But while I measured the volting ergs of famous future you were pulse after pulse bringing back to homely Gotham from your own moving void your American interior rafting Colorado rapids, judging a drum majorette final, placing (a slightly injured) last in a celebrity trampoline event, and, high in a Houston office complex, cooling a thousand-dollar-a-plate cadre of the underground Counter-Blast Org — somehow the immeasurable familiarity of the bone-white nick on Bob’s cheek displayed your daring territory. The same with the tough low moccasin-toe boots that like his father he ordered from L. L. Bean in Freeport, Maine, and the same with the green-gray tweed whose quality he’d have spotted at a sale in Boston, and likewise the tiny edge of roughness where he’d worn his Nixon button last year; yes and your ergs were displaced, too, by Bob’s blank gaze behind the gold rims waiting for a violent intuition to take hold (a habit that so sets him apart from my country friend Al that they could never get along). And while these details of Bob displaced the loud wilderness of your life, Dom, I endeavored successfully to remember again what I had in common with you, and simultaneously, or you might say “equi-valently,” I felt next to me the fatal familiarity of this friend Bob whom I’m so unlike.
Bob shook his head. “He’s running for a nomination he doesn’t want. Did you read the piece in Time?” (I read most of those depth-studies knowing they never come close.) “It’s easy,” said Bob, “to see where his ideas come from; his wife left him, his son and daughter disowned him, the student movements are dropping him left and right — so he decides to enshrine chaos.” Bob lighted a cigarette and said again, “He enshrines chaos.”
“Which came first?” I said; “the ideas or the personal screw-up?”
“There’s no center,” said Bob. “That’s the point. Let’s go get a drink.” So we are not at The Whaler yet.
We had come back to the east porch of the church and were looking into the long turning cleft of Wall Street. I ought to think up some entertainment, but I wondered why Bob had mentioned Al so casually as if Al were some mere matter of fact in (say) that poly-grid of equi-valent phenomena you, Dom, have profoundly outlined for your public if your public would only think and see. People hurried down Broadway toward Bowling Green, some no doubt toward South Ferry, people coming the other way dropped down subway stairs, a man named Breen we’d gone to Poly with and hadn’t seen for years saw us and waved, men grabbed their newspapers at the corner-stands without seeming to stop. Bob quoted Nahum — or, as I later learned, Father Sedgwick quoting Nahum in an ecological context: “Locusts and grasshoppers.” We had both waved back to Breen. Bob probably regretted missing his regular Friday doubles at the club.
In his pronouncements that Friday afternoon and evening for all their force I felt some absence of priorities puzzlingly similar to what you’ve preached and displayed (at least till tonight, when you did away with your options). Bob never once acknowledged my comment that our new apartment was still a mess, nor mentioned Ev (who I’d said was home with Emma and painting a second bathroom); in the cab going uptown to The Whaler, he asked about my work in Strictural Anthroponoia; but later downtown in the middle of his second plate of octopus he stared hard at me and said this octopus was “terrifyingly insignificant” stuff. He seemed then to want to get away from the long, strewn table-cloths of Puglia’s but not exactly because he was afraid we’d miss the lady archaeologist I was introducing him to. To you, Dom, I needn’t describe Puglia’s, its local posters of combos coming, its grizzled Sicilians chewing roast chicken, and the veteran waitress with brittle-black coif eating her supper out of a carton she’s brought back from a Chinese place — for, that platform day of your Hester Street climax, your oil-dark brown-paper sheepshead came from Puglia’s.
Bob said no one understood the mystery at the heart of the State of Maine or had any visible pride in New York, at least the people he looked at around here, and he said, “Let’s go see your friend and ask him what he’s running for”—as if you were my friend! — which startled me because I now saw that I’d been treating Bob like a visitor, not a New Yorker, and he really was a visitor.
Dom, to no one could I deny that I did not bring about your suicide. I didn’t do it. Bob’s conscience is simpler than mine but he too would disown any theory of suicidal influence. He’d say, You do it or you don’t, nobody commits anyone else’s suicide. Which may have been Bob’s refuge from resenting his father’s influence.
Your typewriter repair receipt is in those pages your son-in-law appropriated, so at least one of his questions will get an answer.
When we got to her apartment, Bob was surprised when I said I had to go. But surprise was checked by pleasure; and any thanks for my politeness was frustrated by his sneaking knowledge of me. He must not have thought I was heading home to Ev and to what after my words of explanation I could almost smell — the penetrating spread of expensive oil-base paint our landlord had refused to buy or apply since ours was an irregular takeover sublet prior to statutory tenanthood next year. Bob simply said, “You’ll come back, eh?”
He and the archaeologist were discussing Robby when I came back two hours later. They were sitting across the long room from each other. She was pinching the last inch of a joint. Bob had a cup and saucer. She dropped ash on her wifely bathrobe of pink quilt. You understand, Dom, I’m following simply a direct if not straight line to a point; hence nothing about her age, her lack of brothers and sisters, her friendship with Kit Carbon, her uncle’s stake in New Mexico natural gas, the equidistance from her of her father’s money and her summer dig in Turkey with two equidistant girl-friends of Cora’s and so on. Bob had his gold spectacles off and his shoes off.
“Why did I say I’d come back,” I said. They chuckled. She said, “Why did you leave?” and I said, “Did I interrupt anything?” and she said, “By leaving?” and Bob laughed again and padded out of the room and then guffawed as if at an afterthought. He continued from there what they’d been on when I arrived. “Robby knows he’s kidding himself. He’s not temperamental any more than I am. He’s just lazy. Told me he didn’t have any homework.” Bob appeared in the doorway telling the story as if it were a joke. “Petty tried to cover for him, I gave him something to remember by Jesus.”
A stranger might not have identified in the picture near Bob that famous stone relief of Assurbanipal just back from Nineveh having a bite with his sweet queen in a bower complete with flowers, fruit, birds, but pendant from a curling bough also the upside-down (hence seemingly bearded) head of the severed king Teuman of Elam often erroneously thought to be a forebear of that greatest Persian a century and a half later who (I once hazarded on a Poly exam) if he owed nothing to the postal system instituted by Assurbanipal’s grandfather may yet have traced a dream or two of sway and perpetuity in the track of the Assyrian tiger and its river of blood.
My archaeologist friend said to Bob, “Glad you’re not my father, love.”
As Bob and I left, she told me Cora was having an Accident on somebody’s roof tomorrow night—“I think it’s going to be just a lot of cotton waste to wade in”—and could Ev and I come, she’d forgotten all about us; but I said it was impossible, and was about to say the apartment was still a mess when she said the paint smell must have gone by now and to me she added, “Ev said Cora got you that apartment. Lucky, from what I hear.”