What was more — and this alarmed l’Abruzzesa more than any threat of poverty or the disagreeable reappearance of Marsha Blank — Peter himself was not well. He had lately had difficulty walking; had developed a positive limp in his left leg, which he’d been as loath to acknowledge to her as he’d been to acknowledge that it was his own late father who, almost certainly, had falsified those core samples from Redmans Neck. But their family doctor had confided to her privately that X rays had been made and Tests taken; that, though Peter had sworn him to silence, he felt it a disservice to his patient and to her not to tell her that her husband had cancer of the bone in his lower left leg. Inasmuch as Peter would not consent, whilst his mother lay dying, to the prompt surgery his own condition called for, the doctor had to hope that his elder and terminal patient would get on with it before his younger became terminal too.
Well! Having been down that horrid road with my Jeffrey, I was able genuinely to sympathise, if not to help. We had our Good Cry. The ice broken and Magda so obviously harbouring me no ill will, I acknowledged that things were indeed less than blissful between Ambrose and me. Further, I candidly apprised her of the Pattern business: how, starting from that play upon the opening letters of the New England Primer in his first love letter to me, Ambrose had come to fancy a rough correspondence between the “stages” of our affair and the sequence of his major prior connexions with women. How this correspondence had so got hold of his imagination that he could no longer say, concerning the subsequent course of our love, what was cause and what effect.
Magda was sharply interested; I reviewed for her the four “stages” thus far, as I understood them, (a) The period of our first acquaintance, in the fall semester of 1968, through Ambrose’s unexpected declaration after Harrison’s funeral, to his mad overtures of March and our first coition in the ad hoc committee room — which-all he compared to his youthful admiration of Magda as rendered in his abandoned novel, The Amateur. The ardour then (I wistfully recalled) had been altogether his, merely tolerated and at length yielded to by its object, (b) That month of frenetic copulation, with no great love on either side, from early April to early May, which put him in mind of his late-teen fucking bouts with the Messalina of the Chesapeake, Jeannine Mack, (c) Our odd and gentle sexless first fortnight of May, when we both had felt stirrings of real love, and Ambrose had flabbergasted me with intimations of his wish to make a baby. In his mind this was not unlike the period of his second, innocent “connexion” with Magda, by then Mrs Peter Mensch; the resemblance is not obvious to me. (d) That disagreeable “husbandly” period just ended, during which, alas for me, my ardor exceeded his, and our physical connexion was sedulously procreative in intent, if not in issue. All I could say of this interval was that, if it really did resemble Ambrose’s marriage, I’m surprised the thing lasted fifteen months, not to mention fifteen years; and unless I was confusing cause and effect, I quite sympathised with Marsha’s busy infidelities. But I could not imagine that chilly individual’s permitting for a fortnight the highhandedness I’d indulged for a month already. Those ridiculous costumes! His insulting attentions to Bea Golden! What’s more (and more’s the pity for me), I loved him despite that degrading nonsense; loved him still and deeply, damn it. I could not imagine Ms. Blank’s entertaining that emotion for anyone.
Be that as may, we were by A.‘s own assertion done with d and entering e. Inasmuch as he had declared to me in his Ex-hor-ta-ti-on of 3 March that I was the 6th love of his life, and as the evidence was that he had come to me from a painful third connexion with Magda, I urged her now to tell me what I must look forward to from Our Friend in Stage #5.
