Letters полностью

Ambrose did not. I drove home too dazed by all these obscure comings-together to bother rechanging into go-go garb. My lover was cross, unreasonable. Of course I might go where I pleased — to Chautaugua, to London, to Hell — but why hadn’t I notified him? He was not at all surprised that A. B. Cook might be involved in Prinz’s film, inasmuch as your Sot-Weed Factor novel involves the Cookes and Burlingames, and the film has a retrospective as well as a prospective aspect. What did surprise him was that I would be as it were unfaithful to him with “old Cook.” Never mind the accident of Cook’s not being there: I had slipped out, slipped into my Old Lady clothes, slipped across the Bay on pretext (at best a pretext to myself) of verifying those patently concocted letters, to a chap whose obvious interest to me was his possible connexion with my erstwhile lover…

Jolly enough of that! I shot back. That day’s driving had been a shlep, not a slip, and made for good if futile cause. Those letters were not obviously false, though very possibly tampered with. Those Old Lady clothes were a welcome respite for this old lady, in whose neck moreover that A. B. Cook had been almost as considerable a pain as present company. And even if I had pursued him for his connexion with the grandest pain in the arse of all, my erstwhile lover, lifetime tormentor, and father of my lost child — even if I’d bedded the bloke in hopes of solving that nasty little riddle — well and bloody good, and he Ambrose ought to bloody aid and pity me instead of bloody banging a weary old lady on the head with his bloody mad jealousies and petty despotisms, et farking cetera!

In short, a little lovers’ quarrel. It did not last long. I was weary; am; and Ambrose knows how to play me. Under my fatigue I liked it that he was jealous; knew he knew I liked it; even liked knowing he knew, etc. God and my sisters forgive me!

He made me doff the O.L. oufit instanter; tupped me a good one. As I lay propped after for the sake of his low-motiles, he announced more agreeably that whilst I’d been taking French leave that morning, he’d solved with his diagrams a tricky problem in the plan of his Perseus story, and authorised me to pass the info on to you if I was still writing these weekly one-way letters. I begged him fill that blank another time; I was too weary. And speaking of blanks, I mentioned my blank informant at Chautaugua. Ambrose was not interested.

I asked him whether he thought André Castine of Castines Hundred and Andrew Burlingame Cook of Chautaugua could possibly be the same man. He crisply replied, to my surprise, that he thought the question as academic, under the circumstances, as that of the authenticity of those 1812 letters: the skill and subtlety of those circumambient impostures over so many generations, the welter of obscure purposes and cross-purposes, made a kind of radical positivism the only possible approach to, or bridge over, the vertiginous quicksand of history, including my own past. Much moved, I sprang to hug him. He gruffly bade me look to my insemination; gave me liberty to explore the matter as I would whilst we were in Ontario and west New York, up to the point of physical infidelity: should there be even the slightest possibility of my impregnation’s being attributable to another, we were kaput; if on the other hand I managed despite all to conceive, and indisputably by himself… then he hoped we might marry.

Ontario? West New York? Marry? Flabbergastment! Arrant presumption!