Provost indeed! What am I doing here, in this getup, in this office, in this country? And what are the pack of you doing to me?
Driving me bonkers, is what — you and Ambrose and André, André—straight out of my carton, as the children say. And I, well, it seems I’m doing what my “lover” claims to’ve devoted a period of his queer career to: answering rhetorical questions; saying clearly and completely what doubtless goes without saying.
E.g., that my apprehensions re the “4th Stage” of our affair prove in the event to have been more than justified. Every third evening, sir, regardless of my needs and wants — indeed, regardless of Ambrose’s needs and wants too, in the way of simple pleasure — I am courteously but firmly fucked, no other way to put it, in the manner set forth two letters past, to the sole and Catholic end of begetting a child. ’Appen I enjoy it (as, despite all and faute de mieux, I sometimes do), bully for me; ’appen I don’t, it up wi’ me knees and nightie anyroad, and to’t till I’m proper ploughed and seeded. In this business, and currently this only, the man is husbandly, John, as aforedescribed: husbanding his erections, husbanding my orgasms, his ejaculate. His eye like an old-time crofter’s is upon the calendar: come mid-lunation we are to increase our frequency to two infusions daily in hopes of nailing June’s wee ovum, May’s having given us the slip.
As I too must hope “we” do — yet how hope a hope so hopeless? Why, because, if this old provostial organ do not conceive, I truly fear the consequence! Silent sir (you who mock me not only by your absence from this “correspondence” but by your duly reported presence, even as I write these words, just across the Bay in College Park, to accept the honour you would not have from us. O vanity!): what I feared in mine of Saturday last is come to pass: our friend Ambrose has turned tyrant! Witness: I write this on office stationery because — for all it’s a muggy Maryland late-spring Saturday, the students long since flown for the summer, the campus abandoned till our anticlimactic commencement exercises a fortnight hence — I am in my office, winding up my desk work and putting correspondence on the machine for Shirley Stickles. And I am here not at all because the week’s work has spilled into the weekend. Au contraire: since our (early) final examinations put a term, hic et ubique, to the most violent term in U.S. academic history — one which I wot will mark a turn for ill and ever in the fortunes of many a college in this strange country — there’s been little to do, acting-provostwise. No: I am here now because I’m ashamed to show myself to Stickles, Schott, & Co., and so must do my windup work by weekend and weeknight, always excepting those reserved for conjugation.
And why ashamed? Oh well, because Distinguished Visiting Professor Pitt, Lady Amherst, acting provost, semicentenarian, erstwhile scholar, erstwhile gentlewoman, erstwhile respecter of herself, goes about these days sans makeup, bra, and panty girdle, her hair unpinned and straight and parted in the middle, her trusty horn-rims swapped for irritating contact lenses and square wire-framed “grannies.” The former she tearily inserts on the days her lord and master decks her out in miniskirt or bikini (dear lecherous Jeffrey, how you would laugh now at the legs you once called perfect, the arse and jugs you salivated after across Europe!); the latter complement her hippie basse couture: ankle-length unbelted calicos, bell-bottomed denims and fringed leathers — the whole brummagem inventory of head-shop fetishes, countercultural gewgaws, radical fripperies… Lord luv a duck! In which I am led forth, yea even as I feared, to “do” (and be done in by) “bags” of “grass” (I do not even like tobacco, excepting the smell of certain English mixtures in the briars of the couth) and I-forget-whats of lysergic acid diethylamide; to throw my limbs about like a certifiable lunatic in response to the “mind-blowing” megawattage of beastlike androgynes with surreal and grammatically singular denominations: the Who, the Airplane, the Floyd, the Lord have mercy on my soul. This in the hired “pads” and horny company of the film folk, generally — young and “with it” and “together,” beautiful of body and empty of head though not unskilled, the technicians especially — among whom I feel (as surely I’m meant to) a walking travesty, female counterpart of that rouged and revolting old fop in Mann’s Death in Venice.
