Lookout Cartridge (12 page)

Motives that did not get voiced to Dagger included, for instance, the power of spoken words to make even more magical the merest objects of daily life—seen, say, in the scene designated Suitcase Slowly Packed: the laying of a black Marks and Spencer sweater upon a white-and-green plastic bottle of medicated shampoo, the insertion and removal of hands, the documentary account of each thing given in one voice as Dagger wished against his partner’s alternative but impracticable plan that each thing going into the one gray case go with a new voice to live distinct and separate, though Dagger, as he assured his partner and his partner’s son one day in the park, would not automatically say no to any idea.

One summer there was one gift for the whole family from America—the one and only lost Cartwright family flick found in a large Whitman sampler—for God’s sake take it, my mother had said, the kids might enjoy it.

That was a past all right but barely a remembrance even for those who shot it, certainly not for the stars. These were the two Cartwright children, a curly blond three-year-old boy named Me in light-colored jersey shorts that came out stony gray, and a five-year-old girl my sister in nothing but a rubber life-ring, the frames in those days so few per second that the pretty little girl in the film’s grainy snow hops into and out of a shallow canvas lawn-pool like a swallow dipping its beak and wings in a birdbath. The little boy jerks down his elastic-waisted shorts, he pushes them to his ankles, stands free and bends menacingly at the camera, then erect turns profile and with a dynamic faraway look like a lookout but looking merely at his pretty sister, he forgets his hobble and starting off falls flat on his elbows.

The film (released from New York now) seemed a waste. Lorna said, A manly boy. Will said, There’s no sound. Dagger, stationed at his projector, said, A remarkable film for its period. Alba said, You were enchanting, I recognized you right away. Jenny said, It’s raised a lot of new questions, I must say.

Everybody laughed when Jenny said that. But her pleasantly insignificant quip with the film still running set some new deadline the meaning of which must come clear before the reel ended, and then it raced on and the leader whipped off and flapped clear leaving on Dagger’s screen a glare without clear scale, and like a deadline set just on principle the thought came, with the end of these images of the thirties that weren’t after all so distinctively of the thirties, that this film should not have been taken away from the creaky, spider-inhabited American attic, for someone would have to pay for its removal. The canvas pool is an ancestor of today’s collapsible vinyl-lined Doughboy pools that have their indispensable counterparts in England and can even be heated from the point at which the pool’s filter cartridge is located.

Unlike the three-year-old Virginia who said Daddy bring back a present, the seventeen-year-old Jenny said something else killingly sophisticated to her international businessman father: Bring back a memory.

Motives? Others would come after the film was done, even later—even now—leaving or holding out possibility like a lunar depression or one of a series of superimposed transparencies, even that ultimate form, the shape of that slot-space visible through various contents.

5

Let me convey Monty Graf’s face, confirm his rather still voice. A mixed face and a dark mild voice that doesn’t so much confide as pass on to you some prior confidence reached with someone else. Between nostril and upper lip an area very ample, sensitive, and ambiguous. Absolutely black eyebrows, thick and trimmed. And a vocabulary.

When he spoke to me his zinc-gray eyes widened sharply on certain words—
Stratford, Soho, Handel, Coventry, brain-drain
.

To see what it was like I widened my eyes the same way on two of mine—
Knightsbridge
and
Stonehenge
.

The narrow healthy nose and the eyebrows and eyes so vitally differed from the rest of his face they seemed a section jammed down to fit the rest as if that were a receptacle—pocked sallow cheeks, a pudgy, brief though not recessive chin jabbed by a mole at the fork of a center cleft, which was less an event than a surplus fold.

Dagger’s camera could glibly sum up this face: a wary, half-sensual indeterminately beat-up forty-six soon to be much older.

Three deep lines cross Monty Graf’s forehead no matter what happens lower down. The second stops midway across, but your eye goes on as if drawn between the upper and lower wrinkles to the far temple and its softly combed swell of gray and black hair, and my eye went still further to the ash blonde with her back to me in the next booth and to the right of her hair and above the back of the booth the eyes of the man she was with.

Monty Graf went through Coventry during the war and still knew someone in munitions there; the new modern cathedral was a great experience I should be sure not to miss—bitter experience, Coventry, but of course the English were pretty reserved—but I must know all about that, having lived there.

You said it, I said, they’re so reserved there’s a postman none of his coworkers have spoken to in three years.

Monty Graf picked that right up, said not he thought in Coventry but someplace else, it was due to a strike the postman hadn’t joined, and did I know where that phrase sending to Coventry came from.

I did not know.

Coventry jail, Civil War, he said, the citizens of Birmingham sent a passel of Royalists away to Coventry; I’m an Anglophile, he said. He asked me what I’d drink. I was thinking it wasn’t quite true that the English were reserved. How can you live so long there and not know if they’re reserved or not? Think of the stranger, the bank clerk who came up behind you at Stonehenge and gave you a little talk unsolicited complete with weights and measures.

I said by the way I had indeed seen the new Coventry Cathedral, but speaking of Anglophilia he wasn’t the one who phoned yesterday afternoon, was he?

He didn’t seem to make the connection of Anglophilia with the phone call, but he did shake his head.

I asked if he was with Outer Film; he said No though he’d heard of them. Our film didn’t include Coven try, did it—or had I said I knew someone in Coventry.

An engineer, but I don’t think I mentioned him to you.

Automobiles?

I nodded.

Monty Graf sipped through a short straw a New Orleans gin drink made with milk and fresh-cracked ice, sugar, and white of egg.

He’d come in from London this morning, he said.

I said I’d guessed that.

He took another sip and said he’d learned—in London—that a film I’d made was very interesting and that I hadn’t sold it yet.

I said we’d lost most of it so there was virtually nothing to sell.

He said according to his information we still had some significant footage.

I said what could you do with a few minutes of 16 mill?

Monty Graf drew gently on his gin and milk and looked beyond me phrasing the next move.

I asked if he had a settled place of residence, and he smiled and said sure he had a house south of the Village, I could come and stay any time; he mentioned the address.

Two fish platters came by and were placed before the ash blonde and the man. I’d been brought a dark beer by mistake. I said I didn’t realize the kitchen was back there—and I turned around and saw light through the swinging door opening for the other waiter also in white shirt and white apron and as my eye further along the bar and off by the door thought it found the profile of the man in glasses who’d tried to serve me a cup of tea, I became aware of the jukebox playing later Dylan, and Monty Graf said he didn’t know if I’d eaten but this was just a neighborhood place but pretty good pot luck and he could recommend the osso buco and the stuffed bluefish.

Who had he heard about the film from? I asked.

He passed right through that question and said (headed toward me like a devoted skin doctor), I’d like to hear about your film from
you
.

I wondered how Dagger would take the question. Lately Dagger didn’t seem to care, though I will say for him that he seemed deliberately to want
not
to talk about the loss. He was considering the States, he had even assembled a job-application vita.

The truth was that there were in a way two films—his and mine.

That would be of little interest to this man waiting across the table in a black double-knit blazer.

You decide to reach, and before you’re half into it the thing you want has taken you in hand and said wait here keep an eye out while we get through the window and look around inside, we’ll be out in ten minutes unless you whistle.

Or your wife says to some visiting American who’s asked if she’d like to go back to the States, By now it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other, but it would be a change—though you think that when she looks over at you she remembers you inside her, recalls looking forward and backward to it, looks forward to it. (Why are English not called expatriate when they settle in the States?)

Or you say to your friend Dagger, We’ll make a film, and you tell him what’s on your mind. But later the film seems not yours, not his either, but just to have happened—and it’s not what you dreamed of, but it’s something.

You get an inkling one day that the ruination of the film was something someone decidedly reached out to effect: and you get on a plane to New York, leaving behind an encounter with your seventeen-year-old daughter and looking ahead beyond the East where you’ll be to a California she says she is settled on going to perhaps even before she takes her A-levels.

But you were coming anyway on business, and the last time you made love to Lorna it rose through your head in clear blue-green bubbles of smiling sound that that amateur film had not after all been necessary.

But life is not so disappointing as such passages of consolation seem to conceal. You’ve spent forty-eight hours in New York and someone is coming to you wanting to know what you have, though who is hand in glove with whom is hard to say. You haven’t picked up those Wall Street brochures for your son or was it a
book
about the market—then over your cheeseburger you saw Will hadn’t made it clear, maybe was just giving you something to do. Your frothy vanilla malted flowed down and was gone—such a malted.

You haven’t had your cigarette today.

Monty Graf waited and now broke his lips to speak but I was in ahead of him: There are two films really, what my friend Dagger DiGorro wanted and what I wanted. He’s good on the hardware. I mean, he never made a serious film but when we shot the naval engagement in Corsica in slow motion he knew it wasn’t just a matter of turning the frame knob up to 64, there was the little power switch below and the ASA gauge above.

Could I have heard about him on the grapevine? said Monty Graf.

I turned to wave at a waiter and look the man in glasses in the corner of his profiled eye. He was the one who’d made me a cup of tea all right.

The idea was this, I began. But I couldn’t mention Claire. Graf must be the Monty that Claire was talking to on the phone, for she’d already mentioned Monty Graf to me. I had slipped into other circuits, and Graf must know Aut too if Jan Graf was any relation, but if he knew Claire he must at least know
of
Aut; but Graf would not know Dagger, for Dagger would have mentioned him—still, through Claire Dagger must have become known to Graf, though what Claire could have told Monty Graf remained to be seen and Claire knew only what Dagger had told her plus my bait yesterday; but if Jan Graf was a relation, did Monty therefore know the Indian who worked in the Knightsbridge gallery, or even Cosmo? But that kid in the loft Jerry might know Claire, the way he said You never met her to the man in glasses.

So to be at least myself, I decided to tell Monty Graf what the idea had been and still in some form was. Graf widened his eyes as I said
Bluefish
to the waiter, who raised his eyebrows when I said beets or carrots instead of french fries, and as he was going away I said
light
beer.

For example, said Monty Graf, the footage that survived the fire, why a rush of that? Was that the beginning of the film and you wanted to see how you were doing? You shot that in London? Someplace else, I forget.

You didn’t forget, I said, you were never told.

The waiter brought a coffee-colored dark beer with a thick head like rusty marshmallow. I pointed to my companion’s milky champagne glass and the waiter said Right, and went away.

No, I said to Graf, it wasn’t the beginning. I’ll tell you about the beginning; we never did see it printed; but this is what happened.

I did not describe my effort to get Chaplin to let us film an interview with him and it would have been too hard to explain to Graf what I’d had in mind vainly urging Dagger to shoot a hundred frames or so of a letter lying, say, on Dagger’s worktable that I in fact wrote to Chaplin.

No, I said, the beginning would have been a bare room and the only things on the film besides a couple of straight chairs and a vivid blue-red-and-umber Turkish floor cushion were the two guys we were shooting, plus whatever Dagger got of me with the mike: just a quick cut, then back to the faces.

We told them to go ahead, maybe not mention England, just say for example
“here,”
so the room as I conceived it with plain plaster walls that we’d depictured would be just an unplaced room. Dagger went along with this.

Who were they? said Graf.

One’s an American corporal from Heidelberg, skipped to Sweden, later crossed into Norway, stopped off with his sister’s girlfriend who’s teaching at an English Institute in Trondheim. Well, then he shipped on some American’s yacht looking for sanctuary perhaps and wound up in the Faeroe Islands between Iceland and the Shetlands and waited while his employer, a dilettante geologist, fished for trout. But our deserter apparently couldn’t wait. He made it to the Hebrides with a fisherman and there I happen to know he lived in a hut near Mount Clisham.

The other? said Monty Graf.

Friend of the first, according to Dagger.

How did Dagger know? said Graf.