Where Three Roads Meet

by John Barth

  "Poor shmuck," had commiserated Winnie—who, like Al but not yet like Will, had acquired a handy array of Yiddish disparagements from Jewish friends and classmates.

  "Poor fucking shmuck," had added Al: From the veterans on campus all hands were picking up the liberal use of what they called "the word that won the war."

  Yes, well. What mattered, Narrator had been gratefully reminding them when the telephone rang, was that upon reading said mid-term essay its author's instructor was even more pleased by the narrative conceit and prose style than by what it had to say about that equiangular Y: enough so that he not only A-plused it but declared to the Three Freds' drummer at their next Trivium session, "What we have on our hands here, my friend, is a capital-G fucking Gift: the one you wished you'd had for music but did not, and the one I wish I had for lit-making but do not. We're talking capital-V Vocation, man! The capital-C fucking mythic-heroical Call!"

  Of the authenticity whereof he became so generously convinced—through the rest of that freshman semester and the next, and the summer following and the sophomore fall semester after that, as the Three Freds worked, played, and, increasingly, lived together—that at his urging, self-skeptical Will gave VVLU's Rudiments of Narrative course a try. And although he learned more from his mentor-friend's editorial comments on those primitive efforts (and from keen-eared Winnie's, and from the classic authors they bade him read) than from his classmates and course instructor, Fred-the-Mentee resolved, in the semester following (i.e., spring '49, the "now" of this section of this Three Freds story), to change his academic major from General Arts and Sciences to the university's recently established program in Creative Writing: not necessarily what Al Baumann thought the best curriculum for aspiring writers, inasmuch as literature had managed quite well for millennia without such programs, but he shrugged his (non-)shoulders at the news and agreed that further intensive practice, with feedback more various than his and Winnie's alone, wouldn't likely do harm and might well be of some benefit—if one were sufficiently alive to Literature's vastness and variety to counter every facile generalization about what constitutes Good Writing with an inarguably brilliant contradictory example.

  This would by him get said, of course, only after Will got his say said: his declaration of major-changing intent, with which he meant to follow his grateful reminiscence-in-progress of that first-semester term paper on Analogues to the Y which had led him to what he was now entirely persuaded was his true Calling, however ably or otherwise he responded to that call. And it was in the midst of just that reminiscence that Briarwood 304's telephone rang, first with a wrong number and then—as Will was saying "As I was saying, guys"—with a mellifluous baritone response to Winifred Stark's "Hello?"

  "Is there a Wilfred Chase there, please? Louis Levy calling."

  Win arched her never-plucked eyebrows, puckered her ever-unpainted lips, beamed conspiratorially at Freds One and Three, held out the receiver to that latter, silently mouthed the name Lou Levy, and (not for the first or last time in this trio's history) said to same, "It's yours."

  2. THE CHEATERY

  In his Lit & Phil class discussions of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, Alfred Baumann was at pains to distinguish Truth from Fact: "We speak of the truths of great novels, or the truths of great myths, even though both involve made-up stories," et cetera. And he was fond of pointing out to his students how different were the meanings of Veritas vos liberabit to Jesus, for example (as quoted by his disciple John in the eponymous book, 8:32); to the research university whose motto, eighteen centuries later, those words became; and to the newly founded U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which had also seen fit to appropriate that "bit o' Scripture" as its motto. He enjoyed pointing out (the class was reading Sophocles) that while "the truth" might indeed be liberating—whether from soul-damning Error in the first instance, intellectual benightedness in the second, or perilous ignorance of what the nation's designated enemies were up to in the third—it could also be devastating, even fatal, as witness poor Oedipus and various other tragic heroes. "Gnothi seauton, the Delphic oracle advises," he would remind his more or less attentive freshmen. "Know thyself. Because, adds Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living. So, then: Was Oedipus in better shape, was he more quote-unquote free, for learning that the old guy he'd knocked off at the Place Where Three Roads Meet was in fact his dad, who'd tried and failed to have him knocked off at birth? And that the widow-queen he'd then married and sired kids upon was his birth-mom? Remembering the King James Bible sense of 'to know' as 'to have carnal knowledge of,' one could fairly say that in Oedipus's case, to know himself was to screw himself altogether! So tell me: Given that for him the examined life was literally unlivable, would our Oed have been better off not knowing? One bluebook's or fifty minutes' worth of lucid commentary, s.v.p., whichever comes first."

  Although never a varsity athlete, senior class officer, or other sort of high school bigshot, Wilfred Chase (wrestling determinedly there in the third row with Al's bluebook question) had been a not-unpopular teenager who'd quite enjoyed his small-town adolescence despite wartime deprivations and the county's junior-year senior year. He'd been a columnist for the school newspaper and had co-managed the boys' varsity basketball team, had co-organized that aforementioned rudimentary jazz combo, and had dated two or three girls over that foreshortened period. No extended romances, but when his buddies compared notes on their postprom exploits—typically a matter of who among them had managed, in the lingo of the time, to get to First or even to Second Base with his date—Will was not obliged either to lie or to remain silent at risk of being thought prudish or queer. Few of their age and kind back then could claim honestly to have reached Third Base (reciprocal manual masturbation, fellatio, or cunnilingus, for all which they knew only the vulgar terminology); and the few who not only had attained that much-coveted station but had actually "scored" were not inclined to boast of having done so, their partners typically being longtime sweethearts whom they meant to marry "when the time came," and of whose reputations they were therefore, for the most part, honorably protective. He had, had our Will, by his seventeenth birthday French-kissed Vicki Parker as the pair rocked on her front-porch glider; had playfully patted Helen Davis's behind several times while jitterbugging in her family's rec room and teasingly squeezed same while slow-dancing; had fondled Doris Travers's starboard breast through sweater and bra in Schine's Avalon Theatre during a Saturday matinee of Lady on a Train, starring Deanna Durbin and Ralph Bellamy; and had done both of the above plus actually getting hand under bra (Vicki again, junior/senior prom night, in back seat of Donnie McDougal's parents' brand-new DeSoto) and even up under skirt and panties, briefly, where he'd touched the pert blond's presumably-also-blond pubic fur (what did he know?), but had been by her firmly escorted off those premises before reaching its sacred precinct, moist heart of the mystery. Into penile masturbation he had been initiated in Boy Scout Camp at age almost-thirteen by pretending that he knew all about it already while an older Eagle Scout in his cabin explained the procedure to a wide-eyed fellow Tenderfoot; thereafter he availed himself of that solitary pleasure with a frequency that he assumed—correctly, as it happens—to be within normal parameters.

  That-all said, however, Will himself readily acknowledged to his Fred-friends that as of his matriculation at VVLU, his innocence, of which he was more than ready to be divested, was of an extent whereof he'd been innocently ignorant, excuse all those ofs: It included not merely the difference between, e.g., Cabernet and Beaujolais, Hapsburg and Hohenzollern, Windsor and four-in-hand, but also—unusual though by no means rare for late-teen small-town middle-class WASP males in those days, unless they were in the military—the ins and outs, so to speak, of intercourse, in both senses, with the opposite sex. Except for Donnie McDougal's older sister Karen—who'd walked bare-ass naked one moonlit July night through her brother's bedroom en route to the house's single toilet while wide-awake Will was sleeping over, and then en route b
ack, as if suspecting that the boys might be only feigning sleep, had paused at their bed-foot and given her plump backside a mischievous twitch or two in their direction before returning to her own bedroom and closing the door—he had never seen a woman in the altogether.

  "Whereas Freds One and Two, on the other hand, dot dot dot..."

  Had been so intimately familiar through so many years and developmental stages that by the time they reached their twenties and commenced their unofficial cohabitation in Briarwood 304, while not at all bored with each other, they found it erotically interesting, shall we say, to admit the so-innocent Fred Three, gradually, into their intimacy.

  "Erotically interesting, yes: We shall say that. Part of his tutelage in Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, though more to do with life's facts than with its capital-T Truths."

  Thus did it amuse and perhaps mildly titillate Will's teacher-pal to emerge grinning one January late afternoon from 304's bathroom (whereto he'd excused himself to take a leak while the threesome were playing hearts) brandishing Winnie's douche syringe, with its large red rubber squeeze-bulb and its penis-length curved black plastic nozzle, and to declare, "Pop-quiz time, Wilfredo: What is this instrument, and to what end, so to speak, is it applied?" And then—when the best his protégé could come up with (pretty sure he was mistaken) was "Enema?"—merrily demanded of eye-rolling Winifred that she enlighten their benighted combo-colleague, "with or without demonstration, as your pedagogical sense inclines." And enlighten him she did, plucky girl: In the I'll-show-you spirit of mock-indignant retaliation that she and Al not infrequently assumed for their own entertainment, she plunked down her cards, snatched the item from him, bade him sit and not dare peek while she led their much-discomfited tutee into the bathroom, closed the door halfway, and in a voice pitched to carry through the apartment, said, "So let's pretend that that charming chap and I have just fucked, okay? And even though his charming little pecker may be less formidable than this charming dildo here, it will have managed to unload a charming troop of little Al Baumanns into you-know-where. Or maybe you don't know where, right? So let me just step out of these step-ins and show you. Now, then: Our objective being for him and me to have our premarital fun without knocking up poor Winnie before we're official, either our bass player uses a rubber—but what fun is that?—or else our post-coital pianist fills this bulb with a spermicidal douche (from the French for 'shower,' mind, not the French for 'sweet,' and plain water will do for this demo). Lacking a proper bidet Français— did you know that un bidet means an old nag or a trestle as well as a certain hygienic fixture?—she then bestrideth this Yankee toilet like so, opens her pearly white thighs like so, and—watch closely, now, enfant ... In fact, you can do this part yourself: Be my guest, and gently, please, in and out, au point d'orgasm. Entendu?"

  Et cetera, not actually removing her underpants and sitting, much less permitting her awed attendant to insert the nozzle, but giving Al every reason, so it seemed to Will, to imagine otherwise. Grinning broadly, "So, dites-moi," that friend demanded of him when wondering student and triumphant teacher-demonstrator returned to the living room, "d'j'ever see such a pettable puss? But don't forget"—holding up a warning forefinger—"I'm the only one who really gets to see it, not to mention—hey!" For here the faux-indignant Winnie picked up her wineglass from the card table and dumped several ounces of Sauvignon Blanc onto her lover's head. Laughing with him then while still standing between the seated males, "I'll show you, Mister Wiseass!" she said, and yanked her panties down to her knees, then lifted her skirt front with one hand, seized hapless Will by the pompadour with the other, and in fact showed him, nose to bush, the dainty precinct under discussion. "Truth, Goodness, and Beauty: voilà!"

  "All in one piece," wowed Wilfred managed to marvel, and for that double-entendre bon mot got his face pressed briefly but squarely into it. Lesson done then, Win pulled up her underpants, and the laughing trio resumed their card game. Reraising his forefinger, "Fifty years down the road," Al predicted—not altogether in jest, so it seemed to Will—"some academic hack like me will do a doctoral dissertation called Briarwood 304: The Moral/Aesthetic/Erotic Initiation of Wilfred Chase."

  "Or," added Winnie, sorting her cards, "The Post-Joycean Novelist as Quasi-Mythic Wandering Hero. Dissertation subtitles have to have an as."

  "You're no academic hack," loyally protested Will. "And I'm no Post-Joycean Quasi-Mythic Wandering Whatever."

  "Not yet, for damn sure," his mentor agreed, then resumed his mock-solemn air: "But mark my words, comrades: Half a century down the road, this three-way-hearts-game afternoon when Stark first rubbed Chase's nose in Truth Goodness and Beauty will be seen to have been a literary-historical turning point. The Ur-Mythic Summons to Adventure! The fucking Call!"

  Offered somewhat flustered though deeply flattered Will, "Another archetypal Y? The Stark Pudendum as Nowise-Trivial Trivium? But I forgot to notice whether it's equiangular."

  "I'll let you know in the morning," Al promised. "Unless Win wants to continue your French lesson now?"

  "Kiss my sweet as," growled she, "the pair of you. And let's play, okay?"

  Play they did (after Al informed them that the above-alluded-to Irish Modernist émigré writer, responding to a critic's charge that the language-play of Finnegans Wake was "ultimately trivial," had declared, "I'm not trivial; I'm quadrivial"): played through that academic year, and not only at their card games, their verbal badinage, and their jazz sessions at the Trivium (where, they agreed, long musical comradeship had given them a nonverbal, nondiscursive, but subtle and eloquent medium of three-way communication rich in cues, signals, teasing or serious queries and responses, improvised joint statements, and trial-and-error experiments), but with Truth, Goodness, and Beauty as well.

  Know thyself...At this point in his story, what Will Chase understood of himself included that he was physically okay: tall, lean, healthy, free of disfigurement, and, though not particularly handsome, not physiognomically ill-favored either. Historically fortunate, too, having been born to comfortably middle-class American parents in just the right historical "window" to miss both world wars (not here for the first, too young to serve in the second) and to be scarcely aware of the Great Depression of the 1930s, which his parents had gamely scrimped through in their son's grade school years. That although no whiz kid like Al and Winnie, he was reasonably intelligent. Not well educated by their enviable standard, but learning fast and eagerly. Not remarkably brave, he supposed (never having been put to serious test in that department), but no coward either, he'd bet. No longer a believer in God (he had shrugged off in high school his parents' perfunctory Protestantism), but withal a morally inclined and ethically decent fellow by his own estimation despite some questionable, mainly experimental lapses, to be reviewed shortly. And finally, that in place of the professional-caliber musical talent that he had erst so craved but was reconciled to lacking, he had been endowed with (or was anyhow resolved to acquire and develop) a Way with Words.

  As to those Mainly Experimental Lapses: "Intense, even impassioned moral/ethical concern," Alfred Baumann would remind his students when they were reading Plato and Dostoyevsky, "doth not in itself a moral person make." What ardent discussions he and his Lit & Phillers enjoyed, in class and in Briarwood 304, about Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov, about the mischievously appealing Symposium-crasher Alcibiades, about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... Yet (or And) in the same spirit wherewith Will especially, as the least experienced of the Freds, calibrated his tolerance for alcohol by exceeding it, and the threesome shared occasional "reefers" back when few of their age and station had ever seen marijuana, much less used it, they found it mildly exciting—and not morally indefensible, they half-seriously opined, for low-budget students in a corporate-capitalist society—to shoplift groceries, say, from large chain supermarkets (though never, they piously agreed, from small independent merchants); to gain sales access to those potential black-ghetto insecticide customers by
declaring, "We're the people who've been sent to spray your house," and then, once inside, pitching their product after spraying one room (a single week of this bait-and-switch scam sufficed to turn their moral stomachs; their ever more adventurous shoplifting, however, extended through a full semester and then some, before one of them—Winnie, most likely—asked, "What are we, guys, lunatics or hypocritical common thieves?" Whereupon they acknowledged their makeshift rationalizing and forswore further larceny, but made no attempt at restitution); and to misrepresent to the Baumann/Stark parents, "for their own peace of mind," Al and Winnie's Briarwood cohabitation.

  "In short, Reader, we three played with dynamite the way macho schoolboys used to play with lighted firecrackers, seeing who'd hold on longest before tossing them away or losing a finger. And speaking of holding: Has Lou Levy been on hold back there in B Three-oh-four right through this Extended Narrative Digression? Did we even have telephonic holds in 'forty-nine?"

  Not a digression, really, but an aside on the subject of self-knowledge acquired via Mainly Experimental Detours from what the trio knew very well to be the Straight and Narrow. Thou shalt not lie, we learned—about why thou'rt knocking on rowhouse doors, for example, with cockroach-spraygun at the ready. Nor shalt thou steal—not even packaged sliced bacon from the A & P...

  "Win scored a six-pound turkey breast once, remember? Pretending she was preggers!"

  And actually got away with that apt-though-painful-in-retrospect foreshadowing: our last major heist before both conscience and commonsense risk-benefit analysis set in.

  "And Thou shalt not cheat— not even under the benignant cover of Louis Levy's soi-disant Preparatory School."