Now, a woman may consent to sexual connexion, even to a more or less protracted affair, for no better reason than that persisting in refusal becomes too much bother. Ambrose, very big on solstices and equinoxes, chose Thursday, 20 March, to “make his play.” Your letters had arrived, declining the degree and suggesting we give it to Ambrose himself, an unthinkable idea. I’d called a meeting of the nominating committee for 2:30 to decide our next move, and invited Ambrose to stop by my office earlier on and discuss ways of forestalling Harry Carter’s inevitable renomination of A. B. Cook. To my surprise he proposed, straight upon entering, that we copulate at once atop the conference table, and took my arm to usher me there. I bade him be serious; he expressed his ardent wish that I bend over my desk and be mounted a tergo. I promptly so bent, but only to ring for Shirley Stickles, certain he’d not risk public exposure. As I asked her to come in, however, he called my bluff by hitching up my skirt and down my panty hose (horrid term!). I bade Shirley wait a moment; turned to him furious; found his trouser fly already open, penis out and standing, face all smiles. At the same time, Shirley announced into my ear that President Schott was on the line and must speak to me at once; even as she so declared, that unctuous baritone broke in to say he’d heard of your declining and wished, without of course in any way intervening in the committee’s deliberations, to read me then and there A. B. Cook’s newly published ode, in the Tidewater Times-Democrat, comparing Vice-President Spiro Agnew to St Patrick and the liberal news media to serpents. He began to read. As a last defence against Ambrose’s assault I tried to sit; the man was in my chair, set to impale. I could not both fend him off and hold the phone; it was madness, madness! And a too tiresome bother…

Thus it came to pass that at seven past two (so he told me after), just as the sun entered Aries, Ambrose M. entered yours truly. We both sighed, for quite different reasons. I bent as he wished, resting my elbows on my appointments calendar. Our acting president declaimed so vigorously I was obliged to hold the phone away from my ear. Ambrose took up the beat of Cook’s iambics. It had been a while since I’d known as it were more slap than tickle (dear Harrison seldom managed). When shirts of starchless denim (the laureate’s image for campus activists, who he complained were given too much sympathetic publicity by the media) was rhymed with squirts of Marxist venom, we sat as one person, and I assumed the rhythm myself to finish off the business. Then as at last the Effete Eastern Radical-Liberal Establishment was warned pentametrically to

Take heed:

For as Patrick drove into the waves of Eire

Those ancient vipers, so shall Spiro dare

To drive from our airwaves this later breed!

I received into myself my first installment of the Ambrosian ejaculate.

And reflected — what I had had no cause to concern myself with for some little while — that contraceptive measures had not been taken.

Well, Schott cried, what did I think? “Tell him you’d like to sit on it awhile,” Ambrose whispered. I requested a photocopy of the ode for the committee — whose meeting, just a few minutes later, prevented my either taking postcoital precautions or sitting on anything except clammy knickers for the balance of the afternoon.

He had taken vulgar advantage of me, I let Ambrose know at the first opportunity, and had foolishly jeopardised both our positions. That I had acquiesced to his assault rather than precipitate a scandal did not make us lovers or imply my consent to further importunities, certainly not in Shirley Stickles’s proximity. He amiably agreed, and by way of reparation stood me that evening to a feast of white wine and raw oysters (a passion of mine, and this region’s chief attraction) at the Dorset Hotel. He was animated, gently ribald, in no way presumptuous upon his “conquest.” We laughingly reconstructed, as best we could, the Maryland Laureate’s ode: at “squirts of Marxist venom” I chided him for not having deployed a French letter for my sake, or at least withdrawn at “waves of Eire.” He paid me the compliment of having assumed, so he declared, that I was “on the Pill,” and assured me further that, while his sexual potency was reliable, his fertility was not: “High count but low motility, like great schools of dying fish,” he put it — and so I learned of his predilection for, so to speak, self-examination.

Our conversation, then, while bantering, never strayed far from the neighbourhood of sex — indeed, our friend’s imagination is of a persistently, if unaggressively, erotic character. Together with the oysters and Chablis, it somewhat roused me: when he enquired, as offhandedly as one might ask about dessert, whether he mightn’t straightway return me the favour of an orgasm or two at 24 L, I came near to saying, “Why, yes, thank you, now you mention it.” Instead I cordially declined, and when he did not press, but affably hoped we might enjoy each other’s persons at more leisure before very long, I found myself after all desirous of him. In my car (he’d walked to meet me at the restaurant, and asked now for a lift home) he expressed his wish that he might freely so invite me in the future, when the urge was on him, without offending me, and I as freely decline or accept, until one or the other of us had found “our next lover.” One was not immortal, he went on, and solitary pleasures were — well, solitary. I could rely on his discretion and, he trusted, his ability. It was a pity that a woman of the world such as myself, a respected scholar and able administrator, must even in America in 1969 still wait for her male friends to take the overt initiative in sexual matters instead of asking, as easily as for any other small personal favour, to have, say, her clitoris kissed until she came out of her bloody mind…

I reproduce his language, sir, in order to suggest the good-humored prurience, or gentle salaciousness, characteristic of the man: rather novel to my experience and, together with his youthfulness, attentiveness, and general personableness, agreeable, if not exactly captivating. Whatever dependency or exploitation has been my lot, I have ever felt it to be upon or at the hands, not of men, particularly, but of others, more often than not people of superior abilities whom I admired. Moreover, like Mme de Staël I have lived a life of my own in the world. So if Ambrose Mensch “had his way with me” that night, it was by persuading me to have mine with him, first then and there in my little car in the parking area at Long Wharf; next all about the flat at 24 L, where he stopped till morning (and described to me—read would be the wrong word for such wordless pages — between the aforepromised business, his trial draft of the opening of his screenplay, wherein a woman’s hands are seen opening a bundle of letters one by one with a stiletto letter-opener whilst her voice, as if iterating to itself their return addresses, announces the title, the actors’ names, and the sundry credits. And this was the draft soon after rejected by Reg Prinz as “too wordy”!).

In the same way, if his “conquest” was completed eleven days later, on his 39th birthnight, it was because, by making no further direct overtures in that period, but maintaining his low-keyed, half-earnest chaffing about sexual initiative and women’s rights, he kept fresh in my memory how agreeable had been our lovemaking. I found myself not only inviting him back to 24 L for a birthday dinner, but initiating fellatio with the hors d’oeuvres and coitus after the cognac — over which too (I mean the Martell) I showed him your letter of 23 March soliciting the story of my life for your proposed new work. He sympathised with your “perverse attraction” (his term or yours?) to literary realism. He toyed briefly with the idea of incorporating your letter into his screenplay. And he advised me to advise you to bugger off.