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!