Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

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An uninvited guest, entering the empty New York apartment of a man known to intimates as “Dom,” proceeds to write for his absent host a curious confession. Its close accounts of friendship since boyhood with two men surely unknown to Dom and certainly to each other is interleaved with the story of Dom himself.

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What a vast apartment it was! My father was in the back bedroom writing the Market Letter for tomorrow, the weekly long view of what stocks looked good, that his secretary typed first thing Monday; so I couldn’t ask then about exactly where in Herodotus, and then I forgot until just as I was dashing out to catch the subway to school the next morning.

He was dusting himself all over with talcum and he laughed and said, “Well, like Cyrus you were a dream first but then you turned out all right. Your grandfather”—he meant my mother’s stepfather—“said you wouldn’t thank us for that name. Why not read the first book of Herodotus, and pick out what you want. But you read it; I’m not going to tell it to you. And don’t miss the end.” He seemed kind of gray and not so frank and open as usual. Maybe I should just evoke the odor of Amolin talcum.

Let me jump time here as naturally as if I were riding your borrowed ink, from the point that ends my preceding sentence to the lines that begin this one, and loop onto that much earlier Sunday some intent lines Bob was busy shading in when two years later I was on the point of turning to something else from the concluding page of my chem assignment—“Ta: atomic no. 73, atomic weight 180.88.” It was Akkie Backus’s study hall and Bob had his physics book on the desk closed. He finished and passed me the paper. “Know what that is?”

Evidently iron filings, and haired in a neat vertical oval. “Where’s the bar magnet,” I said, “hidden underneath?”

Bob grabbed it back grinning and said, “Not what but whose?” Animal and whiskery, say a squirrel’s alert but unsuspecting bottom. Kind of a bad joke I thought, but on the other hand to the eye gentle and simple and rather purely animal. Not like some tinkling Turk that long-haired Romeo might sniff (not Tracy and perhaps not Perpetua — I took it all very seriously — and not Gail because Bob had never met her and anyway her hair was too light), but more like a private angle of some inadvertent Heatsburg woodchuck. (Salacious junk! Hugh Blood may think today from his space-selling desk but he was trying to see Bob’s sketch too but couldn’t from his aisle. Akkie was watching all of us.)

Maybe I didn’t mean to confess a thing tonight, merely meant to occupy this space. And all I’ve done is keep it up. Talking. Or writing. My face isn’t like yours; I found only mine in the mirror hypotenused across from your terra-pintorial photo-phiz. But I go on and falling into myself here I’ve come to necessary next words I had not foreseen. For you I didn’t need literally to set the stage, outline this room, scale in (and color) this cherry table Dot’s great-grandfather made with his own fingers that’s now warped across the glimmering leaf I’m leaning my forearms on. It’s the same room we all saw in Newsweep’s three-hundred-sixty-degree pan.

(I hear the elevator hall, but not exactly feet.)

Yet there’s a difference in this room now, isn’t there? Something out of place or phase. Something to do with those two presences in that nearby motor hotel.

“Our ancestors weren’t immigrants,” dreary unbelievable Hugh Blood said to Joey and his two pals the day of the big fight and Bob’s white-knuckled fist. And I find shifting away from me bizarre connections not only with your suicide but with your eyes, your fame, your aim, which was to be our fool but a prince, to be in yourself a dangerous and rich walking switchport, an America. “Oh come on, what was he doing around the county courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi,” said Darla at the TWA baggage scales the morning after your defenestration, “did he plan to find our kidnapped kids? He just wanted to have a little brawl downtown with some unarmed redneck and get his face on Time.” Witty, for Darla. But Dom, I’m not calling in your credentials. You’re a hero. A real American one, messy though late-model. O.K., that California ninth-floor is part of my head which you said you’d change and did. But the banal peculiarity linking these New York eighth and tenth is what elevates this confession beyond gossip. I paused for some time between “elevates” and “this.” My inflamed parabola may need what Bob’s dad takes for his sleepless shoulders, injections of gold. I played the field that night in ’53 at their house—

oh shit (your immortal voice says from the coroner’s coolish table), come on up to ’69—

played the field, though only till eleven; concentrated on making Bob’s parents’ Welcome Home party go, even without its reason showing. But a lapse occurred which I’ve since come to call Vectoral Dystrophy.

Wait: Tracy was there, talking to a couple of her old Packer classmates and remaining distinctly moist at the outboard angles of her eyes, and doing absolutely nothing with her free hand in that complete yet vulnerable way of which I have no doubt already taken slow measure in those pages lifted by the Hungarian how long ago I can’t any longer tell, and she had on low-heeled pumps that as I let myself stare through a momentary clearing of hips and legs she began toe-against-heel to take off.

Twenty-odd more were there. I believe I covered the gap. It was not filled by Bob’s small, suddenly round-shouldered mother saying to the Smith twins’ father, “I am sorry , Bart, Bob ran into schedule problems — you’ll just have to catch them at Christmas.” I was quite as successful as that evening in Maine in ’59 when Bob sat there with a concussion but didn’t know it. Petty was glad I ran on and on to Leo and his wife Irish about God knows what — Bob’s monthly window-leap at Poly, the cafeteria hash, Bob’s cross-stick boomerang fired up off the Brooklyn Bridge that came back, and what all, even some mad quizzing about hors d’oeuvres that scared Irish for a second after she admitted that she always had a bowl of chick peas for Happy Hour. Bob sank slowly. Then he was asleep.

But in ’53, there I was in the basement whipping up a dip for Bob’s mother and in answer to her distracted inquiry, telling her how my mother was getting along, which seemed almost to take the lady’s mind off her own catastrophe. Then upstairs sometime Russell Pound — who to my knowledge said not a word about Perpetua all evening — was telling a pair of my nodding Poly classmates that the point about McCarthy was he was a vulgarian, and Ven Mead drew his fiancée whom nobody seemed to have met into Pappy’s group and said very strongly that McCarthy’s vulgarity wasn’t the point, it was our basic liberties that were being jeopardized, and Pappy replied, “I said vulgarian , Venable, vulgarian,” but I dissolved that little problem turning from another group to this saying that as for my mother she seemed upset by some of McCarthy’s young staff, she thought maybe they were the sinister ones, and Russell Pound (who always approved of me and had just clapped into his mouth half a handful of sunflower seeds) nodded vigorously and said, “Know zakly wushee means.” At another point in the party’s arc a bunch of them got a report from me of a Weavers concert (though not, for Tracy’s sake, that I’d gone with black Camille), and not one of them knew who Seeger was. Once Hugh and I turned simultaneously toward each other by accident and he said, “I want you to meet my Uncle Victor, he’s here from Phoenix, that’s him,” unthinkably tall up against the far wall, white-haired and brown-cheeked—“originally from New England” he was saying to a girl he was sort of hunched over. Trace had never told me about him; I said to Hugh, “Yes, I can see him.” Trace was telling Ven Mead’s fiancée that Petty had written her that the Parisians never ask you to their homes for a meal, but take you out.

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