The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  A thing we appreciate about May Jump is that when she says a thing like that, she means it. When May’s bruised, she lets you know; but cynical as she is in some particulars, she does not believe all’s fair in either love or war. Even if she and K had been a couple, May’d have honored what she took to be the limits of anyone’s proprietary rights. But they weren’t a couple; what had passed between them, May knew to have been mainly experimental on Katherine’s part, at a time when she’d ended her Chileno affair and was approaching thirty feeling somewhat jaded and not greatly pleased with her emotional biography. In truth, when Kath reviewed them, as she did that night, not one of her four major affairs, her marriage certainly included, had been deeply satisfying, though all but the marriage had been much more agreeable than not. Only that remarkable one-night stand with the writer Peter Sagamore remained an unalloyed satisfaction in her memory, perhaps because its nature guaranteed inconsequentiality. Nothing had been at stake for either of us, but our talk, as well as our sex, had been serious under its high spirits. In retrospect she felt she’d felt—in the Gramercy Park then, in College Park again tonight—that center of energy beneath P’s laid-back manner, the dark small nothinghood beneath her animation. And that center of his had filled and swelled that center of hers; hers had actively received, accommodated, enfolded his. . . .

  She set her bedside alarm for six-thirty, deciding she’d see how the idea looked when that hour came. At six she waked and thought she wouldn’t go; the invitation had been just party talk, inspired by those crazy coincidences. The dawn was gray; the bed comfortable. But the man had remembered not only our night’s adventure but her story, and he had come back to it six years later. At a quarter past she aborted the alarm, not to wake May in the other bedroom; tossed into her ASPS backpack the few things she had decided during the night she’d need if, as was unlikely. . . . She wondered briefly about lunch and settled upon three apples, two granola bars, and two cans of Tab, understanding he’d never count on her appearing. Wrote out a note for May which she’d composed in her mind already, with driving directions, appeals to her patience and understanding, urgers to rendezvous at Nopoint Point about cocktail time to carry on with their weekend plans; even a request that May telephone the Sherritts later in the morning to explain what was what.

  So bon voyage, May had grumbled into the kitchen then. He’s a lucky stud. She would not be driving over, May had decided, frankly because her feelings were hurt: It was to have been their weekend. Not to worry, though; these things happened; they’d do their weekend another weekend. Better for K to leave this one open for improvisation, should one tack lead to another; better for May’s pride not to divvy up with Mister Straight. Complained Kath You talk as if I’m sleeping with the guy! We’re just going sailing. Said May Yes, well; kiss me good-bye, Kiss. And dress in layers; it’ll be warm this afternoon.

  Me (P. Sagamore tells our listening children), I was asleep in Story’s quarterberth, or awake but not up yet at half past seven, warm in my sleeping bag in shorts and T-shirt and enjoying the damp air coming cool down the companionway onto my head. I watched the sky clear and listened for a breeze and looked forward to the day’s sailing and not for a minute really expected the ladies to show, even when I heard tires on the gravel near Beasley’s docks and a car door open and close. Half the marina would load up and head out by mid-morning; by noon there’d be a thousand and one sailboats between Annapolis and the Eastern Shore. But then I heard your mother call from the finger-pier Ahoy there, Story: Anybody home? And my adrenaline whooshed, even before I said Welcome aboard, girls, just give me a minute here, and popped my head out and saw that we were but one salty-looking lady, soft tight faded jeans and white marl sweater, her hair tucked up under a ragg-wool watchcap against the early chill. My my my. No May? No May. We didn’t pursue it. Said our Katydid, all business, tossing Peter Sagamore her pack, Get your pants on, skipper; I’ll single up the lines.

  Breakfast?

  Oh eight hundred is oh eight hundred, our Kath called back from the bow. Let’s get under way and then talk breakfast. No nonsense is what her tone told him: I have taken a certain initiative in showing up here alone, as I did once before in seeking you out at the Ninety-second Street Poetry Center. The situation between us is reasonably clear and should not be forced. Let things take their course; do not presume by dallying over breakfast with me in your drawers when I have offended my friend by coming here and have pushed a bit to arrive on time.

  My tone said all that?

  And more, and properly. I hopped to it; didn’t so much as pee or brush my teeth till I’d gotten my clothes on, compass and binocs out, mainsail uncovered and up, and Story threading through the aisles of boat slips and out into the creek. My guest had expertly cast off and coiled our leeward lines; when I dispatched her aft to tend tiller and mainsheet while I cast off the last of our windward lines and warped us out of the slip by hand, she asked with pleasure We’re going to sail her out? No choice, I was able to give her one moment’s pause by replying: no engine.

  All right! When he got the jib up and came aft, she volunteered to go below now and fix his breakfast while he sailed us out; she’d had her morning muffin, but wouldn’t mind a second coffee. Said he You sail; I’ll fix.

  That, K. Sherritt tells the audience, was a good move. No quicker way to get the feel of a boat or a situation than to be put in charge of it. She was too happy remembering how to sail, and too busy sailing, to feel further uneasiness about May Jump and what she herself was doing there; and of course it pleased her that P had dropped the What’s-our-hurry stuff and put her right at the helm. The guy took his leisurely time down there—in the head, at the washbasin, in the galley—leaving her in charge as long as possible while he heated water, stripped to the waist and washed and shaved, tidied up the quarterberth, and served out juice and croissants and coffee for two, all the while chatting and smiling up through the companionway and calling out from memory what marks to steer for and what courses to steer. We had six or seven knots of northwest breeze, as Kath remembers: an easy downhill glide out of Whitehall Creek, wing and wing under main and #1 genoa while the sun came through and dried the dew off us. Just right for getting reacquainted with winches and cleats and buoys and day beacons, and the bare brown arms and shoulders of the controversial minimalist author Peter Sagamore, at which she sneaked a look while he was shaving, and which she well remembered around her in New York.

  P swears he wasn’t showing off, except by remembering all those buoys and compass courses in order: If he’d thought she was coming, he’d have been shaved and dressed and ready. But he did his surreptitious share of sizing up too, from down below, while making black coffee and light conversation: sized up the woman, the wind and windfall, the situation. That she was here, alone and admittedly at cost of miffing her good friend, argued that she remembered with pleasure our story’s first chapter and was prepared not only to see where the next might lead, but to steer it along a bit, help compose it. Pieces of vanilla-caramel hair curled out from under her watchcap, especially at her neck-nape when she turned to look aft. Such one-night adventures as Gramercy Park are no common feature of P.S.’s biography: He recalled very clearly the look of what was under that oiled wool sweater and those faded Levi’s—all of it under, around, atop him, kissed and kissing; the caramel hair let down and tenting our two faces half a dozen years past.

  Was he, then, merely moistening his shorts with hope and expectation of a waterborne replay of that scene? Is that what our story comes to?

  Not even mainly, much less merely—though moisten his shorts he did, Peter Sagamore, even at sight of her smooth fingers light upon the tiller-tip (shucks, so did she, when he came gleaming up into the cockpit at last with mugs of hot coffee in gimbaled holders and a paper-plateful of day-old croissants, just as we cleared Hackett Point, entered the Chesapeake, and laid a course for Bloody Point Light and Poplar Island, fourteen miles magnetic south, our lunchtime desti
nation). With no May now to constrain us, and all those preliminary What-are-we-up-tos evaporated with the dew and washed down with the coffee, we got truly under way: relaxed in the warming air, the easy downwind sail. The man did a few small go-fasts to our sail trim, which the woman took an interest in. Then he relieved her at the helm; she swung her long legs up onto the cushion opposite and sat comfortably facing aft with the cabin bulkhead for a backrest and bright October for a backdrop, and we talked southward down Chesapeake Bay.

  Twenty-nine June Sixty-four, declared Peter Sagamore candidly now for openers, remained a red-letter night in the calendar of his life. He’d wanted to tell her that, last evening.

  You did, said happy Kate: more than once, and I told you the same. I think we told the whole party.

  You’re not remarried.

  Nope.

  Involved, though?

  Well . . . A great smile. You?

  Not really. Shall we do love-lives first, or get right to art and politics? Jobs I think we pretty well covered at the party.

  Oh, love-lives, K supposed. She’d gathered from various review articles that her shipmate was neither married nor celibate. She recalled his remarking in the course of 29 June ‘64 that the nature of his medium (the profitless short story: full-time vocation, no-time profession), together with his reluctance to commit himself to regular teaching, made him a poor bet as a breadwinner. Since in addition he had no particular wish to reproduce himself or to devote a large measure of his energy and attention to raising children, he regarded himself as inferior husband material—though he was not by temperament promiscuous and much enjoyed sharing his life with a woman.

  He said all that in the Gramercy Park Hotel?

  One way or another. And K.S.S. told him that after Porter “Poonie” Baldwin, Jr., she felt much the same way. Though she had the luxury of trust-fund income past and present and some inherited wealth in the future, she was resolved upon financial independence and a useful working life; even her high-rolling brother Willy was far from just a playboy. On the other hand, unlike Peter Sagamore she took eventual remarriage and parenthood for granted. She had too much enjoyed her own growing up, and her parents their parenting (of her and young Andy, at least), not to look forward to wife-and-motherhood herself in the coming decade. But she was in no great hurry. No doubt, she supposed in conclusion, the parental urge was stronger in ordinary civilians like herself than among artists, who famously sublimate it into their work.

  Well, now, P.S. wasn’t sure how famously. Seemed to him his writer/painter/musician friends had kids at about the normal clip. Their divorce rate, he’d heard, is higher, but he wouldn’t swear to it. As for excellent parenting, that seemed to him a gift of temperament and couple-chemistry, about as rare as any other real talent and quite uncorrelated therewith. Many nonartists of his acquaintance were wretched parents; some artists he knew were also first-rate moms and dads. He himself would be on the low side of average, he predicted, but better than wretched. She?

  Laughed Katherine Sherritt she’d be terrific! How’d they get on this subject?

  So we dropped it, somewhere abeam of the Thomas Point Light, coming onto ten hundred hours and the morning warming toward sixty. Peter rigged a little sheet-to-tiller self-steerer; folks going upwind were still bundled and watchcapped, but we offwind sailors peeled out of our heavies, down to turtleneck jerseys the both of us, sleeves pushed up, and made a second breakfast of Kate’s apples and Pete’s canned iced tea. For the next hour we did Major Involvements, more or less circumspectly and yet in some detail. The sailing kept us just busy enough to move moment by moment toward or away from intimacy: One paused and looked up to check the windvane, trim a sheet; or one consulted the other’s eyes with whole attention. Peter learned, in no detail, about Yussuf al-Din, Saul Fish, Jaime Aiquina. He’d heard tell of that poet and that musician; was impressed; said as much. Said K You got me going on artists, I suppose. Al-Din had been the most difficult and demanding: the cross-racial and cross-class hangups on both sides. Fish had been the sweetest, most dependable, and most talented; Aiquina the most important both emotionally and intellectually. He had awakened her politically, just as Peter Sagamore—but she hadn’t mentioned this, had she? She laughed and truly blushed. That night in New York, sir, you awakened me sexually, just like in the storybooks, after Poonie Baldwin had closed me up. I didn’t particularly know I’d been asleep! Maybe Peter’d thought she was an old hand at all that stuff we did—she’d tried to make it seem so—but she’d never voluntarily done half those things before, and certainly never enjoyed them so. You turned me on. And I stayed turned on.

  Exciting news that was for Peter Sagamore, the same remarked—and he knew pretty surely now that before very long, maybe even that day aboard Story, he and this woman would strip off their remaining layers and move their conversation out of language.

  Jaime Aiquina’s influence, K said now, had led her and May Jump, whom she’d met by then, to help establish HOSCA, the anti-interventionist group which could by 1970 boast chapters on fifty major U.S. campuses and serious infiltration by both the FBI and the CIA. The acronym was English—Hands Off South and Central America—but the word was Spanish. Did Peter know Spanish?

  A little and badly, he answered in Spanish. But he remembered from somewhere that a hosca is a female mulatto, no? K colored again: As an adjective, it means dark or sullen; Jaime worried that what he’d taught her about U.S. politics south of the border was costing her her sense of humor. But it was a racial tease, too: He’d heard about Yussuf’s hard time with her parents, and he himself was not quite white—some royal Inca blood in there. Any daughter of ours, he used to say, would be a hosca for sure. But HOSCA was their only hosca.

  Said Peter Sagamore So. And where was Jaime Aiquina now, even as we spoke these words on the placid Chesapeake? He was in Santiago de Chile, Katherine replied, trying unsuccessfully to keep our government’s hands off his hero and leader, Salvador Allende. It was Jaime’s prediction that the combined forces of ITT, Anaconda Copper, the Chilean right wing, and the CIA would never permit a Marxist administration in Chile even if legally elected, and that the coup when it came would be a bloodbath in which Chilean democracy would drown like Argentina’s, for the rest of the century at least.

  She smiled thinly across the cockpit. I don’t think we’re that awful. Do you? Jaime Aiquina, she continued, was Marxist, Catholic, married, and separated. He’d wanted her to live with him in Santiago, and she’d said no. This might sound queer in 1970, but the fact was, she was patriotic. She despised what we were doing in Vietnam and South America; she deplored about half of what we’d done in our history. But she did not admire any other major country more, and she liked being American Kathy Sherritt and living right here on Chesapeake Bay. You taught me that, too, she said, as a matter of fact. Your early books.

  Peter wanted to know what, exactly, those fictions had taught her in that line. K replied at once To be plenty skeptical, but to steer clear of easy cynicism as much as chauvinism.

  Well.

  Mainly, they taught me not to lose sight of the tragic view. Didn’t I mention that in New York? It’s not an easy lesson for a natural optimist, but I learned it. Later on, when you start carrying the Less Is More business so far and talking about the tragic view of the tragic view, you lose me.

  Serious Peter Sagamore declared he sometimes lost himself as well in those ill-charted waters, which he was nonetheless determined to navigate, for more reasons than he could readily set forth or was even confident he understood.

  Let me wrap up Jaime Aiquina, Katherine said, and then it’s your turn. Jaime Aiquina believes that the generals are going to overthrow Allende and turn Chile into one more strong-arm state, with a lot of help from Uncle Sam. He believes that thousands of people like himself will get desaparecido’d: tortured and shot. Jaime Aiquina hates injustice, but he’s skeptical of revolutions and has no confidence in the ultimate victory of good o
ver evil. Nevertheless, he went home to do what he could, and he honored me enough to want me to come with him, whatever the consequences to myself. It would have been so easy for him to do the other thing!

  She looks our children straight in the eye. She’d said no, she said, partly out of fear. Her ex-husband had once drunkenly raped and tortured her, and she’d been terrified right through it, even though he wasn’t a professional thug or a certified sex maniac, just old Poonie Baldwin, Jr., whom she’d wanted to kill and should have. But with Jaime Aiquina it hadn’t been just or even mainly fear: She’d said no to Jaime Aiquina because she’d wanted to live here, as happily as she was in fact doing. She was political, all right, but she wasn’t passionately political, the way Jaime had been. Was still. She brightened: There. So who’ve you been going to bed with? Everybody?

  Said pensive Peter Sagamore You think your awakener never sleeps, but in fact he is a middling performer except when inspired by the likes of yourself. The truth was, he went on, that by contrast with those distinguished affairs of hers—in particular with Señor Aiquina’s high seriousness and the startling revelation of her former husband’s brutality (of which P.S. trusted he would hear more another time; she must pardon his writerly lust for detail), his own sexual-romantic life made mild telling indeed: two extended liaisons, several shorter ones, the odd weekender or one-nighter. All more than agreeable; none truly soul-stirring. Couple of real heart-wrenchings, but no heartbreaks. He had said simple truth when he declared our New York night to have been a high point in his erotic career. In his adult life he had seldom lived alone for long, but he guessed he was no great shakes as a sexual activist, much less a sexual imperialist. A busy scribbler, not particularly gregarious, who spent three-fourths of every working day talking to himself, so to speak, and in the other fourth enjoyed athletics, reading, and the company of a friend or two, with one of whom he was usually in love. The most serious since ‘64 had been energetic Marcie Blitzstein: To square his narrative debt he now briefly summarized that affair and its denouement. Nothing there to make a story from, much less to ennoble with the tragic view: Marcie Blitz would have found another man before he and Story reached Chesapeake Bay—and that man would be a good man, and a lucky.