We have more than time now, Dom. Did I mention the Newsweep shot? No special point — except that the photograph singled you out, you were alone, no competing forces, only your tightly growing dark hair and warm squinting pugnacity, your Neoned chops ravished by big trouble you’d had to go looking for yourself, you had to try to know nothing from other people’s say-so but begin it all yourself, and your reward is probably that the Newsweep lens failed to detail that various mass behind you — grays mild yet perhaps dead and as if originally blue — faces (three, I think) — lapels, probables — but, of your cowering America, made vivid only in your acts. Your trampoline jumps began long before our hostess at the private opening last week, Cora, told Ev there was the chance of a vacancy in this building. And after all let’s not forget: mortal risk was always not just a cost of your way of life but also the coast that guaranteed the commerce inland.
Supplied the charge that made the movements move, east to west, and so forth.
You were easy to misunderstand but hard to disregard. You can misunderstand anyone if you’re careful enough. Trace never took that care with me. She was too shy to fight. But she so well knew — which was a motor grip on my eyes, my arms, the small of my back (if not my spinal bulb, for I’d never wink at her except surreptitiously to flinch) — she knew and often knew I liked her legs but the inside of her curious legs from the wrinkles at the back of her ankle all the way up, and her blind abdomen, other parts of her, as much because I liked her, as I liked her because I liked all those motional surfaces. No interruption lapsed between the two likes. As late as last year near a construction site on Lexington when I came out of the branch library that was full of uniformed Cathedral schoolgirls whispering at the main desk or reading Sepia or writing plot summaries of The Devil’s Advocate, Hugh Blood could smoothly accost me and, as if we’d been meeting regularly, indeed as if repaying some taunt of mine a moment ago, ask me (as if he somehow knew of my interest in your life) what “we poor laymen” were meant to make (Dom, in last year’s book) of your strange bedfellows Interruption and the Act of Love, for really weren’t they strange bedfellows? after all didn’t Saint Mary McCarthy say coitus interruptus wasn’t quite de rigueur? (Or something, Hugh boy.) But Dom I didn’t have to phone another of my memorial stations, take a fix and by the plainest trig plot the ancient motive transiting the scar in poor (though now permanently tanned) Hugh’s transmission. You see, I ditched his sister once — Hugh hated me for having her and he hated me for not marrying her and he’d have passed into shock if I had married her. Here now, as two city buses end to end both bound for City Hall passed us and the gold-badged checker at the curb scowled and shook his finger at the second bus driver, I could only mutter merrily to Hugh that maybe you meant as well to interrupt the urge to interrupt, but — and of course I didn’t complicate my advice by saying No I didn’t know you Dom personally—“don’t make him be consistent in that crazy old-fashioned way, think of his notions operating in a field-state, Hugh: many forces acting in many directions through many distances that you could call—”
“You haven’t changed,” he broke in in vain (I think he didn’t like my pedagogic “Hugh”)—
“Possibilities you see made palpable just by being possibilities but also by other possibilities.” “Thanks—” said Hugh but I wasn’t finished; “Who was it, Hugh, who divided the Tigris into three hundred and sixty channels?” “Thanks,” said Hugh, “I’m going across the street for a workout.” Faded color photos of his health club were in frames on the brick wall of the hotel. Being aware of two of the schoolgirls in cadet-blue coördinates, vest and pleated skirt, whom I’d been watching before, I chose not to broach with them after all their availability to baby-sit, and simultaneously (a) by seeing Gail’s newly softened breast as she lay leaning on her elbow speaking to me with the window leaves dark green that early Portland morning after Annette provoked Al, and (b) seeing tall soft Tracy after a few minutes’ absence come back into the nonsense and smoke of some antique Heights living room one gently drunk New Year’s noon with her hem caught way up on her garter, I (c) sensed contemplating each other (though Dom I swear I did not see) Ev naked in morning light and Emma just dressed, I said to Hugh, “Haven’t you ever played it by ear in bed—?” “Christ what a thought!” Hugh said with unthinking wit—“like,” I said, “you see a part of her you really didn’t before and you interrupt yourself? Love is short maybe, but the body is long, I can remember times…” dot dot dot.
With lame reflectiveness Hugh said, “No… no, you haven’t changed.”
“You still selling space for — that magazine?” I said, and Hugh said, “No,” and he said, “Call you sometime,” and, mastering himself only enough to not say what he felt, he added, “Ever try the Jap steak house—?” “There’s more than one,” I said. “As I get older,” he went on, “I seem to eat in more expensive restaurants.” But he’d said I hadn’t changed, and he went back a long way.
I knew we would never get together — unless Ev for no reason phoned him — but I knew we would meet like this a few more times.
Since my pages went, I guess I feel all over again I can say anything to you, Dom. But didn’t I feel this when I broke off? They’re like Pope Alexander’s envoy to Prester John, those pages. But could Alexander say anything he wanted to John? I can pick up where I was interrupted, but what preceded that? The Pope’s envoy never returned, nor with him the Pope’s message. Maybe he self-destructed at destination. Or changed. In the shower at the New York A.C. where up to about my thirteenth or fourteenth year we sometimes went on Uncle Cooley’s honorary card when he was in town on a Saturday, and he played pool while we swam, my father looked me up and down, we were letting the moderately hot water purify us of our energies and putting off the moment when we’d turn on the cold shock, and we’d been discussing whether it was true that swimming used all your muscles, then we were discussing the magnetized handle of the new knife my mother stuck on the refrigerator door, my father was telling about the electric field, and I finally asked whether you could get fried if you touched a live wire in the shower but were wearing sneakers, and my father said why would you wear sneakers in the shower and continued his former explanation by ending it saying that even if you didn’t use a coil or solenoid, even if nothing was there to detect the field, the field itself was still there, and then we turned off our hot taps and turned up the cold, and howled in the searching chill and though I thought there was something about my father’s last remark I should reflect on, I thought upstairs to my uncle and that when we’d arrived earlier I’d wanted to play Chicago with him rather than slog a whole lot of laps crawl, backstroke, and butterfly in the championship chlorine. Did I tell you, Dom, of my brief argument with my father? It was the morning after my date with Camille. Her father was so amused by my embroidered account of how I was named and so startled by my knowing the Exuma islands and his own Andros and its predominant marshes where once he’d slaved for visiting duck hunters — that he’d said she could stay out till one. And my father woke up in the morning more tired than he’d gone to bed and wanted to know more about Camille, whose modest mouth beyond my memory as I sat on the Sunday edge of my cooling bed I found slowly smiling between my thighs. I heard my mother say the father was West Indian and the mother from Detroit, and my mother said to my father, “I promise you you are not going to church today; so you can take it easy in the living room,” upon which I said, by now swaying happily in my pajamas in the hall between my room and my bathroom as my mother passed me going to the kitchen, “Only reason to believe in God is it’s someone you can tell your side of the story to.” An only child doesn’t only protect his parents. They lose their lives in his, so he must take care not to lose his life. Even including the action theater of your suicide, or my omenoid reflections on history and religion, or the physical witchcrafts of childhood and the kitsch biophysics of your (and my) Americanolysis, is my trick here tonight only the unchidden privateering of an only child? You were one too. Did I talk like this earlier this evening? But in tonight’s history we are beyond evenings in a state whose chances — as you yourself Dom if you knew me well might say — seem congruent with the field haunted by my erratic but aforementioned vectoral muscle.