Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

For some minutes now, Dom, I have not been writing. Was the claim-check from the typewriter shop in with the pages the Hungarian took?

Whether or not you are dead doesn’t matter, though you are. It would be outside this apartment anyway. Your pen and your paper make my apparent hand in your suicide easier to bear. Again I haven’t put pen to paper for some minutes. What kind of time was that? I waited for The Heatsburg Hour all week long and then it was all finished in no time.

I shouldn’t have taken your letters perhaps. Maybe so far from ensuring the continuity of your resolve, I interrupted it by increasing your parental isolation, that most assaulting sadness of all, yes maybe more contagious than the masochistic patriotism you told past-President Dave Dickens’s Inner Group you sought to embody.

Sometimes she’d murmur in the middle of something wonderful, “I’m so awkward,” letting the magnetic tip of my elbow move her weightless wrist or my cheek her long leg, yet thinking that she hadn’t been prompt (or something) enough when ye gods she was the kind of prompt that makes love into one waiting mass of near-time. It’s Tracy, I hope you’ve already guessed from what I hope I said somewhere in those pages removed by your weighty (though, from my angle then, spaceless) son-in-law — her whole body every place equal so if I knew in the dark or eyes closed where her head was and where her hair and the live rimlet tucked in the softest pout nearly hiding the navel, they were in no rank of reward or time — well Dom maybe that’s slavish but — they were just all always equally there. She murmured “awkward” because she liked to inject that titillating lie — she wasn’t the tiniest touch awkward but I never said so to her in words, for bare as I was, that word “awkward” coming through her lips uncovered me all over again as if now she’d grown a third hand, and teeth as kind as reeds. Tall she was, oh yes; but her vulnerable neck was hardly in the same league as that of Parmigianino’s Madonna; and in general her proportions and gentle mobility could not have reminded anyone of a giraffe, not even someone who like me lay newly awake at four a.m. visualizing her beside a pale Nubian giraffe (or cameleopard I called it on a history quiz) from all sides and in all attitudes, knowing that her father could never have had in mind that persecuted ruminant’s rare, remote beauty that the Romans unerringly exploited in their degenerate amphitheaters.

I’m going on to the end of this, Dom, even burdened by the chance that I may have killed you, who now become my ideal listener alive in the space of your things here. Why do Bob and Al want to bring me together?

Ev told me how toward the end she said to Doug her first husband that he should expect less of himself, a little less honor and mind and honesty; have more fun, be less sensitive and — oh she cried for a while; but it wasn’t because I was touching her that she was able to say as I was just dropping off, “No, you know I honestly did not drive him to do it.”

Dom, I tried to know Doug.

She said that too, said it often: “I tried to know him, you know. I didn’t let him push me into some fixed household policy of (say) never again mentioning something, oh like having another baby or moving to Phoenix or California (which was one of his ideas once and then he said no it wasn’t ever again to be mentioned) or changing his job, taking a real estate course up in Westchester and selling New-York-State-approved lots in Bahama Sound. I mean I didn’t go out of my way to bring up what upset him, but I just kept myself from becoming a nurse to his — oh his dreary wet mind (but it didn’t used to be!) — like resolving to not do some little thing and keeping to your resolve, never letting it get interfered with, interrupted, like you were saying your friend Bob wouldn’t speak to Hugh Blood after the big vestibule fight, just sat pat”

Next to him in Problems of Democracy and French, was often in the same car of the Fourth Avenue Local going out in the morning (though Bob and I often drove home with the lacrosse coach) and Bob brought a poem he wrote into the Polygon office where Hugh was managing either and Bob still wouldn’t speak to Hugh — that’s the kind of methodical madness you must never let yourself be a party to inflicting.

“on himself, though you can say I was unyielding. But I did give in often. I sat eating soufflé and a lovely wheaty Arab salad one supper all alone with him and I saw that, gobbling up the tabboule salad which he used to like very much, he wanted to be miserable, so I went against my impulse and didn’t interrupt his mood and the sound of his munching. But I stayed human, Cy, don’t you see? And say I had that polyp in me that I didn’t exactly want to go to Mount Sinai to have excised — even if Dr. Sailor is quite a blade — and I was fucked if I wouldn’t bellyache to Doug about it, I was not going to treat him like an invalid on a special diet. Say I wonder if gynecologists aren’t always pretty dashing. Oh yes I asked Doug that. I was trying to make conversation one night he couldn’t sleep, and he said what did I mean by ‘dashing,’ a cunt-lover?” As if Ev’s words were some heretofore unknown tropical or para-tropical vocabulary, they must be honored.

Ev was in bed when she said all that to me verbatim. I said Doug was right about gynecologists, but in the wrong spirit. And after a moment, when I thought she’d dropped off, she giggled. I think at me.

And So Dom this is the last time I try to tell about Al and Bob — distinguish, so to speak, between them, as if by spelling out what keeping them apart meant, I clear up… only perhaps a hypertrophied membrane: I must become less precious, and Ted must become as precious to me as my only child Emma, as precious as my only child’s body, whose “Ong Zeus” moves to “Ange-ooce” and toward the reality of orange juice that comes in a Tropicana carton. Ev pays attention, she’s one person who pays attention. Is this because what I tell her about, say, Hugh Blood or “Pappy” Russell Pound or Joey Neurohr and learning how to reach in and flip the lock of the Vande Land’s areaway door, does for her what Bob once said my words could do for him, show up as if before an electric field old images sleeping on the inside of his head: a room filling with salt water, a church filling up with winter boats: No. To Ev, Hugh is simply what I’ve told her he is, she’s never met him. I’ll add, Dom, that because the touch of Tracy Blood doesn’t find another locus — even if I know that at the open end of tonight’s confession that lonely loop is to be smudged (like ironic filings lured by an unforeseen polynomial lode from one pattern to another) — I haven’t told Ev about Trace.

What did Al not tell me about Tracy? She made a pass at him that bad weekend in early ’53, as I learned from her not him. That poem Bob submitted in ’46 when Hugh was in the Polygon room was all about a girl’s body found to be like a sort of composite vacation land, and we all thought it was fantastically great though I wondered if he’d really done it himself. Even Dr. Cadbury (the reluctant adviser to the paper) was impressed and took it to his room to read it again, but then, though he said he’d be interested to know who the girl was, he had to veto Hugh, who’d of course instantly accepted it when Bob brought it in because he wanted to get back in good with Bob. I never asked Bob if, in those iambuoys of his, “peaked mounts” and “rolling braes,” that “long dividing ravine,” “moist bois,” and “ancient strait” added up to Petty or one of those two Catholic girls on Pineapple Street whose mothers worked, or (for the words made me think of her) my own Tracy.