I worry about J. Bray, whose psychopathology I take seriously — Merry Bernstein’s hysterics I regard as entirely in order! — but Ambrose only shrugs and speculates, with further amusement, on Bray’s likely reaction upon returning to Lily Dale and discovering that Marsha too (per Joe Morgan’s report) has thrown him over. At Prinz’s departure some sort of payment was disbursed to all hands; Ambrose’s share, unaccountably, was generous (to me, even that seemed ominous). We decided to make a little vacation tour of the Niagara Frontier until the 15th — and here we are at Kissing Bridge: a low-rise ski-platz, August-empty, fit for lovers.
So much for the chronicling (the good people of Buffalo are baffled as I am by the Meaning of All This, which however they found at least as diverting as the pop art at the Albright-Knox); now for the News. As you will have gathered, my menstrual period’s nearly a fortnight overdue. Surely, surely at my age this signifies nothing. I am fifty, John: fifty, fifty! I will not, I dare not hope…
What I must acknowledge would be a real hope now, not a bitter one. Till today, Ambrose and I had not made love since Saturday morning last; yet this has been a week the reverse of loveless: reminiscent rather of our chaste May, even more so of our first courtship. We are in accord as to the probabilities — but he is all gentleness and, especially since the Battle of Conjockety, Ad-mi-ra-ti-on for my conduct on that occasion. Admiration, it would seem, for my history and character in general, and I am either vain enough or bruised enough by the season’s humiliations to find his attitude convincing as well as therapeutic. He cannot thank me sufficiently for enduring and indulging his early importunities in my office and elsewhere, his excesses and sentimentalities; his programmatical later abstinence followed by yet more programmatical inseminations; his couturial and other demands; his outrageous behaviour at the Marshyhope commencement ceremonies; his infidelities and other unkindnesses. Quite a catalogue! He declares all that to have been the purgation by reenactment (a variety of catharsis not mentioned by Aristotle) of sundry immaturities and historical hang-ups long laid on him like a spell. He declares that my love and forbearance have dispelled that spell, set him free to love me truly and properly for what I am, have been, shall be — this without regard to what’s what womb-wise, though nothing could more crown his Ad-mi-ra-ti-on than Ge-ne-ra-ti-on. Part of why we’re here, indeed (I mean why we’ll do Toronto and Stratford and, if he has his way, even Castines Hundred), is the returning of a few corners in my own intimate biography: once the Movie’s “in the can” and my Condition is established one way or the other — and his mother’s done dying, and his brother’s prognosis is clearer — he hopes we can revisit Coppet, Capri, London, Lugano, Paris, Geneva — Scenes I Have Been Knocked Up In.
I tell him I do not particularly share his taste for reruns. Why not make it Tobago, Maui, Tahiti — scenes untouched, if not by History, at least by our several histories?
Just as I wish. But I won’t object, surely, to an evening’s theatre at Niagara-on-the-Lake or a good meal in Toronto?
I jolly won’t! And jolly well haven’t objected to this week’s tender knocking about west New York in our budget subcompact, from the handsome Grape Belt down your way (but giving a wide berth to Lily Dale, and not bothering to bother anyone at Chautauqua), to the scene of Commodore Perry’s prodigious accomplishment at Presque Isle, to the haunts of the Tuscaroras and Niagara Falls.
This last by way of a revisit to ourselves, so to speak, more agreeable by far than last time ’round. The American spigot, I’m sure you know, has been fully reopened, and if still not equal to the Canadian, it at least inspired my lover and beloved (how sweet, John, at last to use those terms unironically!) to post in it, in an empty bottle of Moët & Chandon Brut, what he fancies may be the last of his replies to that famous Yours Truly who blankly messaged him in 1940. The gesture (I didn’t read the letter, but welcomed his comment as one more fatuity purged) appears to have turned his own spigot back on as well: we are now making spirited, I think reciprocal, love here at Kissing Bridge.
There, I think, is the term. It has been a week, not really of abject and fulsome apologies, solicitudes, smarms, but of easy reciprocity: two seasoned adults renewing (you know what I mean) their mutual love, which had grown rocky and uneven to say the least.
I like it! And should it (as I pray) persist, and should its persistence (as it may) come to make these weekly communiqués as unnecessary for me as Ambrose’s bottled epistles have become for him — why then, we shall be at our story’s end, you and I, and that will be that.
But we are not there yet. Seven days do not a season make. You are not done with (Ambrose’s)
Germaine
