John Barth - Letters

She considered. Nope. It would, she guessed, if she were 17, or even 25. But after 35 years and three failed marriages, her legal father dead and her mother happy with a new lover, the question didn’t strike her as particularly important. And it wasn’t why she’d propositioned me, or, she imagined, why I’d responded. Was it?

I laughed: Not particularly. She laughed too: Just normal depraved curiosity. One more taboo over the side. See me in the morning?

I was put in mind again of her mother and of Polly; now that everything was still I saw the questionable assumption in my thinking about the previous night’s phone-caller, that it had been a man. But Jeannine’s breathing indicated that she was asleep already; I’d ask her in the morning whether she was quite sure, etc.

End of Day One. (Almost. I never sleep soundly the first night out. When a tiny southeasterly swung us about at 3 A.M., I woke at once and went on deck to see how we all looked in our new positions. Half a dozen other skippers moved about with flashlights, doing the same: checking scope and anchor set and clearance from neighbors. En route back through the cabin I inspected my young friend; she appeared to be sleeping soundly, but when I bent and kissed her forehead she smiled and said wryly, Thanks, Daddy-O.)

Next morning, however, she declared she hadn’t slept so well in ages. She rose at first light and got right to it: peed, skipped out of her shorty pajamas, and piled headfirst into my berth, down under my sheet — cool and dry now in the fresh morning air—69’ing us before I quite realized what was what. Her thighs were sweet, her labia dainty-fresh beneath a faint sharp trace of urine; we tongued and tumbled for a spell, which with one fingertip (mine, right fore-) in her rectum brought Jeannine to a fine yelping orgasm. First woman I’d ever known personally to get there upside down, Dad. But old John Thomas would not stand so soon again; such things happen. Jeannine tried awhile longer, giving me the pleasure of her buttocks and belly as she scolded the Old Pensioner for not rising to his own past performance (the idea did titillate her, then) and threatened to swallow him whole if he would not Come Full Circle, her term. No use. Oh well, she sighed presently: it’s a better day for sailing than for incest.

It was: a perfectly dandy sailing day, best of the cruise. The night’s southeasterly shifted with the tide to a spanking west-southwesterly, perfect for a long reach up and across the Bay. We took a quick wake-up swim, got nettle-stung on calf (mine) and shoulder (hers), made short work of breakfast, and were first out of Dun Cove. It pleased me that when, as we lotioned each other’s welts, I kissed her from nape of neck to crack of ass, she said Let’s sail now and play later, okay? For the sport of it we sailed our anchor out and threaded wing-and-wing through the fleet, Jeannine at the helm while I secured the ground-tackle and cleaned up the foredeck. She’d lost none of her racing skipper’s sang-froid about tight clearances. Once we’d beam-reached down Harris Creek we cut in the engine, doused the jib, and let the main luff while we powered through Knapp’s Narrows and into the Bay. The waves were coming dead at us from the mainland, a foot and a half high already and lightly crested; we felt the old excitement you never knew, Dad, of leaving sheltered for open waters; we called things happily back and forth to each other as we reraised the foresail, lowered the centerboard, and sheeted in close. We were just able, by dint of some “pinching,” a push from the motor, and a little help from the ebbing tide, to clear Poplar Island on a port tack (Yesterday today! Jeannine cried merrily); then we set our course for 015°, a broad reach straight toward the Bay Bridge, fourteen miles up. On that point of sail, with the tide against us, it would be fairly slow going and seem even slower — faithful to his origins, Osborn Jones carries no spinnaker, but there’s a lot of off-wind push in that big, low-aspect mainsail. So much the better: we lashed the wheel, trimmed centerboard and sheets for balance, broke out some iced tea (the air was 80ish already and close, especially off the wind), and let Captain Osborn virtually sail himself up the Bay while we relaxed — tops off now, but bottoms on for comfort, and hats and lotions against the sun — and got some talking done.

I was more and more pleased. Not only was my girl (excuse me: the woman) in apparent control of her drinking; she was making sense right down the line. The will case: She wasn’t interested in litigation; she’d loved her father despite her well-merited later rejection by him. On the other hand she wouldn’t settle for nothing; she needed some money to start a new life with, especially since she had no professional skills and had ceased to badger Louis Golden for unpaid alimony. The split I’d proposed to Jane suited her fine, if her mother and brother were agreeable; otherwise she guessed she’d file suit in probate and take what she could get. Her personal survival might be a cause less worthy than Drew’s revolution, but she reckoned it at least as defensible as her mother’s wish to enrich a future husband.

That fellow: Nope, she hadn’t yet had the pleasure of meeting “Lord Baltimore,” whose real name however she understood to be André Castine. There was, coincidentally, a “Monsieur Casteene” at the Remobilization Farm, but he spelled it differently, nobody knew his first name, and anyhow he was at the Farm, not with her mother. In any case, Jeannine wished them well and hoped that what was left of her own good looks would last half as long as Jane’s. One day, perhaps, she and her mother could be friends again, if she ever got herself straightened out.

Her parentage: Could I tell her what her mother’s and my affair had been like, back in the ’30’s? Had it been a ménage à trois, or what? She couldn’t imagine Mom letting her hair down so — though there had been that later fling of hers, with that English Lord. The month when she herself had been conceived, for example, was her mother putting out pretty regularly for both Harrison and me? How much truth was there in that novel that people used to tease her with, that was supposedly based on my life?

Some, I acknowledged. That part of it was a reasonable approximation, except that for purposes of plot it made Harrison Mack into a weaker and simpler fellow than her father had ever been. But her mother and I had indeed been lovers, with her father’s knowledge and complaisance, for two separate periods, totaling more than three years and including the date of Jeannine’s conception, when the odds on her biological siring were, by my best guess, about 50–50. I did not mention 10 R, our evening sail on Osborn Jones in mid-May of this year.

Our own copulation: It still didn’t bother her, either in principle or in fact. In Jeannine’s mind, Harrison Mack was 100 % her father, and I was 100 % her oldest friend (in both respects) and the only man she’d ever been the least close to who hadn’t wanted something from her. No doubt that that, along with simple gratitude and a touch of the old Kinky, was what had turned her on last night (she’d’ve laid me in the cottage, she confessed now with a grin, if she hadn’t feared I’d think she was a pervert, or ulteriorly motivated, and refuse to take her sailing). It still turned her on, she didn’t mind telling me; anytime Old John got his act together again, she was ready. As Kinky went, this struck her as pretty harmless; she wouldn’t be bearing me any two-headed children, or grandchildren. Could she have a beer with lunch?

Why not. The day grew fairer by the hour. As the tide slackened and the temperature rose, the wind freshened to twelve knots and veered to west-northwest, putting us on a dandy beam reach that both felt and was faster; cooler too. O.J. ’s favorite point of sail. I was growing absentminded, though I’ll plead exhilaration: not till Jeannine came up from the galley with two cans of National Premium and an ad-lib antipasto of sardines, fresh cherry tomatoes, red onion slices, peperoncini, and wedges of caraway Bond-Ost (hungry, Dad?) did I remember to ask her, apropos of Friday evening, whether our crank or inadvertent phone-caller had in fact not uttered a sound.