by John Barth
There came times, alas, when, colt no more, I felt every inch a stone-horse! and regarded her leanness, perched on the couch, with nostrils all but quivering. Those were embarrassing times. I suspected that, should I ever approach her, our peculiar rapport would vanish. Besides—the chasm yawned, the mystery—what if she were to submit?
“Your ice is melting,” Betty June would observe, and I would hide myself in my drink.
Up to this point—late winter, perhaps February—I had remained fairly objective about the matter. I understood that Betty June was in love with Smitty; that she found in me only a sort of spiritual brother; that both she and Smitty were people whom at bottom, I did not really respect; that, finally, one of her chief attractions was her possibility: the tantalizing fact that unlike most of the girls in my set, Betty June was experienced, and that it was therefore not entirely impossible that—
How many aching, perspiring nights I placed on the altar of that possibility!
One afternoon she came over to where I sat in Dad’s leather study chair, to light my cigarette. She held the match expertly, and while I drew on the cigarette she ran her free hand playfully through my hair. I caught her arm instantly; she laughed and fell into my lap. I took the cigarette from my mouth and crushed her lips with a violent kiss. She grew skittish, playful, but she didn’t move away, and I kissed her again and again, passionately. I could scarcely believe my good fortune; I couldn’t speak. Betty June still laughed softly, and kissed back—no girl had done that to me!—and pinched, and nuzzled, and caught my ears, nose, and eyebrows gently in her teeth. I began pawing her flat chest clumsily, sure I’d be slapped, but she stretched and made no objection. Incredible! I had a field day. At three-thirty she left me to marvel at my good luck.
From that day on our relationship was of a different sort. She still regarded me as harmless, I’m certain, but now we played instead of talking. It was beautiful sport; every afternoon ended with my transgressing the boundaries she’d tacitly drawn, pleading with her to surrender to me—confident in the knowledge that she would not. Then she would leave.
How my opinion changed! My objectivity was peeled off with her chemise and tossed unwanted into the corner. I came to loathe Smitty; to rail at him inwardly—for Betty June allowed not a word of criticism; to lay elaborate plans for his ruin. I wept furiously whenever she spoke of her love for him, and she pressed my wet face to her small breast. I regarded my love—it had never been voiced—as a thing inviolable, out of reach; a hot, virginal intercourse of souls. I went about looking wan and distracted, brooding, melancholy. My friends kept a respectful distance; none, I think, knew of Betty June’s visits. I regarded us as lost souls, condemned by the Fates (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos—I remember looking them up, and weeping at the justice of their names) never to consummate our love, separated by prior commitments and by barriers of position and caste (be sure I never mentioned this to her!), et cetera, et cetera.
Thus until March 2, 1917—my seventeenth birthday. I wasn’t expecting Betty June until that afternoon, and I had decided to spend the morning—it must have been a holiday—knocking down the weathered frame of my unfinished boat, which still stood rotting in the back yard. But no sooner had Dad gone to court, and the housekeeper to her sister’s place, as she always did, than Betty June came running into the house, weeping crazily. I held her tightly, and when she refused to calm herself I shook her by the shoulders—it seemed a manly thing to do, and it worked. She still sobbed and whimpered, but less violently.
“What’s the matter with you?” I demanded, so frightened by her emotion that I actually felt ill, and my knees trembled.
“Smitty’s married!” she cried.
“What?”
She nodded, sniffing and shuddering. “He’s been married secretly to Mona Johnston for a year,” she said, “and all that time I was—”
“Shut up!” I commanded. “Don’t even say it!” I had decided to be strong.
“Now he’s got her in trouble, and her folks are making them announce it.”
“Good for them!” I said toughly. “Serves the bastard right!”
“No!” Betty June loosed fresh tears. “Now he’s enlisted in the Army, because he can’t stand Mona any more! He’ll go overseas, Toddy! I’ll never see him again!”
She threatened to break down completely.
“Tough luck!” I sneered, very proud of my new strength.
Betty June ran into the study and collapsed on the leather couch. I sniffed, strode into the butler’s pantry, and took a good pull of bourbon, right from the bottle. It scalded to my stomach, set my blood on fire. I gave Betty June a few minutes to cry (and to wonder what I was doing); then I took another swig of bourbon, choked on it, replaced the bottle, and went to the study, walking with precision. Betty June, her eyes red, looked up at me dubiously.
I said nothing (couldn’t have if I’d wanted to). I sat carefully on the edge of the couch and with one wrench opened her blouse. I was in no mood for trifling!
“Don’t rip it,” Betty June whimpered, recovering her composure.
“That’s your problem,” I growled, and gave her a bruising kiss. “If you don’t want ’em ripped, take ’em off yourself.”
She sat up at once and slipped off her blouse and chemise. I stood up and watched impassively.
“You quitting there?” I demanded sarcastically, as a matter of form.
Betty June regarded me for a moment with a new expression on her face. Then she stood up, and unbuttoning her placket, let her long skirt fall to the floor. Quickly she stripped off her petticoat, and without the least hesitation, her shoes, stockings, and bloomers, and stood before me nude. I very nearly swooned. Luckily I had the presence of mind to embrace her at once, so that I was out of range of her eyes.
“Take me upstairs,” she whispered.
I was petrified, now that the opportunity was at hand. Take her upstairs! My mind raced for honorable excuses.
“Suppose somebody comes home?” I croaked.
“I’ll run to the bathroom,” she said. Obviously she was no novice at this sort of thing. “Come on, get my clothes.” She broke away from me and ran, all pink skin, to the stairs. I retrieved her clothing and followed after, scared to death; soon, in my bedroom, cluttered like a museum with the relics of my boyhood, she received that boyhood happily, and kissed me, as I chose to think, for making her its custodian. I should have kissed her, for no hot bump of a boy ever had defter instruction. I have been uncommonly lucky with women, surely through no virtue of my own.
What follows is indiscreet, but it is the point of the story.
A seventeen-year-old boy is insatiable. His lust is a tall weed, which crushed repeatedly under the mower springs up again, green and unbowed. He is easily aroused and quickly satisfied, and easily aroused again. New to the manners of the business, I cried like a baby, bleated like a goat, roared like a lion. The time came, the lesson, when I was stallion indeed…
And then I looked into the mirror on my dresser, beside us—an unusually large mirror, that gave back our images full-length and life-size—and there we were: Betty June’s face buried in the pillow, her scrawny little buttocks thrust skywards; me gangly as a whippet and braying like an ass. I exploded with laughter!
“What’s the matter?” Betty June asked sharply.
I tossed and rolled and roared with laughter.
“I don’t see anything funny!”
I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t comfort the nervous tears that ran from her, though I swear I tried. I couldn’t help her at all, or myself. I bellowed and snorted with laughter, long after Betty June had fumed out of my bed, out of my room, out of my house, for the last time. I laughed through lunch, to Dad’s amusement (and subsequent irritation). I laughed that night when I undressed.
I have said that my experience in the Argonne, not very long afterwards, was the second of two unforgettable demonstrations of my animality. This was the first. Nothing, to me, is s
o consistently, profoundly, earth-shakingly funny as we animals in the act of mating. Reader, if you are young and would live on love; if in the nights of intercourse you feel that you and your beloved are models for a Phidias—then don’t include among the trappings of your love-nest a good plate mirror. For a mirror can reflect only what it sees, and what it sees is funny.
Well. I never laughed at poor Betty June again, because a few days after my birthday I enlisted in the Army. Smitty was killed; I was not. Mona Johnston married someone else. Betty June, I learned upon my return from service, had become a prostitute during the war, first in Cambridge, and then—when after the Armistice it was no longer patriotic to sleep with soldiers—in Baltimore. When I next saw her, it was under entirely different circumstances. I’ve not heard anything from her for years.
Think me heartless—I could wish I were—but even as I write this now, thirty-seven years later, though my heart goes out to pitiful Betty, generous Betty, nevertheless I can’t expunge that mirror from my mind; I think of it and must smile. To see a pair of crabs, of dogs, of people—even lovely, graceful Jane—I can’t finish, reader, can’t hold my pen fast to the line: I am convulsed; I am weeping tears of laughter on the very page!
XIV. bottles, needles, knives
A good habit to acquire, if you are interested in disciplining your strength, is the habit of habit-breaking. For one thing, to change your habits deliberately on occasion prevents you from being entirely consistent (I believe I explained the virtues of limited inconsistency earlier); for another, it prevents your becoming any more a vassal than you have to. Do you smoke? Stop smoking for a few years. Do you part your hair on the left? Try not parting it at all. Do you sleep on your left side, to the right of your wife? Sleep on your stomach, on her left. You have hundreds of habits: of dress, of manner, of speech, of eating, of thought, of aesthetic taste, of moral conduct. Break them now and then, deliberately, and institute new ones in their places for a while. It will slow you up sometimes, but you’ll tend to grow strong and feel free. To be sure, don’t break all your habits. Leave some untouched forever; otherwise you’ll be consistent.
In deciding to see Marvin Rose for a physical examination I was accomplishing two things at once: the appointment was extraordinary, and that fact gave an element of inconsistency to my last day on earth, which I’d decided to live routinely. At the same time, I was breaking a thirteen-year-old habit of not seeing doctors.
Marvin Rose had last attended me in 1924, when he prescribed for my infected prostate. At the time, I had just enrolled in law school and he was interning at the Johns Hopkins Hospital; we had been fraternity brothers as undergraduates at the University, and were dependable, if not intimate, friends. It was a terrible morning that I went to him—drunken, bloody, half-conscious, aching—where he worked in the outpatient department of the old brown hive. He washed me up, gave me some kind of pill to swallow, perhaps even administered a needle. What he said, finally, was, “Stay here for a few days, Toddy.”
I intended to refuse, but it seems I fainted; when I was conscious again I was hospitalized, and within a few hours, upon my being examined—painfully!—the infection was discovered. Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, Marvin’s words had terminated a phase of my life, for upon my discharge from the hospital a month later, I was an entirely different person. I had stumbled in a drunken animal; I walked out a saint. The story is neither religious nor long.
Of the noises in my life, one of the loudest in my memory is the tiny popping puncture of my bayonet in the German sergeant’s neck—that sergeant with whom I choose to think my soul had lain for a while. Were I ever so foolish as to try, I’m sure I could close my eyes and hear that puncture as distinctly now as I heard it then, and the soft slide of my metal into his throat. To a noise like that, thirty-six years is a blink of the eye.
Of the human voices I have heard, one of the very clearest in my memory is the gravelly, somnolent Missouri voice of Capt. John Frisbee, the Army doctor who examined me after a heart attack just prior to my discharge. Here are his very words:
“Ah sweah, Cawpr’l, if that isn’t endocahditis yew got! How in the heyell did yew git in the Ahmy, boy? Yew too young to have a haht attack, now ahn’t yew?”
He shook his head, examined me again to make sure, and then wrote his report, which he explained to me as gently as his naturally blunt manner would permit.
“The endocahditis isn’t so bad, son; that’s what clubbed yew fingahs, and it should of kept yew a civilian. It won’t git no worse. The bad thing is that yew liable to have a myocahdial infahction—and that can very likely kill yew. Might be any second; might be a yeah from now; might be nevah. But yew just as well know ’bout it. Ah don’t subscrahb to this secrecy hoss-m’nure, d’yew?”
Can you understand at once—I neither can nor will explain it—that I was relieved? To say that the puncture had deranged me would be too crude, but—well, I was relieved, that’s all, to learn that every minute I lived might be my last.
My first impulse, after discharge, was to rush home as quickly as possible, in order to say farewell to Dad and my town before I fell dead. Every time the train slowed for a crossing I squirmed and fidgeted, sure I’d never reach Cambridge alive. Dad welcomed me warmly, and seemed so happy to have me safely home that I hadn’t the courage to tell him the tragic news at once—though of course I mustn’t wait too long, or my sudden death might surprise him, coming unprepared-for. I decided to gamble on a week, during which time I idled nervously about the big house, unable to concentrate on anything.
But at the week’s end, when one night Dad called me into his study, and I resolved to tell him at once, he forestalled me by speaking first.
“Cheer up, Toddy,” he laughed—I must have looked glum. “I didn’t call you in to scold you, like I used to when your mother was alive! What I’ve got on my mind is serious, but it isn’t solemn.”
He was feeling affectionate. He handed me a cigar, and I sat on the leather couch and smoked it.
“Todd, the first thing I want you to do, if it’s all right with you, is take a vacation—from now till fall. Don’t feel obliged to stay here unless you feel like it—go anywhere you want to. For spending money you’ve got a pretty good wad in Liberty bonds that I banked for you while you were away.”
I listened, hoping my heart would last until he finished, so that I could explain.
“Then when September comes, son, nothing could make me happier than if you’d go to school.” He grinned. “I shan’t specify Johns Hopkins, but I must say that that’s where the bright men are coming from, lately. Then, if you really want to humor me, study law. And do it right, in a law school; not in an office like I did. But again, I shan’t even specify the law. I do want you to go to school, though, son—after a vacation. See if you can spend your whole bank account by September!”
I must say that at that moment I felt wonderful about my father. His concern for me, the (for him) remarkable diplomacy of his approach, his generosity—all these, I see now, were ordinary sentiments, not unusual in themselves; but then I was a very ordinary sort of young man, too, at the time, and the sentiments, if commonplace, were nonetheless uncommonly strong. My ailing heart felt lodged in my throat; I couldn’t speak.
Seeing my hesitation, Dad busied himself attending to his cigar. His smile perhaps set a little, but it did not disappear.
“Don’t answer,” he said then. “Don’t say anything one way or the other, yet.”
“No,” I protested, “no, it’s—”
“Not a word,” Dad insisted, sure of himself again. “What a crude fellow I am, calling you in here without a word of notice and springing a whole life’s plan on you! A fine son you’d be, come to think of it, if you ever agreed to anything that drastic without a little thought first!” His spirits were high again. “Get out now,” he ordered cheerfully. “Go get a little tight or something, like a veteran’s supposed to. I shan’t listen to a word you say about this
at least until tomorrow, if not next week. Go on, now, git!” And he buried his attention in pretended business on his desk.
Well, I worried for a day or so—and he did too, poor fellow, thinking I didn’t like his proposal—and finally decided that, since I was after all still alive, and might be for several months, I might as well leave Dad happy by enrolling in college: he wouJd have the satisfaction of knowing he’d done all a father could do for me. Besides, why tell him about my heart? Why make both suffer, when there was no help for it?
“I’m going to Hopkins, Dad,” I announced one morning at breakfast, “and then to Maryland Law School, if it’s all right with you. And I don’t know if this is right or not to ask, but I’d like it if when I get out I could eventually set up here in town, like you did, maybe as a junior partner or something.”
Dad didn’t say a word. He was so happy his eyes watered, and he had to fold his napkin and get up from the breakfast table. I was certainly glad I’d said what I said.
So I went to Johns Hopkins, enrolled in the pre-law curriculum. At Dad’s suggestion I joined a fraternity—Beta Alpha Order, a Southern outfit—and lived in the fraternity house. I must say that if one has to go to college under the conditions I went under, the early twenties was an excellent time to go. It seemed to me that nearly all of my fraternity brothers expected, like myself, to fall dead any moment, for they lived each day as though it were to be their last. Their way of life suited my feelings exactly, and I soon made myself one of them. We stayed drunk for days at a time. We set fire to the men’s rooms in night clubs, ignited smudge pots in the streets, installed cows in unexpected places. We brawled and fought, made nuisances of ourselves, spent nights in jail sobering up. We kept women in the house overnight, in violation of University and chapter rules—night-club strippers, prostitutes, strange ladies, college girls—and we paid fines for it; some of us were justifiably expelled from the University. We went on adulterous weekend trips to Washington and New York, beach parties at Beaver Dam and Betterton, and once a fantastic bullfrog hunt in the Dorchester Marshes south of Cambridge. We fell from speeding automobiles, and were hospitalized; occasionally even fought honest-to-goodness duels, and were hospitalized. One of us died in an automobile crash, drunk. Two of us were obliged to marry girls inadvertently made pregnant. Three of us were withdrawn from the University by irate parents. One of us committed suicide with sleeping pills and was discovered at the autopsy to be syphilitic. Three of us turned into chronic alcoholics. Perhaps a dozen of us were dismissed from school for failing courses.
