Letters

Nor is Milady gainfully employed (Though she has not one but two new projects in the works, Arthur old chap: (a) a study — suggested to her by of all people A. B. Cook VI! — of “The Bonapartes in Fiction and the Fictions of the Bonapartes.” Right up her alley, what? For which she is hopeful of Tidewater Foundation support, via her friends Jane Mack and Todd Andrews. And (b) the grand, the resplendent, the overarching, the unremunerative but tip-top-priority project on-going — dare we yet believe? — in her half-century-old womb. Ah, Art! Ah, Ambrose! Ah, humanity! But why this letter?) Magda, preparing straightforwardly for widowhood, begins work this month in the hospital kitchens, the most convenient job she can find. In her absence, at least during Peter’s terminality, Germaine and I shall look after Angie and the patient. It is Magda’s hope that we shall stay on in the Menschhaus “even afterwards”: that Germaine will be reinstated at Marshyhope (there’s talk of that) and I find a fit and local enterprise for the Second Half of my Life. Though she will of course understand if we etc.

But Art! All this is not what all this is about! (What, then, Ambrose?) Between his late diagnosis and his pending amputation, Peter has been, is, at home in a ménage too apocalyptic for normal inhibition. We, uh, love one another, we four. The only literal coupling—N.B., Germaine — has been quasi-connubial, between us betrotheds, who in our fourth week of Mutuality have gently reenacted the Fourth Phase of our affair (that’s 16 May—4 July, Art: the “marriage” phase), itself an echo of my nineteen years with you-know-whom, of whom more anon. But these “marital” couplings are as it were the bouquet garni in a more general cassoulet: a strong ambience of loving permission among the four of us. Dear Peter, though impotent, sick, scared, and shy, hungers rather desperately for physical affection, and is fed. His love for Magda is what it always was, absolute, only fiercer; his love for me, never earned, is scarcely less strong; his love for Germaine (now her Englishness and the rest have ceased to frighten him) is a marvel to behold. In turn, my fiancée’s love (Say it again, Ambrose: your fiancée’s love) comprehends the household. And Magda — beneath our calm catastrophe powerfully sexed, a stirring Vesuvia — Magda, devoted to us all, does not go wholly unconsoled.

Entendu? Quietly and without fuss, by all hands, everyone’s needs and wants have been being more or less attended. Now: today begins, for G. & me, Week 5 of our affair-within-our-affair, duly echoing Phase 5 (July) of the original, itself an echo of sweet painful 1967/68, when, here in the Menschhaus…

(Entendu. But this letter…)

With all this circumambient love — and let’s speak no more of it — has gone a sort of reticent candour, wherewith certain sore history has been resurrected (by Peter) in order to be laid to final rest before he is: Magda’s old “infidelities” to him, with me, in the excavation of this house; Peter’s single adultery years later, with score-settling Marsha; Magda’s mighty extramarital but intramural passion of ’67/68. Matters all of them quietly broached, quickly acknowledged entre nous quatre, and dismissed forever with a touch, a kiss.