Lookout Cartridge (29 page)

She asked for an electric pencil sharpener one year and I got her one through Dag.

I packed Will’s stock exchange literature and set the suitcase on the day bed.

I hadn’t thought to pick up some duty-free whiskey last night but it was less than a week between trips and I suddenly didn’t know the law. My charter associates on either side of the ocean seemed farther and farther away.

I went out and purchased for Tris and Ruby and Sub two small packs of magic markers and a bottle of Scotch.

There was a fresh TV in the living room, a small Sony portable.

I left a note in case Phil Aut called and for good measure my address and phone but not Monty Graf’s name.

I thought of an answer if Monty asked about the sound track.

However, if I’d known for sure about the sound, then I’d have been between Monty and Dagger. But right now I felt between. Like a lookout, my eye peeled for a sign from my people or a sound from the enemy.

Instinct this morning had been right. Bar the outside chance Graf was in with Aut, either Monty was in my way in my effort to get to Outer Film, or I was in his.

I set out again, couldn’t find a bus; I didn’t want to pay for a cab, though I didn’t really think I’d have to buy Lorna’s
Blue
all over again. I envisioned the map of Lower Manhattan, my destination a grid come adrift in slipped parallels sieving into some one of the drags funneling noise toward the tunnels and bridges, and against that map in my head I ticked off like a tourist my list of things that at this stage were not inevitable.

It was not inevitable I would run into the asbestos-watcher again to whom I’d given a dollar outside the record shop, or the touchy blind man, or Jim the stabber; it was not inevitable that Aut would phone, nor that my collaboration with the painter Jan Graf would get a rise; not inevitable that it meant anything my seeing my name on the panel truck just before the aerial stabbing; not inevitable Dagger would mention the sound track on his own without prompting, nor that I’d ever meet the schoolteacher who had lost his job in the Bahamas possibly through associating with Dagger and now lived in London or Paris, I forgot which. And not inevitable that Gilda would phone, nor that Jenny would come to the States, nor that Claire, newly bathed and happy, would be waiting with Monty Graf when I arrived, nor that Sub would be angry seeing the suitcase, or for that matter even care if I came or went. Not inevitable that the weightlessness I now felt again seeing my head in the window of an uptown Express bus would recur or have meaning.

But the Druid my sometime source says that in the current between lungs and shoulders, head and hand, breathing and pancreas—or one’s own breathing and that of others—the gate which a pulse finds open may then flip a whole future of gates; for the gods, to whom are proper certain provinces of possibility in the field of forces, know each other and know that Yes sometimes equals Yes and sometimes No, and my Druid agrees all this lore looks and is parallel to computer talk because in every age arise partial tongues that may do violence to some truth but that you learn to use to find the gods who themselves have given the tongues. Think but of the difference between the true (if flattened) globe we live in (says the Druid) and Gerardus Mercator’s plane grid on which regardless of the deformation of sphere into flat map Raleigh unlike Columbus could plot a straight-line course to the New and virgin World and know he had a line of constant compass-bearing.

Which, as my Druid may not have known, is a
rhumb line—
really not straight at all, a gentle loop from one point of the great circle you were following to another, but in practice a plottable and constant bearing the wheel-watch could hold till you ordered a change. Look at Mercator’s Greenland (said the Druid), it dwarfs your United States because the price of transformation is that as you move away from the Equator your scales change, latitude parallels widen, Greenland grows into a new space that both does and does not exist.

And is for my Druid more mysterious than at this stage of my film inquiry it could quite have been for me. Yet for the sailor seeking some calculated haven beyond guesswork, Greenland could grow and grow till it covered the pole—what mattered was that you could draw a line from Cape Farewell straight to Norfolk and allowing for drift and other measurable accidents actually get there.

But weighing my head in the glass of the wrong (the uptown) bus, and touched by some words above in an ad that ran the length of the bus, I asked a question more appropriate to London than New York, and it was this: What will you have in your hand if you do get to the bottom of your film mystery?

I run into people in midtown Manhattan. Old acquaintances. People in a hurry, sort of like me, people I now began to list as I walked south thinking I could better bear the full threat of that London question if I met a casual handshake creased with the offspring of the years—and these you understand are many of them in my address book—people, not years, but years too in various colors of ink—and I phone them on some of my trips; but now what I wished was for one of these persons to happen without my dialing a number—as if there were nothing odd about my trip or about its enclosing me as so many of those things are enclosed that we know but put separate in their slots or soft portable places. But I did not run into such friends from school, from college, from Brooklyn Heights, from London, from the systems of business and entertainment. And I stayed west of Claire’s pastel flat and east of Gilda’s florist, I was inevitably east of Outer Film, then south, and inevitably north and then at last west of the man in glasses and Jerry who claimed to pay the rent; and I was, in my course, several directions from Brooklyn Heights, where at this time of year my parents may or may not have been—the directions to begin with all relative (as my father might say about many matters) since Manhattan is thought of as a north and south grid only by convention, and in fact moving south in Manhattan (or one should say
most
of Manhattan) is moving south-southwest, take it from there.

A newsstand headline said
PROBE
—but the rest as I swung by was half blocked by an oblong iron weight marked
LIFE
. The names and hastening faces in the thick city had begun to come at me one after the other clearing me like a fence. I might be early to get into Graf’s house. The day had turned warm. I passed south to Twenty-third and thus unintentionally missed one of my few chances for a diagonal through Madison Park, the south side of which I now traversed so I saw the statue with Lincoln’s body and Seward’s head. A bum was leaning forward gripping the railing as if being searched, and as I passed, thinking he was vomiting, I saw he was peeing into the scraggly grass inside the railing, no hands, and feeling my eyes he lifted his tan face and opened his mouth to say the words asking me for something but couldn’t bring it off in that position and looked back down. Two blocks north on the park’s west (or Fifth Avenue) side the Statue of Liberty’s right forearm, hand, and torch once stood displayed as if the rest of her had been buried by time. For several years money was raised for the pedestal and then in 1884 the arm returned to Paris.

I’d passed the Seward-Lincoln story on to Will when he was studying the assassination, but now as I walked down lower Fifth Avenue thinking I’d just take a turn into Tenth Street to look at where one of the Allott aunts had found Tessa and Dudley a flat in ’64, that bony bronze touched me. First executed as Lincoln for some middle American city that in the end would not pay for it, then capitally altered when New York wanted a Seward, the statue now seemed more curious than the bare fact featured in one of Will’s pages for his history teacher. It followed me down Fifth and went into Tenth and I was finding like my Druid currents from the quill in Lincoln’s right hand up to his Secretary of State’s fine frowning brow or from the long right leg (crossed over the left knee) through Lincoln’s lap up to Seward’s cool shaven chin, but wondered too if I had Sub’s brain
dommage
and was sinking forward after too many trips here from London into some incontinent tourism.

A penny dropped again, but one out of many, and though its slot took it with a snug cluck which is one of my minor pleasures in machines, its meaning was more potent than clear and all I had in my hand was Tessa’s hand, yes my wife’s best friend, and we were strolling across Union Square past black and white junkies doing their skits and old Jews who might have just come from the socialist book shop. Yes, autumn ’64, seven years almost to the day—and she was saying, Well you can see I’m at least
trying
to become a tourist, but saying it not so disconsolately as you’d expect after a bare two months settled sleepless in New York.

And curiously that was what the Druid had said to me now a fortnight ago in 1971 before I set out for America again to make inquiries about the film: But you try to
become
a tourist.

I was telling Tessa about the first Negro volunteers in 1864 presenting their colors in Union Square; but she squeezed my hand, stopped me, and looked up into my face, her pale brown eyes deceptive and lucid, and said with a flick of her hand, New York squares aren’t in fact square, I mean some of them are rounded.

She refilled a prescription on Sixth Avenue. She complained of the price but she couldn’t sleep. She liked the mail chute on each floor of their apartment building on Tenth Street and she liked the shower. Dudley was beginning a second week practically living at the Museum of the American Indian way uptown examining an eight-foot drawing of Maya ruins by Catherwood. Tessa complained about the taste of the water. She had a
London A to Z
on the desk. Her daughter was going from school to a friend’s house. Tenth Street wasn’t as noisy as Tessa said.

Not even seven years later, now in ’71. But the traffic was gathering when I turned south in Sixth. When I reached Graf’s house south of the Village I was drained.

But what happened now seemed even better than an informant telling the whole story. I stood at Monty Graf’s desk and beside me was Claire scenting the bright room with something liberatingly organic like the milked essences of safflower pistils, and in the kitchen Monty was fixing gin and tonic and I suspected getting ready perhaps in concert with Claire to make me an offer that would tell me even more than it promised me for my cooperation—and as Claire and I stared at Jenny’s typing and were amused, I found in one of Claire’s bare feet a new map that took me up to the Highgate room of Will my American son and his mother’s dark hair and what he was kneeling on—and I said in answer to Claire’s inquiry, No, I think Jenny will go north before she comes here if she comes here at all.

Black eyebrows, black alligator slippers (a gift from Claire), Monty came now in white crepe shirt and white bell-bottoms with a tray of glasses.

North? murmured Claire.

Monty passed glasses laced with bubbles. He raised his glass and said, To film.

Claire said to Monty, To make a long story short he spent part of one night with her and now she’s calling him transatlantic.

Monty said, So father and son do talk after all. I can guess why Jerry likes to think his friend was impotent with that girl.

I wasn’t going to tell Claire what I had found in her beautiful foot, which was what I had found all over again on my son’s floor. But so that it may be taken for granted in what follows I will make it clear: the map of Jenny’s that Will borrowed, and in which as if nearsightedly I’d seen merely Mr. Ogg’s gradients and my pride in Will’s grades, was mainly of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides; and while Jenny after all was not likely to go trekking seven hundred miles up there herself, she was involved with Reid and Reid with the red-haired woman and the red-haired woman through the gallery was connected with the Indian and perhaps with Aut and through the Softball Game with the Indian and with us. Now whatever the meaning of the black-haired chap’s whisper in the Unplaced Room that I had so attentively depictured before we began shooting, his friend the deserter whom he treated with increasing condescension which the camera must dramatically have caught, had explicitly lived in that northernmost part of the Hebrides that Jenny’s ordnance survey map covered (or was it Reid’s? Not mine because it was too well used and I was sure I’d never bought one of Lewis).

It was necessary now to talk. We had had our sips, and now I had given thanks for hospitality and said how different this room looked with the northwest light let in past the opened blinds, and Monty had said I must be eager to get back to London and Claire could
live
there and he and she had talked about it.

Claire said Dagger had had the right idea. I asked if she’d give up her job with Aut or work for him abroad. She smiled at Monty, who was a very good twenty years older, and he said to me gently looking back at her that Outer Film didn’t do all that much in Europe.

I said, But Phil Aut.

Monty said Claire knew more than he about Phil Aut, but what he knew was simple: Phil Aut was his brother-in-law, he was doing OK but was having to support his operation increasingly with porn imports and educational films and Claire thought he had a new silent partner; Phil was younger than he looked, lived in Connecticut, had no contact with Monty, and had a cousin attached to the twelfth precinct.

Claire was looking like Jenny again, in a blue blouse and pale green jeans, her light hair parted in the middle and flowing down beside her eyes. Her feet were tucked under her and against the white couch she was more vivid than she had been last week, an autumn sacrifice plucked from the fingers of a god by Monty Graf, who knew how old he was now and how old he’d be in ten years.

He was talking oh so calmly, very quietly; King Street was as quiet as Highgate, a car ran by, Claire bent her head looking at nothing, Monty was explaining that she didn’t know as much as I thought but did know more than he did, and that now on the basis of what she knew, she reckoned the time had come to change.

On what she knows about what? I asked.