I started the car and we turned down Congress in the general direction of Al’s rented room.
“Karl’s very sweet but I wouldn’t pretend with him.” “When did you smoke?” “This afternoon before I came to meet you. You didn’t ask me to come around to your place. They were at Noreen’s — oh you don’t know Noreen. I had a nice time, that’s all. And a good appetite worked up for your Number Four Family.” “You’re being cheap.” “Call me a whore.” “I though you were a good head.” “A one-man whore.” “Nobody home.”
Gail put her hand on my arm and said to Al without looking around, “What’s wrong with trying the stuff? What’s wrong with you, Al?” Annette was right back at her: “Don’t give me that ‘trying’ stuff, because I know what you’re saying.”
“I’m not saying anything,” said Gail.
When we got to Al’s place, Annette said, “What am I doing here?” Al went ahead but turned around at the steps and lowering his voice told Gail he was going back to the ship and she could stay here and I could use the hotel room. I told Annette I’d drive her home. The hotel was the other end of Congress. My bag was still in the trunk. I told Al I’d see him tomorrow. We left him and Gail standing on the sidewalk.
No one was out. Just a hundred wooden houses. Lending themselves, Dom, to multiple reproduction. I turned where Annette told me; she seemed to be staying away from her street, I was lost. I said Al was mad at me too tonight. She said I was out of my mind. I asked if we were getting warmer, I was tired. She said she had an idea why I’d come this weekend. I asked if Al ever talked about Heatsburg and the quarry. She said, “Left here… sure, but he tells me so many things. He’s not mad at you, I just think he probably knows you. You been writing Gail?”
I said it was three years since I’d seen Gail. “Rich girlfriend at Smith,” said Annette, “I don’t understand you. And you just graduated college. And let me tell you dear I don’t care about some scribble in a moldy margin beside something about ziggurat, I swear to God I don’t. I care about that screwed-up guy.” “Screwed up?” I said, “it’s just that he’s not settled down yet.”
At Annette’s house I asked the name of the street and she asked did I want to know the way to Gail’s hotel or Al’s room. When I said, “Congress Square, I can find anything in Portland from there,” she said, “There’s a shortcut, Mister Scientist — that was a science you majored in, wasn’t it?” “I guess so,” I said, and she went “Hmph.”
Then she said, “Your father’s happy, I bet.” “Why?” I said. “He wanted you to be a scientist.” “How do you know that?” “Oh Al told me once.” “My father’s dead.”
Then Annette said, “I know you can find your way to Congress Square but that’s the long way. Aren’t you a fellow who likes shortcuts? Do it my way. Al’s walked back to State Pier by now, and one way or another there’s going to be a lot of space wasted tonight.”
So after watching her go slowly up the walk, then suddenly quick up the porch steps, I indeed did it her way. We duly if disingenuously pay for all our experiences. But you expect to pay only in tedium and trouble, and you’re not told that you may have to pay by having pleasure: like Gail — like being a conspicuous absence for Tracy that night.
But Dom, the discovery didn’t last. Any more than the space you occupied high in the hearts of dissentient students. Only last week when you returned from the Caribbean to your mailbox, you said (blindly to me) that they didn’t want you: there it was, two mornings after you got back; the o’s in “To Whom It May Concern” sliced right out of the paper, your typed note left in your mailbox presumably a reply to my insurance note to you the preceding week, anonymous and anxiously encouraging for I knew how the factional anomie you’d tried to underwhelm yourself in coupled with the renewed loosening of family ties might have sucked you into some new move you might mistake for the right kind of risk. Your surprise defenestration from the ninth floor above the Pacific twilight was the right kind of risk, or your bullhorn speech outside the white poet’s storefront children’s club in El Barrio (which neither Bob nor Al would know is uptown and poor and Spanish) saying the South was like Viet Nam, we should get out and tend to home, the Mississippi kidnap would remain unsolved but in an open field (that is, frank war). But the wrong kind of risk was to bring your beautiful black Costa Rican Kit when you met Dorothy for lunch. You’ve been deliberately dieting on the most demanding foods. I was sitting near enough behind you so I heard you order that heavy cassoulet and so was able myself to order it in time to follow you bravely bite for bite. But Dot was more demanding still, demanding of Miss Kit Carbon the archaeologist if she’d yet reached the phase at which the Chief — namely you, Dom — would be obliged to find her a husband as he did for his “abortive secretary” a few years back. Dot had by then swallowed all the Sole Dunkirk she proposed to, and as she finished this sentence her eye now found me chewing wild sausage and mealy beans. And she stopped, and I for the space of one climactic swallow almost thought she knew me. She was saying too loudly to Kit, “Well I’ve known him for years, and I’m sorry — I just don’t get it.” Dom you said something to her with your mouth full, and she said, “I thought I saw a photographer, I can do without that today, this isn’t my year.”
No, the kids who challenged you the morning after your electrifying defenestration had missed wholly the tone of your two-year-old book on suicide: What did it add? / It subtracts, you said. // Suicide’s an existential act, right? / It’s also an occasion for measurement. // But we’ve had statistics, like, we’ve had parameters, we’ve had all that. / Where? // Easy to ask me where, but you know I’m — you know we’re right. / I know nothing about you. // It’s a dull book; like, who cares if the Hungarians and Finns head the list? / It’s a dull book; I don’t really remember what I said in it. // It’s a cop-out. / No! (the pro lifts his voice, and a newshen scribbles faster) // It’s a sell-out. / (You barely smiled — Jesus what creases! — while I knew that you had endeavored to do a deliberately dull book itemizing causes (like suicide as retort, as revenge, resurrection, publication, / suicide due to Sphinx syndrome, suicide as time-killer)) and piling on such numbers of numbers, such calmly provisional percents as to flatten the subject into its terminal banality. A student asked if it was true one of your children committed suicide. You said not to your knowledge. Darla Fasinelli’s late boyfriend called from behind his camera, “You can’t prove you were pushed out that window last night,” and you replied, “I don’t prove I was pushed, I’m not pressing charges,” and he said, “Publicity stunt, you looked before you leapt.” As a lone cornet struck up “Hail to the Chief,” you replied, “I’m stunted by publicity”: which, as I hear the elevator door release new hall steps, hales my eye round to your styrofoam-de-force. When I her habitual reader interviewed her the columnist back here in Gotham Friday of the weekend Bob was last in town, Darla for all her hawk-like loveliness seemed so politic and darkly gentle I almost could not hear above the laughter jamming my ear pulses what she gladly gave me, she talked all morning, she was speaking privately and with surprised comfort. Neither Bob nor Al, even tonight on the tenth and eighth floors of a midtown motel, would be able to believe her long tale of your defenestration, and indeed it is so double Darla by her own admission chose in her Hash column not to report it in its doubleness lest she force her readers to see so much that they missed the point. At last I looked at my watch, Bob would be getting into the midtown air terminal. Why was he coming so late if he wanted to see people in Wall Street?