Letters

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ode: at “squirts of Marxist venom” I chided him for not having deployed a French letter for my sake, or at least withdrawn at “waves of Eire.”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…