Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

The super is making a sound again and again in the hall halfway between words and groaning, and the Irish tenor is getting mad. Far away from me he’s saying somebody must have had a key to lock the door, his man Donahoe claims he just let the door close and had no key but forgot the lock didn’t lock by itself. So who the hell but the super? The super says maybe a neighbor and tells the dick to watch his language, but the dick quickly says if you don’t like it call The First National City Bank, call your boss, the son-in-law’s coming any minute with his key — but Dom here you are:

From below, with the big rescue mat fifty feet in front of me and the Pacific pink and gray behind me, I kept expecting fire and smoke from the ninth-floor window whose sill you were straddling apparently being jostled. Cops cordoned us back further, and from a window adjacent to yours the FREEDOM NOW poster came paddling down followed by two paper cups. Now your head eased out under the raised window and then your other leg came out too. Maybe Darla was right, maybe it was double; but it was supreme and undivided, that sight of you apparently trying to hold onto the sill behind, so far behind.

Your final lean was abrupt enough to seem pushed, but as you yelled “No” you twisted to fall out half-sitting, and that was almost how you hit, bringing with you, I swear, the darkness we all had imagined the dramatic California twilight postponed.

Dom, the click of heels (in suspense films always the loud prowl of leather heels) and the near elevator’s spindle-engine at the top of the shaft stimulate your voice in one of its several imperfect accents to ask — not who’s been christening my new fountain pen? who’s been sitting at my table in my window? who’s been at my cold halibut? but— why , if I so wanted to keep my friends Al and Bob, I let myself be so indiscreet.

Talking to you is like talking to me. I see no stars in the rain, though I’m slipping out past our little cap of ancient atmosphere. If you were me you’d cut the quarantine, tiptoe across a corner of the foyer into the kitchen and hang up the phone receiver. And I will. But the sounds are so close outside your front door they’d hear me pass. You’d approve of the risk and surprise I’ve played on myself to bypass the time into an open-ended phase of space. Space possessed by rent alone. There’s room to stand behind the folds of the floor-length curtains drawn back at either end of this window-wall. Ted came home from a lecture in the Village and seeing our bedroom light still on came in and said with loud irony, “Well big deal, now I know there is no such thing as space,” and Ev shushed him, he’d wake Emma. Ted once told me the plump Hungarian must be paying three bills minimum for that gouged and padded wall-to-wall of his with the extra door fitted behind the regular one to seal the office from the uneasy waiting room. Poor Ted prided himself on not wanting to keep either of the doors closed when he was on the couch, but the doc said no, but not the mysterious harsh No with which my father ripped off the end of his awful debate with my mother over where we were going that summer. Ted’s thirty-five-dollar hour would be interrupted by phone calls about medication or emergency commitment. Then the doctor would tell Ted Ted wasn’t being spontaneous, was preparing material for the sessions. I foresaw Ted wouldn’t last, just as I foresaw the possibility of tonight, perhaps through that ultimate pound of lamb’s liver fried tenderly for me last week by a woman I love in spite of all the area codes she has at her firm feathery fingertips. But if you’re not here to pin your suicide on me, the thought survives (like me) centrifugally. You wouldn’t have expected to get back the art work called Location Piece you mailed Richard plus a key to this apartment and a request that he forget the old differences and do you a favor (if only as a friend) and check the place while you were away trying to break up the misguided demonstrations interfering with work at the Marine Nutrients Station. Of course I intercepted the two items on their return trip, your note and your Location Piece which I gather you offer as some form of documentary event if not art. But your son seems to have kept the key. And you wouldn’t have worried about no confirming letter from Dicta-Sec, though your losing track of Dot, Dick and Lila was my fault as much as theirs. But Lila didn’t help by telling you her husband thought you were dangerously divided. Well I am not split between this pen of yours and the voices tampering with the doorknob. If your suicide book failed, last year’s On Interruption had a kind of New York success. But then what if I am the man who created your suicide or at least caused it? I am. Darla’s surprise letter yesterday might have cheered you in the wrong way, I had to confiscate it. I can tell you this much: she says she’s changed and now can’t wholly condemn (though she still disapproves) your electronic relativism — thinks your mystical Commitment to Field-State and your ballsy talk about absorbing without waste the hottest, spiniest ailments is irrelevant, but thinks you’re a lamb with the muscles of a viper. But I couldn’t on your behalf invite her attention and even love, for they might have lowered your resolve to probe into the form of some final confusion. Was I wrong? Do not say I did your suicide. Voices from an outer phase gather in. Picture me before my TV with Emma on my lap and my hands on hers, and the Space Program’s moon is receding. Well even if the door was unlocked when (and if) the neighbor buzzed and entered, there must be other keys even if the super doesn’t have one. He and the Irish voice are at it again. I may have to stepacide. It isn’t as if this place is sacred. I didn’t see how to bring Al and Bob together, and so was drawn to you, Dom, not necessarily because you fused Dialectic, Dichotomy, and Field-State, but because you tried. My parents would knock before coming into my room. I used theirs as indiscriminately as my Ev brings people together. That night in ’49, I didn’t tell my sick father I was going back to the Village after dinner to see Camille. But he went to bed at seven-thirty bearing his tumbler of acidophilus milk, after we’d made up by reconfirming our suspicions that Herodotus is unsure how the Cimmerian Straits and the River Phasis act as boundaries. And kissing but not halting my mother as she played the piano, I slipped out: much more smoothly than I slipped in after the Bohack Joey fight two years and more before, hoping I wouldn’t have to explain the honorable mess on one side of my long face which neither Tracy (an onlooker) nor Perpetua (a participating issue) had been eager to take to their houses to clean up lest their parents be upset, and Bob had already gone home with a cut thigh and a thin trickle out of his lacerated scalp coming down his forehead like a crack. I wanted to hide my marks not so much because they’d scare the pants off my parents — the elevator again, now opening — as because I’d had no one to go home with: it was Hugh and Tracy, Wit Holmes and his older sister’s boyfriend, the Smith Twins, Petty and at the last minute her father’s scrumptuous friend Mrs. Bolla, the minister’s son and his brother, and others. But I alone was alone. For this odd reason I did not even want to explain to my loving parents. Explain that my fairly fast hands had moved out to answer Joey’s insult to Petty but also to seal my suspicion that he’d stolen my Corona — (but was it a Corona? or was it, say, a Royal?) stolen two Saturdays before after my father had lugged it back under the river from the repair shop and while he was across the street helping Mrs. Bolla get a huge cardboard carton out of a cab.