Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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At this point in “Casteene’s” narrative I recall Morgan’s having remarked to Todd Andrews and myself that A. B. Cook had once offered to arrange a murder for him; that he had declined the offer but been enough convinced of its seriousness to believe Cook a genuinely formidable man with underground, perhaps underworld, connexions, the nature of which however was unclear. Had that offer been serious? I asked Casteene now.

He smiled handsomely, almost like André: Such a thing is easy to arrange, my dear, the easiest thing in the world. In fact he had been, let us say, half serious: he was seriously exploring Morgan’s character, as a possible candidate both for the presidency of Tidewater Tech and, perhaps, for a certain role in the Second Revolution. But he had found the man not yet ready for that latter, and was in any case finally disinclined to your doing in, given your then current project. This project he regarded as of sufficient usefulness to persuade him to forgo his Marylandiad in its favour (he was anyhow too immersed in “action historiography” to bother seriously with composition) and bestow upon you his researches. Your Ebenezer Cooke, he declared, like the original sot-weed factor, needed a foil to his gullibility, a counter to his innocence, to heighten the comedy and deepen the theme: he made you a gift of his “cosmophilist” ancestor Henry Burlingame III, together with Captain John Smith’s Secret Historie and the Privie Journall of the first Henry Burlingame. In return, unwittingly, you would provide him with a point de départ for some future counterdocument to assist in the delicate conversion of “our son” to “our cause.”

I conclude. Deponent sweareth that he has had no contact with you since that day in 1959. That he enjoyed your rendering of his material, but on the whole prefers actions to words. He regrets having later had to support ridiculous John Schott against Morgan in the Marshyhope power struggle (it had to do, as what has not, with the preservation of his precious cover), and is gratified at least to have been able to arrange (in his “Monsieur Casteene” aspect, under which he does whatever it is he does at the Farm) Morgan’s invitation to Amherst and subsequent enrollment in the cause of the Second Revolution. Even more, it Went Without Saying, he regretted—

But no: I will not entertain you with the song and dance of this man’s regrets concerning my ordeal since 1940. He professed to be delighted at my new connexion, in whose favour he had been happy to have “A. B. Cook” decline the M.S.U. Litt.D. Further, he made bold to venture that Ambrose’s energetic flirtation with “Bibi,” at the Falls and the Farm, was owing to his unexpected rencontre with his ex-wife. Casteene counselled patience, even indulgence on my part; he would not, for example, in my place, attempt to compete for Ambrose’s favour by dressing beneath my age and dignity…

Speaking of lovers: he trusted I would not mistake his own little arrangement with “Pocahontas” (he tisked his tongue at the outrageous smallness of the world) as anything but a physical-clerical convenience: what passed for his heart, I might be assured, was mine toujours, but he would never again presume any claim upon me after that painful reenactment, in 1967, of our original star-crossed intimacy. We were no longer young, n’est-ce pas? By the projected date of his life-work’s completion he would be nearly 60. And aside from the annotation and publication of those letters of Andrew Cook IV’s – his discovery of which, in Buffalo two years past, he regarded as both the unlikeliest and the happiest coincidence in a life fraught with improbability – he would ask nothing further from me ever.

Here he brightened. “But we haven’t said a word about notre fils! Le Burlingame des Burlingames!”

I stopped him. Indeed, at this point I put an end not only to our interview, but to our remaining connexion. Had the man been unequivocally André (but when was André ever so?) or unequivocally A. B. Cook, or unequivocally neither… But he was equivocal as those letters – which now, upon a sudden, strong, heart-heavy, but unequivocal impulse, I returned to him. Whoever he was, I told him, he was not who he’d been, nor whom I’d loved even as late as two years ago. And whoever, wherever our son was, he was as dead to me as my André, surely in part by my own hand. I did not share what seemed all about me to be an epidemic rage for reenactment. The second half of my life, or third third, I must hope would be different indeed from what had so far preceded it! I had no more to say to him; at this point I would have nothing to say to our son either, a 29-year-old stranger, should he be “restored” to me: such reconnexion must be principally an embarrassment to all parties. As he had observed, I was in love again, no more happily than before, but at least my troubles were of a different sort. Whatever the future held for me, it did not promise to be a recapitulation of the past, and I was prepared to settle for that.

He bowed, kissed my hand. Thus we parted, I trust forever – though I quite expect some version of A. B. Cook to appear at this afternoon’s festivities, disclaiming any connexion with M. Casteene or involvement in the foregoing conversation. The gentleman was not pleased. In particular he bade me reconsider the matter of the letters: if neither our past intercourse nor our son retained importance for me, would I not at least abet in this small way a cause larger than either, the cause of the Second Revolution? In which Henri, if things were managed skillfully, might well play a major rôle?

Bugger your Revolution, I’m afraid I said, and got out of there – that dreadful, spooky Farm, where the chief crop raised is ghosts of the past – and back to the Erie Motel.

And, I wish I could say, back to my understanding and sympathetic Ambrose. But though my lover affirms with each insemination his resolve to marry me once I’m preggers and The Movie Thing is done, this past week has been the hardest of our history. On the Monday and the Tuesday, making the most of the rare sunshine, Prinz shot footage of the Chautauqua Institution, the lake itself, and the vineyard country round about, though Ambrose acknowledges that nowhere do these appear in your writings. Bats figured as prominently as actors, flitting around the Miller Bell Tower, the cupola of the old Athenaeum, and (I ventured to suggest) the belfries of Reg Prinz and Ambrose Mensch. The former had been enchanted by the latter’s passing mention of the obscure, winged ascent of the villain “Harold Bray” at the end of your Goat-Boy novel; and though I can attest that as of where I am therein (halfway through) it is nowhere suggested that that charlatan is Batman, so he seems to be becoming in the film. Prinz himself rappelled down the tower by Monday’s twilight in cape and domino to carry off Bea Golden (aptly cast as your nymphomanic heroine Anastasia) and make threatening squeaks at Ambrose in the role of, near as I can guess, Himself playing the Author dressed as Giles the Goat-Boy: sheepskin vest and a horned helmet borrowed from the Chautauqua Opera Company’s prop room, Wagnerian section.

Perfectly preposterous, of course, and as aggressively unfaithful to the novel as Ambrose endeavours to be to me. I cannot make myself recount his pursuit of “Anastasia,” which, with Prinz’s obvious consent, no doubt even at his instruction, Bea permits, nay encourages, but does not (I believe, who am ready to believe the worst) yet reward. It is All Part of the Movie: but inasmuch as there is no discernible boundary between that wretched film and our lives, Ambrose’s conquest of her, when and if it occurs and whether on or off camera, will be Part of the Movie too, as is my ongoing humiliation. I hate it!

On the Tuesday evening a cast party was organised which culminated in a triumphant fiasco, enlarged the cast by at least one lunatic more, and altered the direction of the movie’s “plot.” Prinz chartered the Chautauqua excursion yacht Gadfly III; caterers provisioned it with bar and buffet; the Baratarians – augmented by musician friends from the resident theatre troupe, all there for preseason rehearsals – piled merrily aboard, and we set out from the institute dock in the last light (swallows, bats, cameras!) for a nautical carouse. Imagine Our Surprise when we discover our skipper for the evening to be Someone We’ve Met Before: no, not André-Castine-Andrew-Burlingame-Cook, at least not apparently, but a chap whom Ambrose tells me I should remember from Harrison Mack’s funeral (my mind was on other things), which Mr Bray attended as a beneficiary of the Tidewater Foundation’s misguided philanthropy.

One Jerome Bonaparte Bray of Lily Dale, N.Y., surely the original of your goat-boy’s nemesis. But your “Harold Bray” is only abstractly sinister, a sort of negative principle. The original, while of a lesser order of magnitude, is ever so much more alarming because he’s real, he’s mad as a hatter, and he is – or was—in charge of the bloody ship!

We suspected something was amiss when an old Volkswagen beetle drove erratically up to the dock a quarter-hour late (the college lad who was the crew had allowed, with a roll of the eyes, as how his skipper “went” more by the sun and stars than by the clock) and, like a little circus car disgorging a large clown, gave vent to a great lanky chap wearing sunglasses, sea boots, a Lionel Barrymore sou’wester out of Captains Courageous, and, of all the landlubberly incongruities, a cloak and kid gloves. We thought him part of the entertainment; the Baratarians cheered, whistled, and straightway dubbed him Batman. So far from replying in like humour, the man seemed particularly offended by the name; he drew his cloak ’round him as he hustled through us to the wheelhouse, then turned at its door to declare in an odd mechanical tone that his name was Captain Bray, and that while as an employee of the ship’s owners he could forbid neither our lawful presence aboard the vessel nor the evening’s debauchery we were clearly bent upon, as the ship’s master he insisted we not address him by that obscene sobriquet, attempt to enter the wheelhouse, or otherwise interfere with his management of the vessel.

We were abashed. The Baratarians assumed he was joking and applauded his speech; he slammed the wheelhouse door and started off almost before the boy could let go our lines. Bea Golden, looking slinky despite her new rôle, wondered around her drink whether he was For Real. Ambrose clapped his brow, took the opportunity to take her arm, and made the connexion: between the chap at her father’s funeral who’d claimed to be doing something revolutionary with computers; the celebrated assemblage of spiritualists at Lily Dale, home of the Fox sisters, near Chautauqua; and that ambiguous humbug villain whom George Giles, Grand Tutor and Goat-Boy, supposes in your novel to be as necessary to himself as Antithesis to Thesis. Prinz hummed, narrowed his view-finding glasses, dispatched an assistant for camera and sound gear.

And so we steam down past the state fish hatchery towards the narrows where Chautauqua—French voyageur spelling of an Indian word supposed to mean “bag tied in the middle”—is tied in the middle by the old car-ferry. Regardless of us merrymakers, our captain is delivering the routine tourist spiel on the ship’s P.A., with what sound like embellishments of his own, in a voice that seems itself pieced together by computer in the days when such artifices were still recognisable. The boat, we are informed, is named after his Iroquois father. All of this was Iroquois country, he declares, and by rights ought still to be, unpolluted by the white man’s DDT and marijuana and purple martins and bats (!)… The Baratarians whistle and turn up the rock music. Bray escalates his own amplifier to full volume: Our elevation is 2,000 feet above sea level, 700 feet higher than Lake Erie. A raindrop falling into Lake Erie, 8 miles to northwest of us, will make its way over Niagara Falls, through Lake Ontario, and up the St Lawrence Seaway to the North Atlantic; one falling into Chautauqua Lake will exit via Chadakoin Creek (a variant English spelling of the same noble Indian word) into the Conewango, the Allegheny, the Ohio, and the Mississippi, then into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, itself a great Bag Tied in the Middle by its “narrows” at the latitude of the equator, where South America once fit into Africa…

Hoots and bravos; louder music. It was to be observed that these two raindrops between them traced the boundary of New France, or Upper and Lower Canada, the latter following the route marked in 1749 by Céloron de Blainville, or Bienville, “discoverer” of Chautauqua Lake, with lead plates bearing the coat of arms of the house of Bourbon, that dynasty deposed by the Revolution to make way for the Emperor Bonaparte…

Curses, muttered Ambrose: foiled again. He had it seems posted overboard one of those bottled epistles he indites from time to time to “Yours Truly” (which in a happier season were declarations of his love for yours truly; God knows what they declare these days, and to whom) on the ebbing tide. This one, he’d believed and hoped, could nowise return to him; now he quite expected it to round Florida and run north on the Gulf Stream, work its way past the Virginia Capes and up the Chesapeake, and Return to Sender on the river shore by Mensch’s Castle.

The liquor flowed; the duel of decibels or battle of the amplifiers continued as we circuited the dusky lower lake and headed back by starlight for the upper. Prinz and Ambrose, therefore Bea, put by their partying (if not the latter two their drinking) to improvise an episode out of the situation. Ambrose briefed Prinz on the characters and plot of your Goat-Boy novel, consulting my more recent if incomplete memory thereof; the object became to lure our Bray into playing yours. For reasons unclear to me, Bea was pressed into service to pantomime a moth or butterfly in distress: to the strains of the pas de deux from Swan Lake, a tape of which fortuitously appeared and was substituted for the rock music, she fluttered fetchingly about the foredeck, in full view of the wheelhouse. Prinz went into his Batman/Count Dracula act to menace her, with much baring of teeth and flapping of arms; Ambrose into his Giles-cum-Siegfried antics, loping about in postures of attempted rescue or countermenace.

Well, the woman is not without talent; ditto Prinz. My lover’s abilities lie elsewhere than in ballet-pantomime. The Baratarians fell to, some pressing the ship’s lights into service, others manning the camera and microphones, still others miming outraged or horrified bystanders. At length the poor hapless Whatever-She-Was was caught: to no avail her pathetic wing-beats; her averted face only exposed the more her slender throat to Prinz’s fangs, which now with great rollings of his eyes to the wheelhouse he made ready to have at her with, maugre the bleats and caperings of her would-be saviour (who stands en garde with fountain-pen for foil). The music soars. We repass the car ferry, reenter the S-shaped narrows.

Now, I myself had a drop or two in, depressed and anxious over Ambrose’s late behaviour, the whole unswallowable “Casteene” business, my frustrating attempts to communicate with you. But if what I and the others saw next was the effect of some common delirium tremens, the camera shared and recorded it. From the wheelhouse suddenly sprang—sailed, flew, whatever! – Captain Bray: an astonishing feat, as if his Phantom-of-the-Opera cloak were the wing membranes of a flying squirrel. With a frightful buzz that carried through Tchaikovsky like the artillery at the end of his 1812 Overture, the man traversed as if in one bound the half-dozen metres from wheel to foredeck. Prinz was knocked heels over head, his eyeglasses were sent flying; Ambrose stood open-mouthed in mid-caper; the Baratarians’ consternation was no longer feigned. For by some second marvellous gymnastic our mad captain rebounded from the deck to the forward railing with Bea Golden under one arm, drew his cloak about her, and stood holding onto the bow flagstaff and threatening us with further sound effects from his repertoire. Incroyable!

All this in three seconds, John, by when Poor Butterfly got her breath and, far from doing a Fay Wray faint, screamed bloody murder and laid into her fetcher-off with proper hysteria. Confused, he set her down; backed off a step (I mean up, onto the rail again) when valiant Ambrose hurried to her rescue—i.e., snatched her arm and yanked her away from there.

Who is piloting Gadfly III this tumultuous while? Why, no one at all: Joe College stands agape with the rest of us, and having traversed, during the above, the nether bend of the S, with no one to swing her to port our craft ploughs now smack into Long Point, where the state park is. I mean literally into the point, which must have considerable water right up to shore. There is a mighty bump; now we all go pitching forward, with shouts and shrieks and tinkle of gin-and-tonic glasses. We are a miniature Titanic—but in lieu of iceberg chips there are maple leaves fluttering to the deck, from the trees into which our bow has driven as into an arbor; and instead of sinking we are as hard aground as if dry-docked, or beached like that ferryboat restaurant in which, a century ago, my Ambrose initiated this miserable “4th Stage” of our affair.

Bar and buffet are all over the decks. In creepy silence we pick ourselves up out of Swedish meatballs and spilt soda water: the fall has cut Tchaikovsky off in mid-climax; the ship’s engines gurgle to a stop when the crewboy finally betakes himself to the throttles. There are exclamations among the passengers regaining their feet, some cries from far down shore (the state park is closed at night: the only such depopulated stretch around the lake, I think), the whine of a couple of outboard-motor boats – determined fishermen – heading our way. Otherwise silence, echoed as it were by the absolute motionlessness of the ship and made spookier by the illuminated leafy canopy over our bow.

Remarkably, no one seems injured. Reg Prinz finds his eyeglasses and calls for his cameraman. Ambrose is comforting Bea excessively where they have fallen together against a spilt stack of folding chairs. I myself had clutched the railing in amazement at Bray’s behaviour and at sight of the fast-approaching shore, which evidently no one else remarked, and so I only laddered my panty hose against a stanchion at the crash, but did not fall. Therefore I was also perhaps the only one who saw Bray spring into the bower of branches a moment after, and hang there easily awhile by one hand like a – well, what: gibbon? fruit bat? Tarzan of the Apes? – surveying the chaos with great frightened eyes which he shaded with the other hand. By the time folks are on their feet he has dropped noiselessly to the deck and stands blinking as if about to weep or swoon. Prinz approaches him cautiously, cameraman at his elbow. Men with electric torches are running toward us along the shore now, calling ahead…

But I shan’t write, not to you; only summarise. The Gadfly was fast; when reversing her engines failed to pull her off, it was decided to leave her there till morning, when the situation and damage to the hull could be better assessed. (She was “kedged off” next day without difficulty, as fortunately undamaged, except cosmetically, as ourselves.) Meanwhile, state police cars, park police cars, sheriffs’ cars, ambulances, volunteer firemen, and hosts of Chautauquans assembled to witness and assist: we were handed down ladders from bow to beach – rather, from bow to woodland path – questioned, examined for injuries, and led through the flashing lights and milling curious to a bus sent over from the institution (The Spirit of Chautauqua) to fetch us, finally, home, after Prinz and Ambrose had got all the footage – I should say mileage – they wanted from the scene.

All this, I daresay, you will have read in your Daily Chautauquan or the Buffalo press, together with the news that while no charges were placed against “Captain” Bray – who plausibly maintained that he had sprung to save Ms Golden from what he took to be assault by a drunken passenger – he was peremptorily sent packing. We were apologised to, offered another excursion gratis at our pleasure (no takers), instructed to send our dry-cleaning bills to the little company for reimbursement. It was explained that the vessel’s safety record was thitherto unblemished; that Bray was not a regular employee but a part-time standby pilot called on only for unscheduled occasions when the regular skipper was unavailable, et cetera.

What was not likely in the news reports is that Prinz, and Ambrose too, were delighted with their episode and fascinated by their Mr Bray – who, when he learned that we were Only Acting, wept with humiliation at his disgrace (I think he had cause to be indignant at us, madman or no). Indeed he went upon his knees to ask our pardon, in particular Ms Golden’s, for whose sake he disquietingly declared himself ready to kill or die. And when these effusions were accepted by A. & P. (if not by Bea, who uncharitably bade him Fuck Off Already and called for a drink), he declared himself egregiously misled about our characters and intentions by “agents of the anti-Bonapartist conspiracy” and begged us to permit him to make amends. Specifically, in the name of our mutual benefactor His Majesty the late Harrison Mack, he hoped we would call upon him next day in nearby Lily Dale, where he invited us to photograph a ruin infinitely more consequential than that of a paltry excursion boat: he meant the failure of “LILYVAC II,” his “computer facility,” and with it the wreck of his “Novel Revolution” (or revolutionary novel, I never got it straight which), sabotaged by those same conspirators who had undermined the Tidewater Foundation and the world’s best hope for – here he looked worshipfully at Bea – a new Golden Age.

Certifiable lunacy! Which of course enraptured Ambrose, especially the “computer-novelist” business. Back at the Athenaeum at last, well past midnight, I tumbled straightway into bed and sleep. Before my lover joined me (and woke me for my nightly seeding) he and Prinz had made plans for an overland excursion on the morrow to Lily Dale, to Wrap Up That Part of the Story on location before returning to Maryland.

Thither we trekked next day, through heavy clouds and chilling rain, up into the hills to that smaller version of Chautauqua Lake and seedier replica of the institution: just the four of us, plus the cameraman and one all-purpose assistant. Bea Golden had at first refused, having suffered Transylvanian nightmares till dawn; she was at last, alas, persuaded by her shipboard hero, whose actions of the previous evening had clearly scored him a few points. Ambrose even invited Prinz to record their conversation in the car; he offered to reenact with Bea, at our destination, “the Author’s growing ascendancy over the Director in their symbolic rivalry for the Leading Lady.” Prinz declined with a tiny smile and shake of the head.

We wound through tacky lanes of spiritualists’ cottages, each with its shingle advertising “readings,” to a little farm overlooking Cassadaga Lake, just below a Catholic retreat house on the hilltop. Goats grazed in the meadow: footage. Bea thought the kids just darling, how they cavorted and banged heads. Ambrose cavorted with them to amuse her, till the nannies moved him off. Footage.

Ex-Captain Bray came out to greet us, at once obsequious and somehow menacing. I don’t like him! Now that the conspiracy had turned Drew Mack and the Tidewater Foundation against him (for which, he muttered ominously, They Shall Pay), and his services were no longer desired by the Gadfly company, his sole support must be the modest income generated by those dairy goats: their milk he sold to a commercial fudge maker in Fredonia, their hides to artisans on the nearby Seneca Indian reservation, who turned them into “Spanish” wineskins for sale at Allegheny ski resorts. Upon such shifts did the Revolution wait! And it must break our hearts to see to what pass LILYVAC II had come, sabotaged by Her whom he had judged of all humans the least corruptible. Et cetera. We exchanged surreptitious glances. He took us to the computer facility, at one end of the milking shed. Footage. Absolutely crackers.

Ambrose presumed, innocently, that our host was acquainted with the fictional George Giles, Goat-Boy and Grand Tutor, if not with the author of his adventures on “West Campus.” Dear me, sir, you are not held in universal admiration! First M. Casteene’s casual report of his offer to arrange your assassination for Joe Morgan, and now such a diatribe as should have warmed my heart if I truly bore you a grudge for not acknowledging these confessions written at your own solicitation. But surprising, yea alarming, as was the vehemence of Bray’s fulmination (you may thank us for not telling him you live within daily sight of the Gadfly; he believes you a Buffalonian tout court), it was upstaged by yet one more Uncanny Coincidence that came to light in course of it. To summarise – for why should I write? – it very much appears that Bray’s trusted “assistant” (she seems to’ve been his sort-of-lover too, repugnant as that notion is) in his woozy radical-political-literary-mathematical-ecological enterprises, who he came to feel was seduced by “anti-Bonapartist” elements into sabotaging his computer, and whom I gather he then assaulted in some fashion, was a certain hippie-yippie young woman from California by way of Brandeis U. named Merope Bernstein. Not only does our Bea Golden, with a Thrill of Horror, now understand her to be the same girl fetched hysterical to the Remobilisation Farm in May by her far-out friends (who thought she was “freaking out” on an overdose of something ingested back at their Chautauqua pad), but… ready? Brandeis, he said? Bernstein, Merope? From California originally? Omigod, cries Bea (and staggers for support, not to her Reg Prinz, but to my Ambrose): It’s Merry! I didn’t even recognise her! What did he do to her? Why didn’t she tell me who she was? I haven’t seen her in six years, since she was fifteen!

At length we got it sorted out: In an earlier incarnation, Bea Golden was Jeannine Bernstein, wife of a minor Hollywood character actor, himself much married and divorced. Bray’s allegedly perfidious assistant (but now he was calling her Morgan le Fay – altogether bonkers!) was this chap’s daughter by a prior mating. Hence…

Jee-sus! Ambrose exclaims.

Your wicked stepdaughter ha ha! Mr Bray cries feverishly to the recoiling Bea, with whom he is clearly smitten and whom he fears he has alienated. Footage. He didn’t hurt Ms Bernstein, he swears now; he only sort of spanked her for ruining his life’s work; put a bit of a scare into her, don’t you know. After all, she did save his life once; no doubt she was led astray in good faith; oh, they shall pay! He shall not rest till he has made it up to her – to Bea, for whom now he openly declares his adoration – for having chastised her ex-stepdaughter, however deservedly. They must go together, at once, to the Farm: he is a friend of Mr Horner there; he will declare to Ms Bernstein in her former stepmother’s presence that though with the best of intentions she has blighted his life and at least postponed the New Golden Age, and though he durst never trust her again with the LILYVAC programme, he harbours her no ill will and in the blessed name of her (ex-)stepmother forgives her his irreparable betrayal.

I summarise. With the greatest difficulty we got out of there – never did see the famous “printout” Bray claims to have been spoilt by Ms B. – back to Chautauqua; thence, Ambrose and I on the Friday, back Home. I do not envy Bea Golden her new admirer! Bray declares he will Put Things Right for her sake; that he will follow her to Fort Erie, to Maryland, anywhere she goes, let the goats fend for themselves; that with her aid and inspiration he may yet solve the Riddle of LILYVAC II and get the 5-Year Plan back on schedule before the “Phi-Point” of his life…

Ambrose finds him both frightening and fascinating: the Phi-Point, did he say? Point six one eight etc.? Bea finds him merely frightening, and threatens legal action if he attempts to follow her across either Peace Bridge or Bay Bridge. She was never close to Mel Bernstein’s daughter, she tells us now, whose mother of course had the custody; she thinks it possible Merry doesn’t even recognise her with her new name, any more than she Bea recognised her; but she cannot account for the coincidence. Ambrose cannot either, and worries for the ladies’ safety.

Castine, Castine, I assure him: there is the very god of Coincidence. Bea has but to place herself under his ubiquitous protection, as “Pocahontas” has evidently placed herself under “M. Casteene’s.”

He will thank me, says Ambrose, not to speak of his own prior incarnation. Jee-sus, what a week! And though it included that dismaying reencounter with Marsha (Did I see what he’d meant? Those thin-plucked eyebrows; the cold eyes under them; the mean turn of her jaw; the featureless regularity of those features he’d once thought attractive, then come to find empty of character, and now saw as the very stage mask of Vindictiveness… I said nothing), not to mention the grave tidings from Magda re his mother – despite all, it had been a long while since he’d felt so potent…

Oh really.

Yes, well, he meant that way too, and we’d see, we’d see. But what he really meant was Musewise: the Perseus story was clipping along in first draft; he was delighted with the conceit, equally with the execution; it made him feel Writer enough to more than hold his own with Reg Prinz, whose movie he thought he now quite understood and rather relished. He took my arm (we were on the United flight down from Buffalo to Baltimore): no doubt it had been a rough week for me, on more than one front. Aye, said I. He daresaid there would be rougher weeks ahead. O joy, said I. What he meant was that his new “ascendancy,” whether real or set up by Prinz, would doubtless provoke an escalated retaliation. He told me frankly then what was pretty obvious anyroad: that while he regarded our connexion as Central, and central to it his desire not only to impregnate but to wed me straightway thereupon, he was determined by the way to make conquest of Bea Golden if he could. It was a kind of craziness, no doubt (Yup, says I), a playing of Prinz’s game. Just for that reason he meant to do it; beat the man at his own game; out-Prinz him.