Will your son-in-law come back? He has my words but not the key. Where did that typewriter repair receipt go?
Your son Richard evidently had no use for your peculiar Location Piece, an 8 1/2 by 11 shot of a grid bearing what looks like a plan of this apartment plus dots and dates possibly designating where somebody will be at certain times. The blocking in of little spaces here and there almost makes a picture so maybe the blocks are like picture elements in a TV screen. But who knows whether he used your key and obliged you and came and checked this place for you while, after a lecture-stop at a college, you were helping the phytoplankton people on the Cape? They’d had that strange breakthrough, but now after protesting that they were non-political they were having to fight off pacifist guerrillas who claimed the breakthrough research was tied to some of the more belligerent fundings of the space program — and what about the Chemical Bank’s investments, what about those?
The Ohio Oil I told Perpetua’s father’s broker to buy me in ’59 changed its title to Marathon in ’62 and eventually split, but its holdings are now sixty-five percent in Libya so I’ll get out. When I mentioned all this to Bob he said he and Leo were telling their Portland clients about Ohio as early as ’58. I think in interrupted scenes, Dom, but there is only one scene here. It is here. It is an arc quite out of time and real not at all like all those good and bad times and those bewildered distances that determine this arc. It is in a field-state, one might gaily say, which is not a proud parable of anything but is the fact of multiruptive bodies acting on each other though rarely in contact.
Though I say so, those vectors know how to slide into the one, albeit interrupted, sinew of my confession.
Since Ev and I were seeing each other long before her divorce, you can imagine what Ted let me feel when she and I observed her former husband’s suicide by marrying. You know I could line out the whole damn story: the final five years (for Ev) of nothing; Doug’s unclever recessions like “Don’t you wish I was an alcoholic, then you’d know I wouldn’t dare leave you,” and every aging day a supposition painfully shallowly imbedded in Ev that because he had to blame his job as a bond underwriter for his gathering indifference, he blamed her; so that she stopped saying what she knew was the true truth, that the job wasn’t dull at all but…, his new days of hooky in a sunny rental car, a widening (though not deepening) weight of implicit nights (an ancient history, another life, another sex life Ev would not go into, though I didn’t ask); then her efforts to fool them into touch again, starting a fight when he’d come and sit down with the New Yorker movie listings or a Consumer Report on swimming pool chemicals; puerile provocation in his announcement that Ted would go to public school next year for a change, Ted’s junior year when the grades count most — countered by Ev with mere explicit acquiescence plus then next day her humiliatingly detailed and ye gods helpful information about Stuyvesant, the best public high school nearby, maybe the best in the city except Bronx Science — but one spring day (for after all you can’t do this sort of thing on two or three days unless you want to torture yourself) he rented a Hertz and they found him on a back road near Croton Reservoir.
This thumbnail contour is perhaps the locus of all equidistances from Ev’s breast and the man’s half-recaptured ambitions, or simply capillary imbalance within and urban noise without.
And Dom, you can tell by now that whether or not you asked me What’s my line (and were answered) I could do that scene near the Westchester-Putnam line if I had to, and with flair.
But be fair: did I have the power to funnel your interests into suicide? Although you make a point of avoiding losers you survive on a diet of response, and your children disembodied you. Even if I’d let their letters through, you’d have felt disinherited, wouldn’t you? By another delivery system, my confession to you comes back to me. Instead of that DA-LITE screen you could have bought another lenticular one just as good from Ward for less than half the price. Bob’s conscience is not mine, nor Bob’s son Robby, though for some reason Robby now writes me long letters. My hand has turned sort of scrawly in the last few lines. Bob would, but indeed did, think your life had lost its center judging from what he’d recently read by and about you; there was a day in New York in which we happened to see you. I was still full of the Chicago room where you talked to the Inner Group with your mouth full of powdery doughnut and I suffered (in the graph of our gathering coördination) a drop in faith: yes, for one instinctive moment — did I say this earlier? — I thought what the hell had your life to do with mine, except that I’d moved into your building recently.
Bob didn’t know I’d interviewed Darla at the very time he was packing for the plane trip but he read on the plane about your ambiguous defenestration, and he said whatever happened he didn’t think you were playing it safe. For him of course you were merely a face on a news magazine. From your angle, Dom, you can imagine how tempted I was to confide in Bob my full dossier if not my (as Darla would say) Involvement. But there wasn’t time.
From that eighth floor above Wall Street Bob knew you as soon as I pointed; he said (what of course I knew) that the now mildly famous retired cop had been discouraged by his lawyer from suing you for saying he had a prostate condition. A group had come around you in a parallelogram of late sun down there on the floor of the street’s tall chamber, girls in bulging headscarves starting the weekend half an hour early, hatless commuters with attaché cases, ancient gray Mercuries with their stock transfers or certified hundred thousand dollar checks making sure this was the last day’s errand. We couldn’t hear you; the man Bob had come to see in this office was saying that Donnelly printing, and the publishing stocks generally, hadn’t done as well as Connie had predicted in ’66; but down there in the street someone reached to push you, and you shoved the wrong shoulder. And eight floors above you Bob — whose old nick over the cheekbone showed white against his tan — was diverted by a nearby secretary holding a phone who called to a man that they were ready with Cairo. Bob said he was ready to go. But it was hardly half an hour we’d been in this his parent office — seats on the Exchange, weekly Market Letter, wire service, informational amenities, all unimportant to my purposes (even to the future of my 100 Marathon that had once been 50 Ohio Oil). Hadn’t Bob come all the way down from Maine to talk business? Here we were, headed back over the ticker-to-ticker carpet past desks and file cabinets, past the research library where a lady with rings on her fingers was cutting up a newspaper with black scissors, past a bulletin board featuring a long, crooked graph, and suddenly a doorway through which I saw an ochre conference room with a long oval table clear except for a pad and an ashtray in front of each chair.