Letters (66 page)

Item:
My attempt to reenact in Ocean City this morning what I am only now and here enacting: this latest reply to your letter of etc. 29 years ago today—when, as now, Saturn was on the farther shore of Pisces, leaving the water signs for another revolution of the zodiac—on the beach below Willy Erdmann’s Cornlot I received your water message, the sense of which perhaps only now I begin to see. Zeus knows I have been bone-tired before: wrung out, hung over, down. But never heretofore all these and almost 40 too, my life’s first half wound past its terminating ticks, no key in hand yet to rewind me for the second. Only some portents that, if one does not look to’t, biography like history may reenact itself as farce.

Amazing, this A.M.‘s business on the beach! To have wrestled all night with Prinz’s damned scenario; to have found after all the words that might make the wordless happen; then to be
shown
—so roughly, publicly, instantly, and incontrovertibly!—their irrelevance… We’ve lost a battle, Ma’am or Sir, in what till now I’d not understood to be a war. That P. is a genius (at improvisation, at least: a master of the situational moment) merely surprises me: I’d thought him able at his trade; now I believe him to be a genuine virtuoso. What shocks is the revelation of his
absolute enmity:
the man contemns, the man despises me!

Is it less or more distressing that his contempt is not even particularly personal? I ought to find it amusing that he’s out to get, not Ambrose-Mensch-the-oddball-in-the-tower, but “Arthur Morton King,” whom in his antiliteracy he mistakes for an embodiment of the written word as against the visual image; of Letters versus Pictures! Does he not see that what he’s acting out is a travesty of my own running warfare against the province of Literature? That we are comrades, allies, brothers?

Of course he sees—with the wrongheaded clear-sightedness of Drew Mack, who lumps stock liberals like Todd Andrews with reactionaries like A. B. Cook. And it “proves” P.’s point, I suppose, that in the face of his blank hostility I see my own dispute with letters to have been a lovers’ quarrel. Sweet Short Story! Noble Novel! Precious squiggles on the pristine page! Dear Germaine.

Your old letter, then, Ms. or Mr. Truly—that blank space which in my apprenticeship I toiled to fill, and toward which like a collapsing star I’d felt my latter work returning—was it after all a call to arms? Left to right, left, right, like files of troops the little heroes march: lead-footed
L;
twin top-heavy T’s flanked by eager E’s, arms ever ready; rear-facing
R;
sinuous S—valiant fellows, so few and yet so many, with whose aid we can say the unseeable!
That green house is brown. Sun so hot I froze to death. History is a code which, laboriously and at ruinous cost, deciphers into
etc. Little comrades, we will have our revenge! Good Yours, I have never been more concerned!

Bea Golden. Aye, Bea, I see still in my dark camera the honey image of your flesh. Your beach-towel twitches: there are the breasts Barry Singer sang, the buttocks Mel Bernstein bared, Louis Golden’s glowing gluteus, Prinz’s pudenda! A little shopworn, sure; a little overexposed. Prinz’s cold judgment, as you report it, is surely right: that you will never be an actress unless in the role of yourself-without-illusions, a washed-out small-timer, wasted prematurely by an incoherent, silly, expensive life: the role he would have you play in “our” film. (When did he string so many words together? Or was his message in some tongueless tongue?) But Bea, Bea, battered Aphrodite, how I am redrawn to you, to my own dismay! Not to “Jeannine Mack,” the little tart who frigged me to a frazzle in my freshman year, no;
there’s
a passion I’ve already reenacted, and have nor wind nor sap to re-re-run. It’s Reg Prinz’s played-out-prize perversely I would prong: the Bea you have become: unmobled quean of bedroom, bar, B movie. Why in the world, Y.T., do I itch for Bea? Not
just
that she’s Prinz’s, surely? And surely not for want of other blanks to fill?

Au contraire:
the scent seems to be on me since crazy April, and will not leave me be in abstemious May. Young “Mary Jane” in the beach hotel this weekend: a ringer for Jeannine Mack 20 years ago except less well washed and high on grass instead of bourbon; hoping His Nibs the Director would notice her, but settling in the woozy meanwhile for the worn-down nib of her ex-Freshman-English prof. Nothing wrong with shagging a
former
student, Mister Chancellor, Members of the Board of Regents: anyhow she was C+ in class, high B in bed (my curve is lower than in yestersemester); I was tired, my mind was elsewhere (hi, Bea), and I don’t dig sex with the inarticulate, though those 21-year-old bodies are, as the children say, Something Else—not even
conceived
yet, Y.T., when I was first laid.

Which fetches us to the other anniversary we celebrate on this date, fortunately unbeknownst to Prinz: the loss of my virginity in 1947. And to my second Remarkable Reenactment of the day. Home from the sea I drive at sundown: beaten, wordless, Mary Jane’s juices drying on me and mine on her, the Bea-Prinz image beprinted on my ego like a cattle brand. I stand her to dinner, drop her off at her dorm
(C
you later,
Allgelehrte),
and head for mine. I pause to consider a pause at 24 L St., Dorset Heights, and decide against it: I have begun to love milady A., but it isn’t she I wish to see in this particular distraction. I reflect that we have not coupled, she and I, since May Day, near two weeks gone. This reflection, itself coupled with the scents and images of Bea-Plus, not surprisingly reminds me of that time in my life when I was chastely loving Magda while humping Jeannine around the yacht-club circuit. Harry Truman days. And
that
reminds me…

The Lighthouse is dark but for the driveway light. Peter’s pickup advises me that the closer I get the less. Angie is abed but waiting to say good night: I bring her saltwater taffy and a coin with her name lettered round it so:

We speak awhile in the dark of angels, stars, and Ocean City. As I kiss her good night I think of her mother and other bad news. She mortifies me with the giggled observation that my mustache smells like “Bibi” (her pet name for her vulva, Truly, derived in baby days from
pee-pee,
to make water). My not very inspiring private history seizes me by the throat. Dear menstruating, masturbating, certainly motherless, uncertainly fathered child: what is to become of you? Peter, Magda: why do you put up with us, and what on earth would we do if you didn’t? Dear Mother, dying next door: Am I legit, prithee, and does terminal cancer hurt awfully? Marsha Blank, chucker of responsibilities, exacter of two eyes for an eye and whole dentitions for a tooth: let him look to’s balls, whoever fills you now! Germaine, Germaine: why am I taken with the crazy craving, even as I write these words, to
do it over again,
and specifically with you? Why not get a child on Magda, tat for tit for tat?

Et cetera. Nighty-night, Ange. Not a little shaken, I go downstairs for a nightcap. No ale in the kitchen: since Peter and the twins, great do-it-themselfers, finished the basement into a Family Room (in which our old camera obscura stands like an improbable TV), all alcohol is stowed belowstairs, in the fridge behind the “wet bar.” It is nearly midnight. I pour a Labatt’s India Pale, turn down the rheostated lights, and contemplate an actual Choptank lighthouse winking from the c.o. screen every 2½ seconds, off to westward. It does not suggest what I am to do with the second half of my life.

Familiar female footsteps overhead: Magda, in her slopping slippers. She pauses in the kitchen—Ambrose? Mm hm—then pads on down. Can’t seem to get to sleep. Cotton nightgown, demure. How was Ocean City? Don’t ask. Pours herself one. We almost drove down to watch the shooting. Glad you didn’t. Did you really do the water-message thing? Yup. Peter says if they’re hiring you to be Ambrose in the picture, they ought to hire me to be Magda. Your ass is too big, Mag. Happy anniversary.

She
said it first, raising her mug, and when I asked, neutrally, Which one, she replied, cheerfully, Who cares about that stupid note in a bottle? I mean your 22nd year of prickhood. Ah. We sipped to it. I couldn’t assess her tone, quite. How are you, dear Magda?

As is her wont with me, she answered calmly, gravely, fully. She was okay, all things considered. She no longer feared, as she had last winter, that she would kill herself. She had assumed, when we began our affair in ’67, that it would be brief and end in the destruction of someone she much loved: Peter by suicide; me by homicide; herself by either; the children somehow. For she had hoped and expected that we two would chuck the world and go away together—to Italy, to Italy—and she had imagined that Peter, despite his best resolves and infinite responsibility, would find the situation unendurable. Since things had not gone as she’d wished, she was relieved that nothing fatal had ensued. But that fact reminded her that her love for me, and whatever it was I’d felt for her, had been
inconsequential;
she hated that. With all her heart she wished still that we had run off to Italy, if only for a season, and let the chips fall where they might. She did not hate Peter for being complaisant (out of his fancied and unwarranted guilt for having let Marsha once seduce him); but she didn’t admire him for it, either. She did not hate me for having been unable to love her as she’d loved me: she only regretted it—almost, but not quite, to the point of self-destruction.

Most of all she lamented my refusal to make her pregnant. Marsha’s opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, Magda believed me capable of loving deeply; but even if I’d gone so far as to marry her (which she’d never expected), she would not have given my love for her more than two years—inspired as it was in part by the shock of my divorce. Inasmuch as she herself would never cease to love me, she wished as strongly now as ever that we’d had a child together, through whom she could gratify that love. A child—and my removal from the scene—would have been the fittest end to our affair, in her judgment. It was only because I’d not given her that child that she was able to bear, indeed required, my continued presence in the house: I was surrogate for the child who was to have been surrogate for me. And how are
you,
Ambrose?

Oh, shot to hell. I told her the story of my set-down on the beach and my rewakened interest in Bea Golden. The former mightily amused her, as I meant it to. She hoped and trusted I was teasing her about the latter. I’m drawn to has-beens, I said. The exhausted. The spent. Maybe I’ll write an old-fashioned novel: characters, plot, dialogue, the works. Maybe I’ll remarry and start a family.

That hurts, Ambrose.

Sorry, said I, taking her hand. It’s late. I’m tired and a little drunk. What I really feel is a mighty urge to go forward by going back, to where things started. Rewind, you know. Rebegin. Replay.

That is known as regression, Magda declared; I bid you good night. She leaned to buss me; got wind of old Bibi, perhaps; anyhow made a small sound of pain, an indeterminate whimper. I held her to it. I don’t know what yours are like, Yours, but Lady Amherst’s lips are pleasingly dry and firm; Jeannine Mack’s (in the old days) were hot and hard; “Mary Jane’s” just lately were wet and thin and a touch maloccluded; Marsha Blank’s I don’t remember—but Magda Giulianova’s, now as a quarter-century ago, are two extraordinary items of flesh. A man cannot kiss those lips without craving to take one into his mouth; a man at once wants more… come on, Language, do it: read those lips, give them tongue! Language can’t (film either, I’m happy to add; it’s the tactile we touch on here, blind and mute) do more than pay them fervent, you know, lip service.

Tears. Not
her,
Magda prayed. Meaning Marsha! I shook my head. Time to end the mystery, at least the evening; I wanted that mouth again, that man cannot kiss without tumescing. To cool us down (so I truly, innocently intended) I told her gently of Germaine.

Something of a male chauvinist, Magda was at first startled and a bit amused (the lady had once been pointed out to her in a shopping plaza). The woman’s
fifty,
Ambrose! Etc. Then relieved, clearly, that her successor was no smashing 25-year-old. Then curious: bona fide British nobility? Well, part Swiss, and not born to the gentry; more of a scholar than a blue blood; disappointed writer, actually, like yours truly. Then
more
curious, and a touch excited: What’s she like? Is she crazy about you? Are you madly in love? Well, let’s say ardently in sympathy. Remarkable woman, Germaine Pitt: I suspect she’s as given to Erotic Fantasy as I am, for example. Then more excited than curious: Did you have to teach her how to do it right, the way you did me, or had she had a string of lovers already?

Magda.

She was glad, she said. She’d been worried for me since our breakup. I needed sexual companionship, not just the odd lay. She’d known I was sleeping with someone; had hoped and prayed it was someone good both in and out of bed… Breathier now, and tearier, that remarkable lower lip shaking. But God I miss it, Ambrose (Magda seldom uses nicknames, nor enounces that trochee without stirring me to the bowels. I think I know who
Ambrose
is only when Magda speaks the name): it isn’t fair; Peter can’t do it; you shouldn’t have showed me those things are real; I was satisfied enough; I don’t want to be unfaithful to him; it’s only sex; who gives a fuck; anyway that’s not it, that’s just not it. I miss you. I love you. I’m going crazy.