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.
“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—