Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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Текущая страница: 43 (всего у книги 75 страниц)

I dutifully suggested we take Angela. Touched, Milord thanked me for that thoughtfulness, but declared there was another female going with us instead. Now, John: our autocratic 5th Stage really has been in full noxious flower since I wrote you last, even though (thank God) Bea Golden had not returned from that Farm after the Doctor’s “funeral.” But for all I knew she might be back in town with Prinz, and now I wondered: Was I really expected to… But no, he was joking! My avant-gardist, it seems, has conceived a passion for old Samuel Richardson (the first to speak of the Death of the Novel, it turns out, in a letter to Lady Barbara Montague dated 1758): the third member of our ménage à trois was to be R.‘s Clarissa!

All four volumes, dear? Sure, and a six-pack of National Premium, two beach towels, and our suntan lotion. Ambrose cannot bear reading that endless novel, you understand: he likes hearing me read him the table of contents and Richardson’s chapter summaries.

Chacun à son goût. He was in good humour (not good enough to let me wear my own clothes; he decked me out in a Roaring-Twentyish cotton middy blouse with black silk sailor kerchief, rather fetching actually, Lord knows where he found it); I was in middle month and wondering whether we might manage the Zeus-&-Danaë trick up in that tower, seeing more conventional deposits had so far failed to yield interest. The weather was of course steamy and threatening thundershowers, which the soybean and corn fields needed; on the other hand, below-normal rainfall had kept the mosquito population down. The campus was deserted. We understand that A. B. Cook has already occupied my office – may be there as I write these lines – but he was not in evidence: only a few student groundkeepers and, over by the Media Centre, a van that we recognised as belonging to Prinz’s crew. We sped past, not to be recognised in turn, parked on the far side of Schott’s Folly, and let ourselves quickly through the padlocked cyclone fence into the construction site.

The scene was dead quiet: one could hear the Stars and Stripes and the flag of Maryland flapping in the damp breeze at their staffs a hundred yards off, and a few desultory cicadas. Round about the site were paper sacks of, of all things, Medusa Cement. We were duly amused, but the coincidence prompted, instead of erotic associations with Danaë’s brass tower, a re-remarking by Ambrose that whereas Medusa turned everything into stone, Mensch Masonry (whose cement it was) could be said to turn stone into everything, except money. Indeed, though allegedly cracked as the House of Usher, the stone-masonry base of the tower is handsomely done, in the same random rubble as the brothers’ camera obscura. The rest of the shaft is a rough-finished reinforced concrete eyesore.

We climbed, A. reminiscing about the alphabet-block towers they’d built together as boys: compromises, not always successful, between Peter’s interest in their engineering and Ambrose’s in what they spelled. I went first up the fire stairs, pausing at unglassed windows less to look at the not-much-of-anything than to give Ambrose occasion to “do a verbena,” as was his wont back in sexy April. (Do you know Maupassant’s tale “La Fenêtre,” about the verbena-scented lady who invites her suitor to her country château but will not yield to him? He consoles himself with her chambermaid and, discovering this latter one morning leaning out a turret window – so he supposes, from his position below and behind her – he resolves to surprise her by slipping up the stairs lifting her skirts, and kissing her knickerless derrière. The little prank succeeds; he quickly plants his lover’s kiss; is confounded by the scent there, not of the maid’s familiar odeur naturel, but of her chaste mistress’s perfume! Scandalised, the lady sends him packing; but – ah Guy! ah, France! – years after, as he retells the tale, it seems to the narrator that he can still summon to his moustaches la senteur de verveine…)

Nothing doing.

We attained the top: dusty concrete floor and a sultry view of loblolly pines, parching grass, Marshyhope U., and white crab-boats on the distant creeks. A view (Ambrose declared after one perfunctory conning, and I agree) better mediated by camera obscura than viewed directly. Exam time again: Do you know Gossaert’s 16th-Century Danaë? A winsome, moon-faced teenager half wrapped in open indigo drapery, she perches on tasselled red cushions in a Renaissance campanile, ankles crossed but bare knees parted, and looks up with puckered unsurprise at the shower of gold which rains past the plump little breast that will one day suckle Perseus, onto the folds of her robe, and out of sight between her thighs. So presently perched I (changes changed) on a pair of clean 50-lb. sacks of Medusa, the only unsoiled seat thereabouts. Ambrose likewise, and fetched out… his beer and his Richardson.

It is the final tyranny of tyrants that, when on occasion they behave like decent chaps, we are inordinately grateful. Milord was merry. Roused already (and knees tentatively ajar), I was roused further by his mere friendliness for a change; further still by our rehearsal of Clarissa’s table of contents. Her mother connives at the private correspondence between her and Lovelace… Her expedient to carry on a private correspondence with Miss Howe… A letter from her brother forbidding her to appear in the presence of any of her relations without leave. Her answer. Writes to her mother. Her mother’s answer. Writes to her father. His answer… Her expostulatory letter to her brother and sister. Their answers… Copies of her letters to her two uncles, and of their characteristic answers… An insolent letter from her brother on her writing to Solmes… Observes upon the contents of her seven letters… Her closet searched for papers. All the pens and ink they find taken from her… Substance of her letter to Lovelace… Lays all to the fault of her corresponding with him at first…

Et cetera. These from the mere 99 letters of Volume 1, with yet to come the 438 of the other three volumes! But we never came to them – Clarissa’s protracted rape and even more protracted repining unto death. For if, admixed with Ambrose’s mirth, was professional envy of his great predecessor’s wind (and the stamina of readers in those days), admixed with mine was a complex sympathy for Clarissa Harlowe – yea even unto her employment (Vol. IV, Letter XCVI, Belford to Lovelace) of her coffin for a writing table! I recalled that Clarissa’s “elopement” with Lovelace had been a major event in Mme de Staël’s girlhood, when, as 15-year-old Germaine Necker, she had doted breathlessly upon Richardson’s novels. And now she was dead, as presently Ambrose, André, I, and all must be, the most of us having done little more, in Leonardo’s phrase, than “fill up privies.” Before I knew it I was weeping instead of laughing, there in my antic getup on my cement sacks: half a century old, childless, husbandless, wageless, surely a little cracked (as Schott unkindly alleged), and stuck on Redmans Neck with an unsuccessful writer and petty despot instead of flourishing in Paris or Florence with some Benjamin Constant…

He kissed me, God bless Ambrose for that: a proper loving and consoling buss before he touched between my legs. Then I did go a bit mad: moaned at him to take me as he’d taken Magda in Peter’s cellar a quarter-century ago. Dear God, I wanted to conceive by him, to get something beyond my worn-out self! And by God we tried, on that hard bed of Medusa Portland. Let Danaë do it her way; I’ll get my Perseus with a regular roger! If there’s connexion between the ploughing and the crop… Comes then the golden shower, not a drop wasted on the draperies; surely that should turn the trick, if we’ve one in us to turn; my joy poured out as A. poured in—

Which is why I didn’t hear what he heard. My Zeus sprang off me as if galvanised, snatched up Vol. I and winged it staircaseward with a curse. Now I heard the whirrs and clicketies over there! By the time I got my legs together and my hem pulled down, he had armed himself with the sack of Vols II, III, & IV and, bare-arsed with his spigot still adrip, was whamming in a rage at Reg Prinz, perched there with his hand-held!

Now, of course, I’m indignant at such sneakery. But at the time I was still too busy feeling Zeus’d to the Plimsoll, too surprised at my lover’s shocking leap off me, too marvellous at his fury to muster a proper indignation. How Ambrose did go at him, cursing, swinging good weighty Sam: first at Prinz’s fuzzy head (who till the last possible frame kept the camera running), then at the instrument itself, when he saw Prinz more concerned for it than for his own cranium. Chucking Clarissa, Ambrose fought for that camera – it was strapped to Prinz’s arm – and threatened to smash it and Reggie’s head together if he didn’t expose that film then and there. By george he did it, too, Prinz shrieking like a wired-up bat the while: prised open the case, did Ambrose, clawed out the reel, and flung it like a Frisbee from the tower top before two of Prinz’s graduate-film-workshop types came to their master’s rescue.

You’re bananas, Prinz cries now (the clearest statement I’ve ever heard from him): that was footage! Shove your effing footage, Ambrose replies, I’m done with it. He comes back now for his britches; the three cinéastes withdraw, examining their precious machine for damage and smirking over their shoulders, the two younger ones, and me at my bottomless beau.

So ends the Mating Season Sequence, I presume! Which I might’ve suspected I was set up for, had Ambrose’s outrage not swept all suspicion before it.

And if Reg Prinz’s riposte today hadn’t so gravely upped the ante. Good as his word (What shall we do for money?), Ambrose cut off his connexion with the film company as of that Monday. Inspired perhaps by Richardson as well as by the Battle in the Belfry, he has vowed to commit himself absolutely to the printed word: letters and empty spaces on the page! The whole hot week since, he has rededicated his energies to Perseus, resolved to redraft that piece (and, I daresay, somehow to work Bea Golden into the plot, now he’s been in her knickers). Bastille Day’s humour passed; his obnoxious “5th Stage” behaviour reasserted itself. I spent my week daily visiting his mum in hospital, wishing they could let the poor thing die; Magda more often than not was with me, a real friend now I’m in “her” stage, urging upon me patience and Italian old wives’ advice for getting pregnant. Between sickbed and seedbed (daily follow-ups to the Shower of Gold, here at 24 L), we watched Apollo-11 & Co. lift off for the moon (Magda’s one of those who seriously wonder, to Ambrose’s delight, whether it isn’t All Faked by the Television People) and Dorchester County, with proportionate to-do, make ready for last night’s opening of its nine-day tercentenary celebration.

We imagined Prinz’s crew to be on the margins of that latter action, though what exactly he’s up to these days in the Mating Sequence way, we can’t well tell. Yesterday evening we went down to Long Wharf to witness the opening-night activities: proclamations by the mayor and the county commissioners, tugs-o’-war between such civic organisations as the Citgo Bushwhackers and the Rescue Fire Co.‘s Chimney Sweepers, calliope tapes amplified from the Original Floating Theatre II at pierside – all amiable provincial entertainment, I don’t mean to belittle it. Most especially we approved the new county flag, a buff field bearing the arms of the 4th Earl of Dorset: supported by twin pards rampant, a shield quarterly or and gules with a bend vair, topped by the earl’s coronet, a fleur-de-lys or, and an Estoile argent of eight wavy points. Under all, the charge Aut Nunquam Tentes Aut Perfice (“Finish What You’ve Started,” shall we say), which it pleaseth us to take for our own, vis-à-vis our project of engenderment, and Ambrose for a particular spur to his myth in progress. Sure enough, the filmists were there, footage, footage, though nothing in the mating way was visibly transpiring. With them, if our eyes did not deceive us, was your odd-duck neighbour Jerome Bray, looking very strange even in the costumed crowd. No sign of Bea Golden, to my continuing relief, nor of Marsha Blank, ditto. Ambrose studiously ignored them all. Prinz gave us a long, neutral look through his viewer and turned away. This morning’s program, for us and for the tercentenary, was to have been a presentation, from the stage of the showboat, called Dorchester County in Art & Literature. But we never got aboard, for as we crossed the municipal park we saw Prinz’s crew setting up their light and sound gear beside that of a mobile television news unit from Baltimore. This latter, alas, was interviewing Ms. Golden – just flown in, presumably, from the Farm, and unfortunately fetching in early-19th-century crinolines (1669 or not, the committee had tapped her to dramatise the county’s resistance to Admiral Cockburn’s Chesapeake foraging raids in the War of 1812, so the telly man was explaining to his microphone) – and Ambrose was inclined to Say Hello. Before we could do that, however, I luckily espied (to my true dismay) J. Bray again, on the fringes of the crowd, in earnest conference with, of all people on the planet, Angela!

Magda, Peter, her twin elder cousins – nowhere in sight. What on earth was Angie doing there, with that person? Ambrose literally ran to snatch his daughter away, once I pointed out to him their tête-à-tête. The pair were passing under Prinz’s mike booms as he overtook them, manned by one of those chaps who’d come to their director’s rescue in the tower. Just as Ambrose collared Angie by her T-shirt top (MARYLAND IS FOR CRABS, with a red claw pinching each prominent nipple) and Bray by his – well, cloak – the boom swept ’round and down and caught him a terrific clout upside the head as aforespecified, dropping him cold as a mackerel to the blacktop.

Bray vanished (no mean trick, you’d think, in that drag, but he manages it); Angie set up a caterwaul; the mike boy was all apologies. One of the twins appeared after all, a husky young replica of Peter who’d only gone for ices; Bea Golden broke off her interview but kept a little distance; the Rescue Fire Co. ambulance crew, standing by, came to our rescue, even giving Carl and Angie a lift home via the hospital emergency room. Magda hurried down from the cancer ward upstairs, Peter over from the Lighthouse next door; it was a regular homecoming.

Ambrose was up by then, but groggy: mild concussion, no detectable fracture of the skull. We were instructed to keep an eye out for nausea and vertigo, barring which, sleep and aspirin ought to do the job; we weren’t to be alarmed at (what now pretty scarily began to manifest itself) his temporary circuit-failure. He was discharged. I overrode P. & M.‘s desire to fetch him chez lui for recuperation, but accepted Magda’s help in getting us back to 24 L (Peter’s leg is worse; he no longer drives).

Here we yet abide, sir, still Getting It Together whilst Apollo-11 and Luna-15 zip ’round their moon orbits, and Thor Heyerdahl’s crippled Ra limps on toward Barbados, and the strange news trickles in from Martha’s Vineyard of Senator Edward Kennedy’s (also peculiar) accident. It was that fucker Prinz, right? enquires my woozy master. I daresay, luv, say I. And I do dare so say, though I never saw him and though the mike boom lad (not the light boom, luv) has rung us up twice, in fear of lawsuit no doubt, to ask after his victim’s condition and to swear it was All Accidental.

Bea Golden has phoned too. Somewhat timidly, I am pleased to imagine. No mention, of course, of their Mating Season Sequence down on Bloodsworth Island. Magda reports that Angela reports that the Funny-Looking Man only wanted to read her T-shirt and warn her that insect repellents cause cancer.

Well, John! As the Chappaquiddick people put it, much is yet unclear. Marvellous though Coincidence can be, in life as in Uncle Sam Richardson’s novels, we strongly incline to our Ambrose’s view that it was that fucker Prinz’s doing. With the mike boom, dear. Which gives us to worry that on this front too, once he recollects himself, what my Dorchester darling hath begun, he may resolve to finish.

We pray not: I mean my friend Magda and her pro-tem Doppelgänger, yr faithful

G.

R: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Battle of Niagara. Surgery for Magda. Lady Amherst desperate.

24 L Street

26 July 1969

John,

Ra’s in Bridgetown Harbour, the moon men are back on earth and quarantined aboard the Hornet, young Mary Jo Kopechne’s in her grave, and Teddy Kennedy’s on probation with a suspended driver’s license. Today’s St Anne’s Day, mother of the Virgin, and – Mother of God! – Dorchester County Day, the windup of “our” tercentenary. “Floats,” high school marching bands (the musicians outnumbered by troupes of strange-looking girls twirling batons), volunteer firemen in procession with their shiny machines, the dénouement of “The Dorchester Story” at the municipal baseball park, and the planting there of a time capsule to be opened in 2069: a sort of letter to the future containing all this news. Whose sender, like myself, may not hope for a reply from the addressee.

Today’s also the 194th anniversary of the inauguration of the U.S. Postal Service. Happy birthday, U.S. Mail! The commencement of dog days. The end (as the full Buck Moon approacheth, and with it no doubt my monthly monthlies) of our unfilmed Mating Season Sequence at 24 L. And, 155 years ago, the day after the Battle of Niagara in 1814, also known as the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, our topic for this week’s letter.

That battle (on the Canadian shore of the Niagara River, just below the Falls) was bloody and inconclusive, a sort of stand-off, as was “our” “reenactment” of it yesterday before the cameras. General Jacob Brown’s Americans had crossed the Niagara from Buffalo earlier in the month and captured Fort Erie on 3 July; two days later, led by Winfield Scott, they managed a considerable psychological victory at Chippewa, just above the Falls, by driving back the British regulars with heavy casualties. On 25 July, they sallied forth to Lundy’s Lane and met a regrouped and reinforced British army. From 7 to 11 P.M. the fighting was close and sharp, including hand-to-hand bayonet engagements in the dark; each side suffered nearly 900 casualties, about 30 % of their actively engaged troops! The Americans won the field, but ill-advisedly withdrew to Chippewa and thence (tomorrow) back to Fort Erie, returning the initiative to the British and abandoning their invasion campaign. Both sides claimed victory.

I rehearse all this to remind myself that I was once an historian of sorts, and to put in what perspective I can the confused, distressing events of yesterday. The “real” historian on the scene this week has been our old friend the new Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English at Marshyhope, you know whom, who appeared from Redmans Neck or Barataria, all smiles and mellifluous couplets, to volunteer his services as Reg Prinz’s historical consultant, at least until the company returns (next week) to Niagara. Cook’s idea it was – since Prinz had postponed that return in order to film the D. Co. tercentenary – to kill two birds with one stone by exploiting the “1812” episodes of “The Dorchester Story,” that ongoing nightly pageant at the ball park which tonight attains the present and projects the future. There were all the “extras” one could use, more or less in period costume (the same outfits serve for the Colonial, the Revolutionary, and the 1812 episodes), dramatising the exploits of the Marshyhope Blues versus Joseph Whaland’s Picaroons in 1776 and the depredations of the British fleet in 1813/14; more than willing to extend their props and performances gratis to The Movie. Since it is, anyroad, not the war we’re interested in but its reenactment – in which 1969 and 1812 (and 1669, 1776, and 1976) are tossed together like salad greens – the historical inaccuracies, the thinness of the sets, the amateurishness of the actors, all play into our hands.

Yup: ours again, John. Aut nunquam tentes et cetera, exactly as I feared on Saturday last. As soon as his head cleared (Sunday morning), Ambrose was furious with himself for having abandoned like General Brown the field he’d won on Independence Day: i.e. (and woe is me), B.C., that all too tangible token of his “victory” over Reg Prinz on the O.F.T. II. Bea is, I am to understand, only the Symbol of What’s Being Fought Over (a flesh-and-blood symbol, alas, which can be, which has been, reslept with): the fight is the thing now, the armature of a drama which has clearly outgrown its original subject. Your fiction is at most the occasion of the film these days; perhaps it was never more than that. One would not be surprised if the final editing removed all reference to your works entirely, which are only a sort of serial cues for Prinz and Ambrose to improvise upon and organise their hostilities around. Those hostilities – between “the Director” and “the Author”—are the subject, a filming-within-the-filming, deadly earnest for all they’re in the “script” and despite Ambrose’s being literally on Prinz’s payroll as of Thursday 24th.

That day, aptly, was Commerce & Industry Day in Dorchester (each day of the tercentenary has had a Theme). On the Wednesday, misfortune resmote the family Mensch, from a most unexpected quarter: with Andrea still a-dying in hospital and Peter imprudently putting off his own treatment till she’s done, Magda, poor thing – La Giulianova, l’Abruzzesa, whom I so wrongly feared and now feel such connexion to – having felt abdominal discomforts for a secret while and gone at last, bleeding, for gynecological advice, was clapped straightway into surgery, one wing over from her mum-in-law, and hysterectomised.

Fibroid tumour; patient doing well enough physically, but in indifferent psychological case. Over and above her concern for the family (Peter is not immobilised yet or otherwise helpless; the twins are looking after things), Magda is suffering more than usually from the classic female set-down at the loss of her uterine function. The woman loved not only pregnancy, childbirth, and wet-nursing; she loved menstruation, that monthly reminder that she was an egg bearer, a seed receiver, generator and incubator of fetuses. More than any other woman I know, Magda relished the lunar cycle of her body and spirits: the oestrus and Mittelschmerz of ovulation, the erratic moods and temperature fluctuations of the menstrual onset, the occasional bad cramps and headaches, even the periodic flow itself. She ought to have borne more children. When I called on her after surgery, she wept and kissed me and said, “Now it’s up to you.”

No comment.

Among the effects of this turn of events on Ambrose was a sober review, with his brother, of the family’s finances. All bad news, of course. Indeed, their mother’s only cheer in her cheerless terminality is that at last they need no longer fear insolvency, having achieved it. Mensch Masonry has passed officially into receivership, and precious little there is for the receivers to receive (the status of the Lighthouse is moot: in an ill-advised moment the brothers designated the camera obscura as corporation property, thinking to take tax advantage of its unprofitability; it may therefore be claimed by M. M. Co.‘s creditors). On Commerce & Industry Day Ambrose put Perseus aside once more – surely that chap will ossify before Medusa gets to petrify him! – sought out Prinz (I wasn’t there), and grimly informed me afterward that he was on salary again, “no holds barred.”

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