JOSEPH McELROY
73
French friends of mine said he sounded a little crazy (the way in
America they say that some poor person is "harmless"). A private
citizen was how I took him, a survivor-craftsman testing the air. The
boomerangs I dreamt were not some American dream's disposable
weapons; my twilight companion's resources proved renewable, his
boomerangs reusably old and known; this wasn't some Apache spill–
ing the blood of vowels F. Scott Fitzgerald rendered out of Rim–
baud, but a native true to the wood from which the aboriginal im–
plements were cut. I made him up out of what I knew, and I
assumed he was too authentic to have time to make me up.
The phone rang and I went out to meet a friend. I checked the
Mont St. Michel tides and saw a French child on a train wearing a
red University of Michigan sweatshirt. I came out of Chartres
Cathedral and went back inside. I returned to the Jeu de Paume to
hear American spoken without hesitation or apology and, from
within that temple of light and color, to view through my favorite
window the gray spirit of the riverbank - its founded harmonies of
palace and avenue, whose foreground proved to be where those
waterlilies hang, safe-locked in the sister temple of this tennis court,
where my three-dimensional, fellow wanderers, refusing to disap–
pear into the "Moulin de la Galette" we're all admiring, crowd about
me as if I were my mind. Here, what went up must come down–
downstairs, I mean."What gains admission must find exit," they say
with justice.
But what goes out-does it come back? I cannot help the signs
and symbols; they are as actual as the knocking on my Montmartre
door at the moment of my dream when at last I completed the inven–
tion of the man with the bag full of boomerangs in the Bois de
Boulogne. It was more urgent even than a phone ringing in the mid–
dle of the night, that knock at my front door- was it the
concierge? - and I must wake from my dream just when I have at
last found the French with which to accost the person I have made
up. The stamp dealer went home eight hours ago. Who can it be at
the door? Well, you can't always choose your time to make the ac–
quaintance of a neighbor. I'm out of bed, croaking, 'Tarrive,
j'arrive" (pleased to recall the more accurate English), walking half
in my sleep through someone else's curtain-insulated rooms to ask in
French, "Who's there? What is it?", only to realize I have heard no
more knocks, and to suspect that they were not here upon this front
door in the pitch-black hall but back in that bedroom where I left the
dream. What a way to gain entrance to an apartment! Knock on the
