Why wouldn’t Bob now? Is it because, unlike Bob, Al neither saves his stubs nor often even fills them in in the check book, and loves dealing his twice-applied-for Carte Blanche to charge Lobster Fra at the motel near the college he teaches at? No, not exactly. Or would it be because Al, unlike Bob, can tell the difference between Antioch theology and the more parabolic Alexandrian, yet cares about Cyril’s supposed persecution of Hypatia or Empress Eudoxia’s of golden-mouthed Chrysostom only for the reverend learning these violences sprang from.
Why wouldn’t Bob accept Al now? Because when he got around to telling Al — as ye gods he’s bound to in their midtown motel bar tonight — that if he were back today pursuing his interrupted Master’s he’d write his thesis on the figure of the Ordinary Masculine Jesus in Bonhoeffer, Beckett, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, terribly he would feel in Al’s cordial doubt the pitiless condescension of an after all in no way limbless boy from Heatsburg who once said he’d give his right arm to have gone to Harvard and who way up in some nook of his mortal soul assumes Bob could have gone as if by social fiat. Al lets nothing intrude on his Saturday morning at the new squash courts. Both Al and Bob would be as suspicious of head-shrinkers as Ted’s own doctor was of Ted’s “prepared material” when Ted was just casually talking about a guy he knows who turns on with 125 mg. antibiotic suppositories taken orally and even hourly.
How, without me, could Al and Bob ever find a way to talk about (granted) the odd (though trivial) kinships between them, like how they used to make their wives stay up with them at night till they finished their reading?
Once when Bob did his famous simulated window leap from the fifth-form study hall, “Freddy” Smith sitting as usual way at the back broke the silence with applause and a “Hear, hear” he’d picked up from his father (who played court tennis with Mr. Pound and one muggy Memorial Day said to me with arched eyebrow over bloodshot eye, “It’s as o double t as e double l”). Well, Akkie Backus up on the podium with his Times at the sports pointed his open scissors at “Freddy” and told him to report after school to do two hundred cubes before he went home. We all forgot Bob’s leap and turned varying degrees around to laugh at “Freddy,” but because of those endless multiplications he missed his prissy twin Bill’s victory in the hundred in the dual meet that afternoon.
Sometimes, though, betraying how much of all this I recall seems to be in me merely the power not to grow up. And I wonder if my memorial dwellings are after all made out of the third little pig’s bricky-brick-bricks baked in the warm morning of self-esteem. Ev lets me alone.
For some minutes now, Dom, I have not been writing. Was the claim-check from the typewriter shop in with the pages the Hungarian took?
Whether or not you are dead doesn’t matter, though you are. It would be outside this apartment anyway. Your pen and your paper make my apparent hand in your suicide easier to bear. Again I haven’t put pen to paper for some minutes. What kind of time was that? I waited for The Heatsburg Hour all week long and then it was all finished in no time.
I shouldn’t have taken your letters perhaps. Maybe so far from ensuring the continuity of your resolve, I interrupted it by increasing your parental isolation, that most assaulting sadness of all, yes maybe more contagious than the masochistic patriotism you told past-President Dave Dickens’s Inner Group you sought to embody.
Sometimes she’d murmur in the middle of something wonderful, “I’m so awkward,” letting the magnetic tip of my elbow move her weightless wrist or my cheek her long leg, yet thinking that she hadn’t been prompt (or something) enough when ye gods she was the kind of prompt that makes love into one waiting mass of near-time. It’s Tracy, I hope you’ve already guessed from what I hope I said somewhere in those pages removed by your weighty (though, from my angle then, spaceless) son-in-law — her whole body every place equal so if I knew in the dark or eyes closed where her head was and where her hair and the live rimlet tucked in the softest pout nearly hiding the navel, they were in no rank of reward or time — well Dom maybe that’s slavish but — they were just all always equally there. She murmured “awkward” because she liked to inject that titillating lie — she wasn’t the tiniest touch awkward but I never said so to her in words, for bare as I was, that word “awkward” coming through her lips uncovered me all over again as if now she’d grown a third hand, and teeth as kind as reeds. Tall she was, oh yes; but her vulnerable neck was hardly in the same league as that of Parmigianino’s Madonna; and in general her proportions and gentle mobility could not have reminded anyone of a giraffe, not even someone who like me lay newly awake at four a.m. visualizing her beside a pale Nubian giraffe (or cameleopard I called it on a history quiz) from all sides and in all attitudes, knowing that her father could never have had in mind that persecuted ruminant’s rare, remote beauty that the Romans unerringly exploited in their degenerate amphitheaters.
I’m going on to the end of this, Dom, even burdened by the chance that I may have killed you, who now become my ideal listener alive in the space of your things here. Why do Bob and Al want to bring me together?
Ev told me how toward the end she said to Doug her first husband that he should expect less of himself, a little less honor and mind and honesty; have more fun, be less sensitive and — oh she cried for a while; but it wasn’t because I was touching her that she was able to say as I was just dropping off, “No, you know I honestly did not drive him to do it.”