Magda.

She was glad, she said. She’d been worried for me since our breakup. I needed sexual companionship, not just the odd lay. She’d known I was sleeping with someone; had hoped and prayed it was someone good both in and out of bed… Breathier now, and tearier, that remarkable lower lip shaking. But God I miss it, Ambrose (Magda seldom uses nicknames, nor enounces that trochee without stirring me to the bowels. I think I know who Ambrose is only when Magda speaks the name): it isn’t fair; Peter can’t do it; you shouldn’t have showed me those things are real; I was satisfied enough; I don’t want to be unfaithful to him; it’s only sex; who gives a fuck; anyway that’s not it, that’s just not it. I miss you. I love you. I’m going crazy.

Ditto, Truly. Look here, Mag…

You mustn’t refuse me when I beg you, Ambrose.

Magda, you know as well as I. She was on me then: the lips, the lips, hands, hair. Poor John Thomas, thought his shift was done, took a bit of coaxing he did. Magda favors the rec-room Barcalounger, herself on top: still shy of her heavied hams, she eases herself onto me with a happy gasp, slips the gown off to give me her breasts and shoulders, goes to it. I’d early learned — unemancipated Mag! — in these circumstances to give detailed running orders for my gratification. When she gets it off she never cries out (there’s usually a sleeping child, or adult, about), just closes her eyes and makes a small, awestruck sound that goes on and on.

Sex.

Now what. She sat there a postclimactic while, holding shrunk J.T. tight in her vaginal fist and giving me serene instructions. I was not to worry. She would not keep after me to make love to her or otherwise infringe on my new attachment, which she approved. I should fetch — Mrs. Pitt? Mrs. Amherst? — over to meet the family as soon as possible: it would help her, Magda, to see us together as a couple, and to have the family so see. I should make plans to move out of the Lighthouse — in easy stages, for Angela’s sake. Maybe first to the old Menschhaus up the street, now that Mother’s hospitalizing had left the place vacant. Angela of course must stay with them, until and unless… A few tears here (J.T. was released). Soon the twins would be off on their own; dear Angela was all she had left. Why hadn’t I given her a baby? She quickly calmed, apologized. I reminded her she’d doubtless be a grandmother before very long: young Connie had the looks of an early breeder, and Carl was obviously a stone-horse: both would marry within the year and get offspring at once.

This talk pleased her; she climbed off me, smiling. I’ve done an immoral thing, Ambrose, she said then, and I don’t care what you or anybody thinks. I thought she meant this anniversary reenactment of our original infidelity, and waved it away; reminded her wryly I’d been doing retakes all weekend. Not that, she said. All those months I begged you to make me pregnant, and you said No, it wouldn’t be right, I never once tried to trick you. I wanted everything we did to be together, 100 %. The IUD was in there, every time, even when you’d forget to remind me.

Magda.

But you were so selfish yourself, completely selfish. I’m not blaming you. You can’t make a person love another person. You can only pray for it…

Mag?

And I won’t bother you, Ambrose. I love you, always will, and I wish you well. I even know you love me, in your way. But I want that baby. So tonight I cheated. I wasn’t even going to tell you.

I closed my eyes. You know I’m practically sterile.

Not absolutely. When was your last ejaculation?

Hum. Not counting this one? This morning.

That hurts a bit. But you filled me up. And I’m ovulating; I can tell.

Not a Chinaman’s chance, Mag.

I’ve never understood that saying, she said. There are so many Chinese. Anyhow, we Catholics believe in miracles. Don’t be angry. If nothing comes of it I’ll settle for grandchildren, like you said. I’m going up to bed now, so it won’t all run out.

And having come, with a smile and a little tossed kiss she went.

Truly, Yours, I am back not where I started but where I stopped: restranded on the beach of Erdmann’s Cornlot, reading your water message; relost in the funhouse — as if Dante, in the middle of life’s road, had made his way out of the dark wood, gone down through Hell and up Mount Purgatory and on through the choirs of Heaven, only to find himself back in the dark wood, the right way as lost and gone as ever.

Jeannine. Germaine. Magda. Longest May 12 on record. No copy of this one to milady. What would it spell, deciphered?

Ambrose His Story.

S: The Author to Jacob Horner. The story of a story called What I Did Until the Doctor Came.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

U.S.A.

Sunday, May 11, 1969

Jacob Horner

c/o Remobilization Farm

Fort Erie, Ontario

CANADA

Dear Mr. Horner:

Some years ago — fourteen, when I was a young college instructor in Pennsylvania — I wrote a small novel called The End of the Road. Its “hero,” an ontological vacuum who shares your name, suffers from attacks of futility manifested as literal paralysis, to cure which he submits to the irrational therapies of a nameless doctor at an establishment (on the Eastern Shore of Maryland) called the Remobilization Farm. In the course of his treatment, which includes teaching prescriptive grammar at a nearby state teachers college, Horner becomes involved in and precipitates the destruction of the marriage of one of his colleagues, a morally intense young historian named Joe Morgan. Mrs. Morgan, “caught” between her hyperrationalist husband, whom she loves, and her antirationalist “lover,” whom she abhors, finds herself pregnant, submits to an illegal abortion at the hands of the Doctor, and dies on the operating table. Her husband, in a state of calm shock, is quietly dismissed from his post. Jacob Horner, contrite and reparalyzed, abdicates from personality and, with the Doctor and other patients, removes to an unspecified location in the wilds of Pennsylvania. The narrative conceit is that he writes the story some years later, from the relocated Farm, as a first-person exercise in “Scriptotherapy.”

If I were obliged to reimagine the beginnings of The End of the Road, I might say that in the fall of 1955, having completed but not yet published my first novel, I began making notes toward its companion piece: a little “nihilist tragedy” to complement the “nihilist comedy” of The Floating Opera. At twenty-five I was married, had three young children, was getting by on the four thousand a year I was paid for grading one hundred freshman themes a week, and moonlighting in local dance bands on the weekends. As there was seldom money in those years for an evening’s baby-sitter, much less a genuine vacation from responsibility, I now invent and grant myself retroactively this modest holiday:

It is the last week of the calendar year. A live-in baby-sitter, unprecedented luxury, has been engaged to care for the children for the weekend, so that their parents can drive with another couple up into the Allegheny National Forest for two days of skiing. We have never skied before, never seen a ski slope. The expense will be dizzying, by our standards, even though we’ve borrowed and improvised appropriate clothing and plan to cook camp dinners on a hot plate smuggled into our room: equipment must be rented, lodging also, the sitter paid, car expenses split, lift tickets purchased. We are intimidated by the novelty of such adventure, much as we enjoy the long drive with our friends up into the bleak mountains, Iroquois country, where natural gas and oil rigs bob like giant bugs in the rocky clearings, and black bears are still hunted among the laurels and rhododendron. Skiing has not yet become popular in these parts; metal and fiberglass skis, stretch pants, plastic boots with buckles, snow-making machines — all have yet to be invented. We have never been to New England, much less to the Rockies or to Europe; the whole enterprise, with its international vocabulary and Alpine ambiance — chalets, stem christies, wedeln, Glüwein, après-ski — is outlandish, heady, alarming. We make nervous jokes about broken legs and Nazi ski instructors.