Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

Dom, to no one could I deny that I did not bring about your suicide. I didn’t do it. Bob’s conscience is simpler than mine but he too would disown any theory of suicidal influence. He’d say, You do it or you don’t, nobody commits anyone else’s suicide. Which may have been Bob’s refuge from resenting his father’s influence.

Your typewriter repair receipt is in those pages your son-in-law appropriated, so at least one of his questions will get an answer.

When we got to her apartment, Bob was surprised when I said I had to go. But surprise was checked by pleasure; and any thanks for my politeness was frustrated by his sneaking knowledge of me. He must not have thought I was heading home to Ev and to what after my words of explanation I could almost smell — the penetrating spread of expensive oil-base paint our landlord had refused to buy or apply since ours was an irregular takeover sublet prior to statutory tenanthood next year. Bob simply said, “You’ll come back, eh?”

He and the archaeologist were discussing Robby when I came back two hours later. They were sitting across the long room from each other. She was pinching the last inch of a joint. Bob had a cup and saucer. She dropped ash on her wifely bathrobe of pink quilt. You understand, Dom, I’m following simply a direct if not straight line to a point; hence nothing about her age, her lack of brothers and sisters, her friendship with Kit Carbon, her uncle’s stake in New Mexico natural gas, the equidistance from her of her father’s money and her summer dig in Turkey with two equidistant girl-friends of Cora’s and so on. Bob had his gold spectacles off and his shoes off.

“Why did I say I’d come back,” I said. They chuckled. She said, “Why did you leave?” and I said, “Did I interrupt anything?” and she said, “By leaving?” and Bob laughed again and padded out of the room and then guffawed as if at an afterthought. He continued from there what they’d been on when I arrived. “Robby knows he’s kidding himself. He’s not temperamental any more than I am. He’s just lazy. Told me he didn’t have any homework.” Bob appeared in the doorway telling the story as if it were a joke. “Petty tried to cover for him, I gave him something to remember by Jesus.”

A stranger might not have identified in the picture near Bob that famous stone relief of Assurbanipal just back from Nineveh having a bite with his sweet queen in a bower complete with flowers, fruit, birds, but pendant from a curling bough also the upside-down (hence seemingly bearded) head of the severed king Teuman of Elam often erroneously thought to be a forebear of that greatest Persian a century and a half later who (I once hazarded on a Poly exam) if he owed nothing to the postal system instituted by Assurbanipal’s grandfather may yet have traced a dream or two of sway and perpetuity in the track of the Assyrian tiger and its river of blood.

My archaeologist friend said to Bob, “Glad you’re not my father, love.”

As Bob and I left, she told me Cora was having an Accident on somebody’s roof tomorrow night—“I think it’s going to be just a lot of cotton waste to wade in”—and could Ev and I come, she’d forgotten all about us; but I said it was impossible, and was about to say the apartment was still a mess when she said the paint smell must have gone by now and to me she added, “Ev said Cora got you that apartment. Lucky, from what I hear.”

In the cab uptown to the Biltmore Bob said that that woman knew things her mother never learned, and he laughed but broke off sharply. “She’s quite a remarkable woman,” he said. Just tired.

I said, “And remarkably interesting to compound,” and Bob said quietly, “Yes, without a doubt. I should imagine so.”

We hardly saw the westbound cab that, jumping its light as we raced ours, nearly hit us broadside. It would have been right by Bob’s straightened-out leg, but it was like some vector irrelevantly intruding from another problem.

“Whatever happened to your black poontang? When I asked at The Whaler, you never said.”

“She married a strawberry-blond leprechaun. They teach dance at a settlement downtown.”

“ We’re into that problem in a way. I mean in Maine. Some are all for getting black students up from Boston, New York—”

“From the south,” I said.

“—but it’s treating them like things. Friend of mine in the Maine House wants the new program strictly Indian; they’re in bad shape.”

Bob didn’t ask where I’d spent two and a half hours. He didn’t say why he’d really come down this weekend, why he’d left his mainland house and family, and his windy bay, and the island beach he’d take a run out to in the glaring raw solitude of winter to check the camp and think. He’d have had to have reasons for coming down this weekend, wouldn’t he? But possibles smoothed out to an equality or a hopeless field beyond mere alternatives. He didn’t seem to recall that he himself had tipped me Ohio Oil. But as an empty cab bounced past us up the avenue doing fifty, Bob and I seemed to meet in a space devoid of intention — New York not Nineveh, Bob not Nahum, and I not now bugged to be occupying a profound center whose emptiness was at many cubic distances all around it charged with centrifugal and gravitational trivia really fundamental not trivial.

I begin to be the measure of this living room of yours, Dom.

At the Biltmore Bob stopped in the middle of his signature and he and the desk clerk and I stared at the poised ballpoint and Bob said he’d checked his bag at the East Side Air Terminal and we had a laugh at that. History teaches nothing, or so our agnostic Dr. Cadbury at Poly used to say, lowering his rumpled bulk into his chair and gazing up with skeptical apprehensiveness at the board where he had wonderfully reduced, say, the Egyptians and the Assyrians to two somewhat slanted columns of opposites — like, Nile, Tigris-Euphrates; Union of Two Egypts, Conquest of Neighbors; Bull-headed God, Human-headed Bull; Landscape of Bilateral Symmetry, Landscape of Rugged Variety and Hazard. My father demurred, but said there was certainly at least one pattern, history was a sequence of moral illuminations so long as you had Jesus Christ. Yet my father’s pleasure in sheer fact, like his pleasure in the fact of myth, belied this simplicity. When Bob and I got back from 38th Street with his bag we had a drink in the Biltmore bar, and I have again failed to interrupt myself at an appropriate point to pass ahead to the next rim of my paraphase from early 1969 on to the fight at the Moon in ’53, thence to Al’s painful part in the student interruption in ’68 and then, in a race against sequence, to the truth about the Heatsburg Puzzles and where Al’s sneaker landed, much less Bob’s white-knuckled first, Joey’s guilt, and finally, through this mere pen of yours in words which will open new words, the secret structures I have been working on for months now which may make the continuing scene of my early life plain without doing violence to that vectoral muscle I trust I discussed in those pages that have now been taken from me just as the bartender put down two bottles of Bud.

“Funny, you should have talked like that all of a sudden in the churchyard; I mean about this Al.” But Bob was vague. “Ever been to Austria? Asshole question, course you have. Do you know what she asked me tonight? what Robby really thinks of me. And when I said he thinks I’m a hard man, she said wait till he’s eighteen. By the way, she misses the whole point of the Dead Sea Scrolls; hasn’t even looked at Wilson.”

“She tell you about her work?”

“Petty should listen to her.”

“Petty has her points.”

“Petty simplifies. Child-breeding, it’s all some kind of drug, driving a cab, anthropolony, shoveling shards, do-it-yourself house pride. Remember when Freddy Smith cracked up and left Amherst — Stingy Bill said it was because Freddy’d refused to go to Williams with him — and Freddy just drove a cab for six months, fourteen hours a day, made good money, there’s nothing wrong with that except it’s an asshole thing to do for someone like Freddy, but I don’t know that I wouldn’t like six months of it right now. Bill Senior told my mother Freddy was driving a cab so he could get material for writing, but Freddy told me that was insane. And I guess he proved it. Old Man Smith was a Williams trustee.”