PRUDENCE IS GETTING MARRIED and not to me. As I checked out of Signor Martello’s hotel, distributing gratuities in grand American fashion—three half-pound tins of Revelation to the porter—I received in return a fat stamp-bright envelope from the States. Enclosed was a short and enigmatic letter from Jose announcing that he and his tootsie nun were getting married. Enclosed also in the envelope was another envelope, which quaintly had been sent to me nine days before from Venice. Inside this second envelope was a long unenigmatic letter from Prudence, which announced that she was getting married to, who else, the enterprising father of her unborn. Apparently Father had had a change of heart and full of honorable impulses flown to Italy and his love on wings of steel. I would quote this letter to you, because it was a very beautiful letter, which spoke of foregoing the private need and selfish impulse, but I tore it up and let the bits fall on Ciampino airfield. I tore and tore until the pieces were too small to hold and tear again. And I got on the plane, as planned, and flew to Milano, and I got on a bus, as planned, and rode to Bardolino, and all the while I wondered who he was, this happy fructifier. Do you know who I thought he was? Just as surely as I had leukemia two weeks ago, he was Harvey. The evidence was overwhelming. Harvey had worked at MUI before me, thus he knew Prudence before I had. And! When he learned that I was going with her he had made no comment—studiously made no comment. And! He was meeting her at Bardolino. On Lago di Garda. When I had looked up Bardolino in the Nagel guidebook, I noticed there was a town nearby named Sirmione, the modern counterpart of Sirmio, where Catullus was supposed to have kept a villa two millennia ago. It was exactly, but exactly, Harvey to choose for a rendezvous a place which held arcane meanings. Or if not the place itself, a place nearby. Then suddenly the evidence would crumble and I became sure it was Mr. Pudgybald. Neuter nonentity indeed. The smooth seducer had only pretended to pay court to Mommie in order to screw the daughter. A classic ploy. I recalled, word for word, his comments about Prudence on our trip back to the city that night along the river. He had said she was a wonderful and sensitive woman. He hadn’t called her a girl, as any man his age should have. And finally, why hadn’t she told me in the restaurant who the father was? Because she was ashamed of Pudgybald, ashamed of being diddled by a plump inadequacy. As I collected, sorted and refined the evidence for both cases, they replaced one another in my head with increasing speed and certainty. By the time I arrived here at Bardolino they had merged into a Harvey Pudgybald. But who is he really? He sells Chris-Craft motorboats to rich suburbanites, but otherwise I can’t tell you. I have seen him a number of times now, stared at him intently, but I cannot describe him. I do not know if he is fat or thin, tall or short, fair or dark, coarse or fine. His lips move—I have seen them from a distance—but I do not know the words they spoke. He displaces matter, I have observed him making waves in Lago di Garda. Others note him when he scratches himself—at least I believe they do—so he reflects light truly, he is no illusion. His bathing suit bulges, consequently I deduce he pees like a man. And since it is he who knocked up my friend Prudence, I judge his tool emits on occasion more than urine. In a word a whole man, a hole man. But I cannot tell you his appearance. If someone had held him down for me and someone else had forced me to remember, I could give you something, but as it is, he’s a Chinese waiter, a pigeon in the park, a black cat—merely one of a species, the species of man-shaped turd, a piece of nature filling cunts and other voids, and I wish him well, a long life, a faithful companion, worldly preferment, many orgasms of exquisite strength, a deathbed repentance and eternal happiness in the afterlife. And why am I so generous? Because I am a Christian, reared to neighbor-love and cheek-turning, a gentle, genteel, Gentile chap withal. So Prudence is wedding Mr. Right, Mr. Right-in-there. She is doing the Right thing, so to speak. She mentioned the word Responsibility—not to my face but in the letter—and I must remember to suggest to her in future colloquies, if any, that she use it for the child. And perhaps when the child’s confirmed she can add Accommodation. Responsibility Accommodation dear, why are you so pale, made in a hot night on the leatherette seat of a stalled auto, deserted in gestation, rejoined from guilt, born in doubt, raised in discomforture, why so pale? Stretch yourself on the couch, Responsibility Accommodation, and remember what you never knew, that Daddie meant, he really meant, to pull out, break it off, you off, ah but the warm weather, the full moon, the odds against you gathered to make his stick stick, and all those eager spermies scurried like ladies at a sale. Plunk went the winner into the soft ovum, plunk, set for life. And Mommie didn’t douche you, jolt you, gouge you, shake you, did she? So don’t feel bad. Daddie came to Bardolino to shower you with further icky sperm. Isn’t that a sign of love? I arrived in Bardolino well after dinner and rose late the next day so that I missed them for breakfast. It wasn’t until lunch that we saw one another. A picture, tanned and smiling, the four of them—Prudence, Mrs., sister Billy, friend-and-father—all seated neatly at their table under the vine-covered trellises next to the lake. As I asked the captain for my table, she saw me, half rose. But I held up my hand, turned my back. Seated I looked again, and she too was seated, staring at her plate. I found out later, when she came to my room, that at that moment she thought I had flown from the States in response to her Venice letter, and I might have. We ate, six or seven tables apart. I out-ate them, and they left, no one but Prudence knowing and she not telling, all smiling except Prudence, and then I left too. In the afternoon I went to the hotel’s private dock, and they were there, Prudence bikinied in the Bardolino mode, and I watched them from the awninged bar at the foot of the dock until they left, then I swam. The water was warm and felt dirty but was as clear as a new bath. The bottom is slippery stone, little fishes nibble at the hairs on your legs. In a while she came back to the dock alone. I stayed in the water far out, looking at her. She waited, not moving, and finally dove in. I swam away, out toward the center of the lake. She didn’t follow but got back on the dock and left. At four-thirty a melancholy chill sets in here, but I stayed on, floating and swimming for more than an hour, almost to abuse myself, to draw the discomfort out from the bone’s to the skin. And I took my time getting back and dressing so that they were gone from the dining room when I arrived. There’s nothing to do in the evenings but walk or sit in the piazza, talk and drink, and I stayed in my room and waited, waited with a vengeance, and then at twelve-thirty she came. I considered letting her knock-and-whisper, but also I was eager for the scene. I opened without a word, she came in without a word. I motioned to a chair, she sat down. I wanted her to talk first, but she wouldn’t, and we sat, and I watched her fine skin with the two pink spots over cheek and cheekbone. The feeling against her drained away finally because I saw I had no right to it. You won’t believe this, you’ll think it’s sour grapes, but I didn’t come to Italy to marry her necessarily, or even to confirm the engagement. I came to see, to make up my mind as my mind made up me. And there was this. If Prudence’s friend had not shown, and I had decided I didn’t want to marry her I would have had no feeling for her feelings. You don’t think I’m that much of a prick, do you? Well, don’t be fooled by me being the hero of my own letters. I am that much of a prick. Let me remind you that back at the ranch Mary thinks I’m engaged to her again. Have I wasted sympathy on Mary? Anyway, I figured all this out with Prudence on a chair, me on the bed, looking at one another between midnight and one o’clock in a hotel on Lago di Garda, and I finally gathered up the revelations and worked them into a civilized statement. I said I’m glad things are working out this way for you, Prudence. Then with a word she knocked me down. I know you are, she said. She knew I was, she really thought I was glad. I wasn’t glad. I could have broken her in two just to keep her from that guy, but she thought I was glad, she was giving me credit for a generosity I’m no more capable of than I’m capable of biting off my hand. But do you see, that’s why I wanted her, I wanted her because that’s the way she is. But do you see also, that’s why I didn’t want her, why I didn’t grab her back in the States, answer her letter, rush to Italy, because she thought I was something I was not. I’m Fox, Wally, Feldshuh, Austin, Foxshuh, Madam Fox, Jose, and all the rest, but this was Prudence, and if I had married her, there would have been, one dark night or one bright morning over coffee by the window, that terrible unveiling. The skin would have been pulled all the way back on prick me. Well, we talked, and she wanted me to meet this creep. It was a reasonable impulse, but I said Why, so you can include my image in his? Do you want me to approve of him or something? Well, I don’t want to meet that son of a bitch, and I’m sure that son of a bitch wouldn’t want to meet me. And all I did by saying this was make her sad. She excused me, said I was upset, and I was, and I tried to kiss her before she left, and she gave me her cheek instead of her mouth because she was marrying someone else and she left, and I started crying. Later I fell asleep, but I kept waking up to cry. Slob extraordinary. The next morning I watched them from my window, a boy loading luggage on the handtruck, everyone smiling, even Prudence. She didn’t look up, she must have known I was there, but she didn’t. She was marrying the father of her child, doing the right thing, which gives one stuff, doesn’t it? I tried to see what he was like, but his face was mushed like a Francis Bacon painting. I think he had a thin mustache, but I’m not sure.