What I remember, though, are a lot of good things from that time, some of them with Bob, some not — yet his being there seemed to fuel them. There was a day I spent with an old friend from Science, a little butterball named Richard, who outlined for me step by step the derivation of Güdel numbers as well as the proof of Güdel’s theorem. To pass a whole afternoon where the logic obtaining was all mathematical was like a walk in fresh snow after being cooped in an overheated apartment for a month. Since I’d read the Philip Horton biography of Hart Crane, I’d always planned to visit the New York Public Library and look over the works of the tragic prodigy, Samuel Greenberg. Now, on the long wooden tables, under the green glass reading lamps, I copied out various verses of Greenberg’s into my notebook from the delicate pamphlets no one had checked out in a decade. There was the quiet Sunday Marilyn spent, sitting with Bob at the round table, working on a translation from the Spanish — he’d always wanted to learn the language, and Marilyn knew it fairly well. Or, another day, with a small jeweler’s screwdriver, he dismantled, piece by intricate piece, her camera, showing her how its inner mechanism worked. Or, once, Joe — the trucker I’d briefly encountered on the docks the summer dawn in ’62 (though ironically, Joe didn’t remember it at all), now living around the corner with his lover Paul — hired Bob and me to work for a weekend with him on his transmission in a Jersey garage, where, on tracks across the girdered ceiling, a great grapple could be maneuvered by a remote-control box, like the waldoes in the SF stories I’d read as a boy.
“Waldoes?” Bob asked, as we stood in the echoing concrete hangar, among the truck bodies, the piles of tires, the benches full of tools. “What’re they?”
“Try to imagine,” I told him, “a mechanical glove you wear on your hand that controls a huge, mechanical hand that hangs in the middle of all this. You move your arm … and the great metal hand swings in the same direction. You raise yours … it raises. You drop yours … and it drops. It’s much stronger than you are. It’s bigger than you are. You can maneuver it over that chassis there, drop your own hand down, and just close two of your fingers: it closes two of its fingers … and picks the chassis right up when you lift your hand!”
“That’s neat!” Bob said, looking at the grapple like a metal flower hanging from its cables. “And suppose you brung your hand down in front of you”—as I’d been doing, now he mimed the gesture — “so that them big metal fingers was right around you. Then you made a fist!” He laughed, sharply, squeezing his hand. “You could crush yourself to death, couldn’t you? If I’d a’ had one, that’s what I’d a’ done the night I got that letter from home!” But he laughed again.
51.5. The only thing I remember that came close to an actual problem in our day-to-day living, among Bob, Marilyn, and me, was this. After two weeks at the tool-and-die shop, Bob came home, still in his jump suit, black from hair to shoes.
“What,” Marilyn said, looking up from the table, “happened to you?”
Bob held his filthy hands from his sides. “They put me down in the basement, cleaning off some old equipment there — man, that stuff is dirty! I gotta get a bath!” His light eyes blinked from the sooty smudge of his face.
“Let me go run you a tub.” I left the stove to go back into the bedroom and, in the bathroom, put in the stopper and turned on the tub tap.
When I came back into the kitchen, at the table Marilyn was laughing. “You look like somebody rolled you around in a coal scuttle!”
“That’s about the way I feel.” Bob smiled. But his filthy face looked tired.
“Sit down,” I said, as I came back out. “You want a beer?”
“No. And I don’t wanna sit on nothin’ either, till that water’s ready.” But finally he perched at the edge of the wooden bench, leaning with his elbows on his knees, sooty hair hanging forward, now and then talking to Marilyn or me, while inside the water chattered and splashed.
Finally he said, “That should be enough to get me started,” got up, and loped back into the bedroom.
About half an hour later, he came out, a towel wrapped around his waist, his blond hair darkened and clinging to his forehead.
“Just in time,” I said. “Dinner’s ready.” I’d set the table around Marilyn’s papers and books.
She got up now and looked at Bob critically, one hand pulling at her chin. “Mmmmm …” She frowned.
He looked at her, with a questioning smile.
She reached forward and pulled the towel from around him.
“Hey —!” Bob laughed.
Marilyn nodded. “Well, you do look a little cleaner.” She put the towel over her shoulder.
“Do I get that back?” he asked.
“What for?” she asked, in mock surprise.
“It’s okay by me,” he said. “But if the neighbors across the yard start sayin’ somethin’—” he glanced toward the bright slab of our fourth story kitchen window, in which the only protection from outside eyes was a couple of plants — “don’t come talkin’ to me.” With water beads still on his shoulders, neck, and long, wide feet, he stepped over the bench to sit.
After dinner, though, when I went back into the bathroom — Bob (naked) and Marilyn (clothed) were still at the table laughing over something — I looked at the tub.
It was ringed with grime and streaked with black as high as the drain. I shook my head. But Bob’d had a hard day. I took a sponge and the scouring powder off the window sill, turned the water on again, got down, and scrubbed out the tub. Then I picked up the jumpsuit that was slopped half in a puddle and hung it over the back of a chair in the bedroom. When I came out to sit at the kitchen table again and pour myself a second cup of after-dinner coffee, I said: “That was some tub ring you left there, man.”
“Sure was,” Bob said.
He and Marilyn went on laughing. Pretty soon so was I.
The next night, when Bob came in, he was as begrimed as before.
“My God!” Marilyn said. “How long are they going to keep you down in that basement?”
“I don’t know,” Bob said. “Probably all week.” He stood rubbing a forehead gone darker than graphite with blackened fingers. “The first day it was kinda fun — the five of us down there, it was like a bunch of kids playin’ in mud. Today it was just work. Tomorrow I think it’s gonna feel like five grown men in a basement wadin’ around in shit — which is just about what it is.”
I went back to turn on the tub.
A few minutes later Bob went back to wash. When, several shades cleaner, he came out, naked, with the damp towel this time just hanging from his hand, he grinned at me, then stepped up behind Marilyn, who was sitting at the table, reading. “Hey.…”
She turned around, somewhat surprised, to find nude Bob only about three inches away from her nose.
He grinned down. “You want this?” Then he dropped the towel over her shoulder.
We all began joking around again.
But at one point, kind of on a hunch, I went into the bathroom. The tub was as ringed and befouled as it had been the day before. I sprinkled scouring powder around in it, then left it to go back outside and turn the chops in the broiler we were having for dinner. While we were eating, and laughing about something or other, I said: “You know, Bob, it’s a lot easier for you to wash the tub out while you’re still in it — and there’s water there — than it is for me to come along after you later and scour it. I don’t mind running a tub for you, but I’m damned if I feel like washing it out after you.”
Bob took a large forkfull of greens on top of a piece of porkchop.