“You never want to kiss me unless it leads to something,” Tracy lied.
Bob wound up and hurled a gristley red wedge of beef neither of us could manage, and a gull materialized out of the half-light and reached the meat as it hit the water. Above this near-point, running lights were now two miles off. “It’s about time,” said Bob.
Al hates leftovers, cold or hot, even for lunch.
Bob grabbed my boomerang just as Hugh shouted to us from the top of the steps leading to the main part of the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian way. Did Bob see Freddy and Hugh coming into view before he grabbed my boomerang? In the anthrochron of friendship those are big questions, though in the field of probabilities — which is trying to engross my already smudging parabolas and my dystrophic dialectic of anthronoiacly keeping apart Al and Bob — these misgiving questions spread into tacit maturity. Bob fended me off and ran toward Hugh and Freddy, but then Freddy said to me, “Guess who’s keeping tabs on you?” and Hugh said knowingly, “They all have claws, every goddamn one of them.” Freddy meant that Tracy had begged him to come and see what we were doing on the bridge. We all started picking on Hugh and somehow my boomerang ended up that night on Bob’s wall.
At the Pounds’ next day Bob’s father said chucking boomerangs off the Bridge was like dropping something out of a window — violated a municipal ordinance, didn’t it? Rear Admiral Worth twitched a small smile and said gently that of course it was worse than that. Bob’s father laughed, kept coming back to the achievement Petty had described, and laughed some more and said to Admiral Worth that Bob was co-captain of lacrosse. Admiral Worth said he hoped Bob hadn’t been aiming for the Navy Yard, and Petty took him up and said Hey wait, Bob had aimed for the Statue, not the other way, and in the teeth of a stiff wind up there among the cables. Russell Pound entered the room with two old-fashioned glasses and called across to me Did my father have any clue who’d walked off with the typewriter.
I happen to know that this boomerang adventure eased things between Bob and his father.
(Elsewhere in tonight’s often short-circuit field, that tough gruff gentleman heard from Russell Pound at Seneca’s Sunday night Family Pot Luck Buffet (who had it from Mrs. Bolla who got it from Petty who had it from me) that Bob needed various thousands of dollars for the herring nets; so Bob’s father phoned Bob station-to-station to offer a non-interest loan).
For after I’d told Bob’s father that Bob could have been class president if he’d campaigned the spring before, Bob’s father challenged Bob on the matter: but this uneasy affection was received by Bob with such triumphant silence that his old man phoned me one night saying what was up with Bob, he was still planning on applying to Princeton, wasn’t he? But though Bob had seemed to deliberately throw away that boomerang, he kept mine on his wall several weeks, I guess for his father to see. At school other guys were impressed by Bob’s laconic confidence — his views on first dates with Catholic girls versus Jewish girls, and on what Torger Tokle’s record at Iron Mountain had been; and because of Bob some of us thought seriously for several weeks of becoming seismologists on the west coast. To Bob class office was at best beside the point, he was a leader anyway. Akkie Backus told Bob that during lacrosse season he’d prefer Bob not to waste his time even on occasional contributions to the school paper. Bob’s father was afraid that because of wrestling he’d end up at Lehigh.
“They certainly waited long enough,” said Bob as the Land Rover’s lights went on and we heard the motor. Bob stared at the steamer’s running lights so neatly independent out there off the promontory.
“He a neighbor?” I asked, referring to the Land Rover.
“Him?” Bob murmured, moving down off the ledge. “He’ll talk your head off. Married into an old Portland family. Ever hear of the Deerings?”
We were on the beach now and Bob was shoving a thin log under the bow to roll the rowboat down. He laughed. “Damned if I’d ask him over tonight.” On the beach the Land Rover backed around and swung toward the island road. “’f he knew he’s missing a herring haul,” Bob chuckled, “Jesus he’ll talk your head off.”
But I’ve said Land Rover elsewhere tonight, Dom. Who was it I said meant to buy one? That famous vehicle appeared in those pages your psychiatrist son-in-law took from this antic table together with a typewriter repair ticket and no doubt a sly slip or two of your pen.
The white phone’s been sounding in the kitchen.
It was Fred Eagle the Land Rover Fred Eagle. Is this the same vehicle? Footsteps to the elevator, no doubt fingers to the button — fingertips—eyes to the articulator, and then distinctly vague shuffling: nothing for three seconds but my phone still going off like an occulting alarm clock: another shuffle: are they kissing out there listening to this apartment ring? and perhaps each independently determined not to end their kiss at least till that phone stops. But if the elevator comes? The fine for tampering with your mailbox — if mere use is tampering — equals what Bob borrowed for his nets not of course allowing for inflation.
Bob dragged the roller out and down again to the stern. “He’d have had himself a couple three belts and told us what a lot of trouble his Land Rover turned out to be, and then told us how to get these herring.”
“I doubt it,” I said.
“You know, we should have had him over. He’s a very funny man, and that’s something.”
“It was him or us,” said Darla in ’69 the morning of the Friday Bob flew down to New York and less than two days after your defenestration, “it was a live dichotomy. He wanted to upstage us for his own sake but he let himself down, he got confused. He poured himself some of our wine — well I didn’t really mind, the ed and anthro departments sent us four jugs of Paisano and we should probably have boycotted it.” As she spoke to me in New York, Bob was packing for the plane in Maine and he and Robby were arguing whether the noise cone came from the plane’s bow or tail, a dispute confused at first because Bob thought Robby was talking — now they’re talking out there as the elevator arrives — about a nose cone, and terminally interrupted when Robby said as he left his parents’ bedroom, Well anyway Bob wasn’t going by supersonic to New York, so who cared.
“A boy I just broke up with,” said Darla, “was there with his zoom to photograph us holding the ninth floor and the crowd down below. He poured himself more wine and I said, Cool it, Ed, and took away his cup, I don’t know why he let me, we weren’t some fraternity party, I said. And Ed and I were just having it out, and he’s saying Darley you’re absurd and me saying our personal relationship was irrelevant to the overriding issue, when the great man was suddenly standing there, in a suit with a vest. One of my girls, Haya Watt, got stagestruck and told my guards outside to let him in.
“Nothing was negotiable, I said, so he laid a hundred-dollar bill on top of the dean’s secretary’s dicta-pol and said it was a contribution to the party. I told him to keep it, he’d need it for his own political career and he said would I meet him in Trinity Churchyard, Broadway and Wall, day after tomorrow — that’s today, isn’t it? — he was filming a TV spot he said between Al and Bob. Al and Bob? That’s what he said. And Ed said, What’s this Al and Bob? Well, some of the kids were settling down to enjoy him, and I had to go check the security of the rest of the floor and find out who let him past eight, but he was half fighting us half charming us — like, he said stop trying to purify and start studying just what it was that was supposed to be being contaminated, like what did we know about plankton and he went and hugged one of the guys who goes around in an old Arab skirt and a headband and told him not to think he was a freak but study, study, study — review the Cheyenne transvestites and their relation to the regular bravery, then he wheeled around and grinned and punched a fat kid in the shoulder and said to Ed, ‘Al Hamilton, Bob Fulton.’