Letters (75 page)

As befits what looks to be the commencement of my
post
-Ambrosian life. Having been the efficient cause of my dismissal from Academe, the man has, as of Monday last, dismissed me, and as of yesterday abandoned me. Whilst I write this in air-conditioned solitude at 24 L, he is alone at “Barataria” with his new mistress, Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer Bernstein Golden, of whom he made triumphant conquest last night by the rockets’ red glare.

Do I seem calm? I
am,
rather: that bitter hopeless peace old Thomas promised. Everyone is being frightfully understanding: good Magda Giulianova Mensch, of whom more to come; Todd Andrews; Jane Mack; even
Drew
Mack, who regrets by telephone that his disruption of the MSU commencement cost me my job (an example of bourgeois capitalist academic capriciousness, says Drew). My old friend “Juliette Récamier” has written sympathetically from her current post at Nanterre (don’t ask me how she heard so fast), where “for such an outrage [as my cashiering] we would burn down the university.” Oh, yes, and “Monsieur Casteene” also deplores (from Castines Hundred) John Schott’s move, of which he disclaims foreknowledge; nor had he imagined, when as A. B. Cook he accepted Schott’s invitation to visit Marshyhope for the fall semester (a detail he neglected to mention in our Remarkable Conversation) that he would be
replacing
me. He’d hoped, as my temporary colleague, to change my mind yet about publishing his ancestor’s letters: a service to himself, to historiography, and to the 2nd Revolution which he now prayed my altered circumstances might reincline me to, but which he would not solicit from me against my wishes. He is making “other arrangements” for their publication. If things should go ill between me and my current friend, God forbid, and I needed a change of scene, I was of course welcome at any time, and
for
any time, to Castines Hundred.

I thanked him politely for the invitation, but told him that things between my current friend and me were just dandy.

I have not mentioned that, even as he left me for Bea Golden (more precisely, upon Monday’s evidence that his low-motile swimmers had failed again with me, but before his Independence Day triumph over Reg Prinz), Ambrose informed me that our affair is
not
ended; only its 4th Stage, corresponding—somehow—to his failed marriage. As I was not pregnant, the 5th Stage would now commence—it was how he
felt
—and he hoped it would be of short duration, for he could not imagine my enjoying it any more than #4. I was a fool, he added (not for the first time since Commencement Day), to have persisted in this one-way correspondence with you, and especially to have
made a carbon
of such compromising stuff: but in my circumstances it was an understandable and forgivable folly. He was very sorry that it and he had cost me my job; contemptuous as he was of John Schott’s vulgar ambitions and pretentions, he was not finally so of mass public colleges like Marshyhope, as long as one did not mistake their activity for first-class education. He knew I’d done excellent things for the few really able students who had come my way, and at least no harm to the commonalty. Even
he
is sympathetic!

He could scarcely say what had possessed him at the exercises: he’d had an equivocal hint from Prinz, who had it from Drew Mack, that the radicals might be Up To Something after all; we both had heard from Bea with some amusement that Merope Bernstein had mobilised herself and disappeared in a hurry from the Farm when her ex-stepmother, after a sympathetic reunion, had cautioned her that Jerome Bray might well materialise in Fort Erie. But there wasn’t “really” any prearrangement: it had merely occurred to Ambrose that some sort of neo-Dadaist, bourgeois-baiting stunt would suit the movie, and he
was
distraught about his mother’s dying, and for that matter he
was
professionally preoccupied with the roots of writing, its mythical connexions with Thoth and Hermes, ibis and crane, moon and phallus and lyre strings… He too had been disrupted!

Oh, yes, and by the way: he still loved me, he declared; still hoped to impregnate and to marry me. To that end we ought still to Have Sex from time to time, once my bleeding stopped, what? Not to worry about the rent and the groceries; we’d manage. But I might be seeing a bit less of him in the days ahead, when he suspected that Andrea’s condition, his authorial concerns, and his activities in Prinz’s film might all approach critical levels.

Have I mentioned that, unaccountably, I Still Love Him too? Elsewise I’d clear straight out of this incubator of mildew and mosquitoes and get me to the clear cold air of Switzerland, or the at-least-civilised perversions of my “Juliette” in Nanterre. I could truly almost wish I were lesbian! When Magda came ’round this morning—ostensibly to ask whether I wanted to go with her to visit Mother Mensch in hospital, but actually to comfort me for Ambrose’s infidelity—when to the surprise of both of us we found ourselves embracing and enjoying a good womanly weep together—I was so moved by her direct understanding and sympathy, so relieved to be close to another
woman
for a change, I could almost have Gone Right On. She too, I half think, and altogether guiltlessly. There
was
a rapport there… But we didn’t, and I’m not, and what would please me even better would be to be sexless altogether, as shall doubtless come to pass soon enough. In the meanwhile, and mean it is, I love and crave (and miss) that unconscionable sonofabitch Ambrose; that—that scratcher of my itch; that
writer.

And I have got clear ahead of my story. No question but moviemakers have the world in their pocket in our century, as we like to imagine the 19th-century novelists did in theirs. Let Ambrose ask the skipper of the
Original Floating Theatre II
to delay his leaving Cambridge for half an hour so that he can make a few notes thereupon for a novel in progress: the chap wouldn’t have considered it. But let a perfectly unknown Reg Prinz show up with camera crew and the vaguest intentions in the world… the world stops, reenacts itself for take after take, does anything it can imagine its Director might wish of it!

The showboat was docked at Long Wharf on the weekend of the Marshyhope fiasco: we were to have gone to see Bea do her Mary-Pickford-of-the-Chesapeake on the Saturday evening—and Ambrose actually went, straight out of the pokey, as did Prinz & Co., but yours truly was too ill with consternation for further vaudeville. The
O.F.T. II
was to have sailed on the Monday, but lingered till the Wednesday, cast and all, so that Prinz could get footage for
possible
use, and agreed to an unscheduled return to Cambridge on 4 July so that he could combine shots of the locally famous fireworks display with—here we go—a “sort of remake” of the
Gadfly
excitement of just a fortnight past! History really
is
that bird you mention somewhere, who flies in ever diminishing circles until it disappears up its own fundament!

En attendant,
as I despaired here in Dorset Heights, and wondered where on earth a sacked acting provost might go from Marshyhope, the cinematographic action shifted down-county to “Barataria,” where it and Ambrose and Bea got on quite well without me. I wonder who does Prinz’s cost accounting? That set, elaborate for him, was built months ago and has scarcely been used; as of the end of
Giles Goat-Boy
(I’m done), there is no mention of the 1812 War in your works. But on 23 June 1813, a British naval force attempted to dislodge Jean Lafitte’s Baratarians from their stronghold on Grand Terre Island, near New Orleans, and on the following day Admiral Cockburn’s Chesapeake fleet sacked Hampton, Virginia, raping a number of American ladies in the process. It was decided to combine “echoes” of both events in an obscure bravura scene shot on their approximate sesquicentennial down at the Bloodsworth Island set. Don’t ask me why they didn’t throw in Napoleon’s abdication on the 22nd (which coincided nicely with my cashiering and Jerome Bonaparte Bray’s abandoning the goat farm and pursuing Bea to Maryland on the Sunday), or Custer’s Last Stand against Sitting Bull at Little Big Horn on the 25th.

Don’t ask me either what exactly went on down there. I was—perhaps you noticed?—still too distressed in last Saturday’s letter to be either a good listener to, or a good reporter of, the news. Ambrose passed through on the Thursday and the Friday en route to spend time with his mother and his daughter; we slept together (this was just before the Hot Moon rose and my last hopes sank); I gather from his perfunctory accounts that Bea was as frightened of Mr Bray as he and Prinz were intrigued by him, and that the chap had fastened himself upon the company like a solicitous mosquito. Merry Bernstein (before she jumped the bail Drew Mack put up for her and fled underground upon Bray’s appearance in Cambridge) had confided to Bea that Bray’s assault on
her,
in her flat at Chautauqua back in May, had been of a bizarre anal character and literally venomous: she believed he had sodomized her with some exotic C.I.A. poison on his member, out of spite for her leaving him; she warned her ex-stepmother that the man was scarcely human. At this point Bea was still as much amused as alarmed by Cook’s protestations; she confided to Ambrose (a mark of their increased chumminess) that the story had reminded her of Merope’s father, whose penchant for anal copulation had been a factor in their divorce. She’d learned, she said, to keep a tight arse in such company. Ambrose himself was still fascinated by the correspondence of some of Bray’s obsessions—1st and 2nd Cycles, Midpoints and Phi-points, Fibonacci numbers, Proppian formulae—with his own preoccupations, of which they seemed to him a mad and useful limiting case. Bray’s rôle as a new rival for Bea’s favours did not much concern him: it seemed to frighten her closer, and Bray himself appeared to regard him as an ally against Reg Prinz—who, we must remember, was at this time still Bea’s lover.

Well: at some point in the shooting, Mr Bray—an amateur Stanislavski-Method actor, it would seem, as well as something of an amateur historian—carried over into the Rape-of-Hampton sequence his piratical characterisation from the Assault on Barataria (sound effects courtesy of the U.S. Navy), in which he’d taken the rôle of one John Blanque, a Creole friend of Jean Lafitte’s in the Louisiana legislature who later joined the buccaneering crew. Now it happens that Admiral Cockburn blamed the rape of the Virginia women, not on his English sailors, but on a gang of unruly French
chasseurs britanniques
whom he had impressed from the Halifax prison-ships into his Chesapeake service, and as the two events were being as it were montaged… Our Beatrice finds herself not only leapt upon, per program, by two extras and stripped fetchingly of her hoopskirts and petticoats to the accompaniment of “Gallic” grunts and leers, but “rescued” suddenly by Monsieur Blanque, who with surprising strength flings other Baratarians off her (one has a swelling the size of a goose egg on his thigh) and very nearly accomplishes Penetration before his victim—who must have felt herself back in her blue-movie period—can unman him with a parasol to the groin.

Yup, parasol. It was late June, Prinz had reasoned; they’d’ve had parasols. And never mind verisimilitude, he liked the fetishistic look of naked ladies with open parasols, and had instructed the girls to hold tight to their accessories whilst being stripped. Our pirate now clutches his family jewels and begs Bea’s pardon: he was overcome with love; it was that season of year. Ambrose not quite to the rescue this time, but nearby enough to get his comforting arms about the victim, I daresay—who is inclined to bring assault charges against Bray until Prinz dissuades her. Indeed, the familiarity of the tableau—Bea
in extremis,
the Author to the rescue (sort of), Bray apologising—has given the Director an Idea: inasmuch as the movie reenacts and re-creates events and images from “the books,” which do likewise from life and history and even among themselves, why should it not also reenact and echo its
own
events and images?

Ambrose is enchanted, Bray is willing, Bea is appalled, Prinz is boss. The 4th of July re-creation of the
Gadfly
party is devised. But it mustn’t be a strictly programmed reenactment: we are on the Choptank now, aboard the
O.F.T. II,
with a different backup cast. Time has moved on: it will be Independence Day; never mind the War of 1812. Let each principal, independently, imagine variations on the original
Gadfly
sequence.

How is it, I wonder, Prinz gets so much said when I’m not there to hear him? In any case, my own variation, proposed at once, was that this time around I stay home in bed. Ambrose’s idea—which, along with my menstruation and the completing of his Perseus-Medusa story in first draft, kept him from me most of the week since my last letter—was to reply to Prinz’s triumphantly Unwritable Scene (on the beach of Ocean City back on 12 May) with a victoriously Unfilmable Sequence.

He was in a high state of excitement; didn’t even remark upon the fact, if he noticed it, that since the full moon I’d ceased to wear my teenybopper costumes, too depressed to give a damn what he thought. Did I not agree, he demanded to know, that we were amid a truly extraordinary coming together of omens, echoes, prefigurations?
Item:
On the Tuesday noon, 1 July, the midpoint of the year, he was in midst of a fiction about the classical midpoint of man’s life, and felt himself personally altogether
nel mezzo del cammin
etc.
Item:
Our sacking from Marshyhope U. had occurred (so said his desk calendar) on the anniversary of the end of Napoleon’s 100 Days.
Item:
Wednesday the 2nd, when Prinz began preparing his reenactment of the
Gadfly’s
grounding and Ambrose all but wound up his tale of Perseus and Medusa, was the date on which in 1816 the French frigate
Méduse
ran aground off the Cape Verde Islands and put out the raft that inspired Géricault’s famous painting; the frigate itself had just the year before—and at just this same time of year—been involved in Napoleon’s postabdication scheme to run the British blockade at Rochefort and escape to America. And—get
this,
now—he had just that day
(i.e.,
midday Thursday, 3 July) been informed by Todd Andrews, whom he’d happened to meet in the Cambridge Hospital and with whom he’d had a chat about the strange Mr Bray, that that gentleman had once represented himself to the Tidewater Foundation as the Emperor Bonaparte, and had even mentioned, in one of his mad money-begging letters, his abdication, his flight to Rochefort, the plan to run him through the British blockade, his final decision to surrender and plead for passport to America: where (Bray is alleged to have alleged) he lives in hiding to this day, making ready his return from his 2nd Exile!