Letters

And where it will end, deponent knoweth not, only feareth. What Ambrose makes of me is plain enough and scarcely flattering, despite his assurances that (reversing the order of your own interests) my person attracted him first, my “symbolic potential” only later. What to make of him I do not know, nor how much of his past and present you’re acquainted with. Like the pallid Tityrus of André Gide’s Marshlands novel, which Ambrose has not read, he lives a near-hermit life in a sort of tower on the Choptank shore — a tower he has converted into a huge camera obscura! An “expert amateur of life,” he calls himself; an “aspirant to honorary membership in humankind.” In that sinking tower my lover measures the stars with a homemade astrolabe, inventing new constellations; he examines bemused beneath a microscope his swarming semen, giving names to (and odds on) individual spermatozoa in their blind and general race. He savours a tepid ménage à trois of many years’ languishing with the soulful East Italian wife of his stolid stonemason older brother (“two Krauts with garlic dressing”); he awaits with mild interest the turning cancerous of a port-wine birthmark on his brow — allegedly bee-shaped, but I see in its outline no more Apis mellifica than I see the initials AMK (for Arthur Morton King, his nom de plume) he claims to find in the constellations Andromeda, Cassiopeia, and Perseus. (Admittedly I can’t see Perseus and company there either, only a blinking bunch of stars.) He writes me “love letters” in the form of postscripts to an anonymous Yours Truly, from whom he claims once to have received a blank message in a bottle, and posts them on the Choptank tides (I get photocopies by the regular mail). His notion of wooing is to regale me with accounts of his previous love affairs, to the number of five — a number even less remarkable in that three were with the same woman (that Abruzzesa aforementioned) and two of those all but sexless.

Indeed, on the evidence of these “letters” and what I’d gathered of his life, I would have judged the man probably impotent, certainly no candidate for loverhood. Not in my book, any road, though God knows I’ve loved some odd ones, H.M. II (R.I.P.) not least among them. With that affair, such as it was, I was only just done; I wasn’t ready for another of any sort. Moreover, my taste has ever been for older men, make of it what you will: considerably older men, who’ve made some mark in the world. I’ve no time for nobodies, never have had; were our Tityrus as glamorous as a cinema star (he isn’t), I’d not have been interested in his clownish propositions.

So I thought, so I thought — and I thought wrong. My lover is most decidedly not impotent, only regressive and a bit reclusive. Like myself (I now realise, having paid scant attention to such things hitherto) he goes easily for considerable intervals without sexual connexion; then he sets about it as if the thing were just invented, or like a camel tanking up till the next oasis. I like him altogether better as a friend — so I told him frankly when he followed up his first “love letter” with an imperious visit to my office, pressing through Miss Stickles’s defences like Napoleon back from Elba. That tidewater Tuileries once attained, he plied his suit so ardently I almost thought he meant a rape, and was anxious less for my “honour” (he had no weapon, and I am not helpless) than, believe it or not, for the integrity of our ad hoc nominating committee for the Litt.D.: an integrity already vulnerable for our having become personal friends.