Doing sixty on Route One, Bob is answering a question of mine that I’ve forgotten. “Leo’s a lyrical man, he just hasn’t found a center.” Bob’s wife staring straight out ahead from the right front seat says gently, “Now what the hell does that mean?” Behind them Robby slides a hand through my arm as I gaze into the familiar dark hair ahead. Bob races the light at the new shopping center, risks fifty yards of red, and after braking a hundred yards past the intersection accelerates left into the narrow blacktop that leads to the landing. “I told him we were buying Schick for everybody. He’s been researching electronics just duplicating data we already had from the New York office, but without my saying a thing he dropped it and went back to his phone. Leo veers between being a really remarkable customer’s man and fighting to keep the 1800 barn from being destroyed, and getting his girls out soliciting door-to-door to tempt some Finnish tympanist away from some other symphony and some young conductor in Salt—”
“It was a Hungarian violinist.”
“Well you should know, Christ I’d rather listen to records; and not Carousel or My Fair Lady either—”
“I don’t just listen to Carousel, Bob—”
“Did you,” I intrude, “ever think about the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye?” Bob guffaws, “Beautiful! but close enough if you’re measuring — no, the point is it’s melody with Leo, not harmony; horizontal not vertical—”
“He’s horizontal all right,” adds Bob’s wife, “you walk right over him.”
“The point is, he’s doing all the right things but doesn’t feel how they come together in one life. But—”
“But Bob—”
“But”—the chuckle sub specie mysterii—“he’s just amazing, he goes out to some of these towns he’s never heard of himself, The Only East Otisfield On Earth, and an old gal gives us an order for two hundred Ohio Oil — oh in the heart of the State of Maine oh Jesus — always hankered to be in the market but thought there was some trick to getting in, and Leo found her. I had him to the island last week—”
“Breaking his lyrical back, dear—”
“I’m going to build him a house on the nubble.”
“You haven’t finished ours,” the familiar voice breaks in again.
But “Daddy” (Bob removes his arm from mine) “do we have to go camping next summer too?”
“Dear, you don’t know what camping is, you fellows have your own beach… and—”
“And a house” (I interrupt) “that Bob will build for the rest of his life.”
Not to be confused, Dom, with the mainland home in whose cellar I have just taken up a hundred-weight of cement and seen my step-grandfather’s shoulder blades curved in thought, a man as factual as my father was and my country friend Al became, though Al never learned that I’d told his sister Gail about our quarry. I want to reach Bob’s white-knuckled fist and I can’t even get to the island his lovely wife (who thinks of everything) got her “Pappy” to buy Bob part of for their fourth anniversary. I’m telling Robby and John B. about Buck Rogers and John B. isn’t impressed, but they’re both silent after I tell about the spaceman who was on a metabolic microsupport system out beyond the moon for decades and when they finally vectored him home to Earth and he stepped from his spacecraft, he hadn’t aged a year.
If I veer forth into some madness tonight in this space of yours Dom that I’m only beginning to use, I hope I’ve brains to make something of it. Of madness or of space? Is that where this night is taking me? You’re not here yet. My head and chin were heavy, but not now. Below in that place I pay rent on where the water in the johns sways in and out as if we were at sea, Ev instead of phoning the police will have indiscriminately phoned her friends. She’ll have scouted the basement boiler room and laundry and even, with gingerly decorum for the rats’ sake, checked the super’s workshop. It is so overhung with pipes multiplying on the whole horizontally lower and lower from an obscure ceiling, that if you’re like me you’ll infer certain earlier pipes aren’t used now, or more have been added maybe because besides the daily load the past in some modest style is being accommodated here too, waters caloric or residual centrifugally if not quite cleanly contained in this benighted pile’s once elegant system that connects not so much with the city as with itself. Ev may have phoned Cora, whose party she didn’t attend last week because at the last minute Ted decided not to babysit, perhaps a lucky break for me. Is our building doomed by Mafia timetable? So claims the florid Austrian music teacher who if the east elevator stops at five is invariably there in her old dressing gown styled somehow of pink quilt and blue (or is it gray) chiffon, and she is always dismissing some male student of almost any, or indeed even of indeterminate, age or instrument. And the gent who smells of dog and onion who gets off sometimes at ten sometimes at eight promises me that the city has forgotten about us and that the inspector whose signature at three different dates in a framed proviso protected by ancient plastic up above the button panel is just a landlordly whim, for the hazards of these shafts are wholly in the landlord’s power not ours.
Dom, I looked for you in vain at the tenants’ meetings. You did, though, sign the complain I helped the venerable TV scriptwriter in 11F word, for later there indeed you were among the others in two columns beneath our grievances. You rarely write even your name in longhand.
Pure information now lacks for me the exercising power I once breathed out as well as in, yes the grand intercostal lights spreading a vernal gulf whose source I was. In Utah, where you have a choice, a condemned man in 1912 chose hanging because it cost the state more. But the year I received my typewriter the first electro-cardiograph ever made of a man’s heart action while being executed proved that John Deering, who took the other Utah option, would have died even if the squad had fired blanks. His heartbeat rose to 180 just before he was shot. His heart stopped 15.6 seconds after it was pierced, a remarkable muscle even if you pierce it with pure information. Oh I knew every point of interest around the Fertile Crescent from Jerusalem the Golden to the suburbs of Ur. Think, Dom, of 1940, a trip to Washington and to my uncle in Alexandria, my father and I playing “Capitals”: and just as my mother, having negotiated a rotary, climbed onto a bright concrete span I answered my father’s “Honduras” in one intaken breath “Tegucigalpa!” my brutal éclat as reveling as my exam answers at school which were delivered in densely correct sentences about (say) the stargazer Pytheas who my teacher said only probably invented latitude, or about the Great Northwestern Quadrant containing the Great White Race which to judge from James Henry Breasted’s words apparently did not, like “the black world” to the south, “teem”; or sentences about (say) the eye-for-an-eye, death-for-a-death (life-for-a-life?) legal code dictated by the Sun-god to that creative Babylonian king Hammurapi (whose dates at that time were 1948–1905). I knew the Nile as I knew the Potomac, backwards and forwards. I can never again, Dom, command the joy with which on an exam I exemplified that tidy code (preserved, I knew and would someday see in the Louvre on a block of diorite) by telling my tale from Breasted of the house that fell down around its owner’s son whose terminal concussion was then according to Hammurapi’s system answered for by, not the “guilty builder” as Breasted put it, but unbearably the builder’s son. I drew engaged columns with darkly incised capitals to illustrate my stolen views about those puzzling buildings A and B next to Zoser’s Step Pyramid — lotus, papyrus, Upper and Lower Egypt. I saw with my own brown eyes sun-fired bricks, hills of silver coin, I saw more than you can imagine — the incensed beauty Ishtar with terrible grief seeking her fellow god Tammuz through seven precincts of the Underworld, and in one of Breasted’s plates a fedora’d scholar with double-jointed legs standing stoutly in tweed plus-fours on a wall of excavated earth, toes pointing out; and I on these exams proudly reported the twenty-percent interest rate under Hammurapi and the organic link between commerce and religion. When Ev is lucky enough to find me a pound of lamb’s liver — though I guess those days are over now — I call up that classroom past like a future found in omens. No one else is partial to liver in my house, and yet we all foretell the future. At the tenants’ committee meeting I suspect it was felt that I took on too vividly my mantle as annalist of this building. I told the super’s tale of the defective baffle, and then I described the incinerator-room on our floor and told about holding your breath as you move between a deep, grimy basin and two cartons of empties to the chute and the door slams behind you, and still holding that breath (such as it is) you pull back the trap like the lid of the big mailbox on the corner that’s always too full to trust a letter to in the afternoon, then tip your stuff in holding your hand up to keep bits and even ash from blowing back; then letting the trap slam you stride back bursting to the door. But I couldn’t very well tell them I was disposing of your letters.