Letters (113 page)

In an Unprecedented Show Of Self-Possession, which alas Marsha was oblivious to, you Dared The Thomas E. Dewey Thruway for the 20-odd consecutive miles from Exit 59, Fredonia, to Exit 58, Irving/Angola, before your Nerve Failed and you Exited. Handing the attendant the correct change! Checking
Mr. & Mrs. Jacob Horner
into the Iroquois Motel, overlooking Lake Erie, as if you Did Such Things Every Day! Finding Room 121! Extracting 2 ham sandwiches, 2 ice cream bars, and 2 Pepsi-Colas from 3 several vending machines with scarcely a hitch! Spreading that repast before your Woman on one of the twin beds in Room 121, whose air-conditioning unit you Adjusted yourself, and Bidding her eat! Posting outside your Door for all to see the Do Not Disturb sign; Turning back the bedcovers;
Undressing both her and yourself;
and, Almost Swooning with your Authority, Very Nearly Ordering her, in consideration of her tender vulva, to perform fellatio upon you! But exhaustion, exhaustion imperiously reasserted its claims: you Stood Unsteadily before her where she sat still on her bed edge; you Cupped her chin in your Left Hand, your Already Flagging Member in the other; you Wondered Gently Whether? She obliged, mouth still ice-creamy. I Love you! you Ejaculated.

Then with the Last Of your Strength you Wiped her mouth, Laid her down to rest (it was past 3 P.M.), and yourself Collapsed Into Sleep beside her. Next day, Wednesday, as the Dow-Jones Industrial Average sank to the year’s low and General Grant died and Senator Kennedy’s driver’s license was suspended and Haile Selassie was born and the Sun entered Leo, Jacob Horner was Scheduled per
Wiedertraum
to Have Dinner with Joe and Rennie Morgan, his Prospective New Colleagues at Wicomico Teachers College, where he had Just Been Appointed as a Teacher Of Prescriptive Grammar. But schedule or no schedule, you Needed Further Restoration before Resuming Management both of Marsha and of the Mercury. That day, therefore, a bright still one, you Spent In your Room except for three excursions to the now friendly array of vending machines, for breakfast, lunch, dinner. The chambermaid looked at you. There seemed to be no other guests at the Iroquois Motel. Deprived of her Honey Dust, Marsha was vacant but not comatose: it Appeared To you that she understood where she was and with whom, and did not mind. Sometimes she even replied to your Remarks and Queries. Daytime TV. When you Suggested A Shower she even said My my, and as you Soaped Up in there together, she declared almost crossly that she was able to scrub her own tits, thank you. This sharpness you Took For A Sign Of Recovery. Ditto her disinclination, this time, to receive your Ejaculate in her mouth, though she had no objection to collecting it in her other hand, which promptly thereafter she washed with more soap and water.

Skip your Sex Life, Horner. Any more information about that computer?

Only that when you Asked her sometime that night, as David Brinkley reported a .6% increase in the U.S. cost of living for June, whether in her opinion LILYVAC was a bona fide electronic computer or a monstrous simulacrum, she formed the longest syntactically coherent sentence you had Heard from her since before her disappearance, possibly excepting the one about her tits, to wit: Life is going to be a bitch without Honey Dust.

Next day, then, Th 7/24, as H. “Rap” Brown’s speech in Cambridge, Maryland, inspired some of its black citizens to arson, and Congress established the Internal Revenue Service to raise money for the War of 1812, and President Nixon greeted the Apollo-11 astronauts quarantined aboard the U.S.S.
Hornet,
happy birthday Dumas père, Lord Dunsany, Amelia Earhart, you Successfully Checked Out of the Iroquois and Made Your Way up through South Buffalo, across the Peace Bridge, through U.S. and Canadian Customs, and back to the Farm! Fetched Marsha to the infirmary (Just rubbed raw is all, Tombo X’s new black nurse reported: She been getting it off with a corncob?)! Et cetera.

Joe allowed that afternoon’s P & A, here reported, to serve in
Der Wiedertraum
as your Abortive First Interview at Wicomico Teachers on 7/20/53; the subsequent week’s P & A (7/31/69) as your Second Interview (7/21/53), whereat you First Meet Joseph Morgan—though in fact your Dinner With Joe & Rennie Morgan (7/23/53) had been reenacted, inversely, the night before, 7/30/69. 1st tropical storm of season (Anna) reported in Caribbean, Goethe’s “Albert” arrives at Waldheim, Ted Kennedy announces will rerun for Senate but not for presidency in ’72, munitions ship
Black Tom
blown up at Jersey City docks by German saboteurs. Bibi/“Rennie” having gone off somewhere again, and you and Pocahontas/“Peggy Rankin” (as all save yourself still called your Woman) having Established yourselves at the Farm as a Couple, it was decided that you (O heavy plural!) would Have Morgan To Dinner instead of vice versa:
i.e.,
that he would sit at your Table in the Dining Hall; that Marsha would pass the salt et cetera; that yours would be the awesome Hostly Initiative: Welcome, How are you this evening, Splendid or Beastly Weather we’re having, Like you to meet my Woman, How about a drink, all that. For you were a Couple, though access to Marsha’s vagina was proscribed till Lammas Day,
☽
on Equator, Herman Melville’s birthday: you Personally Monitored her withdrawal symptoms and her schedule of therapies (principally workouts on the Exercycle, meant both to ward off catatonia and to toughen up her crotch); you Slept Together (but see above); you Ignored the smirks and ungenerous comments of Tombo X and others; you Even Went So Far as to Make Clear to M. Casteene that while you Had No Objection to Marsha’s resuming her secretarial activities for him, he was not to expect resumption of additional services, inasmuch as etc. Fortunately he only laughed, wished you good luck, declared his business as prime mover at the Farm was about done in any case, and gave you to understand that the services previously rendered him by Pocahontas he had made shift to secure elsewhere. Even so, your Temerity laid you out for an interval.

What shall we Serve for hors d’oeuvres? you Wondered. Marsha reminded you that the dining hall menu includes neither hors d’oeuvres nor appetizers nor choice of entrée, only the options of coffee (regular or decaffeinated), tea, milk, or water and, in summer, the first two (or three) of these either hot or iced. It did not Take you Very Long To Decide on the coffee, decaffeinated, iced, for yourself. Marsha chose the water. Your guest the milk. You yourself had Selected Marsha’s dress for the occasion from her considerable wardrobe, in which she took less interest than formerly: a short sleeveless cotton print that set off to advantage, you Felt, her excellent arms and legs, her trim figure generally, and was neither Too Dressy nor Too Casual for the circumstances. Exhaustion. Her hair—no longer the meticulous coiffure of pre-Independence Days, but not the rat’s nest of Comalot Farm, either—was Beyond your Competence: at the last moment you Gently Suggested a kerchief, whereupon Marsha asked, rhetorically, Who gave a fuck?

The evening was successful, All Things Considered. You yourself Made Frequent Trips to ice-cube bin, water tap, milk dispenser, to keep everyone’s glasses filled. The meat loaf, in your View, was not up to par, and the mashed potatoes had been too long in the steam table. Too, there were perceptible wrinkles in the Fordhook lima beans, from their having been served the previous evening and reheated. But the chef surprised everyone with orange Jell-O! At table the conversation ranged from Marsha’s chain-smoking (which we Agreed Should Be Indulged For The Present) to Marsha’s worrisome intention, which she spoke of as if it were a contractual commitment, to return to Comalot in mid-August for her Final Fix. You Took The Position that such a return would amount to a relapse, unquestionably antitherapeutic. Marsha wittily shrugged her shoulders. Joe eloquently lighted his pipe. Is it a briefer an extended visit you have in mind? you Asked Her As If Jestingly, and she parried, That depends. Joe regarded you both.

By next afternoon’s P & A, Mariner-6 Mars photos show cratered terrain, Pony-Penning Day on Assateague Island, Va., you were Enough Recovered from the social whirl to Express to Dr. Morgan your Alarm at the prospect of Marsha’s retailing into Bray’s queer clutches. He looked at you. Did it not remind you, he mused, of another woman’s Compulsive Return, should we say, to her seducer, on 9/11, 16, & 25/53? Not greatly, you Retorted, and Seeing Joe’s face darken you Added Sincerely, Except in the hurt: that she should be “intimate” with any other man. He looked at you. It was decided that the Horseback-Riding Lessons of August 1953 (wherein your Relation to Rennie Morgan grew Ambivalently Personal as you Teased her with her husband’s programmatic rationalism and her own apparent self-subjugation), would be echoed most conveniently in
Der Wiedertraum,
by joint sessions on the Exercycles: you and Bibi every morning that she was present; you and Marsha-as-stand-in-for-Bibi-in-the-role-of-Rennie when (what seemed increasingly the case, to Joe’s annoyance) she wasn’t.

You Admitted To Some Concern that Marsha might disapprove of your Exercycling Privately with Bibi; nor were you yourself Delighted At The Notion of Marsha in the role of Mrs. Joseph Morgan. Your Audacity astonished you. Joe smiled. Do it anyhow. End of interview.

It is not working. Marsha’s progress (till today) was unimpaired by Bibi’s return, which indeed seemed to reinspire some degree of her former bitchery; you are still a Couple; she has permitted you Brief Access To Her Vagina on two separate occasions, Lammas and Transfiguration days, without contraceptives, Tombo X having attested with relish your Surgical Sterilization on 10/25/54. But though you are Pleased To Construe Marsha’s renascent vindictiveness as recuperation from her sojourn at Comalot, it does not make your Relationship more easy. And, as Joe grows ever more disaffected with Bibi’s alcoholism (this morning she fell off the Exercycle), Marsha meaningly insinuates that she herself could play the role of Rennie more ably
in all respects.
Already you Recall With Nostalgia your Idyll in Room 121, Iroquois Motel, Angola, N.Y., 14006, on Gregor Mendel’s and Coventry Patmore’s birthdays. Minatory Chambermaid! Faithful Vending Machines! Only Slightly Malfocused Color TV!

Then today’s mail, today’s P & A. What Bray has written to smashed Bibi you Would Very Much Like To Know. Marsha won’t tell—
can’t,
now she’s Honey Dusted. But in their separate oblivions the two women Seem To you to have reached some dark sisterly understanding, just at the approach of fell August’s Ides. And, as if your Woman’s relapse weren’t worry enough, Dr. Morgan all but apprises you that Bibi won’t do. My late wife, Horner, while no teetotaler, was not a drunk. You’ll have to Do Better. Dream Up Something Else. Time is short.

But your Dreams since March have been all of a kind: a large service handgun on a table midway between Joe, Rennie, and yourself, accessible equally to all. Rennie announcing her uncertain pregnancy and certain resolve to abortion or suicide. Rennie drowned in her own vomitus on the Doctor’s operating table. The only innovations are that since 8/1 it has been Marsha Blank on that table: your Woman, for whom you Care. And the pistol, aimed at a point just above a point equidistant between your Eyes, is in Joe Morgan’s hand.

8/28/69

U.S.S.R. acknowledges danger of war with China. Slavery abolished in British Empire. Moon on equator. Last of first 25,000 U.S. troops leaves Viet Nam. Kennedy request for cross-examination of inquest witnesses in Chappaquiddick investigation denied. Civil-rights marchers march on D.C. Happy birthday Leo Tolstoy, Wolfgang Goethe, Edward Burne-Jones, Charles Boyer.

It is your Wish that by thus Turning Backwards that key of keys, Alphabetical Priority, you could Reverse its fellow principles of arbitrary choice: Sinistrality (never mind Sinistrality) and—back! back!—
Antecedence.
That
Der Wiedertraum
might never reach Monday next, 9/1, St. Giles’ Day, but run backwards from Horseback-Riding Lessons With Rennie through First Dinner With The Morgans through First Fucking Peggy Rankin In Ocean City Motel through Arrival At Wicomico Teachers College through Remobilization By Doctor through Rescue By Doctor From First Paralysis In Penn Station, Baltimore, March 16, 1951, to the Sweet Void between that date (28th Birthday of Jacob Horner) and your Birth.

It won’t work, Horner, Joe reminded you this afternoon, in your Last P & A Session before his deadline. You Knew, you Acknowledged: the arrow of time, etc. Only a wish.

Today is Day 41 of our original Hundred Days, he went on inexorably, ticking his pipe stem upon a square of desk calendar. Tomorrow will be Day 42, not Day 40.

You Knew.

And Sunday 8/31 will be Day 44: your and Rennie’s Evening Espial, upon Return From Equitation, of Morgan Irrational: making faces at self in mirror, speaking nonsense aloud to self, springing monkeylike about room, simultaneously picking nose and masturbating.

You Knew; you Knew. Mme de Staël bears son Auguste to lover Narbonne. 14th Sunday after Pentecost. Queen Wilhelmina, Fredric March, Baron von Helmholtz, Theophile Gautier. Stop that. You Stopped.

You and Pocahontas will Espy, Joe either prescribed or presumed.

If that was what he wanted, you Sighed. Though Marsha Blank is not Rennie Morgan. Indeed she is not, agreed your Advisor, unamused. But in default of Bibi, not to mention the original Mrs. Rennie McMahon Morgan, deceased, your Woman will have to do. How is she?

Very near the end of her Honey Dust, you Replied: that final two weeks’ worth she fetched from Lily Dale just prior to the Great Fort Erie Magazine Explosion, as if in payment for delivering Bibi to Comalot Farm. A using up (that of that supply) that you Looked Forward To with very nearly as much apprehension as to Day 45, with which it might well coincide. She was meanwhile, your Woman, you Reported, principally engaged in composition of a Bombshell Letter, her own description, to her former husband: a Bombshell that, while you yourself Did Not Precisely Know its nature, she was pleased to imagine would Knock The Bastard Dead.