Joseph McElroy: Ancient History: A Paraphrase

I flipped your pickproof Eagle. If the cop comes back won’t he know he left it unlocked? Does he know that an Eagle doesn’t lock itself, that you flip it from inside or use a key from outside? Or will the cop say what the hell maybe the super locked up, or a neighbor. But would you have trusted anybody with one of your registered keys, Dom? I feel I know the answer to that one, if I stick around here long enough. My going in here and staying is a trick I played on myself that may take hours to explain. It is nine p.m. It may take other than hours. It is open-ended like a circle that’s only a moving point whose centrifugal trail fades behind it. I wanted to speak to you of Bob and Al. I knew all about even events in your career I hadn’t actually witnessed, like upwards of three years ago taking a jump with paratroop trainees in Georgia. Not even the Base paper much less the local weekly ran a picture of you, in harness or out, but you told a woman representing a wire service that parachuting was like nothing else, and then instead of telling what it wasn’t like you went on about finding that morning in your motel that when you doused cold water on the right side of your jaw to clean off shaving blood and close the cut you couldn’t help dousing the left side too. For ages I’d wanted to know you, and then last week I learned that Cora knew you and that you’d be at that opening; and I found that I could get asked.

Last year landing an apartment here was even trickier. I needed a cover for my acts on your behalf. Fortunately my wife Ev had also had her eye on this old building. She, too, thought it might be just the ticket if we could keep below the control ceiling. Real space at a sane rent. Now the city has made it illegal to have a fire in the fireplace. Jumping into the sky you were hooked up like your slimmer comrades the trainees to a static line that opened your pack automatically. Until you got into the plane you thought your rip pin would be controlled by you. Here in New York the week before, you were quoted saying what could one know about jumping if one didn’t jump. My father hoped I’d go into science. I was one of those only children who go into other people’s lives. I could have used a tape measure tonight, Ev would be interested to know the coördinates of your long brown living room. I see I said coördinates. Your place is roughly like ours downstairs. Which now you’ll never see. Ev was expecting some very nice people any minute, I should go back. She tends to mix people without thinking, so you could find yourself facing two who don’t get along, which can kill an evening.

She asked Bob the weekend he was last here. We were just settled in. Bob preferred the Biltmore.

We could put both Al and Bob up, our place is spacious. But they’re on the eighth and tenth floors of a westside motor hotel for this (I now suppose) extraordinary weekend. You see, I received independent letters from them saying we’d all meet. Al and Bob have never met, or at least to my knowledge hadn’t until their respective arrivals in the city yesterday. Yet each worded his note almost as if he were arranging to have me meet the other. Till now their sole bond has been me. I haven’t phoned the motel. I’ve known them both for years.

Summers I knew Al, a country boy. Soon after Labor Day I turned to Bob, who spent summers at the ocean. Yes, after fields of goldenrod and the serial flow of bugs finely buzzing above the warm tar road that Al and I wildly pedaled, my friendship with my Poly classmate Bob returned as cleanly exercising as new kinds of math problems and as alien and promising as the paint smell in my parents’ city apartment.

But Dom I meant to start with your career and its meaning. Instead I interrupted with Al and Bob, and must now announce, dear Dom, that over the years by design I’ve kept Bob and Al from meeting. Not that this took much care. I’ve told you too soon, without preparation. Maybe I couldn’t help it. “Hopefully”—as our super begins his grand answers to tenant questions — what I have to tell you Dom will occur like those confectionary bomblets in capsule staggered to go off at equal intervals keeping our common cold occluded. “Occupation?” the police recorder asks, if by some awkward chance I’m called to the precinct in your death. Preamping him I reply, “When I was six or seven and had a headache my mother would take my head and press it fore-and-aft then transversely, which helped to relieve the pressure.” The police recorder says, “Occupation: Head,” and writes.

You, Dom, I could ask, “What’s my line?” and your notorious grasp of the times could let you coolly bear my quip back to me on a sliver of neutral wit. With civil rhythms what I have to say will slowly come — occluding, yes, our common cold.

Bob wouldn’t touch one of those two-a-day specifics. He’d tell one of his kids to take a pill if he had to but stop the sniveling and suffering. I saw Bob once look into his and his wife’s medicine cabinet with wincing wonderment at salve and powder and spray, cosmetic, medical, marital. If like one of his lobsterman neighbors he’d toppled into that northern bay that he drives the way he used to play lacrosse, and been then tracked by his empty, circling outboard till pitching the frosty swells it found him and came back at his naked head and he ducked but came up too quick and lost the main part of a hand, this huge result would bring out of him not a frail finality of breathless cries but a Whoop of epical amazement, before he died of shock. Bob no longer lives in the city.

Imagine Al and Bob head-on. Al, who has barely lived in Maine, could say, “Bet you didn’t know that four hundred and sixty-eight people died in Lewiston in 1961.”

“I’ll bet you I didn’t,” Bob may say. “The number doesn’t do a thing for me.” He’ll grant some mild whimsy in Al but doesn’t see that Al meant fact for fact’s sake, not even when Al adds, “Four hundred and sixty-eight died there in 1962, and four hundred and sixty-eight in 1963.”

“Local pride,” says Bob rising, and takes Al’s empty; “local pride,” moving toward the kitchen, where he calls out, “In the heart of the State of Maine is a mystery you and I will never be able to put into words. And it’s an American mystery too by Christ. All the rest is sheepshit, Al, pure and simple.” A dew-stained can cracks. The weekend is snug and gray. Country rain seals Bob’s self-made house.

But Bob and Al have not met. And if I say they wouldn’t have got along at all you with your well-known knowledge surely know my not bringing them together was no simple social precaution, Dom. (Dom for Dominic?) For I don’t after all boast many friends and so you’d think I’d want my friends to know each other. But Al and Bob? Enough for them to have in common me. It’s not my fault that apparently in these last weeks they’ve been in correspondence and apparently this weekend have left their families and come to the city to a midtown motel with better elevators than ours: Bob on the tenth floor, Al on the eighth. Were they two men who would stir each other’s worst colors? Apart, they are dreadfully alive for me.

It’s raining. I have just stood at one of your west windows and seen far below me the sealed beams of a long car stopped at the light headed east. The wipers pace parallel on the windshield. A second slick length racing up behind braked to fall just shy of the lead car’s prompt take-off as the light turned, the second car’s wipers are different, they meet and part like the ribs of a fan. On the corner a black man with a plastic bag over him down to his chest looked in the framer’s window which I know says, “To the Trade Only.”

But now here at this old beautiful table I can’t hear rain. News of your impromptu death won’t hit the streets for a few hours. A mobile unit is sliding you downtown I imagine. My only fear of death, Dom, is of losing my approach to it. I must say suicide’s old stuff. I will scratch some of this out, it seems to take you to task for what you’ve done. When Cora invited me to the opening where I met you she said she’d heard from the blind actor’s former girlfriend Kit Carbon that you were taking marijuana for migraine. How far will I go? By one view, Dom, I cannot lose your audience even if I try. A minute ago passing in your foyer the large white mirror whose uncertainty and depth you devised by superposing four sheets of windowglass, I looked into it as if it held a hint of your late form suspended like the odor of an orange or a cigar that meets you in the empty elevator. Why don’t I get back what I give?