Letters (46 page)

Left sleepless anyroad by the Sunday’s shooting (in which—the thought gives me vertigo—Bea Golden appears to have acted a role something like the young Magda Giulianova!), Ambrose had spent most of the night in his boardwalk hotel drafting a scenario: on Prinz’s instructions, the fellow on the beach was to be the Author—
i.e.,
a ten-year-old “Ambrose” nearing forty and recollecting his boyhood; the couple
in flagrante delicto
were to be a youthful sweetheart of this Author’s
(l’Abruzzesa,
played by Bea Golden? I didn’t ask) and her current lover, a filmmaker no less, played of course by R.P. Never mind why they’d gone under the boardwalk for this coupling—the
mise en scène
was changed to Ocean City, “to tie in with the Funhouse sequence”—when all those hotels stood ready to hand. Then
mirabile
(but not ours, not ours)
dictu
—better,
mirabile obtuear,
marvellous to behold, for there were no words in this enactment save the dissolving ones of Ambrose’s text: on the strand next forenoon, the company assembled, Prinz’s first act is to make the
written scenario itself
the water message! As the cameras roll, he stuffs into a bottle half full of ocean
Ambrose’s rendering of the scene to be played
and tosses it into the surf, as if to punish the Author for having intruded on his amours (his fly is open; Bea Golden wears only a beach towel; the Marshyhopers still in attendance are agog)! Ambrose is aghast, then furious to the point of literally clenching fists… then
thrilled,
his very adjective, as he believes he begins to see the point: Prinz, having mouthed something soundless at him, strides into the cold surf, retrieves the bottle, fetches out the marinated, washed-out script, presents it with a smile of triumph to the Author, then stands by expectantly, his arm around Ms Golden, as if awaiting direction.

The point, my lover now concluded, was precisely the inversion, in this double reenactment, of the original, historical state of affairs (the Author, grown, relives his boyhood experience; the wordless film reiterates the written story). The World having given “Ambrose” a tantalising carte blanche when he most craved specific direction, “Arthur Morton King” had vainly striven for nearly three decades to fill that blank. Now, before his and the camera’s eyes, his scenario of this predicament’s reenaction—itself the latest of those strivings, and
nothing but direction
—is washed away. Things have come full circle; the slate is clean; he is free!

And, for the moment (as the movie moves on), he is also immobilised, speechless, unable to direct either the Director or himself. Then he laughs; he finds his first words (“I
see…!”)
and is interrupted by Prinz’s “Cut.” To which is presently appended a directive to the sound man, to make Ambrose’s laugh echo that of “the Laughing Lady in the Funhouse sequence.” Prinz then turns his back and strides hotelwards with the shivering heroine, leaving the bested Author as stranded as our ferryboat restaurant, which we now prepare to leave.

“It was simply brilliant,” Ambrose declared. “And the most brilliant thing about it, its final
point,
was… exactly what I can’t put into words,”—and what you will therefore excuse my having lost in this retelling!—“that the whole scene was not only nonverbal, but
unwritable.
Proof against literary rendering! A
demonstration;
a visual
tour de force.
What shall we do now, Germaine? You and I?”

My turn for speechlessness? For
Words fail me,
or
Dumbstruck by his sudden change of subject, I could not at once nor can I now…
that sort of thing?

Not a bit of it! Somewhere amid rockfish and recountment I had got a quiet message from my own Yours Truly, the genuine Germaine. While I found Ambrose’s story interesting enough, I had not been by it diverted, not for a moment, from the question posed on Todd Andrews’s foredeck. As if its reposing now were no non sequitur but the obvious close of his “unwritable sequence,” like a ready player at her cue I replied at once: We ought to tip the waitress moderately; we ought unhurriedly to recross the bridges to 24 L; there we ought leisurely to disrobe and temperately come together. If our fortnight’s abstinence was neither the effect nor the cause of a waning of his affection for me, as it certainly was not of mine for him, and if his inclination (which he’d said was clear to him) corresponded to mine, we ought at once to resume our sexual connexion, but less frenetically than before.
That’s
what I thought we ought; what thought he?

And now I bring this chronicle at last to bed with Miracle #2, so long
in utero:
He thought the same, exactly! 10% for the waitress, whose fault the place was not; a decorous disembarkation (but his hand on my arm, his beaming smile, his instant wordless rising from table, belied his composure); 50 mph across the moonless, still Choptank (where Andrews’s skipjack sat becalmed now in the channel, sails raised and slack, drifting on the tide in the last twilight) as we spoke—warmly, quietly, but neither urgently nor lightly—of how we’d missed one another’s persons, and had rather savoured that missing, and would be pleased now to have done with that savour. In April we’d have gone to it in the car; we tuned in the ten o’clock news instead and smiled together at the announcement that Venus-5, the Russian space probe, had successfully soft-landed on its target and begun, presumably, to probe. By half-past—serenely, surely—so had Ambrose.

He declared (calmly) he loved me. I replied, less calmly, I had liked him in March and craved him in April, and believed I now loved him too. He declared his wish to spend most nights with me; I replied that that was my wish also. We agreed however that some discretion should be exercised (more than we had done in April) to avoid unpleasantness in a small, conservative community; his daughter, too, posed something of a problem. In any case, there were more or less definite plans to shift the film company to the Niagara Frontier for ten days or so in June, which happened to fall between MSUC’s final exam period and commencement ceremonies: he hoped I would go with him; that we could as it were elope, “honeymoon” at the Falls…

“Stage Four” of our affair, then, I gather, will be the sweet extension—long may it extend!—of Miracle Two: this… this
spouselike
intercourse (he insisted I wear a nightgown: I am to help him shop for spare pajamas, a bathrobe,
carpet slippers,
to keep at 24 L!), which I find seizes me with a strange, helpless ardour. Poached eggs and tea! The morning newspaper! How far this delightful husbanding? Will it come to pipe and dog and bumbershoot? Am I to play at wiving even to the point of—

But now words fail me, anyhow falter, as they did not at Miracles One and Two. Last night, postcoitally, I’d reminded Ambrose of his promise to elucidate that Deeper Pattern he’d perceived in our relation. He pled fatigue, pledged a full account at breakfast, and proffered for the meanwhile only that our April binge had reminded him of the one other such sexual marathon in his life, twenty years previously, at age nineteen. It had been his second romance, if the term could be applied to an altogether physical connexion. Inasmuch as his first love had been hopeless (a prolonged boyhood admiration for his older brother’s girl, our friend Magda Giulianova), the uncomplicated sexual release of this second affair had been of great benefit to him. His partner, however—he would tell me tomorrow; I would be amused—a nymphomaniac of sixteen, had moved on after an exhausting summer to fresher fields, and in the ensuing season of involuntary chastity he had consoled himself (but not sexually) once again with Magda, by then Mrs Peter Mensch, whom he found himself this time loving but not desiring. Thus his first three “affairs”: recollected in this manner, they’d put him in mind of both that curious alphabetical list from the
New England Primer
and,
mutatis mutandis,
the progress of our own affair, which for better or worse bid to recapitulate his carnal biography. He had not however (he admitted with a drowsy chuckle) got the correspondences quite worked out: we were at Stage Four in the recapitulation, but Letter Seven of the
Primer’s
list…

A restless night for me: the novelty of a bedpartner; certain private memories of my own associated with Ambrose’s mention of the Niagara Frontier; half-impatient speculation on these rôles I was being cast in willy-nilly. If
l’Abruzzesa
(as it appeared) had been both #1 and #3, and I myself was #6, it wanted no great inductive prowess (from the chaps who brought you Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie) to guess that Magda had also been #5, no doubt this time sexually: the
ménage à trois
from which Ambrose had come to me with his talk of beggared Dido and an Aeneas who would not weigh anchor and run for Rome. Ergo, #4 will have to have been… his ex-wife: that obscure Marsha, of whom Ambrose never spoke; of his marriage to whom I knew little more than that at one point it had made him suicidally unhappy and that it had been terminated not very long since.

Also, perhaps unfortunately, that it had not been fruitless. The “dear damaged daughter,” as Ambrose called her, of whom the mother had evidently washed her hands, and
l’Abruzzesa
taken charge…

Now, I had not forgot that mad string of postscripts to his first letter: the G that followed
For-ni-ca-ti-on
was not
Germaine…

Nor was the Third Miracle a proposition of marriage. Ambrose slept soundly, as I did not, and woke refreshed and roused. I was headachy, anxious (forty-five needs its sleep, and I now confess to you, for good reason, a small vain lie in last month’s letters: I am not forty-five, but… a touch older); made the fact known when he essayed his “A.M. quickie,” or second probe of the Venusberg. Unperturbed, he reminded me that on May Day I’d found orgasm a pleasant palliative for menstrual cramps: ought we not to give it a go for simple headache? His bedside manner was so good-humored, I agreed to try his prescription if I might take two aspirins first. He popped up to fetch them for me.
Aussi mon pessaire,
I called after him: from its case in the medicine cabinet, just above the aspirin; I had neglected to deploy it last night.

He came back with two aspirins, a paper cup of water, an almost undiminished erection, a grave smile… and no diaphragm.

Let’s take a chance, says he. No thank you, says I: it’s smack in the middle of my month. As it was last night, he reminds me. My own recklessness, says I: it’s being late-fortyish I was taking a chance on. Germaine, says he, and takes my hand (I’ve downed my aspirins), and his voice goes thick…

3. And here is our Third Miracle, too flabbergasting for exclamation marks: A. wants us to forgo all contraception. He wants his seed in me. He wants me pregnant, impregnated, preggers. He wants to get a child on me, to get me with child. He wants us to make a baby: my old egg, his sluggish swimmers.
Conceive:
he wants me to conceive by him, conceive a new person, our chromosomes together, his genes and mine, the living decipherment of our mingled codes. That’s what
he
thought we ought.

I write this sunning by the newly dug pool of Jane Mack’s apartment complex, where I’ve basked and written all afternoon whilst my lover confers with his brother on some new crisis in the family firm. The Dorset Heights pool is empty; Germaine Pitt’s depths are full to overflowing, despite the best efforts of her vaginal sphincter. His stuff is in there, pooled with mine: I sit on it as I did first in our ad hoc committee chamber; for all I know, the flailing Ambrosian beasties have done their work already upon the ultimate Amherst ovum.

Surely I am quite crackers! I feel my life profoundly changing, and half hope it is my change of life. Even were we wed, two such poor track records as his and mine should not be bred. What imbecile child will be our
“Petit Nous’”?
And yet I love him, this odd Ambrose, for pressing me to this unthinkable thing—which I must pray will not come to pass!

Do you pray too, silent author of the novel I am still in midst of, and which still pleasantly distracts me when I am less distraught. Pray that your friend will not conceive the inconceivable upon your poor

P.S.: #2, I learned at breakfast (the mistress, not the miracle), was none other than our Bea Golden, then sixteen and busily about it under her “maiden” name, Jeannine Mack: all over the back roads of Baltimore County, the back rooms of yacht clubs right ’round the Chesapeake regatta circuit, the back seats of autos at 60 mph on the highway or parked on the roads aforementioned or garaged or driven into drive-ins or en route across the water aboard that same ferryboat (then unstranded, as the Bay was then unspanned; this was 1948-49) whereon I’d ventured over rockfish what we ought. Bea was a fresh young woman then; A. a freshman at the university: by the time their rut had run its alphabet he had gone from
A
’s to
F
’s in half his courses, and she was being serviced by upper-class underclassmen up and down the Ivy League. They had scarcely seen each other in the twenty years since, until Harrison’s funeral in February. Her rearrival here with the film company this month, coinciding as it did with the close of our own salty Second Stage, Ambrose found (and I quote) “piquant”: as if our recapitulating coupling had reconceived and rebirthed her. I find myself piqued that he finds it so, and I review uneasily his growing involvement in Prinz’s film. That water-message sequence on the beach: it seemed in his telling rather a rivalry, and she the prize. Did Dante’s Beatrice, I wonder, lay for the part? Is Ambrose really in conference with his brother as I sit here on his sperm?

P.P.S.: Shame on me: if I am mad, let it not be with jealousy. He has just telephoned (I’m back indoors now), not from his camera obscura but from the county hospital next door. The crisis, it develops, is not alone with Mensch Masonry, Inc.—which however is beset by problems enough—but with Ambrose and Peter’s mother, who underwent mastectomy last year but whose cancer has evidently metastasized and brought her down again, in all likelihood terminally. It is time, he suggests, I met what remains of his family: he has spoken of me to his brother, to
l’Abruzzesa,
to the D. D’d D. He would have his mother meet the potential mother of a grandchild she will never see (May she live forever and not see it!). Tomorrow, as Apollo-10 takes off to orbit the moon, I am to visit the hospital, then take lunch
en famille
at Mensch’s Castle! I am nervous as a new bride; they will think me too old for him; it is all madness.