Wait. Wait.
The only way to be sure if Ted knows of my brush with Doug his father the night before that post-marital suicide is to tell him. I should have tonight, or what was tonight. Instead tonight I let him bow to me and look with Ev’s blue eyes rather than his father’s gray coolly through my forehead like a laser targeting ten feet behind me. And I should have countered his terrible terrible statement with an opener honesty that unlike his wouldn’t mean to stop talk but to recomplete the circuit even if that did mean going round and round. So when Ted then slipped out the front door I called to Ev combing her hair in the bathroom that I wanted some andirons in the basement, and as the door fell to behind me and I was in the hall looking at the near elevator and at Ted (who now made the physical mistake of turning back and gazing into me as if daring me to dare to leave the apartment), I heard dimly Ev’s puzzled but tolerant “Andirons?” and hardly had time to wonder how Ted’s terrible statement struck her or be glad she hadn’t stepped out of the bathroom with her hair half-unpinned to intervene, for at the elevator door now Ted couldn’t hold his gaze. Should I have given him a break and looked down? On the dark marble floor lay unrinsed swipes of an unrinsed mop, swift gray arcs and loops. With a prissy left-flank-Harch turn Ted made for the door to the stairs.
But Dom: Ted and I often do get along. Maybe I failed to interest him in the parabola principle — ye gods maybe to demonstrate conic section I should have drawn a few living cones like Gail’s early breasts mole for mole, or the quarry pool which fear and desire told my cold-pressed diving eyes would spiral to a deep central point and thus prove even more conical than those truncated markers the bright ominous monuments to the man her father. Even at a gap of three or four or five miles that day of the dive he was making his force felt in the buoyant water even if accelerating up some secondary blacktop in his pickup, he was unaware that he was with us and unaware of the kiss and unaware of Al in his jeans exploding into the water to come to somebody’s aid.
But if I failed with the parabola, I did one night succeed with Ted when I told about my half-mislaid accumulation of silly tales about Interfear perhaps part-inspired by that birthday gift in ’38. Ted almost liked them, those I could recall.
Interfear! My God, I didn’t expect to be here, Dom; yet the only child’s room in Brooklyn Heights where in September ’40 I (a natural speller learning to touch-type) keyed a word so it came up “interfear” was as real a scene of the difference between Al and Bob as this living room of yours was, Dom, hours ago when in some other state I got in here fresh from Ted’s rebuke: he said if he and I were going to quit kidding ourselves we’d see that to him I’d always smell a little like a betrayer however much I did the father bit.
Being a natural speller I couldn’t stand to leave the error right there in front of me in the machine. But having X’d out “interfear,” I got thinking what it meant.
Well, until I was fifteen or sixteen I wrote Interfear Mysteries. And I was ahead of my time.
A blue-jowled giant, a genius named Darius Dominion, would create and cable anywhere on the planet any sort of fear required, so long as the person who ordered it for his own use or to blow someone else’s fuse was bright and original. Darius Dominion didn’t need a home; he simply lived inside his own great head, which had rather shocking knots and ridges down its back, for Uncle Cooley had given me Dr. Bernard Holländer’s turn-of-the-century treatise on the higher phrenology. Uncle Cooley called it a real eye-opener; but there were things in it that meant much more to me than its level-headed distinction between Gall’s bumpographic cranioscopy and Gall’s real bequest to the study of cerebral localization. Many a night I sat handling my head as I read Holländer and imagined I had persecution mania due to injury of my temporal lobe’s posterior, or ye gods a sexual desire “exalted” (as they used to say) by some perversion of my gray matter. But I’d have been ashamed to tell Ted all this about how Darius Dominion’s bumps arose.
My father dismissed those Interfear Mysteries — but if that had nothing to do with our unhappy bout the Sunday morning I said God was just someone to tell your side of the story to, why do I bring together that Sunday encounter when he was feeling so badly, and those silly mysteries that I probably should have tried out on Ted tonight to ease him? But in those sheets that the Hungarian removed so long ago, didn’t I somewhere say Ted has trouble with Betsy now? He started to phone her back and I walked past the phone and for some reason grinned at him. Did he go out to the phone booth on the corner across from the framer’s to call her in private? But someone ripped the new gray receiver out of that booth, and it hasn’t been replaced. But Ted could have gone in the hotel down the block. I do not know. I do know I was harsh, Dom, to Ev one early morning when I’d just pivoted from my delusion about her potholder to the real thing and warm against my shoulder came her voice saying, “I’m worried about Ted,” and then, “Do we know any psychiatrists?” and I said to phone up Hugh Blood, he’d been shopping around for years. When Ev said, “I hardly know him,” I said, “That doesn’t usually stop you,” but she was nice enough to ignore that and say, “I don’t really know him. Would you?” I moved my shoulder blade back against her mouth.
Al said he thought he knew the boy in my rented back seat but not the girl, and if he could identify a photo in the Dean’s Office file he’d report him for molesting a faculty guest. Al was quite serious. He was taking his two oldest to a birthday party, and before he left, I and Annette urged him to forget it, if he went after the boy he’d get him suspended. “Oh I couldn’t get him suspended,” said Al.
Annette may have been embarrassed. We sat on the couch to look at her album. The third little girl was upstairs, Al’s special favorite who bawled him out for eating before it had cooled one of the sugar-dough stars she’d baked in her toy oven, and bawled him out for not giving her a Valentine, and for losing a patch of hair in back that Annette called his tonsure.
Annette and I stared at a snapshot of Al asleep on a bed beside a baby. Annette said, “He just feels the students are rude, that’s why he gets so upset; he says they want more than they’re prepared to give — they don’t know any facts.”
There was a picture of Al’s parents sitting formally relaxed on this very couch that Annette and I were sitting on. The house was quiet. Annette said, “Those two used to fight. But I guess she was devoted to him.”
“Well, there was trouble,” I said. “But… what the hell…”
“Bound to be,” said Annette, crossing one knee over the other.
“The old man got to dislike me,” I said, looking at the top of her top knee gleaming in its nylon.
There came a rattly knock at the kitchen door, the boy to mow the lawn.
It was one a.m. after the company steamer had scoured up into its two holds that dark field of silvery fish, all but those that flipped over the finally narrowing corral of expensive nets; and it was one, after Bob and I had left the outboard on its mooring and rowed the dory twenty-five yards in to the beach; and it was one before we’d divided most of the Jim Beam in slugs interrupted by minutes of silence and friendly but cautious and at one point rather tense talk, and it was after one before we’d said what the hell and killed that fifth and I took it outside and left it on a rock glimmering dully in the touch of a small moon.