John Barth - Lost in the Funhouse

5

“ ‘ “ ‘Said Eidothea: “Eidothea.” I hemmed, I hawed; “I’m not the man,” I remarked, “I was.” Shoulders shrugged. “I’ve advised disguise,” she said. “If you find your falseface stinks, I advise ambrosia. My sixth advice is, not too much ambrosia; my seventh—” Frantic I recounted, lost track, where was I? “—ditto masks: when the hour’s ripe, unhide yourself and jump.” Her grabbèd dad, she declared, would turn first into animals, then into plants and wine-dark sea, then into no saying what. Let I go I’d be stuck forever; otherwise he’d return into Proteus and tell me what I craved to hear.

“ ‘ “ ‘ “Hang on,” she said; “that’s the main thing.” I asked her wherefor her septuple aid; she only smiled, I hate that about women, paddled off. This noon, then, helped by her sealskins and deodorant, I jumped you. There you are. But you must have known all this already.’

4

“ ‘ “Said Proteus in my voice: ‘Never mind know. Loose me now, man, and I’ll say what stands between you and your desire.’ He talks that way. I wouldn’t; he declared I had one virtue only, the snap-turtle’s, who will beak fast though his head be severed. By way of preface to his lesson then, he broke my heart with news reports: how Agamemnon, Idomeneus, Diomedes were cuckolded by pacifists and serving-men; how Clytemnestra not only horned but axed my brother; how faithless Penelope, hearing Odysseus had slept a year with Circe, seven with Calypso, dishonored him by giving herself to all one hundred eight of her suitors, plus nine house-servants, Phemius the bard, and Melanthius the goat-herd …” ’

“ ‘What’s this?’ cried Peisistratus. ‘Telemachus swears they’ve had no word since he sailed from Troy!’ ‘Prophets get their tenses mixed,’ I replied; ‘not impossibly it’s now that Mrs. Odysseus goes the rounds, while her son’s away. But I think he knows what a tangled web his mother weaves; otherwise he’d not sit silent, but call me and Proteus false or run for Ithaca.’ There I had him, someone; on with the story. ‘On with the story. “ ‘On with the story,’ I said to Proteus: ‘Why can’t I get off this beach, let go, go home again? I’m tired of holding Zeus knows what; the mussels on my legs are barnacled; my arms and mind have gone to sleep; our beards have grown together; your words, fishy as your breath, come from my mouth, in the voice of Menelaus. Why am I stuck with you? What is it makes all my winds north and chills my wife?’

“ ‘ “Proteus answered: ‘You ask too many questions. Not Athena, but Aphrodite is your besetter. Leave Helen with me here; go back to the mouth of River Egypt. There where the yeasting slime of green unspeakable jungle springs ferments the sea of your intoxicate Greek bards,’ that’s how the chap talks, ‘make hecatombs to Aprodite; beg Love’s pardon for your want of faith. Helen chose you without reason because she loves you without cause; embrace her without question and watch your weather change. Let go.’

“ ‘ “I tried; it wasn’t easy; he swam and melted in the lesser Nile my tears. Then Eidothea surfaced just offshore, unless it was you …” Shipboard Helen. “Had he been Eidothea before? Had he turned Helen? Was I cuckold yet again, an old salt in my wound? Recollecting my hard homework I closed eyes, mouth, mind; set my teeth and Nileward course. It was a different river; on its crocodiled and dromedaried bank, to that goddess perversely polymorphous as her dam the sea or the shift Old Man Thereof, Menelaus sacrificed twin heifers, Curiosity, Common Sense. I no longer ask why you choose me, less tusked than Idomeneus, et cetera; should you declare it was love for me fetched you to Paris and broke the world, I’d raise neither eyebrow; ‘Yes, well, so,’ is what I’d say. I don’t ask what’s changed the wind, your opinion, me, why I hang here like, onto, and by my narrative. Gudgeon my pintle, step my mast, vessel me where you will. I believe all. I understand nothing. I love you.”

3

“ ‘Snarled thwarted Helen: “Love!” Then added through our chorus groan: “Loving may waste us into Echoes, but it’s being loved that kills. Endymion! Semele! Io! Adonis! Hyacinthus! Loving steers marine Odysseus; being loved turned poor Callisto into navigation-stars. Do you love me to punish me for loving you?”

“ ‘ “I haven’t heard so deep Greek since Delphi,” I marveled. “But do I ask questions?”

“ ‘ “I’ll put this love of yours truly to the test,” Helen said. Gently she revived me with cold water and pungents from her Nilish store. “I suppose you suppose,” she declared then, “that I’ve been in Troy.”

“ ‘So potent her medicaments, in no time at all I regained my breath and confessed I did.

“ ‘Severely she nodded. “And you suspect I’ve been unfaithful?”

“ ‘ “It would be less than honest of me to say,” I said, “that no fancy of that dirt-foot sort has ever grimed my imagination’s marmor sill.”

“ ‘ “With Paris? And others as well?”

“ ‘ “You wrest truth from me as Odysseus Astyanax Andromache.”

“ ‘ “In a word, you think yourself cuckold.”

“ ‘I blushed. “To rash untowardly to conclusions ill becomes a man made wise by hard experience and time. Nevertheless, I grant that as I shivered in a Trojan ditch one autumn evening in the war’s late years and watched you stroll with Paris on the bastions, a swart-hair infant at each breast and your belly swaggèd with another, the term you mention flit once across the ramparts of my mind like a bat through Ilion-dusk. Not impossibly the clever wound I’d got from Pandarus festered my judgment with my side …”

“ ‘Helen kissed my bilging tears and declared: “Husband, I have never been in Troy.

“ ‘ “What’s more,” she added within the hour, before the boatswain could remobilize the crew, “I’ve never made love with any man but you.”

“ ‘ “Ah.”

“ ‘She turned her pout lips portward. “You doubt me.”

“ ‘ “Too many years of unwomaned nights and combat days,” I explained, “gestate in our tenderer intelligences a skeptic demon, that will drag dead Hector by the baldric till his corpse-track moat the walls, and yet whisper when his bones are ransomed: ‘Hector lives.’ Were one to say of Menelaus at this present hour, ‘That imp nips him,’ one would strike Truth’s shield not very far off-boss.”

“ ‘ “Doubt no more,” said Helen. “Your wife was never in Troy. Out of love for you I left you when you left, but before Paris could up-end me, Hermes whisked me on Father’s orders to Egyptian Proteus and made a Helen out of clouds to take my place.

“ ‘ “All these years I’ve languished in Pharos, chaste and comfy, waiting for you, while Paris, nothing wiser, fetched Cloud-Helen off to Troy, made her his mistress, got on her Bunomus, Aganus, Idaeus, and a little Helen, dearest of the four. It wasn’t I, but cold Cloud-Helen you fetched from Troy, whom Proteus dissolved the noon you beached him. When you then went off to account to Aphrodite, I slipped aboard. Here I am. I love you.”

“ ‘Not a quarter-hour later she asked of suspended me: “Don’t you believe me?”

“ ‘ “What ground have I for doubt?” I whispered. “But that imp aforementioned gives me no peace. ‘How do you know,’ he whispers with me, ‘that the Helen you now hang onto isn’t the cloud-one? Why mayn’t your actual spouse be back in Troy, or fooling in naughty Egypt yet?’ ”

“ ‘ “Or home in Lacedemon,” Helen added, “where she’s been all along, waiting for her husband.”

“ ‘Tresently my battle voice made clear from stem to stern my grown conviction that the entire holocaust at Troy, with its prior and subsequent fiascos, was but a dream of Zeus’s conjure, visited upon me to lead me to Pharos and the recollection of my wife — or her nimbus like. For for all I knew I roared what I now gripped was but a further fiction, maybe Proteus himself, turned for sea-cow-respite to cuckold generals …