by John Barth
I was impressed with the woman’s understanding of what had happened to her; how judiciously she assessed the contributions of Peter, Ambrose, and herself to the experience. She’d been near forty, heavier than at c (and than she is now); it turns out that Peter—despite his being an affectionate, strong, and devoted husband—was, no doubt still is, an indifferent lover: perfunctory, unskillful, often impotent though decidedly fertile, withal Not Very Interested in That. Magda had never managed orgasm, except solo. Of this she’d been aware, in a general way: a more vigorous erotic life, like a larger income, she could imagine to be agreeable if it didn’t bring problems with it. But she’d felt content, sufficient, and had not thitherto been tempted to infidelity.
Even so, it had unquestionably been a factor in her overwhelmment that, however it was they got together again at e, Ambrose revealed himself this time around to be an amateur no longer in the sexual way. I abbreviate: at age 38 she learned from him how to fuck, and by her own admission the experience set her a little crazy. It also inspired in her—focussed, channelled, whatever—a passion for him which, alas, he scarcely measured up to and but feebly reciprocated. This part was painful: for Magda especially, of course, but for Ambrose too (and for me to hear). Early on in our own connexion he had mentioned “a Dido whose Aeneas can neither return her love nor leave her palace…” She had no wish to divorce Peter and marry Ambrose; she had not really expected him to love her as she loved him, though hope was hope; neither did she think their affair would last long. On the other hand she could not imagine—it would have appalled her to imagine—an experience so important to her as being without consequences. She begged him to “run off” with her; she was ready to put by the family she genuinely prized and give herself exclusively to her lover for the vague “year or two” she could imagine them together, in Italy… More than anything else she prayed he might make her pregnant, before he left her, with
a little Aeneas to play in the palace
And, in spite of all this, to remind me of you by his looks…
Then she would return to Cambridge and take the consequences, whatever they were.
But that’s not our Ambrose, what? He was moved; she believed his testimony that if he had taught her what sex was all about, she had taught him, just as belatedly and more considerably, what love was all about; made him realise that he’d never truly been loved before. Surely that tuition was what kept him from cutting his anchor cables: it was a remarkable, new, and of course very flattering business, to be loved like that! And he did both admire and love Magda, though not quite so much as at c and at a…
And not enough. No help for that, but it must have hurt. The truth was—he felt a fool, a beast, a sexual snob for feeling it, but there it was, and she sensed it without his saying it—she no longer aroused him very much; he could be seduced away by the first trim 22-year-old at Marshyhope. He deplored this fact, and resented having to deplore it. Very painful for the pair of them, whilst Peter, humble and ashamed, looked the other way.
Thus e: as if circumstances and want of heroical destiny had held Aeneas in Carthage not for a winter but for a year and more, with a Dido less queenly than Dido and whose passion he found himself ever less able to return, despite his esteem for her… Ambrose didn’t oblige Magda to dress like his undergraduates (she’s but a year his senior), but he said cruel things, and hated himself for having done: she was not dainty; she was not fresh; he made her douche; he made her shave her legs and underarms daily, and the fleece between her navel and her fleece. Clumsily she went at any perversion, tried to dream up new ones, anything to keep him.
Last September, not to beggar her self-respect altogether, Ambrose finally managed to put an end to this 5th Affair; would have moved out of the Castle as well, down to Redmans Neck or somewhere, but for Peter’s insistence, which frantic Magda seconded: Angie needed them both; all three. Through the fall and winter, whilst she went crackers with desperation, he humped the odd ex-student; by March she knew he’d got Serious again with someone. The knowledge went into her like Dido’s knife, for she still much loved him.
But not, she acknowledged, as much as before. Surely I must see (I saw) that she did not resent me; on the contrary. She was not yet over her Grand Passion, but she was getting over it, rather to her own surprise and much to her relief. She bore him no grudge for having been unable to match her feeling for him; what would be the sense in that? She could not imagine ever falling in love again; was glad her marriage had been no worse scarred; was as prepared as one could be to face the prospective widowhood that now shockingly loomed. But like Héloïse her Abelard, she could not forget the things she and Ambrose had done, the places where they’d done them…
Hm. I was, to be sure, as busy noting and assessing the differences between our cases as sympathising with Magda’s confidences. Ambrose had not taught me how to screw; André had, in Paris, an age ago. Our mighty April sessions were as much a refresher course for him as for me. The Baby business—which I understood better now—was his idea, not mine (Magda tearily prayed me luck for July, and belied her statement of a paragraph ago by wishing fervently she could feel again the joy of pregnancy). Nevertheless, the ground resemblance was plain enough to promise that Stage 5 is going to be no picnic: my Aeneas-Come-Lately has stripped me of my queenship, demanded of my worn-out womb that it find the wherewithal to germinate his feeble seed, and in the meanwhile makes a fool of me with the dockside whores of Carthage!
Even “the meanwhile” may be optimistic. I’m at the period of my period, but July has yet to see him reinseminate me. As I write this it is Bea Golden he ploughs, down in Barataria; for all I know he may nevermore dip his pen at 24 L.
My friend La Giulianova assures me otherwise: last night and its consequences, she’s certain, are Just Part of the Movie. Bea Golden is scarcely literate, much less literary: surely I don’t believe she’d throw over her darling last hope for movie stardom just because Ambrose apparently got the better of him in a single encounter?
I replied that the evening’s end, like its beginning and its mad middle, had the aspect not only of open-ended Scenario—written by “Arthur Morton King” but directed by Reg Prinz—but also of an Episode, with further episodes to follow. Jerome Bray and Marsha Blank—improbable new allies!—have withdrawn together back up the flyway; Bea is in her new lover’s arms on Bloodsworth Island; the Baratarians are dispersed (shooting is suspended for at least a week, till the 13th); Prinz himself has retired up the Amtrak to Manhattan, apparently put down by last night’s “defeat.” Oh, no doubt it is all acting, only another Sequence; they’ll be back. Meanwhile, however, whether at Prinz’s behest or her own, Bea is unquestionably down there with Ambrose, shagging away; and 30 pages have not assuaged my misery, only lengthily recorded it!
Unfilmable Sequence! Magda declares that it was nothing more than a letter, John, like this one: another of those dum-dums in a bottle from “Arthur Morton King” (Whom It Still Concerns) to “Yours Truly,” in reply to the blank one Ambrose picked up 29 years ago! There they all were (not I) on their expensive prop: the O.F.T. II done over in part to “echo” the Chautauqua Lake Gadfly III. The musicians and actors from Chautauqua Institution were replaced by the pit orchestra and repertoire troupe of the Floating Theatre; the Baratarians were assembled, with a sprinkling of Cantabridgeans; no sign of M. Casteene, but grim-visaged “Pocahontas” was aboard, in surprising deep parley with “Captain Bray” after returning Angela postprandially to Magda. Those two and Peter Mensch were there also, at Prinz’s invitation: ostensibly to flavour the crowd with extra locals, possibly to add a notch or two to the general tension. Todd Andrews was on hand, too, looking like death itself, reports Magda. No sign of Jane Mack. All of County Dorchester gathered about Long Wharf, several thousand strong, to witness the fireworks and the filmmakers, by now notorious in the area. The late sun goes down; the O.F.T. II chugs out through the swarm of anchored pleasure boats into the river channel, its amplified (tape-
recorded) calliope loudspeaking patriotic airs. The cameras roll, the fireworks fire…
Well, I wasn’t there. Why try to make you see what I didn’t? What Magda didn’t either, since the whole point of what followed was its unseeability, hence its unfilmability! From Ambrose, before he left me, I had the generallest notion of his conceit for the episode: certain features of the 12 May “Unwritable Sequence” filmed on the Ocean City beach were to be echoed in combination with certain others of the Gadfly party of 17 June—e.g., the Author’s attempt to woo away or rescue the Fading Starlet from the Director. This attempt would more directly involve another Water Message and, “as in the myths,” a literal Night Sea Journey. The vessel to be forging upchannel, against the tide, under the gibbous moon, as the contretemps is enacted. J. Bray to fly again to some misguided rescue. Bea to receive A.’s water message at the climax. The dénouement (presumably left open) to be illuminated by the rockets’ red-white-and-blue glare.
All quite filmic, so far and so put, and the more technicolourful for Marsha Blank’s apparent half-conspiracy with Bray: that chap wants Bea himself, Ambrose calculates, and regards Prinz as his more immediate rival, therefore inclines to aid the Author against the Director. Marsha, from mere epical vindictiveness we suppose, wants Ambrose not to have what he wants, therefore will incline to help Bray get Bea for himself. Don’t ask me, John—whose own main question is why in that case it wasn’t I she directed her spite against! I wasn’t there, and anyroad this visual bravura was all a red (white and blue) herring on Ambrose’s part, to throw Prinz off guard. For the Big Surprise this go-round was to be that what had been a literal blank on 12 May (the washed-out script) and an insignificant detail on 17 June (A.‘s posting his bottled missive into Chautauqua Lake and learning from Bray’s spiel that it could after all just possibly return to him via the Mississippi, the Gulf Stream, and Chesapeake Bay) would now—unroll? explode? all visual verbs!—into the whole climactic “action”: no action at all, not even the minimal action of inditing or reading a letter, but the letter itself.
A letter! Which, to date, none but the Author and the Reader (Bea’s surprise new rôle!) has read. Therefore nobody who witnessed what happened knows what happened. What Magda and the others saw (and heard) was a hammed-up rehash of the earlier business: Bea (in beach towel, from the boardwalk scene) is either menaced or embraced by the Director (sans sheepskin now: all the male principals are wearing tails; I mean animal tails, not formal coats. Don’t ask me. Pencil > penis = tail?) and additionally menaced, or threatened with rescue, by Mr Bray. Who this time, knowing it’s All Part of the Movie, either will not or cannot repeat his astonishing gymnastics of last month, but merely bumbles about, unable to comply with the Director’s direction to “do [his] number” on Bea. Bray too wears a tail, between his legs; he cannot take his eyes off Bea, who earnestly promises to scratch them out, Movie or no Movie, if he lays a hand on her. Marsha appears, to everyone’s surprise (except, I suspect, Reg Prinz’s—where else would she have got the costume Magda describes, which is clearly the same worn earlier by Bea, butterfly wings and all?): a little drunk and without Bea’s semiprofessional talents, but coldly attractive all the same, Magda admits, in her amateur attempt to do a Poor Butterfly. Bea, Ambrose, Bray are nonplussed; the Baratarians are breaking up; the men among them, tails in hand, go dancing ’round the five principals.
All good cinema! But then Ambrose fetches out his bottle (“a big one,” Magda reports; my guess is that it was a certain famous jeroboam of Piper-Heidsieck); he puts Bea’s hand around its neck and covers it with his own; together they smash it over the ship’s bow-rail as if to launch her. In lieu of champagne, a quire of writing paper sprays out, blank as the message that Started It All. I imagine the chorus pauses; Prinz frowns. And now it develops that our hero has a tail with a difference: he sets Bea down before him, snatches up tail tip and paper with a flourish (his last cinematical gesture), and begins… to write.
The Baratarians’ tail dance peters out. Bray and Marsha (he has Rescued her; his cloaked arm is about her wings; she looks very uncomfortable, M. attests) are transfixed, sort of. Ditto Prinz and for that matter Bea, who finds it harder to sit than to stand attractively in her beach towel. Everyone wonders what’s up, none more than the camera crew. The Director gives no directions.
And Ambrose writes. First page done, he hands it to Bea and begins Page 2. He writes, she reads, both silently, almost motionlessly. Marsha makes a single strident effort to get things going again: a few squeaks and flutters. Bray whispers something urgent to her, leads her off; to Magda she looks cross and uncertain, but she goes with him, somewhere else in the vessel, out of sight. Prinz removes his glasses, contemplatively sucks one earpiece. The passengers turn their attention, with appropriate shrugs and murmurs, to the fireworks just beginning to rise from Long Wharf. Peter Mensch scratches his nose, confesses that it’s all beyond him, he’s not much for the movies anyroad, and gimps over to explain the ground pieces to Angie. She, reasonably enough, wants to know what all the tails were for. Magda suspects they have to do with spermatozoa (Bea’s towel is virgin white, eggshell white; she wears a tight white old-fashioned bathing cap; some of the men wear black ones), but mumbles something about tadpoles, frogs and princesses; she’s not sure what Daddy has in mind.
Ambrose writes. Bea reads, silently, altogether engrossed, and discards each page overboard as she finishes it. Half an hour later—the cameras have long since turned to the fireworks—the pair go off together hand in hand, somewhere inside. Prinz confers gravely with his cameraman, then stalks off after them. When the O.F.T. II docks, Ambrose appears for a moment to say good night to Angela and announce to Magda that he’ll be down in Barataria for a few days. With Bea. That Prinz is furious, has suspended shooting, may even scrap the film. That Magda needn’t bother getting in touch with me; that was his problem. But she should ring him up at once if his mother either revived from her coma (of three days’ duration now) or actively resumed her dying.
So. Happy Birthday, America! And bugger off, Germaine!
I think I know enough of my ex-lover’s preoccupations with the medium of fiction to guess what he might have attempted in those pages: not only (instead of a blank sheet) a full and gorgeous love letter from Whom It Concerned to Yours Truly—much too full for the camera to follow its inditing or a Voice-over to intone—but a text whose language is preponderantly nonvisual, even nonsensory in its reference. How many postcoital apostrophes I heard from him, in June, whilst I up-ended for his low-motile swarmers, upon the peculiarly noncinematic properties of written fiction! Composed in private, to be read in private, at least in silence and virtual immobility, author and reader one to one like lovers—his letter would ideally have been a sort of story, told instead of shown, exploiting such anticinematical characteristics as, say, authorial omniscience and interpretation, perhaps some built-in ironic “discount” in the narrative viewpoint, interior monologue, reflexion. Its language would be its sine qua non: heightened, strange, highly figurative—and speculative, analytical, as often abstract as concrete. It would summarise, consider, adjudicate; it would interrupt, contradict itself, refer its Dear Reader to before and behind the sentence in progress. It would say the unseeable, declare the impossible. I have even argued with Ambrose, warmly, that such defining of his medium, however understandable the impulse among writers who feel their ancient dominion usurped by film, is strictly unnecessary: that the words It is raining are as essentially different from motion pictures of falling rain as are either from the actual experience of precipitation…
O Elysian June, when I was miserable with instead of without him!
Oh and who knows whether he wrote anything of the sort! I cannot imagine Bea Golden sitting still for It was the best of times and the worst of times, not to mention It is raining; it is not raining! Indeed I cannot account at all for her enthrallment by any sort of text. Did Ambrose offer her the female lead in his next novel? Did Prinz arrange his
own “defeat,” and only pretend chagrin, to chuck a Dido of his own? Is Bea—dear God, the notion just occurs to me, 40 pages late! Is she now playing the only woman I know to have been literally deflowered by a (capped) fountain pen, and seduced thereafter time and again by aging wielders of that instrument? Has she taken the role as well as the lover of
Yours truly?!
E: Todd Andrews to his father. Further evidence that his life is recycling: 11 R.
Todds Point, Maryland
Friday, June 20, 1969
Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d
Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery
Cambridge, Maryland 21613
Dear dead Dad,
Even as declared beneath the old Mack Enterprises trademark (about to be retired by majority vote of the directors), Praeteritas Futuras Fecundant. If I am no longer interested in your ancient suicide, I’m presently more involved than ever in the recapitulation of my past. My Todays, since Jane Mack reseduced me five weeks ago today, are spent in watchful anticipation of Tomorrow’s reenactment of Yesterday. What praeteritas will be fecundated next? So my interminable Inquiry sleeps (inconclusive but, I think, done with) while my Letter to you flourishes as never since I commenced it in 1920: three installments already since Groundhog Day, and the year’s calendar but half turned!
I’m at my cottage, Dad, out on my point, at sixes and sevens. It is earlier than I’d thought. I’ve been fretting and fussing about here all day, getting the house ready, getting the grounds ready, getting the boat ready Just In Case, not answering the phone (even though it might be Jane calling off our “date”!) because I’m supposed to be over in Baltimore on business. I am surprised at myself: an emotion I thought I had lost the capacity for.