Letters (88 page)

Also, that A. B. Cook was waxing heavy on the 1812 business, which—especially in the forepart of August, up your way—is to be coordinated with the “Mating Flight” and “Conception” sequences. He did not wish to speak further of it, though he might very well require my assistance. However—“especially
now”
and “given our poor showing on the pregnancy front”—I probably ought to look for things to get even worse between us before they get better. It All Depended.

O John:
damn
the fellow! And myself for merely damning instead of getting shed of him! I did at least tell him—when he said we-all would be “echoing the Battle of Niagara” in the ball park next evening
(i.e.,
yesterday, Military & Veterans Day), and that Bea and Cook and perhaps J. Bray would be involved—that he would have to fight that battle himself, as I was scheduled to spend the P.M. with his ailing family. He…
regarded
me, and left to “go over the shots” with his confreres.

For my pains, I get a concerned frown from Peter, a dry chuckle from Andrea, and a mild reproof from Magda for attending them instead of—
what,
for pity’s sake (I ask M. rhetorically)? Playing the vile procuress Mrs Sinclair to Ambrose’s Lovelace and Bea Golden’s Clarissa? Magda does not know the novel. Holding Bea down, then, whilst he climbs her for the cameras? Magda replies, not to my questions but to my condition: When is my period due? Is there yet hope? Due Monday or Tuesday next, I respond, and there’s been no hope from the outset. Meanwhile, what is Ambrose up to out at that ball park?

Why, as best I can piece it together this sore Saturday, he was up to some mad staged replay of that set-to in the tower, reported in my last, which not surprisingly caught Prinz’s and Ambrose’s retrospective fancies in equal measure. “Background footage” only, at the ball park: a certain amount of military bustling about with those handy extras to “echo Lundy’s Lane” whilst the county high school bands play martial airs and the twirlers twirl by way of “pre-spectacle entertainment” before the evening’s installment of The Dorchester Story. Which last, vertiginously, was to deal with the county’s contributions to the Civil War, the two World Wars, and the Korean “conflict”! (No mention of Vietnam, too confusing a matter for pageantry.) Then out to Redmans Neck for the Mating Season sequence: the shooting script itself substituted for
Clarissa;
Bray this time (quite at home in that belfry, I’ll wager) to aid the Author’s assault on the Director, “their common foe,” in hopes of then eliminating the Author in turn and gaining sole sexual access to… my stand-in!

I.e.,
Bea, in 1930’s costume. Their (simulated) copulation interrupted as ours was on Bastille Day by the Director, who films it with his hand-held and is filmed filming it by the regular camera crew. The Author to succeed as before in destroying that first film (but with Bray’s aid, who I suppose has been hanging by his feet from a rafter, shooting overhead stills) and to
retire with his lady
in apparent triumph. Whereupon the Director reappears in the empty belfry, surveys without expression the pile of ruined film, reloads his camera, and exits. Lengthy shot of deserted belfry (Where’s Bray?) to remind viewer that Author’s victory is at best ambiguous, since entire scene has been filmed and is being viewed. Got it?

The Battle of Niagara ended before midnight on 25 July 1814. Ambrose came home by dawn’s early light this morning. Late next week, up in Buffalo, in similar juxtaposition to a very minor skirmish there known as the Battle of Conjockety, or Scajaquada Creek (2 August 1814), they will replay the mike-boom “accident” of last Friday week: the Director’s Revenge on the Author. Thus the Author informed me this A.M., truculently, at the end of his account of last night’s action.

Never mind Conjockety, I said, and demanded to inspect his penis.

His what?

Yer bloody ’and-’eld, said I. Fetch ’im out!

He did, defiantly, for he knew what I was after, we having remarked together in frisky April how the old Intromitter, when thoroughly applied, will look, even hours later, recognisably Applied. I forwent inspection: his gesture and manner were confession enough. Sick to tears—and
angry!
—I went at him at last, with the first weapon that came to hand (I was at my desk): a brummagem letter opener marked
Souvenir of Niagara Falls, Canada,
where in a campy June moment we’d bought it. Nicked his writing hand, too, I did; first blood drawn between us, not counting my four menstruations since the bloke first applied
his
opener to
me
in March. Should’ve gone for that instead, made a proper Abelard of him! He caught my wrist then, as men do, and made me drop
Niagara Falls;
forced me to a chair and held me (I don’t mean lovingly) till despair got the better of my rage and I broke down.

He apologised. Not particularly for having humped Bea Golden again, but for the Inevitable Pain he’s been putting me through in this Stage. To me it seems Evitable! And by way of
soothing
me—as he leaves just now to fetch Angie to the Dorchester Day Parade—he supposes that my hyperemotionality is premenstrual! I shriek and scrabble after that
Souvenir
… but he’s out before I can find it, or reach the kitchen for a better blade.

Thus am I reduced to
this
one, Clarissa Harlowe’s: a decidedly poor substitute for the sword, in this author’s opinion. I do not forgive my lover this new trespass. I do not forgive him this whole 5th Stage, or the 4th before it. Even if (they’re all so “into” the Anniversary thing) his Reign of Terror should end with the French (tomorrow 175 years ago), I find myself conceived—if of nothing else—of an impulse grand as Roderick Random’s: for
revenge.

But what would even touch the man? Not to mention
sting
him, as he’s stung me! Ought I to bed with Reg Prinz? With A. B. Cook? With Peter Mensch? None of them, for their different reasons, would give me a tumble, much less a tumbling. Oh, unfair!

Who’s keeping
you
company these days, dear Addressee? Have you scores of your own to settle in this line? Shall I make a side trip from the Battle of Conjockety and hand-deliver next Saturday’s letter from your

2 August 1969

Near but Distant Neighbour,

“Your Germaine” will post this after all, like its predecessors, instead of delivering it to you herself. Your silence has drawn so many words from this pen—which has still a few to write—’twere pity to break it with conversation.

The Buck Moon filled five days since; no sign yet of my “period.” I do not doubt that what we have here is a mere irregularity for a change, or a mere missed monthly, or that at last I’m putting the old lunations behind me in the natural way, without benefit of hysterectomy, oöphorectomy, salpingectomy. I’m nearly fifty!

But the effect on Ambrose of this delay (together with our set-to last Saturday with that
Souvenir;
the sobering decline of his mother and brother; perhaps too his sense of what’s about to happen in the Movie) has been marked; was so even before we flew to Buffalo yesterday. Since the morning of the letter opener, for example, he has not to my knowledge “been with” Bea Golden: a lapse of attentions that plainly piques her. He has allowed as how I may wear
my own clothes,
John: neither the teenybopping or hipsy-potsy costumes of June nor yet the flapper drag of July, but
my own clothes!
Sensible middle-aged mid-lengths! Admirable Abercrombie’s! Blessed Bonwit’s! Bliss! He has waxed humorous, friendly, even affectionate, as back in March, but without March’s posturing and bluster. Daily, discreetly, he enquires… No, I haven’t, say I, but don’t be so ruddy foolish as to suppose… Of course not, he agrees. Still…

Okay: I like it that his Robespierre’s gone to guillotine at last. Though I believe life to be no more probable in my old womb than Tuesday’s Mariner-6 photographs show it to be on Mars, and though the season’s maiden tropical storm (Lady Anna) is moving our way from the Caribbean, I am much gratified by this serene “developement” and look forward with appropriate interest to learning what the character of the Sixth Stage—
our
stage!—of our affair will be. (I would be tempted to wonder, with your Menelaus, how Proteus can ever be confidently known to be “himself again, having been all those other things—but a mad experience last night has shown me how.) I still truly love Ambrose, don’t ask me why; daresay I shall even if he comes ’round to loving
me,
as he most certainly appeared to do from March through May.

Nevertheless, sir, and though my late behaviour argues contrariwise, I am
not
by disposition a hand puppet, whether it’s Ambrose’s or even André’s hand under my midlengths. Mr Mensch’s apparent abdication of his tyranny has not ipso facto cancelled my resentment of so extended and public a humiliation as mine since spring: the loss of my job, my “self-image,” my self-respect. When in my last I threatened reciprocal infidelity—a rum sort of retaliation, that, and retaliation itself a rum sort of game—I was only half-serious.
I.e.,
I was half-serious! I came back up here with Ambrose because I
do
still love him; but I did in fact try to ring you up, no doubt with mixed motives, but principally I’m sure with a view to terminating all tyrannies, including this insulting one of our one-way correspondence. I learned among other things that you’ve vacated this city to live year-round in your Chautauqua cottage… whereupon I lost interest in your pursuit, realising I’d prefer after all not to
discuss
with you what I have at such immoderate length confessed. Hence my salutation.

I even imagined myself ready to kick this habit, my Saturday epistolary “fix,” whatever the withdrawal pains. Then came last night’s dreamlike adventure, which, though I was its victim, I am still far from understanding.

As we have seen, all doors open for the maker of movies. Reg Prinz & Co. had preceded us to Buffalo, and a bit of judicious PR had evidently preceded him. Both local campuses of the state university, I don’t have to tell you, have modest but active departments of film, and I gather the city prides itself generally on its hospitality to new art. A word to the right people that Prinz will be “echoing” the Scajaquada Creek Battle of 1814 has put at his disposal, with attendant fanfare, as much of Delaware Park (through which Scajaquada Creek runs, I learned yesterday, dammed now to form Delaware Park Lake but memorialised by an eponymous expressway) as he needs for as long as he needs it, plus the resources of the flanking institutions: the Erie County Historical Society and the Albright-Knox Museum of Art. Plus more graduate-student volunteer helpers than he can sort out, all eager to improve their credentials, and at least half of them (so it seems to me) stoned out of their American minds.

We were scarcely checked into this unpronounceable motel (accent on the antepe
nul
timate) before being whisked off last evening to a cocktail buffet in the Park Pavilion, hosted by the directors of the institutions aforecited. Hello from a cultural attaché of the mayor. Welcoming statements from the two curators, praising what they took to be our combination, in this Belligerently Antihistorical Decade, of the historical foretime and the avant-garde present, a combination nowhere more aptly symbolised than in the architecture and the collection of the museum beside us: half Greek revival and half front-edge contemporary. Trustees and local patrons of the arts turned out spiffily in evening clothes among the jeans and patches of the with-it young. Whatever justice there may be in the proverbial put-downs of Buffalo, N.Y., I found it agreeable indeed to be back in a genuine
city,
among what appeared to be genuinely civilised folk: the black-tie crowd and the blue-jean crowd on easy terms; the night balmy; the catering not bad at all; the sweet smell of
Cannabis sativa
mixed with that of roses, pipe tobacco, and chafing-dish chicken tetrazzini; taped rock music on the pavilion P.A. Add Ambrose’s new mildness, the contrast with Dorset Heights, the being back in
my own clothes,
even the absence of humidity and mosquitoes—I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Joe Morgan was there! Come over from the Farm as historical consultant (A. B. Cook, it seems, remained behind in Maryland), he was more conventionally dressed than at last sight, but still long-haired, necklaced, somewhat crazed-appearing about the eyes. In the spirit of the evening I was delighted to see him; we hugged hello and had a good talk. Crazed or not, Morgan has still his low-keyed, quick-smiling, intense, but almost boyish authority, once so appealing to his students and colleagues. He has I gather rather taken over the Farm, by his natural leadership, since the Doctor’s death, but we didn’t speak of that. We talked History for a bit, apropos of the occasion, two ex-professionals reminiscing: How a pathetic remnant of the Iroquois League, some 100 warriors, fought on the American side under General Brown in these last engagements on the Niagara Frontier, hoping to retain what was left of their reservations in western New York. How underrated by historians was the influence of anti-British sentiment among French Canadians generally throughout the war, and the particular Anglophobia of wealthy French refugees from the Terror, who like Mme de Staël had bought huge landholdings along Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence, but who unlike her had emigrated, raised impressive châteaux in the forests, and after 1814 confidently expected fallen Napoleon to appear among them and establish a sovereign French-Canadian state. Et cetera.

When Ambrose and Bea—separately—joined us, the talk turned to gossip. My lover had been dancing with, of all people, Ms. Merope Bernstein—remember?—who, her bum apparently mended, had come over from the Farm with Morgan and their polyglot comrades: a large black girl, a somewhat sinister-looking Latin, and an
echt
Manhattan greaser of indeterminate ethnicity. Her quondam stepmother had been dancing with this last, looking alas neither unattractive nor out of place in a boutique redskin outfit—Tuscarora mod?—and came to our table clearly to flirt with Morgan in demonstration of her indifference to us. I paid her no mind. Ambrose merely smiled. Joe indulged her lap-perching and osculatory effusions with mild indifference. Bea soon went off to find her Reggie.