Every Third Thought (11 page)

End of quote, and of erotic/scatologic specificity.

 

Over next morning’s breakfast and camp-breaking, the four of us shake our heads at having been simultaneously so stoned and boozed, but avoid the subject of our partner-swapping. Impish Ginny, however, manages to make a little
mwah
at Narrator over our instant coffee, and Ned, when the girls aren’t looking, tilts his head toward Marsha and gives Narrator a knowing wink and nod of approval.

We presently repack and trudge carward with our stuff. There seems to be, along with the subtropical humidity, some small voltage in the air, but Narrator, for one, is still too hung over to assess it. Setting down his load at the station wagon’s
tailgate, he fishes in the side pockets of his Bermuda shorts, wondering aloud, “Where’d the fucking keys get to?” and then locates them in one of the buttoned front pockets, where he’d secured them along with his Swiss Army knife against getting accidentally dropped in the sand and lost. Without our customary josh and banter, we open and make to reload the old Olds, Narrator beginning vaguely to wonder what if anything is afoot. Then “Y’know what?” Ned Prosper asks or declares, standing at the open tailgate with his spread fingertips contemplatively tented together: “On
third
thought, I say fuck the fucking Keys: Let’s haul our asses home.”

In the log of this aborted odyssey that he’s been keeping for possible literary use down the road and will draw upon in the century to come for this reconstruction, George Irving Newett cannot resist noting en route back north that although they failed to reach the continental USA’s southernmost point, he at least attained Ginny Hyman’s. At the time, however—also disappointed, but sensing that Ned’s and Marsha’s minds are made up—what he says is, “So it’s
hasta la vista
, Hemingwayville? Farewell to Arms-of-Life?”

“Shucks,” laments Ginny, but then half-turns in her passenger seat to wink at all hands. “Well: At least this Rough-Draft Chapter ended with a
bang,
right?”

 

But not its Flashbang retelling, which closes with neither bang nor whimper—just quietly. Back in Maryland after two marathon driving-days and nights, the foursome split up to end the spring recess with their separate families before returning to Stratford College and Tidewater State University.

“Last night of spring break before last half-semester before graduation,” Ned Prosper observed over his and George Newett’s final National Bohemian beer of that evening in the Prospers’ club basement, where the pair had been reviewing the ups and downs of their aborted odyssey.

“You and your Last Things,” G. imagines he replied.

“Yup. Like, think of that Naples shit as your last fling at bachelorhood before you take your bachelor’s degree and marry Marsha till death do you part. Or divorce, whichever cometh first.” For the couple had indeed resolved en route home, partly in reaction to “that Naples shit,” to tie the knot promptly after Commencement Day in as simple a ceremony as possible, with Ned as Best Man and Marsha’s kid sister as Maid of Honor. After which—and maybe a weekend honeymoon at nearby Ocean City or Rehoboth Beach—bride and groom would take
whatever summer jobs they could find before starting their M.F.A. and M.Ed. studies at TSU in September.

“You?”

“Me.” He sipped and swallowed; shook his head. “Me, I’m outta here, man: Neither Arms-of-Marriage nor Arms-of-Academe for this here Cree-ay-tive Rotter.” Ginny Hyman, he assumed we would agree, was a good sport and frisky in bed, but no more ready to be any man’s wife than was he to be any woman’s husband. (He trusted, by the way, that that little pup-tent experiment in partner-swapping had put no lasting strain on the Newett/Green connection: “Marsha did it for
your
sake, you know, hoping it’ll scratch that particular itch of yours for keeps.”) As for grad school, they’d been over that already: If G. thought it the Best Next Thing for his Muse, then more power to him—and to that Muse, whom Ned imagined as a Marsha/wifey type. But his own was more a flirty-fickle, catch-me-if-you-can, anything-goes sort of chick, as changeable as wind, weather, or Ginny Hyman. If he was ever to complete his novel-in-the-works (which, unlike all previous manuscripts, he had steadfastly declined to share or even really discuss with his longtime Bridgetown buddy, still claiming it to be in too early gestation even to risk talking about), he and She would have to do it
à deux
. He intended to work at it as much as possible for the remainder of his final college semester; then, along with academic commencement, he would graduate from StratColl’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (to which he’d switched from the National Guard in his junior year) into the
Army’s Language School out in California to pick up an Asian tongue or two—thence to Korea or wherever the Action was, but safely behind the lines rather than in a hellish foxhole on Hill Number Whatever.

G., who’d more or less seen this coming, shook his head. “I wish you luck, man.”

“Me too, and you too—with our fucking muses and elsewise.”

That evening—the last with his longtime friend that George Irving Newett can clearly reimagine—ended with the pair of them recollecting together an incidental but still-vivid scene from their high school graduation days (it would resurface subsequently in G.I.N.’s mostly-unpublished fictive efforts and, he’d bet, in the lost manuscript of Edward “Ned” Prosper’s
Seasons
-or-whatever novel as well):

On a hot, humid, mid-to-late-June afternoon in 1948 (Ned, being Ned, recalled it as Last Day of Spring), the pair are stretched out on that mud/sand “beach” near Stratford’s Matahannock River bridge, reviewing yet again the StratColl and TSU course-catalogues in search of a major more specific and to their taste than General Arts & Sciences while also idly watching a clutch of their fellows diving into the river from a high platform that the town recently added to the (newly improved) waterfront park in hopes of discouraging use of the highway bridge itself as a launch pad. Art History. Botany. Chemistry. French. Geology. Literature. Philosophy. Physics. Psychology. Zoology. Such a smorgasbord of ways to spend
one’s working life, one’s mortal prime time! And there exactly, they agree, is the rub: If one had fifty lives to live, or even the modest feline nine, one could do
A
for a career
this
time, try
B
next, then
C
and
D
or
G
and
H
or even
A
again, reliving and improving upon one’s prior go at it. But with only a single measly ride on the carousel, how to choose among Horse and Lion, Rhinoceros and Giraffe, as one’s mount for the too-quick spin?

Out on the platform, meanwhile, some do the swan, some the backflip, some the cannonball, some the unintended, ignominious, and painful bellyflop. In every case, it’s Climb, Dive, Whatever, Splash.

“That there is
life
,” observes Ned. “Except in life we get just one dive.” Both then and upon subsequent recollection, “Crock of shit,” the two agree (a popular negative in that time and place): Four quick decades after college, if they’re lucky, before they’ll be old farts on a pension—and already at age eighteen they’ve spent nearly half that much time getting ready to get ready! Will they end up like the fellow they now remark out there who, when his turn comes at the springboard’s tip, merely shrugs his shoulders and steps off, turns up his palms as he falls feet-first, and goes under having attempted nothing en route?

“At least he made a splash,” ventures G.I.N.: “Better than sinking without a trace, like most.”

“Plus he entertained us all for about two seconds; let’s grant him that. But shit, man: We want to do more than just make a splash, don’t we? Something
worthwhile
. . . ” That
last inflected
à la
his parents, who hope their son will “find his calling” in one of the do-good professions: medicine, scientific research, the law (in its less venal aspects)—perhaps even (like themselves) education?

Once again his friend envies Ned Prosper such parents. Enough for Fred and Lorraine Newett that their son will be “going off to college,” the first in either of their families ever to have had that privilege. They would not presume to suggest a career major, although Dad has heard tell of something called Business Administration, and Mom agrees that that sounds Nice.

“Me,” says Ned now, “I want a damn Nobel Prize—and not just ’cause it’d make me famous, but ’cause I’d be famous for doing something
worth doing
, y’know? Something
worthwhile.
”

Responds much-impressed G., who could never have presumed to such lofty ambition, “Wow! O
kay!
So come on, man: I’ll race you!”

“To Stockholm?” Ned pretends to wonder. “You’re on, pal!”

But it’s into the sea-nettled Matahannock that they run, risking a sting or two for the pleasure of a cool-off in the still spring-chilly river.

“And four years later,” observed Ned Prosper four years later at the last-night-of-spring get-together that prompted the above recollection, “here we are: two wannabe Cree-ay-tive Rotters still looking for the road to Stockholm.”

“Speak for yourself,” advised George Irving Newett: “Me, I’m still clearing my narrative throat, trying to find my Capital-V fucking Voice.”

“Likewise—though I suspect I may actually be finding it in this new
Seasons
thing I’m into. I’ll let you know.
So
. . . ” Last clink of near-empty bottles: “May our testicles finally descend and our throats clear, and may the better Rotter take the Prize.”

He had, by the way, he then added, formulated a proper definition of our presumptive calling as pronounced by that Deep-South undergrad writing-coach of mine over at Tidewater State—a definition that G.I.N. was free to pass along to the guy at baccalaureate time: “Cree-ay-tive Rotting is, quote,
the active decomposing and digesting of life-experience and the corpus of literature, followed by their artful
re
composing into new fiction and verse
, end of quote. Shall we get on with it, in the arms of our separate and different muses?”

 

“Good idea,” declares Amanda Todd 5.6 decades later, when her husband finally winds up, for the present, his account of this Spring Break Flashbang Vision/Whatever: “And a not-bad definition of your and your pal’s quote Cree-ay-tive Rotting—always bearing in mind, however, that what most often follows Decomposition and Digestion is a load of shit.”

“Q.E.D.?”

“No no no. I’m enjoying this, actually: my One-and-Only’s pre-Me years, composted. Quite a buddy you had there.”

“That he was, love: Taught me more than just how to jerk off and make out and smoke and drink. Taught me how to swim; how to drive a car; how to go to college. Taught me to love the arts, especially Capital-L Literature, and even to have Capital-A Ambitions in that department.”

“I’m grateful to him for all that, Gee. Wish I’d known him.”

“Just as well you didn’t, or you’d likely be in
his
pup-tent instead of mine.”

All this on a late-spring evening in C.E. 2008: not the last of StratColl’s spring break (by then well past, along with the academic year) nor the last of the season itself, still a few weeks from its solstitial close, but an early-June post-dinner P.M. In the course of which, appropriately, as wife and husband retired to their separate spaces for their routine hour of pre-TV-&-bedtime reading, a fast-moving thundershower rolled by to south of us, as if conjured by G.I.N.’s recollected vision. Nothing destructive, like those that had lately flooded Iowa and Indiana and broken levees along the Mississippi, not to mention the typhoon that would drown the Philippines on the approaching equinox: just a bit of wind and rain, one blink of the neighborhood lights (requiring all digital clocks to be reset, but no auxiliary power-generators to be fired up), and an appropriately impressive display of lightning well downriver from Stratford/ Bridgetown, which we set aside our reading to admire together.

“Bye-bye springtime; come on summer,” Mandy commented. “When, as Gee Gershwin tells us,
the livin’ is easy
, even for us not-yet-retired academics.” More seriously then, “Ma
Nature is obviously in synch with your and your late friend’s equinox/solstice/seasons thing: Let me know what y’all come up with down the road, OK? On the shortest night of the year?”

“My midsummer night’s dream?” it occurred to Narrator to wonder. “Or would that be in mid-August, since the equinox just
begins
the season? I’ve never been sure which.”

“So go Google it, and let me know,” his Ms. suggested, and returned to whatever she’d been reading.

As did Narrator to whatever
he
’d been, but found himself too distracted, even overwhelmed, by the confluence of associations—seasons /
Seasons
, timely tempests, and the prospect of an upcoming midsummer night’s Dream/Vision/Whatever #3—either to read or to reboot his closed-for-the-night computer. When he does, next morning, he’ll learn from Wikipedia that the European “midsummer” holiday, pre-Christian in origin, marked the ancients’ “middle of summer,” later the astronomical
beginning
of that season, and by coincidence the nativity of St. John the Baptist (“St. John’s Day”), and is celebrated in North European countries especially by festivals, bonfires, and—in Sweden anyhow, where warm weather arrives late—by Maypole-dancing in the last week of June rather than on May Day. But by then (last week of spring: Senator Hillary Clinton has finally conceded the Democratic presidential nomination-race to Barack Obama; the price of regular gasoline in the USA has for the first time in its history topped $4 a gallon; Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s thugs have stalled that nation’s runoff election by murdering numerous
of his opponent’s supporters; wildfires are blazing in northern California; and deadly Typhoon Fengshen is bearing down on the Philippines) what’s really mushrooming from his imagination’s compost-pile is, on First Thought anyhow, his Next Big Project: not another O.F.F.-novel, but a memorial-memoir of growing up with Ned Prosper, who if he’d lived might well have become the Capital-W Writer that George Irving Newett didn’t. The “Winter” of their Bridgetown childhood and preadolescence, as suggested by Narrator’s solstitial fire-tower vision, followed by the Springtime of their adolescence and vigorous young adulthood: 1944–54 for unlucky Ned; for his memoirist, 1944–59, maybe? Mid-teens to late-twenties, by when his own attempts at fiction were going the rounds in notalways-unsuccessful search of publication?
⁸