thighs, and dries the spray on her face and arms, and warms the Chesapeake wind that fans her cheeks, fluffs her hair, and swells the gleaming sails. And in fact her skin, particularly across the plateau of her stomach, did indeed, I later learned, smell of sunshine, and her hair of salt spray; and the smell of her in my head never failed for five years to give me that giddy exhilaration which as a boy I always felt when I approached Ocean City on a family excursion, and the first heady spume of Atlantic in the air made my senses reel. To be sure, she insisted it was simply the result of not washing her hair as often as she should: she was in fact an ardent sailor.

  For dinner we were served chicken breasts and some vegetable or other. Harrison was too drunk to bother with small talk; he ate and gave polite orders to the maid. And I was too full of gin and Jane to do much besides stare at the chickens’ breasts and hers. Luckily, Harrison had told her that I was shy—his impression of my former sainthood—and so she interpreted as a timid inability to look her in the face what was actually a hushed and admiring if somewhat drunken ogling directly beneath. I’ve no idea what was said that evening, but I remember clearly that, as frequently used to happen when my sexual passions were aroused and unsatisfied, my ailing prostate gave me pain that night, and I was unable to sleep.

  Of course I wanted to make love to her—I can’t think of any attractive girl I ever saw in my youth whom I didn’t wish to take to bed, and young Mrs. Mack was, if somewhat grave like her husband, a good deal more lovely and sensible than most of the women I’d encountered in my thirty-two years. Nor had I scruples about adultery—I was a cynic, remember, Still, I know that left to myself I’d never have carried my attentions beyond ogling her and telling her, half seriously, in Harrison’s presence, that I was in love with her: I simply didn’t choose to prejudice my friendship with Harrison, whom I really enjoyed, or to do anything which, if successful, might disturb what appeared to be a pleasant marriage. There could, I decided during the first weeks of what turned out to be a close friendship between the three of us, be no doubt that in their sober fashion Jane and Harrison were in love with each other.

  But the matter was taken out of my hands one August weekend. Harrison had acquired one of his father’s summer cottages, on Todd Point, downriver from Cambridge, and the three of us often spent weekends there, sailing, swimming, fishing, drinking, and talking. On the morning of the second Saturday in August he and Jane roused me out of bed in the hotel, loaded me into their roadster with themselves and two cases of beer, and set out for the cottage. It struck me during the ride that they were unusually, even deliberately, exuberant: Harrison roared risqué songs at the top of his voice; Jane, sitting in the middle, had her arms around both of us; husband and wife both called me “Toddy boy.” I sighed to myself, resolved not to wonder, and emptied three bottles of beer before we finished the fifteen-mile trip to the cottage.

  All morning we swam and drank, and the exaggerated liveliness and good-fellowship continued without letup. It was decided that after lunch we would load the rest of the beer into the Macks’ sailboat—a beamy, clinker-built knockabout—and sail to Sharp’s Island, in the Bay at the mouth of the Choptank, in order to sail back again. Harrison gave Jane a long goodbye kiss and set off to find ice, which he declared we needed in quantity; Jane set her bathing-suited self to washing the lunch dishes, and I went to sleep on the Macks’ bed in the cottage’s one bedroom. The absence of Harrison—the first time he’d left us alone together, as it happened, because of my supposed shyness—was conspicuous, and on my way to sleep I was acutely conscious of Jane’s presence on the opposite side of the plywood partition. I fell asleep imagining her cool brown thighs—they must be cool!—brushing each other, perhaps, as she walked about the kitchen; the gold down on her upper arms; the salt-and-sunshine smell of her. The sun was glaring through a small window at the foot of the bed; the cottage smelled of heat and resinous pine. I was tired from swimming, sleepy from beer. My dream was lecherous, violent—and unfinished. Embarrassingly. For I felt a cool, real hand caress my stomach. It might have been ice, so violently did my insides contract; I fairly exploded awake and into a sitting position. I believe it was “Good Lord!” I croaked. I croaked something, anyhow, and with both hands grabbed Jane, who sat nude—unbelievable!—on the edge of the bed; buried my face in her, so startled was I; pulled her down with me, that skin against mine; and mirabile dictu! I did indeed explode, so wholly that I lay without sense or strength.

  Damned dream, to wake me helpless! I was choked with desire, and with fury at my impotence. Jane was nervous; after the first approach, to make which had required all her courage, she collapsed on her back beside me and scarcely dared open her eyes.

  The room was dazzlingly bright! I was so shocked by the unexpectedness of it that I very nearly wept. Incredible, smooth, tight, perfect skin! I pressed my face into her, couldn’t leave her untouched for an instant. I quiver even now, twenty-two years later, to write of it, and why my poor heart failed to burst I’m unable even to wonder.

  Well, it was no use. I fell beside her, maddened at my incapacity and mortified at the mess I’d made. That, it turned out, was the right thing to do: my self-castigation renewed Jane’s courage.

  “Don’t curse yourself, Toddy.” She kissed me—sweetness!—and stroked my face.

  “No use,” I muttered into her.

  “We’ll see,” she said lightly, entirely self-possessed now that I seemed shy again: I resolved to behave timidly for the rest of my life. “Don’t worry about it. I can fix it.”

  “No you can’t,” I moaned.

  “Yes I can,” she whispered, kissing my ear and sitting up beside me.

  Merciful heavens, reader! Marry Ruxton and Gibson Island, I charge you! Such an imaginative, athletic, informed, exuberant mistress no man ever had, I swear: she burst frequently into spontaneous, nervous laughter…

  Enough. I don’t really believe in chivalry any more than in anything else—but I shan’t go further. Enough to know that we were soon able to commit jubilant adultery. Afterwards we smoked and talked.

  “How about Harrison?” I asked.

  “All right.”

  “All right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “He doesn’t mind.”

  “Doesn’t or won’t?”

  “Doesn’t.”

  “He knows?” I asked incredulously.

  “Approves.”

  “Don’t you love each other?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Don’t be silly.”

  “What the hell!”
>
  “We talked it over,” she explained, embarrassed again. “Harrison thinks the world of you, and I do, too. We don’t see why a woman can’t make love to somebody she likes a lot, just for the pleasure of it, without a lot of complications. Do you?”

  “Of course not,” I said quickly.

  “That’s how we felt,” she said. I was becoming curious and a bit amused. “Harrison and I love each other completely,” Jane went on, speaking very solemnly and scratching a fly bite on one leg. “So much that neither of us could possibly ever be jealous. If you thought for a minute that I didn’t love him because of what I’ve done, I’d die.”

  “Nonsense,” I assured her, just as solemnly. “I understand everything.”

  “Thank heaven.” She sighed and rested her head on me. “We talked it over for a long time. I was scared to death. I still don’t know if I should’ve done it, but Harrison is wonderful. He’s so objective.”

  “I’ve loved you since the first time I saw you,” I said, and though I intended it to sound convincing, the solemnity of it made me blush.

  “I wish you wouldn’t say that,” Jane said. “I don’t think there’s got to be any love in it. I like you a lot, as a friend, but that’s all, Toddy.”

  “Not for me.”

  “I mean it,” she said. “I enjoyed making love to you, and I hope you liked it, too. That’s plenty enough, I think, without falsifying it with any romance.”