Letters полностью

So. I ought to’ve shown him the door, and did not. We languish here in air-conditioned desperation whilst the peninsula swelters: an odd, dull lull after all the recent action, but hardly a respite, certainly no vacation. Tender and tyrannical at once, vulnerable and volatile, my friend is burdened with something beyond his mother’s dying (which proceeds all too slowly, alas for her), the abandonment of his story, the impending return of Reg Prinz and the resumption (Monday next) of their rivalry — beyond even the set-down of his sexual ego on Bloodsworth Island. I don’t know what it is. My clear feeling — very possibly a desperate delusion — is that his “conquest” of and failure with Bea Golden really did have more to do with me (I mean with us, our unsuccess in the conception way) than with her. But I don’t know. He is a raw nerve now; sore as my heart is, I love and oddly pity him.

Too, we are back to’t. Impotent with her, he is a standing bone with me. And who cares? Well, the pair of us; God knows exactly wherefore. A touch more frequently in this “5th Stage” than in our fanatical 4th (but nothing like our sexy 2nd), we go to’t, to’t, to the crazy end — but not just—of July engenderment. Now I know the pattern, I cannot drop knickers for him without thinking of poor three-timed Magda: with mixed feelings as I fancy Ambrose thinking likewise. Once only I remarked as much: his eyes filled up; I shan’t again.

Anyroad, I am not to forget that we are not merely reenacting; that even were we, with luck this as yet but ill-defined 5th Stage will bring us to the 6th—i.e., to ourselves, to Ambrose and Germaine, not Ambrose and Magda/Jeannine Mack/Magda/Marsha Blank/Magda! Who will I be, I wonder, when, having gone through such protean metamorphoses, I return to my “true” self?

What else is new. Oh, that I seem in for a new couturial outrage. From old steamer trunks and attic cedar closets in the Menschhaus, Ambrose has recovered a virtual wardrobe of 1930-ish ladies’ wear — his then-still-stylish mum’s, I suppose — and…

Yup. That’s how we do’t when we go to’t these days at 24 L. It’s nothing Oedipal, I think (we’re not even sure they’re Andrea’s clothes): rather that, having failed to fertilise me in the costumes first of my present age and then of the presently young, he’ll give me a go in the garb of my own young womanhood and first fertility. And indeed, for all my apprehension that he may carry this new mummery, like the old, out of doors, I confess that intramurally it is not only Ambrose who finds arousing these early Joan Crawfords, late Greta Garbos, middle Marlene Dietrichs, not unreasonably unlike what I wore in Paris when André’s first intromission found its mark, some 350 ovulations past…

I cannot write.

And so I shall begin your Lost in the Funhouse stories. A. says he’s in them. If so, for whom is the funhouse fun? Not, I think, for lost

Germaine

A: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Dorchester County Tercentenary and Mating-Season Sequences. Ambrose’s concussion, and its cause.

24 L, 11 P.M.

19 July 1969

Well, John,

All evidence indicates that our little lull is done and some new storm hard upon us. As I write this (near midnight), our friend Ambrose lies half-conscious in my bed, his circuits just beginning to reconnect after a terrific crack athwart the cranium this noon, which decked and, it seems, mildly concussed him. My first experience of that alarming phenomenon, taken so lightly in our films, on the telly, in our fiction, where folks are regularly and tidily “knocked out,” to waken some minutes or hours later, shake their noggins a time or two, and then On with the story!

I here attest that that is not the way it is. A blow to the head severe enough to cause loss of consciousness (A.‘s, classically, was just above the temple, his left, not far from the famous birthmark), if it does not actually fracture the skull, plays hob with the memory functions for (going on to) half a day at least. One prays that this symptom — and the headache, and the heavy sleeping — will not be accompanied by nausea and vertigo, indications of subdural hematoma and more serious consequences. So far, so good: when he is awake, my dear despot cannot remember the question he put 90 seconds since, or my answer. He smiles, reputs and re-reputs it; I reanswer and re-reanswer. It was that fucker Prinz, wasn’t it? Yes, luv. With the light boom? I think the mike boom, dear. It was Prinz, wasn’t it? No question, luv; and no accident, I fear. With the fucking light boom, right? At the fucking tercentenary? The fucking mike boom, I believe, dear.