Unlike me. I’m on the line registering under my own name in public space.
Bob was incredibly standing when we looked down. Seeing him we then swung our gazes away and back like a pendulum; he had a smudge of new-mown green on top of his crewcut, and we all heard him tell our athletic director he knew what he could do with the lacrosse game tomorrow.
Almost three floors he’d dropped. Now he walked away and he was placing his feet carefully. “You could be a parachute-jumper right now without a single day of training, Bobby,” the athletic director called after him. But Bob just warped out of sight into the locker room, and the hapless athletic director who could not punish him glared up at us but didn’t say a word to us and followed Bob inside.
Bob wouldn’t let him drive him to the subway.
I was puzzled. Bob might well have made that window-leap in any event, but I did not tell my parents about it and about the miracle of his safe landing. At the time, it seemed a corollary miracle that my parents never heard about the feat from anyone else. I’m sure they never did. Sometimes you don’t hear about things — especially without our old friend ye vectoral muscle. But you can bet Bob’s father heard all about it from our athletic director, who as if to keep it all from being true by staying on the phone in the face of Bob’s father’s stoic courtesy kept saying the same things in varying sequences: A fine clean guy. Could have killed himself. He was a good boy, no one’s fault. Backus wasn’t at fault. Bob was enough shaken up so he forgot the game tomorrow. He landed just enough off balance, and with enough basic thrust, to tumble. The game tomorrow. A good clean boy. It was unprecedented.
I had told Hugh his whistle hadn’t done Bob any good. Hugh ignored this and asked if it had been a thirty-foot drop, and I said Less.
Bob wouldn’t see any “medicine man,” but his dad called Doctor Field anyhow and according to Petty, who wasn’t really there, when that excellent laconic man came up to Bob’s top-floor room Bob was very seriously taping his knees and looked up blankly like a king.
“But how could Al’s dad like you?” Annette said lightly returning from the back door. Then, as if finding reasons for something she hadn’t really meant, “All that hocus-pocus about newspaper puzzles? And the old man and Gail were driving past that antique shop of course when you were unloading your encyclopedia and later Al didn’t believe his father but Gail said it was true. But so what? Al didn’t care. He said he wanted the books. There’s no puzzle in that.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“You might say he needed you, Cy. Don’t think badly of him for
that.”
We share life, even our attempts not to.
Is it possible that I won’t or can’t explain to you, Dom, how Al and Bob happen to be here this weekend? If you were here perhaps I’d not risk it. Fred Eagle coughs and coughs, grinning helplessly; then he stops and hoarsely says, looking into his handkerchief but not at either of his visitors: Someone I want you to meet:
Al and Bob shake: and Fred’s shelves and shelves of stock are comfortably around them, and on an old table a gallon of Gallo and a partly carved turkey: Fred tells the joke about the Renaissance Jew who in his lonely wanderings came at last to Rome and seeing the utter corruption of the clergy but concluding that this church, having survived it, must be indeed the true church, became a Catholic.
Al said, “He should have been content just to know his true enemy.”
Bob said, “If you feel so strongly you ought to read Simone Weil.”
A moment interferes in which A and B elect to be friendly.
Ev may not have gotten on to the cops; she may have just figured I went, and will come back.
Al checked Bob’s name and origin, then said, “I wasn’t invited to your Welcome Home party in ’52 or ’53, whenever it was.”
No surprise from Bob: “Neither was I. I mean, we didn’t go.”
“But you were invited.”
“Matter of fact, it was a surprise party, so I wasn’t. But why would you have been asked to my parents’? Did you know someone?”
I am mentioned and Bob privately wonders why I let Al think the honored couple had turned up for the Welcome Home, for Al neglects to tell Bob it was not I from whom he learned where I really went that night in ’53. And of course Al was awake enough to note that I came home with my mother, and my mother was heard to say the Vande Land’s Dutchman was a lot of fun even if he hadn’t been a Resistance hero. He had talked about Europe’s coming demands for energy and had been quite fascinating on the subject of natural gas in the Netherlands.
Dom, long ago I should have done you a floor plan of my parents’ apartment on Brooklyn Heights, but for that matter a plan of our Heatsburg house too, including the upstairs room where on Sunday mornings early my father would sometimes sit with his dark brown Brokers Special pencils and long yellow pad, first outlining ABCD. For thus these spaces could have been around us throughout this night of time that seemed urgent one way when I came in your unlocked door but now spreads like an inestimably charged field ever, yet, within the coördinates of this room, to a mode like time, but solute — a paraphase.
As on the educational channel last week my small Emma was watching the thin man Mr. Rogers from his own private outer space end his kids’ show “You make each day such a special day. You know how. By just your being you,” the gossip column Eagle Eye said that your wife Dorothy had got her final decree but that you were sitting around these days enjoying life in your “vast elegant” living room running your slide collection round and round your Carousel projector — mostly “candid news shots involving himself.”
I don’t think that from our brief meeting at Cora’s you recognized me in the Think-Tank shot or in Ed’s overhead zoom of the Defenestration Crowd waiting. But are those even in your slide box against that far bookcase-wall above and to the right of the styrofoam?
I’ll have enough paper, and even though as I write this, to my surprise I vector one of the elevators up its shaft and I divine footsteps preparing to come into existence, I will have time enough as well as paper, for I’m now into my proud paraphase. Let me subtract from that, rather than add, that instead of the dreaded Vectoral Dystrophy, I’ve got Writer’s Cramp. And looking into your newly insured past though no longer divining by means of liver because Ev says even our high-priced butcher admits that liver is apt to be polluted nowadays, I think I can tell who it is in that east or west elevator coming here. He will not get to your floor until we’re ready.
You learned Spanish after the War. Did I say you were an only child earlier tonight?
You were not an only child, though you said America was.
You said you didn’t fear overcopulation any more: you said every great human test is new and its right solution unimaginable at first: the day you resigned from the primary to throw your support elsewhere, you said the secret of future solutions resided in the idea of spacecraft. After tonight you’ll never know if spacecraft will as you predicted turn out to be earthcraft — if life-sup-portable microfields designed for interstitial vector-treks and vacuum-strolls can feed and house our ordinary unlaunched future too, and even space us far enough apart so we can like each other. Mmm… spacecraft is to politics, as—
One reporter asked if you’d said “statecraft” and you said No, and then incredibly another reporter, a girl, asked politely if you’d said “statecraft,” and you stared at her but spotted your shrink son-in-law standing five spaces down from me and hailed him but he slunk sideways among the crowd. I think he’d been observing me.