Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas

by John Barth

  "So...?"

  Raising herself on one elbow, "D'you think he doesn't know I'm here, and what we're doing?"

  "He does?"

  Her sex-wet, fragrant thighs clamped shut. "Did you think I was cheating on him? Wait'll I tell him!" He had all but ordered her there, she declared—not that she objected to her assignment: the capital-P Protagonist's capital-I Initiation into the ditto-M Mysteries.

  Lucky protagonist, to have so able an initiator. No beauty, Winifred Stark, with her too-plump cheeks and less-than-slender waist and legs; but she was high-spirited, amused and amusing in and out of bed, while also impassioned: an altogether admirable part-time preceptor. And Al clearly did know, at least in a general way, and evidently accepted, what his trio-mates were up to in their ménage á deux et un peu, as he himself came to call it on the infrequent occasions—over dinner or between sets at the Trivium—when the subject was lightly alluded to. Did he also know that as his protégé-protagonist's sexual self-confidence increased, Will would sometimes importune his initiator, en route home to Briarwood from the Cheatery, to detour into 204 for a quickie, perhaps even a not-so-quickie, before she continued upstairs? And that Winnie seemed pleased by these impromptu detours—"intromission times," she liked to call them—to the point of occasionally arching an expectant eyebrow himward as their elevator reached floor 2? That it was she who forbade him to sheathe his grand peu, as she saw fit to call it ("plus grand than some other peux in this ménage"), even when she was sans diaphragm, as was generally the case in these unscheduled come-togethers, bidding him instead to withdraw at the last pre-climactic moment and ejaculate instead into her navel or any other nonvaginal receptor? One imagined not, though with Al Baumann there was no telling.

  Face-down in Will's pillow at a Wednesday afternoon's end, her pink butt elevated for their mutual pleasure, "Who knows what our Amazing Al knows and doesn't know?" Win would ask rhetorically. "The guy knows such a shitload!"

  "He didn't know, Reader," those couplers' mentoring spirit here interjects. "At least not in any face-down-in-Will's-pillow detail, although he half suspected something of the sort, swallowed hard, and did his best to shrug his Burgundy-bottle shoulders thereat. While his part-time fiancée was presenting her plump pinkery to his protégé's plus grand peu, her PTF was ears-deep in the dissertation that he aimed to finish in time for their spring 1950 wedding: a thesis not on the Myth of the Birth of the Wandering Hero, but on the Birth of the Myth thereof. More precisely, on its rebirth for twentieth-century Modernists like James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, et alii after Sir James Frazer's groundbreaking Golden Bough of 1890, and its culmination in such landmark studies as Lord Raglan's, Bronislaw Malinowski's, Joseph Campbell's, and, one had innocently hoped, Alfred Baumann Ph.D.'s, that erstwhile Friday-night wittol and subsequent impromptu cuckold. Pardon the footnote?"

  Footnote pardoned, O best of mentors—whose culminative dissertation was fated never to see the publication it eminently deserved, nor its author his post-doctoral fulltime academic appointment and ensuing, assuredly brilliant professorial career.

  "Aborted, like some other things. But before we get to that, permit said nipped-in-the-bud dissertator to remark aside that thus far into this Three Freds Story its narrator has neglected to mention, among other things, any of Will Chase's other VVLU classes, seminars, and workshops besides Lit-Phil and Yarnspinning One-oh-one, or any other-than-Fred friends, classmates, and professors, some of whom surely must have impacted, as they say, his vocation? Nor has he, for the sake of verisimilitude and capital-T Texture, gotten into the nitty-gritty of our weekend music-making at the Trivium, as might have been expected. Too busy choosing ejaculatory receptacles?"

  Too busy crying Fuck Fate!, which so roundly fucked good Al Baumann.

  "Leave that ejaculation to Fate's fuckee, friend, and get on with Will and Winnie's getting it on. Tell Me."

  Ro-ger, Teach: Brit slang, Narrator believes, for what that pair were energetically up to, more or less behind their best pal's back. Will rogered Win, Win Will, all over B 204, and B 304 as well when her One True Love was off in the library stacks comparative-mythologizing, as he often was. Even rogered her there one mid-summer Monday eve, he did, or she him, up against a carrel in the farthest alcoves of Sanskrit Lit—decoupling in the nick of time, or nearly, to spritz the gilt-lettered spines of the Panchatantra instead of Ms. Stark's unshielded privity.

  "The Ryder translation, that would have been, one wagers: 1925."

  If you say so, boss. Yet let it not be supposed that these goers-to-it loved each other, or that their busy erotic/moral experimentation was shame-free. Bonded they were, for sure—mainly by their joint esteem for Win's One True Et Cet—but what they felt for each other was friend-love, nowise lover-love. And while their shared appall at their infidelity was no doubt an added spice to those non-Friday clandestineries, it was nonetheless stingingly authentic shame, of the what-the-fuck-are-we-doing? variety. "Sexual errancy in general," Al Baumann liked to tell his Lit & Phillers when their syllabus reached Tolstoy and Flaubert, "and adultery in particular, are to the nineteenth-century social-realistic novel what Fate and hubris are to Greek tragedy: the mainspring of the action. Oedipus innocently but not unintentionally nails his dad at the Place Where Three Roads Meet, fulfilling the very prophecy that he was in flight from; Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary drop their extramarital drawers. In both genres, it's on with the story."

  Which is to say, in the errant Freds' case, on to the next turn of the plot-screw, excuse the expression.

  "Expression excused, friend. Likewise plot-screw, while I'm at it: unforgotten, mind, but truly long since forgiven, as it would be even if I hadn't brought it on myself with that Friday-night Share the Goodies routine—my bright idea, though Win didn't need much persuading. And it's time those horny young cheats forgave themselves. Maybe that's what's going on here?"

  Not for Teller to presume.

  "Anyhow, man, on with it: Eternity doesn't last forever; it only seems to. Turn that screw!"

  Pause. Sigh. Screw that turn, Al: Can't do it.

  "You fucking must; otherwise it'll be my turn to tell and our story's turn to get screwed. How through that spring and summer of 'forty-nine, the season of the Cheatery—while the new state of Israel celebrated its first anniversary, and Mao Tse-tung's Red Army drove Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists out of China, and the USSR maintained its Berlin blockade while preparing to test its first A-bomb, and North Korea made ready to invade South—all three Freds went at it like the variously gifted, high-energy young screw-ups they were, dot dot dot et cetera. Tell me."

  ...by no means merely rogering one another literally and figuratively, busy as they were at that. Much more busily, in fact, they were (in Winnie's case) pursuing mastery of both the pianoforte and the Science of Libraries; in Al's, taking unto himself the rest of the corpus of Comparative Mythology and related disciplines while also teaching Adult Ed classes in the university's night school, prodding Will through the long list of texts he'd better have under his belt if he aspired ever to add something of his own thereto, and also coaching him in the Proper Percussionist's paradiddles, flamadiddles, flamacues, and other such licks that Will used routinely in their Trivium sessions without knowing the terminology—

  "The way Molière's Monsieur Jourdain, you're expected to say at this point, discovers he's been speaking Prose all his life without knowing it. Tell on."

  And in said percussor's case, practicing likewise with Bassist Baumann's assistance the cues and diddles of narrative sentence-making, plot construction, character and scene rendition—

  "Insofar as one without those knacks can aid one with."

  Which is to say, considerably. And over and above all this cue-and-diddling, or in its interstices, Ann Stein and Stan Fine (and Jim Murphy, Jean Wallace, and half a dozen other Lou Levyites) not only got their homework assignments virtually done for them by their two-buck-an-hour virtual grad-student part-time preceptors, but were by them
genuinely preceptored as well: some rather much, some only slightly, depending on their own receptiveness, but none not at all. Enough anyhow so that toward summer's end Headmaster Levy declared himself prepared to make it worth Will's and Winnie's while to stay on, "with a not-inconsiderable pay raise," come fall.

  "But the fall came early that year, as I remember. July, was it? August?"

  3. "TELL ME"

  One early-June-'49 Friday evening in Briarwood 304, as she and Alfred Baumann were introducing Wilfred Chase to beef fondue, with which, like many another civilized item, he was unfamiliar, "Did you-all know," Winifred Stark asked her male colleagues/companions/lovers, "that the triangle—by which I mean the humble chrome-steel musical instrument, not the rusty old mainspring of Romantic fiction—despite its being the smallest and simplest bit of hardware in the orchestra, can make its ding-a-ling heard through the sound of all the other symphonic instruments combined? Just thought I'd mention that."

  "Mm-hm," said their Near-Boy (the VVLU graduate-students' term for doctoral candidates otherwise classified as ABDs, they having completed All [of their degree requirements] But [their] Dissertation[s]) Baumann. "And apropos of what, exactly, does our winsome Win-Win offer her Fred-friends this musicological tidbit?" Which had been prompted by their Friday-evening pre-dinner custom, in lieu of either Christian table-grace or Jewish Sabbath-prayer, of rubbing wet index-fingertips in concert around the rims of their half-filled wineglasses to make them sing in ethereal near-unison before clinking same and commencing the meal.

  "You tell me," the ruddy lass invited, then demonstrated to webfoot Will how one speared a cube of raw beefsteak with one's fondue fork and plunged it into the Sterno-fired cooking-oil pot before dipping it into one of the several garnis ranged palette-like around one's plate.

  "To me," obliged her fascinated preceptee, "that penetrative ping sounds like a simile waiting for its other shoe to drop—pardon the mixed figure."

  "Not mixed, actually, in this instance," corrected ABD Al. "Compounded, maybe?"

  "Like a felony?" Win wondered, at the same time teaching Will by example that one's place setting was provided with two long-shafted fondue forks so that one's next beef bit could cook while its now-done predecessor was garnished and eaten.

  "Simile upon simile!" that greenhorn marveled. "We're three-deep now, by my count; want to go for four?"

  "In your resident Near-Boy's considered opinion," put in Al, "mixed-metaphoric triangles should be compounded no more than thrice. Let's quit while we're ahead."

  There was upon this banter a palpable voltage—as if, so it felt to Will, his fondue-mates were on to something that he was not, of a character more mattersome than the timbre of chrome-steel triangles, the compounding of tropes, or the oil-boiling of beef. As if, moreover, each of those two knew something further that the other did not, at least for certain, yet. Unsophisticated as he was in many a department, young Narrator-Aspirant Wilfred Chase had some feel for interpersonal voltages.

  "As to that," next declared Winnie—"I mean quitting while we're ahead?—I suspect it's too late already." Dinging then her fondue fork on the pot rim as if signaling the room's attention, "Bombshell time, everybody!" she announced, and went on to report that for the very first time since her menarche at age fourteen, she had, just a fortnight past, missed one of her regular-as-moonphase menstrual periods. Should she similarly, a fortnight hence, skip her next, one or the other of her fellow fonduers was an expectant father, the odds being by her estimate between three and five to one in the Three Freds' bassist's favor, "and what in God's name are our parents going to say when we tell them?" Teary-eyed now, "And what the damn hell are we going to do?"

  When stunned Wilfred had regained his breath, if scarcely his composure, he inhaled deeply, closed and then opened his eyes, dinged one of his brace of fondue forks in like manner, declared "My turn now," and to Al (who'd seemed not at all startled by Winnie's announcement) confessed that, other things equal, the paternity odds were in fact shamefully closer to fifty-fifty than to five or even three to one, himself and Winnie having been at it over the past two months rather more often than on their Al-allotted, post-Trivium Friday nights. He, for one (but he was sure Win felt the same), was contrite at their having so abused the generosity and trust of the best, most valued friend he'd ever had. "I feel like absolute shit, man."

  Too angry now for tears, "You are absolute shit!" affirmed Winnie. "Squealing on us without giving me a chance to come clean first!" For a moment she seemed ready to attack Will with her fondue fork; then she flung it down instead and buried her face in her paper dinner napkin. "You shit!"

  "Ding-ding, guys," wearily here interjected Al, and rapped his fork now on the fondue pot like (Will could not help noting to himself) the aforefigured triangle sounding through the rest of the orchestra. "My turn in the bombardier's seat now?"

  Before adding his tuppence to this dinner-table truth-telling session, he then calmly declared, he wanted to remind his tablemates once again that this Friday-night deux et un peu Al/Win/Will routine had been his questionable idea in the first place, in his self-assumed role of Hero's Helper; if it had gotten out of hand, as he'd lately been pretty much aware that it had, he supposed he deserved the consequences. In a parody of his classroom lectorial voice, he reminded all hands further that his use of the term hero in this context by no means implied a conviction on his part that young Willie Chase of Blue Crab County was destined to do Big Things. Among its other parallels, the Wandering Hero shtick was just Everyman's story writ large, or nearly every man's; the odds against any given Young Talent's grandly fulfilling its promise were in his opinion comparable to those against any given spermatozoon's thrashing successfully upstream through its swarming fellows and nailing the ovum, pardon his analogy. What he'd come to feel, and strongly—a preoccupational hazard, he supposed, given his dissertation topic—was merely that Comrade Chase, despite whatever shortcomings in the sophistication way, belonged distinctly in the category of Swimmer, and himself, just as distinctly, in that of Coach-Facilitator.

  Shrieked Winnie, "Would you stop it already with the sperm and eggs? I'm pregnant, damn it! Knocked up!"

  "Quite possibly." Taking her hand across the table corner, "And when we know for sure, we'll deal with it."

  Steadier now despite her tears, What did he mean deal with it?? she wanted to know—as, very much indeed, did Will.

  Their companion shrugged. "Either we move up our wedding date and make the kid more or less legit, or we consult Matson," Winnie's gynecologist, a colleague of Al's father, "about fixing it for us, if that's what we'd prefer. And if Matson declines," these being pre–Roe v. Wade days, when abortion was still officially prohibited in the US of A, "we fess up and ask Dad for suggestions."

  "What's this if we'd prefer?" But she didn't snatch back her hand. "D'you think I want a kid that might even possibly not be yours? I'm not ready even if it is yours!"

  Patting her his-held hand with his other, "So we have ourselves a chat with Doc Matson when the time comes. But—as I was saying?" He dinged the pot again for attention and resumed his mock-lectorial tone: "What we-all find ourselves presently approaching on the not-so-merry-go-round of the Heroic Cycle"—he indicated by fork each Fred in turn: "Hero-Aspirant malgré lui or anyhow Protagonist in potentia, Prematurely Pronged Princess, and Has-Been Helper—is the So Long, Sidekick scene, celebrated in song and story."

  The first- and second-named of that triad froze in baffled apprehension, borderline alarm. Has-Been? So Long?

  "Said Sidekick's addio aria," Al went on, "commences with his gently informing Miz Princess that the fruit of her womb, whether nipped in bud or nurtured to harvest, is almost certainly not of his planting, he having learned among other interesting things in a recent clinical workup (a) that his sperm count is low almost to the point of nonexistence, and (b) that roughly ninety percent of his paltry output are nonmotile. Ergo, guys, whether or not it's bye-bye baby this time next month
—and I, for one, rather hope it won't be—the odds against its being Baumann's wee bastard in there are ... what? About a quarter-million to one? Half a million?"

  Too stricken to reply, Winnie pushed aside her plate and plopped her head face-down on the table before the bubbling pot. Soul-shaken Wilfred, suddenly more apprehensive than before, wondered, "So what else did the docs have to say, Al?"

  Their bass-figured leader smiled at his questioner and then at Winnie (sitting upright again, face drained). Speaking as if to their clasped hands, "In a properly constructed story," he declared, "there'd've been a few strategically placed foreshadowings before now: I might've mentioned joint pains ten pages ago, for example, or you two could've remarked between fucks that old Near-Boy was looking weaker and paler in Part Two of this yarn than he looked in Part One..."

  "Al?"

  "At least we should've planted a little bleeding from mouth, nose, and asshole—or, as the Merck Manual elegantly puts it, quote thrombocytopenia giving rise to pete-chiae and ecchymoses unquote." To Will, "Don't you love that lingo, man? You could have the guy's girlfriend find him reading the seventh-edition Merck one night in bed when she comes up from downstairs, and sort of wondering, What the fuck? But she figures it's just another of his gotta-know-everything things, so she nods off worrying about her period instead..."

  "Al!"

  Returning his fork to its intended use, their ariast (more pallid indeed, they noted now, than his never-ruddy usual) speared and dunked a final beef bit into the pot, just barely bubbling above its waning blue Sterno flame.

  "Not A-L Al anymore, friends. From here on out it's A-M-L Al: Acute Myeloblastic Leukemia." And "here on out," he explained to his listeners too shocked to speak, meant possibly the whole upcoming academic year, if the methotrexate with which he was currently being dosed effected the brief remission that he much hoped for in order to wind up his goddamned myth dissertation, see his PartTime Fiancée's Interesting Condition resolved one way or the other, and maybe goose his Ritual Wandering Whatchacallit-pal one step farther around the famous Cycle. "Otherwise, guys," which VVLU's oncological gurus, Dad Baumann included, had regretfully informed him meant Usually, "we're talking maybe four to six months. Sorry about that. But ain't Truth swell? I feel freer already."