Letters

Briefly: my lover dates his erratic and problematical career in letters from his receipt, at age ten, of a cryptic message in a bottle washed up on the Choptank River shore near his present odd establishment. You know the story: Ambrose even told me — in a 100-page enclosure in the second of his two letters thus far to “me”—that you wrote the story, anyhow rewrote and published it with his consent: how on 12 May 1940, as an overstrung, underconfident, unhappy preadolescent yearning for reassurance from the Wider World that a life lay ahead for him less crabbed (let’s say) than that of backwater Dorset, he’d come across that bottle, fished forth eagerly its communique, and been dismayed to the bottom of his soul to find only a salutation at the head (“To Whom It May Concern”) and at the foot a close (“Yours Truly”). No body; no signature! Monday last happening to be the 29th anniversary of this non-message’s delivery, and the company having filmed on the Sunday certain sequences at Ocean City in which Ambrose took the role of an author rehearsing the boyhood of one of his principal characters, it was decided to include a scene suggestive of that water message. But instead of the seven words of the original (per “Arthur Morton King’s” fictionalization of the event, which also included the surprising, by a group of schoolboys, of a pair of lovers more or less in the act in the gang’s makshift clubhouse, with attendant lower-form dialogue), Prinz suggested there be either an entirely blank sheet or a considerable manuscript in the bottle, which latter would however wash to illegibility even as the camera — and before the anxious protagonist — scanned it.

Left sleepless anyroad by the Sunday’s shooting (in which — the thought gives me vertigo — Bea Golden appears to have acted a role something like the young Magda Giulianova!), Ambrose had spent most of the night in his boardwalk hotel drafting a scenario: on Prinz’s instructions, the fellow on the beach was to be the Author—i.e., a ten-year-old “Ambrose” nearing forty and recollecting his boyhood; the couple in flagrante delicto were to be a youthful sweetheart of this Author’s (l’Abruzzesa, played by Bea Golden? I didn’t ask) and her current lover, a filmmaker no less, played of course by R.P. Never mind why they’d gone under the boardwalk for this coupling — the mise en scène was changed to Ocean City, “to tie in with the Funhouse sequence”—when all those hotels stood ready to hand. Then mirabile (but not ours, not ours) dictu—better, mirabile obtuear, marvellous to behold, for there were no words in this enactment save the dissolving ones of Ambrose’s text: on the strand next forenoon, the company assembled, Prinz’s first act is to make the written scenario itself the water message! As the cameras roll, he stuffs into a bottle half full of ocean Ambrose’s rendering of the scene to be played and tosses it into the surf, as if to punish the Author for having intruded on his amours (his fly is open; Bea Golden wears only a beach towel; the Marshyhopers still in attendance are agog)! Ambrose is aghast, then furious to the point of literally clenching fists… then thrilled, his very adjective, as he believes he begins to see the point: Prinz, having mouthed something soundless at him, strides into the cold surf, retrieves the bottle, fetches out the marinated, washed-out script, presents it with a smile of triumph to the Author, then stands by expectantly, his arm around Ms Golden, as if awaiting direction.

The point, my lover now concluded, was precisely the inversion, in this double reenactment, of the original, historical state of affairs (the Author, grown, relives his boyhood experience; the wordless film reiterates the written story). The World having given “Ambrose” a tantalising carte blanche when he most craved specific direction, “Arthur Morton King” had vainly striven for nearly three decades to fill that blank. Now, before his and the camera’s eyes, his scenario of this predicament’s reenaction — itself the latest of those strivings, and nothing but direction—is washed away. Things have come full circle; the slate is clean; he is free!

And, for the moment (as the movie moves on), he is also immobilised, speechless, unable to direct either the Director or himself. Then he laughs; he finds his first words (“I see…!”) and is interrupted by Prinz’s “Cut.” To which is presently appended a directive to the sound man, to make Ambrose’s laugh echo that of “the Laughing Lady in the Funhouse sequence.” Prinz then turns his back and strides hotelwards with the shivering heroine, leaving the bested Author as stranded as our ferryboat restaurant, which we now prepare to leave.