John Barth - Letters

Then the blue blouse. Was there a hanging locker? she asked with a smile. Fine flash of white teeth, white eyes; white jacket held out by the collar in one hand, the other on the placket of her white slacks. White bra against her dark tan. I came down the ladder and kissed her.

Goodness gracious me. The main cabin settee of the Osborn Jones makes into a snug double, Dad, but Jane thought it unseamanlike for no one to be on deck. Anyhow it was balmy and beautiful up there, more like late June than mid-May. We took our time undressing; hung and folded everything. I lit a cabin lamp to see her better. She liked that: let me look and touch all I wanted; did a bit herself. Sixty-three: it was not to be believed. She was the cove, I told her, proof against time. I feared I was Sharps Island. She’d settle for Todds Point, she laughed, and went back up the ladder — calling pleasantly that I needn’t take precautions, as she’d ceased her monthlies some years ago. Jane, Jane! Above the masthead a planet gleamed: Jupiter, I believe. An osprey rose from and returned to her pile on a nearby day-beacon (19A, off Howell Point); a great blue heron glided past us and landed with a squawk somewhere out of sight. Albinoni was followed by Bach on the FM, after a commercial for Mercedes-Benz. Sedately, patiently, but ardently, Jane Mack and I made love. Traffic streamed across the New Bridge toward Ocean City for the weekend, an unbroken string of headlights. Stars came out: Arcturus, Regulus, Pollux, Capella, Procyon, Betelgeuse. Our combined ages are 132 years. Dew formed on the lifelines, gunwales, cockpit cushions.

Polly Lake goes at it like a trouper, Dad: lots of humping and bumping and chuckles and whoops. Jane Mack does it like an angel: lithely, gracefully, daintily, above all sweetly. Suddenly she clutched my shoulders and whispered a long O. For an instant I feared something was wrong. Heart attack? Coronary? Then I understood, and wondered why Bach didn’t pause, the bridge traffic, all the constellations, to hear that O.

Sweet surprise. Afterwards she lay for a minute with her eyes closed (registering with a small smile my own orgasm); then she slipped dextrously out from under and into the head compartment to clean up. The air was chill now; there were patches of mist on the river. I wiped off with a paper towel, dressed, broke out a couple of Windbreakers from a hanging locker, spread bath towels on the cockpit cushions against the dew, started the engine, and went forward to lower and furl the sails. When I came back Jane was sitting with her legs curled under — dressed, jacketed, hair in place — smoking a cigarette and sipping a brandy. Another was set out for me. When I bent to kiss her, she gave me her cheek.

I asked what we should drink to. She smiled brightly and shrugged, the old Jane. I was disappointed; the question had been serious. To the letter O then, I proposed. She didn’t know what I meant. Look at that traffic, she said: In a few years they’ll have to build another bridge and a bypass; Route 50 really bottlenecks at Cambridge. Her first words since the “Todds Point” wisecrack, not counting that O. She thought it just as well that Mack Enterprises had stayed out of the high-rise condominium boom in North Ocean City; they were way overextended; some people were going to lose their shirts.

Back at the slip her chauffeur was waiting; Jane had him toss her the forward dock lines and made fast, then gave me a hand with the aft and spring lines. Then she said, Dad, and I quote: “That was just delightful, Todd. We must do it again. Soon. Nighty-night now.”

No irony, no double entendre. Yet she had shown, out there in the channel, that she was capable of both, and of sentimental recollection too. Indeed, as we’d shucked our duds out by Red Nun 20, I’d set about amending my whole conception of Jane’s historical amnesia; now I was obliged to revise the amendment. More than that pants suit had been doffed and redonned; even when the only white left on her was what had been under her bikini in Tobago, I realized now she’d never acknowledged unambiguously our old affair; Todds Point was where she’d lived as well as where she’d 8-L’d me. A fresh frisson: had this been, for Jane, no sweet replay at all? Was she still and forever in that left-hand column, doing everything for the first time?

Well, Dad: here I sit aboard the Osborn Jones like Keats’s knight at arms by the sedgeless lake: alone, palely loitering, enthralled. And baffled to the balls, sir! Could #8 & #10 R, my reseduction, whether or not Jane was conscious of the echoes, be simply another Mack Enterprise? A bribe? A retainer? It doesn’t seem impossible; with Jane, not even quite cynical. I think of the chap in Musil’s Man without Qualities who only seems a hypocrite because of his spontaneous, genuine feeling for those who happen to be in a position to further his interests. I think of Aristotle’s sensible observation in the Ethics, that the emotion of love among the young is typically based upon pleasure, among the elderly upon utility. Then I think of that O, and cease to care.

O my heart. Whatever Jane felt out there at the dewpoint, among the blue herons, black cans, red giants, and white dwarfs, your ancient son felt, more than passion, an ardent sweetness: a grateful astonishment that life can take, even so late, so sweet and surprising a turn. Or, if after all no turn was taken, I feel at least a grateful indulgence of that Sentimental Formalist, our Author, for so sweetly, neatly — albeit improbably — tying up the loose ends of His plot.

The earth has spun nearly around again since; the world with it. Many a one has been begotten, born, laid, or laid to rest since I began this letter. Apollo-10 is counting down; #11’s to land us on the moon before summer’s done. It’s been years, Dad, since I gave a fart why you hanged yourself in the basement on Saturday 2/2/30. You frightened me then about myself, whom I’ve ceased to fear, and turned into a monologue the dialogue we’d never begun. Only the young trouble their heads about such things.

10. Mar. 28-May 16, 1969: Another Mack v. Mack shapes up, and Jane reresumes our affair, at least to the extent of reseducing me.

Where will my #11 land me, this second time around? That’s all I’m really curious about, now I’ve seen the pattern. Yesterday I took an interest in (and the Tragic View of) the careers of Charles de Gaulle and Abe Fortas, the campus riots, my government’s war against the Vietnamese, even the enlargement of our knowledge of the universe, not to mention the disposition of Harrison Mack’s estate and the threatened blackmailing of Jane Mack. But I seem to have lost something overboard last night: today nothing much interests me except that O, which fills my head, this cabin, all space. I can hear nothing else; don’t want to hear anything else. I’ve written these pages, imagined that pattern, just to hear it again.

O that O.

If I try to sleep now (it’s getting on to cocktail time again), will my dreams rerun that episode? Never mind history, this letter, the rest of the alphabet. Bugger off, Dad. Author of us all: encore! Back to #10 R, Red Nun 20, Jane’s O!

I: Jacob Horner to the Author.Declining to rewalk to the end of the road.

5/15/69

TO:

Professor John Barth, Department of English, SUNY/ Buffalo, Buffalo, New York 14214, U.S.A.

FROM:

Jacob Horner, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

Sir:

In a sense, I Am Indeed the Jacob Horner of your End of the Road novel, for which you apologize in your letter to me of May 11, Mother’s Day, Rogation Sunday, birthday of Irving Berlin and Salvador Dali. Never mind in what sense.