Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas

by John Barth

  "His fucking work."

  Another misleading adjective, Thelm, if Bernbridge Manor's resident authority on that activity may put in a word here about that word. Somebody mentioned erotomania a while ago—me, probably, because what's on my mind is either Gracie's or Manny's reminding us, way back then, that since Erato was the Greeks' muse of love poetry, capital-E Erato-mania can mean being hooked on that muse and her medium, not necessarily on sex per se. Am I being too literary for an ex-pornie?

  Maybe, but not for an Arundel State cum laude and ex—Severn Day drama coach. It was the idea of women and their bodies that obsessed Manny: all our little nooks and crannies, what could be done with them and said about them, and what they could be made to stand for—

  Or to put up with...

  —of which our actual PTTs—pussies, tits, and tushies?—were just inspiring reminders.

  "Right on. What it used to remind me of, changes changed, was a certain husband of mine's endless fascination with every aspect of female plumbing, wiring, and the rest: a professional fascination, I was going to say, but it wasn't merely professional, by a long shot. Sammy used to say that he became a gynecologist because he'd liked playing doctor with his little-girl classmates in first grade. So he becomes a top-flight gynecologist who can't keep his fly zipped with any willing, uninfected chick who's not one of his patients. Who's to say what's cause and what's effect?"

  While Manny, on the contrary, did keep his fly zipped the whole time we were working together on The Fates. He wasn't interested in committing adultery, either of the Passionate Extramarital Love Affair kind or Doc Sam's General Screw- ing Around. It was the concept of Sexual Infidelity, like the concept of Love, that turned his imagination on. Don't think of him as whacking off with his left hand while scribbling sentences with his right, Junior, or as fantasizing about his fictional heroines while humping your mom—

  Which is not to say he mightn't have done both, at least now and then...

  "But Gracie's right, as usual: The point is that literal sex was never his point."

  Never his whole point, and seldom his main point. Manny just couldn't get over the ingenuity of Evolution, coming up after millions of years not only with sperm and eggs and cocks and cunts, but with peacock tails and seventeen-year-cicada mating swarms, along with love poems, wedding ceremonies, G-strings, and string bikinis—

  Named after a certain South Pacific atoll, our younger listeners may need reminding, where the US of A tested nuclear weapons from 1946 right up to the year when Manny published Clotho. You could say that The Fates are a kind of literary fallout from that radioactive period.

  "Or that sister Aggie could've been a fine English teach like her twin."

  Our point being that there's a shitload more than S-E-X in that trilogy of his.

  Amen to that. The great ones in any medium get to the bottom of things through some unlikely doors indeed: Monet's haystacks, Joyce's Bloomsday, Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon—

  "And M. F. Dickson's Gracious Masons, who lent him their et ceteras."

  Meaning truly our ears, Listener, this time around. Especially Gracie's—who'll now maybe homestretch this oral history?

  "A-u-r-a-l history? Sorry there, guys..."

  Here we go: It's been said already that Manny and I worked closely together from '55 through '62/'63, first while he was part-timing at ASC and then while he was happily doing the same back at his alma mater, on the strength of Clotho's acceptance for publication in '57 but before it became a succès de scandale. I want to get it on record that he did all the composing—in his nearly illegible ballpoint-penmanship on stacks of white legal pads, which I then deciphered as best I could and typed up for him to revise and rewrite: draft after draft, year after year—

  With a fair amount of editing by his frustrated-writer typist, over and above her quote-unquote deciphering of his hieroglyphics—

  "Not to mention the raw material, excuse the expression, that the three of us filled his eager ears with. We all did our bit."

  We did indeed. But let's be clear on that editing bit, Ag: I made comments and suggestions aplenty, some of which he picked up on and others not. But the critics who've claimed or implied that I as much as coauthored Manny's books—

  "Not to mention at least one who'd like to believe that you ghostwrote 'em for him—"

  —have their critical heads up their professorial asses, and that's the end of that.

  But not the end of your story. Our story.

  Not quite its end, but its end's beginning. Let Listener be reminded that the Fates novels came out at three-year intervals, commencing with Clotho in '57 and Lachesis in '60—both from a small, notorious English-language press in Paris that specialized in Seriously Naughty Lit—before the complete trilogy was published with much fanfare by a New York trade house in November 1963. The coincidence of its appear- ance and President Kennedy's assassination was a factor in The Fates' becoming one more icon of the Johnson/Nixon/ Vietnam War high sixties in rock-and-roll America, along with sit-ins and love-ins, sideburns and ponytails, bongs and bell-bottoms and the rest. But even before Atropos was in print, Clotho and Lachesis had gotten their author hounded out of academia as a pornographer and divorced by his wife, who moved cross-country with ten-year-old Junior and holed up somewhere out in Oregon. Poor Manny—hailed in some quarters, condemned or merely dismissed in others—ended our seven-year working relationship with not much more than a shrug and a thank-you-ma'am. He holed up in a mountain cabin back in his native western Maryland and commenced his descent into alcohol, drugs, and cranky hermithood like some combination of Jack Kerouac and J. D. Salinger, rumored to be still writing, though no longer publishing, until his mysterious disappearance "out west" at the decade's end.

  Which we'll return to, folks—having established, we trust, that while the capital-E Erotic was our "Fred"'s characteristic mode, medium, and material, it was seldom his real subject. The guy was no prude, but that old Lambda Upsy-daisy of ours was a notable exception to a sexually restrained, contentedly monogamous life.

  "Poor shmuck—and that's enough about that. Gracie?"

  Poor dear shmuck. So he kisses me goodbye in the winter of '62/'63—modestly, mind you, on the forehead—and thanks me for all my help. For which he'd been paying me ten percent of his meager royalties, I should've said earlier: another little secret I kept from my husband, like my notebooks on our collaboration. Then, when the American edition of the trilogy brought in some serious money, Manny's ex claimed most of it as back alimony and child support, and he signed it over to her.

  "Shmuck shmendrick shlimazl!"

  It's who he was, Thelma, for better or worse.

  Following which, he disappears in an alcoholic haze out west...

  With Elvis-like reports of his being spotted in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury or some hippie commune in Santa Fe or on the road with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. No trace of further manuscripts in the abandoned cabin, but now and then some lit mag would come out with a Dicksonish piece that it claimed had been sent in under Manny's name from Taos or Tijuana, but with no cover note or street address, and which the critics would then debate the authenticity of. Likewise the occasional fragments and even a couple of whole story scripts that someone would claim to've turned up in a desk drawer at Arundel State or Mason-Dixon U.—a gimmick that Cindy makes good use of in her Wye novella. I could've identified his handwriting right off, but those scripts were always typed (not by me), so who knows? Some of the ones I saw in print sounded less unlikely to me than others—but by the time they surfaced, in the early 1970s, I was busy with my own troubles.

  Weren't we all. But yours first, Grace: the non-Cindy-Ella version.

  Listener needs to be reminded that when Manny first relocated me back in '55 and asked for my "input" on his project-in-the-works, I didn't mention it to my husband for fear he'd find out how his wife had paid her way through college. When our reconnection grew into a regular working relationship, my
line with Ned and our kids was that I'd always secretly aspired to write a novel, and was determined to give it a try in what little time a prep school wife and mother can spare from her main responsibilities. And they were great about leaving Mommy undisturbed when she was typing away in her study or "doing her homework" in the Severn Day or Arundel State libraries. During most of those seven years I was seldom actually with Manny for more than an hour maybe once a week, when either I'd meet him on campus at ASC to pick up his latest batch of scribbling and go through my annotated typescript from the week before, or he'd stop by the faculty mailroom at Severn Day after he'd shifted up to MDU. In the Atropos period, after he'd been sacked by the university but before he holed up in the Allegheny hills, we'd have our little conferences in an Annapolis restaurant booth. And maybe half a dozen times, I admit, I met him in some motel or other where he was camping after his wife threw him out, or just staying over to get some research done.

  "Some research..."

  Okay, I know what Listener's thinking—same as Ned did when he found my diaries. And I grant it sounds like we were going at it. But as Cindy makes clear in her story, it was really more like modeling for life drawing classes in art school. If Manny's mock–Mythic Hero "Fred," for instance (the male lead in the Fates novels, as in Wye), is having himself an early-midlife crisis—as he does in Atropos after dodging the Korean War draft and realizing that he and his wife are evolving in different directions—and one of his colleagues' wives happens to hit on him, and he's reminded of some crazy sex he had back in college days with a girl who looked like a younger version of this one, and Manny needs to describe exactly how Fred feels being in a motel room at age forty with a thirty-year-old married woman naked on all fours, and worrying that he might not get it up for her because of the novelty of it all, dot dot dot? But I swear on Bill Clinton's testicles that I never had sex with that man: I merely might as well have, since I told my damn diary all about us, chapter and verse.

  No comment.

  "Ditto—except what if Mister Manny needed to know exactly how it felt to Mister Fred there to ball the lady's brains out?"

  No comment. What I want to get said is that after '62, when the Dickson-Mason connection was history, it was a real relief for me to abandon my make-pretend writing ambitions and get back to full-time wifing, mothering, and school-teaching. I loved Ned Forester, damn it, different as we were in too many ways. And our kids meant the world to me.

  I beg to disagree with that "make-pretend": Not only did you teach literature and composition for a living, and fill umpteen diaries with your take on everything from losing your cherry at age sixteen to posing bare-assed for Manfred Dickson in a Howard Johnson motel room at age thirty; you also "edited," quote/unquote, every page he wrote for seven years! Thelma and I supplied him with a certain amount of information—

  "Not to mention a few demos here and there—"

  But you were muse and editor rolled into one.

  "So to speak."

  So okay, you didn't write Manny's books. But The Fates would never have gotten themselves written without you.

  For better or worse, thanks, depending on where you're coming from. Junior himself half wishes he could prove I wrote them, we half suspect, so he could shoot down his big bad daddy's main claim to fame—except that there would go his only fame-claim, too. But my diaries made it clear which of us was the novelist and which the typist/editor, as does dear Cindy's Wye.

  "Pity Junie didn't get to read 'em. And the world."

  A painful subject, so let's get done with it. I never kept those diaries hidden, Listener: neither the ones that Manny found so useful, from back in our tuition-earning days, nor the later ones from our reconnection. They were lined up on a bookshelf in my study, where anybody from the kids to the housecleaner could pick them up. But they were under lock and key, sort of, because like a lot of schoolgirls I'd started with the kind that have a little locking tab to keep them private, and I kept on using that kind, half out of habit, half as a joke. Ned and the kids used to tease me about "Mommy's deep dark secrets." I even made the little brass keys into a charm bracelet, usually tucked away in my jewelry box, and never imagined that et cetera.

  And to this hour I don't know quite what prompted Ned to fish out that bracelet one day in December of1973 and unlock those locks. He'd been in bed for a few days with the flu and got bored lying there alone in the house while the kids and I were in school; said he noticed that key-bracelet on my dresser (possible, but not likely) and thought what the hell, no harm in just taking a peek—and that was that. Just as the Arab oil embargo and economic recession of '73 ended the American sixties, of which The Fates had become an emblem, Ned's reading those diaries was the end of the world as Grace Mason Forester had known and enjoyed it. Twenty years of contented marriage and eighteen of happy motherhood down the toilet, not to mention my job and poor Aggie's at Severn Day.

  What happened, Listener—contrary to the "C. Ella Mason" version—was that Outraged Hubby threatened to put those diaries in evidence if Grace contested their immediate separation and divorce—although of course he'd prefer not to, to spare all hands the embarrassment of everybody's learning that nice Missus Forester is an ex-hooker who later shacked up for seven adulterous years with a famous dirty-book writer.

  Which I didn't, but who'd believe me?

  "I still think you should've called his bluff and said, So go public, asshole. He had as much to lose as you did."

  I couldn't do that, Thelm, for the kids' sake. And for Ned's, too. I'd loved him, damn it, and what he'd found out about me cut him to the quick. I didn't want him publicly humiliated too.

  So the bastard insists on divorce for irreconcilable differences, full custody of the kids, and Gracie's and my resignation from Severn Day, where he was sure we'd been corrupting our students' morals: otherwise he'd blow the cover on my porn-queen past along with Grace's diaries. But if we agreed to his terms, he promised to destroy the diaries, keep mum about our naughty résumés, and make a generous alimony settlement.

  "And Listener should understand that the matter of Grace's visitation rights with their kids was academic anyhow, so to speak, since Ned Junior was about to take off for Princeton and Cindy was a fifth-former already at Severn Day. Even so, I think you should've dared him to go ahead and cover the whole family with shit."

  Nope. And as things turned out, I'm glad I didn't—rough as it was for Ag and me to quit teaching, pretending that we were burned out.

  Plausible enough for Grace, who'd been at it heart and soul for twenty-plus years. But I was only two years into the best job I ever had! As for how things turned out...

  Poor Ned.

  "Would you stop it already with the Poor Ned?"

  No. What poor Ned had learned about me literally broke his heart. Cindy has him jump out of his high-rise office window—her way of getting even with him, I suppose. But in fact her dad died of a coronary, Listener, the very next year, at age fifty.

  "On the fifteenth hole of his club's golf course, and in the opinion of some of us, his coup de grâce, excuse my French, was Tricky Dick Nixon's disgrace and resignation after Watergate, on top of all the rest."

  So there went those cushy alimony payments, with which my sweet sorrowful sis had been helping me out while we both scratched around for new jobs. But she regained full custody of two well-off kiddies indeed, with their dad's estate added to their trust funds, and their mom in charge of the show till they reached twenty-one.

  By when I'd long since explained to them what Mom and Dad's split had really been about.

  "And they were totally cool with it, bless 'em! Sort of proud of their mom and dear aunties for having worked our way through college the way we did. They even thought it was cool that Aunt Aggie had been a porn star: 'No wonder she's the best gym coach ever!' Cindy told me: 'All those acrobatics!'"

  And young Neddie—who'd switched his major at Princeton from Business to Art History as soon as his dad wasn't around
to say no—was as wowed as his kid sister by the news that their mom had not only known the late, great Manfred F. Dickson, but had actually worked with him on The Fates for all those years! That news was what turned Cindy-Ella into a writer.

  Into a commercially unsuccessful writer, she likes to say, who refuses to write "chick lit" and who defines the novella, her favorite form, as a story too long to sell to a magazine and too short to sell to a book publisher, bless her. Anyhow, the coast being clear, Ag and I were of course eager to get back to our teaching, both to pay the rent after my alimony stopped and because we were teachers to the bone. But our slots at Severn Day had been filled by young replacements whom we didn't want to bump, and we didn't have the Education credits that public school systems are fussy about. So in '761 went to work as assistant librarian at Severn Day and then as head librarian when my boss retired: a post 1 held happily indeed for the next eighteen years, till I retired at age sixty-five and my health gave out, as if on cue. As for Aggie . .. she'll speak for herself, and then Thelma likewise, before we're out of tape. Ag?

  Not much to tell. Less blessed in the résumé way than my twin, when Ned forced us out of teaching I supported myself with pickup jobs—like selling cosmetics and jewelry at Kmart and J. C. Penney—until Grace was reestablished at Severn and eased me back in to help coach drama, dance, and gym. When arthritis and emphysema sidelined me for keeps, we shared a nice apartment in Annapolis, not far from where we'd grown up, and I played housekeeper as best I could to earn my room and board till Gracie retired. It was like being kids again, only with separate bedrooms for us and a sleep sofa for overnight guests like Gracie's grownup youngsters.