Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

As the nubble man backs around I think of asking him to help us and take Bob down that next crescent of beach to the island’s one short road that bends past the general store and ends smack at the ferry landing.

Bob is coming around. I don’t know how long it’s been, I don’t wear a watch. Dom, what is happening here is beside time. Bob has gone yellow. Petty holds his shoulders back but he pulls up and stands. And then without having time to bend forward he vomits yellow all over himself.

So we’re all five of us going back to the mainland tonight but not before Bob swims it off; and then I pole him out to the Brandeis professor’s lobster pot but to get enough we start the motor and go out to Bob’s own buoys, while Petty watches from the beach, arms akimbo. Bob is remote. Petty watches us haul up the wood cages. The small lobster is too small to take and of the four others one is missing a claw; we take them all. There’s little talking at supper, Petty isn’t happy. The beach is ours.

Back on Route One she’s at the wheel.

We’ll cut to Bob’s living room, the boys in bed, John B. with a sore behind to go with his sore hand.

“No, I’m all right,” Bob calls going out through the kitchen to the bathroom.

“Listen,” I ask Petty quietly, “did you ever tell Bob what I told you about Al and Gail in Heatsburg? The quarry?”

“Oh yes, maybe; yes, years ago. Maybe the same day you told me. I went out with Bob all those summers. I used to tell him everything. But before I wrote you that silly letter last week he’d just been talking about that very thing, which must be why I mentioned it to you.”

So I learn even more than I wanted. He told Petty I mixed emotion with biology, and why get mixed up in a ploy to a girl that compromised my friendship with a guy? but it’s water under the dam, and Petty said she thought all that about emotion and biology was typical Bob.

But ask for reproof and you’ll get it.

Bob has a fresh bourbon when he comes back. His forehead has been rubbed and there are still some drops in his hair in front.

Petty is worried about him and wanted to cancel the two couples Bob phoned as soon as we got home, bump on his head and all.

Bob is almost eager for me to meet Leo and Irish. I find I can’t imagine them. Why can’t I?

I ask Bob, Have they children? Yes, a girl three, a boy two, and something on the way. Do they come to the island? Yes, of course they come; say have you read Beckett? Only his novels, I reply. Well, I’ve only read his plays, but — now the seismic pause, and Petty frowns, she’s had a hard day; she murmurs Which plays did he write besides — Ben Sedgwick and I talked this out all night last May after they did Krapp’s Last Tape at the church: by Jesus he’s a religious writer, Beckett. Bob’s guest is tired. Final things maybe, I say, but things , just things . Bob shakes the same head that commended Joey and got badly hit this afternoon: No s’r, I think you’ve got a problem… no two ways about it, Beckett’s religious, why he’s God-obsessed. He seeks him because he’s found Him, that’s how Father Sedgwick puts it. It’s a problem of commitment, Cy, commitment.

Do I hear tires on gravel? “Was it a castle or a city this afternoon?” I ask Petty.

Bob says, “Which said which?”

“John B. said a city,” I answer. Do I hear a car motor die?

Petty sighs. “And Robby said a castle.”

“I know, I know,” Bob says. He looks at me, Dom, and I feel Al behind me, and Bob says slowly, “I just don’t love them the same. John B. is more lovable. I don’t love Robby as much.”

We’re silent, and then Bob claps his hands to his eyes. He is weeping.

He jumps up and with one hand holding his distorted face he rushes out through the kitchen, and Petty follows him. A door shuts, probably the bathroom.

The bell goes, Dom. My great-aunt Sue said a terrible thing once when I wouldn’t kiss her after she’d taken me to a double-feature. But though my other great-aunt Kate looked over her crossword at me and said, “Nonsense, he’s a lamb,” I took it to heart and got to work thinking about it.

The bell goes? No, not your buzzer. (I took a break for orange juice, I drank it right out of the carton and topped it off with some flaky halibut which besides a half-consumed coffee yogurt was the only other thing in the strangely personal interior of your old medium-size icebox.) No indeed, I’ve heard not a thing since the four feet passed, or were they the future and my icebox raid further past than I know? Middle-class life goes on.

I don’t care how much you were looking forward to your son Richard’s next letter (as it began by saying you’d said), believe me most of it was punitive decoration. The core was that you ought to lay off: take Dorothy back, who he said looked better than ever having lost weight living apart from you; get back to your “long-term” writing and your “hobbies,” which I assume include that light, fat styrofoam pastoral crowded in front of the bookcase between window and screen tripod; stop trying (he said with a shade of mere intimacy) to throw yourself against odds into the maelstrom of this country’s kitsch doom (or was it “century’s”?); and get to the barber at once. “For it isn’t necessary to try every life you imagine in order to be one on whom nothing is lost.”

Ten big days in jail right on top of your ejection from that Jackson hotel interrupted your private investigation of the Mississippi Mystery and left you visibly weakened but visually more vivid. In jail, time is very different, you told reporters. Who smirked, no doubt recalling that the hotel management hadn’t had to lean toothpicks up against your door to know that you and your secretary used only one of the two rooms you booked.

What odds would Richard have given that you’d bump yourself off? I made sure you didn’t get enervating letters from an actuary who reads James, happens to be your son, and loathes the phone.

To keep on top of your mail yet be at those public exhibitions of yours that I foresaw would be significant, I had to play percentage. So from Mississippi I didn’t go direct to Point Magu to start the March, but flew here to check.

From your daughter Lila’s note I learned that during the week at the end of which the Anti-Abstraction March would hit Santa Barbara she and her husband would be in San Francisco. Their address was in the Mission District with friends. Why not in a hotel? (Well now I’m going to stop in Melbourne with retired friends on the way to Naples where I’ll put up with an old friend— if she’ll put up with me! — whence I mean to combine a look at Tamiami Canal (I know a skipper with a side-trip to look up a full-blooded Seminole Al served with in Ike’s Coast Guard.)) And plainly, Dom, Lila hoped you would call on them there at their friends’ in Frisco when your March was over. Her husband’s drug therapy conference would end Friday but they’d stay on hoping you’d fly up. (Prudential provisions! Thursday afternoon we leave the St. Francis conference early to meet some friends who want us to see an ancient site; then sunset and sweet-and-sour duck with Sam, did you ever meet Sam? he’s a beautiful old man — sort of everybody’s uncle: then early to bed ’cause Friday’s a big day.) But then for some reason Lila and husband came on downstate instead of waiting for you to come up, and were suddenly right in front of me in your open-air audience when through your bull-horn you startled Darla Fasinelli’s crowd with that veiled gamble, what I called earlier tonight a “risky trick,” a “gappy calculus.” Lila’s plump spouse turned to stare around, and whether or not his eyes found mine he seemed fed up.