Every Third Thought

by John Barth

  Get him outta here!

  No, don’t bother: At age all-but-fourscore, he’ll be outta here soon enough. Meanwhile, with an ever-shifting mix of dismissive annoyance, curiosity, exasperation, fascination, and frustration, in the morning hours officially reserved for museand home-office deskwork he has found himself tinkering with these intricate new toys. And it’s in the course of his fiddlingwith /exploring/trying-out/fucking-up their miscegenative interconnections—Googling the time-differential, e.g., between Maryland and Morocco16 while still linked to the cell phone via some wireless technology that he hasn’t read up on yet in the manuals—that he first hears her voice:

  Hello.

  A woman’s voice, neither old nor young by the sound of it: a serious but pleasant, mature female voice from somewhere in the space between computer (on hutch desktop along one wall of home-office/study, the area G. calls “Production”) and cell phone (temporarily on “Business” work-table on opposite wall, along with cordless phone, desk calendar, file drawer, and the like): i.e., in the “Creation” workspace where he longhands the first drafts of his O.F. Fictions and where—but from where? Digital weather-alert radio? Electric pencil sharpener?—he hears that voice again, this time interrogatively:

  Anybody there?

  “Sometimes I wonder that myself,” he admits to himself or whomever. Could it be Mandy, maybe, calling his new cell phone from hers, or from the cordless on her desk? Not likely she’d do that before he’s finished with its set-up and ready for a test call. Anyhow, she’s busy with her Muse just now, he assumes, as her husband would rather be with his than futzing around like this. But now that he’s into it, he’s more or less hooked.

  Can you hear me now?

  The classic cell-phoner’s question—and that really does sound like Amanda’s voice, sort of, but as if she’s mimicking some outsourced tech-support service person in Mumbai, or speaking in italics.

  “Well,” he says aloud this time—and mighty odd it feels, as if speaking aloud to himself—“I hear somebody. The question is who—or whom, I guess—and from where? Can you hear me?”

  No reply, so he supposes not—and screw this: He’ll go take a piss, replenish his coffee, and update Mandy on his nonprogress with their new gadgets. But having bladder-voided, flushed, rezipped, and washed hands for the second or third time since daybreak (a bi-hourly rite among enlarged-prostatenear-octogenarians, its last step given particular attention in the current swine-flu scare), he finds to his mild surprise his wife’s study unoccupied: door open instead of ajar, desk lamp off, and computer dark, as they would not normally be if she were, e.g., merely visiting their other bathroom. Nor does he find her in the kitchen when he refills his thermal mug and turns the autodrip percolator off for the day.

  “Mandy?”

  Probably putting some paid bill in the mail. Or maybe—it being a sunnybright and breezeless tidewater morning, mild for mid-March—even musing with her notebook out on the condo’s riverfront pier, as she sometimes enjoys doing. Come (belatedly) to think of it, didn’t she finger-wave him a See You Later not long since? En route back from the kitchen, he detours to their living room’s river-facing windows: no sign of her down there. So okay, she’s somewhere between—in conversation, maybe, with a neighbor also posting mail at the building’s communal mail-drop, or scanning the community notice-board beside it. No problem, for pity’s sake, and he knows she wishes he didn’t fret so whenever he briefly loses track of her (not that he frets much, but still . . . ), just as he wishes she’d let him know when she’s stepping outside for a bit or otherwise getting temporarily out of touch, the way he routinely keeps her posted on his movements even at the risk of interrupting her musings. Okay, so this time she did that, if he remembers correctly—but how often, shopping together in supermarket or department store, he’ll turn from whatever wares he’s been regarding and find her vanished, whom he’d thought close by! Then the systematic look down each aisle and section, from Produce to Dairy, Men’s Wear to Jewelry, until he locates her—sometimes not locating her until the second check, she perhaps happening to round one end of an aisle as he rounds its other, or he perhaps not spotting her behind some other shoppers. “Why does it bother you so?” she’ll ask: “If we happen to get separated, just wait for me at the check out.” He is a bit obsessive about it, he’ll acknowledge, to the point even of bad dreams on that theme: losing her not in the Stratford Safeway or Walgreens, but in the swarming Tangier souk, say, where an otherwise appealing little beggar-waif whose guide-services we’d politely declined had trailed after us calling “Dur-r-ty Chews! Dur-r-ty Chews!”—as if all guideless non-Muslim tourists were ipso facto Jewish and ipso facto et cetera. But it was in Tangier also—the city that inspired Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade suite and Matisse’s odalisque paintings—that G. I. Newett had felt closest to his favorite storyteller, especially at evening prayer-call time, when the muezzins summoned the faithful with amplified chants from the lighted minarets of mosques near the Newett/Todds’ hotel.

  “You didn’t used to get so worked up about it,” his mate will scold when he finally finds her, or reports yet another such alarming dream. So clearly now can he hear her saying that, half amused and half chiding, it’s as if that computer/cell phone/ whatever has spoken again.

  “That’s because I didn’t used to be an Old Fart,” he’ll acknowledge, granting readily that the source of this prevailingly mild Separation Anxiety is no doubt his ever-growing awareness of the actuarial clock: that their so-blessed life together is mostly behind them, and that any year now, any semester (their academic-reflexive calendar measure), any day, really . . .

  Mandy?

  Is it his voice speaking that dear name as if in italics, or the cell phone/computer’s, or no literally audible voice at all, but the italicized next line of some new Newett-work in uncertain progress that goes on to say Pretend you just want to tell her to come listen to this weirdo Genie-thing in your study—which in fact you do want her to—and go check every room in the place again, plus walk-in closets, balcony, outside corridor, stairwell to the ground floor, garage, parking lot—the works. Then when you find her coming back from putting out the garbage or whatever, you’ll feel enormously relieved and pathologically stupid.

  Not a bad idea. And if I don’t?

  Don’t find her, you mean, or don’t go looking, but for a change assume the best and likeliest scenario rather than the worst/unlikeliest, and just sit there and type out more G. I. Newett-sentences, maybe in a less paranoid, self-titillative vein?

  “Genie-thing,” he sees he’s written (not on that still-unfamiliar new word-processor, but with his faithful old fountain pen, a comfort to return to). Along with the djinns/jinnis/genies of the Nights, the word conjures his beloved’s long-since-discarded middle name. Amanda Jean Todd, her parents dubbed her, and although by the time G. met her she had long since dropped the “Jean” (on the grounds that double first names like “Barbara Ann,” “Susie Mae,” and “Amanda Jean” sounded redneck to her), he sometimes teases her with it still: “My wonder-working Jeannie,” he’d call her in their relationship’s early years, when her mere touch sometimes gave him an erection; or, stroking her pubes, “My Genie with the light brown hair.” Or—when he had introduced her to the Nights, with their varying transliterations of the Arabic word for those plot-escalating spirits—“Me G.I.N.; you Jinni: Open Sesame, sez me, and your devoted Ifrit will gladly enter.”

  Stuff like that. Those were the days—not that these latter ones aren’t sweet, rich, precious. Desperately precious—there’s the rub, for the actuarial reasons aforementioned—and damn it to hell, why doesn’t he cap his fucking pen, stop imagining or pretending that he’s hearing voices, stop scaring himself shitless that his Without-Whom-Nothing mightn’t be where she normally is at this weekday hour or that it’s Bad News if she happens not to be, and just go have a look instead of imagining that he’s done that already, in vain?

  “Hey, Mandy? Come lis
ten to this. Mandy?”

  Did you speak that aloud, or just write it?

  2. Are You There?

  Well of course she’s not in her study/workroom composing Mandy-verses, paying bills, making service-people appointments, and/or arranging the next Todd/Newett vacation trip (to Alaska, he believes it’s to be, next August): When G. exits his to get a swig from his personal spring-water bottle in the fridge, he notices that hers—a different brand, for ID purposes, although they usually refill each a few times from a gallon jug on the countertop before discarding—isn’t there. Gone also is their grocery-and-errand list from under its magnet on the fridge door and, when he now checks, the blue plastic ice-packs from the freezer door shelf and the small portable cooler from the laundry room that they always take to the supermarket. So okay: That means that her car will be gone too, from its numbered space behind the condo, because—of course!—she had business on campus, including (as he now more or less remembers) lunch with the guy who succeeded her as Director of Stratford College’s Shakespeare House upon her retirement. How could he have forgotten? It’s probably even noted on his desk calendar, and she didn’t interrupt him to remind him because she assumed he was communing with the Muse of O.F. Fiction, not futzing with computer/cell-phone interlinkages, and she decided to pick up a few items at the market while she was in town: a chore that her mate much enjoys sharing with her except for those occasional Where-did-she-go? moments aforementioned. So relax! Not to worry! Write a sentence!

  Or push a few buttons....

  Are you there?

  I’m here, Genie-lady. Where’re you? And who?

  I’m here, as you can hear.

  Here where?

  Wherever here is. As to who, well . . . Who’s anybody? Who’s “who”? Who’s You?

  G. I. Newett, as if you didn’t know it: Look him up in the Who’s Who of Postmortem Fiction.

  Postmortem? . . .

  All that Death-of-the-Novel crap, you know? Very big in late-twentieth-century English departments. ’Twas born a-dying, I’ve heard tell, like Yours Truly and the rest of us; been dying vigorously ever since, and can be expected to go on dying for a lively while yet. Over?

  But you just said that it’s not over.

  You know what I mean: Your turn now.

  To die? Not my métier, friend: As you may have read, we genie-types can sometimes be tricked back into our bottles, but we’re afflicted with immortality.

  “Afflicted,” you say? Is it maybe contagious, then? Sexually transmissible?

  Listen to you!

  I’m listening to you, Dreamy Jeannie.

  Your beloved bed- and life-mate of forty years steps out of the house for a couple of hours, and you flirt with your fucking office equipment!

  Provocative modifier noted. As some other oldie once said about his latter years, “Sex goes. Memory goes. But the memory of sex never goes.”

  Spare us the details.

  “Us” meaning, presumably, G. I. Newett’s uncorked jinni/ djinn/genie and his Patient Reader, should any such exist. To spare herself the details, perhaps, Ms. Jeannie-Voice goes on to remind him that increasingly of late, when his mate is out of the house or even just unexpectedly out of sight, G. I. Newett inclines to more or less alarming What Ifs. What if she’s taken a tumble down the condo stairs (less likely at her age than at his), or had an out-of-nowhere ruptured aneurysm? What if she and her pesto-green Honda Civic are carjacked in the Safeway parking lot (such things can happen, even in low-crime Stratford/ Bridgetown), or rammed by an errant driver, or squashed by a falling tree such as they sometimes see along Avon County’s rural roads?

  Come off it: More likely she’s hooking up with some StratColleague because your paranoia’s been driving her bananas—or your recent inclination to conjure up sexy genies.

  Sexy, are you?

  Forget about it.

  He does, for the present anyhow, and scribbles instead his resolve, when Mandy attends the two-day Eastern Shore Writers Association Conference—scheduled for this weekend, is it? down at Marshyhope State U.?—to abstain from such grim and admittedly far-out (but not unimaginable, Q.E.D.) worry-wart worries. They are, he acknowledges, inspired not by love alone, but also by self-concern: his practical as well as emotional dependence upon his mate in so many life-departments, from loving companionship and moral/ethical compass-correction to menuplanning, bill-paying, copyediting, laundry—the works. He does his share, he hopes: managing as best he can their uncomplicated finances and home-office accounting; vacuuming the floors before she does all the rest of the weekly cleaning; handling a few guy-type things like car tire-pressure and fluid-level checks and simple household repair-and-maintenance chores; serving as her sous-chef in the kitchen—but although neither of them can imagine life without the other, he believes (despite her ardent, exclamatory denials!) that in the dreadful event, she would somehow cope better than he. At their age, needless to say, they’ve seen friends and colleagues aplenty widowed or widowered—some by fluke accidents like those afore-imagined, others by mercifully brief or painfully extended illness, and at least one by her spouse’s alcoholic suicide. Remarkably, to us Newett/Todds, the survivors seem in the main to carry on, thanks no doubt to networks of supportive friends and family-members. Although a few succumb to chronic depression, most of their acquaintance, aided by their grown children, stoically exchange their houses for apartments or assisted-living quarters, sometimes in a different part of the country. They attend social-club events, do volunteer work, and in a few cases even remarry. Unimaginable!

  Even for a bloke whose line of work is imagining stuff, like sexy “Jeannie”-voices in his workroom? Conveniently coincident with the non-presence, let’s say, of his Without-Whom-Nothing mate?

  May one inquire just what the fuck you’re suggesting?

  One may. You having conjured my Mandy-like voice out of these office-gadget interlinkages into your quote “Creation Space” unquote, I’m suggesting that you now take advantage of Ms. M.’s presumably temporary absence to conjure into your Business Space my also-temporary but (literally) fabulous physical presence: naked as a jaybird, slim and frisky as your mate was back when the pair of you first frisked—but with darker hair, I guess, we Jeannies being of Persian/Arabic extraction—and we’ll get down to Business, me straddling your magically restored youth ful virility with my pert young bubbies in your face and humping your geriatric brains out. Or in, rather, until you’re ready to fire off not yet another O.F.F., but a B.&B.T.D.F.: Brash and Brilliant Tour De Force! When wifey then returns from her in-town and on-campus business (if she ever does, and if that’s where she is and what she’s up to), you’ll surprise her with a very different sort of Capital-P Performance from the ones you’ve been laying on her lately. Whatcha say, Boss? Come have yourself one last Capital-V Vision!

  Well: Since you ask, I say A, that I’ve never understood why we say “naked as a jaybird,” when every jay I’ve ever seen has head-to-tail plumage....

  Until we’re plucked. Shall we get to it?

  And B, that that’s quite enough Old Fart Fantasizing for today. Back into the bottle you go, girl: I’m off to meet Mandy for lunch at Bozzelli’s and do our weekly grocery shopping.

  Quit fooling yourself.

  Quit fooling yourself, George Irving Newett says or writes, whether to “her” or to himself or to both or neither. She’s out checking the mailbox; back in a minute. She’s doing stuff in town; back after lunch. She’s prepping her poetry reading for the Shore Writers conference (which, despite his pride and pleasure in her verse, he has reluctantly decided not to attend, because its venue evokes so many bittersweet memories of his brief first marriage). Or none of the above?