Lookout Cartridge (21 page)

Lorna when she shopped felt she earned our dinner choice by choice; it was those little paper bags she acquired at the various Highgate Village shops (apples, runner beans, new potatoes, small ripe Guernsey tomatoes, hunks of pale yellow or dull orange English cheese), bags so full you couldn’t hold them by the top even if you had hands enough to hold them all and so you left the top twisted closed at either side and held the bag under the bottom. Lorna placed them all with a pound of newspaper-wrapped mincemeat (in the seventies at last sometimes called
hamburger
and now wrapped in plain white butcher’s paper) in her then recently acquired string bag which when you set out shopping next day you carried folded up in your hand.

But during the bad time in the late fifties, if I offered to cook she said it was one of the things she actually did. When Jenny and Will were in bed—Jenny the messy sleeper, Will neat, both snugly small asleep in bed—Lorna would stare at the blue air letter on the kitchen table or at the honey-varnished oak surface, or at an alumni review I never read which she might read, and if I came in for coffee she’d give me an ironic smile. Said I was keeping an eye on her.

She said her hair came out. I couldn’t see it. It was long, it was dark, it seemed thick. She had it cut and had a rat of her own hair made saying she expected to need it in a couple of years.

She said why did I begin my letters home
Dear Mother and Dad
when I didn’t write
Mrs. and Mr
. on the envelope.

She took her underwear off and stood at the mirror. She ran her hand along the pearly stretch-marks above her groin and said she was finished. I told her she was twenty-eight, she wouldn’t hit her prime for ten years. Holding her, I felt protective in my clothes. (A touch of porn too whole for film.) I said, You’re small—it was what I’d felt from the first. She said, Oh I’m not, I’ve never felt I was small. I squeezed her: But you are, and the only reason you don’t think so is that you were tall for your age till you were twelve.

All this is not the present point. Which is that into this ungrounded but so slowly spinning wheel came Tessa. She was not a friend of anyone we knew, though later I found that her American husband had known someone at the Embassy who knew Dagger.

Lorna met Tessa one Sunday at Kew. The ducks pedaled in toward Billy who had crawled near the water, I can barely see him he’s so small, though I was not there. Then Jenny who was then Ginny was trotting off toward two boys who were throwing grass and sassing a fat groundskeeper who seemed to be equipped with a slow fuse, while a third, in an attempt to hew down a tree, was hitting its trunk with a wooden sword. I was at home in Highgate. An elderly woman in a little round hat was saying—as if to anyone or to herself though in hopes of Lorna—that weren’t those boys terrible, got no respect—and instead of replying as she’d normally do no matter how she felt, Lorna turned away and spoke to a woman on her other side—asked what she was reading—and the woman said it was about a man who had collected 267 cowbells. But she said it without looking up from the book, so it came with the eeriest intimacy, neither English matter-of-fact friendliness nor anything else Lorna could think of except that Tessa—for this was Tessa—was a close friend (Lorna examined her), or a sister, with whom Lorna had come to Kew today. But after a while Tessa did look up; she looked at Jenny and Billy off playing, but not at Lorna; then she said, I’ll tell it you when I’m finished.

What passed between them that day I think I never learned. When Lorna came back she seemed less aware of me, indifferent though in a casual family way as she hummed through two stacks of music looking for something. And through her preoccupation which seemed to express a feeling she’d come home with, I saw she was elated. Whatever I don’t know, I know when she’s miserable and when she’s not. I took Jenny upstairs to wash and bandage her arm where one of the grass throwers had scratched her rather badly. When I came downstairs Lorna was empty-handed in the middle of the living room, behind her my sister’s photograph just above her shoulder, and the house seemed to be trying to return Lorna to the state she had seemed to be released from by the event of the afternoon, which as I’ve said was Tessa Allott. Lorna said she’d been repelled by the first woman trying to start a conversation in Kew Gardens and as soon as Lorna had turned to speak to the other person, a woman with the palest brown eyes—and indeed as if it could not happen
until
Lorna stopped watching Jenny—she got thrown down by one of the boys, thrown down again with some swiping motion that dug nails into her soft arm so it bled, and no doubt dirty nails.

There was apparently no place in my account of the Marvelous Country House for any of this—like later when Lorna was way past that trouble of the late fifties her remark that for her to meet Tessa, Jenny had to suffer that infected arm—
septic
, the English say—for it became infected—who knows where a nine-year-old’s nails have been?—Jenny would peel up the bandage to show Billy the scab crusting and would inform us over our lasagna that there was some white around the blue and the bloody-red—the tracks of the scratches were like whip-welts—Jenny was absorbed: She picked and picked, and the little disk of scab pried away too soon and what was left itched and she scratched it till it bled and Lorna had to take her back to the doctor.

Which is again not the point. The link of Tessa with the Marvelous Country House thirteen years later was too strong to omit in my diary. The meeting in Kew was May 1958. Ronald Colman died a year later in California—my mother devoted a letter to him. If you had told Tessa that Ronald Colman was born in Richmond, Surrey, she would have looked away with a wild smile and said with a quiet quiver you might mistake for a put-down, My goodness.

In June Lorna took Tessa to Royal Festival Hall to hear Menuhin—our neighbor in Highgate whom Tessa’s father had known for years—play Mozart and Bach concertos with the Festival Chamber Orchestra. On June 21 they took Billy and Ginny to the West End to
South Pacific
at the Dominion Cinema. I know, because summer solstice brought Stonehenge to mind—which we hadn’t even known was in Wiltshire—and with it all the other wonders of Britain that after four years’ residence we still had not seen. Ask a New Yorker if he’s seen the Chrysler Building lobby or any American tourist abroad if he’s been nearer the brink of the real Grand Canyon than an insurance company calendar. Well, in the paper next day was a report of Druid daybreak observances which Geoff Millan says have as little to do with Stonehenge as Welsh chapel services or Geoffrey of Monmouth’s erroneous account of the Dance of the Giants—though Geoff Millan can describe for me from New York Franz Kline’s great black forms against white canvas which seem some secret cross between ancient wood growths and the magic lintels in Wiltshire.

That June 21, 1958—scarcely a month after Lorna and Tessa had met at Kew—Tessa’s husband joined them at the movie and had a fit of sneezing in the middle of “Bali Hai.” The British Museum is only four blocks from that St. Giles Circus intersection where Tottenham Court Road, Charing Cross Road, and Oxford and New Oxford streets end and begin—and that was one of his Reading Room Saturdays at the BM. So after lunch instead of going somewhere to draw an old building in his sketchbook, Dudley Allott met them at the Dominion, and Lorna described him to me that evening. She was not sure what was between the Allotts, but she had this odd feeling Tessa was pregnant.

Not the point either; but maybe I’m thinking that Lorna never in any way described Tessa. Instead she would say—which was quite true when I had been with Tessa—that while Tessa sitting knees together and seeming in her narrow high shoulders tense or formal would never seem to do the talking, you might sometimes feel after she got up and went home that it was she who had moved the conversation—from Jews in New York, say, to Jews in London and the Brooklyn College girl who stayed with the Allotts one summer in the sixties who was surprised to find Tessa, a Jew, speaking with an English accent; yet Tessa brought
us
out—yet sometimes I discovered in myself, even in words I was using to tell anecdotes arising out of Tessa’s easy transitions, an idea that our lives had been parallel and what I was telling had happened to Tessa, who sat listening till Lorna would go to the piano and ask her to sing.

Tessa and the film—not just parts of one’s life sensing one another in that spirit of exhilaration called manic in someone deranged. Yes: Tessa and, in particular, the Marvelous Country House. But in the abbreviated form in which Lorna began but then was kept from finishing my section, the link with Tessa may be clear only to me. And what I now tried to tell the person who sat beside me, her soft dry hand half-closed in mine, was part what she’d read, part what she hadn’t reached, and part what I added out of courtesy. I looked at her—at all except her eyes, the governing powers of her face which gave person to her bones, though in themselves those eyes if you forgot everything else and saw only them were impersonal, both mechanically animal for all their flecked textures, and wildly opaque—and then I looked right at two things in our room as if I could look at them both at once—and thinking of Tessa and the tiny fold at the inner angle of each of her eyes, I thought why didn’t I include in my account of Tessa’s connection with the film these two things. One is a cigarette burn in the northwest quadrant of our carpet. The other is a jagged blue-green hunk of rock salt Tessa brought from the Bavarian Alps when she at last brought herself to visit Germany in 1963.

The second came to us accompanied by the remark that this was the color Tessa had wanted her eyes to be instead of watery pale brown. I pointed out that in black and white her eyes looked blue. She said Dudley had told her to buy herself some of these new colored contacts, just as he had once told her to go ahead and get another cat—she smiled and shook her head, and Lorna said, You don’t wear glasses, and Tessa said, I’d rather long for the eyes than have the contacts, it isn’t that Dudley misses the point, he gets the point but he thinks why say so, though he’s probably right that the rock salt must have come from Saxony, not where we were.

Tessa’s cigarette burn occurred in 1970, just a year before Dagger and I began shooting. She would hold her cigarette for a minute or two as if she’d forgotten it, then take a deep stabbing drag and as if in the same motion sweep her cigarette away and tap it—but this time she tapped off a sizable coal, but more interesting than what it did to the carpet was her interest in what it did, the calm, the objectivity which in me and in Lorna and in three others in the room seemed to come from Tessa’s—we sat and watched the spot smoke and settle out into a smudge of burnt nap and as if it were a nostalgic winter blaze or a hypnotic peephole we looked and looked until Lorna laughed and said, Tessa you bloody cow!

Beside me on the newly resprung couch as I troubled to show Tessa’s place in the Marvelous Country House, Lorna seemed now incapable of such a frank outburst.

Why did you read the diary?

I thought it was about time.

I listened for Jenny who was still upstairs. After Reid had seen me across the street in Knightsbridge he might have told Jenny (no doubt also saying Don’t look)—and now she was not sure what to do next. But I was sure I had to settle with Lorna before going on. Celibacy was one thing in Manhattan, another in Knightsbridge.

Lorna shook her head but held my hand. She wondered what the three moments I’d put in had to do with the film, and she said even if Will hadn’t surprised her in the dark house and she’d read through the second and third of these “moments,” she still would not have understood.

In the first of these moments, I come home to find not Lorna alone at stove or piano or with Jenny or Will, but at the kitchen table with Tessa, who taps ash onto a blue willow-pattern plate in the center of which is an uncut red-waxed Edam cheese. Someone has just said something; I think Lorna. Smiling silence ensues because of me. It might be just Her Beloved Man Arrives, but I don’t take it quite that way. Lorna pours me a drink from what’s left of the bottle. Dagger got me the case. Lorna doesn’t ask how things went in Liverpool. Tessa now continues, and I’m stupidly thinking, Tessa is English, what the fuck am I doing here—dumb things to think when you are dealing with a mind and body as tenuously demanding as Tessa’s. Yet she was German. And her mother had been Rumanian, and the shape of her eyes was east of Rumania.

So to make a long story stop (she says), my uncle woke up blind—woke up
being
blinded—and never saw the dawn of that day, and he was, as I’ve already told you, unaccustomed to opening his eyes before ten in the morning. But to the day of his death he was as filled by the dreams he had just before waking as if the new house they entered several years later had been really the house he’d dreamt of that night—which was only one of his dreams asleep in that bed before the accident—as influenced as if he’d been seeing that future home and thinking about it just as he was (say) killed—and dying seemed never to end but to be an endless continuation of that. So there. That’s immortality: just concentrate hard enough when you’re dying but you have to know you’re dying. Uncle Karl still dreamed, of course. But the dreams that night were to him like the last things he saw.

Tessa rested. It was precise and seductive. But I did not ask for what I had missed of the story. How, for instance, had her uncle been blinded? Which uncle was this one? Most of her uncles were cousins or old refugee friends of her father. Had a burglar groped her uncle’s eyeballs?

Dud
ley (she said) had said that it merely showed how we must keep our eyes open as it might be our last look. But, picking up her intonation though I still hardly knew
Dud
ley, I asked did she mean
Dud
ley had no real right to this truth he spoke. And Tessa at once said, Anyone has a right to it, don’t you think? I said enforcement was one thing, right another, and no I didn’t think just anyone had a right to it, her story was a good one, I said, I’d once dreamt I was making love to Lorna and woke up and I was—but she was only just beginning to wake up.