Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

But Dom, the triangle collapsed to a kind of eclipse-line. I asked Darla how big that room was and she couldn’t tell me. Is one of Ed’s pictures in the box of slides in your bookcase right there behind the screen? Ed got several shots of the crowd below.

You sent Richard your Suicide when the paperback came out, and his neutral thank-you would have made you mad if I’d let it through. Long ago Richard rose beyond “attractive nuisances,” Acts of God, and Mortality Expectancy Abscissae, to Quality-Probability curves. You learned that Richard had had a feeler from the Demographic Congress who were ready to make him a big research offer but he wasn’t interested. If I hadn’t this feeling that time’s been temporarily solved tonight (if indeed “tonight” is not the wrong idea) I’d phone dear Ev now and apologize for this egregious breach of my legendary punctuality. In 1575 Costanzo (or Constantio) Varoli died in Bologna at thirty-two years of age, during at least the last three of which he was physician to Pope Gregory of the Calendar (the latter christened Ugo Buoncampagni, a professor of law at Bologna before Varoli was born and as pope an ambitious administrator for a decade after Varoli died). It was Varoli who noted that the cerebral cavities communicate, and it’s only fair to say that if I’d never come across the properly memorial Pons Varolii, Varoli’s Bridge (that mass of nerves across the belly of the brain at the anterior end of the Spinal Bulb), I might never have located the Vectoral Muscle. No doubt one of the Field Pundits will answer the Televizier that yours was an instance of Anniversary Suicide. Listen, your life was so dense, every day was an anniversary. The dean’s secretary is back at her Dicta-Pol high over the Pacific, and those occupation folk are elsewhere, and so the site though easily restored is hard to understand.

Petty was at the bedroom door as Bob snapped his case shut. She came and knelt on the other side of the broad bed facing him across the case he’d insisted on packing himself. She asked if he’d put a new blade in his razor, she was afraid she’d dulled the one he’d had in, doing her legs in the tub last night. He said he’d buy a dispenser of five when he got to New York. She asked what he had said to Robby, Robby just stamped out of the house and slammed the door the way he never does, and it was starting to rain. Bob said he’d always said Robby didn’t know when to come in out of the rain and simultaneously as if by prearrangement Petty fell easily sideways off her knees onto her side on the bed much nearer Bob and Bob sat down, and the simultaneity produced an inertia that brought him right down to her face. She said, “But he went out in the rain; that’s not the same thing.” Her broad cheekbones and narrow nostrils should have excited him all over again, the faintly Indian strength opened for him but centered on a simple female secret he would have to ask for. (“Hey wait,” you perhaps say, Dom, after three TN’s too many, “what’re you recommending, man, nose-fucking?” but normally you would have caught my sense.) Bob reached to put his fingers on a space of her neck below her ear but his hand stopped short of there and didn’t touch her — or so he said in the bar that night over our second beer; and as he moved back to get up she got a hand on his hand before he moved it too, and she said she wished he’d let her pack for him for she was sure he’d forgotten something, and when he said there was hardly anything to put in it, it was practically empty, she said it was just as if he were packing that smelly old Austrian haversack they used to lug on one shoulder and he said he didn’t see why. And at the airport in South Portland he told her it had been just some silly thing about noise cones and it was his fault, not Robby’s. And Petty and Bob touched each other and paused. Petty said, “He’s not a sissy, is he?” And Bob said, “Oh Jesus not him!” and laughed and opened the car door and got out.

Dom, at Cora’s party last week where at last we really met, I might have been able amiably to say, “In case of disaster call me,” or soberly that I’d seen at once that your deliberately dry suicide book wasn’t trying to say something new but rather (and without humor) was a piece of the new measural experience. Or (before, having gazed past me, you walked around me as if I was a nobody and went to speak to the famous blind Negro actor) I was capable of saying and (as you may have recalled) did (succinctly) say, “I’m glad you reconsidered your space-program reservations and decided to take a close look at those guys.” You murmured, “Reserve me a first-class on the next one out, man,” and I heard Cora say, “Oh there he goes, I didn’t know if they were speaking, but I couldn’t not ask…” and a woman said very fast, “But Dom said the man was glad he’d waited till he went blind to do a black Oedipus; so maybe he’ll forget Dom’s new position on black militancy,” and Cora said, “But he’s always been blind, it isn’t just the last few years.” “But he isn’t in Dom’s league,” the woman said, and Cora said offhandedly, “There are twenty thousand leagues nowadays, sweetie.”

But at that opening and in the space of a mere handshake I couldn’t very well tell you how months before I’d taken an interest in you as locus of violence and contemplation, how I’d even found similarities between us, and how I’d come to link our secret kinship with my ancient habit of not introducing Al and Bob. After you were stabbed in the calf by the black decathlon star who reached out from under a table, you told a reporter that the host (a traveling homosexual who kept a studio at the Chelsea Hotel) thought New York offered nothing better than the chance to throw a party at which two big shots would be brought together in order to rub each other the wrong way. Anyway last week at the opening I could not have demonstrated the relevance to what I’m saying tonight of sneaky Hugh’s ill-advised challenge the Wednesday after Bob tested his boomerang off Brooklyn Bridge. It was May Day evening — I’ve checked it against the perpetual calendar in your almanac; the three of us were comparing our American History notes for a big exam; my notes were scantier even than Bob’s but my knowledge was greater even than Hugh’s, for I had a complex style of mnemonic encapsulations developed two years before when I was Dr. Cadbury’s student. The key trick was to make a name contain a mass of data: thus, “Hammurapi” yielded “Babylonian Plain,” from the alternative p and b spellings of that prudent king’s name; it yielded “house” (from H), and hence building regulations and generally the famous Code of Laws which I ought to have mentioned before now; also (from a) “Amorites,” whose Semitic tongue the Code was written in; m for Marduk; r for “religion” and Ishtar, i.e., my Asian Venus and the prime goddess of Babylon… Forgive me, this is of interest only to my father, who loved me, and to Tracy’s brother Hugh, who did not. He’d been expatiating on my father’s recollection about the stolen typewriter: namely, that Bohack Joey’s delivery rig had been parked at the curb when my father went across the street to help the lady out of the cab but was not there when he returned to our apartment entrance and found my Corona gone. Hugh said I owed it to my father to do something about it, he was probably too nice a guy to. Ignoring Hugh and returning to history, I said today was not only May Day but Loyalty Day. We were in Bob’s room, and Hugh had taken the boomerang off the wall. He said, Like hell it was Loyalty Day, there wasn’t any such thing; and I said, Like hell it wasn’t, and while Bob took the boomerang off the bed and idly looked at it and hung it up again, Hugh and I argued some more about Loyalty Day and I finally shrugged and said, “Act of Congress,” gave the date of passage, picked up my book, and casually asked Bob if he thought our Intramural division at Poly between Blues and Grays was because of the Civil War. I went to the kitchen to make us a vanilla malted, and my mother, who had the entire contents of the refrigerator out on the table, said she would make it.