When I said you were about to film a political ad in Trinity churchyard at the Broadway end of Wall, Bob said let’s have a look. I was wondering if Bob was seeing anyone elsewhere on business that weekend, for I had a ledger full of field results to structure on Saturday. It crossed my mind as we head up toward Trinity that through some fatal trick Bob had learned by way of Dot — and Ev! — that I was under surveillance.
In The Whaler later, when Bob asked if Camille was still around — and for a second I didn’t know who he was talking about — I dwelt again on his response to your energy in that city churchyard. It’s all one to me tonight, Dom. Why so it is! All one. “What’s it?” asks my later father—“what’s all one? Gee, for a Cultured Anthropogromer you’re mighty impressionistic.”
Don’t you want to know what Bob was really doing in New York that weekend? He wanted some illumination postcards for Petty, but we were too late arriving at the Morgan Library, though we’d left Trinity churchyard before you finished shooting. Hard between Fulton’s erect slab and Hamilton’s topless pyramid, you chatted and hollered and mused to different distances, and the videotapers triangulated your active profile and the unspeakable records of your full face, and there were hecklers and the representative of Bankers Anonymous To End the War; and while they were trying to film this ad for your forthcoming campaign and the young director was calling Cut, and trying to kid you into being more simply serious, and two cameramen contentedly firing away from Gleaneagled shoulders with (from one vantage) the church and (from an opposite) a clutch of women grinning through the Rector Street fence, I said to Bob that when I’d come here with my old friend Al he’d gotten the sexton’s Puerto Rican assistant to trot out the cemetery book showing who and where everyone was; and Bob hardly heard me and murmured something about that sort of fussing over facts, he was grinning at the scene and at you Dom with a kind of readiness that made me think he could easily let go and pop someone. You glanced our way, and I thought you looked twice at my saddle-shoes as if they were odd or even you’d seen them before. Which you had, the day you lost your wallet while sharing the alarm box with the premature witch. And suddenly, as if recollecting more than he could possibly know, Bob turned and said, “Oh yes; Al.”
In The Whaler, where Bob wanted to go for old time’s sake, I answered that I hadn’t seen the fair Camille in years, and Bob said that after that Christmas time in the late forties he phoned her once himself but she said any friend of mine wasn’t necessarily a friend of hers. Bob would not have accepted Al as an equal.
A couple of hours ago Bob had breezed through that office floor like an up-country millionaire; and on the way to the man he dealt with directly — the lacrosse All-America from Hopkins — Bob had lacked only his old Poly stick to complete in my image the wily broken-field romp that had been his trademark, shoulders going low and then swinging unpredictably, sharp turn at one desk into a lateral aisle, sharp turn then near the window into a longitudinal aisle. Now in The Whaler I told him this, ignoring the query about Camille. I picked up my recollection of Al’s intrusive New York data and said Al would do well in Bob’s racket, make a hell of an analyst — he’d know how much it would cost in differing circumstances to ship natural gas from Alaska to Japan, and the exact equidistance from a point on the north shore of Alaska’s Banks Island to New York, London, and Tokyo — but he’d hesitate to prophesy.
“What is this?” asked Bob and tipped his gold-rimmed eyes back and finished his double martini. A middle-aged tar in faded denims came down a toy gangway and passed bearing a tray with a pair of drinks. In the low light they looked like Topaz Neons, but I couldn’t turn away from Bob’s vague, rough question to peer around that dusky lounge, and of course I couldn’t imagine you here in The Whaler Bar among the Fairleigh Dickinson girls and the tourists from East Pennsy. “I mean,” he said, “all this about Al. Is it the same Al used to live in Massachusetts? your summer place? where you made a fool of what’s-his-name who died in Basic?”
There wasn’t anything wrong, I said. But Bob said I had a funny idea of what he and Leo did. I asked what Leo was up to this weekend. Lewiston on business, Bob said. I said Yes of course I knew they were committed to the gross national progress, the central notion of America, the individual pursuit of the truth about national enterprise, the life of companies, the coast-to-coast miracle. And Bob said quietly, O.K. that was it if I wanted to put it like that, I saw my irony had made the bullshit sound intellectual; so he wasn’t unpleased. And just as the denim tar came to see if we wanted another martini Bob interrupted his bemused — even mystical — concurrence sharply asking if that was “coast” or “cost”—had I picked up a brogue doing field studies in Brooklyn? But when the waiter left, Bob went on from Brooklyn to say that you really couldn’t go home again after your “center” had shifted, and I pointed out that though I carried my present investigations into eastern Brooklyn I after all did live in the center of Manhattan now.
And ye gods my words have blown a bell-jar vacuum before me with inside it Bob’s white-knuckled fist, and my stolen Junior Corona, and Bohack Joey’s horny hand and a dim, slim form in corduroys that should be me coming between that pushing, grasping hand and its angry object the indescribably supple, now sweaty Perpetua, just in time for my intervening jawbone to catch Joey’s dim thumbnaiclass="underline" but though Bob’s fist is here — and Dom you know I could describe Petty’s neck and arms if I chose — I now see I can’t merely get to that white-knuckled fist
(that has so little to do with those groin-impaled captives who added savor to my early acquisition of the Assyrian postal system; so little to do with the hunted lioness, a live relief in stone, dying from her paralyzed hindquarters on up her great edificial slant to the fierce head and shoulders above the muscled struts of her forelegs; so little to do with Sennacherib’s library of clay who, though at the Egyptian borders his iron armies were frustrated to decimation-point by some Delta pest subsequently identified by the Hebrews as the angel of the Lord, found cleaner fields on the eastern arc of the Fertile Crescent crushing once and for all the Babylon of my old Hammurapi)
no indeed, I find I must earn that white-knuckled fist by equidistancing such other forces as slipped into my field while I was merely minding my own parabola.
Bob’s idea of you was standard all-purpose, from the media, and he knows what is said of you. But there in the graveyard I felt with wondrous Calm and Elasticity the Force and Truth of your achieved doctrines, Dom, now once more (albeit in jagged fragments) laid neutrally out. You were putting on your abortive Italian rhythm: “We gotta get away from centralized privacy, stop try’n’a keep a hold of our sentiments — wait I mean—no—our sentiments make us hold onto this crap about our owna centrality — this city gotta be deunified, everybody gotta see the city from one big helicopter. If elected that’s where I begin, pal, everyone rides that helicopter, see the city as a coördinate field of force, not a series of kitchens subordinated to living rooms subordinated to underpants on the bedpost.”
Were you faintly Irish answering the first of their questions? Who’s financing your campaign? “Cost-to-cost cross-section.” What you really running for? “Want win in a walk.” A tall thin prematurely gray man in a clerical collar said with a rueful smile, “He’s high, the man’s high,” and in steady Spanish you called him a couple of names and said you were almost in the end-zone and he was still looking around for his balls.