John Barth - Letters

But in none of these witnessings, gratifyings, and tongue-tiskings could I find augury of 11 R. The Bull gave way to the Twins, May to June; PLF Day rushed from Tomorrow towards Now, casting no discernible shadow before it.

Then, on that same unlucky Friday of me’s adoption and my rejection by President Jane, Polly pleasantly announced her retirement, effective virtually at once! Her replacement she had already selected and trained: the “girl” (37, our age on the original PLF Day; she seems a child!) who’d filled in for her at vacation time for several years and worked half-time for us while raising her children. Polly would stop in on the Monday to insure that all was well; she would stop in from time to time thereafter when she happened to be visiting Cambridge, to see to it I was neither exploiting nor being exploited by her successor. And she would miss me sorely, and the good ship Osborn Jones, and dear damp Dorchester, whose Tercentennial festivities she would miss too. But her heart had got the better of her head, she declared, as she hoped for my sake Jane Mack’s would too before very long. She had acceded to the entreaties of her (other) occasional lover of many years’ standing, that gentleman three years my senior whose existence I believe I mentioned in my last: not quite to marry him, as he wished, at least not right away, but to pool her pension benefits with his and retire with him to Florida, the Elysium of Social Security lovers. He’d proposed, not for the first time, after dinner on a certain Friday night last month. She’d reviewed, not for the first time, all the pros and cons, and some days later had said yes.

The short notice to me? To give herself ample time to chicken out before Going Public, and no time to do so having Gone; also to give me less time to talk her out of her resolve, which she hoped I cared enough for her not to try, lest I succeed. On the Tuesday they would fly from Baltimore down to Tampa for a “honeymoon” of real-estate prospecting and trying each other out as living-companions; assuming all went well, they’d be back in Maryland in August to wind up their affairs here and move south for keeps.

I didn’t try to dissuade her, Dad. Was too entirely stunned to. After 35 years, half a day’s notice! Yet she was quite right: Ms. Pond (dear God, God, have You no shame?) had all the skills, knew the office pretty well, was not disagreeable to work with; the rest there was no replacing, however long the notice. But (I wondered silently, terrifically) what about 11 R?

Good as her word, she came in on the Monday. Bon voyage gifts were laid on, jokes made about Florida, about septuagenarian lovers. Embraces, tears, laughter. Polly looked fine. Her friend was in good health, a gentleman, well enough off; they would be all right. How I envied them! She wished me the best; half her life was in that office; we’d done remarkable things together. She paused. She didn’t believe history really repeated itself. There were echoes, of course, if you listened for them, but the future — what there was of it for people our age — was new, and lay ahead, not behind us. All very well, I thought; yet what about…

But as if by tacit agreement, no allusion whatever was made to…

And so Tuesday the 17th came and went in thunderous silence, as if Polly’s flight laid an antisonic boom along the Eastern Shore. From 9 to 5, whenever Ms. Pond was in the office, I managed to drop things: my pen, my iced-coffee spoon; she must think me senile. But they were gracefully and soundlessly retrieved, a young woman picking up after an old codger with a sudden unquenchable thirst for iced coffee and a queer predilection for staring out the window at a certain oyster-shell pile.

Nothing — unless indeed opposites, negatives, count, in which case perhaps the entire absence of Polly Lake, and a fortiori of her etc., might betoken at the least my loss of the pending contest over Harrison’s will, and at the worst… Nonsense: 11 R didn’t happen, not on PLF Day or the next, or the next, by when in my frustration I was not fit society. For if time is not circling ’round, then 8 and 10 R, Jane’s return to me in the evening of our lives, that wondrous O out by Red Nun 20… portend nothing. My inchoate vision on the New Bridge was a delusion, and Now will be Tomorrow and Tomorrow: empty.

I missed Polly. There was no Jane. I was a fool.

At half past three yesterday I left the office, saying truly I felt ill and meant to rest up in the country till Monday. The afternoon was airless; I’d left my car back at the cottage: I motored O.J. out from Slip #2 and downriver to its Todds Point dock. As I left the Howell Point day beacon to starboard, I saw the Original Floating Theatre II chugging out of the Tred Avon into the Choptank, en route from Oxford to Cambridge for the weekend (unlike the original Original, the replica is self-propelled). I kept my eyes on it, not to glimpse a certain red buoy to port, the sight of which just then would have undone me. Docked, I took a swim (no sea nettles yet) and lingered on deck for cocktails; even made dinner aboard, to put off entering this cottage too crowded with ghosts. Over the last of the wine, by the light of citronella candles in the cockpit (but there are no mosquitoes yet either, to speak of), I read the Evening Sun and wondered how the prospecting was in Florida.

The phone fetched me in just after dusk, when the swifts had given way to the swallows and the swallows to the bats. It’s me, she said: Jane.

I replied: I resist the obvious reply.

What? O.

Say that again, please.

What? She was in Dorset Heights. Might she stop by at the office tomorrow?

She didn’t sound entirely official. I took a breath, and a chance. Here I am at the cottage, I said: why not make Tomorrow Now?

She couldn’t, possibly, much as she’d like to see the place again. She had a dozen things to do before bedtime. Didn’t I have a minute tomorrow?

Another chance: I’m in Baltimore tomorrow till three, I lied; then I plan to drive straight back here for the weekend. Will you meet me here at six for dinner, or shall I pick you up and fetch you out? Grilled rockfish with fennel and rémoulade, a house specialty.

She hesitated; my heart and history likewise.

Well… okay. She’d drive out. Make it six-thirty? Bye.

No matter that her hesitation, I was quite confident, had to do with the logistics of her business day and not the implications of revisiting me in situ where the world began. She was coming!

Is coming, Dad, and your antique son is going bananas in anticipation. Since breakfast I’ve been at it, a superannuated Jay Gatsby awaiting his Daisy’s visit: the maid fetched in to reclean the place she cleaned only Tuesday, the gardener to trim the beds he wasn’t to bother with till Thursday next and prune every dead blossom from the tea roses and climbers. Osborn Jones cleaned out, swabbed down, and Bristol fashion, just in case. Anchovy paste, chervil, and capers at the ready for the sauce, fennel and lemon and brandy for the fish. No Pouilly-Fuissé available, alas, but a perfectly okay little Chablis from of all places western Maryland, and champagne in the fridge just in case. Roses mixed with cuttings from the last of the azaleas on the screened porch, in the living room, in the bedroom. Fresh sheets, of course, just etc. Everybody out by four; an anxious eye on the thunderheads piling up across the Bay, where I’m supposed to be returning from Baltimore; nothing further to be done but wait and keep some hold on my heart. Hence this letter.

But the telephone! Haifa dozen times it’s rung already, the last two since the maid left (who loyally reported me not at home), and I can’t answer lest I betray my childish fib. It’s Jane, canceling our date at Lord Tarzan’s jealous insistence. It’s the Muse of History, calling to explain what happened to 11 R. It’s Jane, wondering whether I’m bespoken for the rest of the weekend. It’s you, suggesting I just phone you instead of writing these asinine letters. It’s Jane.