Where Three Roads Meet

by John Barth

  The Cheatery. It has been made clear, Narrator trusts, that the telephone in B 204, "Will's" studio apartment, was listed as Al's, and the one in Al and Winnie's 304 as hers, for reasons of decorum. When therefore Headmaster Levy desired to telephone prospective tutor Wilfred Chase, he rang up the number supplied him by former tutor Alfred Baumann as his own, understanding the pair to be roommates—which number, however, was the one where Al could be reached in fact: B 304's, routinely answered by Winnie. (Dr. and Mrs. Baumann, when phoning their son, soon learned to expect that it would be Wilfred, his official roomie, who took the call and promised to have said son call back "as soon as he comes in." The actual living arrangement must surely have soon been apparent to them, but for decorum's sake they went along with the fiction, as did M/M Stark—and refrained from visiting their children in situ, where the charade would have been immediately obvious.) All which explaineth why—when Will took the instrument from Win and said "Hello," and was asked resonantly "Is this Wilfred Chase?" and, instead of acknowledging that he sometimes asked himself the same question, said merely "Speaking"—the hearty reply was "Glad to catch you at home, Mr. Chase! I'm Louis Levy. Perhaps you've heard of me from Al Baumann?"

  "I have, sir." To put it mildly.

  "One of our best preceptors ever! We were sorry to lose him to the higher realms of academia, but so it goes! Now we're looking for another grad student of his caliber to fill a part-time preceptorship that just opened up here, and Alfred tells me you're our man!"

  "Very kind of him," Will allowed, thinking, Preceptors? Preceptorship? He really calls them that? Not to mention, Grad student? Me? Of Al's caliber?

  "You'll be tutoring a handful of high-schoolers in literature and composition, helping them with their essays and other homework assignments. Good kids, some from our private schools and some from the better public ones. Couple of hours every weekday afternoon—say, half past three to half past five? Two bucks an hour. What do you think?"

  From across the room Pal Al smiled, as does his ghost when Narrator here recounts this benign surprise, this little joke of a setup. For in Will's scrabbling after part-time work to supplement the Three Freds' weekend wages from the Trivium—the same scrabbling that led him to peddling roach spray, tallying steel-mill timecards, reshelving library books, and various other jobs—he had envied Al the easy two dollars an hour (not bad money in those days) picked up on the side at Lou Levy's establishment one previous semester. "Best way to learn a book or a language is to teach it" was an oft-repeated Baumann article of faith, and while they'd shaken their collective heads at the nature of Levy's downtown-rowhouse "preparatory school" (dedicated mostly to doing rich kids' homework for them, Al had reported), he had found it possible to improve a bit not only the students' reading and writing skills in their native language, but his own appreciation of the poems and essays involved in their homework assignments. And without mentioning the matter to Will, he had recommended him to Levy as his replacement. "Lit and Phil One and Two it ain't," he would say after the phone conversation in progress. "But some of the brats are likable and even teachable, and some of their preceptors learn a bit about teaching and about the texts. So give it a shot: one more item in your résumé."

  But to his caller Will confessed, "I'm not quite a graduate student, Mr. Levy. Actually, I'm just finishing my sophomore year." And would demand afterward of Al, "Why'd you tell him I was a grad student?"

  Replied the mellifluous former with a knowing chuckle, "We quite understand that those distinctions get blurred in your university's new fast-track program. But okay by Al Baumann is okay by us." And the latter, with shrug of hands and eyebrows, "Graduate shmaduate: You're good enough for Levy's Prep, and you'll learn a thing or two. He needs to be able to tell the parents that their heirs are getting individual attention from VVLU grad students—which in effect they are, 'cause I'll be checking on you through the first week and as needed thereafter."

  "I'll buy that," Winnie declared at this point—Will having accepted Levy's invitation to hop the bus down St. Paul Street next day for the mere formality of an interview. "Come to think of it, maybe I'll apply for a PTP myself: Part-Time Preceptorship? For my résumé."

  Which she did, cutting half a day's senior-year classes at Goucher on a pleasant mid-April morning to ride the bus with Fred Three down past the marble-stepped, brick- and Formstone-fronted rowhouse corridor to Levy Prep, and introducing herself to that establishment's pudgy, black-curled, florid-faced, dark-suited but bright-necktied proprietor-cum-headmaster as "Al Baumann's part-time gradstudent fiancée—in case you need another preceptor in Literature, History, French, German, or Spanish?"

  Replied the amused, unruffled Levy, "Two questions," and raised first his left forefinger: "Are you out to snatch this young man's job before I've even interviewed him?" Then the finger beside it: "And are you a part-time graduate student or Mr. Baumann's part-time fiancée?"

  To Will's considerable surprise, as he'd never heard his Fred-friends speak of themselves as officially engaged to marry, she linked her arm with his, gave the two men an exaggerated vampish wink, and said, "No to the first and yes to the second and third of your two questions." Holding up her own left forefinger, "Al and I think of Wilfred as part of us, and you can't steal from yourself, right?" Then a second finger: "And my courses at Goucher and Peabody this year would be graduate courses if they had a graduate program—which they don't, quite, yet." And then a third: "Plus, Al and I don't regard affiancement as a full-time job."

  "Lucky fellow," Levy said smoothly to Will, raising his massive eyebrows, stroking his chin, and gesturing us into his office-cum-classroom. To Winnie then (whose arm and Will's were still linked), "And when you say, quote, which they don't comma quite comma yet, unquote, do you mean that they don't have graduate programs quite yet, or that their present programs are as yet not quite graduate programs? Come in, please, and have a seat."

  Unhesitatingly, "I quite agree that those propositions are quite different," Win responded. "Excuse the intensifying adverbs? But in this instance, both are quite true." Pointing then to a short list of long words on the blackboard behind the desk labeled HEADMASTER, "I also happen to know what every one of those sesquipedalia means," she declared. "And I'm sure Will does, too: He's the family wordsmith."

  With a knowing smile at the papers he was moving about on his desktop, "All in the family, eh?" said Levy. "Now, then, Miss Stark: If you'll just step into the next room for a few minutes, your friend and I will get down to business. After which, maybe you and I can have a little chat."

  Sesquipedalian was, in fact, one of the listed words, along with adjudicatory, misogynistic, eleemosynary, and our language's longest, antidisestablishmentarianism.

  "Quite a gal," Levy remarked when Winnie closed the office door behind her. To cover his discomfort at the small smirk in the man's voice and manner, "Smart as a whip," Will agreed, "and plays fine jazz piano as well as classical. She and Al and I work weekends at the VVLU Trivium: piano, bass, and drums. Do you happen to know why people say 'Smart as a whip'?"

  For the first time, Levy regarded him with what seemed genuine interest. "I don't, in fact. So tell me, Mister Wordsmith, why do we?"

  "Beats me," Will admitted. "And I confess I don't know eleemosynary, either."

  Turning up his palms, "So look it up!" Levy said. Confidingly then, with a nod at the board behind him, "We teach the kids a few fancy words to impress their teachers with, if they can work 'em into their papers." He stroked his chin. "You're hired, by the way. I see from your transcript," which, per Al's advice, Will had brought a copy of to the interview, "that you got off to a very rough start up there and then really hit your stride. That sets the right example for your tutees."

  Will reminded him that he wasn't "quote quite a graduate student quote quite yet."

  "Nor are we quite a preparatory school, strictly speaking." Complicitous smile. "More remedial, actually, though we really do prepare the kids' homework as
signments. You'll do just fine. Starting tomorrow? And tell your winsome friend Miss Chutzpah that we might just have something for her, too, before the school term ends."

  As the Freds made dinner à trois that evening back in Briarwood 304's tiny kitchenette, "Winsome," Al Baumann echoed, wincing, when that friend reported to him what their friend had reported to her of this conversation: "Our winsome Winnie."

  "As in 'You win some and you lose some' " supposed the family wordsmith. "Anyhow, I learned a useful new word today: not winsome."

  "Eleemosynary, I'll bet," Al teased. "I should've prepped you: Levy had that same list on his blackboard when he interviewed me last year."

  Replied Will, "Fuck eleemosynary. On the bus ride home, your fiancée Miss Winsome preceptored me in chutzpah. We didn't hear much Yiddish back in Marshville."

  "Part-time fiancée," Win reminded him, and perhaps reminded Al as well, for to Will's considerable surprise—after declaring that although she had indeed explained to him Levy's term for her, Fred Three remained in her estimation lamentably innocent of the quality thereby named—she turned from the stove, embraced that fellow from behind as he chopped onions at the sink, pressed her breasts firmly into his back, reached one hand around to cup his crotch, and declared her conviction that with just a dash of chutzpah their drummer-boy could be "a real stud instead of a sexual ree-tard." Regarding the pair benignly sidewise from the cutting board on which he was dicing Idaho potatoes, "Maybe the kid needs a part-time preceptor," Al ventured.

  "Could be," she agreed. And giving her handful a playful squeeze and pat, she returned to her liver-and-bacon sauté-in-progress.

  "Remedial or preparatory?" her prospective tutee pretended to wonder, and in the spirit of their three-way tease, made bold to squeeze in turn one plump-but-firm, beskirted Winnie-buttock. "And when's my first lesson, Teach?"

  "Enough chutzpah already," declared her part-time fiancé. "Let's fry this stuff and feed our fucking faces."

  They did that, bantering of other matters than the one now uppermost in Wilfred Chase's much-aroused narrative imagination; then withdrew to their separate quarters to prepare the next day's schoolwork.

  Which in Will Chase's case included not only VVLU's Rudiments of Narrative course—in which he was endeavoring, without impressive success, to "find his own voice" amid the cacophony of his similarly struggling fellow novices and their innumerable full-throated predecessors— but also his maiden sessions on the other side of the pedagogical divide, "tutoring" Lou Levy's after-school enrollees in what was labeled, simply, English.

  "How do I Part-Time Preceptor them?" he had wondered to his own preceptor-in-chief. "What part-time precepts do I have to offer?"

  "All of our precepts are part-time," Al had replied, "whether in the sense of Inconsistent—like Thou shalt not shoplift except from large chain stores?—or in the sense of Provisional and/or Temporary, like Who were we kidding that it's okay to steal within limits? Anyhow, you won't be teaching TGB"—their shorthand for Lit & Phil's Truth, Goodness, and Beauty—"you'll be fixing their diction, grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and improving your own in the process. Relax and enjoy it."

  He did, rather, once he'd met the two or three tutees with whom for the next six weeks he worked at one of several tables set up in what was meant to have been the rowhouse's living room. While other PTP's did similar repair work in other subjects at neighboring tables, and Levy himself held forth in his open-doored office to a select few on antidisestablishmentarianism and other sesquipedalia, Will pointed out misplaced modifiers, dangling participles, subject-verb disagreements, superfluous or missing commas, objective-cased predicate nominatives, and other such lapses in his students' high school English compositions, learning as he went along the names of those errors and the principles by them embodied, and improving by the way his own copy-editing skills. "In this next paragraph," he would explain to Ann Stein, daughter of a prominent local department-store owner, "when you say 'The Indians only hunted and fought on foot until the Spanish brought horses to America,' you imply that they did nothing else on foot, like just walking, or maybe dancing around the campfire. What you mean to say is that the Indians hunted and fought only on foot until et cetera. Okay?" Whereupon that sultry black-haired beauty (at seventeen, only a year younger than her precociously part-time preceptor), who drove from her private school sixth-form English classes down to Levy's Prep in a new canary-yellow Ford convertible, would roll her lustrous eyes and make the correction—not without grumbling that only an idiot would misunderstand what she meant. Likewise when Stanley Fine—curly-headed, mischief-twinkling scion of the city's Fine Laundry and Dry Cleaning chain—wrote "Turning the corner, the Empire State Building came into view," and Will observed that skyscrapers don't normally turn corners: "So if everybody understands it, what's the problem?" Considering that not-unreasonable question for perhaps the first time, Will responded experimentally to the grinning pair that a mother's understanding her child's baby talk is no justification for letting the kid remain at that primitive level of communication. "Weak analogical reasoning," Al would object that evening (and Will would duly report to his preceptees next day), "since nobody except Mom understands the kid, whereas et cetera. What you should've said is that misplaced modifiers and such are like static on the radio: objectionable even if we can make out what number the band's playing. We shouldn't have to get the message despite its wording."

  "Aiyiyi," groaned Stein to Fine. "They really dig this stuff! Can you believe it?"

  And Will, unbothered, "You'd better believe it, friends. Sloppy language equals sloppy thinking. Honor thy mother tongue."

  Cheerfully retorted Fine, "Never mind our mother tongue, man; let's finish our mothering homework and get our tushies out of here."

  For that was, as Al had forewarned, what Levy's preceptors were chiefly paid for: not merely to correct errors in their charges' homework assignments with a bit of instruction in the process, but to do those assignments for them, more or less, under the guise of tutelage. Hence the Freds' name for the place: the Cheatery.

  "But it's more than just us helping the kids cheat their teachers and themselves," Winnie observed a week or so later, when Levy hired her after all to replace a PTP in French who'd quit without notice: "The kids are cheating their classmates by getting professional help that the others don't have. The parents who know what we're really up to are cheating both their own kids and the school system. And the ones who believe we're actually tutoring instead of cheating are being cheated by us."

  "Also, contrariwise," Will pointed out, "the ones who're paying us mainly to cheat get cheated when some of us try mainly to teach."

  What was more, they agreed, Lou Levy was cheating the parents by representing his preceptors as graduate students, and cheating both by charging five dollars an hour, paying the PTPs two, and pocketing the other three himself—a tidy profit, by the Freds' estimation, even after allowing for building upkeep and other overhead expenses—all the while maintaining that the institution was pedagogically proper and beneficial, indeed all but eleemosynary. It could even be argued, they enjoyed supposing, that in at least some instances the kids' official teachers were cheating all hands with make-work assignments designed primarily to satisfy the Procrustean requirements of curriculum planners and to compensate for indifferent classroom teaching.

  "So what are we doing here?" Win asked Will, taking his hand in hers on the uptown bus ride home a few days into their joint preceptorships. "Who the fuck do we think we are?"

  As to the first of those questions, it was Al Baumann's subsequently delivered opinion that in time-honored 3F fashion they were exploring moral ambiguities, experimenting with ethical parameters, honing their language and editorial skills, and scoring two dollars apiece per hour, all to the end of clarifying, if not necessarily answering, Question Two. "More to the point," Will in turn asked Winnie as that pair sat hip to hip on his Murphy-bed edge in Briarwood 204 after their two-hour gig at t
he Trivium at the close of that same April Friday evening, about to consummate his sexual initiation and (he supposed with guilty excitement) her first sexual infidelity, and she reported her "part-time fiancé's" reply, above, to their bus ride questions, "What are we doing here? Who do we think we are?"

  Same answer, no doubt, his naked friend and colleague supposed. What she'd like to know (picking up his hand again, placing it firmly between her legs, and declaring "It's yours") is why it was always she who had to take the lead with him, as she'd done once again by knocking on his door a short while ago and brisking past him into his apartment, announcing cheerily as she peeled off her robe and pajamas that it was class time for Fornication 101. "You're supposed to set the beat, not follow it."

  As to that, dazzled Will would remind her presently, in their combo it was Al, ever their leader, who set the beat from his stance between them at his bass—"A-one, a-two, a-one-two-three-four"—and himself who then maintained it, kept it up.

  "So keep it up!" she urged, implored, commanded from beneath him, her eyes winced shut, head whipping from side to side as if in happy pain. "It's yours, Will! Go to it!"

  He duly went and shortly came, his instrument unsheathed except by hers in their duetto agitato ("Leave precautions to me," she had instructed him while demonstrating Insertion of Diaphragm: "I'm the one who gets the bill if things go wrong"), and did likewise repeatedly through that spring, deliciously by her preceptored in intercourse digital, oral, vaginal, and anal, in a repertoire of positions and with assorted refinements, usually but not always on post-Trivium Friday nights in his apartment. "Jesus, Win," he groaned into her not-quite-equiangular Y at one point during that first of them, as she was tutoring him in soixante-neuf: "Al's the best friend I ever had! Best teacher! Best coach!"

  To his scrotum she responded, "Mine too, dummy—and has been for ten times longer."