Kissing Bridge Motel
(near) Buffalo, New York
9 August 1969
Ah John,
Novelist Nabokov ne’er conceived for his Lolita so portentous a catalogue of motels as Ambrose and I have couched in since my last, or reserved for couching in the nights ahead: old nymph and her young debaucher! Forgetting Scajaquada, as I’d prefer, can you believe (not necessarily in this order) the Lord Amherst, the Colonial Court, the Regency, the Windsor Arms, the Gulliver’s Travels, the Kissing Bridge, and the Memory Lane? All (except Toronto’s Windsor) within a Niagara Falls radius of Buffalo — a radius we will extend early next week to Toronto and Stratford — and so, perhaps, not unknown to you. May your nights in them have been agreeable as mine!
For if the Movie is experiencing a hiatus (filming’s to resume across the river in Fort Erie on the 15th), the drama of Germaine Pitt’s sore affair with Ambrose Mensch clearly approaches some sort of climax: easier for me to savour than to characterise, yet doubtless easier for me to characterise than for any save us to savour. By the reckoning you’ll recall, it is “our” stage, this “6th” of our connexion, which I judge to have commenced sometime between the Full Buck Moon of Monday week last and last Saturday’s Scajaquada Scuffle. I had wondered what “we” would be like, if indeed we rereached “ourselves”: well, we’re All Right Jack, and not only by contrast with the madness of the past few months. Indeed, this first week of August has reminded me in some ways of our maiden month of March, except that A.’s behaviour has been more a gentleman’s and less an annuated adolescent’s.
But my last, I believe, left the beleaguered lovers on the verge of the Battle of Conjockety, or Scajaquada Creek, on 2 August 1814. (More precisely, my letter ended with a certain sick surmise — but never mind! I still believe myself to have been unbelievably ensnared and at least sexually abused by… “André Castine”… on that Friday night, 1 August. We understand the quotes, who will never, never understand the evening! If I do not sound here like a woman more or less assaulted in body and ravished altogether in spirit one week since, that is because age and experience have evidently taught me to contain the unassimilable, and because — I think coincidentally — the seven days since have been such balm to my sore psyche. I will speak no more of that rose garden!)
Of the details and outcome of the 1814 skirmish, not much is clear: it was a raid, not a battle, between the more important engagements at Chippewa, Lundy’s Lane, and Fort Erie. Some British and Canadian troops ferried over from the Ontario shore to attack the U.S. encampment along Scajaquada Creek, a staging area and supply depot for American movements against Canada. Both the raiders and the raided suffered casualties; some Yankee supplies were destroyed; the attackers withdrew per plan.
Our “reenactment” last Saturday evening was similarly obscure and inconclusive but, I daresay, more complex. With no further History to go on than the above, Ambrose and Reg Prinz had sharked up the following scenario, which like Freudian “dreamwork” was to echo simultaneously such disparate matters as that minor military action, the mike-boom incident at Long Wharf in Cambridge of 19 July last, the ongoing hostilities between Author and Director, and that vague circumambient business they’re calling the Mating Season or Mating Flight — which I take to refer to, at least to include, the sexual casuistries of Prinz/Bea/Ambrose/Germaine, with that horny maniac J. Bray hovering over all.
To this last (I mean the sexual cobweb) a new strand has been added. Contrary to what a nameless informant informed me in a nameless place on a night I shall not name, it seems that young Merope Bernstein is not attached to “Monsieur Casteene”; at least not enough to prevent her having conceived an attachment to Reg Prinz, under the banner of bringing the Revolution to the Media That Matter. Our Director, in his way, neither encouraged nor discouraged this attachment, but at once incorporated it into the story. Bea Golden, you may imagine, was not pleased: indeed, it wants small wit to fancy her not only jealous of this new rival (her own ex-stepdaughter!) but frightened, inasmuch as Ambrose’s “pursuit” of her had been merely and clearly per script since their Baratarian interlude, for which (even if he directed it) Prinz seems not quite to have pardoned her. Follows that she will now eagerly ally herself with the Director against the Author in our Scajaquada Scuffle, right? At once to reingratiate herself with Prinz, to score points against her competition, and to defend herself from her only current real pursuer, the lecherous Lily Dale lunatic.
Got all that? Well, our Author’s projected reenactment was to go as follows: Buffalo’s Delaware Park would serve both as the battle site (which it is) and as Municipal Park in Cambridge, which it decidedly is not; the park pavilion both as the American general headquarters and as the Original Floating Theatre II. Bea, in red-white-&-blue wrapper, would represent, let’s say, Columbia, being interviewed before the pavilion in early movie newsreel-style, by the Director, on the American position in the War of 1812. Myself to make my cinematical debut (we do not count Prinz’s surreptitious and/or illegitimate footage) in the role of Britannia, being interviewed concurrently upon the same subject as I cross Scajaquada Creek by rented rowboat just prior to the battle. My interviewer of course to be the Author, fastidiously transcribing my polished periods with a quill pen for publication in the London press. Enter by helicopter (just as A. & I reach the pavilion) the Medium of the Future — in form of J. B. Bray cast as a network television reporter! — who makes off with both willing subjects and leaves the Battle of Scajaquada Creek to be fought, not by Britain and the U.S., but by Author and Director. Weapons and outcome ad libitum, except that the famous mike boom would somehow be worked in.
Thus the scenario. I protested to Ambrose that neither Bea nor I was jolly likely to take a helicopter ride with Jerome Bray. He imagined Bea would do anything her Director asked of her at this juncture, but insisted I follow my own inclinations once the cameras were rolling: that was the Point. And Merry Bernstein? Ambrose wasn’t sure, but believed she was to begin the episode as some flower-childish avatar of his daughter (they’d not been able to lay hands on a MARYLAND IS FOR CRABS T-shirt in Buffalo, but had found one blazoned BUFFALO IS FOR LOVERS) and end it with a Revolutionary Statement made Godard-like to the camera as the ’copter reascends and the Obsolete Media slug it out.
She had been warned, though, Merope B., that her nemesis Bray was to be there? Well, Ambrose hoped so: that was really Prinz’s department; she was his hanger-on. Himself was too busy anticipating what the Director might have up his sleeve in the ad-lib assault way to bother with such niceties: he did not fancy another concussion. On that score, I was to stay clear when things got sticky between him and Prinz: he had a couple of rabbits in his own fedora if push came to shove, and not for anything would he have me endanger our just-possible You Know What.
It is evening when we commence. The park brims with floodlights, searchlights, portable electric generators, and the Buffalo curious, whom (true to form) Prinz does nothing to keep back, but often turns his cameras upon. Traffic on the Scajaquada Expressway makes its contribution to the light and sound track. Somewhere overhead a chopper chops. I do not get to hear, alas, Bea Golden’s extemporisings upon American policy objectives in the Second War of Independence: A. and I are busy yonder in our skiff, across the pond. Nor do I get to extemporise myself (I’d given the matter some thought, and concluded that Fatigue was the finally regnant factor on the British side of the negotiating table at Ghent, as it may one day be for you Americans in Vietnam: more than we wanted what we claimed we wanted, we wanted Out): the Script calls for our transit of Delaware Park Lake to be shot in flickering silent film-style, our Q & A to be transcribed into subtitles — but no one is there.
Our wigs and tights and crinolines, quill pens and Union Jacks, amuse the bystanders until, muttering that Prinz has scored again, Ambrose seizes the oars and rows us out on the dark pond toward the bright pavilion, where a Newswatch Traffkopter has already landed. Buffalonians commandeer other park rowboats and follow us. Prinz has missed a good shot: we are a proper little invasion flotilla! I wave my U.J. wanly; am even moved to attempt “Rule, Britannia” against the pavilion loudspeakers, whence softly issues “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” Ambrose does my harmony, and not badly: I am touched.