Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

I wish I could be Forgetorix the First, and leave behind me a mass of Past as merciful as Gail’s plaid case that Al started to take but I said we’d pick up later.

I turned back into my apartment after Ted snubbed me tonight, and with her hands out toward me Ev came from the bathroom but came and spoke hastily because we had people arriving, and said, “It’s inevitable, you know that,” and she smiled at my sad stupor and said, “Well he doesn’t know about all you said to Doug, and he never shall, because he couldn’t understand.” And I kept from asking how the hell she knew but then saw of course it’d been my friend Al.

Abra was juggling her ball and talking to two women with grocery bags, who must have been on the far sidewalk. The Italian was crying in the areaway where he’d wrecked his shoulder lighting on the raised handle of a garbage lid.

Which as I reached into the vestibule was so far from the issue I’m surprised it comes back.

As I reached for Joey, who was on his knees with his back to me, he dodged Bob’s ladle uppercut whose follow-through sliced my check and shook me sideways into the one of the two inner doors that didn’t open, and there was Petty inside the house on the other side of the door that was ajar having got it open and slipped through to the hall, and she was pulling hard against the door-closer’s piston-resistance, as Bob grabbed that door as Petty gave it the final pull and it shut on his fingers. Joey was a mess but so was Bob, as I hope I described in those pages Richard’s brother-in-law whom he doesn’t like took away. A pair of good chinos were slit and there was dark soaking one khaki leg.

Joey staggered up between me and Bob, Bob groaned trying to get his white-knuckled fist out of the door that Petty thought she was pulling against Joey, who turning around toward me saw his switch-blade at my feet and with a glance of authentic apology as if for bad manners bent his bloody head and reached, and Bob kicked him in the ass and I swung and I just missed Joey’s mouth but hooked his septum and as I recall his nostrils broke out and up and between Bob and me we lifted him right off that marble floor. And then all he could think of, all Joey could think of, to say was, “I din’t take your typewriter.” But Bob, who was panting so hysterically fast he retched for a second, dropped to his knees and as if continuing a quite other conversation said to me with a breathless half-belch, “So why’n hell’d you let her believe that crap about the boomerang?”

And at last now after more than twenty years I recall not only my consequent feeling but my words . On cue I said, “Why the hell didn’t I throw that pitch right over A.B.’s head? Why didn’t I stop you from doing that stupid window-stunt? Why didn’t I keep my boomerang?” Well, I didn’t have to underline my point, if you can underline a point. And Joey crawled out of the vestibule past Hugh, crying, “I didn’t touch any fuckin’ typewriter.” I thought I vectored hatred on Bob’s cracked face. Petty opened the front door again and said, “Do you know there’s no one home — my God Bobby! — and they left the door unlocked. Your head!” And then Bob got hold of her and I went down the stoop to see about Wit and I saw the daffodil yellow dress in the areaway, Tracy looking at the Italian’s shoulder but now at me in needy bewilderment.

Petty’s police never came. But did she phone?

“Simple,” my step-grandfather would have said if he’d learned of the fight and my feelings about it: “You lost your tempers.”

But how much did Ev hear about the tongue-lashing I gave Doug? — who you may recall was Ev’s first husband.

Well there’s no point in killing yourself rehashing all this.

My parents were oblivious of me. I mean three years before.

Richard’s key is in your lock, Dom, and my paraphase is about to close.

I was thirteen, and after half an hour of their strange bickering my father’s voice rose on a rush of absolute reasonableness and my mother’s broke into a hardness that wasn’t firm; he wanted to go to the shore for the summer, she wanted Heatsburg and thought he wanted the shore because of Heights people and business, and when he said she’d have music galore she said with the wrong intonation, Oh you’re very fair! I’ve always said you’re very fair! — so that one of my vertebrae started getting dry-ice signals from Ultima Thule — then the voices were low but worse, until I turned out the light and stared not unhappily at the intimate fire of the Statue’s torch out beyond Governor’s Island. (I made a mental note to write down if I could ever figure it out who she was carrying the torch for.) Then my father cried such a nightmarish No! No! that I tiptoed in my stocking feet to my door and slowly into the hall whence I could see the piano and the Seth Thomas metronome. There was nothing and I didn’t move. There came material against material, and I snuck to the living room entrance and peeped past toward the couch and as far as feet, then further; and they were kissing in a position there’s no more point in graphing here than there is in prophesying the past.

Richard will enter. Looking into the dark kitchen at the far window like the one Ted looked through one early morning, Richard will find reflected part of the TV screen. Seeing the back of your portable Admiral just inside the door to his right, he’ll perhaps put a foot over the threshold. He may not know the wall phone is only a few inches away. But since I took the phone-receiver off the TV and hung it back up, Richard won’t connect the TV with the excuse list above the phone, and hence not with EARTH = SPACECRAFT, which he’d not have understood anyhow. He’ll turn away to the living room and he’ll look in the desk for bank books and such, not for his sake but for expedition’s.

He’ll spot these 8 1/2 by 11 sheets that I’ve made mine, and he’ll peruse the last one or two, which are on top, and he’ll straighten the pile and roll it and, finding a rubber band in a desk drawer, he’ll take this second part of my convection with him. But he won’t dare look (say) behind my curtain by the long window. Through the window I see that the red EXIT in the great workroom of the nightgown company across the way is dimmer now as morning nears and the containing edifice itself shapes forth its towering stone verticals. But you didn’t assume your son would come before morning, so maybe you didn’t think it would be dark and you thought he would indeed connect himself, by cathode ray, with SPACECRAFT and thence to the body’s volume and the cubic habits of the heart and your love for your only son. But that link is left to me.

What brought the cops so quickly long ago? All that kind of thing will come out in the wash. Richard will almost think the steps he heard came from another apartment, even from the penthouse where he doubtless does not know you used to trampoline. He will extinguish the light over this table. He will keep his key; he will dart his eyes about seriously, to make himself feel better. Departing, he will open the door slowly, stand a safe moment in case what he has percentally ignored betrays itself (though what would he do if it did?). He will step to the mat, and he’ll think What’s all this about someone’s mother seeing a Puerto Rican kid pedal a delivery rig past in the opposite direction with a skull and crossbones on it and her thinking what’s happened to Joey? and as Richard descends the west shaft he’ll wonder who it was that Joey didn’t deliver to which lost him his place at Bohack’s though Monday after school he went to work for A&P on Montague Street; and then who is this Bob on an island at night? — to whom someone says it takes a thousand pounds of phytoplankton to produce a hundred zooplankton to produce ultimately ten pounds of herring, and this Bob says back to this someone “So what!” still irked that this friend or companion or whatever he is offered advice about Bob being gentler with one of his sons.