For my pains, I get a concerned frown from Peter, a dry chuckle from Andrea, and a mild reproof from Magda for attending them instead of—what, for pity’s sake (I ask M. rhetorically)? Playing the vile procuress Mrs Sinclair to Ambrose’s Lovelace and Bea Golden’s Clarissa? Magda does not know the novel. Holding Bea down, then, whilst he climbs her for the cameras? Magda replies, not to my questions but to my condition: When is my period due? Is there yet hope? Due Monday or Tuesday next, I respond, and there’s been no hope from the outset. Meanwhile, what is Ambrose up to out at that ball park?
Why, as best I can piece it together this sore Saturday, he was up to some mad staged replay of that set-to in the tower, reported in my last, which not surprisingly caught Prinz’s and Ambrose’s retrospective fancies in equal measure. “Background footage” only, at the ball park: a certain amount of military bustling about with those handy extras to “echo Lundy’s Lane” whilst the county high school bands play martial airs and the twirlers twirl by way of “pre-spectacle entertainment” before the evening’s installment of The Dorchester Story. Which last, vertiginously, was to deal with the county’s contributions to the Civil War, the two World Wars, and the Korean “conflict”! (No mention of Vietnam, too confusing a matter for pageantry.) Then out to Redmans Neck for the Mating Season sequence: the shooting script itself substituted for Clarissa; Bray this time (quite at home in that belfry, I’ll wager) to aid the Author’s assault on the Director, “their common foe,” in hopes of then eliminating the Author in turn and gaining sole sexual access to… my stand-in!
I.e., Bea, in 1930’s costume. Their (simulated) copulation interrupted as ours was on Bastille Day by the Director, who films it with his hand-held and is filmed filming it by the regular camera crew. The Author to succeed as before in destroying that first film (but with Bray’s aid, who I suppose has been hanging by his feet from a rafter, shooting overhead stills) and to retire with his lady in apparent triumph. Whereupon the Director reappears in the empty belfry, surveys without expression the pile of ruined film, reloads his camera, and exits. Lengthy shot of deserted belfry (Where’s Bray?) to remind viewer that Author’s victory is at best ambiguous, since entire scene has been filmed and is being viewed. Got it?
The Battle of Niagara ended before midnight on 25 July 1814. Ambrose came home by dawn’s early light this morning. Late next week, up in Buffalo, in similar juxtaposition to a very minor skirmish there known as the Battle of Conjockety, or Scajaquada Creek (2 August 1814), they will replay the mike-boom “accident” of last Friday week: the Director’s Revenge on the Author. Thus the Author informed me this A.M., truculently, at the end of his account of last night’s action.
Never mind Conjockety, I said, and demanded to inspect his penis.
His what?
Yer bloody ’and-’eld, said I. Fetch ’im out!
He did, defiantly, for he knew what I was after, we having remarked together in frisky April how the old Intromitter, when thoroughly applied, will look, even hours later, recognisably Applied. I forwent inspection: his gesture and manner were confession enough. Sick to tears — and angry! — I went at him at last, with the first weapon that came to hand (I was at my desk): a brummagem letter opener marked Souvenir of Niagara Falls, Canada, where in a campy June moment we’d bought it. Nicked his writing hand, too, I did; first blood drawn between us, not counting my four menstruations since the bloke first applied his opener to me in March. Should’ve gone for that instead, made a proper Abelard of him! He caught my wrist then, as men do, and made me drop Niagara Falls; forced me to a chair and held me (I don’t mean lovingly) till despair got the better of my rage and I broke down.
He apologised. Not particularly for having humped Bea Golden again, but for the Inevitable Pain he’s been putting me through in this Stage. To me it seems Evitable! And by way of soothing me — as he leaves just now to fetch Angie to the Dorchester Day Parade — he supposes that my hyperemotionality is premenstrual! I shriek and scrabble after that Souvenir… but he’s out before I can find it, or reach the kitchen for a better blade.
Thus am I reduced to this one, Clarissa Harlowe’s: a decidedly poor substitute for the sword, in this author’s opinion. I do not forgive my lover this new trespass. I do not forgive him this whole 5th Stage, or the 4th before it. Even if (they’re all so “into” the Anniversary thing) his Reign of Terror should end with the French (tomorrow 175 years ago), I find myself conceived — if of nothing else — of an impulse grand as Roderick Random’s: for revenge.
