Every Third Thought (9 page)

“On
second
thought,” Narrator half-seriously complains outside Charleston, South Carolina, after the third or fourth such fill-up (his turn to pay, per the group’s agreement), “maybe we should’ve just stuck out our fucking thumbs and hitch-hiked.”

Objects his ever-sensible Marsha, “Who’d ever pick up all four of us plus our stuff? Nobody
I’d
trust.”

Picking up the tease, “Our
other
thumb?” his Ginny pretends to wonder. “Not our
fucking
thumb, like you said before?” She examines her two thumbs, then playfully sucks at each. “Which one
is
that, anyhow? They taste the same to me.”

“Depends on what’s going on, “ Ned reckons with an exaggerated wink. We’re headed by then for Kiawah Island, hoping its barrier beach will be warm enough for camping, if not yet for the skinny-dip swimming that we guys, at least, look forward to down in Florida, maybe even Georgia. G. I. Newett finds Ginny Hyman’s risqué antics
interesting
; his girlfriend does not. In the Oldsmobile’s backseat he makes a show of sniffing his own thumbs, then reaches for Marsha’s, but she lightly pushes his hands away. In the run-ups to their initial freshmanyear intercourse, as they moved from groping through each other’s clothing to groping under it, Narrator had excitedly
index-fingered the girl’s moist
Vulva
and anon her
Vagina
(fascinating words, their V’s so evocative of the
mons Veneris
that G. always visualizes them upper-cased) before first introducing thereinto his shy but ready penis, and routinely does so still by way of foreplay and pre-coital lubrication. He has even, on occasion, lightly fingered her rectum during copulation in a sitting position or supine with Marsha on top (she objects, on hygienic more than on moral grounds, and has made clear that between them there’ll be none of the anal intercourse that Ned claims to have scored now and then with Ginny. No hemorrhoids for her, thanks!). But
thumbs?

“Thumbs up to that,” is the best Narrator can come back with, although its
double entendre
isn’t altogether clear to him.

Roused by such raillery, after several more beers the two couples retire, if that’s the right expression, to go to it in their adjacent pup-tents, pitched amid the all but deserted because still chilly Kiawah dunes: Narrator and Marsha quietly
front-to-back in the cozy dark confines of their double sleepingbag, he withdrawing before ejaculation because they find condoms distasteful but she hasn’t gotten around to being fitted for a diaphragm yet; Ned and Ginny unrestrainedly in their still lamp-lit tent as if for their neighbors’ benefit: “Yes! Yes!” “How ’bout
this
?” “Yes!”

“On
second
thought,” Ned says to G. the next day, or the day after, “to hell with getting hitched just to beat the draft.” We’re setting up camp on Amelia Island, just south of the Florida state line, the guys unpacking and pegging the tents while the girls take the car to a nearby general store to stock up on miscellaneous supplies, from ice and food to toilet paper and Tampax, Ginny having announced that she feels her period coming on. (“Tough titty for you guys,” Narrator had teased, to which Ginny had replied, “Says who? There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” “And more than one cat in the bag,” Ned added, “if puss comes to shove.” “Shove
that
!” Marsha had then scolded, who’ll later complain to G. that
he
should’ve done the scolding.) “You and Marsh might as well tie the knot, since that’s where you seem to be headed anyhow. But I’m not ready to settle down.” After seventeen straight years of school school school, he declares, kindergarten to the baccalaureate,
what he has just about decided is to attend grad school, if at all, as a Journalism major, not a Creative Rotter: a year or two of that at either Johns Hopkins or Iowa, taking his chances on the draft (Hopkins is the better university, he concedes, but its M.A. program includes only one token course in journalism, whereas Iowa offers what looks like genuine hands-on training in newspaper work), and then out of the Ivory Tower into the Arms of Life—like young Hemingway, who’s been more and more on his mind as we head for the Keys.

“Experience
, man! Experience of
life
, not just books books books and talk talk talk, if we’re going to have something
real
to write about.”

Yes, well: Narrator is impressed, as usual, by his friend’s ideas. But he knows, and declares, that for better or worse the Arms-of-Life curriculum, especially the Hemingway-macho variety, is not for him. Marcel Proust in his cork-lined room, Franz Kafka in his workaday bureaucratic office, William Faulkner in his Mississippi campus P.O.—how Arms-of-Lifey were they, who nonetheless managed to define literary Modernism at least as much as Macho Ernie? And that other navigation-star of ours, James Joyce: How much frontline, go-where-the-actionis Experience did he require in order to move from his quietly realistic
Dubliners
and
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
through the complex “mythic realism” of
Ulysses
to that virtual last word in avant-garde Modernist lit,
Finnegans Wake
?

“That says it, right there,” opines Ned as we finish setting up the tents and reward ourselves with the day’s first beer:
“After the Last Word, what comes next? Now that the Mod Squad
[Narrator recalls his friend’s using that term, a dozenplus years before the debut of ABC’s popular TV series thus titled]
has brought down the house, what do we Johnny-Come-Too-Latelys do with
our
turn onstage?” Anyhow, he goes on, my redneck Willie F., as he recalls, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1918, farted away the war up in Toronto, came home to lie about his combat experience in Europe, and then bummed around New York, New Orleans, and France before settling down in Ole Miss to write his masterpieces. And Joyce’s “Trieste/Zurich/Paris” subscript to the
Wake
is a long way from Bridgetown/Stratford/College Park,
n’est-ce pas
?

Those are the issues most on our minds during the run-up to this spring break road-trip and en route down U.S. 1, while our girlfriends listen without much interest or speak of other things (Marsha is on track for elementary-school teacher certification; Ginny aims to be “a dietitian or something”): Just as, in the graphic arts, Impressionism was succeeded by Post-Impressionism and it in turn by Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and the like, so in literature something was bound to supplant the now all-but-exhausted aesthetic of High Modernism that had defined our century thus far. In Ned’s view, the torch is ready to be passed, and the questions are how best to seize it and in what new direction to run with it. By temperament less adventurous, Narrator counterargues that the whole notion of each artistic generation’s need to define itself against the preceding one is a hangover from
nineteenth-century Romanticism plus a questionable analogy to scientific and technological Progress. A
really
new direction for our time, he half believes, might be to quit thinking in those terms and neither imitate one’s immediate forebears nor define oneself against them, but, having duly surveyed the vast corpus of the “already said,” simply go to one’s writing-desk or typewriter, invoke one’s personal muse, and see what happens, living one’s life and paying the rent in whatever manner one chooses, whether as a journalist, professor, doctor, lawyer, office worker, day-laborer, or gadabout hand-to-mouth bohemian. What best suited Henry James, he likes to say, wouldn’t have done for Henry Miller and vice versa, any more than Lord Byron’s lifestyle would have appealed to Emily Dickinson, or Hemingway’s to Kafka, but each did first-rate work of his/ her kind. In short, mightn’t Ezra Pound’s Modernist imperative “Make it new!” (which, after all, Pound translated from Confucius!) already be getting old?
Chacun à son goût!

“If we-all
goût
each other in French,” Narrator warns, “we’ll need a circumflex. Did you pick up one of those at the store?”

Fifty-plus years later, “I’ll second that,” says Amanda Todd (among other things) upon reviewing Narrator’s first-draft printout of this so-called “Flashbang.” “And if a mere versifier may offer suggestions to a counter-Romantic prose fictioneer, mightn’t it be advisable to give Reader some idea of what these people
look
like? What they wear, and how things feel and sound? More Sensory Texture, as we say in Cree-ay-tive Rotting One-O-One, other than the Vulval V’s of your firstwife-to-be’s Venusian delta?”

To which Narrator can reply only that her criticism goes without saying, he having often acknowledged both to himself and to her that were he an abler hand at such basics as the Sharp Rendition of Relevant Sensory Detail, he’d be a National Book Award winner instead of a mere Old Fart Fictionist.
Chacun à son faute
, pardon Narrator’s French....

“We were just four skinny middle-class Caucasian-American twenty-somethings, all of us pretty bright and none particularly wise; the girls quite attractive and the guys not bad-looking, Ned especially. All four of us light-brown-haired: Ned’s and mine cut short, Marsha’s and Ginny’s probably ponytailed. Exact eye colors forgotten—including Narrator’s own, until he checks a mirror. Marsha and I both bespectacled, mine the Dave Brubeck heavy-black-framed kind back then. Jeans and shorts and tees, and that’s enough of that. Speaking of Venusian deltas, how come Anaïs Nin calls pussy ‘the Delta of Venus,’ when the Greek letter has its apex on top? Is the goddess standing on her head, or is Mars sixty-nining her? That’s
the sort of relevant sensory detail that Ned and I wrestled with back at spring break time, along with what ought to follow High Modernism in the literary arts and the A.B. in our C.V.”