Would I like to feel I’ve done some of all this to Ted? And am I initially disarmed by his willingness to shut his eyes, shake his head, successfully try to smile, then so expertly recount the waiting room sequence? Yes, Dom, I indeed am initially disarmed. For I want to believe he’s resisting. So I think, What? is he inventing it all? No, that sideways sag of the combed head denies he is. The waiting room serial strains my brain. Would he tighten truth into a puzzle to prove to my satisfaction my adult poverty, sitting here ruling parabolic axes with your typewriter repair shop claim card? No, he’s too natural. Yet this high-priced interlude composed over the secret weeks of certain half-hours in his psychiatrist’s waiting room shrinks out of reach. I can merely listen to the kid and pay his bills. His doctor, a plump but distant Hungarian highly recommended by poor old thirty-eight-year-old Hugh Blood, came often late for appointments or even forgot and gave two patients the same hour. So often that Ted thought he meant to. But he produced excuses, like incredible morning traffic coming down from the hospital, or an empty squad car double-parked blocking the nonetheless vacant space he always parks in, or then somebody broke into his buxom Mercedes and he had to go to his garage to order a new burglar alarm, which was the only thing tampered with. Or he’d blame the time-lag on his secretary, who operates from someplace else and serves several doctors. Three or four times, the person waiting with Ted was a girl who at first when the plump Hungarian finally showed was glad to dislodge her pending congruence with Ted and go out for coffee. Ted teased himself that she was the plump Hungarian’s plant testing Ted’s capacity for healthy selfishness; but on the other hand, Ted’s appointment Monday was for no less than nine a.m.
During the first wait with Betsy, when he rose to change Look for Time or the other way around — I forget — his shoes felt like diver’s boots, his jeans like bandages. But subsequently he found that she felt the same way, and he guessed that, sitting on one blue-foam length of the L-shaped couch leaning against the whitewashed beach-house wall-planks whose raw hairy pine a decorator had scored with a random design of gouges, Betsy likewise felt financially embarrassed by the bandanna’d black char whose brown, stockinged soles below her kneeling bottom lay over the lavatory’s threshold as she applied Lestoil to the floor and seemed to explode the toilet every minute or so like a persistent throat-clearing. Ted in selfdefense began to talk to Betsy. And she, who at first seemed relieved when the doctor would at last appear and remove his six-button jacket and neaten the great knot of his wide tie, seemed the next time content with Ted, till one day she read Ted’s mind and led him to suggest they not stand for that grave Hungarian’s absence any longer but leave a note canceling these costly hours, and they did and never looked back, though as they came out onto the sidewalk Ted detected across that tree-green street something which, should he and Betsy discuss it, might smudge the dimensions of what they believed they were leaving, so he kept it to himself. But listen, Dom, when the suppositious secretary billed us a whole month’s two hundred and eighty dollars we paid only what my step-son told us to, and we’ve heard nothing since. Nor have I seen Betsy, though I’ve had her on the phone. Three’s a crowd, yet that strain the waiting room sequence put on me seems to even that odd fear of meddling I have. So after telling Betsy that Ted’ll be right here, I idly ask if she thinks their doctor contrived their conjunction; but Betsy’s gentle “Brought us together? I suppose so” softly adorns surely her alarm at the chance I’m right. Or maybe like Ted she doesn’t like the phone. I gather it’s not exactly dates they go on. Is he playing the field? He wouldn’t put it like that. Betsy was phoning all day today. Ted was in and out, and didn’t call her back on our phone.
And I, Dom, what do I do about Bob and Al? You might accuse me of bringing them together. Ev if she’d seen their notes to me could have picked up her beige phone and dialed them with magic dispatch. No one dials like Ev. But unless Al and Bob have called me in the last how many minutes and been asked over by Ev, they may still not have met. I can afford to feel that here in your apartment I’d almost rather tell the tale right to your face. But you are not here, yet granted thus not able to judge me a harassing crank. This great fountain pen came fresh from its art shop gift box which lay on your desk near the west window. Your daughter Lila’s birthday note lay under the box. The bottle of black ink in its box beside the pen may have come from Lila also, for you don’t write in longhand.
As I read this room, once your redoubt, I do not find in your things mere expressions of you. They don’t need you. Which might be precisely why you should have been able to need them. With the north book-wall behind it, a tripod-based shaft, extensible but not extended, supports in the intermediate position a horizontal case containing a standard 40 by 40 projection screen. I have space, if not time, to explain, and I will, uninterrupted by Al or Bob or Al’s father’s number two puzzle or the cross-stick boomerang Bob fired off Brooklyn Bridge in April of ’46, or Bohack Joey and the fight. Where’s your projector, being fixed?
Did you make a wish as you killed yourself? Did you wish to be friends with the black, blind Hamlet who in an interview on educational TV condemned you for caring more about technology than for poor people, and for telling a black militant breakfast their only hope was intermarriage? Was suicide your way to say to present friends and former wife, You never knew me, now you know? But Dom, what was this that these minds surrounding your life could now know at last? I am also one of your survivors, maybe your first unless some neighbor here who heard the high Irish voice is close enough to you to claim such. I’m the Unknown Survivor. What if I put your phone back on the hook? For the busy signal may bring someone over here. Having much to do, I put Al and Bob right out of my mind, be they limpid parable or lame fact. If, Dom, you couldn’t stand the solitude which others’ views of you enforced, these crowding distances are still to be preferred to what your suicide says, namely that these wrong views must now be supplanted in your absence by the clear blank vision that you weren’t what these persons thought — say, a hero ideologue, or an idea devoted to a man, a creature who tolled new rates of time on one hand but on the other swore to all the ages old and young, thirties, forties, that time was overrated and could be controlled, you were a prophet of the present in a superland of plans, you had something for a retired cop on jury duty or a tired post-adolescent feeling obsolete, though now nothing for a Zionist uncle who said he hadn’t heard you right when you said to him on a prime-time talk show that you weren’t interested in the death-camps any more. Well, if everyone missed the point of you, you alas won’t be here for the review. Yet something worse, your quondam wife Dorothy and your dear, if adult, children Richard and Lila won’t be able to turn this faithful event, your suicide, to any purpose; for their idea will be not to let grief turn to death but to get along, just get along. Suicidal satisfaction better not be the locus of somebody else’s feelings, even if that would sound better rendered in Latin. You know so well how people don’t pay attention.
But you couldn’t have known where my fugitive circle crossed yours, and your suicidal satisfactions can have had nothing to do with me. But I’ve had much to do with you. All worlds are real, but yours seemed realer than mine.