The Floating Opera

by John Barth

  “Whoa, now—” I protested.

  “Let me see if I can say what I want to say, and then you can take it apart,” she proposed. I grinned shortly at Harrison, who, however, didn’t see me, engrossed as he was in his empty glass. “When Harrison and I got married we were as prudish as they come about extracurricular sex,” Jane began. “I swore I could never look at another man, and Harrison swore he never even thought of another woman in a sexual way. Then as we got a little older we saw how dishonest that was—is that the right word?—yes, dishonest. I won’t go into all that. Well, we decided there was nothing wrong with either of us making love to somebody else now and then, because we were absolutely sure of each other. I was very attracted to you as Harrison’s friend, and as soon as we didn’t have to be dishonest any more, I realized I’d like to make love to you. And except for the one bad spell, it worked out all right. It was mostly our fault, we realize, about that bad time.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I shrugged. This was all very embarrassing for Harrison and me.

  “Well, anyhow, neither of us has any regrets that it happened.”

  “Or that you’re calling it off,” I smiled.

  “Don’t be bitter,” Harrison said.

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “You’re right,” Jane said. “We don’t have to have any regrets about that either, if you understand why I’m doing it.”

  “Is it because of that note this morning?” I asked.

  “The note? Oh, that stupid thing! I never did pay any attention to that. I assumed you were upset about last night, for some reason or other. I sent you my note as a joke, to get even. Heavens no, that’s silly! I hadn’t even considered it. Here’s the thing: I don’t want you to think that Harrison and I are retreating in any way to our old standards.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “I can’t find the damned words—what I mean is, we were unsure of ourselves when we decided to try this extracurricular business, I guess that’s why we were so demanding, come to think of it. We wanted reassurance that we hadn’t made a mistake. God knows that’s understandable enough!”

  “I think that’s probably why Janie thought she was in love with you,” Harrison put in, “and why I thought that was a good thing.” I pursed my lips.

  “That’s right,” Janie agreed, looking at her husband. “Then after we started up again, after Jeannine was born, everything was fine. We all understood each other, and nobody was kidding himself. Now, then. What I want to say is that it was kind of necessary before to be actually carrying on affairs, to prove to. ourselves that we meant what we were talking about. But we don’t feel it’s necessary any more. I just feel stronger, is all. Harrison does, too. Do you understand anything I’ve said, Toddy?”

  “I told you before, I understood everything before you said a word. I exude understanding. Didn’t I say that the same thing exactly was on my mind? I was going to broach the subject this evening.”

  “He doesn’t understand,” Harrison observed to Jane. I turned to him at once, startled, but said nothing.

  Jane sighed. “I can’t make it any clearer.” The maid signaled silently from the dining room. “Dinner’s almost ready, if you want to wash up,” Jane said. She got up and headed for the kitchen, paused, and came over and kissed me lightly on the mouth.

  “You were wonderful a great many times,” she said. “I hope this doesn’t leave you with a bad taste.”

  I licked my lips. “Tasted fine.” Jane laughed and it to help the maid, and Harrison and I went upstairs to wash.

  “Did you find a buyer for the house yet?” I asked him.

  “No, not yet. Matter of fact, the whole thing’s been sort of tentative. All we knew for sure is that we wanted to go to Italy for a while. It’s kind of crazy, I guess, but a small town can be right stultifying.”

  We talked for a while in the bathroom, but there was a coolness between us. And at dinner afterwards, the talk, though pleasant (even relieved), was devoid of warmth. Harrison and Jane seemed fused into one person, entirely self-sufficient. They should, it occurred to me, be permanently locked together, like the doubler crab or Plato’s protohumans. I caught myself smiling inadvertently at my cold cuts all through the meal, as I thought of Jane’s speech. And, I am obliged to add, I noticed several times that Harrison and Jane smiled at their cold cuts as well: for what reasons, I shan’t presume to say.

  A final observation: when, after dinner, I went upstairs to the bathroom before leaving the house; when, indeed, I stood there comfortably reflecting, an entirely unexpected emotion gripped me: I suddenly wavered in my resolution to die—was shaken, in fact, by reluctance. The reason was simply that my suicide would be interpreted by the Macks as evidence that their move had crushed me; that I was unable to endure life after their rebuff. And this interpretation would fill them with a deplorable proud pity. Happily, the faltering lasted only a moment. By the time I’d washed my hands, I had come to my senses; my new premises reasserted themselves with force. What difference did it make to me how they interpreted my death? Nothing, absolutely, made any difference. And, sane again, I was able to see a nice attraction in the idea that, at least partly by my own choosing, that last act would be robbed of its significance, would be interpreted in every way but the way I intended. This fact once realized, it seemed likely to me that here was a new significance, even more appropriate.

  Passing down the hallway from the bathroom to the stairs, I happened to glance into my old bedroom, now a guest room, and my eye fell on a large mirror near the bed. I chuckled so hard that my eyes watered, and I walked jauntily down the stairs, more ready than ever to carry out my plan.

  “Be seeing you around,” Harrison called from the porch as I left; and Jane, too, added cheerful goodbyes.

  “So long, so long,” I called back, just as cheerfully. Looking over my shoulder as I walked down the road, I saw them standing close beside each other, talking together as they watched me leave. Perhaps—I clucked my tongue—their arms were even encircling each other’s waists. I waved, but they didn’t see me.

  I turned and headed back toward the hotel. I believe I might even have whistled something or other, for I was as unburdened at that moment as must have been Socrates when, Xanthippe at last departed, he was free to face without distraction the hemlock that lay at the end of his reasoning.

  XXIV. Three million dollars

  No; there was one final matter to be settled before I could call myself really free from distracting encumbrances. I had to decide what to do about Harrison’s three million dollars.

  I paused halfway across the creek bridge to think about it. In order to focus the problem, I took from my billfold the letter from Eustacia Callader, and from my coat pocket the note to Jimmy Andrews, and laid them both before me on the bridge railing. Either I must put Eustacia’s letter in my writing desk, where Jimmy was instructed to find it, and drop the note to Jimmy in the mailbox, or else I must drop both documents into the creek below, where fat gray gulls fed lazily on perch killed by the pollution from the packing houses. The first course would result in Jimmy’s filing suit for Harrison against Elizabeth Sweetman Mack, charging that, by allowing her gardener, R. J. Collier, to spread the contents of the seventy-two pickle jars on the ailing zinnias, she had disposed of a portion of the Mack estate which was no more hers to dispose of than the three million dollars. This suit would serve to postpone the hearing of my appeal of the Circuit Court’s order (to execute the will in favor of Mrs. Mack) until after Joseph Singer had replaced Rollo Moore on the Court of Appeals bench. Then Jimmy would drop the suit and argue our appeal: for the reasons explained in Chapter X, the lower-court order would almost certainly be reversed, and Harrison would get the inheritance. If, on the other hand, I decided to drop both letters into the creek, then there was little chance that the appellate court would do anything except affirm the court order.

  Now, you’ll recall that in the morning I had decided that the basis fo
r my decision was to be Harrison’s and Jane’s strength; specifically, whether they had the strength not to care, except superficially, whether they got the money or the manure. And I must say that the morning’s note from Jane and my luncheon conversation with Harrison had both inclined me in their favor. By afternoon I had, although I didn’t clearly realize it at the time, more or less resolved to let the deciding factor be Jane’s response to my note of the early morning, now that I’d fulfilled the conditions of hers by going to see Marvin Rose. If she chose to make Capt. Osborn the happiest old satyr in the country, I’d make her the richest woman in the country; if she was as angry and insulted by my proposal as Harrison had been by the incident in my office in 1933, then I’d destroy the letters.

  But Jane had nullified this basis by choosing a third course, one difficult to evaluate. She’d been neither angry nor insulted, nor had she felt obliged to carry out her end of the bargain. She’d simply laughed at the whole thing. Was this evidence of obtuseness, insincerity, or a real and formidable strength? In fact, I no longer knew how to feel about the Macks at all, whether their new resolutions manifested a commonplace sentimentality or a strange integrity. I had no feeling about them at all.

  Consequently, after inhaling deeply the fetid air of the creek for several minutes, I chose a new basis for judgment: taking a nickel from my pocket, I flipped it, caught it, and slapped it down on the letters. Heads, I preserve them; tails, they go in the creek.

  My hand uncovered the skinny-assed, curly-tailed old buffalo.

  Despite which fact, I gathered up the letters, dropped one in the mailbox on the corner of Academy, Market, and Muse Streets, just off the creek bridge, and put the other in my desk when I reached the hotel. Harrison had survived a double chance: that the coin would demand the destruction of the letters, and that I would allow myself, a free agent, to be dictated to by a miserable nickel.

  Then, let us say, I doubtless whistled some tune or other, unburdened as must have been Socrates when, etc.

  XXV. the inquiry

  It was a few minutes after six o’clock when I reached my room, set my straw hat on the dresser top, and prepared to put in a last evening’s work on my Inquiry. I gathered around my writing desk the three peach baskets and one cardboard box of notes and data, put in a convenient place the empty beef-stew can my ashtray, and began my night’s work by transcribing from memory the notes I’d made that day and filing them at an appropriate depth in one of the peach baskets. Then I sat back in the chair and stared at the window for a while, deciding which aspect of the project should receive my attention.

  When the clock on the People’s Trust building chimed six-thirty (the Macks, as usual, had eaten early), I sat up, took a long ruled sheet of yellow legal paper from one of the pads stacked on the desk, and wrote on the top:

  I. Nothing has intrinsic value.

  Because I regarded this sentence for some minutes before adding to it, and because staring and regarding is duller to describe than to do, let me use the time to explain as clearly as I can the nature and history of my Inquiry and of the great project of which the Inquiry itself is only one part.

  The full title of the Inquiry, if it ever should reach the stage of completion where a title would be appropriate, will be An Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Self-Destruction of Thomas T. Andrews, of Cambridge, Maryland, on Ground-Hog Day, 1930 (More Especially into the Causes Therefor), or something of the sort. It is an attempt to learn why my father hanged himself, no more.

  And no less—for it became apparent to me after a mere two years of questioning, searching, reading, and staring, that there is no will-o’-the-wisp so elusive as the cause of any human act. Easy enough to spend weeks poring over bank statements, budget books, letters from stockbrokers; to spend months examining newspaper files, stock-market reports, volumes on the theory and the history of economics; to spend years in careful, unhurried, apparently casual questioning of every person who had more than a superficial acquaintanceship with my father. All this is just more or less laborious research. But it is another thing to examine this information and see in it, so clearly that to question is out of the question, the cause of a human act.

  In fact, it’s impossible, for as Hume pointed out, causation is never more than an inference; and any inference involves at some point the leap from what we see to what we can’t see. Very well. It’s the purpose of my Inquiry to shorten as much as is humanly possible the distance over which I must leap; to gather every scrap of information that a human being might gather concerning the circumstances of my father’s suicide. Say, if you wish, that the true reason for this investigation is my reluctance to admit that Dad hanged himself because he was afraid to face his creditors. Perhaps so (noble work has been accomplished for more questionable reasons), although consciously, at least, I have a different reason. At any rate, I am certainly prepared to admit that my observation of the data I collect is biased, and it’s partly for that reason that even in 1937 I kept one peach basket reserved for notes on myself—it was into this basket that my two thoughts of the day, for example, were filed. It would be more accurate to say that my rejection of the stock-market losses as the cause of his suicide was the hypothesis with which I approached the Inquiry, the thesis that oriented my investigations.

  You understand, do you, that the nature of my purpose—to make as short as possible the gap between fact and opinion—renders the Inquiry interminable? One could, of course, stop at some point and declare, “I have sufficient information to warrant the inference that the cause of Thomas T. Andrews’ suicide was such-and-such.” But my purpose is not really to leap the gap (which can be deep, however narrow), only to shorten it. So, the task is endless; I’ve never fooled myself about that. But the fact that it’s endless doesn’t mean that I can’t work on other aspects of the grand project, even though the completion of those aspects depends ultimately on the leaping of the gap in my Inquiry. It doesn’t follow that because a goal is unattainable, one shouldn’t work toward its attainment. Besides, as I’ve observed elsewhere, processes continued for long enough tend to become ends in themselves, and if for no other reason, I should continue my researches simply in order to occupy pleasantly two hours after dinner.

  But let’s suppose that by some miracle it were given to me to know the unknowable, to know the cause or causes of Dad’s suicide. My Inquiry would be complete. But my researches would not, for after supper on the day of that revelation I should draw to my desk a different peach basket—that one beside the lamp there—and after some minutes of wall-staring, resume work on a larger Inquiry, of which the above-mentioned is at most a relevant chapter. And this Inquiry, had I world enough and time, might someday be entitled An Inquiry into the Life of Thomas T. Andrews, of Cambridge, Maryland (1867-l930), Giving Especial Consideration to His Relations with His Son, Todd Andrews (1900- ). In other words, a complete study of my father’s mind and life from his birth in the front bedroom of the Andrews house to his death in its cellar; from the umbilicus that tied him to his mother to the belt that hanged him from the floor joist.

  A considerable task: it is my aim to learn all that can be learned of my father’s life; to get the best possible insight into the workings of his mind. To do this I must, in addition to carrying out on a larger scale all the researches described in connection with the other Inquiry, perform extra labors as well—I must read, for example, all the books that I know my father read, looking for influences on his character and way of thinking. If one can compare infinities, this task is even more endless than the other.

  I said a moment ago that the death-Inquiry was but a chapter in the life-Inquiry; in another sense, the study of Dad’s life is only a necessary preliminary to the study of his death. And ultimately, I should say, they stand side by side, for they share a common purpose: what I really want to discover is the nature and extent of my father’s contribution to our imperfect communication.

  Imperfect communication: that’s the proble
m. If you understand that (for to go into greater detail would enmesh us beyond hope of ever returning to the story), then it’s time to pass on to the last document of all, of which my two colossal Inquiries combined are no more than important studies for one aspect: the Letter to My Father.

  This document dates from the fall of 1920, when after my unsuccessful attempts to tell Dad about my uncertain heart, I enrolled in the University. I had resolved, you’ll remember, not to tell him at all while I lived, because I believed that my death was imminent and that therefore I’d as well humor him during what remained of my life. Nevertheless I worried that I’d been unable to tell him when I wanted to, and (I was no cynic then) that the both of us would go to our graves without ever having understood each other.

  And so I began to write a letter to my father, working on it in snatches during my four exhausting years at college. The letter was to be found by him after my death, and its original purpose was to explain what Dr. John Frisbee had told me about my heart.

  But this purpose, though I never lost sight of it, was soon subsumed into a larger one: I set out to study myself, to discover why my communication with Dad had always been imperfect. I reviewed my whole life carefully, selecting and rejecting incidents for use in the letter. I spent a month, at least, attempting to explain to Dad why I’d never finished building my boat in the back yard. More than a year went to searching my muddy embrace with the German sergeant (with whom my communication had been pitifully imperfect) and to analyzing the effects on me of a certain particular popping noise. I worked, of course, irregularly, completing perhaps twenty pages of notes and one page of letter every month; seldom more than that. By the time I was installed in law school, the letter was perhaps fifty pages long, and I had a respectable stack of notes. I did not shy away from mentioning Betty June Gunter, even, although I realize now that those early attempts to understand our liaison were shallow. Especially between 1925 and 1927—the first of my saintly years—I worked with some diligence on the letter.