John Barth - Where Three Roads Meet

"Aiyiyi," groaned Stein to Fine. "They really dig this stuff! Can you believe it?"

And Will, unbothered, "You'd better believe it, friends. Sloppy language equals sloppy thinking. Honor thy mother tongue."

Cheerfully retorted Fine, "Never mind our mother tongue, man; let's finish our mothering homework and get our tushies out of here."

For that was, as Al had forewarned, what Levy's preceptors were chiefly paid for: not merely to correct errors in their charges' homework assignments with a bit of instruction in the process, but to do those assignments for them, more or less, under the guise of tutelage. Hence the Freds' name for the place: the Cheatery.

"But it's more than just us helping the kids cheat their teachers and themselves," Winnie observed a week or so later, when Levy hired her after all to replace a PTP in French who'd quit without notice: "The kids are cheating their classmates by getting professional help that the others don't have. The parents who know what we're really up to are cheating both their own kids and the school system. And the ones who believe we're actually tutoring instead of cheating are being cheated by us."

"Also, contrariwise," Will pointed out, "the ones who're paying us mainly to cheat get cheated when some of us try mainly to teach."

What was more, they agreed, Lou Levy was cheating the parents by representing his preceptors as graduate students, and cheating both by charging five dollars an hour, paying the PTPs two, and pocketing the other three himself — a tidy profit, by the Freds' estimation, even after allowing for building upkeep and other overhead expenses — all the while maintaining that the institution was pedagogically proper and beneficial, indeed all but eleemosynary. It could even be argued, they enjoyed supposing, that in at least some instances the kids' official teachers were cheating all hands with make-work assignments designed primarily to satisfy the Procrustean requirements of curriculum planners and to compensate for indifferent classroom teaching.

"So what are we doing here?" Win asked Will, taking his hand in hers on the uptown bus ride home a few days into their joint preceptorships. "Who the fuck do we think we are?"

As to the first of those questions, it was Al Baumann's subsequently delivered opinion that in time-honored 3F fashion they were exploring moral ambiguities, experimenting with ethical parameters, honing their language and editorial skills, and scoring two dollars apiece per hour, all to the end of clarifying, if not necessarily answering, Question Two. "More to the point," Will in turn asked Winnie as that pair sat hip to hip on his Murphy-bed edge in Briarwood 204 after their two-hour gig at the Trivium at the close of that same April Friday evening, about to consummate his sexual initiation and (he supposed with guilty excitement) her first sexual infidelity, and she reported her "part-time fiancé's" reply, above, to their bus ride questions, "What are we doing here? Who do we think we are?"

Same answer, no doubt, his naked friend and colleague supposed. What she'd like to know (picking up his hand again, placing it firmly between her legs, and declaring "It's yours") is why it was always she who had to take the lead with him, as she'd done once again by knocking on his door a short while ago and brisking past him into his apartment, announcing cheerily as she peeled off her robe and pajamas that it was class time for Fornication 101. "You're supposed to set the beat, not follow it."

As to that, dazzled Will would remind her presently, in their combo it was Al, ever their leader, who set the beat from his stance between them at his bass—"A-one, a-two, a- one-two-three-four " — and himself who then maintained it, kept it up.

"So keep it up!" she urged, implored, commanded from beneath him, her eyes winced shut, head whipping from side to side as if in happy pain. "It's yours, Will! Go to it!"

He duly went and shortly came, his instrument unsheathed except by hers in their duetto agitato ("Leave precautions to me," she had instructed him while demonstrating Insertion of Diaphragm: "I'm the one who gets the bill if things go wrong"), and did likewise repeatedly through that spring, deliciously by her preceptored in intercourse digital, oral, vaginal, and anal, in a repertoire of positions and with assorted refinements, usually but not always on post-Trivium Friday nights in his apartment. "Jesus, Win," he groaned into her not-quite-equiangular Y at one point during that first of them, as she was tutoring him in soixante-neuf: "Al's the best friend I ever had! Best teacher! Best coach!"

To his scrotum she responded, "Mine too, dummy — and has been for ten times longer."

"So…?"

Raising herself on one elbow, "D'you think he doesn't know I'm here, and what we're doing?"

"He does?"

Her sex-wet, fragrant thighs clamped shut. "Did you think I was cheating on him? Wait'll I tell him!" He had all but ordered her there, she declared — not that she objected to her assignment: the capital-P Protagonist's capital-I Initiation into the ditto-M Mysteries.

Lucky protagonist, to have so able an initiator. No beauty, Winifred Stark, with her too-plump cheeks and less-than-slender waist and legs; but she was high-spirited, amused and amusing in and out of bed, while also impassioned: an altogether admirable part-time preceptor. And Al clearly did know, at least in a general way, and evidently accepted, what his trio-mates were up to in their ménage á deux et un peu, as he himself came to call it on the infrequent occasions — over dinner or between sets at the Trivium — when the subject was lightly alluded to. Did he also know that as his protégé-protagonist's sexual self-confidence increased, Will would sometimes importune his initiator, en route home to Briarwood from the Cheatery, to detour into 204 for a quickie, perhaps even a not-so-quickie, before she continued upstairs? And that Winnie seemed pleased by these impromptu detours—"intromission times," she liked to call them — to the point of occasionally arching an expectant eyebrow himward as their elevator reached floor 2? That it was she who forbade him to sheathe his grand peu, as she saw fit to call it (" plus grand than some other peux in this ménage "), even when she was sans diaphragm, as was generally the case in these unscheduled come-togethers, bidding him instead to withdraw at the last pre-climactic moment and ejaculate instead into her navel or any other nonvaginal receptor? One imagined not, though with Al Baumann there was no telling.

Face-down in Will's pillow at a Wednesday afternoon's end, her pink butt elevated for their mutual pleasure, "Who knows what our Amazing Al knows and doesn't know?" Win would ask rhetorically. "The guy knows such a shitload!"

"He didn't know, Reader," those couplers' mentoring spirit here interjects. "At least not in any face-down-in-Will's-pillow detail, although he half suspected something of the sort, swallowed hard, and did his best to shrug his Burgundy-bottle shoulders thereat. While his part-time fiancée was presenting her plump pinkery to his protégé's plus grand peu, her PTF was ears-deep in the dissertation that he aimed to finish in time for their spring 1950 wedding: a thesis not on the Myth of the Birth of the Wandering Hero, but on the Birth of the Myth thereof. More precisely, on its re birth for twentieth-century Modernists like James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, et alii after Sir James Frazer's groundbreaking Golden Bough of 1890, and its culmination in such landmark studies as Lord Raglan's, Bronislaw Malinowski's, Joseph Campbell's, and, one had innocently hoped, Alfred Baumann Ph.D.'s, that erstwhile Friday-night wittol and subsequent impromptu cuckold. Pardon the footnote?"