Lookout Cartridge (25 page)

Will had jumped ahead and was in his room saying, I’ll show you what you can do.

But he made me think of the carbon. I called to him that I had to ring someone up.

I plunged three steps at a time back into the hall.

The Xerox shop didn’t answer.

I had been on the landing in front of the stained glass, and I could have used the upstairs phone in the bedroom. But I had come down to this hall.

I rang again, I thought of finding the proprietor at home and getting him to come back and open up. But even if he lived on the premises, which in Junction Road I doubted, he was as English as anyone else and five thirty closing would be as final as lunch time.

Will would break in with me if I asked him.

It was out of the question.

There was nothing in this hall inconsistent with a thousand interiors.

I had had to come back.

When I put the receiver down the phone started ringing.

Will called to me.

The man’s voice could be Reid’s. It moved around behind my back, it tried to loop a tense smile about me but my son called again,
Come
on, Dad! I want you to look at this; and then the voice, having heard me answer rather than Jenny or someone else, seemed to stop before starting, maybe just take a breath.

I said Jenny was out. I thought, Maybe with you.

The voice said boldly that it had expected her to be in.

I said You might call in an hour.

That’s true, the voice said—ask her if she left a message for Reid.

Are you Reid? I said, though the question didn’t do for me what I was beginning to think coloring in Jan Graf’s portrait had. If you’re Reid, I said, the lady at the gallery wants you to stop using their phone number as an answering service.

I am Reid, the voice said, and smiled again I swear.

Yet if I were to go to the vastly empty center, vaster than its actual circuit could ever really enclose, empty I suspected of me—and say straight out, Who’s the woman in the picture? What’s your connection with Krish the Indian?—what would I do with straight answers if I got them?

Reid said, We met at second base.

I said, Well we played against each other more than once Sundays.

Right, said the voice further away now.

I’ll give you her message, I said.

Wait. She can’t phone me. I’ve moved.

Where are you?

There’s no phone here, said Reid, and rang off.

Lorna was entering with two shopping bags hanging from either hand. Reid’s last words aside, Lorna’s entrance opened in me a desire to find a formula to express the day, the day had been a thought, and if I didn’t say in a few words what the thought was I would loop forever about a fascinating capture that must be killed to be known.

What would I say if the Indian phoned to ask why I’d defaced Jan Graf’s picture.

We had a list of numbers Scotch-taped to the table. I heard Lorna put her shopping down. I felt her hands on my shoulders but I didn’t turn. I felt her breasts under my wing-bones.

The gallery wasn’t in the phone book under Aut. In the second book out of curiosity I found Jan Graf. I put down the number. I knew the area, it was rough.

Come
on, Dad, called my son above.

Come
on, Dad, murmured my wife below.

Where is my daughter, I said, I have a message for her.

In his room Will was kneeling on Jenny’s map.

If I could only get the film across to Lorna I would find something beyond her.

She was making stuffed pork chops and a ratatouille out of the
New York Times Cook Book
.

How do you gauge the height of someone like Will upon his knees and leaning over the hilly folds of this map? Three years and two months ago he had been a child. He and Jenny and Lorna and I had taken a rainy-day leave from the seaside village where we were spending August and I was considering what to do about my share of the hire-boat business; and we had driven east to the Giant of Cerne. Jenny had been our road-map reader. You’re always looking after our education, Lorna had said to me when we got out of the car into a drizzle. She decided to get back in and leave us to make the ascent. The children scrambled and raced so it occurred to me they might expect to find at the top of the chalk slope a giant looming upright above them. But he was on his back, at least as we could see him; the turf was cut away from the lines of his white chalk form 181 feet long. He was hard to see, like the rugged coast of an island you spend two or three days hiking along, and you can’t grasp the indentations with a clarity other than your small map’s. I had shown Will the aerial picture in the Dorset guide but we’d left that in the glove compartment. When we reached the top, we were all alone; we walked the craggy slant of the giant’s shillelagh, the valley of his rubbery, dipper-like right arm; we jumped from eye to circular eye, and below we paced the span between nipple and circular nipple; and then Jenny and I on either side of his torso crossed his three ribs like five-yard stripes on an American football field, and then found Will between us standing on the tip of the Giant of Cerne’s upward lying cock, and Will, facing down its twenty-foot length to the twin coves at its root, said, Is this…? And Jenny said, What did you think it was, stupid. And Will chased her, and she eluded him, all over the giant’s genitals, deliberately stepping and stamping and contouring the marvelous marks in the deep earth, while I tried again to get an over-all view and wondered what the original incisers (Roman Britons or earlier cultists) had been able to see without the moving wand of a plane’s aerial height.

The map that Will now kneeled on in his room in Highgate was almost half blue, the land area was coast, maybe island. The rest was white and tan, the tan mainly elevation contours.

He stopped talking as I entered, but began again as if we had a briefing deadline.

You see, he said, you have to think of each of these isarithms as if a plane has been passed through the land at a certain height. These are the z levels, Mr. Ogg said. He read maps during the war; he is going to retire soon. The
x
and
y
values are horizontal, see, and the
z
is vertical, I don’t think we all understood that, but you should have seen Mr. Ogg, he got all excited drawing on the board, and Stephen laughed.

I knelt beside Will and felt the relative lightness of my beard against the darkness of his hair whose fineness didn’t lie flat because he didn’t give it a comb very often and our English water is hard.

He was getting better marks. I have encouraged him to take Spanish. He’s always been good in maths, which his teacher in primary school said frankly was not much of an indicator at that age, but now he was as good in English as Jenny had been and also wrote impressively boring essays on world interest rates, the Boston Tea Party, and the history of tobacco that were a bit slow but were saved by a tone of authority. He considered himself an American but told his friends that he would visit but never live there, Americans were too interested in making money and the cities were too dangerous.

You see this, he said, running an index finger around a nest of contours and working inward but occupying too much space with his fingertip so I couldn’t tell which level he was on—you see, he said, this distance between two
z
levels, one at two hundred feet, one at one hundred, well the distance between tells you the gradient.

I asked how from this map he’d tell the exact gradient.

Mr. Ogg hadn’t told them that. He got onto maps from something else, by accident, he was talking about percentages and the income tax and got sidetracked; he didn’t do that often, he stuck to the point and you could never get him off it, but today he drifted into averages and statistical surface and how you can put the pins in and drape plastic wrap over the pins and make a real topography and he drew a set of contours on the board getting smaller and smaller going inward and then he went silent and stared. Stephen was trying to catch my eye.

Were you scared when you heard someone in Jenny’s room in the night?

I guess so. But I wanted to see.

Were you disappointed it was only Mummy?

No. But she thought I was the one breaking in. I didn’t like that.

Why not? It’s funny.

This is our house.

Could you find your way around in it blind?

Naturally!

Mr. Ogg.

Mr. Ogg stood looking at the board almost with his back to us and his ears sticking out and I looked at Scott because he might be inclined to burst into snickers and shake his head as if Ogg was bonkers, Scott’s done that before; but he was interested and he didn’t even look at me.

What did Ogg do then? I asked, and I smelled the first softenings of our dinner in pan and oven downstairs as if being on my hands and knees brought me closer.

Old Ogg drew this super thing on the board. It was an island, a hypothetical island all mountain, and on a little platform like. And he drew all the z levels like pieces of stiff cartridge paper sort of half cutting into the mountain at different heights and from the front edge of each cut he drew dotted lines which were
traces
he said. But the best thing was it was three-dimensional, you could see it like a model on the desk.

Is he going on with it?

I don’t think so but I don’t know. He was saying at the end that this imaginary intersection, the plane that looks like a piece of paper, must intersect the land surface at all points having that
z
value, and he lost me there and when he said the
trace
will be a closed line and then he drew some more contours as if you were seeing them from above and he said you see these lines are closed. The hour was over. He just stood looking and I thought for a second he couldn’t move. He was thinking. Then he just gave us the next lesson in the book for tomorrow but we were all left hanging and he was too. He wanted to go on.

Will stared down at Jenny’s map. I pointed out other informations; archaic characters locating a “Chambered Cairn” or “Stone Chele” and at one spot there was a circle drawn around the designation “Standing Stones.” It seemed a long way from bedtime stories. Through level upon level of Mr. Ogg’s cartilaginous contours his ears guided his words in to memories he would rather not bring back from the wartime garden of the noble beast where at least you knew where you were and what you must do—garden of night—plucked flak, hills of bombed houses, the late Victorian castle-keeps of Tessa Allotts London childhood, her hair below her waist—what would we have done without bombed houses I hear her saying to Lorna in another room.

And so we sat down without Jenny, and as we sat down—Lorna and Will and I—the phone rang. But no one spoke when I answered.

Will switched off the lights but before lighting the candles rather than after. He opened the wine for us. He complimented Lorna on the herb stuffing stuffed into pockets in the chops. He said to me, You’re supposed to be in New York; does anyone know you’re here?

I said apart from Jenny and present company it was hard to say, and by the way Jenny was touchy about things taken out of her room.

Will said he planned to put the map back. He said did I know the dome Reid built with a friend who was on his way to Africa and stopped off in Connecticut was elliptical.

Lorna asked if I wanted to go to Geoff Millan’s Sunday night. I didn’t know.

Will cleared the table and did the dishes. Stephen phoned to ask if Will could spend the night next weekend. Will had been going this past Sunday but though Lorna urged him not to worry about her he’d only had lunch at Stephen’s and come home for supper.

Lorna and I talked in our bedroom. We looked each other over. Her cheeks had never developed that ruddiness that when you look close is a hatching of veinlets ruptured by years of tea-drunk tannic acid. She had put on lipstick for dinner; old times, new fashions. Tessa was after her to stop wearing a bra, but Tessa was built differently. Lorna had compromised on the soft contour of the new slipover that looked like a bathing-costume top.

What did you find out today? she asked.

After a moment, I said, A man who was in from the beginning and came here from New York over the weekend flew back this morning. I think of why we made the film, which may be vague in Dagger’s mind but not in mine; then I think: Why let someone get away with this!

Do you think they’re finished with this house?

Will your young blond second tenor come and stay with you when I’m not here?

Ah. Since when is he blond?

Since this morning when he left here, and you must be watching yourself pretty carefully if you remember you didn’t mention his hair. Did he have curry last night?

Will your digestion be better if I say no?

My digestion is perfect. Say no.

No. He’s a friend of Dudley Allott’s. Tell me more about Tessa.

The film?

Tessa and the film.

Undress.

All alone?

No.

Maybe you shouldn’t have brought Jenny that memory of the red-haired woman and Reid.

Maybe I shouldn’t have come back.

I was feeling something even before the burglary.

What?

I phoned Dagger to ask how Alba was. You know how he is. He said he’d come over and keep me company.

You phoned
him
.

This time yes. He told me his brother—

His brothers range from twenty-five to fifty.

His brother the car salesman had to stand by and watch his alcoholic cousin let the business go down. They were on the edge of Watts. The cousin kept saying Negroes buy Cadillacs too, in fact that is what they buy. But they didn’t buy that many and then they didn’t keep up the payments and one of these Cadillacs disappeared and Dagger’s brother had to fly down to Mexico to repossess it but by then the chief of police was driving it around and said they could have it for thirty-three hundred dollars.

But the car salesman doesn’t work for the bank.

Anyhow it was funny.

Lorna always took her pants off before her bra.

I’ve heard that story before, I said.