John Barth - Where Three Roads Meet

Footnote pardoned, O best of mentors — whose culminative dissertation was fated never to see the publication it eminently deserved, nor its author his post-doctoral fulltime academic appointment and ensuing, assuredly brilliant professorial career.

"Aborted, like some other things. But before we get to that, permit said nipped-in-the-bud dissertator to remark aside that thus far into this Three Freds Story its narrator has neglected to mention, among other things, any of Will Chase's other VVLU classes, seminars, and workshops besides Lit-Phil and Yarnspinning One-oh-one, or any other-than-Fred friends, classmates, and professors, some of whom surely must have impacted, as they say, his vocation? Nor has he, for the sake of verisimilitude and capital-T Texture, gotten into the nitty-gritty of our weekend music-making at the Trivium, as might have been expected. Too busy choosing ejaculatory receptacles?"

Too busy crying Fuck Fate! which so roundly fucked good Al Baumann.

"Leave that ejaculation to Fate's fuckee, friend, and get on with Will and Winnie's getting it on. Tell Me. "

Ro -ger, Teach: Brit slang, Narrator believes, for what that pair were energetically up to, more or less behind their best pal's back. Will rogered Win, Win Will, all over B 204, and B 304 as well when her One True Love was off in the library stacks comparative-mythologizing, as he often was. Even rogered her there one mid-summer Monday eve, he did, or she him, up against a carrel in the farthest alcoves of Sanskrit Lit — decoupling in the nick of time, or nearly, to spritz the gilt-lettered spines of the Panchatantra instead of Ms. Stark's unshielded privity.

"The Ryder translation, that would have been, one wagers: 1925."

If you say so, boss. Yet let it not be supposed that these goers-to-it loved each other, or that their busy erotic/moral experimentation was shame-free. Bonded they were, for sure — mainly by their joint esteem for Win's One True Et Cet — but what they felt for each other was friend-love, nowise lover-love. And while their shared appall at their infidelity was no doubt an added spice to those non-Friday clandestineries, it was nonetheless stingingly authentic shame, of the what-the-fuck-are-we- doing? variety. "Sexual errancy in general," Al Baumann liked to tell his Lit & Phillers when their syllabus reached Tolstoy and Flaubert, "and adultery in particular, are to the nineteenth-century social-realistic novel what Fate and hubris are to Greek tragedy: the mainspring of the action. Oedipus innocently but not unintentionally nails his dad at the Place Where Three Roads Meet, fulfilling the very prophecy that he was in flight from; Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary drop their extramarital drawers. In both genres, it's on with the story."

Which is to say, in the errant Freds' case, on to the next turn of the plot-screw, excuse the expression.

"Expression excused, friend. Likewise plot-screw, while I'm at it: unforgotten, mind, but truly long since forgiven, as it would be even if I hadn't brought it on myself with that Friday-night Share the Goodies routine— my bright idea, though Win didn't need much persuading. And it's time those horny young cheats forgave themselves. Maybe that's what's going on here?"

Not for Teller to presume.

"Anyhow, man, on with it: Eternity doesn't last forever; it only seems to. Turn that screw!"

Pause. Sigh. Screw that turn, Al: Can't do it.

"You fucking must; otherwise it'll be my turn to tell and our story's turn to get screwed. How through that spring and summer of 'forty-nine, the season of the Cheatery — while the new state of Israel celebrated its first anniversary, and Mao Tse-tung's Red Army drove Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists out of China, and the USSR maintained its Berlin blockade while preparing to test its first A-bomb, and North Korea made ready to invade South — all three Freds went at it like the variously gifted, high-energy young screw-ups they were, dot dot dot et cetera. Tell me."

…by no means merely rogering one another literally and figuratively, busy as they were at that. Much more busily, in fact, they were (in Winnie's case) pursuing mastery of both the pianoforte and the Science of Libraries; in Al's, taking unto himself the rest of the corpus of Comparative Mythology and related disciplines while also teaching Adult Ed classes in the university's night school, prodding Will through the long list of texts he'd better have under his belt if he aspired ever to add something of his own thereto, and also coaching him in the Proper Percussionist's paradiddles, flamadiddles, flamacues, and other such licks that Will used routinely in their Trivium sessions without knowing the terminology—

"The way Molière's Monsieur Jourdain, you're expected to say at this point, discovers he's been speaking Prose all his life without knowing it. Tell on."

And in said percussor's case, practicing likewise with Bassist Baumann's assistance the cues and diddles of narrative sentence-making, plot construction, character and scene rendition—

"Insofar as one without those knacks can aid one with."

Which is to say, considerably. And over and above all this cue-and-diddling, or in its interstices, Ann Stein and Stan Fine (and Jim Murphy, Jean Wallace, and half a dozen other Lou Levyites) not only got their homework assignments virtually done for them by their two-buck-an-hour virtual grad-student part-time preceptors, but were by them genuinely preceptored as well: some rather much, some only slightly, depending on their own receptiveness, but none not at all. Enough anyhow so that toward summer's end Headmaster Levy declared himself prepared to make it worth Will's and Winnie's while to stay on, "with a not-inconsiderable pay raise," come fall.

"But the fall came early that year, as I remember. July, was it? August?"

One early-June-'49 Friday evening in Briarwood 304, as she and Alfred Baumann were introducing Wilfred Chase to beef fondue, with which, like many another civilized item, he was unfamiliar, "Did you-all know," Winifred Stark asked her male colleagues/companions/lovers, "that the triangle — by which I mean the humble chrome-steel musical instrument, not the rusty old mainspring of Romantic fiction — despite its being the smallest and simplest bit of hardware in the orchestra, can make its ding-a-ling heard through the sound of all the other symphonic instruments combined? Just thought I'd mention that."

"Mm-hm," said their Near-Boy (the VVLU graduate-students' term for doctoral candidates otherwise classified as ABDs, they having completed All [of their degree requirements] But [their] Dissertation[s]) Baumann. "And apropos of what, exactly, does our winsome Win-Win offer her Fred-friends this musicological tidbit?" Which had been prompted by their Friday-evening pre-dinner custom, in lieu of either Christian table-grace or Jewish Sabbath-prayer, of rubbing wet index-fingertips in concert around the rims of their half-filled wineglasses to make them sing in ethereal near-unison before clinking same and commencing the meal.

"You tell me, " the ruddy lass invited, then demonstrated to webfoot Will how one speared a cube of raw beefsteak with one's fondue fork and plunged it into the Sterno-fired cooking-oil pot before dipping it into one of the several garnis ranged palette-like around one's plate.

"To me," obliged her fascinated preceptee, "that penetrative ping sounds like a simile waiting for its other shoe to drop — pardon the mixed figure."

"Not mixed, actually, in this instance," corrected ABD Al. " Compounded, maybe?"