Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

Now someone slapped my rear fender and The Cannibals broke for a smoke; I told Al he was wrong about that March morning, maybe I was bleached and dumb, but not jealous; in fact Tracy knew I’d just about had it with her, there were only one or two more times.

The boy snickered in the back seat and Al said, “Yeah, maybe so, but as much of her phone call as I remember, she said you were jealous.”

But Al had to admit she’d been pretty curious about where I was, I’d left the party a good hour and a half before she phoned.

In the space of that one accidental phone conversation with Al, it seemed Tracy had tied me up in my own words and given me away; been fond to Al so he woke up enough to worry that my mother might not be home yet and might walk in and see him in his skivvies; and given Al an acceptable reason for my not bringing him along to the party he thought was at the Vande Lands’. Most puzzling of all was that the next morning Al had not merely not reported the phone call from Tracy, he hadn’t denied what she told him she’d told me, namely that when she’d gone up to make the beds, there deep in the drear but refreshening country of March, Al had slapped one or two on her. Dom, you recently professed little interest in space. But what about this parking area by the river landing? what about my rented Galaxie with two beautiful strangers in back? what about what happened to your living room tonight?

Bill Smith had told Freddy that night that I had a Coast Guardsman staying with me who’d been busted back to Third; well, Freddy went across the room and used it to try to amuse Tracy, who always tried to discourage his attentions without being unkind. Anyway Trace guessed it was Al and when she phoned me an hour and a half after I’d left the party and she got Al instead, she said to him he should have come, and he said he thought it was all older people but as far as I could tell hadn’t recalled the name Vande Land, and since Tracy was phoning him within earshot of Bob’s mother (who was no doubt hoping everybody would go home) Tracy didn’t tell about the Welcome Home fiasco and thus apparently didn’t name Bob’s parents. But your room interrupts me, Dom. I’ve left something out of it.

“She said if I’d been busted to Third I should have come to the party, she’d have cheered me up. Anyway I said sorry I didn’t know where you were if you weren’t at the party.”

The boy in the back seat, who must have picked up a lot of Cannibal music for background to our talk, said, “What are you guys doing down here at the landing?” and the girl laughed admiringly. I think the tape recorders were off.

“Annette’s mad because I took out a fifty-thousand whole life policy.”

The boy said, “That won’t keep you from dying,” and Al said, “Caesar Bemis used to say death pays all debts. ’Course he was talking about his own death; but debts other people owed him.”

“Insurance is sick,” the girl said.

“It’s expensive,” said Al.

“It’s sick,” said the boy. “It’s sad,” said the girl.

Al said, “If it comes from the student it’s the uncomfortable truth, if it comes from the teacher it’s an up-tight put-down.”

But it wasn’t just Annette and the student Greatorex bugging him, it was in some way me. I’ve always forgotten, Dom, that I can’t just give myself to a place and fit in — not Bob’s parents’ living room, not that joint the Moon on Commercial Street in Portland, not (I guess) even my very own rented Ford, any more than our west elevator where your visiting Hungarian son-in-law looked at me with the alertness of a prospective employer one night a week after Santa Barbara, any more than the ninth-floor window out of which you slipped more definitely than the freedom placard.

Now, with more of that battery-powered purr behind us, Al was saying Annette had bought liver for tonight because she knew I liked it even though she didn’t like cooking it, and there’d be plenty because they’d thought Ev was coming with me. And by the way, had I told Tracy why he’d been busted?

“Of course not, I mentioned it to Bill; I didn’t say a thing to Tracy all night.”

Beyond the bonfire and the Cannibals’ camper a Volkswagen was being fought over, inside and out. Pulled away out of the front seat by his hair, one student suddenly towered over the car; someone was trying to defend the brake against someone else who wanted to let it off, and others were trying to push the VW into the river. The Cannibals’ Camper was between the VW and the prowl car, so the cops didn’t see what was going on, or in.

Our passengers said they’d had it, yeah they’d had it with us, what they’d got on tape was just gossip. Al jerked around and stared, then shrugged back forward and told them to run something else over it then.

They were getting out, and Al said, “Live now,” but seriously. But the boy paused and said, “I’m sick of hearing older people say don’t waste these years — my swinging parents are always saying it, it makes me feel I’m already looking back too. Well why not waste them? I don’t know what to do with them and neither do most of my generation. I mean, you blew it and I guess we’re going to too if there’s anything to blow.”

“Hey record this,” said Al; “wait.” The boy was out; I felt without looking around that the girl had a foot out but her behind on the seat. “‘If you shall see Cordelia, — / As fear not but you shall — show her this ring,/ And she will tell you who that fellow is/ That yet you do not know.’ That’s Kent, the best part in a muddy play.”

“I wouldn’t know,” the girl said, “but I think you two are going to have a fight tonight and I wouldn’t mind taping that.”

When they went away and I turned the ignition key right (noting that Al had left it on battery), Al said, “We’re not old”; and I remembered another reason I’d left the Welcome Home fiasco at eleven; the “extra man” at the Vande Land’s, the Dutchman, had been billed as a Resistance hero.

Annette had the bacon in as soon as we arrived. There was no Greatorex, and the children were in bed. With Annette off in the kitchen, we didn’t speak for some moments, which there’s no point in confessing because it hardly shortens the line to Bob’s white-knuckled fist or my stolen Corona. And you know if I chose I could show wholly the pine sinks and water benches and the half-hidden pins hanging the lower doors of the high jelly cupboard Annette has her blue china and silver and pewter in in the narrow brown and gold dining room. Or if I chose I could show in part the distance, say, from Al’s 1750 Windsor topped by a fine spindle-comb he’s proud of with at either end of it carved ears he’s even prouder of:

to (upstairs, and dated from the very early Federal Period) a field bed —fair game for coarse jests when Al identifies it for a younger colleague, but the six-foot maple posts a source of joy for a colleague’s wife given the tour by Annette:

to (downstairs) the new eye-level oven , and on the adjacent counter an oval plate of very promising liver whose dry sepia, now free of edge skin and pale cartilage and dusted with flour, has had five seconds’ bath of boiling water poured on it to seal in the blood.

“Where there is a key absence at a homogeneously Brooklyn Heights evening, this gap will be centrifugally ignored with such unbroken élan it will cease to exist.” Now, like any distinction you wish to make between hors d’oeuvres lumpy and mealy and/or sticky, I had foreseen Al’s absence but not clearly Bob and Petty’s; yet at that electro-static party in ’53 my social senses had been so stimulated by the latter absence that I’d let myself in conversation touch gratuitously upon the former.