The drugs do not finally much alarm me: André and I “did” hashish, cocaine, and opium in Paris a hundred years ago, along with our absinthe and Caprice des Dieux. Nor does the “kinky” “scene”: la vie bohémienne was not invented by the Flower Children, and cannot startle in a single of its aspects — the dope, the dirt, the diet, the promiscuity, the neobarbarist posturings, the radical/anarchist politics, freaky costumes, and woozy occultism — anyone acquainted with Europe’s demimonde from Dandyism through Dadaism. What alarms me is me: my acquiescence in this contemptible tyrannising; my playing, at such cost to my self-image, peace of mind, and professional activity, my lover’s stupid game.
Why do I permit myself to make myself ridiculous, boogalooing with Reg Prinz, Bea Golden (no child either, flower or otherwise; but she’s got the body for it, alas, as I have not, and the looseness of limb and morals; and Ambrose, damn him, is attracted), and the “Baratarians,” as the extras call themselves? The easy, obvious, armchair answer irritates me, no doubt because it is the main truth: my guilt for having given up my own child nearly thirty years ago (but Lord, Lord!) leaves me peculiarly victimisable at the hands etc. of a man whose regnant passion is to fertilise me. The more as I am d’un certain âge, widowed, expatriate (but from what fatherland, after all?), and — in Dostoyevsky’s lovely term—“morally prostrate” from the long tantalisings of André Castine and/or his Doppelgängers. True, true, true. But the main truth is not the whole truth. Even before this rage for paternity got hold of him, I had begun to love odd Ambrose; my dozen-or-so letters to you since March must surely bear witness to this weary heart’s movement from colleaguely cordiality to appall at his first crude overtures, thence through amusement, affection, attraction, and reckless lust, to, Lord help me, love.
I love him! (It excites me to write it.) The child thing scares me: both that he demands conception and that what he demands could, just possibly, occur. Preggers, for God’s sake! These other new demands scare me: it is not in a spirit of erotic sport that Ambrose rigs me out like a high school “groupie,” but in frustration at what in an earlier “stage” he prized: that I am Older. Indeed, I believe that were I as young as the would-be “starlets” among the Baratarians — whose narcotised, strobe-lighted, easily proffered favours mio maestro does not always, I think, refuse — he would not so particularly itch to make me big; it is I he wants to impregnate, precisely despite my age. But none of these scares me so much as the possibility of his ceasing to love me (he does, John; I know it). For a little while, I trust, he must work out in this bizarre and degrading wise his rage at unalterable circumstance. I love him! And so I “frug,” I flail my arms, I wiggle my bum — and close my eyes, open my legs, cross my fingers.
Like, um, wow?
Cependant, he has conceived a longish fiction, novella-size at least, upon the theme of ritual reenactment, drafting notes and diagrams and trial passages between his bouts with me and Prinz. I had almost forgot that he is, after all, an author. He had allowed to me as how the materials were to be classical — the myth of Perseus, Andromeda, and Medusa, to be specific — and we came so near to having a proper literary conversation on the subject that for a moment I had imagined myself twenty again in fact with old Hesse, old Huxley, old Whomever, gratifying their elder flesh whilst they gratified my young mind. I actually lubricated at the prospect of exploring with my lover his lovely reading of the myth, in particular the Medusa episode, which he sees not in the Freudian way as an image of impotence and vulval terror, but (the polished shield of Athene, the reflections and re-reflections) as a drama of the perils of self-consciousness. Ambrose’s Perseus, middle-aged and ill married, his mythic exploits and heroic innocence behind him, once again “calls his enemy to his aid” (Ovid’s happy phrase, for Perseus’s use of the Gorgon’s head to petrify his adversaries), attempts to reenact his youthful triumphs, comes a cropper, but with the help of a restored and resurrected Medusa — whose true gaze, seen clearly, may confer immortality instead of death — transcends his vain objective and becomes, with her, a constellation in the sky, endlessly reenacting their romance.
