by John Barth
Well, the thing soon commenced getting out of hand, as I’d feared. Jane was as lovely and skillful as ever, but she was too loving, too solicitous. Harrison was planning a summer trip to the Bahamas for the three of us. Jane spoke vaguely for a while of my marrying some intelligent girl, but soon spoke of it not at all. Harrison mentioned it once too, with the implication that the four of us would live precisely like one happy family. All this out of the excess of their love for me. It was time to take measures.
Once he stopped in my office when I happened to be preparing a suit a vinculo matrimonii for Dorothy Miner, a plump Negro girl of eighteen, who picked crabs at one of the seafood houses. She was an entirely uneducated girl, a friend of mine, and she was arranging a divorce from her husband of a month, one Junior Miner, who had abandoned her. Dorothy’s skin, teeth, and eyes were excellent, and she snapped her gum. Our relationship was Platonic.
“Hi, Harrison,” I greeted him. “This is Dorothy.”
Dorothy grinned hello and snapped a salute.
“How d’you do,” Harrison said, scarcely noticing her. “Coming for lunch, Toddy?”
Recently he’d been taking me to lunch uptown.
“In a few minutes,” I said. “Dorothy here is divorcing her husband, and I’m handling her suit.”
“Oh?” He sat in one of the chairs, lit a cigar, and prepared to read a magazine.
I peered into the waiting room. The secretary had already gone to lunch.
“She’s poor,” I went on, “so I take it out in trade.”
Harrison flinched as though I’d slapped him and, blushing deeply, looked at me with a twisted smile.
“Are you kidding?” He looked surreptitiously at Dorothy, who at my statement had clapped her hand over her mouth to hold down laughter and chewing gum.
“No indeed,” I grinned. “I’m getting to be real good at this business. Isn’t that so, Dorothy?”
“Whatever you say, Mister Andrews,” Dorothy giggled; it was a tremendously funny joke.
“What the hell, Toddy!” Harrison laughed sharply.
“As a matter of fact,” I said, moving toward her, “I believe her bill is overdue right now.”
Dorothy giggled and fussed with her hair. But she rose uncertainly from her chair, brushed her skirt flutteringly, and stood facing me.
“Aw, say, Toddy!” Harrison croaked, getting up from his chair.
“Excuse me,” I said. “You go on to lunch; I’ll be along in a minute.”
“What the hell, Toddy!” Harrison exclaimed, aghast and angry. “I’ll see you later!” He left the office as fast as he could, actually perspiring from his humiliation and embarrassment. I went to the window and watched him hurry up the sidewalk.
Dorothy, meanwhile, watched my face for some clue. “What you up to, Mister Andrews?” she demanded, bursting into giggles after the question.
I don’t recall my answer, but I’m sure Dorothy laughed at whatever it was, since she thought me mad. I went to join Harrison.
“What the hell, Toddy!” he said during lunch, for perhaps the third time. “I’d have felt cheap!”
He was apologizing for what he feared I’d call his prudery, to be sure, and perhaps even chastising himself for having missed his chance; but more than that he was, I saw, deeply insulted.
“I’m not prejudiced; I just couldn’t have anything to do with a Negro girl,” is what he said, but “You’ve been unfaithful to Jane and to me; you’ve defiled yourself and us in that black hussy“ is what he meant.
“Do you make a practice of that?” he asked me.
“Some of ’em pay in eggs,” I said blithely. “But a man can use just so many eggs.”
“Aw, hell, Toddy.”
“What’s the matter, man?” I laughed. “Don’t you want me to put what I’ve learned into practice?”
“You may do anything you want to, of course,” Harrison said. “I’ve said that all along.”
“Hell, Harrison, you knew I wasn’t a virgin, and Jane did, too. What did you think I’d been doing for thirty-two years?”
But of course they didn’t know; they’d believe anything I told them. Harrison could only shake his head. His appetite was gone.
“You mustn’t take things seriously,” I said cheerfully. “No matter how you approach it, everything we do is ridiculous.” I laughed again, as I do every time I remember what happened in my bedroom when I was seventeen.
“Friendship’s not a ridiculous thing,” Harrison said, full of emotion. “I don’t see why you’ve decided to hurt Jane and me.”
“Friendship may or may not be ridiculous,” I said, “but it sure is impossible.”
“No, it’s not,” Harrison said. He was very near tears, I think, and it looked ridiculous in a robust fellow like him. “I just wish you hadn’t hurt us. There wasn’t any reason to. I’m not angry. I just wish you hadn’t done it.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Do you think love is ridiculous?” Harrison asked.
“Everything is ridiculous.”
“Why’d you lie about being a virgin? There wasn’t any reason to.”
“You deserved that for expecting to hear it, and being pleased when you heard it,” I said.
Harrison practically slumped on the table. I really believe I had destroyed his strength.
“You don’t like us,” he declared hopelessly.
“Buck up, man, this is degrading!” I said. “What difference does anything make? Of course I was acting, but you all wanted an act. How do you think Jane would’ve felt if I’d told her the truth? I’m on your side.”
“The hell you are,” Harrison grumbled; he was angry enough at me now to get up and walk out of the restaurant. He even left me with the check.
It was Tuesday, and there was a good chance that Jane was in my room, waiting for me to come up for my nap. I took my time, strolling down to Long Wharf before heading toward the hotel, so that Harrison could rescue her from my clutches. When finally I went in, no one was there, but I thought I detected the smell of her skin in the air. Perhaps it was my imagination. I sighed and, for the first time since that August weekend, really relaxed. It was a pity: the Macks were agreeable people, and they would have a bad day.
IV. the captain’s confession
Now, what was I doing? I believe I didn’t explain how Jane got to be back in my bed again by 1937, did I? Well, I’ll finish the story later, as we go along: I’ve stayed close to the plot for a good long time now. Wait: looking back I see that the whole purpose of the digression was to explain why it was that I was incapable of great love for people, or at least solemn love. And I see I didn’t explain it yet, at that. Good Lord! The last half of this book, I’m afraid, will be nothing but all these explanations I’ve promised and postponed. Let’s forget all this for the moment and get Capt. Osborn his glass of rye, which I’ve been holding all this time, before he dies of thirst and old age.
Very well: I tiptoed from my room, so as not to disturb Jane again from her slumbers, and took the old rascal his drink, which he threw down neat with much sputtering and fuming.
“Ah, that’s a good boy, son,” he grinned upon finishing. Already his face was regaining its color. “If yer headed out, why I’ll jest take yer arm, sir.”
Mister Haecker had watched us listlessly all this time. That morning he seemed more nervous and preoccupied than usual, and—I swear this isn’t all hindsight—I believe I suspected just then that for some reason or other this June 21 or 22 was going to be as momentous a day for him as for me.
“I’m headed out right now, Cap’n,” I said. Capt. Osborn wheezed to his feet and limped over to take my arm, so that I could help him down the steps.
“Going out today, Mister Haecker?” I asked.
“No, son,” Mister Haecker sighed. He looked as if he would say more; as if, in fact, the “more” were filling his head to bursting. One terrible look he flashed me, of pure panic; I’ve not forgot
ten it. I waited a moment for it to come. “No,” Mister Haecker said again, flatly this time, and rose to return to his room.
Capt. Osborn and I left then, and started the slow descent of the stairs. I tried carefully to feel every step, so full was I of the wonder of this day; of my new and final answer, and my stupidity at not having thought of it years ago.
But I am not a thinker, nor have I ever been. My thinking is always after the fact, the effect of my circumstances, never the other way round.
“This is step number nine,” I said to myself. “Isn’t it a nice step? This is step number ten, as you go down, or eighteen as you come up. Isn’t it grand? This is step number eleven, or seventeen…” and so on. There was plenty of time to enjoy each step for its particular virtues, because of Capt. Osborn’s lameness. I was having a fine time.
On step number seventeen going down, or eleven coming up, Capt. Osborn pinched my arm, the one supporting him, and chuckled softly. “How was it last night, Toddy boy?”
I looked at him in amused surprise. “What?”
The Captain chortled. “Ye don’t s’pose a nosy old dog like me don’t know what’s up, do ye?” He poked me with his elbow, and actually winked.
“You lecherous old bastard!” I grinned. “I bet you’ve been listening at my door!”
“Naw, boy, I got ears for that kind o’ carryin’s-on. Shucks! Don’t think I give a durn about it, boy. I’d have ’em up to my room by the clutch if I weren’t most dead.”
I said nothing, wondering only why he’d bothered to tell me about it.
“I been listenin’ to you and her for a right smart while now,” he said seriously, but with his eyes twinkling. “She’s a fine gal, and a frisky-lookin’ one. You know how it is when yer old.”
“How is it?”
Capt. Osborn snorted and smacked me on the shoulder. “Well, sir, I jest couldn’t go on a-listenin’ to ye any more, Toddy boy, without ye knew about it. Tweren’t noways fair. I even left my door open some nights, now that’s how wicked I am. Ye can think what ye like; I done told ye now and it’s off my chest.”
He seemed really relieved—of course he was a little drunk, too.
“How long have you been listening?” I asked him. “Since 1932?”
“Durn near,” Capt. Osborn admitted glumly. “I swear I never did no more’n leave my door open, though. I don’t care, Toddy; ye can hate me if ye want.”
Now he didn’t dare to look me in the eye. He was unable to speak for shame. We were near the bottom of the steps.
“So you think she’s frisky-looking, do you?” The change in my voice gave him courage, but he still felt bad.
“I’ve had a bunch o’ women, Toddy,” he whispered to me solemnly. “My wife, God rest her poor soul, was a fine woman, despite she weren’t no beauty; and a waterman—well, ye run into lots o’ floozies round the boats, want to help a drudgeman spend his wad. Some of ’em was mighty lively, too, for a small town, sir! And I been to the city, and the fancy houses, I won’t lie.” He smiled at the memory, then grew solemn again. “But I swear to God as I’m standin’ here before ye this minute, may He smite me dead if I’m a-lyin’, I never in my life seen a woman could hold a candle to that gal o’ yourn, Toddy. She’s a beauty, I declare!”
“You old goat,” I said after a minute.
“I shan’t do it no more, Toddy,” he said wretchedly.
“Indeed you shan’t.” I laughed, and his spirits were soon restored. I had had a magnificent idea, an idea such as one should have every day. Oh, it was going to be a lovely momentous day. “Good morning to you, Cap’n,” I said when we reached the lobby. “I may go by your corner later on today. I’m going to pay my bill now.”
But Capt. Osborn wasn’t ready to let me go yet. He held on to my arm and chewed his coffee-stained mustache for a minute, composing what he had to say. I waited respectfully, for I was in no hurry at all.
“Do you believe that malarky o’ Haecker’s?” he asked finally, a little suspiciously. “ ’Bout how nice it is to git old?”
“No.”
“I sleep light,” he said after a moment, looking past me to the street door. “Some days I don’t sleep a wink from one day to the next, sir, but I don’t git tired, or I guess I’m the same tired all the time, sleep or no. Ye git that way when yer old; ye don’t need sleep ’cause ye ain’t able to do nothin’ when yer awake to tire ye out no more’n ye already are. An old man hears what he ain’t s’posed to hear, and don’t hear half what he ought to. I’ve heard you and that young lady till I wanted to holler, if my head wasn’t clogged up with the catarrh and my lights a-burnin’ with the bronchitis and my joints stiff with the rheumatism, and I’d cuss myself for listenin’, and couldn’t stop to save me. I’d cuss myself for not gittin’ up to close the door, but when yer old as me, gittin’ up is a chore, and ye got to sort o’ collect yerself, and then ye jest wait all day to git back in bed, but can’t sleep ’cause ye know that sooner or later that there bed ye was so hot to crawl into is goin’ to be the last time ye’ll crawl into it. That ain’t no fit lullaby to git sung to sleep with, Toddy! And when I’d git up and go to the door, why I could jest hear ye all the plainer, and I’d tell myself that right there was somethin’ I’ll never do again on this earth!”
He paused for breath; I was astonished at his volubility.
“Well, sir, Haecker might be right; he’s a sight smarter’n me, but I swear I can’t see one durn thing to this old business. The sinus keeps a-fillin’ yer nose till yer fit to drown, and yer eyes water, and yer legs go to sleep if ye set still, and yer bones pain ye if ye move. I’d rather be forty and feel good and be dumb as a post, and be fit to do work, than to feel all day like I weren’t rightly alive, and hurt all the time and have to blow my nose till it’s sore, and crack a cane on my legs to keep the blood a-goin’, even if I knew all there was to know.”
“Mister Haecker’s just a kid,” I smiled, delighted to hear Capt. Osborn talk.
“He ain’t but seventy and fit as a fiddle,” the old man snorted. “I’d of said the same thing at seventy if I’d of commenced to think about it, which I didn’t commence to think about it till I was eighty. And I can tell you today it’s an awful thing to think about, this dyin’, and I would rather be chokin’ from the sinus, and not fit to git out o’ bed no more, and use a bedpan and eat dry toast, than to be dead, sir! Any man tells ye yer goin’ to git to like the idea jest ’cause yer old, he’s lyin’ to ye, and I want to tell ye right now, when the time comes I am goin’ to cuss and holler.”
Well, he went on in that vein, and I remember it all, but that’s enough of Capt. Osborn for now—perhaps you don’t enjoy old men as I do. When he had said his piece—and completely forgotten, I’m certain, what he’d been apologizing for—he went out into the street to take his place on the loafers’ bench uptown with his cronies in the sunshine. I loved him, if I loved anyone, I think; death for him would be the hyphenated break in a rambling, illiterate monologue, a good way for it to be if you’re most people. He was fooling himself and not fooling himself about it, so that ultimately he wasn’t fooling himself at all, and hence it wasn’t necessary to feel any pity for him. I felt much sorrier, in my uninvolved way, for Mister Haecker, with his paeans to old age and gracious death: he was really fooling himself, and one could anticipate that he would someday have a difficult time of it. In the meanwhile, he must spend all his energies shoring up his delusion, and do it, moreover, alone, for his intensity and prudishness found him no friends; Osborn, on the contrary, sniffed and wheezed and creaked and spat, and cursed and complained, and never knew a gloomy day in his life.
I remembered my little plan and went to the registration desk. Jerry Hogey, the manager, was on duty. He was a friend of mine, and it was due to his understanding of the world that Jane had been able to come to my room despite hotel policy at any time for the last five years. I bid him good morning as usual, and borrowing a sheet of hotel stationery from him, scribbled a note
to Jane.
“This is for the young lady, Jerry,” I said, folding it and giving it to him.
“Sure.”
Then, as I had done every morning since 1930 (and still do), I wrote out a check for one dollar and fifty cents payable to the Dorset Hotel, for the day’s lodging.
V. a raison de coeur
That’s right, I pay my hotel bill every day, and reregister every day, too, despite the fact that the hotel offers weekly and monthly and even seasonal rates for long-term guests. It’s no eccentricity, friend, nor any sign of stinginess on my part: I have an excellent reason for doing so, but it is a raison de coeur, if I may say so—a reason of the heart and not of the head.
Doubly so; literally so. Listen: eleven times the muscle of my heart contracted while I was writing the four words of the preceding sentence. Perhaps six hundred times since I began to write this little chapter. Seven hundred thirty-two million, one hundred thirty-six thousand, three hundred twenty times since I moved into the hotel. And no less than one billion, sixty-seven million, six hundred thirty-six thousand, one hundred sixty times has my heart beat since a day in 1919, at Fort George G. Meade, when an Army doctor, Captain John Frisbee, informed me, during the course of my predischarge physical examination, that each soft beat my sick heart beat might be my sick heart’s last. This fact—that having begun this sentence, I may not live to write its end; that having poured my drink, I may not live to taste it, or that it may pass a live man’s tongue to burn a dead man’s belly; that having slumbered, I may never wake, or having waked, may never living sleep—this for thirty-five years has been the condition of my existence, the great fact of my life: had been so for eighteen years already, or five hundred forty-nine million, sixty thousand, four hundred eighty heartbeats, by June 21 or 22 of 1937. This is the enormous question, in its thousand trifling forms (Having heard tick, will I hear tock? Having served, will I volley? Having sugared, will I cream? Itching, will I scratch? Hemming, will I haw?), toward answering which all my thoughts and deeds, all my dreams and energies have been oriented. This is the problem which, having answered it thrice before without solving it, I had waked this one momentous morning with the key to, gratuitously, gratis, like that! This question, the fact of my life, is, reader, the fact of my book as well: the question which, now answered but yet to be explained, answers, reader, everything, explains all.
