Dom, I tried to know Doug.
She said that too, said it often: “I tried to know him, you know. I didn’t let him push me into some fixed household policy of (say) never again mentioning something, oh like having another baby or moving to Phoenix or California (which was one of his ideas once and then he said no it wasn’t ever again to be mentioned) or changing his job, taking a real estate course up in Westchester and selling New-York-State-approved lots in Bahama Sound. I mean I didn’t go out of my way to bring up what upset him, but I just kept myself from becoming a nurse to his — oh his dreary wet mind (but it didn’t used to be!) — like resolving to not do some little thing and keeping to your resolve, never letting it get interfered with, interrupted, like you were saying your friend Bob wouldn’t speak to Hugh Blood after the big vestibule fight, just sat pat”
Next to him in Problems of Democracy and French, was often in the same car of the Fourth Avenue Local going out in the morning (though Bob and I often drove home with the lacrosse coach) and Bob brought a poem he wrote into the Polygon office where Hugh was managing either and Bob still wouldn’t speak to Hugh — that’s the kind of methodical madness you must never let yourself be a party to inflicting.
“on himself, though you can say I was unyielding. But I did give in often. I sat eating soufflé and a lovely wheaty Arab salad one supper all alone with him and I saw that, gobbling up the tabboule salad which he used to like very much, he wanted to be miserable, so I went against my impulse and didn’t interrupt his mood and the sound of his munching. But I stayed human, Cy, don’t you see? And say I had that polyp in me that I didn’t exactly want to go to Mount Sinai to have excised — even if Dr. Sailor is quite a blade — and I was fucked if I wouldn’t bellyache to Doug about it, I was not going to treat him like an invalid on a special diet. Say I wonder if gynecologists aren’t always pretty dashing. Oh yes I asked Doug that. I was trying to make conversation one night he couldn’t sleep, and he said what did I mean by ‘dashing,’ a cunt-lover?” As if Ev’s words were some heretofore unknown tropical or para-tropical vocabulary, they must be honored.
Ev was in bed when she said all that to me verbatim. I said Doug was right about gynecologists, but in the wrong spirit. And after a moment, when I thought she’d dropped off, she giggled. I think at me.
And So Dom this is the last time I try to tell about Al and Bob — distinguish, so to speak, between them, as if by spelling out what keeping them apart meant, I clear up… only perhaps a hypertrophied membrane: I must become less precious, and Ted must become as precious to me as my only child Emma, as precious as my only child’s body, whose “Ong Zeus” moves to “Ange-ooce” and toward the reality of orange juice that comes in a Tropicana carton. Ev pays attention, she’s one person who pays attention. Is this because what I tell her about, say, Hugh Blood or “Pappy” Russell Pound or Joey Neurohr and learning how to reach in and flip the lock of the Vande Land’s areaway door, does for her what Bob once said my words could do for him, show up as if before an electric field old images sleeping on the inside of his head: a room filling with salt water, a church filling up with winter boats: No. To Ev, Hugh is simply what I’ve told her he is, she’s never met him. I’ll add, Dom, that because the touch of Tracy Blood doesn’t find another locus — even if I know that at the open end of tonight’s confession that lonely loop is to be smudged (like ironic filings lured by an unforeseen polynomial lode from one pattern to another) — I haven’t told Ev about Trace.
What did Al not tell me about Tracy? She made a pass at him that bad weekend in early ’53, as I learned from her not him. That poem Bob submitted in ’46 when Hugh was in the Polygon room was all about a girl’s body found to be like a sort of composite vacation land, and we all thought it was fantastically great though I wondered if he’d really done it himself. Even Dr. Cadbury (the reluctant adviser to the paper) was impressed and took it to his room to read it again, but then, though he said he’d be interested to know who the girl was, he had to veto Hugh, who’d of course instantly accepted it when Bob brought it in because he wanted to get back in good with Bob. I never asked Bob if, in those iambuoys of his, “peaked mounts” and “rolling braes,” that “long dividing ravine,” “moist bois,” and “ancient strait” added up to Petty or one of those two Catholic girls on Pineapple Street whose mothers worked, or (for the words made me think of her) my own Tracy.
Dear Trace stammered trying to speak of my secret, whatever in her romantic head it was: “Ev — e — everybody’s got some… secret. And maybe the guys who talk best are the ones who do the best job of… you know.” But I said Why guys? And that got us onto who talked more, men or girls, and then I cozily conceded she was probably right, men talked a lot more. But from the Biltmore ’69 I was bound (wasn’t I?) ahead to Al’s conservative trap the late spring weekend of ’68 but instead have come to my bust-up with Tracy in March of ’53. Voices from the near elevator jog my sequence. Around four, Al would be arriving at the New London station with or without Annette, Tracy and I had to meet the train, we had to get up, we had to get dressed. March in Mystic was raw but fresh, the sea and land interrupting each other in rhythms more mysterious than frost and thaw. Before we finally rolled out, Tracy picked up her earlier remark about secrets, and when from the high bed I got my feet down on that cold floor of dark honey boards she said as for secrets it was no secret what she wanted, and then said she was sorry but she had dreams of losing me, and I turned around with the ball of my foot in a slight trough warp of one of those magnificent old floor planks and looked at her all snug and anxious under a quilt and said, “We didn’t even have lunch.” The Bloods weren’t coming up this weekend; it wasn’t clear who they thought Tracy was entertaining.
She didn’t drive in with me to New London after all, and I was late; Al was standing outside the station in his pea jacket with his small blue canvas bag beside his spit-shined black toes and reading what turned out to be The Iliad, Dom. I remember, because Al asked what the Thornton Wilder was that Tracy had left on the back seat.
I asked about the ship and Al said he was beginning to have trouble with a couple of the black-gang — enginemen thirds — who played Keep Away in the berthing compartment with his German book, and I asked how Fred Eagle was and how Annette was doing up at Orono and how the librarian in Portland was (whose name I’d forgotten), and the Seminole shipmate and of course the Corpsman who read a lot (whose encyclopedic knowledge of VD, Dom, and of a particular creamy gray meerschaum found in Asia Minor and Thebes and in a certain serpentine mined in Utah I may have mentioned in those pages lifted by your shrink son-in-law) and as I drove away from the center of town toward the bridge that would carry us eastward past Groton (where, as I know I’ve mentioned, Al once got a Captain’s Mast for receiving stolen peanut butter) and thence to Mystic, I was curiously excited returning to Tracy in her car. Al said Annette was wonderful, she should have tried for a scholarship to Smith, Fred Eagle’s wife was sick and he was off the sauce and had taken her to Cuba for a week — a nice nice man. Al said he was really looking forward to this weekend, and I said They call it a farm, it’s a restored farmhouse, they farmed turkeys during the war. I was about to tell in detail how they’d run it while living most of the year in Brooklyn Heights, but Al said, “Eighteenth century?” and said he was looking forward to a few drinks nodding in front of the fender with deep-browed Homer—“and how’s your joint?”