“John B. said a city,” I answer. Do I hear a car motor die?
Petty sighs. “And Robby said a castle.”
“I know, I know,” Bob says. He looks at me, Dom, and I feel Al behind me, and Bob says slowly, “I just don’t love them the same. John B. is more lovable. I don’t love Robby as much.”
We’re silent, and then Bob claps his hands to his eyes. He is weeping.
He jumps up and with one hand holding his distorted face he rushes out through the kitchen, and Petty follows him. A door shuts, probably the bathroom.
The bell goes, Dom. My great-aunt Sue said a terrible thing once when I wouldn’t kiss her after she’d taken me to a double-feature. But though my other great-aunt Kate looked over her crossword at me and said, “Nonsense, he’s a lamb,” I took it to heart and got to work thinking about it.
The bell goes? No, not your buzzer. (I took a break for orange juice, I drank it right out of the carton and topped it off with some flaky halibut which besides a half-consumed coffee yogurt was the only other thing in the strangely personal interior of your old medium-size icebox.) No indeed, I’ve heard not a thing since the four feet passed, or were they the future and my icebox raid further past than I know? Middle-class life goes on.
I don’t care how much you were looking forward to your son Richard’s next letter (as it began by saying you’d said), believe me most of it was punitive decoration. The core was that you ought to lay off: take Dorothy back, who he said looked better than ever having lost weight living apart from you; get back to your “long-term” writing and your “hobbies,” which I assume include that light, fat styrofoam pastoral crowded in front of the bookcase between window and screen tripod; stop trying (he said with a shade of mere intimacy) to throw yourself against odds into the maelstrom of this country’s kitsch doom (or was it “century’s”?); and get to the barber at once. “For it isn’t necessary to try every life you imagine in order to be one on whom nothing is lost.”
Ten big days in jail right on top of your ejection from that Jackson hotel interrupted your private investigation of the Mississippi Mystery and left you visibly weakened but visually more vivid. In jail, time is very different, you told reporters. Who smirked, no doubt recalling that the hotel management hadn’t had to lean toothpicks up against your door to know that you and your secretary used only one of the two rooms you booked.
What odds would Richard have given that you’d bump yourself off? I made sure you didn’t get enervating letters from an actuary who reads James, happens to be your son, and loathes the phone.
To keep on top of your mail yet be at those public exhibitions of yours that I foresaw would be significant, I had to play percentage. So from Mississippi I didn’t go direct to Point Magu to start the March, but flew here to check.
From your daughter Lila’s note I learned that during the week at the end of which the Anti-Abstraction March would hit Santa Barbara she and her husband would be in San Francisco. Their address was in the Mission District with friends. Why not in a hotel? (Well now I’m going to stop in Melbourne with retired friends on the way to Naples where I’ll put up with an old friend— if she’ll put up with me! — whence I mean to combine a look at Tamiami Canal (I know a skipper with a side-trip to look up a full-blooded Seminole Al served with in Ike’s Coast Guard.)) And plainly, Dom, Lila hoped you would call on them there at their friends’ in Frisco when your March was over. Her husband’s drug therapy conference would end Friday but they’d stay on hoping you’d fly up. (Prudential provisions! Thursday afternoon we leave the St. Francis conference early to meet some friends who want us to see an ancient site; then sunset and sweet-and-sour duck with Sam, did you ever meet Sam? he’s a beautiful old man — sort of everybody’s uncle: then early to bed ’cause Friday’s a big day.) But then for some reason Lila and husband came on downstate instead of waiting for you to come up, and were suddenly right in front of me in your open-air audience when through your bull-horn you startled Darla Fasinelli’s crowd with that veiled gamble, what I called earlier tonight a “risky trick,” a “gappy calculus.” Lila’s plump spouse turned to stare around, and whether or not his eyes found mine he seemed fed up.
“We came here,” you called, “not really to penetrate a Think-Tank but to confront ourselves. Not till the missile-man finds himself on the end of his own vector, no not till the pickers became the growers”—here a dramatic shift to grapes—“will you get what you think you’re seeking with your boycotts and your marches. I found as I wended my way from breakfast to teatime in a gentle curve up the coast” (you didn’t on this word veer into your brogue), “that this march is itself an abstraction. So whyn’t you kids become capitalists and change things.”
Well in the space between the Marxist pap and the black-capitalism-for-white-kids stood a charge of paradox that Darla first (through 180 degrees) cheered, then in her Manhattan Hash column next week attacked as the “threadbare neo-conservatism” of a would-be body-contact head who was “ultimately” little more than an “artist.” (Her personally asterisked footnote: “See his minor styrofoams said to be in private collections in Boston, Salt Lake, New York, and the legendary preserve of a rancher-recluse in extreme northeast Montana.”)
But I saw your greatness as your will to interrupt yourself, to be a hero who would not de-oscillate the dialectic. (And yet, Dom, oh the Field-Truth that sometimes seems to surround!) At Cora’s you interrupted my remark about space by gazing past me.
At your climactic equations your patronizing son-in-law the doctor shook his head in despair. Their cameras on straps round their strong tan necks, he and Lila turned to go and they parted to pass either side of me but as if they didn’t see me, which I found peculiarly pleasurable. You called those equations the beginning of a science called Structural Activism—“which,” you added, “is a bit different from a hard-on on a boycott, Darla.”
I could have added a twist of humor to my mouth to honor Lila and her husband’s voluntarily entering my Dom-scope and staring at me in total ignorance of who I was; but I couldn’t, because your equations suddenly so restructured my priorities that I had to review my Force-Field. That is, I found in your ABC’s reason to think I better crystallize your kinship with me. Silence accumulated as through your bullhorn you slowly said, “The relation between altruism and balls will always be to that between collaboration and division exactly the reverse of what the relation of Art or Babel to Commitment is to that between Collaboration and Commitment.” (My father would ask for a paraphrase.)
Simplified in my secret Centrifuge, and subjected there to certain separations and simulated gravities, this equation of yours I saw could mean that as the gap between Bob and Al closed, the one between you and me would widen. Which confirmed me in my long-time preference for keeping Al and Bob apart.
Yet I knew even then what my step-son Ted was to mean when he later said he was trying to buck rid of dialectic. He, if not Betsy, may have sensed a similar trap of forces when after canceling their appointment or appointments they left the doctor’s building and as they came onto that leaf-gray sidewalk Ted spied their doctor reading the newspaper in his car up the street. That night Ted shrugged and said to Ev, “Well it was your friend recommended him,” and Ev without thinking said to me, “Hugh Blood’s your old friend, not mine,” and Ted said gently, “Oh that shrink’s more interested in research.” Downstairs Ev may be washing her face and thinking what to do next. Emma’s speaking in her sleep, reviewing her day, the red light we had to wait at when I was in a hurry to get home, and the things we saw while waiting for the light to turn — she is dreaming of her dad, who seems to be expanding the old parabolic course he follows among his disturbances. But the red light doesn’t turn green, the red light goes off and the green goes on.