Letters полностью

Ambrose was delighted; I soon realised why, and rolled my eyes to heaven. The weekend, you see, was upon us: if we now put by our heavy humping for a spell of Chaste Reciprocal Affection, then Week 3 of this happy 6th Stage of ours would echo Stage 3 of our affair (approximately May), itself an echo of his chaste “3rd affair.” Moreover it was, I now recalled, at about this juncture in our affair that we began to realise how its ontogeny, so to speak, was recapitulating its phylogeny. Did that portend on the one hand that our Happy Sixth Stage was good for another month at least? Did it mean on the other hand that we had only another month? And — dear God! — that we were not really “ourselves” yet after all, at least not entirely, and would not be until, let’s see, the 2nd week of September (i.e., the 6th week of this 6th Stage)?

I offered to go vomit. Was truly nauseated, whether by that tiresome prospect or by the Last Brunch. Morning Sickness! jubilated Ambrose. I made good my offer.

Sunset at Old Fort Erie! Mighty Niagara chugging north before our battlements! The lights of the U.S.A. to eastward; of a coming thundershower to southwestward, out over the muggy lake; of Tweedles Dum and Dee positioned about our ramparts and especially in the neighbourhood of the restored powder magazine, a brick-vaulted subterranean chamber in the northeast bastion atop which, in director’s chairs, sat the Director and the Director’s moll: empty-handed, neither smoking nor drinking nor reading nor talking, only waiting, he in his uniform nondescripts, she in her Salvation Army chic.

And the lake flies, John! Do you have them at Chautauqua, I wonder? Overgrown mosquitoes in appearance, they neither bite nor sting, only fill the night in such numbers at the peak of their week-long hatch that the whole air thrums; gather so thickly upon any light surface that it is darkened; immolate themselves by the thousands on any exposed electric light bulb (small hills of the immolated were piling already beneath the floodlights). Tons of idle protein on the wing: the phenomenon is African, prodigious! We walked through it, exclaiming and waving our arms (luckily our clothing was not light-coloured; the insects are not attracted to people; they landed on our clothes and skin and hair only accidentally, but given their numbers, such accidents occurred by the dozens per second. Once perched, they stay there; brushed off, they obligingly die), to where the lighting crew amused themselves with raising and lowering the volume of that huge thrum at will, as if with a control knob, by brightening and dimming the floodlights. Astonishing!

Once over our initial revulsion, we found we could move through the swarm without injury or much difficulty, and that a constant easy fanning of the hands kept one’s face and hair reasonably bugless. The scene that follows you must envision in ever dimming light, however, as the lake flies becloud the floodlight lenses with their cumulative dying juices.

Can we shoot in these conditions? asks Ambrose when we reach the magazine. We’re shooting, replies the video Tweedle (Dum); you’re on. Must be the Fort Erie Assault scene, quips our Author: American and Canadian Soldiers are dying like flies.

No response from the filmists to this Mordant Wit. I then declared to the company (what Ambrose and I had rehearsed en route from our motel by way of joining the battle, as it were) that in our judgement no Second Conception scene was called for until and unless the First should prove a mis-take. In plain English: played out or not, we had reason to believe ourselves preggers already. The charade Prinz meant as Squeezing Blood from A Turnip would in fact be Carrying Coals to Newcastle; I could not reconceive till I was delivered. Preggers!

We were regarded: the tiniest hint of interest in Merry Bernstein’s eyes; none whatever in the others’ (Prinz still wore his sunglasses, so who knows). Not exactly a triumphant opening, though it was exciting for us so to declare ourselves. Ambrose therefore commenced an improvisation that led to the following exchange, which I approximate from memory and edit for concision:

A.M. (to Prinz and Merry B.): Maybe you should do the Second Conception, what? Film’s as played-out a medium as Fiction. Off with your clothes, Merry.

R.P.: I’m the Director.

A.M.: Direct, then. My script calls for a Fecund, Vital New Medium to conceive a Major Work of Art by a Virile Young Director who liberates her from residual contamination by the Old Medium she has rendered obsolete. It’s your big scene, Mer.

R.P. (quietly, to Yours Truly): You undress, ma’am.

Y.T.: I jolly shan’t.