Every Third Thought (15 page)

So how’s
that
for your big-deal novel’s fanfare,
Nedwardio mio
? Okay, okay: We can imagine you, back there in your damned eternal springtime, giving it the finger. But just as the muralist Diego Rivera famously declared, “I paint what I see,” so your ex-Muse-Mate—less adventurous than you, but perhaps therefore longer-lived—writes whatever dribbles from his Montblanc, take it or leave it.

Suggested Current Muse-Mate M. on 29 October 2008, the second anniversary of that tornadoing, “I say leave it. This
so-called Second Fall or whatever is more than a third done already, no? Your birthday’s a whole month behind us. We’ve had our first frost; all the leaves are turning, and the U. S. of A. is about to elect its first-ever African-American president, Zeus help him. Seems to me you’re overdue for another Capital-V Vision—number four, is it, or have I lost count?”

Number four it would be, if one could have it. Ms. T. hadn’t lost count, but her spouse—having lost to the passage of his prime-time season most of his hair and not a little of his libido, general pep, mental acuity, and . . . he forgets what-all else—is clearly also losing his visionality, let’s call it. The forehead contusion that occasioned First Fall Vision #1 was long since healed, sans stigmata. Vision #2 had been more or less in synch with the vernal equinox, but #3, such as it was, had arrived a full two months past the summer solstice and (who knew?) might turn out to have been his last.

Almost to his own surprise,
God damn you anyhow, Ned Prosper!
he found himself writing on Wednesday, November 5, the morning after Barack Obama’s historic election, which the Todd/Newetts had celebrated with friends at a colleague’s largescreen-TV’d house in Stratford’s renovated Bridgetown neighborhood.
How is it you never showed and shared your goddamn
Every Third Thought
thing with your oldest/best friend, the way he showed and shared his first novel-in-progress with you, chapter by chapter and draft after draft, and we showed and shared every goddamn other thing, from our naughty fifth-grade “pop-went-the-snaps” poem to each other’s adolescent
weenies and their post-adolescent adventures? What was so goddamn special about it, to keep it such a goddamn secret? Maybe you realized from Square One that it was a worthless piece of shit, and couldn’t admit that your buddy was turning out to be the writer you thought
you’d
be? Or hey: Maybe your big-deal magnum opus didn’t actually exist at all! Better yet, on Second goddamn Thought, maybe
this is it
, right? The Great American Novel, beginning with the immortal invocation/execration “God damn you anyhow, Ned Prosper,” lost asshole buddy that George Irving Newett loved almost to the point of bifuckingsexuality! There, he’s goddamn said it—or rather,
you’ve
said it, in this goddamn
Third Thought
thingamafuckingjig that, what the hell, on Third Thought might as well kick off with
PRE-AMBLE: CLEARING GEORGE I. NEWETT’S NARRATIVE THROAT
and carry right on to this goddamn “sentence” in goddamn “progress. ” . . . Why’d you up and die on me, old buddy, and who gives a shit half a century later except, well, obviously, still-desperately-scribbling G. I. Newett, and Mandy’ll understand, I hope, bless her: She’s what one has instead of kids and grandkids and fame and fortune—well, never mind goddamn fortune, but an undestroyed house anyhow and youthful summertime or at least mid-autumn vigor instead of late-November almost-winterhood, but what the fuck, we Todd/Newett//Newett/Todds have each other plus our separate-and-together scribblings and a (rented) roof over our gray- or scarce-haired heads, the pair of us still “perpendicular and taking nourishment,” thank you very goddamn much,
Zeus-or-whomever, plus writing—who knows, maybe even
finishing
!—Ned Goddamn Prosper’s goddamn
Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons
, and there you goddamn
have
it: THE (by-George) END!

 

And there
he
(by-George) had it, G. realized/hoped/wished/ decided and declared, first to himself and then—over lunchtime pepperoni-mushroom pizza at Bozzelli’s between Mandyclasses—to his mate:

 

Sprinkling extra oregano and hot pepper on her half as she frowned at his page-and-a-half printout, “Nope,” his soulmate finally replied, and bit into her first slice.

“Whatcha mean,
nope
? Those pages all but
exploded
out of my pen this morning! I never felt such a
release
!”

“Not even that time in Cancún when we both got dynamite diarrhea? Seriously, Gee: I can see how it must be a Grade-A release—
discharge
, whatever—to put that Third-Thought-Seasons crap behind you—”

“Could you maybe change the terminology?” But he understood at once that, as usual, she was right.

“Sorry there: to
get it off your chest
, okay? But a Vision it isn’t. So okay: You’ve cleared the decks; you’ve dumped your excess baggage . . . ”

“Wiped my butt? Flushed my toilet?”

“
Cleaned your slate
, hon;
settled your accounts.
Thing to do now is refill your pen and turn your page.... ” With her pizza-free left hand, she flipped the printout facedown on the not-all-that-clean Formica tabletop, displaying its virgin white backside, excuse G.’s imagery. “Take a deep breath. Exhale. Have yourself a
ree
-lax and, Muse willing, not just another hallucination, but a bona fide
inspiration
that’ll kick off George Irving Newett’s long-awaited
Meisterstück
: the culmination of his career! Sorry to be so stern, love. What’re you staring at?”

He was, in fact, while perpending her indeed-stern counsel, focusing on his pages’ bare white . . .
verso
, shall we say: not so virginal after all, he pointed out now to On-Target-As-Usual Mandy, but besmirched or anyhow marked with spots of tomato sauce from their booth’s previous occupants. A metaphor, maybe, for even the most original and innovative writer’s situation? What bard’s slate is ever completely clean?

“A poem-worthy point,” his wife happily granted, giving him a thumbs-up with her pie-free hand while nudging his leg under-table with her shoe-tip, as was her wont when her husband scored a conversational point. “I’ll see what I can do with it back in the shop. And
you’ll
see whether you can turn this slop”—by which she appeared to mean, as she handed it back to him, not the pizza-stained
verso
, but the “goddamn”-rich
recto
of his morning’s work—“into G. I. Newett’s latest.” It reminded her, she added as the couple stepped out of the pizzeria, pulling up their coat-collars against a chilly northwest wind, of
Ezra Pound’s take-off from Anonymous’s “
Sumer is icumen in, / Lhude sing cuccu
.” Did G. remember it?

“
Raineth drop and staineth slop
,” as Narrator recalled, indicating with a shrug and sigh his blemished script: “
And how the wind doth ramm! Sing: Goddamm!
Pound spells it with two
m
’s and no
n
, as I recollect; I’ll do likewise in revision.”

Parting at their side-by-side parked cars (Her Honda Civic, His Toyota Corolla, both vehicles in their second olympiad) to go their separate ways—she to the Shakespeare House office that had once been His, he to run a few errands before his cold-weather-afternoon workout in the college gym—they gave their closed right fists a comradely
dap
, Obama-style. Then, “Never mind
re
vision,” advised Amanda: “It’s time to
en
vision. Take that goddamn
goddamm
and run with it.”

Yeah, right. Well. Maybe?

We’ll just see.

A
HEM?

Okay.

21 December 2008: In Stratford/Bridgetown, autumn’s end and winter’s beginning. Likewise in the troubled global economy, in George Irving Newett’s much-morphed opus-in“progress,” and in its perpetrator’s expectable life span. On campus and around the old town and surrounding countryside, all the brilliant maple, birch, and other deciduous leaves have long since fallen except for a few tenacious oak-leaf hangers-on: the sort that, clinging fast right through till spring, reminded old Robert Frost (so Mandy reports) of blown-out-sail shreds on a storm-tossed ship limping into harbor. “He knew there was a Robert Frost poem in that image,” she remembers his saying on a visit to her undergrad college shortly before his death, “but he never figured out what it was.” Severe winter storms there’ve been in fact, from Seattle all the way to Frost’s New England,
though only a few flurries here in Avon County—where those same Never-Say-Die (or Maybe-We’re-Dead?) “survivors” on their gaunt bare boughs put Narrator in mind of the few not-yet-discarded leaves of
Every Third Thought
: the title originally of his lost friend’s lost novel, then of G.’s attempted but soon-abandoned memoir of its author, next (“on Second Thought”) of his likewise abortive effort somehow to reimagine and recreate that novel itself, and finally—surely
finally
, on Third Thought!—of . . . what? Some
Meisterstück
of his own? A perhaps valedictory but nonetheless fresh, original, inspired, and lively new work by Aged-but-Still-Vigorous Fictionist G. I. Newett? Or merely the remains of a feeble attempt at some such last hurrah?

Re-declares its would-be author, We’ll just see.

In the calendar’s ten remaining days, the sinking DJIA will waver from just above to just below 8K. Multitudes of workers will lose their jobs in the worst recession since G.I.N.’s childhood, threatening—in his Second Childhood?—to become Great Depression II. The “Big Three” U.S. automakers will plead for a thirty-four-billion-dollar bailout from the federal government. Bernard Madoff’s monstrous Ponzi scheme will be revealed to have swindled his investor-clients out of half again that amount. Reduced demand will briefly drop the nation’s regular-gasoline price from its October high of more than four dollars a gallon to less than two. And Israel, frustrated by Hamas’s escalating rocket attacks from Gaza, will counterattack massively with tanks, bombs, and heavy civilian casualties.

Happy New Year!

We Todd/Newetts will duly salute it—not at midnight on the year’s last day, we being early-to-bed types, but with a halfglass of Korbel Brut at maybe 10:15 or so—and toast as well G.’s approaching the final metaphoric season of his life, though presumably by no means the final
calendar
season thereof, he being in good general health and (except for ever-more-frequent “senior moments”) some way yet from that Second Childhood, just as the solstice-time we tell of was some way yet from the above-raised Year’s End toast. It too we greeted, as is our wont, with a bit of bubbly at sundown on Saturday 12/21: the first half of that bottle whose second (like its sippers, not
quite
fizzled out) we plugged and re-refrigerated until December’s end. As is also our wont on such reflective occasions, “Lucky us,” we agreed, side by side on our rented “family room” couch in our rented lodgings (owners still undecided about selling, they’ve reported from south Florida, but definitely tending that way despite the real-estate scene’s being currently very much a buyer’s market, not a seller’s), champagne-flutes in one hand and partner’s hand in the other: not only still alive and materially comfortable despite our tornado-loss, but looking back on after-all-pretty-damned-fulfilling careers and a fine life together.

“One suspects,” commented Mandy, “that your Dear Reader has heard that already. Maybe more than once?”

“So here’s to Him/Her, may She/He fare as well! Here’s to your perky poetry and my plodding prose: Long may they waver?”

Lucky to see print at all, opines his Ms., in the age of iPods, BlackBerries, and flat-screen/hi-def/digital TVs, “Just as
we’re
lucky to have a roof over our heads and your pension and my salary, plus Social Security both literal and figurative.”

“Plus Son in St. Louis and Daughter in Detroit,” her mate risked teasing, “or is it Denver? Grandkids in Greenwich and Grenada!”

His
mate groaned and let go his hand. “Don’t start that again, Gee. We agreed to quit that nonsense.”

“So we did: sorry sorry sorry, and sorry to have to keep saying sorry!” But what the fuck, Reader: Now that he’d opened that forbidden door and let chill December in, why not up and confess to her and to Dear Whoever-
You
-Are that “Ned Prosper,” too—lost asshole Buddy who steered G. I. Newett through boyhood and young manhood like Virgil tour-guiding Dante through the first two precincts of the Hereafter—has likewise been Narrator’s invention all along? . . .

“
What?!
”

. . . That of course one had boyhood pals—a series of them through Bridgetown Elementary, Stratford High, and Tidewater State U.—and the usual initiatory “learning experiences” of one’s pre-teens, teens, and early twenties; but none so singly, consistently,
singularly
important as was “Ned Prosper” to “G. I. Newett.” Would that one
had
had, and had him still!

To his relieved surprise, instead of emptying her drink on his head and dialing 9-1-1, his wife merely rolled her eyes, drew a deep breath, and asked sarcastically, “To
ménage à trois
with
you and me, maybe?” But then added, “No thanks, mate—and you’ve gotta be kidding that he and his
Third Thought
novel and the rest have been fictions all along, like Son in Schenectady and Daughter in Duluth, or I’m
outta
here!”

He re-took her hand. Smiled. Shook his head. “Nah. Sometimes I half wish they
were
, so I could dream up a
Seasons
novel from scratch. Whether Ned’s
fiction
was a fiction, we’ll never know for sure. But his being fictitious is
my
dumb-assed, impulsive, God-only-knows-why fiction. The guy himself was flesh-and-blood fact.”