Letters

I was more and more pleased. Not only was my girl (excuse me: the woman) in apparent control of her drinking; she was making sense right down the line. The will case: She wasn’t interested in litigation; she’d loved her father despite her well-merited later rejection by him. On the other hand she wouldn’t settle for nothing; she needed some money to start a new life with, especially since she had no professional skills and had ceased to badger Louis Golden for unpaid alimony. The split I’d proposed to Jane suited her fine, if her mother and brother were agreeable; otherwise she guessed she’d file suit in probate and take what she could get. Her personal survival might be a cause less worthy than Drew’s revolution, but she reckoned it at least as defensible as her mother’s wish to enrich a future husband.

That fellow: Nope, she hadn’t yet had the pleasure of meeting “Lord Baltimore,” whose real name however she understood to be André Castine. There was, coincidentally, a “Monsieur Casteene” at the Remobilization Farm, but he spelled it differently, nobody knew his first name, and anyhow he was at the Farm, not with her mother. In any case, Jea

Her parentage: Could I tell her what her mother’s and my affair had been like, back in the ’30’s? Had it been a ménage à trois, or what? She couldn’t imagine Mom letting her hair down so — though there had been that later fling of hers, with that English Lord. The month when she herself had been conceived, for example, was her mother putting out pretty regularly for both Harrison and me? How much truth was there in that novel that people used to tease her with, that was supposedly based on my life?

Some, I acknowledged. That part of it was a reasonable approximation, except that for purposes of plot it made Harrison Mack into a weaker and simpler fellow than her father had ever been. But her mother and I had indeed been lovers, with her father’s knowledge and complaisance, for two separate periods, totaling more than three years and including the date of Jea

Our own copulation: It still didn’t bother her, either in principle or in fact. In Jea

Why not. The day grew fairer by the hour. As the tide slackened and the temperature rose, the wind freshened to twelve knots and veered to west-northwest, putting us on a dandy beam reach that both felt and was faster; cooler too. O.J.’s favorite point of sail. I was growing absentminded, though I’ll plead exhilaration: not till Jea

Aha, she teased: so I did have something going. Nope, sorry, not a sound or syllable. She put a hand on my knee: Had she screwed something up for me, answering my phone in the middle of the night?

No, no, no. I had nothing “going,” more’s the pity. And now I did dismiss the matter from my mind. No question of stopping for a swim or letting O.J. self-steer: we spanked across the wind, taking the seas just forward of our port beam with a satisfying smash of white water. The old hull seemed happy as I was; we sprinted (for us) up the Bay like an elder porpoise bestrode by a fresh sea-nymph, Jea

Off the mouth of the Magothy, sailboat traffic thickened to the point where Jea

That was, perhaps, a pity, as things turned out — the early anchorage after a dandy seven-hour sail, the unexpected privacy and free time in a lovely swimming place relatively free of sea nettles — but it certainly seemed otherwise at the moment. We stripped and dived in fast to cool off, then put a proper harbor-furl in the sails, rigged the awning to shade cockpit and main cabin and a windsail at the forward hatch, and went back in for a long leisurely swim, spotting nettles for each other as best we could in the clouded, bath-warm water. After an hour of paddling and floating with only one minor sting between us, as I hung at the foot of the boarding ladder to rest, Jea

Enough pornography, Dad: it wets my pants and compounds my felony to record it. But at my age and in my situation, every erection, penetration, thrust, and ejaculation, every touch of nipple, stroke of cleft — there I go; here I came — has the special extra pleasure of its being very possibly my last. (These were, it turns out, my next-to-last; one more to go, and I’ll make it briefer, which it was.) My “daughter,” sir, is now a Missing Person, and it may well be just here, as I seize her buttocks, press my face between her breasts, and squirt what feels like an entire Chesapeake of semen into her, that I begin to send her down whatever path she’s gone. On the other hand (I must tell myself) she might have taken that path sooner, or some worse one later, but for her pleasure in my company thus far.

Done. We opened more beer at her request and lay sipping happily in our perspiration, letting the slight air current from the windsail play over us. Jea