The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  And this despite . . . Frank Talbott’s voice goes thick; he gives his head a shake, but does not dislodge the boina. Well, he says to Peter, you flirted with the Agency for a couple of years and got in almost over your head, right? Secrets from your wife; stuff you wished you didn’t know. I was an officer for seventeen years, half of that time in counterintelligence and covert operations. When I married Lee and got out, I swore there’d never be a secret between us. That was partly what KUBARK was for: to clean out my head. Yet there we were. I meant to show her what I was up to just as soon as the air was clear. . . .

  That first night back in the Chesapeake, I almost did, and she almost told me what was what with her plumbing there. We’d been out nearly a year, nothing was settled, and we had just about closed the circle. It was the right time. But then came the news about Doug, and then that scarf in that distress-flare canister in the York River, like a message from the Company.

  Or from the muse.

  Yeah, well. So we went on up to Baltimore—we tied up at Gibson Island, actually, as if we were still afraid to commit ourselves to the mainland—and we camped at Carla B Silver’s in Fells Point while Lee did what she did in Cross Keys and I did what I did down in Langley. A semesters-worth of mail was waiting for us, too, at Carta’s Cavern: Lee has to decide whether she’s going back to Saint John’s or down to a tenured job in Virginia; I have to choose between a senior archivist’s job at the Aberdeen Proving Ground or some kind of freelancing. What to do with the rest of our lives, really. We’ve seriously considered just sailing right on, around the world.

  Thinks Katherine Sherritt, with an inner wince of sympathy, They’ve also considered splitting. She can see that in their voices, she’ll tell Peter.

  Frank Talbott says Faute de mieux, what we more or less decided to do next is spend this summer at my father’s farm on Wye Island, making the decisions we were supposed to have made before we got there. Last Sunday morning we set out across the Bay from Gibson to Wye—still island to island, and both of us about to pop. I pretty much knew Lee had paid a call on her gynecologist; she pretty much knew I’d scrapped the novel and done more in D.C. than just memorialize Doug Townshend.

  You know the old Baltimore Light, at the mouth of the Magothy. Just as we left it astern, the floodgates burst. We were talking about poetry, of all things, or pretending to talk about it—a villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop that begins with the line “The art of losing isn’t hard to master”—and suddenly everything got told: the pregnancy, the abortion, Lee’s conviction that it’d been twins. I did my best to comfort her—and I told her that down in Langley I’d been pitched to take over Doug’s consultancy under cover of my KUBARK reputation. That’s the way certain minds work down there.

  Katherine Sherritt says Uh-huh and thinks Poor Leah Allan Silver Talbott. Peter Sagamore thinks Aha: Operation BONAPARTE. Lee Talbott moves her long fingers on her husband’s forearm. Rather to our joint unspoken surprise, we Sagamores do not find this particular long confession either creepy or, in this instance, implausible. The Talbotts appear to us to have worked some things out, and we feel as though we’ve been their close friends for years.

  Then it was her turn to be shocked, Frank says of Lee, especially when I added that I’d scrapped the novel way back in Tobago and considered myself finished for good in that line. A failure. We sailed on, about as wrung-out as we’d ever been. I mean rock-bottom. I kept wishing something amazing would happen, out of the blue; something literally marvelous, unaccountable—don’t ask me what—to disrupt the whole story. Like a sea monster: If old Chessie had suddenly risen from the deep, or a flaming sword had appeared in the sky . . . But the world went on being the world: sunshine and sailboats and problems.

  Remarks Peter We were there. That’s just about when I said to Katherine down on Nopoint Point For pity’s sake set me a task, and she said Take us sailing, and here we are.

  And there we Talbotts were, in the middle of the Bay, just above the bridge, and we ran out of wind the way we’d run out of plans. I couldn’t even decide to start the engine: What for? Lee went below for a nap. I put up the awning and let the boat drift and sat and stared at the back of my eyelids for a while and then fished out the Sex Ed script and read through Act One, figuring that if anything about it looked good at such a miserable time, it would be worth saving and showing to Lee if the air ever really cleared.

  It didn’t pass the test. I’d have chucked it right over the side, but I didn’t want to trash the Chesapeake. I’d have dumped it into our waste bin, but space is tight, and the story was so tied up with that vision of Lee floating over me in Arnos Vale. . . . Anyhow, we’d dumped enough things.

  So: Back when Rick and I were growing up on Wye Island, we used to send messages out in bottles. . . .

  Peter grins. Katherine too.

  Rick’s were spy stuff already: secret messages. Never mind what mine were. So there in Reprise’s cockpit locker was that empty canister that Lee had bumped into. I put Act One in a Baggie and put the Baggie in the canister, and at the last minute I stuck this boina in there too, for the obvious reason, and I floated the whole thing off down the tide like baby Perseus in his sea chest or Moses in his basket. Return to Sender.

  Says Peter Alert and Locate.

  Says Katherine, as much to Peter as to the Talbotts, Help.

  Franklin Key Talbott doffs the boina and offers it to his wife.

  WOULD YOU MIND WINDING UP THIS STORY?

  We’re wearing out our narrative welcome.

  Peter Sagamore says Believe me, you aren’t.

  Believe him, echoes Katherine Sherritt.

  They consider us. Lee Talbott takes the hat, kisses it again, puts it on, and tells us that since there wasn’t any wind, they eventually motored on across the Bay—Frank did, anyhow; she stayed below, in her bunk, worn-out—and down into Chester River, intending to go through Kent Island Narrows and on down Prospect Bay to the Wye River and Wye Island, But as they cleared Love Point Light at the mouth of the Chester, NOAA declared a severe thunderstorm watch, and so, rather than get caught in the tricky narrows waiting for the bridge to open on the hour, they drove on up the Chester and anchored in the lee of Cacaway Island to ride out the blow. We could have ducked in here, she acknowledges, but since there was time to get up to Cacaway, and since nothing was settled, we stayed with our island-to-island thing. When the storm hit, as you probably remember, it was a humdinger.

  We remember, all right. But you got more of it than we did.

  Says Lee It suited our mood. I was still down below, licking my wounds. Frank got us anchored just as the shit hit the fan, and then came below saying that the wind had blown his famous boina right off his head and into Langford Creek. I told him no doubt it would come back, one way or another, as it had before, and he said This time it won’t.

  Do you guys enjoy storms as much as we do? At anchor, I mean; not at sea, thanks! This one threw Reprise around like one of those mechanical bulls in Texas bars, and flipped our dinghy right upside down with its painter cinched around it like a saddle girth. But we knew we were safe from anything short of a full tornado, and we’ve ridden out so many storms on dear old Reprise that we enjoyed it despite everything. When it was over, we felt cleaned out, and we made love for the first time since Black Friday.

  We spent the next several days right there, on the boat and on the island, getting back together and deciding not to decide any of the big questions for a little while longer. It was like a mini-sabbatical at the end of our real one. Frank told me what had gone wrong with the novel project and why he’d scrapped it—I’d guessed as much clear back in Scarborough; it was a kind of foreshadow of what I did with Lexie and Drew. Then he told me what he’d been writing instead—I hadn’t guessed that!—and what he’d done with it, and why. I didn’t know what to say. I wished I’d seen it, but if I hadn’t liked it, that would’ve been one more setdown for both of us, and we didn’t need any more setdowns
. He told me basically what the story line was, and an odd thing happened: Now that the script was gone, and in the wake of my abortion and all, that crazy idea more or less possessed our imaginations.

  Over the next few days, when we weren’t swimming and making friends with each other again and remembering the really good parts of our cruise, we each worked for hours on deck with our clipboards or down below at the chart table and the dinette table, scribbling away. I made notes for the new courses I’ll be teaching if I take the Virginia job, and Frank went back to SEX EDUCATION, figuring he’d better write it out of his system after all to clear the pipes before going on to whatever next thing.

  He found he’d all but memorized the first act without intending to. He sketched it all out in one day—last Monday, when the weather was so shitful?—

  Katherine interrupts to say that that was the day we found the original, just inside Knapps Narrows, during some bad weather of our own. All the way down from the Bay Bridge to Tilghman Island in twenty-four hours!

  Frank Talbott observes that the wind had been in the north and northwest, and strong at times: Two or three ebb tides could easily fetch it that far, with the wind to keep the flood tides from carrying it back. The miracle was our finding it instead of some Tilghman Island crabber. Peter Sagamore reminds him that a miracle is what he’d said they needed; be our guests.

  Then he drafted Act Two, Lee Talbott declares. Like Sophocles after Aeschylus, he added a third character: that Swimmer. Then he sacrificed the second one, old May there, who had been inspired by your Annapolis friend. But the rape actually happened to my sister once, over in Fenwick Island, Delaware. Ma probably told you?

  By the end of the week the rough draft was done, and he gave it to me to read. This was day before yesterday: last day of spring and exactly a week since my trip to Cross Keys. How could I be objective about it? The characters weren’t real, but I felt I knew them, and I loved the idea that the sperm had survived by floating downstream like an ovum, and the ovum by swimming upstream like a sperm. Terrific.

  The sperm-and-egg conceit itself is low comedy in Doctor Talbott’s opinion, she goes on, but it’s about as basic as a conceit can get. Theater of the Womb. Plus of course it was pretty obvious, after all that business of forks and confluences and wyes, that old June and her Swimmer friend are going to reach their secret cove at the beginning of Act Three by working across the current instead of up or down it, just as we’d crossed the Bay to Cacaway to get our own act back together. They’re either going to get it on and make a baby or go their separate ways, right? Him upstream to nowhere; her downstream to nowhere. Aberdeen and Virginia.

  Katherine Sherritt says warmly I say get it on. The Talbotts are holding hands, she’s glad to see, but their expressions are not serene. The children wonder whether they’ve been renamed again. Peter says nothing.

  Says Leah Talbott Well. I wanted more than anything to say This is terrific; you got it; dynamite; knock me up again quick.

  Cheers Katie Yeah!

  But the name of the game these days is honesty, right, as long as it’s not aggressive? The fact is I just didn’t know, and that’s what I said. She looks at her husband. I just don’t know.

  In Peter Sagamore’s professional imagination, Act Three of SEX EDUCATION: Play is as clear as if he’d just seen it in color on public television. But he holds his peace.

  So we popped a bottle of Cordoniu Blanc des Blancs, Lee Talbott says, and we toasted our own sex education plus the Drama Thus Far plus our uncertain future, and then we launched Act Two into Langford Creek on the outgoing tide, but in a different spirit from the way Frank had launched Act One. For one thing, we both knew the story now—I guess I read it five times that day. Either one of us could reconstruct its main action, and together we could almost replicate the speeches word for word. It’s in the Talbott family repertory, at least for a while to come. And this time we felt that we weren’t so much throwing it away as floating it off, like a seed or a message. Like ourselves, for Christ sake. Maybe it would take root somewhere and bear fruit; maybe we’d get a response. Or maybe this really would turn out to be the end of things.

  What we did this time was take the flares and stuff out of our working flare container and set them aside in a vinyl bag; they need replacing anyhow before we take another cruise, if we ever do. Then we put the script in, in its Baggie, and it occurred to me to put the paisley scarf in there too: back where it came from. We poured the last of the champagne over the transom, to the muses and the fates, and said bon voyage to June and her Swimmer friend.

  She smiles, not animatedly, and gives the boina back to her husband. Au revoir, as it turns out.

  Less wistfully, Frank Talbott says Then we popped another Cordoniu and watched the canister drift down toward the river, and we felt like firing off all the distress flares then and there. And yet we felt at peace with ourselves, too, full of goodwill, whatever might happen. The air really was clear, and the night was beautiful after that big high that blew in all day.

  So that was Friday. Yesterday morning we upped anchor for Kent Narrows and Wye Island, where we started out this time last year. But it was such a perfect sailing day, and we’d been at anchor so long behind Cacaway, that when we got out into the river we decided to sail up to Chestertown, just for the ride, instead of down to Kent Narrows. Lee used to teach at the college up there; we thought we’d say hello to the old place and then drop down to Wye Island on the Sunday or the Monday. We’re in no hurry! We’ve been half afraid for the voyage to end, and maybe we wanted to give SEX ED a good head start. So we spent a few hours after lunch yesterday strolling the town, and then we sailed back down in the second part of the afternoon.

  We could have kept going and reached my folks’ place after dark. Reprise could sail himself there, almost—in fact, he almost did, last spring, after Rick drowned. But it was another sweet evening, et cetera, and since the weekend fleet was piling up behind Cacaway, we decided to run down here to Queenstown Creek, which we hadn’t seen for a while, and park up by Salthouse Cove, an old favorite of ours.

  Says Peter But somebody had got there first.

  I didn’t recognize the design, Frank Talbott says, but the name Story was familiar. Lee reminded me it was the hero’s sailboat in Peter Sagamore’s second novel, which she teaches every year. We’d enjoyed meeting both of you at Doug’s that time, and we’d often wished our paths would cross again, but we didn’t imagine it was actually you-all on the boat; we assumed it was some fans of yours.

  Sorry about that, says Katherine. The Story story can wait.

  So we took a swim, Frank says to her, and I noticed you were looking us over, so when we came back aboard I got out our binocs and looked vow-all over and saw one very pregnant lady aboard. I thought of moving, for Lee’s sake, but she said no. Even so, the sight didn’t exactly cheer us up, under the circumstances. Then we heard you guys laughing over here, and Lee checked with the binoculars and reported there’s this good-looking curly-haired naked fellow wearing a yarmulke or a beret and reading some pages to the nifty pregnant lady, who’s wearing a bandanna and nothing else, and they sure look a lot like the Sagamores to her, and if she’s not mistaken there’s a Day-Glo orange flare canister on their cockpit seat, and we thought Oyoyoyoyoy, of all the people in the world to find my poor old piece of a playscript; no wonder you’re laughing. But even with the hat right there on your head, we didn’t dream you’d found both canisters. The odds are too staggering!

  He removes the boina. I’m surprised you didn’t see me blushing like a red day-beacon from clear over here. He plops it down upon the cockpit seat and parodies the old song: Why oh why oh why oh, why did I ever leave Wye Island?

  Well: In

  THE OPINION OF US SAGAMORES,

  which Katherine now offers both Talbotts, Homer was strictly correct in supposing that wars are fought so that poets will have something to sing about. Our woman’s sentences, seldom terse, spr
ead their wings at evening’s end like great horned owls. Whether President Harry S. Truman established the CIA after World War II in order to provide Peter Sagamore, thirty-some years later, with a ground-metaphor for his next big novel remains in her opinion to be seen; but she declares to our new friends her suspicion that the reason why Leah and Franklin Talbott left Wye Island last June (to answer your question, Frank), shaken to their core by family bereavements, and then sabbaticaled around the Caribbean, endeavoring in vain to write a novel and to address large questions concerning their personal future, was in order to apparently fail in those endeavors, to reach a painful impasse with which we utterly sympathize, and in despair to cast over the side, in mid-Chesapeake, flare canister #1 and contents, which by the unlikeliest of hazards swam into the ken of dwarf-laden Story at a peculiarly volatile, suspended moment in our own tidewater tale, and in a manner of speaking catalyzed, goosed—Might as well say inseminated, says Peter—inseminated our onboard muse, though what she will deliver remains to be seen.

  Hatting up, she tells them the story of Day 1, Dun Cove to Dun Cove, briefly synopsizing what led up to and what has followed our retrieval of that canister and our perusal, at first desultory, of its contents. In her considered, late-evening opinion, there is no justice: That Frederick Mansfield Talbott should presumably die, Marian Silver be raped and impregnated in a black Chevy van on Fenwick Island, Delaware, Frank Talbott’s probably-okay-though-autobiographical novel go down the tubes, and a terrific couple like him and Lee get so strung out as to wonder even whether they’ll stay together, not to mention have children, just in order to maybe help Peter Sagamore’s lazy muse get off her tush and tune up, strikes Kath as little short of obscene—as if the purpose of the destruction of Dresden in World War II had been to inspire Kurt Vonnegut, Junior. But (she goes on) Dresden was destroyed in any case, and Act One of SEX EDUCATION was jettisoned in any case, and we happened to happen upon it, and that odd happenstance set the tone for this oddball ongoing odyssey of ours, in course of the first week of which we have touched base with Odysseus and Nausicaa, Huckleberry Findley, Carla B Silver and company, and the Talbotts, and have had foreshadowings of Captain Donald Quicksoat and Scheherazade down the line, and have told and been told more stories than in an average year. So thanks, okay? If we were laughing over here on Story this afternoon, it was because your play is fucking funny, Frank, as it was meant to be, and because the additional coincidence of our also picking up Act Two is enough to make any self-respecting minimalist a touch hysterical. Okay?