John Barth - Where Three Roads Meet

Replied the amused, unruffled Levy, "Two questions," and raised first his left forefinger: "Are you out to snatch this young man's job before I've even interviewed him?" Then the finger beside it: "And are you a part-time graduate student or Mr. Baumann's part-time fiancée?"

To Will's considerable surprise, as he'd never heard his Fred-friends speak of themselves as officially engaged to marry, she linked her arm with his, gave the two men an exaggerated vampish wink, and said, " No to the first and yes to the second and third of your two questions." Holding up her own left forefinger, "Al and I think of Wilfred as part of us, and you can't steal from yourself, right?" Then a second finger: "And my courses at Goucher and Peabody this year would be graduate courses if they had a graduate program — which they don't, quite, yet." And then a third: "Plus, Al and I don't regard affiancement as a full-time job."

"Lucky fellow," Levy said smoothly to Will, raising his massive eyebrows, stroking his chin, and gesturing us into his office-cum-classroom. To Winnie then (whose arm and Will's were still linked), "And when you say, quote, which they don't comma quite comma yet, unquote, do you mean that they don't have graduate programs quite yet, or that their present programs are as yet not quite graduate programs? Come in, please, and have a seat."

Unhesitatingly, "I quite agree that those propositions are quite different," Win responded. "Excuse the intensifying adverbs? But in this instance, both are quite true." Pointing then to a short list of long words on the blackboard behind the desk labeled HEADMASTER, "I also happen to know what every one of those sesquipedalia means," she declared. "And I'm sure Will does, too: He's the family wordsmith."

With a knowing smile at the papers he was moving about on his desktop, "All in the family, eh?" said Levy. "Now, then, Miss Stark: If you'll just step into the next room for a few minutes, your friend and I will get down to business. After which, maybe you and I can have a little chat."

Sesquipedalian was, in fact, one of the listed words, along with adjudicatory, misogynistic, eleemosynary, and our language's longest, antidisestablishmentarianism.

"Quite a gal," Levy remarked when Winnie closed the office door behind her. To cover his discomfort at the small smirk in the man's voice and manner, "Smart as a whip," Will agreed, "and plays fine jazz piano as well as classical. She and Al and I work weekends at the VVLU Trivium: piano, bass, and drums. Do you happen to know why people say 'Smart as a whip'?"

For the first time, Levy regarded him with what seemed genuine interest. "I don't, in fact. So tell me, Mister Wordsmith, why do we?"

"Beats me," Will admitted. "And I confess I don't know eleemosynary, either."

Turning up his palms, "So look it up!" Levy said. Confidingly then, with a nod at the board behind him, "We teach the kids a few fancy words to impress their teachers with, if they can work 'em into their papers." He stroked his chin. "You're hired, by the way. I see from your transcript," which, per Al's advice, Will had brought a copy of to the interview, "that you got off to a very rough start up there and then really hit your stride. That sets the right example for your tutees."

Will reminded him that he wasn't "quote quite a graduate student quote quite yet. "

"Nor are we quite a preparatory school, strictly speaking." Complicitous smile. "More remedial, actually, though we really do prepare the kids' homework assignments. You'll do just fine. Starting tomorrow? And tell your winsome friend Miss Chutzpah that we might just have something for her, too, before the school term ends."

As the Freds made dinner à trois that evening back in Briarwood 304's tiny kitchenette, " Winsome, " Al Baumann echoed, wincing, when that friend reported to him what their friend had reported to her of this conversation: "Our winsome Winnie."

"As in 'You win some and you lose some' " supposed the family wordsmith. "Anyhow, I learned a useful new word today: not winsome. "

" Eleemosynary, I'll bet," Al teased. "I should've prepped you: Levy had that same list on his blackboard when he interviewed me last year."

Replied Will, "Fuck eleemosynary. On the bus ride home, your fiancée Miss Winsome preceptored me in chutzpah. We didn't hear much Yiddish back in Marshville."

" Part-time fiancée," Win reminded him, and perhaps reminded Al as well, for to Will's considerable surprise — after declaring that although she had indeed explained to him Levy's term for her, Fred Three remained in her estimation lamentably innocent of the quality thereby named — she turned from the stove, embraced that fellow from behind as he chopped onions at the sink, pressed her breasts firmly into his back, reached one hand around to cup his crotch, and declared her conviction that with just a dash of chutzpah their drummer-boy could be "a real stud instead of a sexual ree -tard." Regarding the pair benignly sidewise from the cutting board on which he was dicing Idaho potatoes, "Maybe the kid needs a part-time preceptor," Al ventured.

"Could be," she agreed. And giving her handful a playful squeeze and pat, she returned to her liver-and-bacon sauté-in-progress.

"Remedial or preparatory?" her prospective tutee pretended to wonder, and in the spirit of their three-way tease, made bold to squeeze in turn one plump-but-firm, beskirted Winnie-buttock. "And when's my first lesson, Teach?"

"Enough chutzpah already," declared her part-time fiancé. "Let's fry this stuff and feed our fucking faces."

They did that, bantering of other matters than the one now uppermost in Wilfred Chase's much-aroused narrative imagination; then withdrew to their separate quarters to prepare the next day's schoolwork.

Which in Will Chase's case included not only VVLU's Rudiments of Narrative course — in which he was endeavoring, without impressive success, to "find his own voice" amid the cacophony of his similarly struggling fellow novices and their innumerable full-throated predecessors— but also his maiden sessions on the other side of the pedagogical divide, "tutoring" Lou Levy's after-school enrollees in what was labeled, simply, English.

"How do I Part-Time Preceptor them?" he had wondered to his own preceptor-in-chief. "What part-time precepts do I have to offer?"

"All of our precepts are part-time," Al had replied, "whether in the sense of Inconsistent — like Thou shalt not shoplift except from large chain stores? — or in the sense of Provisional and/or Temporary, like Who were we kidding that it's okay to steal within limits? Anyhow, you won't be teaching TGB" — their shorthand for Lit & Phil's Truth, Goodness, and Beauty—"you'll be fixing their diction, grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and improving your own in the process. Relax and enjoy it."

He did, rather, once he'd met the two or three tutees with whom for the next six weeks he worked at one of several tables set up in what was meant to have been the rowhouse's living room. While other PTP's did similar repair work in other subjects at neighboring tables, and Levy himself held forth in his open-doored office to a select few on antidisestablishmentarianism and other sesquipedalia, Will pointed out misplaced modifiers, dangling participles, subject-verb disagreements, superfluous or missing commas, objective-cased predicate nominatives, and other such lapses in his students' high school English compositions, learning as he went along the names of those errors and the principles by them embodied, and improving by the way his own copy-editing skills. "In this next paragraph," he would explain to Ann Stein, daughter of a prominent local department-store owner, "when you say 'The Indians only hunted and fought on foot until the Spanish brought horses to America,' you imply that they did nothing else on foot, like just walking, or maybe dancing around the campfire. What you mean to say is that the Indians hunted and fought only on foot until et cetera. Okay?" Whereupon that sultry black-haired beauty (at seventeen, only a year younger than her precociously part-time preceptor), who drove from her private school sixth-form English classes down to Levy's Prep in a new canary-yellow Ford convertible, would roll her lustrous eyes and make the correction — not without grumbling that only an idiot would misunderstand what she meant. Likewise when Stanley Fine — curly-headed, mischief-twinkling scion of the city's Fine Laundry and Dry Cleaning chain — wrote "Turning the corner, the Empire State Building came into view," and Will observed that skyscrapers don't normally turn corners: "So if everybody understands it, what's the problem?" Considering that not-unreasonable question for perhaps the first time, Will responded experimentally to the grinning pair that a mother's understanding her child's baby talk is no justification for letting the kid remain at that primitive level of communication. "Weak analogical reasoning," Al would object that evening (and Will would duly report to his preceptees next day), "since nobody except Mom understands the kid, whereas et cetera. What you should've said is that misplaced modifiers and such are like static on the radio: objectionable even if we can make out what number the band's playing. We shouldn't have to get the message despite its wording."