Far out, chorused the filmists. The black contingent exited. The old folks rocked, smiled, and nodded at each remark. Homer rocked too, though his chair was no rocker, like an Orthodox Jew at prayer. I was moved to suggest: Let’s let that fly hatch be the Second Conception, what?
My lover saluted me with half a ham sandwich.
What is the Second Conception? Merope innocently enquired of Prinz, who replied without turning his head: Same as the first. Bruce?
This last to Tweedledum, who promptly brandishes some sort of periodical — clearly they’d rehearsed this bit of business at their end of the table and were ready for that inadvertent cue from ours — and read (I paraphrase, but pretty closely): The question put by the film Frames, says scenarist A. M. King, comes essentially to this: Can a played-out old bag of a medium be fertilised one last time by a played-out Author in a played-out tradition? King himself invokes William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy The Country Wife, whose hero pretends to be impotent in order to cuckold his sympathetic friends. Viewers of Frames may judge this wishful thinking on its “Author’s” part.
Smirks Tweedledee: Frames is our new working title. Adds Bruce: “Author” is in quotes.
The publication he identified as a Buffalo “underground” film newsletter; the article a report on Those Crazy Goings-on in Delaware Park. He had another copy; Ambrose and I were welcome to this one.
Well, I was appropriately shocked. Not stunned, exactly, but startled for sure. But the cameras — and at least four pairs of sunglassed eyes — were on us.
Dirty pool, growled Ambrose: they left out the Author’s Trenchant Irony; his Mordant Wit.
Don’t they always, I said, as levelly as I could manage. And to Prinz: If that’s your Magazine Explosion, luv, it’s a bleedin’ dud. See you at the fort.
Exeunt Played-Out Old Bag of a Medium and Scenarist A. M. King, the latter smitten (by his own protestation) with pride in my self-possession and presence of mind, the former mad as a wet hen. He was misquoted, for Christ’s sake, Ambrose complained all the way to our motel; I must learn, as he had learnt, the Larger View of Journalism, to wit: that newspapers are no doubt necessary even though they never get anything quite right. Bugger yer Larger View, humphed I: I really am nothing but an effing symbol for you, what?
Symbol yes, my companion ardently acknowledges. Effing Symbol yes; Also an Effing Symbol yes. But Nothing But? Never!
I had aborted one fetus already in Fort Erie Ontario, I reminded him; I could abort another. Ambrose was transported: Was I telling him I truly might be et cetera? If I was, said I, I wasn’t by “Scenarist Arthur Morton King,” who for all I cared could stuff himself into a bottle and post himself over the Falls. Done, said Ambrose: done and done! That King is dead!
We were stripping as we quarrelled, to shower and change for the afternoon. This last was his In-vi-ta-ti-on to come off our spat and into bed, and though I wasn’t yet mollified enough for that, my ire had indeed peaked and was passing. I understood what he meant by also symbolic but not merely symbolic, and if he truly intended to have done with that corny nom de plume and write straightforwardly under his own name, I took that for a healthy developement. In short, I was ready to return to our Mutuality and, in time, lend a hand to King John Thomas’s Restoration. But as I came from the W.C. to kiss and make up, I had a chilly flash that was nothing menopausal: the Second Conception scene!
I tore the room apart to find mikes and cameras. Ambrose swore (when he understood what I was about) he’d not Set Me Up, but agreed that Prinz might well be setting us both up, and joined in the dismantlement of Erie Motel Room 21. Nothing there, unless on the C.I.A. level of miniaturization and concealment. Spent and laughing by now at the mess we’d made — and would have to restore — we were indeed tempted to take a tumble in its midst; “bang the old symbol,” as Ambrose put it from where he lay naked on the piled-up bedclothes. Yet however well we’d searched, and however much I assured him I believed his protestations, I couldn’t bring myself to climb aboard, so repellent was the thought of Prinz’s somehow bugging our intercourse. Indeed, the more that possibility laid hold of my imagination, the more inclined I grew to declare a moratorium on sex — but not on sweet Mutuality! — till we were safely out of camera range.
