Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons

by John Barth

  “Happy happy happy happy happy,” bids Poet/Professor Amanda Todd, and as if suddenly inspired by that pentametric salute, goes on to rhyme: “Were your wife a bard Bardworthy instead of crappy, / She’d sing our lucky love from bed to verse, / And make from her sow’s-ear talent some silk purse. Amen—so to squeak?”

  “Hear hear!” applauds her grateful O.F.F. “And had your mate been the yarn-spinner you deserve, right-thinking readers would be dissing Stockholm for not giving him their effing prize. But his real complaint is that he has no reason to complain.” Never mind fame and fortune, he goes on to explain to her, not for the first time: He only wishes he’d managed to perpetrate in her honor a gen-you-wine Capital-N Noteworthy Novel or two over the past half-century. “Your hubby’s a fucking failure, luv. Cheers?”

  Well, now, replied ever-loyal she: Come to that, at two years past the three-quarter-century mark he remained a stillfucking failure, anyhow, as his drying-up old rhymer of a mate could testify from that morning’s pre-breakfast frolic. To us, then, damn it, and our good luck with each other if not with our muses or the high step up into Shakespeare’s-’hood? And on with whatever’s to be the next episode of our (still-) fucking story?

  Aye aye, ma’am. And even as this account of that fateful fall day has shifted from present back to past narrative tenses, so now shall our quite successful September tour. Never mind its close in big busy history-drenched London and big too-busy Heathrow; the long flight back to our Bush/Cheneyafflicted U. S. of A.; the jet-lagged drag of clearing customs, claiming baggage and long-parked car; the bleary-eyed twohour drive from Philly to that Stratford-Come-Lately on the Matahannock, changing G.I.N.’s brow-bandage only twice a “day” now insofar as we could reckon days. We made it, just as we’d made it through the latter half-and-then-some of the Terrible Twentieth Century into the quite possibly Terminal Twenty-First: no kids or grandkids, unlike Will and Anne (although we sometimes pretend to have them: more on that later, I’d guess); no recently-published prose or poetry, nor any of our prior pubs still in print—but thus far no cancers/strokes/ Alzheimer’s/etc. either, nor (thus far) serious aftereffects of the fall. And decades of well-taught classes, well-critiqued student papers, well-colleagued colleagues, well-read books, and welltraveled trips to take satisfaction in....

  And overlong catalogues like the above to be done with already, for pity’s sake! Back to our “pre-trip” routines (and bemused by the extra voltage on that adjective as we laid upon friends and colleagues our travelogue and its culmination in G.’s Henley Street trip-and-fall), we relished our new perspective on our Stratford, our Avon (County), our Bridgetown (whereof more to come, Muse willing-maybe-please?). Before each afternoon’s errands, chores, desk-business, and recreation, we went as usual each weekday morning to our separate workrooms in hope of inspiration, and as usual . . .

  Well: As usual, September sang its song and became October. In synchrony with Delmarva’s agribusiness feedcorn harvest, the migratory geese returned in strung-out V’s from Canada and honked along our Matahannock, bringing with them brisk cool-weather fronts to relieve Tidewaterland’s drought-stressed but blessedly hurricane-free summer and remind local “snowbirds” that it was time for them to shift south to their winter HQ’s in Florida. As StratColl’s fall semester got under way, the fine maples, oaks, sweetgums, and sycamores on campus and along the town’s streets showed first signs of autumn color. Ideal weather for end-of-season yard work (if one owned a yard) and the battening of hatches for cold weather to come; for the year’s maybe-final bicycling, or canoeing and kayaking from the college’s waterfront facility; for enjoying the long late light with sips and nibbles on porch, patio, or pool deck before November’s chilly shift back to Standard Time, and for savoring one’s own autumnality before winter comes. “Can’t last, of course,” one acknowledged over clinked wineglasses: neither good weather nor good health nor one’s happy though less-than-ideally-productive life with mate nor for that matter the nation’s already-overstrained economic prosperity and the planet’s dwindling natural resources. The “American Century” was already behind us, followed by those quagmire wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an alienated international community, a declining dollar and rising energy costs, Gilded Age excesses and inequities, climate change, economic recession—the list went on (and on and on, as G.I.N.-lists tend to do). Meanwhile, however?

  Meanwhile, the news media busied themselves with the upcoming 2008 U.S. presidential election—the primary campaigning for which was gearing up already a full year in advance, both parties relieved that the Incumbent could not succeed himself for a third term in office—and the Newett/Todd muses sat on their Parnassian butts (the Newett one, anyhow: Mandy, more indifferent to Her output-rate than George to His and more shrug-shouldered about publication, prefers to keep her poetical musings pretty much to herself). In the weeks following our return from abroad, even as his very slight headachiness dissipated and his brow-wound healed to where no further bandaging was required, G. found himself preoccupied to the point of obsession with that fall/fall/Yom Kippur/birthday coincidence and its Adamic echoes, of which he was inescapably reminded every time he looked in the mirror to shave, floss his teeth, or check his attire.

  “I think the wench is trying to tell me something,” he’d report at morning’s end. “Like those mumbling monsters in the old Hollywood horror flicks.”

  “So stay tuned,” recommended Mandy. “Me, I’ve got a class to teach, a batch of papers to grade, and a hung-up villanelle-in-the-works to straighten out in my spare time.”

  Been there, done that, changes changed: Arrivederci, love, and Muse be with you while Hubby turns with relief to such accomplishable after-lunch tasks as vacuuming the floors, picking up as many of the items on our grocery list as he can with confidence as the house sous chef, and then re-meeting her at the campus tennis courts for an hour of mixed doubles (sweatsuited against a cool late-afternoon breeze off the river) with another pair of StratColl-connected Heron Bay Estates refugees. With whom, between sets, we’d shake our heads at the approaching first anniversary of our erstwhile community’s destruction and compare notes on our intentions with respect to it. The younger, more vigorous Simpsons—Pete an associate dean at the college, Debbie an associate librarian—whose home in H.B.E.’s detached-house Rockfish Reach neighborhood had been sorely damaged but not altogether wrecked by T. S. Giorgio’s tornado, were already busily rebuilding an improved version of it and helping to plan a new, ecologically “green” Heron Bay Estates, but were concerned that the downturn in the nation’s housing market and the upturn of its mortgage-foreclosure rate, while not yet damaging to them personally, might well put a freeze on the development’s redevelopment.

  Us?

  Damned if we knew, we shrugged. Much as we had enjoyed our nearly two decades there, we doubted whether we had interest or energy enough this late in our day to rebuild on our own initiative. If some general contractor re-did our “old” Blue Crab Bight neighborhood (an unlikely prospect in the present slump), perhaps we’d re-buy there in what was becoming ever more a buyer’s market. More likely we’d just sit tight in our rented condo; maybe buy it if its Floridian owners chose to unload at a duly modest figure.

  “Unless our B.M. Move comes first,” one of us would interject at this point: H.B.E. slang for its older residents’ notuncommon next-to-last relocation across the Matahannock to the same developer’s Bayview Manor Continuing Care facility. After which, the grave. And meanwhile, as G. I. Newett believes he was saying?

  Meanwhile, he’ll forge in the smithy of his head-banged but not yet quite fossilized fancy one more effing O.F. Fiction, by George, this one having to do with, let’s see . . . fall-falls? The autumnal equi-knocks of a tottering talester seasoned by life’s seasons? By his life’s seasons: its Spring, its Summer, its Fall, and fast-approaching Winter? . . .

  Thus maundered he, while Amanda repaired her villanelle (so she would report somewhile later) and the couple’s
mortal days ticked by to 29 October 2007, the eve of the eve of All Hallows Eve. In Stratford and environs, a day not unlike those just before and after: nearly warm enough for shorts in the afternoon, then cool enough that evening to light the condo’s gas fireplace while attending the usual cheerless news from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq despite the White House’s rote reassurances that our recent troop “surge” was making progress. To our home and/or campus offices after breakfast; to our classes/chores/whatever after lunch. After dinner, an informal anniversary-memorial gathering of H.B.E. survivors organized by Dean Pete and Debbie Simpson in one of the college’s function-rooms borrowable for town/gown occasions, whereat the disaster’s only fatalities (a couple about our age, crushed in the rubble of their faux-Georgian house in Rockfish Reach) were duly saluted and other storm-trauma memories shared, along with decaf coffee and differing opinions regarding the development’s future. And after that, back “home” to enjoy our pre-bed time in customary Todd/Newett fashion: an hour or so of separated reading (Mandy comfortably chaired in the condo’s guest-bedroom-cum-improvised-home-office with a new biography of her beloved Emily Dickinson, G.I.N. couched before the afore-lit fireplace with some young upstart’s deservedly acclaimed first novel), followed by a reunited, port-winenightcapped hour of video entertainment (in this instance, the DVD’d first half of one of Jane Austen’s alliteratively titled, social-class-driven, handsomely filmed chef d’oeuvres: Pride and Prejudice, was it? Sense and Sensibility? Manors and Manners, anyhow), followed by a bedtime goodnight embrace and, for Yrs Truly, about two hours’ sleep before the first of his thricea-night old-fart get-up-and-pees—followed finally by what this long fanfare has been snail’s-pacing toward. Having made his way from night-lighted bathroom through darkened boudoir and climbed back into their bed’s His side (on his mate’s right, in our right-handed household, so that when the couple turn to each other his “good” arm is uppermost, free to caress . . . ), he found himself suddenly overwhelmed by a strange, strong, out-of-nowhere vertigo, followed by

  DREAM/VISION/TRANSPORT/WHATEVER #1

  A sort of prolonged flash: no “action,” but an extraordinarily alive 3-D not-quite-still shot, with all senses operating. Wintertime sunset over brown frozen marsh and gray expanse of open water, viewed from fixed position well above scraggy loblolly pines. No people in sight, but Viewer (stationary) feels . . . accompanied. Also distinctly feels frigid air on face, and both sees and hears stereophonic strings of geese and ducks out over marsh—some below eye level. Overall sensation stirring, even mildly exciting in its vividness.

  End of “vision”: G.I.N. waked or revived flat on back in dark bedroom beside slumbering spouse, head feeling a bit odd still, but rapidly normalizing. Wondered What the fuck?, shaken not by vision’s unalarming content (generic tidewater scene, unusual only in its oddly elevated viewpoint), but by its startling clarity and full sensory accompaniment on the heels of that brief dizziness—a vertigo not felt in the “dream” itself and now all but cleared, so he guessed he wouldn’t bother Mandy with it unless and until (Zeus forefend) something like it recurred. In which case, he promised himself, he would duly consult the Todd/Newett primary care physician. His Upon-Avon Shakespeare House fall was, after all, five symptom-free weeks behind him. . . .

  No recurrences, thankee thankee thankee Z., at that night’s second and third urinations, with normal sleep and normally half-coherent dream-fragments between; nor any the next day and night, nor the next and next. One gratefully presumed therefore that one was out of the woods, concussionwise if not musewise, and returned to one’s futile workday-morning fiddling with that fall/fall/life-seasons stuff, accumulating page after page of notes on this and that aspect or possible significance, week after week while the world ground on and mortal time ticked by. Leaves fell, as did the U.S. housing market and the Dow-Jones Industrial Average. First frosts froze. Thanksgiving, first snow flurries, Pearl Harbor Day, and first light snow accumulations (short-lived) as autumn ran its run and the days shortened toward winter solstice.

  Equinox. Solstice. Equinox. Solstice. “Bitch is definitely trying to tell me something,” our man re-reported presently to his Mandy—with whom, of course, he had shared his peculiar, all-but-actionless “vision” (minus its preliminary vertigo) in the hope that her 20/20 poet’s eye might see more in it than his prosaic and bifocaled ones had managed to. But all she could offer was “Maybe if you invoked your personal Parnassian more politely?” So “Prithee, Ma’am?” he begged in effect through mid-December, returning in daily vain to his brief written description (in italics, supra) of that all-but-actionless though curiously happy-feeling winter marsh-scene.

  And then one day, as we Once-Upon-a-Timers get around to saying one way or another—Friday 12/21/07 it was, in fact: just before the solstitial noon—as George Irving Newett entered StratColl’s own unassuming Shakespeare House1 to meet his Mrs. in her office and do lunch together in a nearby pizzeria, the low step-up over a wooden doorsill from its screenless, almost ramshackle front porch into what had originally been the bungalow’s living room and was now an informal student lounge area reminded him (for the first time, oddly) of the high stone entrance step of that other Shakespeare House, where on a certain previous seasonal-division day . . .

  And that reminded him—how hadn’t it occurred to him long before?—of when/where/how, as a kid, he had first been made really aware of solstices, equinoxes, and the like. The sudden recollection literally dizzied him: less than the lead-in to that afore-italicized one, but enough so that—excusing himself to skinny male undergrad in black warm-up suit on much-worn sofa just inside lounge—he sat down beside him to steady himself before climbing the stairs to Mandy’s second-floor office.

  And noticed that although the kid was perusing USA Today, the magazine he’d picked up from the cushion beside him and plopped onto his lap to make room for the couch’s new occupant was—Get outta here!—the Jehovah’s Witness illustrated monthly Watchtower. And under it (now likewise lapped), the old Everyman edition of Shakespeare’s comedies....

  “¡Jesu effing Cristo!” he’ll groan to endlessly patient Mandy over Bozzelli’s pepperoni/mushroom pizza after collecting himself and her for their lunch date. “I feel like I’m living in the kind of greenhorn novel that I might’ve perpetrated at that kid’s age if I hadn’t had my old buddy Ned Prosper to rein me in! Where are you when I need you, Nedward?”

  “Have another slice before it gets cold,” is his wife’s advice, “and tell me all about it between mouthfuls.”

  As best he could, he did, and was so possessed by the recounting that—again at her suggestion, but he needed no prodding—instead of doing whatever he’d had in mind for that afternoon, he returned to the workroom in which he’d spent another all-but-eventless morning, refilled his ever-ready Montblanc Meisterstück with Parker Quink, and (sans vertigo this time) first-drafted the following.

  SOLSTITIAL ILLUMINATION OF POST-EQUINOCTIAL VISION #1:

  The Watchtower

  21 December 1936, it will have been: the depths of the Great Depression, but a frosty-bright late afternoon in tidewater Maryland. Light snow cover as afore-envisioned, but no ice on the roads, and nearly no wind. On the prickly-plush rear seat of Mr. and Mrs. Prosper’s big black LaSalle sedan with its handsome whitewall tires (including spares nestled into each front fender; no tire-chains needed today, but there’s a set in the trunk, just in case), Narrator is comfortably ensconced between, on his right, first-grade classmate/buddy Ned Prosper, and on his left Ned’s three-years-older sister Ruth. It’s a birthday-party excursion, unlike anything Narrator’s family could ever imaginably come up with: Ned having been born on the winter solstice of 1930, and Narrator on that year’s autumnal equinox three months prior, the Prospers—newly moved to Bridgetown from across the creek in Stratford—have decided to celebrate the occasion by driving over to marshy South Neck, on the Chesapeake Bay side of Avon County, to climb the new fire-watchtower erected there by
President Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (special permission from the local CCC having been secured by Mr. Prosper, a Democratic county commissioner as well as principal of Stratford Junior High School), and to watch the sunset of the year’s shortest day from the windowed observation booth at the tower’s top, saluting its descent below the western horizon with mugs of thermos-bottled hot chocolate and specially-baked birthday cookies. All hands are decked out in winter togs: galoshes, scarves, lined gloves, stocking caps, sweaters, and warmest jackets. Corduroy knickers and knee-socks for the boys; woolen leggings beneath the ladies’ skirts. In the front passenger seat, trim Mrs. Prosper, an English teacher at the private Fenton School outside Stratford (which Ruthie will attend instead of the county’s public schools when she reaches ninth grade—or “First Form,” as it’s called at Fenton), keeps up a merry banter with the youngsters, in which her husband also joins. Through the half-hour cross-county drive, brother and sister play Cow Poker by the complicated Prosper Family Rules, with centrallyseated Narrator as scorekeeper and Mom and Dad as referees: Not only are the pastured cattle on each player’s side of the road counted and added to that player’s score, with half their value to be subtracted from whoever’s side the LaSalle happens to pass a gas station on, but double credit is given if the player correctly identifies the breed as Ayrshire, Guernsey, Holstein, or Don’t Know (meaning that the Referees don’t know either; if they do, one point per head instead of two), and there are further complications as well, all administered in high-spirited mock solemnity. Winner to go first behind Dad Prosper in the upcoming Great Watchtower Climb....