Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

But did Ev find out about my nasty run-in with the doomed Doug from Doug himself? He hired his suicide car the next morning; did he phone her to tell her what I said to him? She brings together unlikely people, but would she phone Al out of the blue to open a discussion of the incident? Must I ask Al?

I must ask Al out of the blue. Ev won’t have asked Al and Bob over from the motel, for if they’ve phoned she’ll have wished to cover my absence and has probably told them she thought I’d go there as soon as I was done at the foundation, where I was let’s say working late.

“Gossip,” says my step-grandfather John from his grave which in the cinereal air is somehow just as far from my clean but no longer weightless parabola as other curiously important lines whose course or point may have made me what I am but whom tonight I haven’t time to evoke.

There was no need to delineate for you your own living room: if I’d succeeded in bringing you here, you could see for yourself; if I’d failed to make you materialize, then what would be the point? Nor is it possible to measure this night in the old way. Yet if, then, I’ve made a paraphase here, maybe your room (including that blatant space on the east wall where the super says Dot removed a long narrow blank gray canvas) constitutes a para-site.

“You just do your work, boy,” says old fisherman John, “you’ll get ahead.”

And all interruptions and rates of time and spaces of lapse collapse into even script, though now more cramped because you’ve so little paper left.

I confess I don’t embrace all interruptions. I embrace Emma, but her silky cheek and the crumb of apple in the center hollow of her chin are hard to conceive of as interruption. And because she walks so slowly, we often miss lights and stand curb-bound staring through the cabs that fly by and seeing something very special across the intersection that we might have missed and the impatience in my tight forehead and the sockets of my eyes dissolves in the sights we see like tourists to these ruins of a city. Say it’s afternoon around our TV, it’s last summer and we’re about to go away, and with Emma on my lap I nostalgically watch the Moon’s pale world recede in the frame of the spacecraft’s window through which the NASA lens witnesses the recession. But where am I? Emma squirms to get off me, and succeeds. At once our TV set experiences mechanical difficulty: the interruption isn’t this channel’s fault, I switch in vain to others.

One day I’ll put a raft of these intersectional interruptions together as if they were one life and all the rest were interruption. I’ll type it up and put it in Emma’s safe-deposit box downtown right on top of her deed to a hundred acres of northern Canada that cost me a hundred dollars through an agency in Winnipeg by which I bypass the trickier, New-York-approved people. I’ve shown Ted his deed, but he’s too busy bucking rid of dialectic to care, his psychiatrist asked if Ted had a picture of me but Ted said No of course not, and the shrink said Why do you say “of course”?

But now I remember: the ribbon-spools on my Junior Corona wouldn’t reverse, and if I did it by hand they still wouldn’t feed to the right. And one night doing a paper for English I just picked up my Corona and chucked it back over my head, but from the living room my father heard only my oath, for the infuriating machine landed on my pillow. I retrieved it when I heard his steps and when he came in without knocking asking me what the devil I thought I meant using language like that he found me holding the old thing in my arms. Subtly I ignored his rebuke and asked in piteous exasperation if he could fix the spool-reverse, the ribbon would stop moving and I’d chew a hole in it before I realized it had stopped. My father said he didn’t trust our neighborhood shop on Montague Street, but when he went to Manhattan in the morning he’d take it to the place around Wall that his firm used.

But my mother stayed in bed the next morning and I heard them talking behind the closed bedroom door for what at that hour of the beginning day seemed a long time. I left my Wheaties bowl with a trace of sweet milk in the bottom of it in the sink and looked in on them to say goodbye and left; but my father when he went off to Wall Street forgot my typewriter. And next day he was so concerned about my typing my English paper and one I was even surer of entitled “The Filibuster: Freedom or Tyranny?” that even though it was Saturday he took my Corona over to Wall Street. Ever been in Wall Street on a weekend morning? I took the subway out to school to play tennis.

Wait. Wait.

The only way to be sure if Ted knows of my brush with Doug his father the night before that post-marital suicide is to tell him. I should have tonight, or what was tonight. Instead tonight I let him bow to me and look with Ev’s blue eyes rather than his father’s gray coolly through my forehead like a laser targeting ten feet behind me. And I should have countered his terrible terrible statement with an opener honesty that unlike his wouldn’t mean to stop talk but to recomplete the circuit even if that did mean going round and round. So when Ted then slipped out the front door I called to Ev combing her hair in the bathroom that I wanted some andirons in the basement, and as the door fell to behind me and I was in the hall looking at the near elevator and at Ted (who now made the physical mistake of turning back and gazing into me as if daring me to dare to leave the apartment), I heard dimly Ev’s puzzled but tolerant “Andirons?” and hardly had time to wonder how Ted’s terrible statement struck her or be glad she hadn’t stepped out of the bathroom with her hair half-unpinned to intervene, for at the elevator door now Ted couldn’t hold his gaze. Should I have given him a break and looked down? On the dark marble floor lay unrinsed swipes of an unrinsed mop, swift gray arcs and loops. With a prissy left-flank- Harch turn Ted made for the door to the stairs.

But Dom: Ted and I often do get along. Maybe I failed to interest him in the parabola principle — ye gods maybe to demonstrate conic section I should have drawn a few living cones like Gail’s early breasts mole for mole, or the quarry pool which fear and desire told my cold-pressed diving eyes would spiral to a deep central point and thus prove even more conical than those truncated markers the bright ominous monuments to the man her father. Even at a gap of three or four or five miles that day of the dive he was making his force felt in the buoyant water even if accelerating up some secondary blacktop in his pickup, he was unaware that he was with us and unaware of the kiss and unaware of Al in his jeans exploding into the water to come to somebody’s aid.

But if I failed with the parabola, I did one night succeed with Ted when I told about my half-mislaid accumulation of silly tales about Interfear perhaps part-inspired by that birthday gift in ’38. Ted almost liked them, those I could recall.

Interfear! My God, I didn’t expect to be here, Dom; yet the only child’s room in Brooklyn Heights where in September ’40 I (a natural speller learning to touch-type) keyed a word so it came up “interfear” was as real a scene of the difference between Al and Bob as this living room of yours was, Dom, hours ago when in some other state I got in here fresh from Ted’s rebuke: he said if he and I were going to quit kidding ourselves we’d see that to him I’d always smell a little like a betrayer however much I did the father bit.

Being a natural speller I couldn’t stand to leave the error right there in front of me in the machine. But having X’d out “interfear,” I got thinking what it meant.

Well, until I was fifteen or sixteen I wrote Interfear Mysteries. And I was ahead of my time.