Every Third Thought

by John Barth

  For the first time, he uses his new cell phone to dial hers—and gets her voicemail voice, as reminiscent of “Jeannie’s” as was her voice of his wife’s:

  Please leave a message after the tone.

  “Mandy? Where are you? Sweetheart?”

  3. Hello?

  “An instrument of Satan,” Mark Twain called Samuel F. B. Morse’s newly-invented telephone. George Irving Newett inclines to agree, granting however that like other of the Devil’s bright ideas—television, the Internet, alcohol, human curiosity and imagination—it has its virtues, to the point of nearindispensability. Himself rather a telephonophobe, more inclined to exchange e-mail messages with friends and colleagues than to dial them up, and appalled by the hosts of cell phone chatterers on the street and in shops, restaurants, and stadiums (not to mention driving vehicles!), he nonetheless grants the superior closeness of phone calls over written messages. Closerness, rather, to face-to-face conversation: the audible voice, the spontaneous give and take. He’s thankful that videophones never caught on back in the twentieth century, as many believed they would, and he quite understands the popularity of Facebook, YouTube, and suchlike audiovisual intercommunication among twenty-first-century young folk—but not for him, thanks. Like the desktop computer in his study’s Production area, the telephone in its Business area and others here and there in the Todd/Newett condominium are instruments of home and home-office business: G.I.N. doesn’t turn to them for pleasure.

  Not even if Jeannie With the Light Brown Pubic Hair pops out of them to let Pop pop her?

  Especially in that unimaginable unlikelihood.

  Which however he seems lately to have managed to imagine, in his absent mate’s recent absences.

  Shame on him for that—but he here reminds all hands that Creative Imaginings are as non-responsible as dreams. It’s what one does with them that matters.

  So let’s see what we can do! Come do me, Pops....

  He further reminds all hands (himself especially) that his Mandy’s “absence” is not indefinite, as to either whereabouts or duration: She’s attending ESWAC, the annual Eastern Shore Writers Association Conference, down at Marshyhope State University on the lower Shore, remember? Where more than half a century ago George Irving Newett commenced his academic-pedagogical career as an entry-level Instructor of English Composition.

  You wish . . .

  What Narrator wishes is that either his wife were back up here with him (as she was supposed to be by now, and no doubt soon will be: weekend traffic delays, most likely; you’d think she’d’ve called—but he knows she knows he dislikes phonecalls) or he down there with her—preferably the former. Hates eating and sleeping alone; making up their king bed singlehanded in the morning; fixing meals and watching TV by himself, here where they do just about everything together except on the toilet and in their workrooms! He much wishes now that he’d gone down to Marshyhope with her, but—

  But much as you honor your long-ago-failed first matrimonial adventure with Miz Marsha Green, you still find its mise-en-scène off-putting, blah blah blah. Let’s not go there, okay?

  I didn’t—and so now I get the bill. But Mandy’ll be back anytime now, so forget it. She’s just a bit late, is all.

  You wish. Meanwhile, I believe you mentioned quote, going down, unquote?

  And you mentioned “light brown hair.” I thought you’d said your hair was dark?

  Better check it out, don’t you think? Even by your wishfulthinking timetable, we’ve got awhile to frisk: Come find my G-spot!

  Back into the bottle you go, girl: If you’d caught me between matrimonial chapters four decades ago, we would no doubt have checked each other out for sure. But alas, we didn’t have cell phones and computers back then to interbreed and interbreed with, and now Yours Truly isn’t yours except in bored/ restless/fretful/sportive/time-filling/make-pretend conversation, he being a long-happily-and-faithfully-married Oldster who very much misses his Missus.

  And who ain’t seen nothing yet—either of Jeannie in the Light Tan Flesh or of really missing his late Miz Mandy.

  “Really” missing? Just what the F-blank-blank-blank is that “really” supposed to mean? And that “late”?

  . . .

  Well?

  . . .

  Hello?

  . . .

  Hey, damn it: I’m talking to you! Hello? Hello?

  . . .

  4. Djinn and Tonic

  When one’s life-partner of nearly half a century, homeward bound from a minor writers’ conference that she self-teasingly labeled Conference of Minor Writers, is suddenly and altogether unexpectedly taken from one—by head-on collision of pesto-green Honda Civic, say, with momentarily out-of-control silver/bronze GMC Sierra 4 ×4 pickup truck whose middleaged driver suffers cardiac arrest at 55 mph on Avon County Road 444 just outside Stratford town limits and also dies, either in or immediately prior to crash (Who cares which? And how one’s late poet/professor/life-partner Amanda [Jean] Todd used to wince at her life-partner’s inclination to the impersonal pronoun “one”; and how one’s heart, soul, and gut now wrench at the memory of her editorial acumen, among a thousand other memories!)—one can be excused (one presumes, but doesn’t finally give a shit) for hitting the bottle a bit beyond one’s routine, afore-specified three drinks a day (see “Summer,” p. 135 supra).

  Or for indulging even more than a bit beyond that customary quota. In deep shock since the so-often-darkly-fantasizedand-feared phone-call (County Sheriff’s Office, regretfully reporting EMS transport of accident-victim to Avon Medical Center and confirmation of her death—and how Mandy also winced at her spouse’s hyphenated adjectival strings!), G. I. Newett is astonished at his somehow managing to address, through the following season, the all but endless postmortem To Do list—or would be, were he capable in his new circumstances of astonishment or any other feeling beyond stunned devastation. There is, e.g., the

  —Clerical Stuff, into which the Newett/Todds were initiated by the serial demises of their parents over the decades, Mandy as usual managing most of it. Death certificates to be filled out and multi-copied; notification of medical and life insurers, credit card companies, Social Security Administration and other pension and annuity payers; execution of Last Wills & Testaments, etc. etc. Then the

  —Notification of Relatives (in their case, none) and of Friends and Colleagues, who’ll no doubt plan a memorial service at Shakespeare House for their much-esteemed colleague that he’ll have to steel himself to attend unless he preventively slits his wrists or flings himself off the Matahannock River Bridge on an outgoing tide, as a graduating StratColl senior once unaccountably did and G. I. Newett wishes he could fucking do as well. Plus the

  —Funeral Arrangements: As with the clerical shit, he’s had some previous experience with the folk at the local “parlor” upon the “passing,” as they like to call it in the trade, of those elder Todds and Newetts—Mandy mainly in charge here too, she being the abler hand at more things than not. Casket and headstone selection; funeral service and interment in Avon County Cemetery per deceased’s expressed wishes; help with survivor’s accommodation to radically altered circumstances, etc. etc. He and Mandy being childless and siblingless non-believers who in recent years have almost never bothered even to visit their progenitors’ graves (contenting themselves instead with marking the respective birth- and death-days with commemorative candles lighted on dining room table beside framed photos of the deceased), the Arrangements for his Sine Qua Non will come down to little more than

  —Disposal of Corpse—via cremation, by their longstanding agreement. “Cremains” to be not ceremonially urned or ritually scattered, as sundry of their bereaved colleagues have done with the leftovers of their Dear Departeds, but dumped by the Parlor People, neither he nor Mandy being sentimental re the ashes of a once-so-treasured body. And then . . .

  —Disposal of Deceased’s Personal Effects. Aiaiai! Oyoyoyoy! With Ma and Pa Newett and Pa and Ma Tod
d, an affecting (and mighty labor-intensive) chore: taking a few small mementoes for themselves; donating closet- and dresserdrawerfulls of clothing to charity-places; arranging and presiding over estate sale of furniture, housewares, wall art, cars, real estate. But in the case of one’s so-much-Better half . . . unthinkable! Empty her clothes closet? Sell or donate the king bed in which for decades they royally disported, and in their later age still long and lovingly embraced at each day’s and night’s commencement? Her files of finished and unfinished poems, prized lecture-notes, and correspondence with fellow scribblers and former students, together with the dear desk at which she did her muse- and schoolwork? He’d rather dump himself!

  Not a bad idea, come (again) to think of it.

  Come again? Let’s get to it, Gin-boy!

  You again. Where were you when I called you, at the end of Scenario Three?

  Back in our namesake bottle, I reckon—which one gathers you’ve reopened for sorrow-drowning purposes. Good mourning, Comrade Newett!

  Okay, we get it: G.I.N./Djinn/Gilbey’s Dry. Which in fact Yours Truly has re-resorted to lately in this bleakest of his life’s seasons. So?

  The classic Old Fart Final Solution: OFF yourself with alcohol, meanwhile indulging last-ditch gin-fueled fantasies....

  Djinn-fueled? Who do you think you’re fueling?

  It’s whom, as a former English teacher should know, and as his quote/unquote “late” mate would for sure. Whom do you think you’re fooling?

  With these progressively Worse-to-Worst case Scenarios, do you mean, or with the virtual materialization of presumably nubile, presumably lovely and buck-naked Arabian-Nights-like Genie from cell phone/computer coupling? And why do we say “buck naked,” when every male Virginia White-Tail I’ve ever seen is as furred from horn to hoof as “jaybirds” are feathered from beak to tail?

  And even your bare-naked “Jeannie,” as afore-noted, is light-brown-haired where it matters. Come have a look.

  . . .

  Has she mentioned that her nom de plume—nom de tongue, I guess, since she’s a story-teller, not a story-penner—happens to be “Scheherazade,” and that all those yarns she spun in the Thousand and One Nights are just a drop in her narrative bucket? One jigger from the Jinni’s bottle? So come jigger me, Boss: Dip your pen in my well, the way King Shahryar used to do every fucking Arabian night! Amuse and re-muse yourself, and I’ll turn a Narrative Old Fart into the Still-Potent Pop of Postmortem Prose Fiction!

  To which genre, come to think of it, this Scenario in particular might be said to belong. Or maybe Premortem Pre-emission Premonition? Prophylactic Imagining of the Unimaginable?

  You wish. You hope. You’d pray, were you the praying sort. No condoms needed with us Jeannies, by the way—and by the way, have you ever heard of Auditory Ejaculation?

  Can’t say I have. Why do you ask?

  Because, being less sozzled than some on Djinn and Tonic, I’m pretty sure I hear someone coming. Better shut down your pornophonic play-toys now, before she catches you in the Acting-Out act. Assalamu alaikum, hasta la vista dot dot dot?

  . . . !

  5. The Book of Fourteen Thousand Six Hundred-Plus Nights

  The likeliest scenario, of course, is that Amanda [Jean] Todd is asleep beside George Irving Newett on her side of their matrimonial bed, as she’s been for all but a few of their union’s forty yearsworth of nights. Even Middle-of-the-Night Paranoid Fantasizers like G.I.N.—whether fetched from sleep by his aging bladder or just wakened, more or less, from a particularly vivid series of brief but alarming dreams—would grant as much. Windows, blinds, and curtains closed, their bedroom is entirely dark except for the night-lighted slit from not-quiteclosed bathroom door that guides them several times per night to urinary relief, each of them usually sleeping through the other’s exits and re-entrances. Unless he switches his bedside light on (which of course he won’t), he can’t always be sure she’s there beside him even if he turns and looks. Which he’s not about to do, A, because he’s not quite that paranoid, yet; B, because even if she’s not there, all it would mean is that she’s off a-peeing; and C, because he’s lying comfortably (except for his own gradually increasing bladder-signals) in his usual position—right-side down on his bed-side, facing away from his beloved—and dreaming up all this Scare-Yourself-Shitless shit.

  Reader is here informed that we Todd/Newetts don’t flush toilets at night, lest we wake our mate. G. listens for her tell-tale tinkle—which, however, he doesn’t inevitably hear, his auditory acuity (too) being Not What It Used To Be. Nor does he hear his partner respiring beside him—always a comfort even when she’s lightly snoring, as both occasionally do—or having one of her Chuckle Dreams, which it makes him smile to hear, or one of her Whimper Dreams, which it so hurts his heart to hear that he sometimes has to touch her hip or shoulder to interrupt it, a usually effective tactic. Nor has he for some while now felt any stirrings from her side....

  So what? So she’s sleeping comfortably but less than deeply: i.e., quietly. All he needs to do, for crying out loud17, is turn over and look or feel—or cry out loud, thereby relieving his nutcase apprehensions at cost of her well-earned rest. (He almost said peaceful rest—as in R.I.P.? Caught himself just in time, but finds himself writing it here instead.)

  Hell with that: He’ll know soon enough, when he hauls out to do his Number Two Number One, whether his bed-partner of some 14,600+ nights is where of course of course of course of course she’ll be: right there beside him. Or else busy doing what he, not having heard her go before him, will have gotten up to do. Or . . .

  Or gone before him, Zeus forefend, as more and more of their coevals’ mates have done, and as he well knows (but can’t finally imagine, and therefore finds himself almost obsessively trying to) that she or he—may it be he, he selfishly but fervently wishes!—must likewise do. Or has already done, as sooner or later he’ll have to admit if never accept that she’s done already, damn her bless her bring her back or get him out of here!

  You could, you know, just turn the fuck over, reach out, and touch, instead of playing these stupid games.

  I know. I know.

  So do it, and I’m outta here for good.

  It’s about time.

  What isn’t? C’mon, Gee-man: One . . . Two . . . Three? Or on Second Thought, as your alledgedly late pal would say, how about

  Three (our little ménage à trois)? . . .

  Two (you Todd/Newett//Newett/Todds)? . . .

  One? (Reach out and touch, old sport, and our story’s done).

  1 Headquarters of the college’s Creative Writing Program, as ought to have been mentioned earlier but may or may not have been, at least in the present narrative-in-utero. The modest frame bungalow just off campus with its offices, workshop/seminar rooms, and student lounge area was purchased some decades ago with a generous endowment from a wealthy alumnus who in his college years had aspired to playwriting, but who made his considerable fortune as CEO of Tidewater Communities Inc., the developer of Heron Bay Estates and other projects. The ever-increasing interest on that endowment not only maintains our Shakespeare House, but also funds our program’s little literary periodical (The Stratford Review), pays for a series of visiting reader/ lecturers each semester, and notoriously subsidizes our annual student literary award, the almost embarrassingly large Shakespeare Prize. For more on this problematical plum (on whose judicial committee both of us Newett/Todds often serve, doubtless earning us the same scornful finger at times that one saw G.I.N. give the Nobel committee some pages back), Reader may either wait for Narrator to amble back to that subject, as chances are he will, or check out an item called “The Bard Award” in that story series mentioned in the “preamble” to this ramble.

  2 Narrator’s Google-search of whom informs him, among its two-million-plus entries, that the character of R the R-N R was invented by George May in 1939 as a marketing gimmick for Montgomery Ward Inc. and later turned into the song made popular by Gene Autry’s
recording in 1949, by when the Newett/Prosper boys will have begun their undergraduate years at Tidewater State University and Stratford College, respectively—Gee still floundering to find a major, Ned already on the verge of resolving to write the Great American Novel—and Ruth Prosper Garrett (a failing octogenarian widow now, Narrator understands, in the care of her daughter and son-in-law somewhere Out West) a newlywed Goucher College graduate whose “Susie” it was never his privilege to re-view.

  3 “I wonder where the birdies is” in the anonymous original, but O.F.F. G.I.N. misremembered it as “flowers” until too late, when flowers had blossomed in the pages to follow.

  4 I.e., the Second World War of the twentieth century’s first half, won by the Allies in Europe officially on “V-E Day” (May 7, 1945) and in the Pacific four months later on “V-J Day” (September 2), at an estimated cost of 45,000,000 human lives.

  5 E.g., the paradigmatic line in Zadie Smith’s 2000 novel White Teeth— “Fuck you, you fucking fuck”—which deploys it serially as verb, adjective, and noun.

  6 Copyright 1961 (renewed) Fall River Music.

  7 Since lightning precedes thunder both in waking Nature and in G.I.N.’s dream, why does the German expression traditionally put the cart before the horse, as it were, or Santa’s reindeer in the wrong order?

  8 Korean-language instruction at the Army Language School in Monterey; busy spare-time sampling of assorted West Coast attractions, from Valley Girls to giant-redwood forests and chilly Pacific surfing, Existentialism to Zen Buddhism; and the ever-shape-shifting programme of his novel-in-theworks—whose title, he reported without explanation, he was changing “on Second Thought” from Seasons to Every Third Thought.

  9 Anonymous, late-thirteenth/early-fourteenth century.