Lookout Cartridge (33 page)

Oh
shut
up, said Len, and took his plate out into the kitchen leaving the door open, but there was no window from where I stood. I turned to the window behind us here in the dining room with its rounded corners and its discussion and its cast all so awkward you felt it was perfectly spontaneous except it seemed rigged—and under the striped umbrella stood two children and Herma’s English boy watching the moon tour so I couldn’t see the screen. I remarked that this was the first trail of the lunar rover. Dagger pivoted the turret to 50 mm. for a shot of the kitchen through the open door. Len stopped on the way back from the kitchen, asked Elizabeth’s boyfriend why he didn’t turn around and look at the camera and seemed testy about something as he moved around the table to his chair, and Dagger moved with him. He said he was going to turn off those seasounds upstairs, but at the hall door blocked by Gene’s wife he turned to Dagger who was still with him, and said What the fuck is the point of this?

There was a little physical business at the door with Gene’s wife but Len didn’t want to play and he pointed his index finger toward her chest as if to touch her but then pushed past and then his steps were on the hall stairs.

John said what
were
we up to, then quickly called out to Len not to be so bloody restless; and Dagger, who was back on 25 and was filming Chad with the pink gentleman in the portrait behind, said we’d know when we saw it all together.

And where have you been? said John, who seemed unaware that Herma was wandering behind the duumvirate hoping to be filmed.

I said we had borrowed a zoom in Corsica but they were very expensive to rent and we figured the three standard lenses we had would—

Turret mount? said John.

The sea sound continued.

Dagger was filming Gene’s wife, who looked more and more like a model. It even made her smile for a second, and John and I went on talking, and when I said we’d been in Corsica filming and he asked what and didn’t let me speak but quoted a long Corsican song about a dead dog that ended with a proudly irrelevant chorus about Napoléon Napolé
on
Napolé
on
, I knew he had his facts off, though all he’d done was put two truths into one instance.

I asked for the camera. I pivoted it on the tripod ball and focused through the window. The patio was deserted, the TV screen snowy, then clear; the landscape beyond Hadley Rille Canyon disappeared and there was a man in street clothes standing by a lunar rover, the child in the olive green mac chugged by and this green against the rain-flattened color of the field was a subtle moment of life. John was asking about Corsica, had we been to Calvi, Bastia, Filitosa. Dagger was saying we’d gotten good footage of a naval battle but we weren’t sure what political context to put it in, and John narrowed his puffy eyes instead of smiling uncertainly.

We needed more film. Dagger unscrewed the camera and tried to put it in my hands, but I said I’d go for the spools in the hall and Dagger indecisively said maybe we should reload out there, there was less light.

Gene’s wife had disappeared. I heard her talking to Len upstairs, it didn’t sound good, her even sound sort of combing through his rising falling intensity. I thought, We’ve been unlucky, Dagger muffed it.

I wanted people we could know, but this complaint found no place in the diary pages I gave Jenny to type.

Eighteenth-century choral music came on upstairs.

Elizabeth was engaged in a discussion of ends justifying means. John knew one of her dons. John was himself a technological consultant. He spent half the year in America and owned a house near Portland, Maine.

Chad was on camera saying he had more to offer us as a ballplayer. The six scars, the paler palms opening and closing, the modest American demeanor cloaking muscle, and behind him someone’s pink ancestor in the wall: a series full of energy, though whose energy? And had one of the portrait eyes now blinked back its two-hundred-year-old pigment in favor of the human pupil of someone on the other side, the ghost of some grandmother somnambulist: and for us—energy of others—look out!—a chance of some experimental revelation on film which the commercial sector would get hold of and shrink to a neat train of erring or psychotic behaviors—and where was Sherman! Maybe just sitting, taking a bath, reading, all of these, or solemnly removing every item in his pack, his other jeans (not mentioned), his Minox (mentioned by Dagger), a photograph? (not mentioned), not the portable butane-cartridge mini-stove because he had given that away to a poor Scots couple after a bed and some porridge and not much sleep listening to them most of the night fight out their poverty and unemployment at the kitchen table rather than in bed.

The English boyfriend of Elizabeth had moved to the hall doorway and was talking to Gene’s wife about the effect of this room’s shape; by rounding the corners you enlarged the space.

Herma and Chad were discussing radical diets friends had gone on, and Chad wrapped one tube of buckwheat spaghetti around the tines of his fork and leaned over and put it in her mouth.

The choral music stopped in the middle of a big note upstairs.

John seemed redder and fatter, I looked forward to seeing him on Anscochrome. He rose in the middle of Elizabeth’s latest sentence saying thank God he wasn’t an undergraduate any more, looked at me, weighed my worth, and said, What
were
you after in Corsica? You went to Filitosa of course, I once met the lady who discovered the significance of the menhirs there, she had a lot to say about a face sculpted by superimposed V’s; you know all about that I suppose.

I said going to Corsica had been Dagger’s idea and the only pure plunge of the whole plan, and Dagger had got expenses from a New York contact, and there was an ecology conference there with Americans, and Dagger’s wife Alba was French, and there are drugs up in Bastia and there was a little Franco-Italian contretemps we got onto film which takes you back to the wartime occupation and a little rumble involving French and American students which was too complicated to tell just with film, but nothing exactly political.

But I didn’t ask about that, said John, I didn’t say anything about that.

No one was talking and we heard steps coming down.

John called out, Going somewhere, Len?

I said I didn’t care if he’d asked or not, and I had almost a thing to say inspired by his dense dark hair almost as dark as Chad’s that made John’s mottled puss and the stiff one-piece movement of his corpulent torso seem prematurely old by contrast, but the thing just missed the circuit of articulation and he was saying You can go to hell, why would anyone pay your expenses to go make a film in Corsica, and spare me your—or were you
in
the war? Why I could tell you about
real
things do you hear, real forces and Corsica too while you’re at it.

Christ, John, said Gene’s wife, but Len was in the doorway beside her raising a long-barreled pistol at John and saying OK what about a game of darts John, but Dagger’s quick pan to Len bumped into my shoulder as I moved slightly and Len fired twice into the dart board. Chad, John, Herma, Elizabeth, and the English boy dropped to the floor, I smelled the after-sound. Gene’s wife said, Christ, Len, who replied, Come on I want to talk to you.

And that was pretty well that.

I guess you could say that in professional parlance we got a few reaction shots.

I smelled the shots.

I wanted to be invisible and stay here and see what the relations really were, though film might have failed to do them justice. And what did Gene’s wife behave like with Gene?

An American proverb says, Modest dogs miss much meat.

The film, if only what was missing in it, was bringing on the very feelings that lay behind it.

But we weren’t finished, though Gene’s wife preferred that we not use the living room.

John and Len disappeared. Gene’s wife made buckwheat spaghetti with soy sauce and insisted we eat.

Now that we were going, Gene’s wife touched Dagger and kissed him.

The rain was trying to stop.

Dagger got a ten-second wide-angle hand-held pan of house, patio, and grounds.

We had more film, and we turned in at the vicar’s. He was a tall, thin, white-haired widower officially retired but serving as supply priest. His reversed collar gave his lean, loose old neck room and his gray serge hung on him gracefully. He gave us a tour of his mantelpiece, all the postcards and knickknacks ending with Marilyn, who had died while he was in America. He had brought this picture. He had given three sermons, one a year, on Marilyn Monroe, and they had been a great success because out here in the country we’d be surprised, he said, but people thought about America. The title of the last had been Marilyn Monroe and the Knights in Shining Armor.

He showed us his set of Mark Twain and asked if we’d read “The Stolen White Elephant”—we had not.

Dagger filmed him but we didn’t have sound, but I’d never have been able to forget the love in his Nordic blue eyes above the thin unhurried mouth that had spoken its brief Communion sermon this morning, even if when we said goodbye out in the drive in the Scotch mist he hadn’t told us—slipping the black-and-white postcard of Marilyn into his pocket—that he had a married daughter in Cincinnati and one here in a hospital.

Elizabeth on the way back to London was of the opinion that Len was envious of John and having it off with Gene’s wife. And who was Gene?

Dagger said I had almost gotten something interesting out of the scene when I baited John.

I said I hadn’t baited him, John was just a bumptious bright Englishman rolled into one big mouth connected to a larger bowel.

Someone made a
ts-ts
sound—English chiding—restrained condescension.

Elizabeth wanted to know how long I’d been over, I said long enough, Herma asked where Sherman was, Dagger said Back loading his pistol.

It was his? said Herma’s boyfriend.

How does one know? said Elizabeth.

I wondered what was on our film. A minor room mainly. A space containing persons English and American, possibly containing the outer spaces of field and farm and church and children in their glimmering slickers.

Why
would
Outer Film pay us to go to Corsica? It had been an even longer ride back from Ajaccio. Now two weeks later I saw the Corsican venture had had an effect on Dagger and me. We were both venturing a bit further into the somewhat chance material.

Or that had always been my idea.

But Dagger had now returned to Yucatan, as if what had passed through the Beaulieu lenses onto film feeding across the camera’s gate had gotten him from the dwarf’s elevation into power, to now the present—or as if the Marvelous Country House hadn’t happened.

Lorna started using the word
marvelous
a lot in 1958. The time of the first quickening of the Tessa relation. And
terribly
in that English or Anglo-Wasp sense of
very
. These words from Lorna’s mouth, whether describing what Dudley looked like when she met him the Saturday they all (except me) went to
South Pacific
at the Dominion Cinema, or reporting Tessa’s facetious respect for Dudley’s historical researches, grew round them a conundrum importance that placed me between two fates: to be right in the wrong spirit, and to be wrong in the right spirit. I am confounding what already was a swollen cartridge but now has still not burst but billows with soft insistence into the creases of many times. My father oddly then in ’58 did not say Well as for me I’d sooner see the rest of America first, though he did imply Well what exactly are you doing there. My mother went further and wanted to know what she could tell two of her dear friends it was I was doing abroad. Staring through her tourist lens foreseeing transparencies (called slides in the States), she found an alien element in the invisibly circled square of lens-view and did not wish to pivot to something else, for what she wanted was right here: in background a band-shell and two hundred empty folding chairs, in foreground upright masses of gross red carnations and rain-fed green (the shrubbery that evoked country estate, the sward that threw up or unfolded in front of you English cathedrals, Lincoln, Wells, Salisbury—within smell of beer mugs and taste of Worcester in the tomato juice)—but there was son Cartwright with a new beard in ’58 and ’59 and his hands in his pockets pursing skeptical lips not setting the scene, not moving out of the way—I speak figuratively, in fact I have on occasion stepped to one side so a lady of some nationality in flat walking shoes could “get” what lay behind me. No, my father said, hell it makes sense for you. It’s a good life. And he told business associates about that good life of mine and my family’s, though my catch-as-catch-can methods of finding a living came out in his words as some culturally filtered mode of capital diversification.

Lorna spoke about a country house. First back in New England. Then later nearer to home, as we increasingly thought of it.

We had six hundred feet, mostly of that dining room. Over twenty minutes. Pretty extravagant I thought then and that night when I got started writing. But the film shrank and my diary account (which I had to stop working on when Lorna came in and I noticed I had a headache) began to seem a rightful decompression.

The dwarf had told Dagger that after he’d killed the gobernador his mother died. But at another village there is an immeasurable well leading to a cave that goes miles and miles to another town, and in this cave by an underground stream an old woman with a snake at her feet sells small portions of water in return not for legal tender but for a tender
criatura
to feed the snake. And that old woman is the dwarf’s mother.

Dagger slapped me on the right arm and I tried to be companionable and said I bet he’d made half of this up.

A little editing, said Herma’s boy.

One of the boys asked if Herma had read Vonnegut.

I said my daughter had read him for days at a go.

The dwarf when Dagger talked to him was pretty well off, but political changes had come and he was no longer top dog, but the locals were afraid of him and he is afraid to go down that well to see his mother because he is after all not much bigger than a
criatura
.