“The simple point,” said this singled-minded directrix Darla, “is that he’s no longer relevant to us except as a fifty-two-year-old interruption who used to be the hero whose life-style meant do your thing… thoroughly no matter what it costs in order to restructure American society… with the humane guarantees that are the only… feasible possible peaceable basis for community. But he turned out to mean — like something… abstract and decadently psychosexual, namely follow your idea out thoroughly no matter what it costs and no matter what it is. That’s the simple point. Anyway we don’t have stars anymore, we have community, and he wants to be the president of everyone. Left conservative he says he is, but it doesn’t fool us. He wants the Nobel Prize for Ubiquity.”
“And he’ll get it,” I said, but did not say with my help. Nor could I tell her she wasn’t tired enough yet to spot the obsolescence factor in her fixed program for community. She couldn’t truly see you Dom, between her line and her point; she could not see how to join Commitment and Field-State. However, to you Dom I confess that when paralyzed from sleep into those moon-shot estrangements transfiguring my favorite print or a quilted potholder that I’ve mentioned already tonight, I too have often lost your track and instead found myself again comfortably caught in the process of keeping Al and Bob distinct in neat problems like (a) did or did not Bob learn what I’d taken from Doc’s trunk (since his case was in the back seat and Doc died at Fort Dix two weeks later of a ruptured colon and probably had no time during those first days of Basic to drop Bob a line), or (b) did or did not Gail report to Al (who woke on the ship Saturday to the bulk smell of steam table scrambled eggs and crumbly home fries) that (waking at three a.m. to the back of her hand) I had asked her if she thought he was angry about the four-hundred-forty-five-foot lighthouse and the ancient history text I once lent him.
But then, as I feel Ev’s hot hip and I pivot from my visions, I begin to know again that in ’52 in the librarian’s living room in Portland, with its cosy Van Goghs and the square-contoured turquoise day-bed and, by a New Yorker Hotel ashtray, a wooden whale with “Welcome to Bergen, Norway” in script on its flank — and in the john a Goya boy — there were livings so fugitive from my petty focus that much was lost, much was lost I firmly sigh. And lost because of the Vectoral Dystrophy chronic I now suppose in only children. My two-year-old Emma may never know Ted; compared to her he’s ancient. “Ong Zeus” is turning into “Ange-ooce.” At thirty-seven Ev would rather not go through it all again, though I think she would for me. This power over her which I so wonderfully have, I have tonight swapped for that other ex-spatio-vectoral power which I may be only imagining I have and which is not congruent with my power over Ev which itself is not complicated by the fact that Ev is now in an unusual sense looking for me. I was leading, but now the words are leading me. To you? The elevator door has opened again, and now there is an echoing inaudible conversation between two men; they are nearer your door, Dom, and nearer still. I could tell them you’re not here yet. Those challenging kids the morning after you descended from that Pacific window positively quivered with pride at having paralleled what they saw as an inadequate monograph on suicide and an inadequately suicidal gesture. Having, with the help of a militant phil major, bumbled onto that parallel, they were high on its logic.
At least I did not keep your letters, Dom, I burned them. Light-years from your real life they could only in their lack of sympathy have lowered your resolve — Lila’s one-time psychiatrist who is now her husband would think me mad if I told about voices tampering with my door knob but—
For thirty seconds I’ve heard you door knob being handled; and accompanying the rattle, ten seconds ago: “Son-in-law’s comin’ awver, he may have a key. Try the super again”—
Now I’m writing again, glad the traverse curtains across fifteen feet of windows at this end are pulled back rather than drawn. Into the regular arc of my legible but distinctive hand so many rates of time collapse: a month in a phrase, interruptions to raid the icebox or listen, a Fred-Eagled hour in three long pages, four summers in the one word “quarry,” and now a nearly instant thirty-word response to thirty seconds. Collapse into paraphase.
Not to rule out outside-time is like letting Al and Bob meet or like meanly leaving you Dom unaided. I have no time for outsiders like this detective tenor or Lila’s Hungarian husband who will indeed have a key. In her typically loose humid letter yesterday she thanked you for mailing the key — why? — and she complained that you’d never answered her answer months ago to your letter demanding to know why she and her husband had walked out on you after you’d spotted them in the crowd outside the Think-Tank. That exchange of course was long before Ev even heard about the chance of a vacancy in this building. Lila and her plump husband matter to you about half what your son Richard appraisingly does, and let it be said for him that though an actuary (who knows? maybe now a poly-thinker deep beyond such family phenomena as chance), he’s not and never was one of these creative salesmen client-oriented to the very root of their courier-case zippers whom (say) Mutual has made not only “Honor Guard” but “Order of the Tower” too by virtue of having each in one twelve-month period designed an umbrella of two million bucks’ worth of insurance for relevant families and businesses. And why should you have to think about Lila’s thanks — or her gawky reproach, “how easily the celebrity could have switched on his ‘secretary’ and just dictated a reply.” Your dictaphone-secretary bill is astronomical because they do everything; and to judge by a confirming note they sent you I think not only that nothing ever comes back to you, not even carbons, not even correspondence for your signature, but that you encourage variety in your signature. During the slight abstractions which lately have interrupted your public utterances — briefings, speeches, even your printed word — you may have thought you missed and needed your family (from whom I guess it could be argued I was keeping you semi-incommunicado) or missed the old tributes from — you name them — Daley, Dali, Dellinger, the furry-wristed divine from Des Moines, past-president Dr. Dave Dickens, Sister Deirdre Reardon’s far from unrepresentative congressional body, and Darlene (now Darla) Fasinelli (who had tried in vain to keep her ideological activism separate, even distant, from the grad linguistics program famous at I.U. for being a creative one and for attracting almost exclusively girls).
I came tonight to talk of you but soon saw it was also Al and Bob. If I kept them apart thinking they wouldn’t hit it off, I kept close to you Dom. Between you and me pivotal affinities occlude such petty tics as my constant distinctive signature with its unforgeable paraph, my not entirely confident dislike of great heights, and my impatience with such idle pressures as the tense Manhattan bragging of Hugh Blood which you’d think healthy self-expression until you discovered that he never interrupts himself.