Lookout Cartridge (26 page)

She was sitting beside me. He asked if you’d take your film thing with you.

He was getting in touch with Claire, I said.

We listened to Will come upstairs. He walked around. From the head of the stairs to the hall beside my sister’s ghetto photos, his doorway, the bathroom (light on but at once off), hall down toward our room, back to the head of the stairs, his room, bathroom (again light on, off), his room, Jenny’s room, linen cupboard for some reason, and then his doorway.

He said, What’s the great circle route, Dad?

I’ll tell you in the morning.

OK.

I pictured the Cadillac dusting a village, shedding its muffler. Dagger had stories to get him from Casas Grandes to Chihuahua, from Tampico to Veracruz. Probably he’d been to Mexico. Lorna and I had not.

What must happen before anything else was that I must finish with Tessa’s moments. Lorna curled herself around behind me where I sat upright in thought—she had only her bra on—and I reminded her of the drink we’d all had in ’68. I’d had some jellied eel and three oysters in the street that afternoon, just passed a stall and had to have some. Then at six I got a stabbing pain below the belt just as we were sitting down with Tessa and Dudley to have a drink and wait for her father who was meeting us. It was one of those old pubs that have kept the three divisions, Public Bar, Private Bar, Saloon Bar. We were in the Private, a wedge of a nook that made you half recall a horse-drawn hansom you’d just pulled up in. In the normal course of accident and permutation, I’d never seen Dudley with his father-in-law, who had once so terribly opposed their marriage. Tessa’s father was an unassimilated German enclosing an assimilated Jew. When Dudley and Tessa made it doubly definite that they were getting married and that Dudley could not convert to Judaism, Tessa’s father put him through scenes of prophetic frenzy—rising to agonies of blood no rabbi’s indoctrination could have equalled, particularly for a young American scholar of modern European history, and descending to exhausted acknowledgment that Dudley was in fact circumcised. But before Tessa’s father arrived at the pub, my vitals attacked, and I left to go downstairs to the Men’s. The pain passed, but as I stood at the wash basin an old man with an enormous nose and hands and a baggy cloth cap and a louring face got hold of me to tell me his plan for a pub. He caught my arm as I reached for the paper towel and he wouldn’t let go and I let my hands just drip. His plan would cater to everyone, mind—it wouldn’t just be the jukebox and the rock-and-roll, there’d be a room for older people and then a room where you could bring a lady for a quiet talk and the dart-board room like the Public Bar now but no jukebox and there’d be room for the rock-and-roll records—I leaned gently away—and there’d be a family room where you’d bring the family for a sandwich and crisps of a Saturday, and maybe other rooms, but the plan would be radiating, see, radiating—you’d get your central bar in like a circle and all the rooms would radiate outward, see, like a wheel.

I said I’d think about it. He said, Right you are, Guv.

He didn’t leave when I did.

At the door to the Private Bar I heard Tessa saying, What would we have done without bombed houses! Her father put down his wine glass of neat whiskey to shake my hand. Lorna and Tessa sat snugly together on the leather cushions. Dudley was tamping his pipe and smiling at no one in particular. He said, That’s the trouble with London, no more bombed houses. Tessa’s father shook his head, no no we didn’t want any more bombed houses, no indeed, why when he came from Germany in ’38 he took a janitor’s job and every house on the other side of the road was demolished. When the planes came over, Tessa sat like an Egyptian cat in the Morrison Shelter. Tessa’s father seemed to be talking toward Dudley’s drink, a pint of beer; he described a Morrison Shelter, right-angle, dimensions—the density and strength of the steel mesh that hung down on all four sides like an oversize tablecloth.

It was Tessa, not her father, who’d told us about his law practice and the house in Munich and everything else that had been taken away except her mother, who had also been taken away. And about coming to England at nine and living for six months with a relation, not knowing till her father later told her that after she’d been sent to England he was picked up and would have died in a camp but as a World War I veteran he was excused so long as he left Germany at once. But her father now gave us a gentler, smaller picture to entertain us—of all the German Jews in North London trying to avoid the authorities who would intern them. They would be sent out by their wives first thing in the morning, and it was a sight, Tessa’s father said, all these German Jews with sandwiches in their long overcoats, hands behind them, aliens each on his own pacing Hampstead Heath all day till the coast was clear at home.

My pain stupidly returned and I was about to get up again, but Tessa cried out in something like a laugh and said, Guess what, sometimes they got home and the coast was
completely
clear—no house!

The barmaid put her head around the partition. Dudley lowered his pipe hand to the table: That was in bad taste, Tessa.

Tessa put her hand over Lorna’s where it rested lightly on the edge of the table and said, If I’m lucky, Dudley darling will buy me my dream house.

I said, Where? in Middle America?

Tessa snapped back, New York’s not Middle America—but we were all laughing, Lorna too, who several years before—though I’d not remind her now as she lay curled around behind my back with her knickers off—had been enough changed by her friendship with Tessa to find herself the following autumn, which would be ’58, plunging into the purchase of the house we now lived in.

I leaned to pull off my socks and looked around at a space of Lorna’s thigh that seemed tonight less routine and less real than the transoceanic clothes I was getting out of.

I said, I suppose the connection with the film scene wouldn’t mean as much to you as to me.

OK, so we laughed at Tessa but maybe I did because she had my hand clamped down.

Of course we all laughed at her—Dudley too.

She’d had a hard day.

I opened my belt and unbuttoned my shirt, which was the same blue as the trim on my teacup this morning when the maid at the Knightsbridge B & B brought my tray and I turned my bare shoulders and chest toward her and raised myself on an elbow and looked beyond her leg to my jockey shorts on the nearly napless oriental rug where they’d landed a few hours before directly below the Joni Mitchell record on the chair.

Diary and film parted and came together, hiding one another, parted and came together like some flesh breathing, an organ like a creature, and I must turn only to the ruining of the film, who did it, who had it done, and why. I would not tell Dagger a burglar had taken the original of the diary.

I turned and put my hand behind Lorna to unsnap her but found no snaps and drew the back of the bra upward toward her head. But she rolled around on her back preventing me from going further in that direction but seeming too to open herself to my feelings. But she rolled toward me and so I reached again to raise the bra over her head. But the phone was ringing downstairs and the ghost of some bad gag tiptoed away down our long-ago refinished stairs and I jumped up and followed, and passed my son standing in his doorway with a ballpoint in his hand.

And I picked up the phone hoping it was Dagger, and heard the male overseas operator telling me something I’d been told for years which I didn’t hear, then Sub’s voice approaching and receding down some drowned cable. And I must go back to America tonight.

I phoned my charter associate. He said I hadn’t a minute to spare.

I needed something to write with. The ballpoint in Will’s hand was a very special one given me by a man I knew in NASA.

When I went up, Lorna hadn’t moved. I didn’t tell her precisely what had happened in Sub’s apartment, only that I must go.

But, she said, what was so marvelous about this country house? What did it look like?

From about any angle except a helicopter the house looked circular; but in fact it was shaped like a squat egg with the ends sliced curved, and it had a circular stone wall around it. The odd thing was that I in fact had told Dagger I wanted a house that looked circular but wasn’t and he found the exact thing.

Lorna simply lay curled on the bed. I did not want to say what the film was about.

I’m sorry, I said.

I’m thinking, she said. That Dudley found a house in the country just like that. And Tessa spoke of it at dinner here. She’d been in Scotland with her friend. You were here part of the evening. You left to meet Geoff Millan, he wanted you to meet an American.

When was it?

Lorna told me.

It had been way back in March long before we shot the Marvelous Country House.

But not long before we laid our plans.

OK, I was fallible. I did recall hearing the beginning of Tessa’s account.

The three key moments moved among all those perhaps trivial pages that I’d written and Jenny had typed.

I remember Tessa’s description of the house. Her having in some eerie way been waiting for me was the least of my worries at this point.

LOVE SPACE

Top-secret lips like a soft book closed. Random elation. I forget during, I forget after, almost. The skin of the back bends from a gloam like Attic honey—late sun behind—to a stretch beyond the couched shoulder blade blue and amber near gray. Does sound from the street in a current of day under the window shade color us? It is skin I finger, not hue, but I have forgotten her first name for a second, and remember that it was a lot like this before with her or someone else, do you remember how the memory slides out or you slip into it? I speak for myself, not for her, though—and for her ribs and a down above the knees and for her fleshly shoulders that are not what you would think from her tense figure clothed, the parts of her body I speak for still speak for themselves, but I can’t speak for her, I have her, I breathe with her, have in my hands even what I wouldn’t ever want to get at in her, like one of my whole memories I can’t divide.

She is on her stomach, hair over wrist, her behind white with a red dot and a pale mole across the way, her legs just open to show a fold of sex puffed downward. This shifts as she lifts the small of her back, and now I comb my nails up either side of the gates that space her spine. She sits up like a dancer slowly, I am behind her in the Japanese position. She settles on me like part of a multiple exposure of bending forward or back. My fingers out of sight catch what they must have forgotten: that the hair coming three inches from her cunt up onto her abdomen is in three plantings, with some of the skin between so the lines don’t feel trimmed. I raise a finger to her eye, it does not shut, it is lidless but there is a fold at the corner by her nose, I can see it.

Before, when we came in the apartment and emerged from our clothes and she stood on the soft bed and then pointed her elbows at me and unhooked herself, these plantings seemed elegant—a sign of truth. Now, kneeling back on my heels behind her, I recall them with a hand and with a hand I fit myself under across an isthmus to hook in her as she bows for a memorable moment forward angling opener, and leans back as I lean forward into her back like this, I look at small shoulders rising, lowering by my mouth, and I can’t imagine her face and I move my hand from forking a nipple way down her belly to touch her slippery tab as big as her nipple seemingly and larger than some other memory told me, unlike a childhood place years later revisited that is smaller—but softer than nipple and without direction, and I put my other hand to her mouth and feel the mouth widen across dry teeth. A fingertip of each hand upon the tongues of two mouths. An eyelid shudders, it is mine; I think of the room as hers, but the bed’s dark footboard and beyond it a chair with a manila envelope extending off its edge and beyond that a chest of drawers all do not belong to anyone, she’s between me and them but I have nothing to tell them if she were a gate to them, they are not hers either. She has a pretty stone or two hidden under a sachet in the top drawer, for she has shown me. I lean back on my fists and I empty my head into my prick, this is this time more muscle than bright flood, for aimed up, and therefore I feel less sure of reaching her than if we are prone and she my horizon, though aimed up now and lifted over my inner ridge along my underside because I am behind her I feel she can’t get off me sitting right down on my pelvis even if she were conscious of not wanting to get off or away. Yet aimed up and become one of her muscles veined and vesseled can
I
get away? It is not worth thinking, she is straining her neck, arms up, I reach round, she’s looking blind toward the ceiling of this double bed, breast firmed upward, back now arched so for a time I am not so deep.

She says, Hold me, which I was doing and as if I or it mercurial might launch her into an outside.

Our being here hangs upon someone’s absence in a like time that goes at like rate but other kind. Whose is that absence, how many occupy it? What is the name of this woman I force forward and turn onto her right side doing what you want before you know what your will (that’s more at rest but more alive) does want, yet it is she your will who does what you didn’t until you got it know you wanted, rolling a hip beyond gravity and drawing knees to chin in honor of your arching back so now you lie face-to-face having pivoted along her thread to get here, her fingers doing bump after bump of your spine as if she is making the phone ring which is breaking you both up because it stops and starts again.

Do you, she breathes lest the phone might find the bed, do you think of anyone else when you fuck me?

What is she made of inside? I don’t answer her but begin circling, I have not much of a self only the change through which I drop and afterward don’t recall except in that other time zone parallel. Her question grips me and is answered as if later in that other time but maybe it is right now as my hardness is felt in these circles I describe.

Someone else? Sure. With one person, have others; wife, think of friend; friend, think wife. Enemies? heavy.