to (upstairs, and dated from the very early Federal Period) a field bed—fair game for coarse jests when Al identifies it for a younger colleague, but the six-foot maple posts a source of joy for a colleague’s wife given the tour by Annette:
to (downstairs) the new eye-level oven, and on the adjacent counter an oval plate of very promising liver whose dry sepia, now free of edge skin and pale cartilage and dusted with flour, has had five seconds’ bath of boiling water poured on it to seal in the blood.
“Where there is a key absence at a homogeneously Brooklyn Heights evening, this gap will be centrifugally ignored with such unbroken élan it will cease to exist.” Now, like any distinction you wish to make between hors d’oeuvres lumpy and mealy and/or sticky, I had foreseen Al’s absence but not clearly Bob and Petty’s; yet at that electro-static party in ’53 my social senses had been so stimulated by the latter absence that I’d let myself in conversation touch gratuitously upon the former.
Now reviewing in Al and Annette’s living room Al’s remarks in the car, I found my fresh equational form thwarted not by Tracy’s acts alone. But how on earth could I broach to Al the now broken theorem when he couldn’t to begin with comprehend why the dialectic inherent in it was insidious, nor believe that it had been a muscular and honest effort to embody field.
Al had often been uneasy or even abrupt about my work. He wanted to know how I’d gotten from Jewish-Negro myth-friction in southeast Brooklyn to hors d’oeuvre ceremony on the Heights. Now (as Annette protested we were about to eat) Al asked me what was the social significance of the pâté de fois gras he was opening; I said goose liver had not to my knowledge had much ancient predictive function but anyway I’d about scrapped my hors d’oeuvres file and was concentrating on you, Dom, and in fact on the anthro-toponomy of friendship.
“That makes you a friendship man,” he said quietly, poking the fire. “Still drawing diameters and truncated spirals?”
Annette asked what Baba Babcock had had in his trunk, but Al ignored the interruption. Hadn’t we cleaned up on those guys at the Moon that time? and I said Yes we had — wasn’t it ’53?
Al said, “You took the little bad-ass striker from the Coos, and I took the big guy. The little one was tougher. Then we finished up with the middle-sized one off my ship.”
The SP who’d been standing outside was no friend of Al’s. But if he didn’t save him from being busted, he saved us both from the Portland cops. “And all because,” said Al, “I told them Coos Bay wasn’t in Alaska, it was in Oregon, and Barataria Bay was in Louisiana and opened into the Gulf, and you said not only was it in Oregon it was in Coos County and the Coos River ran into it, and the big guy seemed to want to try discussing it but the bad ass said, ‘Shee-it’ and the middle-sized one said, ‘Two years of fuckin’ college,’ and Cy you turned up the old insouciance and said something about ‘Furthermore it’s twenty-five-odd miles from Remote, Oregon.’”
Did I say that, Dom? That gray Monday, the Coos Bay docked. Gail had stayed Sunday night as well as Saturday and took a morning bus to Boston. Al brought a volume of his encyclopedia on liberty because he wanted to show me a paragraph biography of someone he thought must have been one of those obscure great men, like Fred Eagle. I was dubious, I knew something about the man and when we sat down in a booth at the Moon I modestly scattered into our talk every bit of stuff about him I had, and the three boors were in the next booth, like a force of gravity.
But now Al thought the fight had been provoked by him.
After dinner he told Annette he was sick of ignorant students and wished he could work for a library like the Huntington and be as independent as (he thought) I was, working indirectly for a museum. Then he said he was glad I’d come up. I asked whatever happened to the hospitable librarian in Portland and Annette said, “Al dropped him,” but Al said, “Hey wait,” as she went through to the kitchen, “he was a bit too unmarried for me,” and Annette called, “You never returned the key to his house.” Then Al said with amiable but real suspicion he’d have to write this Bob and get the facts on that party I ostracized him from. I said I’d give him the address and Al said without paying much attention to me because he seemed to be thinking of what Annette had said, “It’s around Portland, didn’t you say?… or was it you?”
Later he wanted to know why the hell I was interested in you, Dom, and I with ostensible pomposity beginning and deliberating an answer managed to make Al interrupt. “He’s not all wrong, I never said that. He told about two Italian harridans who assaulted him after some speech honoring some Viet vets where he’d said — I almost forget what he said, but I agreed with him. Cy, I hate the war too — Annette knows I do; but tell me why is it most of the time the types who bring me the petitions I can’t stand the sight of them, and they’re not all students either. It’s something about balls. It’s not that they need a bath, I just can’t help thinking would this one stand up for me in a pinch — they’ve got blackheads inside where you can’t see.”
“Oh Al,” said Annette.
“Anyhow I keep politics out of the classroom. Some want to know where I stand on the Domino theory. I say that’s my business and how is it relevant to Boswell’s Account of Corsica? That little teaser tonight never heard of Theodore Dreiser.”
“Dreiser’s coming back,” I said. “These kids want accuracy.”
“And our thousand-dollar lecturer got asked about his pending divorce and you know what that comedian said? that the real function of marriage was it was a prerequisite to divorce. And you say that’s a great man?”
I explained wearily that it was your way of accommodating Dialectic and Dichotomy to Field and Collaboration that induced me to regard you as someone significant.
We all sighed, and a stick of oak that was all coals in the middle burned through and fell.
Al said, “So breaking up is what proves you’re alive.”
Annette said, “Well I just can’t tear myself away.” She got up and touched my shoulder and excused herself. After a couple of minutes I heard water in a basin upstairs, then one of the little girls cry out, then the bathroom door close.
“I’m good to her,” Al said, “but I get these awful moods.”
I couldn’t think of what to say, so he added that I was no one to talk, speaking of fights at the Moon and the Sunday morning Tracy made breakfast for him; I could be, well, pretty direct myself, like with that poor dumb shit Ev’s first husband — wasn’t he an insurance salesman? no? — and why in hell didn’t I bring Ev up this weekend, Annette had never met her.
I said Doug wasn’t a dumb shit.
Al moved the ends of the fire screen in as I was trying to phrase in my head the fresh equation — something about how one coördinated (a) one’s field contact with the distal and (b) one’s actual contact with the immediate, and I couldn’t quite work it into triangulation — and Al asked if Ev had thought he was a goddamn fool to phone up like that to apologize for my being delayed by our encounter with Doug. And I said of course not, my eardrums pounding.
Al of course had wrongly assumed that Ev would tell me right away about his call. I wondered if Al had told her the truth I’d told Doug about himself and Ev and me.
Maybe that girl smelling of vanilla scalp and then peanut butter was right, maybe all this was gossip, and probably their verbatim monitor of that stuff in my rented car was soon erased by the sounds at the river’s edge.