Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

“You haven’t changed,” he broke in in vain (I think he didn’t like my pedagogic “Hugh”)—

“Possibilities you see made palpable just by being possibilities but also by other possibilities.” “Thanks—” said Hugh but I wasn’t finished; “Who was it, Hugh, who divided the Tigris into three hundred and sixty channels?” “Thanks,” said Hugh, “I’m going across the street for a workout.” Faded color photos of his health club were in frames on the brick wall of the hotel. Being aware of two of the schoolgirls in cadet-blue coördinates, vest and pleated skirt, whom I’d been watching before, I chose not to broach with them after all their availability to baby-sit, and simultaneously (a) by seeing Gail’s newly softened breast as she lay leaning on her elbow speaking to me with the window leaves dark green that early Portland morning after Annette provoked Al, and (b) seeing tall soft Tracy after a few minutes’ absence come back into the nonsense and smoke of some antique Heights living room one gently drunk New Year’s noon with her hem caught way up on her garter, I (c) sensed contemplating each other (though Dom I swear I did not see) Ev naked in morning light and Emma just dressed, I said to Hugh, “Haven’t you ever played it by ear in bed—?” “Christ what a thought!” Hugh said with unthinking wit—“like,” I said, “you see a part of her you really didn’t before and you interrupt yourself? Love is short maybe, but the body is long, I can remember times…” dot dot dot.

With lame reflectiveness Hugh said, “No… no, you haven’t changed.”

“You still selling space for — that magazine?” I said, and Hugh said, “No,” and he said, “Call you sometime,” and, mastering himself only enough to not say what he felt, he added, “Ever try the Jap steak house—?” “There’s more than one,” I said. “As I get older,” he went on, “I seem to eat in more expensive restaurants.” But he’d said I hadn’t changed, and he went back a long way.

I knew we would never get together — unless Ev for no reason phoned him — but I knew we would meet like this a few more times.

Since my pages went, I guess I feel all over again I can say anything to you, Dom. But didn’t I feel this when I broke off? They’re like Pope Alexander’s envoy to Prester John, those pages. But could Alexander say anything he wanted to John? I can pick up where I was interrupted, but what preceded that? The Pope’s envoy never returned, nor with him the Pope’s message. Maybe he self-destructed at destination. Or changed. In the shower at the New York A.C. where up to about my thirteenth or fourteenth year we sometimes went on Uncle Cooley’s honorary card when he was in town on a Saturday, and he played pool while we swam, my father looked me up and down, we were letting the moderately hot water purify us of our energies and putting off the moment when we’d turn on the cold shock, and we’d been discussing whether it was true that swimming used all your muscles, then we were discussing the magnetized handle of the new knife my mother stuck on the refrigerator door, my father was telling about the electric field, and I finally asked whether you could get fried if you touched a live wire in the shower but were wearing sneakers, and my father said why would you wear sneakers in the shower and continued his former explanation by ending it saying that even if you didn’t use a coil or solenoid, even if nothing was there to detect the field, the field itself was still there, and then we turned off our hot taps and turned up the cold, and howled in the searching chill and though I thought there was something about my father’s last remark I should reflect on, I thought upstairs to my uncle and that when we’d arrived earlier I’d wanted to play Chicago with him rather than slog a whole lot of laps crawl, backstroke, and butterfly in the championship chlorine. Did I tell you, Dom, of my brief argument with my father? It was the morning after my date with Camille. Her father was so amused by my embroidered account of how I was named and so startled by my knowing the Exuma islands and his own Andros and its predominant marshes where once he’d slaved for visiting duck hunters — that he’d said she could stay out till one. And my father woke up in the morning more tired than he’d gone to bed and wanted to know more about Camille, whose modest mouth beyond my memory as I sat on the Sunday edge of my cooling bed I found slowly smiling between my thighs. I heard my mother say the father was West Indian and the mother from Detroit, and my mother said to my father, “I promise you you are not going to church today; so you can take it easy in the living room,” upon which I said, by now swaying happily in my pajamas in the hall between my room and my bathroom as my mother passed me going to the kitchen, “Only reason to believe in God is it’s someone you can tell your side of the story to.” An only child doesn’t only protect his parents. They lose their lives in his, so he must take care not to lose his life. Even including the action theater of your suicide, or my omenoid reflections on history and religion, or the physical witchcrafts of childhood and the kitsch biophysics of your (and my) Americanolysis, is my trick here tonight only the unchidden privateering of an only child? You were one too. Did I talk like this earlier this evening? But in tonight’s history we are beyond evenings in a state whose chances — as you yourself Dom if you knew me well might say — seem congruent with the field haunted by my erratic but aforementioned vectoral muscle.

Will your son-in-law come back? He has my words but not the key. Where did that typewriter repair receipt go?

Your son Richard evidently had no use for your peculiar Location Piece, an 8 1/2 by 11 shot of a grid bearing what looks like a plan of this apartment plus dots and dates possibly designating where somebody will be at certain times. The blocking in of little spaces here and there almost makes a picture so maybe the blocks are like picture elements in a TV screen. But who knows whether he used your key and obliged you and came and checked this place for you while, after a lecture-stop at a college, you were helping the phytoplankton people on the Cape? They’d had that strange breakthrough, but now after protesting that they were non-political they were having to fight off pacifist guerrillas who claimed the breakthrough research was tied to some of the more belligerent fundings of the space program — and what about the Chemical Bank’s investments, what about those?

The Ohio Oil I told Perpetua’s father’s broker to buy me in ’59 changed its title to Marathon in ’62 and eventually split, but its holdings are now sixty-five percent in Libya so I’ll get out. When I mentioned all this to Bob he said he and Leo were telling their Portland clients about Ohio as early as ’58. I think in interrupted scenes, Dom, but there is only one scene here. It is here. It is an arc quite out of time and real not at all like all those good and bad times and those bewildered distances that determine this arc. It is in a field-state, one might gaily say, which is not a proud parable of anything but is the fact of multiruptive bodies acting on each other though rarely in contact.

Though I say so, those vectors know how to slide into the one, albeit interrupted, sinew of my confession.

Since Ev and I were seeing each other long before her divorce, you can imagine what Ted let me feel when she and I observed her former husband’s suicide by marrying. You know I could line out the whole damn story: the final five years (for Ev) of nothing; Doug’s unclever recessions like “Don’t you wish I was an alcoholic, then you’d know I wouldn’t dare leave you,” and every aging day a supposition painfully shallowly imbedded in Ev that because he had to blame his job as a bond underwriter for his gathering indifference, he blamed her; so that she stopped saying what she knew was the true truth, that the job wasn’t dull at all but…, his new days of hooky in a sunny rental car, a widening (though not deepening) weight of implicit nights (an ancient history, another life, another sex life Ev would not go into, though I didn’t ask); then her efforts to fool them into touch again, starting a fight when he’d come and sit down with the New Yorker movie listings or a Consumer Report on swimming pool chemicals; puerile provocation in his announcement that Ted would go to public school next year for a change, Ted’s junior year when the grades count most — countered by Ev with mere explicit acquiescence plus then next day her humiliatingly detailed and ye gods helpful information about Stuyvesant, the best public high school nearby, maybe the best in the city except Bronx Science — but one spring day (for after all you can’t do this sort of thing on two or three days unless you want to torture yourself) he rented a Hertz and they found him on a back road near Croton Reservoir.