Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

During the first wait with Betsy, when he rose to change Look for Time or the other way around — I forget — his shoes felt like diver’s boots, his jeans like bandages. But subsequently he found that she felt the same way, and he guessed that, sitting on one blue-foam length of the L-shaped couch leaning against the whitewashed beach-house wall-planks whose raw hairy pine a decorator had scored with a random design of gouges, Betsy likewise felt financially embarrassed by the bandanna’d black char whose brown, stockinged soles below her kneeling bottom lay over the lavatory’s threshold as she applied Lestoil to the floor and seemed to explode the toilet every minute or so like a persistent throat-clearing. Ted in selfdefense began to talk to Betsy. And she, who at first seemed relieved when the doctor would at last appear and remove his six-button jacket and neaten the great knot of his wide tie, seemed the next time content with Ted, till one day she read Ted’s mind and led him to suggest they not stand for that grave Hungarian’s absence any longer but leave a note canceling these costly hours, and they did and never looked back, though as they came out onto the sidewalk Ted detected across that tree-green street something which, should he and Betsy discuss it, might smudge the dimensions of what they believed they were leaving, so he kept it to himself. But listen, Dom, when the suppositious secretary billed us a whole month’s two hundred and eighty dollars we paid only what my step-son told us to, and we’ve heard nothing since. Nor have I seen Betsy, though I’ve had her on the phone. Three’s a crowd, yet that strain the waiting room sequence put on me seems to even that odd fear of meddling I have. So after telling Betsy that Ted’ll be right here, I idly ask if she thinks their doctor contrived their conjunction; but Betsy’s gentle “Brought us together? I suppose so” softly adorns surely her alarm at the chance I’m right. Or maybe like Ted she doesn’t like the phone. I gather it’s not exactly dates they go on. Is he playing the field? He wouldn’t put it like that. Betsy was phoning all day today. Ted was in and out, and didn’t call her back on our phone.

And I, Dom, what do I do about Bob and Al? You might accuse me of bringing them together. Ev if she’d seen their notes to me could have picked up her beige phone and dialed them with magic dispatch. No one dials like Ev. But unless Al and Bob have called me in the last how many minutes and been asked over by Ev, they may still not have met. I can afford to feel that here in your apartment I’d almost rather tell the tale right to your face. But you are not here, yet granted thus not able to judge me a harassing crank. This great fountain pen came fresh from its art shop gift box which lay on your desk near the west window. Your daughter Lila’s birthday note lay under the box. The bottle of black ink in its box beside the pen may have come from Lila also, for you don’t write in longhand.

As I read this room, once your redoubt, I do not find in your things mere expressions of you. They don’t need you. Which might be precisely why you should have been able to need them. With the north book-wall behind it, a tripod-based shaft, extensible but not extended, supports in the intermediate position a horizontal case containing a standard 40 by 40 projection screen. I have space, if not time, to explain, and I will, uninterrupted by Al or Bob or Al’s father’s number two puzzle or the cross-stick boomerang Bob fired off Brooklyn Bridge in April of ’46, or Bohack Joey and the fight. Where’s your projector, being fixed?

Did you make a wish as you killed yourself? Did you wish to be friends with the black, blind Hamlet who in an interview on educational TV condemned you for caring more about technology than for poor people, and for telling a black militant breakfast their only hope was intermarriage? Was suicide your way to say to present friends and former wife, You never knew me, now you know? But Dom, what was this that these minds surrounding your life could now know at last? I am also one of your survivors, maybe your first unless some neighbor here who heard the high Irish voice is close enough to you to claim such. I’m the Unknown Survivor. What if I put your phone back on the hook? For the busy signal may bring someone over here. Having much to do, I put Al and Bob right out of my mind, be they limpid parable or lame fact. If, Dom, you couldn’t stand the solitude which others’ views of you enforced, these crowding distances are still to be preferred to what your suicide says, namely that these wrong views must now be supplanted in your absence by the clear blank vision that you weren’t what these persons thought — say, a hero ideologue, or an idea devoted to a man, a creature who tolled new rates of time on one hand but on the other swore to all the ages old and young, thirties, forties, that time was overrated and could be controlled, you were a prophet of the present in a superland of plans, you had something for a retired cop on jury duty or a tired post-adolescent feeling obsolete, though now nothing for a Zionist uncle who said he hadn’t heard you right when you said to him on a prime-time talk show that you weren’t interested in the death-camps any more. Well, if everyone missed the point of you, you alas won’t be here for the review. Yet something worse, your quondam wife Dorothy and your dear, if adult, children Richard and Lila won’t be able to turn this faithful event, your suicide, to any purpose; for their idea will be not to let grief turn to death but to get along, just get along. Suicidal satisfaction better not be the locus of somebody else’s feelings, even if that would sound better rendered in Latin. You know so well how people don’t pay attention.

But you couldn’t have known where my fugitive circle crossed yours, and your suicidal satisfactions can have had nothing to do with me. But I’ve had much to do with you. All worlds are real, but yours seemed realer than mine.

The day we moved in I learned from the magisterial, patient super the kind of thing I had almost forgotten I wished to know. My encounter with him — first in our new apartment, with Ev busy and half-listening (and Emma saying, “Ong Zeus”), then in the hall outside our front door, then in the west elevator whose ID button the super pushed to illustrate a point, then in the dim basement and its corridors where we pretended to look for a vacant storage locket — led to two conclusions, his and mine, distinct yet seemingly congruent in the one rounded shadow we combined to cast in the light of two dusty bulbs, one of them behind him one behind me. Ma’am the answer to that is there’s no space in the basement. Yes sir you sure have got a lot of books, I see you have a book on Islam, very interesting, I don’t know it; have you read all those? It’s going to be a splendid apartment in my opinion we get them bathrooms finished. Sure the fireplace works, long’s the City don’t crack down. Plastering (plastering-plastering) well yes and no, the house painter will do plastering if you ask real nice, he’s very busy. Over the shower? In the window? He’s very busy, I got him on a pretty extensive operation all this week but next week who knows— who knows? Basement (basementbasement) oh we going to look; but like I told you there is no space; hopefully we can allocate a spot for the trunks, yes sure we could take this one now. The east elevator down the hall there’s under inspection. Leggo I got it. This button? The I D! Funny I never thought of that. No it means “One Down,” but it don’t work, push it all you want the only way to go one down from eight is press seven. No I got what you meant, oh the id , sure; no, it’s one floor down, that’s the meaning not the id. Don’t you strain yourself, what the missus leave inside, cinder blocks? O.K. watch out, I got her. We can leave it up against these newspapers. Sure, sure, we can look , but those lockers belong to people been here twenty thirty years. Oh yes he’s got one all right; oh you know him; his first name? Funny, I don’t know either, but he’s a pal of mine, two night owls at the all-night deli, even give me an autographed book he wrote. But he’s got trouble, y’see. See? there’s no lockers for you. Hopefully one could become vacant and then I might arrange for you people to get it but people live here till they die, big apartments for the rent, we don’t have the wherewithal to provide the services we once could before I come here. B’I think we might make a special space back there where we left your trunk, move some of those stacks of papers, I could give you a spot all to yourself, you couldn’t store a bedroom set there but hopefully some of your luggage kind of thing y’see. The trouble? What you expect? the man’s controversial, the mailman needs an extra box for him is what he needs he gets so much mail. Made these speeches all over the country — see, what happened he asked for an unlisted number he was getting some crazy calls after he went around the country and said all that about the Religious Leaders — oh you know? — somebody let it out he was in for an unlisted number, and Christ if the papers didn’t get hold of the number before he did. Yes I know him personally, he’s a real gentleman, and a brilliant man in my opinion; a little extremist but you got to respect him. Thank you sir that wasn’t necessary, thanks (thanks-thanks), we clear them stacks off this week so you got your own space. The space you save may be your own. No he’s not presently in the city. Got some land down in the Islands — Exuma? Well, I couldn’t say, but he got land on two of them down there — no taxes — went there for a long weekend, he’s got pirates from — Haiti I think coming over there they say; it’s undeveloped, just one hotel, he’ll be back Monday Tuesday; mail’s piling up, stacks of it, I think he better get a secretary, had one a few years back then he fired her and she got married all of a sudden and very next month lost her baby, some of his mail just laying around in the mailroom, he never comes down till noon. He’s after me to buy down there.