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.