The Floating Opera by John Barth

Author:John Barth [Barth, John]
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2015-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

XV. that puckered smile

One doesn’t move on without giving that tight smile, Betty June’s puckered smile, some further attention. Mere drunkenness and pain are no excuse for my not having realized, until she was upon me with the bottle, that I had done to Betty June a thing warranting murder at her hands (I am, by the way, reasonably confident that it was Betty June in the Calvert Street whorehouse, although I was certainly drunk). She wanted to kill me, I see now, for having laughed that time in my bedroom.

Here’s how I understand it: that morning in 1917 she had learned that Smitty Herrin, to whom she had unreservedly humbled herself, had all the while been married to Mona Johnston, from Henry Street, and had made Mona pregnant. In desperation, Betty June had come to me and had attempted—unconsciously, I daresay—to reassert her wounded ego by humbling me with the gift of her body, a lean receptacle for my innocence. But in the throes of intercourse I had laughed, so violently as to unman myself, and couldn’t even stanch her injured tears for very helplessness. She had assumed that I was laughing at her, at some ridiculousness of her, although this was not particularly true. And then—what? Smitty and I both enlisted, he was killed, and she became a prostitute. Ordinarily, perhaps, it would have been possible for her to rationalize her behavior, first as a patriotic gesture and later as gaining a livelihood from “the oldest profession”—but she had my laughter in her ears to remind her, every time she unhooked her one-piece gown for a new customer, that there was something ludicrous about her and about what she was doing. For many sorts of people, and Betty June is one of them, this suspicion would be nearly intolerable. So: seven years later, when she’s doubtless so deeply enmired in the business and all its attendant vices that she can’t very well escape, seven years later I show up party-drunk at her whorehouse—looking prosperous and smug to her, no doubt—accept her as my whore without a word, and only later, after permitting her to massage my body, refer with vague regret to the time I laughed at her.

Don’t you agree that this is probably how it was? I can’t account otherwise for her murderousness (yet I must say, though I can scarcely explain it, that if I hadn’t mentioned the matter, I believe Betty June would have gone through with the intercourse I had paid for). The remarkable thing, it seems to me, is not at all that she wanted to kill me—even simple shame at being thus discovered could account for that—but that I failed to realize it at once; that I missed the obvious implication of that puckered smile.

And this is what I wanted to say, because I consider it fairly important (hell, even urgently important) to the understanding of this whole story: quite frequently, things that are obvious to other people aren’t even apparent to me.

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