The Floating Opera

by John Barth

  Harrison was fidgeting to leave. For my part, I was interested enough in the Judge’s prognostications, for he knew how to read newspapers, and read five or six a day. It was, in fact, the Judge who had first predicted to me that Rollo Moore wouldn’t be re-elected, and I’d have gone ahead with my plans on the strength of his judgment even had I not been able to confirm it in certain Baltimore Republican circles.

  “You think Franco’s in, then?”

  “I think it’ll take him a couple of years yet to wind it up,” the Judge said. “By that time the whole shebang might blow.”

  “Well,” Harrison fidgeted.

  I said goodbye to the Judge—after all, I probably would not see him again, and he was one of my favorite citizens—and walked with Harrison as far as his car, which was parked on Poplar Street.

  “Will you come for cocktails tonight?” he asked as he slipped behind the wheel.

  I leaned down and talked to him through the window on my side. “Much obliged.”

  Harrison put the Cadillac in gear.

  “Don’t feel obligated,” he smiled ruefully. “Any time after four.”

  He slid away down the brick street, which shimmered now in the very hot sun. I walked toward the hotel for my nap, feeling fine about Harrison. There was no need for haste in making my decision, but the lunchtime had done his cause much good indeed.

  XVII. the end of the outline

  Climatologically, this day of which I write was rare for Dorchester County, rare for the Eastern Shore, where the same ubiquitous waters that moderate the temperatures—the ocean, the Bay, the infinite estuaries, creeks, coves, guts, marshes, and inlets—also make them uncomfortable. This day, on the contrary, was excessively warm (the temperature as I walked to the hotel must have reached 95), but extremely dry. I was wearing shirt, suit, underwear, and hat, and there was no shade on Poplar Street, but my body was dry as a white bone in the desert, and I was entirely comfortable. It was a day when one would have liked to sit alone on a high dune by the ocean—the Atlantic beach is often just this dry, given a land breeze—in air as hot and salty as Earth’s commencement, the drought of precreation before the damp of procreation; to sit a dried and salted sterile saint, Saint Todd of the Beach, and watch voracious gulls dissect the stranded carcasses of sandy skates and sharks, bleached and brined to stenchlessness. The locust trees by People’s Trust were dusty, and mast-truck high in the High Street poplars, locusts rasped and whirred a parched dirge for my last high noon. It was a lovely day for suicide. One felt that one would hardly bleed into such aridity; more probably a knife in the neck would be kissed with a desiccant hiss of mere dry air.

  Turning the corner of Poplar, High, and Locust Streets, I found the loafers’ bench empty: the old men were home to nap. The Choptank sparkled at the foot of the boulevard. Adam’s Original & Unparalleled Floating Opera posters graced every business window on the empty streets from the Judge’s place to the hotel, red, white, and blue, as though the town had been set for Independence Day and then everyone—men, women, dogs, and pallbearers—had gone to a parade somewhere else.

  The hotel lobby was light and cool; a small chat with Jerry Hogey, and then I went to my room. Are you so curious as to follow me down the hall to the men’s room? If you aren’t (I shall be only a minute), read while you wait the story of my resumption of the affair with Jane Mack. Look back into Chapter III, and you’ll find that near the end of it I reproduced an outline of the events that I imagined led up to my seduction by the Macks. In the final section of that outline I listed what I considered to be the four possible courses that my relationship with them could take after I’d broken it off by an act that, judged in the very terms that I objected to, they must regard as an insult. Now of these four courses, either I or IV (that is, permanent disaffection or the resumption of a qualified affection, one of the qualifications being a suspension of the affair) seemed the most probable to me after the incident in my office with Dorothy Miner, which terminated the friendship.

  However, I was reckoning without two things, neither of which I could reasonably have been expected to predict.

  In the first place, just a few weeks after the Macks had severed relations with me, Jane learned, upon being examined by Marvin Rose for chronic nausea, that she was pregnant. Moreover, she was probably three months pregnant: it was possible for her not to guess it herself only because she had always been irregular. As soon as Marvin looked at her, he said, “You’re pregnant,” and it instantly seemed so obvious to her (she swore later that her tummy filled out the moment he spoke the word) that she became a little hysterical at not having recognized it herself. Marvin gave her a sedative. Jane hurried home and could scarcely wait to tell Harrison when he came in from work, she was so delighted. But when he walked into the house and she opened her mouth to tell him, it suddenly occurred to her that she was three months pregnant, not three weeks or three days; she remembered me, burst into tears, and nearly fainted. When finally she was able to explain things to Harrison, he couldn’t say a word.

  The pregnancy was pretty miserable for both of them (I learned this later, of course). It would have been simple enough to arrange an abortion, but it happened that they really wanted a child, and had tried unsuccessfully for several years to have one. They both wished, too late, that Jane had been more diligent in using precautions with me, but the fact was that she hadn’t; it is a mark of Harrison’s saintliness that not once did he suggest a reproach for her carelessness, and a mark of Jane’s that she owned up to it in the first place. Being intelligent people, they were able to talk about the matter frankly, and they tried hard to articulate their sentiments, to decide how they really felt about it.

  “Look at it this way,” Harrison’s most frequent argument ran; “suppose I was sterile—wouldn’t we sooner or later probably adopt a kid? Or suppose you’d been married before and had a kid—wouldn’t we still love it after you married me? Now, this is better than adoption, because you’re going to be the real mother either way. And it’s better than a previous marriage, because there’s a good chance I’m the real father. After all, I slept with you more than Andrews did.”

  That was a pretty good argument, I thought, but Harrison never could put enough conviction into his voice, and that last sentence, whether intended to do so or not, usually brought Jane to tears.

  “That’s all true,” was her typical reply, “but no amount of reasoning can get around the fact that if I hadn’t made love to Todd in the first place—or if I’d only kept my stupid head and been careful—then either I wouldn’t be pregnant or we’d know you’re the father.” This said with her fine head in her hands, her excellent shoulders shaking.

  Harrison then, quite calmly (but not kissing the sable hair or stroking the shoulders): “What the hell, hon, a fact’s a fact. It was my idea as much as yours. We shouldn’t have taken the step if we can’t stand up to the consequences.”

  “But we didn’t think of this!” Jane would wail.

  And Harrison would shrug. “People get pregnant.”

  And so on. A lousy pregnancy. To make it worse, Jane was ill for most of the remaining six months. She could keep nothing on her stomach, and on several occasions required uncomfortable glucose injections to stave off malnutrition. At the same time, though, her illness had the virtue of keeping her weight down. I saw her just once, in her ninth month, from a short distance away, and she was so beautiful that I suffered a rare twinge of regret and real longing, no less intense for its being short-lived. And her moderate size eased her delivery: on October 2, 1933, in the Cambridge Memorial Hospital, after only three hours of labor, she gave birth to a six-pound ten-ounce girl, whom she named Jeannine Paulsen (Jane’s maiden name) Mack.

  Harrison and Jane had, understandably, been not a little fearful of the day when they must actually bring their baby home; when it would be committed totally into their hands and they would be expected to love and care for it. The care was no problem—there were bottles, formul
as, and trained nurses—but they feared that the love might simply not be forthcoming. Jane especially feared this about Harrison, and Harrison about himself. But as it happened they quickly took to their daughter—she was an engaging child, luckily, right from her infancy—and found it easy to be affectionate parents. Perhaps their knowledge of the danger of any other reaction sufficed to open the buds of love in their hearts. They breathed more easily (the baby obviously doing her best to protect her own interests, contrived to resemble neither Harrison nor me to any embarrassing degree) and wondered what they’d worried so much about.

  “I swear,” Harrison volunteered, “if somebody should prove to me, right this minute, that Todd was Jeannine’s father, I wouldn’t love her a bit less for it.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he’s not,” Jane scoffed (you understand that I heard all this later). “But I don’t think I would, either. She’s beautiful.”

  But the important statement, for this story, Harrison made sometime in the spring of 1934, about a year after I’d insulted them.

  “You know,” he said, “you may not agree with this, because I know how much you dislike him, but I sometimes think that that business with Todd was partly our fault, too.”

  “Our fault!”

  “I mean, what the hell, we put him on the spot, when you got in bed with him; he might not even have wanted to, you know—not because he didn’t want you, but because he might have thought it would hurt our marriage. But if he’d refused, we’d have been insulted, wouldn’t we? And, in fact, if he hadn’t done it on our terms, we’d have been insulted, I think.”

  “Still, he had no business telling us he was a virgin,” Jane insisted.

  “But you can’t deny we were pleased when he did,” Harrison replied. “That proves we were expecting too much of him. And we certainly had no right to expect him not to make love to other women. What the hell, he’s a bachelor.”

  “But he was supposed to be in love with me.”

  “You’re in love with me, too,” Harrison smiled, “but you made love to Todd. You understand.” Jane sulked. “We expected too much. We should’ve known him better.”

  “Well maybe you’re right,” Jane said. “But he certainly had no right to break it off like he did, with that damned colored girl!”

  Harrison grinned. “I guess he’s unprejudiced. To tell the truth, the more I think about that, the more I believe he was just ad-libbing. That girl didn’t know what was up any more than I did.”

  Jane pouted for a while, but after the ice had been broken they talked more freely about me, and less bitterly. Gradually it got to be assumed that they’d really been too demanding (a piece of objectivity that still appalls me), and that to some extent I’d been justified in showing my claws.

  The next step was for Jane to say, “Hell, I forgive him; I just don’t want anything to do with him any more.”

  And for Harrison to say, “I still like Todd all right; it’s just that I can’t get enthusiastic about seeing him any more. I don’t bear him any grudge.”

  Jeannine grew and grew, and discreetly began to look like her mother.

  The second thing that I hadn’t predicted was that on January 10, 1935, Harrison Mack Senior would die, leaving seventeen testamentary instruments for his wife, son, and nurses to play games with. But he did, as surely as sweet Jane got herself impregnated, and as irremediably. No one needed to suggest to Harrison that he needed professional assistance, either; he consulted a lawyer a lot more quickly than Jane had consulted a physician, and the firm that he retained was Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews. The obvious necessity for legal counsel, the disturbance over his father’s death, the excitement over the big estate—all these made his move seem quite natural, so that if there was anything in it of an overt act to reinstate our friendship, the overtness was effectively camouflaged, and one needn’t even think of it.

  There were, one can imagine, dozens of details in the litigation that required discussion, strategies to be worked out, conferences to be held: many more than could be conveniently fitted into my leisurely office schedule. It was inevitable, then, that Harrison and I should occasionally utilize our lunch hours for the purpose; even that he should eventually invite me, with aplomb, to come for late cocktails one evening, and that I, with commensurate grace, should accept.

  Of that evening—at first somewhat strained, since it was my first meeting with Jane in more than two years—just one incident will do here: the Macks had put Jeannine to bed early, thinking thereby to keep discomfort at a minimum, and with the assistance of Gilbey’s gin and Sherbrook rye, the three of us had contrived to reach a condition of mellow, if tacit, mutual forgiveness. We all felt relieved that the nonsense of the past two years was done, though nothing was said about it directly; our good spirits were reflected in the unusual amount of liquor consumed, in the fact that whatever legal matters had provided the excuse for our meeting never got discussed, and (most significantly) by the fact that when Jeannine, who had a slight cold, began to fret in her crib, Jane, despite a private resolve to the contrary, said spontaneously: “Come on, Toddy, you haven’t met this little Mack! Come upstairs and be introduced.”

  She realized her slip as soon as it was out, and added at once, without changing her tone or expression, “Harrison will do the honors, won’t you, honey?”

  The three of us went to the nursery, where Jeannine—a blonde little charmer whom I must say I’d be delighted to learn I’d fathered—stood up sleepily in her crib and grinned at her parents, shyly, because I was there.

  “Jeannine,” Harrison said, “this is Toddy. Can you say Toddy?”

  Jeannine could not, or would not, “Would you like to kiss Toddy good night, honey?” Jane asked her. Jeannine hung her head, but looked up at me from under her eyebrows and chortled. When I kissed her hair—as soft as silk thread, and fragrant with baby soap—she dived into the mattress and buried her giggles in the blanket.

  Jane had crossed the room to adjust the window, and Harrison and I stood side by side at the crib, where Jeannine was already on the verge of sleep. A number of obvious thoughts were in the air of the nursery—it was like a scene arranged by a heavy-handed director—and I, for one, was embarrassed when Jane, after her excellent and immediate good taste of a few minutes before, now came up behind us and grasped both our arms while we looked at the little girl. Our little girl, the tableau simpered, underlining the pronoun. Ah, reader, the thing was gross, sentimental; and yet I was moved, for with the Macks these sentiments are sincere. They are simply full of love, for themselves, for each other, for me.

  We went back downstairs, soberly, but Harrison, sensitive by then to such solemnities, at once poured a round of cocktails and we were soon gay again, restored to grace. The evening was a success; I returned often; and soon, but for the two quiet years that sometimes hung heavy over our conversation, we spoke together as easily as ever.

  Had the friendship remained at this stage of reconstruction, I should have asked for nothing more. I was content to see the Macks outgrow their unbecoming jealousy, which was as dangerous to their own relationship as it was inconsistent with their previous behavior. Nor did I see how things could tactfully become any more intimate, after my rebuff of 1933. But on the night of July 31, 1935, while I was sitting at my window reading a book for my Inquiry (somebody’s critique of Adam Smith’s economics, I do believe), there was a small knock on my door, the knob rattled, and Jane stepped in, wearing shorts.

  “Hi,” she said, standing just inside the closed door.

  “Hello.” I closed my book, threw my cigar stub out the window, and got up to give her the chair. “Sit down.”

  “All right.” She grinned quickly and came over to the window, where I was sitting on the sill, but she forgot to sit down. I didn’t want any nonsense this time—for her sake, not because I objected to nonsense on principle—and so I kept my eyes on her face, not to make it any easier for her. She mostly looked down at the street.

  “We�
��ve been for a boat ride,” she said. When I didn’t answer, she looked at me irritably and began to fidget.

  “You have to understand everything at once,” she declared. “I’m not able to talk about anything just now.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “I can understand everything at once in about three different ways.”

  “You’re not helping me. You’re not saying any of the right things.” She laughed.

  I didn’t smile. “That’s only because I don’t know what you want to hear, Jane. You should know I’ll say anything I think you want to hear.”

  Her smile disappeared, and she regarded the dark Post Office across the street and fiddled with the curtain pull.

  “That was a hard lesson, Toddy.”

  “I wasn’t teaching anybody anything,” I said sharply. “What do you think I am? I was just getting clear.”

  She riddled with the cord.

  “Let me ask you,” I said. “Do I love you?”

  “No.”

  “Now let’s get that straight. I don’t want to hurt you all.”

  “You don’t love me and I don’t love you.”

  This was getting as theatrical as the other. I gave it up. For ten minutes more Jane stared at the Post Office. I honestly couldn’t guess what would come of it. After a few minutes, though I didn’t intend any such thing, my mind—never very impressed by this sort of dramatics—wandered to other things: to the seventeen wills, to Bill Froebel, to the critique of Adam Smith. And it startled me, for I’d honestly forgotten for an instant that she was there, when Jane spun around from the window and said, “Let’s get in bed, Todd.” Without looking at me, she walked to the bed, unfastened her shorts and halter, and lay down, and very shortly after that I joined her.