Letters

“It was simply brilliant,” Ambrose declared. “And the most brilliant thing about it, its final point, was… exactly what I can’t put into words,”—and what you will therefore excuse my having lost in this retelling! — “that the whole scene was not only nonverbal, but unwritable. Proof against literary rendering! A demonstration; a visual tour de force. What shall we do now, Germaine? You and I?”

My turn for speechlessness? For Words fail me, or Dumbstruck by his sudden change of subject, I could not at once nor can I now… that sort of thing?

Not a bit of it! Somewhere amid rockfish and recountment I had got a quiet message from my own Yours Truly, the genuine Germaine. While I found Ambrose’s story interesting enough, I had not been by it diverted, not for a moment, from the question posed on Todd Andrews’s foredeck. As if its reposing now were no non sequitur but the obvious close of his “unwritable sequence,” like a ready player at her cue I replied at once: We ought to tip the waitress moderately; we ought unhurriedly to recross the bridges to 24 L; there we ought leisurely to disrobe and temperately come together. If our fortnight’s abstinence was neither the effect nor the cause of a waning of his affection for me, as it certainly was not of mine for him, and if his inclination (which he’d said was clear to him) corresponded to mine, we ought at once to resume our sexual connexion, but less frenetically than before. That’s what I thought we ought; what thought he?

And now I bring this chronicle at last to bed with Miracle #2, so long in utero: He thought the same, exactly! 10 % for the waitress, whose fault the place was not; a decorous disembarkation (but his hand on my arm, his beaming smile, his instant wordless rising from table, belied his composure); 50 mph across the moonless, still Choptank (where Andrews’s skipjack sat becalmed now in the channel, sails raised and slack, drifting on the tide in the last twilight) as we spoke — warmly, quietly, but neither urgently nor lightly — of how we’d missed one another’s persons, and had rather savoured that missing, and would be pleased now to have done with that savour. In April we’d have gone to it in the car; we tuned in the ten o’clock news instead and smiled together at the announcement that Venus-5, the Russian space probe, had successfully soft-landed on its target and begun, presumably, to probe. By half-past — serenely, surely — so had Ambrose.

He declared (calmly) he loved me. I replied, less calmly, I had liked him in March and craved him in April, and believed I now loved him too. He declared his wish to spend most nights with me; I replied that that was my wish also. We agreed however that some discretion should be exercised (more than we had done in April) to avoid unpleasantness in a small, conservative community; his daughter, too, posed something of a problem. In any case, there were more or less definite plans to shift the film company to the Niagara Frontier for ten days or so in June, which happened to fall between MSUC’s final exam period and commencement ceremonies: he hoped I would go with him; that we could as it were elope, “honeymoon” at the Falls…

“Stage Four” of our affair, then, I gather, will be the sweet extension — long may it extend! — of Miracle Two: this… this spouselike intercourse (he insisted I wear a nightgown: I am to help him shop for spare pajamas, a bathrobe, carpet slippers, to keep at 24 L!), which I find seizes me with a strange, helpless ardour. Poached eggs and tea! The morning newspaper! How far this delightful husbanding? Will it come to pipe and dog and bumbershoot? Am I to play at wiving even to the point of—