by John Barth
“You wanted to kill yourselves?” It was an idea I could comprehend only faintly, by recollecting my state of mind on the day I had murdered Redfearn’s Tom. But what a difference in circumstance! I took a wondering swig from the catsup bottle. Greene sighed, and arched his orange eyebrows, and fiddled with the sugarbowl lid.
“Didn’t have the gumption to choose either way, sir. But I sure did wish I was dead.” I could not discern whether his respectful mode of addressing me was general habit or particular deference. “We figured if the pills did us in, okay; if they didn’t, what the flunk, we’d have to think where to go from there.”
As it happened, they’d misjudged not only the dosage but the drug itself, a mild soporific, the first of what was to be a series of ever-more-sophisticated prescriptions. It was an ignorance they could no more have been saved by in later years, when their knowledge of chemicals came to rival a pharmacist’s, than they could have attained sweet sleep by that old potion. Sleep they did—soundly, long—and Peter Greene dreamed of the great Spring Carnival. When the children woke him next morning his wife was sweetly sleeping still, and it was some moments before he remembered having taken the capsules. He felt utterly refreshed; it was a sunny Saturday, no haste to rise. Nothing had changed: there was still no Founder, nor sense in the University; he was still wretched Peter Greene, his manner graceless, his enterprises failing, his character deficient, his family unhappy; there was still no more reason, ultimately, to heed the summons of his bladder and children than not to. Yet all these truths had a different feel now: he kissed Mrs. Greene and left the bed, still utterly uncertain how his life was to be managed and heedless of its course, but with a new indifference to this indifference.
“Didn’t matter a durn to me any more that nothing mattered a durn,” was how he put it. “I knew I weren’t worth a doggone, and couldn’t of cared less.” For the first time in a long while he felt like working; instead he made love to Miss Sally Ann, also for the first time in some while, and something of his mood must have touched her, for they clung together ardently, swore their love, repented their abuses of it, mourned the past, vowed to do better. He listened to their words with tender unbelief. No matter. Even the question that had come to live with him some months earlier—having visited his fancy on rare occasions over the years—now lost its urgency and seemed just interesting: the question of the broken glass.
“What it was,” he said, “I was looking at myself in the bathroom mirror one afternoon, just when my big depression started. I’d been out all day with the stiffs on the picket-line, busting the windowlights out of one of my papermills, and I’d come home to get a shower before the cocktail party we were having that evening for some Tower Hall big-shots. I got to making ugly faces at myself and feeling terrible, and suddenly it struck me maybe that wasn’t no window at all I’d chunked that rock through, or any flunkèd Peeping Tom hollering at Miss Sally Ann; it could of been one of them mirrors that make you look queer! For all I know it could of been just a plain mirror; I couldn’t see clear enough to tell. There wasn’t any checking back, ’cause they take everything down after the Carnival, and I never could locate the fellow that had run the funhouse, to find out from him. I took to asking everybody I’d meet whether they’d been to the Carnival that year, and did they recollect what was on the wall next to the exit. Some swore it was a windowpane, some was sure it was a trick mirror or a regular one; some said there weren’t nothing there at all. Most didn’t remember.”
I agreed with him on the importance of the question, which had occurred to me some time earlier.
“Once I’d thought of it, I couldn’t think of nothing else,” Green said. He had spent hours then before his mirror, studying his face and what lay behind it, back to the beginning. At times, and in some aspects, what he saw now seemed possible to affirm—in more innocent years he’d taken his appearance for granted, assuming its unblemished handsomeness—but in the main it struck him as repellent, hopeless. Not even fascinatingly so: after an orgy of self-inspection he became so persuaded that it was some sort of mirror he’d smashed on the midway that he now smashed his own (by hurling it out the window), not to have to see himself any further. And though since the critical night of the sleeping-capsules the question had largely ceased to torment him, he still had, in his phrase, “a thing” about any sort of glass near his face: he shaved and tied his necktie by feel, and refused to wear lenses to correct his faulty vision.
“How about windows?” I wondered, for we had huge ones all about us.
“They don’t bother me somehow,” Greene laughed. “Anyway, to wind up my story …” I was relieved to think him nearly done, as we had distance yet to travel.
He had not had opportunity, he said (returning to the subject of his post-capsular attitude), to see whether the strange new feeling would persist—an acceptance of himself, as I took it, and of the student condition, based on the refusal to concern himself further with their unacceptability—and whether unassisted it would have lifted him from his depression. For he was seized out of it shortly thereafter by irrelevant circumstance, in the form of Campus Riot II. The impending threat of it reunited him with his wife, ended all picketing, and kept every shop and laboratory open around the clock; the resultant prosperity, together with the climate of emergency, the exhausting pace, and his new indifference to the question of Final Examinations, did away with what limited appeal Student-Unionism briefly might have had for him. He enlished in the ROTC and became something of a hero. Unfriendly rivals and vanquished adversaries might complain that it was his size and material advantage that accounted for his successes, rather than superior skill and character; he himself was too busy to care.
“I am okay,” he formed the habit of repeating to himself when his motives or performance was criticized, “and what the heck anyhow.” As an officer under Professor-General Reginald Hector, with unlimited supplies partly of his own manufacture, he led his men to victory and emerged from the riot well-known throughout the campus and generally well-liked, with a reputation for open-handedness, vulgarity, fair dealing, bad manners, good intentions, gullibility, straightforwardness, lack of culture, abundance of wealth, and sentimentality. The wealth was certainly a fact: the manufacture of riot-matériel (directed in part by his wife) had made him immensely prosperous, and the great post-riot demand in NTC for building-material, paper, and plastics (a line he’d branched into during the hostilities, when metal was scarce) promised to make him more prosperous yet: Ira Hector alone exceeded him in wealth and unofficial influence in Tower Hall.
“But things went kerflooey all the same?” I asked. I was eager now to have done with the story, which however had certainly illumined me on the subject of human marriage. Greene shook his head no, but in a way that I presently understood to mean Yes, and I still don’t understand it, or something similar. His speech grew no less at odds with itself from here until the end of his relation: an inharmonious amalgam of the several idioms I’d hear him employ thus far:
“Durn if I can figure what got to us, togethernesswise. We bought us a fine house in a suburban quad, with a pool and a color Telerama and all like that; the kiddies started music lessons; Sally Ann had her own wheels to get around with, and only worked when she felt like getting out of the house. She weren’t tied down a speck, what with O.B.G.’s daughter to clean house and me helping with every meal. And like, I’m busy, sure, but George, it ain’t as bad as the old days, no sirree Bob, when I was up with the chickens and worked till midnight.” What was more, he said, they’d agreed to cleave exclusively each to the other, as in the early terms of their marriage, with the difference that now they were to be equal partners and faithful companions in every aspect of life, rather than master and mastered.
“It ain’t that business is slow, you understand, despite the way taxes have gone up. I spend me a fortune every year around Tower Hall to get the College Senate to lower my taxes and stop buying cheap stuff from across the Pond, but it’s n
o go, sir; and they keep taking more and more timberland for college parks and the like. I hired me a roomful of Ph.D’s to find out how to do more business: after awhile I got so took with the idea I closed down half my mills and paperplants and went into the Marketing- and Packaging-Research Department my own self. Didn’t need all them people working for me anyhow, with their durn committees: we got machines now that WESCAC operates, you stick a log of wood in one end and get newsprint out the other, with nobody touching it in between. WESCAC even tells us how many trees to cut down, and which men to lay off.”
In consequence, I learned, though he was prospering as never before, he was virtually unemployed, WESCAC having taken over executive as well as labor operations. When O.B.G.’s daughter had turned up and publicly accused him of having exploited her immorally in his youth to further his own interests, and possibly even having fathered a child on her, he had offered to hire her as a housemaid despite his wife’s old resentment of her. Miss Sally Ann herself he made financial director of his concerns. Their children were amply provided for: the girls twirled silver batons in one of the Sub-Junior Varsity Marching Bands, the boys were star performers on the Faculty Children’s Athletic League Farm Teams; they were never spanked, received large allowances, played games and took vacations with their parents—whom they called by their first names—had Telerama receivers in their bedrooms and a private bowling alley in their recreation basement, and regularly attended their neighborhood Enochist Hall for tradition’s sake, as did their parents, though it was made clear to them that the Enochist Answers were their own reward, there being no such places as Commencement Gate and the Nether Campus. On weekends they all played golf and went to parties at the houses of their friends.
But no one was happy. O.B.G.’s daughter refused on the one hand to be “degradated,” as she put it, to the role of menial, and on the other to be “bought off” with a slightly higher income and the title of Assistant Homemaker. Neither would she take the position he offered her as Special Representative in his Promotion Department, though the job entailed nothing more strenuous than being photographed for advertisements in Frumentian publications: she insisted that he confess his past attraction to and maltreatment of her, that he pay her neither more nor less than he would pay a white male for the same work, and that to redeem his past abuses of her he educate her children along with his, in the same classrooms, summer camps, and Founder’s Halls. His own children showed no such aggressiveness, excepting one son who stole motorbikes for sport and contracted gonorrhea at the sixth-grade prom: they were tall and handsome, their teeth uncarious, their underarms odorless; yet they seemed not interested in anything. As for Mrs. Greene, she had become a scold-perhaps because, though she was still youthful enough in appearance to be mistaken for her daughters, in fact she was approaching middle age. Her moods ran to sudden extremes, more often quarrelsome than otherwise; she complained of her responsibilities; neither she nor her spouse thought it possible to pursue a career, raise the children, and supervise the housework at the same time, yet they could not bear the foolish women who had nothing to do but drink coffee and talk to one another by telephone; they believed in an utterly single standard of behavior for men and women, but practiced chivalric deference in a host of minor matters. She did not think they went dancing often enough; he wished he had more time to play poker with his colleagues.
“I’d swear I wanted her to be her own woman, independencewise, but whenever she’d go to work I’d freeze up and wish she was just a plain wife. Then she’d wife it a while, fix fancy meals and sew drapes and all, and I’d wish she had something more interesting than that to talk about! We got to be so much alike and close together, we’d be bored fit to bust for something different—but go away one night on a business trip, we’d miss each other like to die. And me getting soft, and overweight, and tired all the time from nothing! And Sally Ann skipping periods, and starting to wear corsets! And both now and then half a-yearning to bust out and start over, but knowing we’d never do as well, compatibilitywise, and loving each other too much anyhow, despite all. Durn if it weren’t a bind! I’d say to myself, I’m okay, and what the heck anyhow—but that didn’t help none when she’d bust out crying and go back for another prescription. And them doctors, and them analysts, and them counselors! One’d tell her ‘Stay home and be a woman.’ Another’d say ‘Go to work full-time, let it all go.’ One’d say ‘Get divorced any time you want, that’s the kind of campus we live on nowadays’; another’d say ‘Stay married no matter what, ’cause if the family don’t hold fast there won’t be no character left in the Present Modern College of Today.’ Some told Sally Ann she should let me have my head but tread the straight and narrow her own self, like olden terms; others said to me what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, one way or the other. Take pills; don’t take pills! Go back to Enochism; eat black-strap molasses; practice breath-control! One high-price fellow told Sally Ann she ought to sleep with him to cure herself, ’cause his own wife didn’t understand him! I swear to Pete! I swear right to Pete!”
Things had come to a head only recently, he said, when during a pointless midnight quarrel (over a change of analysts and low-fat diets) he explained to his wife his dissatisfaction with their current therapist, who had declared it impossible to help a patient until the latter overcame his “resistances to therapy.” It was, Greene had been in the process of telling her, like announcing to a sick man that he must get well in order to take his medicine …
But in the course of his analogy his wife had interrupted him with a scream, and another, and a third, and a fourth, and another and another, beyond his shocked remonstrances to consider the children, to get hold of herself, for Founder’s sake to stop. He grew frantic; still she lay in their bed and screamed, her eyes tight shut. At last he called in a neighbor lady and O.B.G.’s daughter. By the time the family doctor arrived to sedate her, her cries had turned to wild weeping; the children were awake and had been told that their mother’s nerves were bad from too much work and worry. Did they understand? Solemn-faced, they nodded yes. Next morning it was added that she would be going away to rest, and away she went—to the Faculty Women’s Rest House, whose services she was entitled to by virtue of her one-time position as district schoolmistress. Once she was established in that stately, hushed retreat, where so many were of their acquaintance, her spirits lifted; indeed, she was more calm and optimistic when he went to see her than she’d been for a long while, despite her doctor’s vagueness about how long she’d have to stay; she quietly apologized for her hysteria, for leaving him in charge of the house and children, for whatever was her share of responsibility in their difficulties …
“I missed her so much and felt so flunking flunked I thought I’d die,” he said. “First thing I did, I come home and got drunk as a hooty-owl, all by my lonesome. But drunk or sober, sir, it seemed to me one minute there was something awful wrong with the way we lived, trying to be pals and lovers and equals all the same time, and next minute it wasn’t our fault at all, we’d come to the right idea, the best idea, but the past was a-gumming us up. Then right in the midst of this pull and haul, who should come into the bar where I went one night but O.B.G.’s daughter—as a customer, mind, and I didn’t even know they served darkies in the place! She asked me how Miss Sally Ann was, all the time a-smiling in her mischievous way, like she was daring me to grab ahold of her, and she said she figured I must be awful upset to be out drinking so late all by myself, a big family-man like me. I knew what she was up to, but I didn’t bear her no grudge for all the things she’d said about me in the papers, and being so ungrateful I’d treated her so white. I bought her a drink, and we talked about poor Sally Ann and old times, and how hard all this was on the kids; and O.B.G.’s daughter said there probably ought to be somebody home with them at night for a while, till they got more used to their mother being gone. All the time she was smiling that smile, that put me in mind how she’d smiled it years ago, when I was just
a scaredy-cat kid and her a gosh-durn tease. Her own husband had run off on her a few months before, and their kids were at some sister’s place; I knew she’d come on home with me if I asked her, despite all she’d said. And I was so low down, and so durn hot and bothered, I up and asked her, and of course she came, teasing me all the way for treating her like a South-Quad slavey. What you going to do with a gal like that, and such a mess as me?”
I was unaware then that his question was of the sort that requires no answer. “Well, now, Mr. Greene—” I began with a frown.
“Pete,” he insisted.
“I find your story quite touching, Pete. I hadn’t appreciated how curious marriage is, and I’m interested to learn now whether it’s that way generally. The only other married folks I’ve met are Mr. and Mrs. Stoker and a Dr. Sear and his wife, and their attitudes seemed a little different from yours and Mrs. Greene’s, at least to me.”
