Letters

Dear Sir or Madam:

Whom it so concerned, the undersigned, You wrote not a word to, not a letter, in Your letter to me of 5/12/40. Therefore I write You, seven times over, everything.

The enclosed You may have seen already: an early effort, abortive, on the part of “Arthur Morton King” to come to terms with conventional narrative and himself. Nine years ago tonight, on my 30th birthday, I first chucked it into the Choptank. There had been a little party for me here in my brother’s house, my wife’s contribution to which was a jeroboam of Piper-Heidsieck; walking home afterward (we had a flat near the yacht basin in those days) we enjoyed what was becoming a ritual quarrel. Marsha alleged that I was unfaithful to her, in spirit if not in physical fact, with my brother’s wife. I protested that there was a great difference, both between psychological and physical infidelity and between my wife and my sister-in-law, and that while I had admittedly loved Magda Giulianova once when she was Peter’s girlfriend and again when she was his bride, that latter “affair” (third of my life, Germaine) was nonsexual and had been entirely supplanted by my marriage.

All which was more true than not, and irrelevant, the real burden of Marsha’s complaint being not that I loved Magda or another, “physically” or “spiritually,” but that I did not love herself as much as either she or I could wish. And to this not-always-unspoken charge I could in good faith at best plead nolo contendere: I loved Marsha and Marsha only, but not greatly — a description that fit as well my feeling for myself.

The night lengthened; tempers shortened. Bitter Marsha went to bed alone. I withdrew to my “study” (daughter Angie’s bedroom) with the last two inches of Piper-Heidsieck, reviewed by night-light this work-then-in-progress and my 30-year-old life, lost interest in continuing either, washed down 30 capsules of Marsha’s Librium with the warm champagne, corked The Amateur in the empty jeroboam, walked drowsily across the park to launch it from Long Wharf on what I hoped was an outgoing tide, and went home to die.

Perhaps to die: I believed that 30 Libriums (I did not know the milligrammage) was probably a fatal dose, as Andreyev believed — when, at age 21, he lay between the railroad tracks in Petersburg — that the train would probably kill him. I also knew, like him, that my belief was possibly mistaken. The probability and the possibility were equally important; no need to go on about that. As I approached the bedroom I was struck by the thoughtlessness of imposing my corpse upon Marsha and Angie. The night was not cold; I had remarked early yachts in their slips; now I returned to the basin, thinking foggily (from the hour and the alcohol, not the Librium) to borrow a dinghy and go the way of my manuscript. None in evidence. A police car cruised from High Street down toward the wharf, parking place of young lovers; I took cover in the cockpit of the nearest cabin cruiser, not to be mistaken for a thief or vandal; curled up on the dew-damp teak; began to feel ridiculous.

And chilly. And cross. It seemed to me that my shivering and sniffling and general discomfort would likely keep me awake, and that unless I slept, the chemicals might make me only nauseated instead of comatose and finally dead. Back to the apartment, which had never seemed so cozy: let the living bury the dead, etc. Good-bye Angie, I wasn’t the best of fathers anyhow; ditto Marsha, ditto husband. My head was fortunately too heavy for more than this in the self-pity way. I stretched out on the living-room couch and tried to manage a suitable last thought: something to do with the grand complexity of nature, of history, of the organism denominated Ambrose M.; with the infinite imaginable alternatives to arbitrary reality, etc. Nothing came to mind.

Best night’s sleep in years. Woke entirely refreshed and, in fact, tranquil. It was explained to Angela that Daddy sleeps on the couch sometimes after he works late, not to wake Mommy. Marsha’s prescription I refilled before she noticed any Librium missing. For a few days my wife was cool; then, after an ambiguous “shopping trip to Washington,” her normal spirits returned until the next domestic quarrel, a month later. The marriage itself persisted another seven years.