Wait, I said to her in her father’s library in Brooklyn Heights hearing my father in the dining room happily agreeing to attend a court tennis match and displaying quite a considerable knowledge of that absurd game, Wait don’t go so fast, turning back to the Monsanto ad she turned her head to look at me, and I slapped one on her with such a rush she had to help us into a warmly leaning balance: “You didn’t really want to look at those Negroes picking cotton,” she said six months later sitting outside the bathhouses at the beach club the summer I was thirteen. My father loved swimming in salt water, especially when there was no surf. No (I told her), it was spontaneous. (She and I heard Bob singing “God Bless America” while he changed from tennis.) I’m not always spontaneous (I said); listen (I said to Petty) one summer at Heatsburg where we used to go and my mother says we’ll go again, I used my friend’s sister to blackmail him into going up to a quarry because I liked her, but he’ll never know.
But I wasn’t afraid Petty might spill this. No, that wasn’t why I hadn’t taken Al along to the Welcome Home party which the honored guests Bob and Petty skipped in ’53. Yes oh of course it’s Petty, Dom. If you were here in this room of yours you’d no doubt have asked more about the dark-braided bride, the familiar voice, the strong angel — Pert, Pet, Petty: Perpetua, Petua — ye gods let it be one of my substantive liberties with you, Dom, that I did not initially condition this maritime precinct of my past with her name. The Examiner identified your former girlfriend Kit Carbon as the “well-known black archaeologist” and Darla Fasinelli in her column in Manhattan Hash condemned the adjective’s bias.
Petty’s wiping a vast black stove Bob found somewhere and cemented here to a mountainous ledge. She flicks her eyes at my bathing suit and murmurs, “K.P.” She’s putting magazines on a cable spool table in the north extension where I changed; under the plastic-paned window an Army blanket covers a cotful of pillows, another cot meets it at right angles along the adjacent wall; she’s asking if my mother ever bought the place near Bob’s parents, and if she still plays the violin and piano; Petty hopes Robby is musical; she hesitates to ask me about my work, then says she was trying just the other night to describe to Leo’s wife Irish what it is I do and that Bob interrupted saying you could call it social anthropology — but she didn’t think that described it exactly. I’m about to ask her if she ever told Bob what I said to her about Gail and Al in ’43, but Bob stops hammering and yells to get the hell out here, and John B. comes in to get the yellow plastic bucket to facilitate construction of the pale city he and Robby are molding. He steps sideways down the rocks and leaps onto the sand.
“—not often,” she says, and I forget what I asked here, I’m in the doorway looking left at the bay and the cove and, thirty-odd feet from here where the new extension is being floored, at Bob’s calf, yellowed athletic sock, and high army shoe, and now the second shoe slides into view; some eastern scent sticks in Petty’s hair, in the doorway her right breast is firmly against my left tricep, but this isn’t why I forgot my late question (“Do Bob’s parents come up?”).
When he came back to New York after almost finishing his M.A. in philosophy, it was only to leave again. He followed the east coast way up beyond the summer place his father was getting ready sto retire to. Missed it completely.
He will indeed continue his own camp at minimal cost and build Leo one on the nubble.
Hindsight eases out of Bob’s life seeming interruption, to make a life as seamless as the unspeakable.
John B. is off in the grass peeing, now grabs a huge rotten plank and tries to haul it down to the sand.
“That man’s there again,” Perpetua says looking up from her knee that’s stabilizing the end of one joist Bob’s hammering. “Comes and sits in his Land Rover above the next beach at our line and looks. No he’s over our line.”
“Maybe I can use him,” murmurs Bob.
I’ve hauled up a fourth, fifth, and sixth beam; the seventh lies across the eighth, which leans on an overturned driftwood stump.
I’ve been in the water and I’m having a beer, I don’t know what time it is.
You can see Bob’s two lobster pots out there past the pincers. But he likes to raid a summer neighbor’s illegal pot within this cove, Bob knows exactly where to put down his boathook for its submerged line, Brandeis professor of economic geography who thinks he’s quite a salt according to Bob. Bob knows he wouldn’t do a thing if he caught us, it’s funny to Bob like sex.
The question isn’t what but who Bob takes seriously, or maybe no one or everyone. In the vaunted order of his life maybe everyone.
Robby to Bob: “That man’s going on our nubble.” The man’s contour against the deepening southeast sky is still.
Bob hammers again, then gets up out of his framework of joists and looks away toward the man. What Bob will do is completely open suddenly.
Al wouldn’t witness Bob’s life without recalling his own father’s incredulity when Al brought home a twenty-two dollar encyclopedia one day in ’45. Al couldn’t witness Bob talking Karl Barth tomorrow night with the Harvard vicar of their local church any more than he could Bob and Petty and the vicar crossing themselves after grace in front of a glistening tower of Liebfraumilch and a blue, willow-pattern platter of hot dogs and the Sunday-night earthenware pot of sweet yellow eyebeans. Imagine Al when the Indian pudding comes, and the jolly buoyant collaboring of the credo’s carnis resurrectionis and that reverent sense of the true business of Monday and Tuesday, parish debts or the bracing distinction between gambling and a hard-nosed faithful participation in the American body economic, yes it’s these mysterious companies that Leo loves to know, the knowing, yes yes and growth prospect the concrete ground toward yes a transcendental Awareness of the Impossible that nevertheless really happened in this synoptic country Ben (while the young vicar nods with palsied speed nay joy); Bob laughs with gay incredulity: the Profit Motive and the Resurrection (and the vicar interrupts: Of course, Bob, but by Jiminy our generation’s heard enough about the so-called Christian ethic, which gets nobody anywhere theologically)—“Kierkegaard,” says Bob, squeezing the brown bottle upside down over Ben Sedgwick’s glass.
Were Al present he would flex his right bicep in anxious scorn, and his game shoulder would jab him.
Yet when I look from Petty to her vulnerable Robby to the man on the nubble a hundred and fifty yards off now staring apparently at its effective owner Bob, to John B. to my own bare foot, my arc between Bob and Al seems to have been crossing a field of force as indescribable, Dom, my normal way as Bob’s harmonies are merely warm.
The finished city lies between Robby and John B. They make no move to wreck it. Bob’s been staring at the man; now he contemplates his dark-bunned bride of six years close by, who knows Bob is looking, so doesn’t break her gaze at the man on the nubble.