John Barth - Letters

But as she said, I said now, that was over and done 20 years ago, and both her then lover and her husband were dead. How could she be blackmailed? Surely her new Canadian friend would not be much bothered to hear she’d once had an extramarital fling?

How warmly our cool Jane blushes. It wasn’t just hearing, she informed me. That darned Jeffrey (Jane has never used coarse language) had had the naughtiest mind of any man she’d ever met! He’d made her do crazy things! And there were pictures…

Aha. Which someone had somehow got hold of, I suggested, and threatened to show to friend André? But what difference could they possibly make?

“Toddy,” she said, in a tone I hadn’t heard for 30 years; Sentimental Jealousy would surely have taken its place with Mirth, Surprise, Fear, Frustration, Despair, and Courage in the gallery of Strong Emotions I Have Known, had it not been largely displaced a moment later by pure Gee-Whizment. For (she now revealed) it was not only the past that had been recaptured by some voyeuristic Kodak, and it was not André she feared would see the photos. André was in one… taken in London… well after Jeffrey’s death… in fact, just a few months ago…

I was incredulous. Jane in tears. It was crazy, crazy, she declared: she’d practically just met the man, though they’d been corresponding ever since he’d traced their distant relations some years before (he was big on family history, on history in general, a kind of hobby). They’d hit it off beautifully from the first, and of course she’d been distraught over Harrison’s condition, that’s why she’d gone abroad. Even so! It must have been the being in London again, with a titled gentleman again; it was even the same hotel, where she’d stopped, not for sentimental reasons, but because it was the one she happened to know best, the Connaught. And the darned thing was, sex wasn’t really a big thing with them; this must have been about their first or second time in bed; she doubted they’d ever done such things since. And how in the world anybody could take their picture without their knowing it!

My turn now to touch her arm, truly wondering whether she was quite sane. Leaving aside the remarkable assertion that there was anything compromising to have been photographed, I asked her just who was threatening to blackmail her with the supposed photographs, and how. From a slim leather briefcase she drew a Kleenex and a typewritten, unsigned note: “If you contest your late husband’s will, these will be distributed to your family, friends, business associates, and competitors.”

That demonstrative pronoun was the kicker: I’d expected, if there turned out really to be a blackmail threat, some allusion to “certain very compromising photographs in my possession.”

“These?” I inquired.

Out they came, Dad, with another Kleenex, from another partition of her case: two 8-by-10 glossies, one in black and white, the other in color. Unbelievable. Across the desk, Jane covered her eyes. Both photos were sharply focused, well-lighted, clearly resolved, full-length shots, made with a good camera by someone who understood photography. In the black-and-white, taken from the side at waist level, Jane (43) knelt naked on the floor to perform fellatio upon a paunchy but pleasant-faced elder gentleman who — remarkably, considering that her body was as perfect in that photograph as it had been at my last sight of it in 1937, when, aged 31, she’d had the body of a 25-year-old — was not yet roused to erection by her ministrations. His expression was mild, bemused, behind a full blond (or gray) mustache and the eyeglasses he’d not removed; his right, farther hand rested upon her head; his left held a cigar whose ash appeared to interest him more than the fresh-faced, hollow-cheeked (because etc.), crop-curled vision of daintiness who looked up at him with full mouth and bright, expectant eyes. O, O, O. In the other, taken apparently from above, a stocky, well-muscled, bald, dark-body-haired fellow of 50 or so with (I think) a short beard and (I know) a considerable erection was busily “sixty-nining” on a forest-green chenille bedspread with…

Absolutely unbelievable. Not the fact of sex among us healthy sexagenarians; heavens no: I myself now look forward to restful soixante-neuf at quatre-vingt-seize. But the well-dressed woman just across the desk from me there, stretched naked on her side here in living color across that bed, her upper leg raised and bent to accommodate her friend, on whose lower thigh she rested her head as he did likewise on hers — she was beautiful! Not as a well-tended 63-year-old may be, well, well tended; Polly Lake, bless her, is that. No, Dad, I mean she was a smasher, a stunner, a knockout. Where were the varicosities, striations, liver spots? The thickened waist and slacked behind and fallen pectorals? The crow’s-feet, jowls, and wattles of latter age? Jane’s hair is perfectly gray; her face is delicately seasoned rather than dewy fresh (as it had still been at 43!); her skin all over, and her musculature, also has that slightly seasoned cast. Otherwise… Fifteen years younger-looking than her inverted lover, for example, a healthy specimen himself. No question about it, she is a physical freak. But there are freaks and freaks; if this is arrested development, let them throw away the key.

Jane (I exclaimed when I was able)! You are a smasher, a stunner, et cetera! How could these photographs possibly do otherwise than delight you as they delight me, as they must be the delight of any family member, friend, enemy, business associate or competitor whose eyes are privileged to rest upon them? As they must delight God himself, whom I suspect of snapping that full-color overhead? Blackmail indeed! Have them enlarged and framed on your office walls, reproduced in the brochures of all Mack Enterprises, direct-mailed to preferred stockholders and to every senior citizens’ organization in the republic!

She thought me not serious, but was heartened enough to scold me, mildly, for reexamining the photographs, which reluctantly I gave back to her. Admiring her vanity along with the rest, I granted that their circulation could be an embarrassment and inconvenience, if not to her affiancement at least to her business and private life. And I seconded her opinion that police and private-detective files were not to be trusted with them: I knew from experience how that brotherhood relishes a good photograph; in any case (so to speak) they were not Sherlock Holmeses or Hercule Poirots, just cops and ex-cops of one sort or another, more or less competent routine investigators.

That was why she’d brought them to me. What should she do? I asked her kindly, Had they really been taken without her knowledge? The lighting and camera angles were so good, and in 1949, especially, the gadgetry of snooping was less exquisite than it had become since. What she’d acknowledged, moreover, about Lord Jeff’s eccentricities…

Okay, it came out then, with more blushes and a couple more Kleenexes: he’d been a camera buff, had set up a tripod and lights and automatic timer himself in their room at the Connaught back in ’49. But there’d been nobody on the ceiling last January! And it was still to be explained how naughty Jeff’s photo (which she’d never even thought of since, or seen a print of till now) came into someone else’s hands 20 years later. And whose? Would I please, as one of her oldest friends and the most trusted, try discreetly to find out who had sent her that note (from Niagara Falls, N.Y., 14302, on St. Patrick’s Day, the envelope revealed, with a 6-cent Cherokee Strip commemorative), so that she could protect herself and “Lord Baltimore” from further invasion of their privacy and proceed to contest Harrison’s will if she saw fit?