Every Third Thought (12 page)

Problem:
This long-since-sprung “Spring” chapter of this whatever-it-turns-out-to-be is clearly winding down, but our guys are still only at the beginning of their twenties. Seven Spring-years yet to go for G., in the course whereof he’ll complete his Master of Arts degree at TSU, wed his self-designated “Mistress of Artist” Marsha Green, score an entry-level instructorship in English Composition down at Marshyhope State College on the lower Eastern Shore, manage after all to
place a few short stories in those more or less obscure lit-mags, complete his first (and thus far still his only published) novel, and terminate by mutual consent (Irreconcilable Differences) that short-lived first marriage. Only two more years for his nipped-in-the-bud buddy before N.’s Arms-of-Life curriculum* leads him—evidently by meaningless, random accident—into the arms of death. Experience-rich, lesson-teaching years for both, well worth memoiring! But always at his back Narrator hears, not “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near” (as in Andrew Marvell’s seventeenth-century lyric pitch “To His Coy Mistress,” a favorite of both of these twenty-somethings), but rather . . . some sort of
birdcall
, is it?

Pigeon? Dove? Canada Goose?

 

 

 

 

O
N A MID-JULY Maryland mid-day some three weeks past the summer solstice, Poet/Professor/Life-Partner/Critic Amanda Todd, having reviewed at her mate’s request the foregoing chapter (“Spring”) of his whatever-it-might-turn-out-to-be, declared or announced to its author, “Two questions-slashcomments, okay?”

“Slash away.” No Vision/Transport/Whatever #3 as yet, to George Irving Newett’s perplexed disappointment. But while he’d been awaiting its arrival, Tropical Storm Arthur
and Hurricane Bertha, as if summoned by his tempest-tossed Vision #2, had kicked off in the Caribbean what looked to be another busy Atlantic hurricane season. The Dow-Jones Industrial Average had dropped from its record high of 14,000 the previous October to below 11,000 in the subsequent worldwide economic recession, and continued its alarming downward slide. And we Newett/Todds, the night before this lunch-hour conversation, had enjoyed a gorgeous full Buck Moon
¹⁰
and brilliant Jupiter gleaming over Stratford/Bridgetown. Now, having finished our morning’s separate muse-work, we were sipping smoothies and nibbling granola-bars in the air-conditioned kitchen of our rented condominium, it being too hot and humid outside to lunch on its little screened porch.

“Well: To begin with?” Mandy began, with the interrogative rising inflection lately picked up from her students. “If I remember correctly—which I do, because I checked it?—back in your ‘Winter’ chapter, when your Narrator-guy steps up into StratColl’s Shakespeare House to meet his missus for lunch on the December solstice, he’s reminded of his trip-and-fall in
Shakespeare’s
house on the September equinox, right? And
that
—plus the sight of that of that kid with the Jehovah’s Witness
Watchtower
mag—reminds him of his fire-tower climb with Pal Neddie’s family in their kiddie-days, when he first
learned about equinoxes and solstices—which leads to his so-called Solstitial Illumination of Post-Equinoctial Vision #1. All reasonable enough. You with me so far?”

Her husband supposes so: “I mean, I
wrote
the freaking thing. . . . ”

“Then maybe you can explain what Narrator doesn’t: why it is that what also jump-starts his fire-tower illumination is the kid’s Everyman edition of Will’s comedies. I remember how you went on about that over lunch at Bozzelli’s, but I don’t think you’ve ever said exactly what its relevance was, other than Shakespeare House/Shakespeare’s house/Shakespeare’s plays. Are we supposed to think of that big-deal Illumination as G.I.N.’s Mid
winter
Night’s Dream, or what?”

Well, now: Author realized and readily admitted that in fact he hadn’t known exactly
what
the connection was: only that it was sudden and strong. His mate’s suggestion struck him as both plausible and too clever by half; now that she’d raised the question, however, its answer seemed evident, especially in retrospect from that storm-fraught Spring Break Flashbang Vision #2: The Shakespeare Connection was not
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, but that grimmer “comedy”
The Tempest
. Prosper=Prospero, the storm-conjuring wizard protagonist of that play, who predicts at its close (how had G. not seen so obvious an echo before, especially given the last working title of Ned’s lost opus-in-progress and his friend’s habit of naming First, Second, and Third Thoughts?) that henceforth his “every third thought shall be the grave”!

“Hiding in plain sight,” supposed Amanda, to whom the connection had seemed self-evident enough not to need remarking. And Ned himself, oddly, back in their apprentice-writer days, had never, as far as G. can recall, ever linked his surname to that of Shakespeare’s island-stranded Duke of Milan.

“What I
do
remember his saying early on is that if a story-teller hung a name like ‘Mister Prosper’ on his tale’s eminently successful protagonist, we would wince at his heavy-handedness—unless the piece was a Capital-A Allegory or a flat-out farce, with supporting characters like Suzy Spendthrift and Mary Miser.”

“Or,” Mandy added, “unless Protagonist P. at the end of the day turned out despite his name to be a loser at everything he set his hand to, in which case he himself might gnash his teeth at
life’s
ponderous irony, not the author’s. Right? I remember your telling me all this forty years ago, when you and I were a hot new item.”

To the tune of the Mary Hopkin recording from back then, “
Those were the da-a-ays, my friend,
” G. crooned to his stillbeloved; “
we thought they’d ne-ver end.
The blooming summertime of our lives.”

“So go have yourself a Capital-V Vision about it.”

He’d work on it, Narrator promised. But he believed she mentioned
two
question/comments regarding his tentative draft-thus-far. What was the second?

“Well . . . ” Final slurp of smoothie. “
You’re
supposed to be the story-maker-upper in this condo, and me the mere lyric poet—”

“
Mere
shmeer,” her husband interrupts to tut-tut.

“But I can’t help thinking that something more
interesting
ought to be going on in the present time of this narrative than just a series of visions that trigger Narrator’s recollections of his boyhood with Ned Prosper, and the ho-hum suspense of whether they’ll add up to another G. I. Newett-book. . . . ”

“Something like what?, its author wonders,” its author wondered.

“Oh, you know . . . like maybe some major bump in the long happy road of Narrator’s marriage, for example, to rev up the story? Suppose I confess an ongoing late affair with one of our StratColleagues, e.g., or maybe discover that you have a grown illegitimate son or daughter by some pre-Me fling of yours that you never got around to telling me about?
That
would juice things up!”

Parodying Andrew Marvell’s aforecited lyric, “
Help like that I shall refuse
,” Narrator intoned, “
till the conversion of the Juice
—into Manischewitz blackberry wine, maybe, or something else non-toxic. So who’d you hump, luv? And when, and why?”

She smiled one of her Mandy-smiles and raised her smoothie-glass in salute: “See? Situation revved up; Reader hooked.
Lhude sing cuccu!
”

“Hooked?” would-be-Author protested. “By such cornball chick-lit plot IEDs
¹¹
as those? But thanks for trying.”

“My pleasure—as has been the all-but-bumpless story of Us. May it remain so.”

“Here’s to that: No Plot-Complications or Rising Action in
our
story, s.v.p.”

Click of empty glasses (no symbolism intended).

“So on with your Summer,” then bade George Irving Newett’s virtual muse. “And if you include this conversation in your chapter-in-progress, consider changing
cornball
chick-lit plot-hooks to
cuckoo
chick-lit et ceteras. Another wink at Dear Reader?”

“Gotcha. I think?”

Heat expands; cold contracts. Although the calendric seasons are of equal three-month length, their days get longer as winter warms into spring and spring into summer, as do the corresponding life-seasons in this narrative. The “Winter” of Ned Prosper’s and George Newett’s childhood was a mere dozen years, 1930–42; the “Spring” of their adolescence and young adulthood was meant to be sixteen years (1943–59, through their teens and twenties), and in G.’s case was. But the “Summer” of Narrator’s full and more-or-less-robust maturity—from his thirties through his fifties, as G. sees it—1960 through 1989, let’s say—is nearly twice that span. How to squeeze it into a single chapter?, he wonders to his balky Muse. And what has it to do with nipped-in-the-bud Ned, who didn’t live to live it, and of whom one understood this rambling narrative to have become a memoir?

What appeared to be the case, its perpetrator realized as Common Era 2008 approached its literal midsummer (i.e., August 21, midway between June solstice and September equinox), was that nothing of Ned Prosper remained to memoirize except his end—a tale quickly told, as there’s frustratingly little of it to tell:

 

What kind of story-ending is that?

Well: As Ned himself remarked apropos of something-or-other in the last letter G. received from him, shortly before that ill-fated south-of-the-border excursion,

That was that—and the unfinishedness of it, as Reader may have noticed, haunts Narrator to this hour, this minute, this sentence. Was his friend even
really
writing that “Seasons” thing through the two years between spring break ’52 and June’54, or did he for some inscrutable reason only
pretend
to be absorbed in doing so while G. himself completed his modest Tidewater State M.F.A., scored his first modest short-story publications (which Ned praised—and helpfully appraised—with a perceptive astuteness unmatched by any subsequent G.-readers except Amanda Todd), and commenced his modest academic career? Could it be that that fiction so long in the works was in fact fictitious?