Letters (12 page)

I am distraught, as even my penmanship attests. You found disconcerting, you say, certain “spooky” coincidences between my first letter to you and your notes toward a new novel.
I
find disconcerting, even alarming, some half-prophetic correspondences between your reply and the course of my current life: so much so that I am led (yet another manifestation of
early
middle-aged foolishness, no doubt) seriously to reconsider your proposal, or proposition. I have much to tell, no one to tell it to…

But you must swear to me, by the Muse we both honour, that you are not nor have lately been in communication with Ambrose Mensch, as he has sworn to me he is not with you. Can you, sir, will you so swear? To

19 April 1969

My dear B.,

L Street and its companions—five long vowelled avenues crosshatched through sand and weeds by a score of short consonantal streets—comprise what is euphemistically called, by its “developers,” the residential “development” of a large corn and tomato field belonging to Mack Enterprises, Inc. Lying athwart an ever shallower winding creek midway between Cambridge and Redmans Neck, at the vertiginous “Heights” of five to seven feet above mean low water, it consists presently of the low-rise brick apartment house at 24 L—tenanted by new MSUC faculty, married graduate students, and (as of a few weeks ago) myself—and three prefabricated “model homes,” unoccupied. The rest is scrub pine, weedy drainage ditches, wooden temporary street signs, and advertising brochures. Mrs Jane Mack, whose backward brainchild Dorset Heights is, confidently expects the burgeoning of Marshyhope U., and the consequent demand for low-cost housing in its proximity, to turn this paper
polis
into a town half the size of Cambridge by 1976 and to swell her already distended fortune: the capital for its next phase of construction she has borrowed against her expectation of a settlement in her favour, rather than her children’s, of her late husband’s disputed estate.

Jane and I have, you see, since Harrison Mack’s death, become—rather, rebecome—friends: more or less, and
faute de mieux,
and warily at that. The woman is civilised. She is uncommonly handsome for her sixty-some years; could almost pass for my coeval. She is very consciously in that line of shrewd
Baltimoriennes
fatefully attractive to European nobility: Betsy Patterson, Wallis Warfield Simpson… We depend, lightly, upon each other’s society here in the depths of Dorset Heights (she drops in for a chat at my
pied-à-marais;
I am no longer
non grata
at Tidewater Farms), and this little dependency itself depends on Jane’s truly remarkable capacity for repressing disagreeable history. If she remembers my late connexion with poor Harrison, for example, or her earlier, less decorous one with my late husband (my small resentment whereat I had long since put by), she gives no sign of it. But her memory for property values, tax assessments, deed transfers, and common stock quotations is photographic! And the Yankee genius for commercial exploitation has flowered full in her since middle age: in those cool grey eyes there is no such thing as “the land”: what the soldier sees as terrain, the artist as landscape, the ecologist as matrix and theatre of natural processes, Jane sees, just as reflexively, as real estate to be developed, or otherwise turned to financial account. About history, tradition, she is utterly unsentimental, except as they might enhance the market value of real property. Such concerns as social equity or the preservation of “undeveloped” environments for their own sake she sincerely regards as madness.

Thus Dorset Heights. Thus L Street (she has offered me a stipend, as a “resource person,” to devise “appropriate” names for her alphabetic streets: a notion I thought
echt
mid-20th-Century American until Ambrose informed me that Back Bay Boston was so laid out in the 19th, on fenland drained and filled by Jane’s spiritual ancestors). And thus #24, where I write this, half appalled, half envious—“tuning my piano,” as your Todd Andrews puts it: waiting only, in order to begin the real substance of this letter, for your assurance that you and Ambrose have not lately been in touch; deciding not to wait after all (What would it matter? Have I not begun confiding already?); wondering really only where properly to begin, and why, and why not.

Yours of the 13th in hand, sir, accepting with polite apologies my rejection of your proposal. A gentlemanly note, for which thanks. Whether I should trust you, there is no way for me to know; but I feel strongly (a familiar, ambivalent feeling) that I
shall,
in any case. Last week I read your second novel,
The End of the Road:
a chilling read withal. Whatever its literary merits, it came obviously as something of a personal revelation to me (as did your first) concerning those several of its characters among whom I dwell: the people we are calling John Schott, Harry Carter, especially poor tragical Joe Morgan, and above all poor pathetical dead Rennie Morgan—with whose heartless exploitation, at least, I readily empathise. I am full of loathing for your narrator Jacob Horner (not only nature abhors a vacuum), who puts me disquietingly in mind of certain traits of my friend A.M., as well as of—

May I ask whether your Remobilisation Farm and its black quack guru were based on anything factual? And whether your “Joe Morgan” has been heard from lately?

Never mind, of course; I know how meaningless such queries are. And I quite understand and sympathise with Horner’s inability to account for his submissive connexion to the Doctor, for I have much the same feeling with respect to my own (uncharacteristic!) submission, both to your request for the Story of My Life and to a man to whom I cannot imagine myself being more than civil this time last year.

I mean, as you will have guessed, Ambrose Mensch: my colleague; my junior by half a dozen years, as he voluptuously reminds me; my ally against Schott and Carter in the Great Litt.D. Affair; my friend of the past few months, since the death of Harrison Mack—and, since Thursday, March 20 last, my lover.

Begun, then!

And where it will end, deponent knoweth not, only feareth. What Ambrose makes of me is plain enough and scarcely flattering, despite his assurances that (reversing the order of your own interests) my person attracted him first, my “symbolic potential” only later. What to make of
him
I do not know, nor how much of his past and present you’re acquainted with. Like the pallid Tityrus of André Gide’s
Marshlands
novel, which Ambrose has not read, he lives a near-hermit life in a sort of tower on the Choptank shore—a tower he has converted into a huge camera obscura! An “expert amateur of life,” he calls himself; an “aspirant to honorary membership in humankind.” In that sinking tower my lover measures the stars with a homemade astrolabe, inventing new constellations; he examines bemused beneath a microscope his swarming semen, giving names to (and odds on) individual spermatozoa in their blind and general race. He savours a tepid
ménage à trois
of many years’ languishing with the soulful East Italian wife of his stolid stonemason older brother (“two Krauts with garlic dressing”); he awaits with mild interest the turning cancerous of a port-wine birthmark on his brow—allegedly bee-shaped, but I see in its outline no more
Apis mellifica
than I see the initials
AMK
(for Arthur Morton King, his
nom de plume)
he claims to find in the constellations Andromeda, Cassiopeia, and Perseus. (Admittedly I can’t see Perseus and company there either, only a blinking bunch of stars.) He writes me “love letters” in the form of postscripts to an anonymous Yours Truly, from whom he claims once to have received a blank message in a bottle, and posts them on the Choptank tides (I get photocopies by the regular mail). His notion of wooing is to regale me with accounts of his previous love affairs, to the number of five—a number even less remarkable in that three were with the same woman (that
Abruzzesa
aforementioned) and two of
those
all but sexless.

Indeed, on the evidence of these “letters” and what I’d gathered of his life, I would have judged the man probably impotent, certainly no candidate for loverhood. Not in
my
book, any road, though God knows I’ve loved some odd ones, H.M. II (R.I.P.) not least among them. With
that
affair, such as it was, I was only just done; I wasn’t ready for another of any sort. Moreover, my taste has ever been for older men, make of it what you will:
considerably
older men, who’ve made some mark in the world. I’ve no time for nobodies, never have had; were our Tityrus as glamorous as a cinema star (he isn’t), I’d not have been interested in his clownish propositions.

So I thought, so I thought—and I thought wrong. My lover is most decidedly not impotent, only regressive and a bit reclusive. Like myself (I now realise, having paid scant attention to such things hitherto) he goes easily for considerable intervals without sexual connexion; then he sets about it as if the thing were just invented, or like a camel tanking up till the next oasis. I like him altogether better as a friend—so I told him frankly when he followed up his first “love letter” with an imperious visit to my office, pressing through Miss Stickles’s defences like Napoleon back from Elba. That tidewater Tuileries once attained, he plied his suit so ardently I almost thought he meant a rape, and was anxious less for my “honour” (he had no weapon, and I am not helpless) than, believe it or not, for the integrity of our ad hoc nominating committee for the Litt.D.: an integrity already vulnerable for our having become personal friends.

He exhorted; he declared; he declaimed; he went grinning to his knees, and made for mine. I could not tell how much if any of what he said was seriously meant. He threatened to fetch Shirley Stickles in as witness to his passion… We laughed and argued, teased and scolded, once I was assured he was neither drunk nor more than usually deranged. Clearly he was not in earnest—yet my firm insistence that I was not the least attracted to him physically, or interested in any “escalation” of our cordial connexion, but enflamed him the more. And if his words and manner were bantering, his bodily pursuit of me about the office was as unremitting as it was leisurely. I thought myself reprieved by the telephone (Harry Carter, relaying John Schott’s apparent nondisapproval of your nomination), but found myself obliged instead to speak in the most unbetraying businesslike tone to Carter and Stickles whilst submitting to my pursuer’s (now my captor’s) suddenly aggressive embraces. Only my calling in Miss S. to take dictation, whilst I had her on the line, put an end for the present to his advances, which otherwise he would very shortly have pressed to the point of my either yielding entirely or calling for aid. And his departure next day (the same Saturday of my first letter to you) for New York City, to confer with Mr Prinz about his screenplay draft, prevented his resuming them promptly thereafter.

They were not, as I trust I’ve implied, abhorrent to me, even repellent, those advances: simply irritating because unwanted. We were not friends enough for me much to fear for our friendship. I am no prude, as shall be seen. Neither of us was celibate by policy or committed to another. Did all those negatives (I asked him on his return, a week or so later) add up to a love affair? This was in my earlier digs, down by the boat harbour in Cambridge, whereinto he had kindly helped me shift from Tidewater Farms after Harrison Mack’s funeral. But they were inconvenient, especially as my provostial duties fetched me to the college five or six days a week; and so I bought a small car and leased the flat in Dorset Heights. Hearing that I was about to shift again, Ambrose had kindly turned up with lorry and labourers from Mensch Masonry, his brother’s firm, to spare me the expense of hiring movers. I was grateful, the more as he did not this time or in the next few days press his attentions otherwise than verbally. When neither manic nor despondent—to both which extremes the man is given—Ambrose Mensch is the mildest, most agreeable of friends: witty, considerate, good-natured, and well informed. But in the two or three matters which command his imagination at any given time, he is obsessive, and his twin projects for the season, by his ready admission, were my seduction and the besting of Reg Prinz.

Now, a woman may consent to sexual connexion, even to a more or less protracted affair, for no better reason than that persisting in refusal becomes too much bother. Ambrose, very big on solstices and equinoxes, chose Thursday, 20 March, to “make his play.” Your letters had arrived, declining the degree and suggesting we give it to Ambrose himself, an unthinkable idea. I’d called a meeting of the nominating committee for 2:30 to decide our next move, and invited Ambrose to stop by my office earlier on and discuss ways of forestalling Harry Carter’s inevitable renomination of A. B. Cook. To my surprise he proposed, straight upon entering, that we copulate at once atop the conference table, and took my arm to usher me there. I bade him be serious; he expressed his ardent wish that I bend over my desk and be mounted
a tergo.
I promptly so bent, but only to ring for Shirley Stickles, certain he’d not risk public exposure. As I asked her to come in, however, he called my bluff by hitching up my skirt and down my panty hose (horrid term!). I bade Shirley wait a moment; turned to him furious; found his trouser fly already open, penis out and standing, face all smiles. At the same time, Shirley announced into my ear that President Schott was on the line and
must
speak to me at once; even as she so declared, that unctuous baritone broke in to say he’d heard of your declining and wished, without of course in any way intervening in the committee’s deliberations, to read me then and there A. B. Cook’s newly published ode, in the
Tidewater Times-Democrat,
comparing Vice-President Spiro Agnew to St Patrick and the liberal news media to serpents. He began to read. As a last defence against Ambrose’s assault I tried to sit; the man was in my chair, set to impale. I could not both fend him off and hold the phone; it was madness, madness! And a too tiresome bother…