Letters (108 page)

Joe Morgan reminded Author and Director that, if historical accuracy was to apply, the detonation of the Fort Erie magazine ought to occur in predawn darkness. Dum & Dee looked to their leader, who quietly intoned: I think evening. The light.

And those crazy lake flies (Tweedledee): there’s a major hatch on. Millions. Joe volunteered that those clouds of insects—which hatch by the
billions
at summer’s end in low-lying areas around the Great Lakes, swarm about harmlessly for a few evenings, and then die—have been known since 1812 on the Ontario shore of the Niagara as American Soldiers, and on the New York shore as Canadian Soldiers.

Far
out,
chorused the filmists. The black contingent exited. The old folks rocked, smiled, and nodded at each remark. Homer rocked too, though his chair was no rocker, like an Orthodox Jew at prayer. I was moved to suggest: Let’s let that fly hatch be the Second Conception, what?

My lover saluted me with half a ham sandwich.

What
is
the Second Conception? Merope innocently enquired of Prinz, who replied without turning his head: Same as the first. Bruce?

This last to Tweedledum, who promptly brandishes some sort of periodical—clearly they’d rehearsed this bit of business at their end of the table and were ready for that inadvertent cue from ours—and read (I paraphrase, but pretty closely):
The question put by the film
Frames,
says scenarist A. M. King, comes essentially to this: Can a played-out old bag of a medium be fertilised one last time by a played-out Author in a played-out tradition? King himself invokes William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy
The Country Wife,
whose hero pretends to be impotent in order to cuckold his sympathetic friends. Viewers of
Frames
may judge this wishful thinking on its “Author’s” part.

Smirks Tweedledee:
Frames
is our new working title. Adds Bruce: “Author” is in quotes.

The publication he identified as a Buffalo “underground” film newsletter; the article a report on Those Crazy Goings-on in Delaware Park. He had another copy; Ambrose and I were welcome to this one.

Well, I was appropriately shocked. Not stunned, exactly, but startled for sure. But the cameras—and at least four pairs of sunglassed eyes—were on us.

Dirty pool, growled Ambrose: they left out the Author’s Trenchant Irony; his Mordant Wit.

Don’t they always, I said, as levelly as I could manage. And to Prinz: If
that’s
your Magazine Explosion, luv, it’s a bleedin’ dud. See you at the fort.

Exeunt
Played-Out Old Bag of a Medium and Scenarist A. M. King, the latter smitten (by his own protestation) with pride in my self-possession and presence of mind, the former mad as a wet hen. He was
misquoted,
for Christ’s sake, Ambrose complained all the way to our motel; I must learn, as he had learnt, the Larger View of Journalism, to wit: that newspapers are no doubt necessary even though they never get anything quite right. Bugger yer Larger View, humphed I: I really am nothing but an effing
symbol
for you, what?

Symbol yes, my companion ardently acknowledges.
Effing
Symbol yes;
Also
an Effing Symbol yes. But Nothing But? Never!

I had aborted one fetus already in Fort Erie Ontario, I reminded him; I could abort another. Ambrose was transported: Was I telling him I truly might be et cetera? If I was, said I, I wasn’t by “Scenarist Arthur Morton King,” who for all I cared could stuff
himself
into a bottle and post himself over the Falls. Done, said Ambrose: done and done! That King is dead!

We were stripping as we quarrelled, to shower and change for the afternoon. This last was his
In-vi-ta-ti-on
to come off our spat and into bed, and though I wasn’t yet mollified enough for that, my ire had indeed peaked and was passing. I understood what he meant by
also
symbolic but not
merely
symbolic, and if he truly intended to have done with that corny nom de plume and write straightforwardly under his own name, I took that for a healthy developement. In short, I was ready to return to our Mutuality and, in time, lend a hand to King John Thomas’s Restoration. But as I came from the W.C. to kiss and make up, I had a chilly flash that was nothing menopausal: the
Second Conception scene!

I tore the room apart to find mikes and cameras. Ambrose swore (when he understood what I was about) he’d not Set Me Up, but agreed that Prinz might well be setting us both up, and joined in the dismantlement of Erie Motel Room 21. Nothing there, unless on the C.I.A. level of miniaturization and concealment. Spent and laughing by now at the mess we’d made—and would have to restore—we were indeed tempted to take a tumble in its midst; “bang the old symbol,” as Ambrose put it from where he lay naked on the piled-up bedclothes. Yet however well we’d searched, and however much I assured him I believed his protestations, I couldn’t bring myself to climb aboard, so repellent was the thought of Prinz’s somehow bugging our intercourse. Indeed, the more that possibility laid hold of my imagination, the more inclined I grew to declare a moratorium on sex—but not on sweet Mutuality!—till we were safely out of camera range.

Ambrose was delighted; I soon realised why, and rolled my eyes to heaven. The weekend, you see, was upon us: if we now put by our heavy humping for a spell of Chaste Reciprocal Affection, then Week 3 of this happy 6th Stage of ours would echo Stage 3 of our affair (approximately May), itself an echo of his chaste “3rd affair.” Moreover it was, I now recalled, at about this juncture in our affair that we began to realise how its ontogeny, so to speak, was recapitulating its phylogeny. Did that portend on the one hand that our Happy Sixth Stage was good for another month at least? Did it mean on the other hand that we had
only
another month? And—dear God!—that we were not really “ourselves” yet after all, at least not entirely, and would not be until, let’s see, the 2nd week of September
(i.e.,
the 6th week of this 6th Stage)?

I offered to go vomit. Was truly nauseated, whether by that tiresome prospect or by the Last Brunch. Morning Sickness! jubilated Ambrose. I made good my offer.

Sunset at Old Fort Erie! Mighty Niagara chugging north before our battlements! The lights of the U.S.A. to eastward; of a coming thundershower to southwestward, out over the muggy lake; of Tweedles Dum and Dee positioned about our ramparts and especially in the neighbourhood of the restored powder magazine, a brick-vaulted subterranean chamber in the northeast bastion atop which, in director’s chairs, sat the Director and the Director’s moll: empty-handed, neither smoking nor drinking nor reading nor talking, only waiting, he in his uniform nondescripts, she in her Salvation Army chic.

And the lake flies, John! Do you have them at Chautauqua, I wonder? Overgrown mosquitoes in appearance, they neither bite nor sting, only fill the night in such numbers at the peak of their week-long hatch that the whole air thrums; gather so thickly upon any light surface that it is darkened; immolate themselves by the thousands on any exposed electric light bulb (small hills of the immolated were piling already beneath the floodlights). Tons of idle protein on the wing: the phenomenon is African, prodigious! We walked through it, exclaiming and waving our arms (luckily our clothing was not light-coloured; the insects are not attracted to people; they landed on our clothes and skin and hair only accidentally, but given their numbers, such accidents occurred by the dozens per second. Once perched, they stay there; brushed off, they obligingly die), to where the lighting crew amused themselves with raising and lowering the volume of that huge thrum at will, as if with a control knob, by brightening and dimming the floodlights. Astonishing!

Once over our initial revulsion, we found we could move through the swarm without injury or much difficulty, and that a constant easy fanning of the hands kept one’s face and hair reasonably bugless. The scene that follows you must envision in ever dimming light, however, as the lake flies becloud the floodlight lenses with their cumulative dying juices.

Can we shoot in these conditions? asks Ambrose when we reach the magazine. We’re shooting, replies the video Tweedle (Dum); you’re on. Must be the Fort Erie Assault scene, quips our Author: American and Canadian Soldiers are dying like flies.

No response from the filmists to this Mordant Wit. I then declared to the company (what Ambrose and I had rehearsed en route from our motel by way of joining the battle, as it were) that in our judgement no Second Conception scene was called for until and unless the First should prove a mis-take. In plain English: played out or not, we had reason to believe ourselves preggers already. The charade Prinz meant as Squeezing Blood from A Turnip would in fact be Carrying Coals to Newcastle; I could not reconceive till I was delivered.
Preggers!

We were regarded: the tiniest hint of interest in Merry Bernstein’s eyes; none whatever in the others’ (Prinz still wore his sunglasses, so who knows). Not exactly a triumphant opening, though it was exciting for us so to declare ourselves. Ambrose therefore commenced an improvisation that led to the following exchange, which I approximate from memory and edit for concision:

A.M. (to Prinz and Merry B.): Maybe
you
should do the Second Conception, what? Film’s as played-out a medium as Fiction. Off with your clothes, Merry.

R.P.:
I’m the Director.

A.M.:
Direct, then. My script calls for a Fecund, Vital New Medium to conceive a Major Work of Art by a Virile Young Director who liberates her from residual contamination by the Old Medium she has rendered obsolete. It’s your big scene, Mer.

R.P.
(quietly, to Yours Truly):
You
undress, ma’am.

Y.T.:
I jolly shan’t.

R.P. then makes a small sign to Merope, no more than a twitch of the mouth and turn of the hand, and she begins peeling off her Salvation Armies for the cameras. I am more and more cheered: Merry’s jugs are gross of nipple and ill suspended, her thighs and bum unappealingly slack for a girl’s and striated already, her legs unshaven. Naked, she stands self-consciously in the (ever dimming) lights: a lumpy Lake Erie Venus shooing flies.

MERRY B.
(approximately): Shoo!

AUDIO TWEEDLE (to
A.M.
): Let the Muse come to you and Reggie now. The camera will show which medium she inspires.

And dear
A.M.
(an able ad-libber when he’s up for the game): She’s not
my
muse, Reg. Exhibition is
your
business.

R.P.
(with smile): You withdraw?

A.M.
(ditto, and still ad libitum, mind): I cannot withdraw from what I decline to penetrate. Germaine and I stand pat.

This sally gained something, no doubt, from the ambiance. I happily took my Author’s arm; he bussed my cheek; the lights dimmed another quantum. Reggie shrugged, fetched up the little megaphone he’d affected in the Scajaquada Scuffle, and terminated what will no doubt prove to be the longest stretch of dialogue in this flick by calling down into the magazine for “Private Blank.”

Yup. Forth issued into the failing light the former Mrs Ambrose Mensch: dazed, sullen, and
much
the worse for whatever wear she’d been at. Marsha’s complexion was flushed and mottled, her gait unsteady; her eyes were wide and glassy, her hair and frock a wreck, as if she’d been in dire clutches indeed. But she was smiling, albeit loonily, as she wandered our way, waving a tiny American flag.

Ambrose squeezed my arm. Jacob Horner cried her name and hurried (for him) from the shadows behind us—we’d not seen him there—to her side. Marsha blinked and flagged him wanly off, as if he were a lake fly. Merope wondered to the Director whether it was okay to put her clothes back on—but Prinz was watching us watch Marsha. Though Ambrose’s concern was evident from his grip, he said and did nothing, sensibly leaving to Horner the anxious interrogation of His Woman.

He got not much out of her—or of Prinz, whom he understandably pressed to tell where she’d come from, where been, and doing what with whom. She’d been to “the
other
farm,” Marsha woozily acknowledged, and now was back at this one; bugger the rest of it. She declined to be taken to the infirmary, or home to bed. She managed after all a sort of smirk of recognition at Ambrose and me. The cameras rolled.

Joe Morgan, expressionless, appeared beside Prinz, who tersely called for “the Exercycles.” Grips at once fetched forth from the magazine a pair of those machines and placed them side by side before the Director, who clearly had prepared this odd business in advance. Docile Marsha mounted as readily as she could manage, saying Ouch, wow, I’m still sore, and began pedalling. Frowning Horner joined her on the other. Merope (dressed now) resumed her chair and lost interest in the spectacle.

It’s the Horseback-Riding scene, Tweedledum explained to a microphone held by his comrade. How can that be? that chap dutifully enquired. In the original it’s “Rennie Morgan” who gives “Jacob Horner” his riding lessons. Where’s Ms Golden?

It was her or me, Marsha muttered. What on earth, I whispered to Ambrose. He shook his head, touched my hand, replied that it looked to him very much as if his ex-wife was stoned out of her mind. Marsha was pedalling now more industriously; one would say almost grimly. Horner reached over to dab her brow with his handkerchief. Looking straight at Ambrose she enounced: You’ll get yours, too.

Prinz signalled Audio Tweedle (so it appeared to us), and, a moment after, there issued from some loudspeaker in the magazine—unnaturally clear, even strident, but as whacked-out mechanical as Marsha’s was whacked-out narcotic—the voice of Bea Golden, delivering what sounded like a pronunciamento: As of yesterday,
“Phi-point
of the calendar year and of LILYVAC’s Five-Year Plan,” the Mating Season was closed. Today—“St Neapolus’s Day and Bicentennial of the Emperor’s birth”—began “the Fall Work Period of Year
E: i.e.,
Year Four of the Five-Year Plan.” Which, however, in the light of “the Perseid Illuminations,” might well prove to be “Year
N,
the first of a new
Seven
-Year Plan.” Et cetera, and don’t ask me! To be fertile matters little, Bea’s voice went on; to be fertilised, little more (this, John, addressed as if directly to Ambrose and me!): What matters is the bringing to term and the successful delivery of that Hero who is both Saviour and Golden Destroyer.
Germaine Gordon Pitt, Lady Amherst:
nota bene!
Morgana Le Fay: your turn will come! The New Golden Age will commence April 5, 1977!