Lookout Cartridge (44 page)

June was where she’d said she’d be but was looking toward the other end of the train that I got off. Between a flight of steps and a post with a chewing gum machine she waited with her back to me, the highsprung ancient crown of hair independent as if turned also away. Two people moving toward either side of the platform crossed between us and at the point of my view where they crossed, June had turned and for that second hadn’t seen me and then had, and I was like some expected surprise at the end of an avenue.

She was in color today, brown and gray and melancholy mauve, mid-thigh soft boots, a hot-pants suit.

She had hold of my arms, she leaned back smiling as if it had been a long time when in truth it had, for Corsica had come between us in the pica lines of Dagger’s note to Claire which I’d left on Aut’s desk, the space of that dubious isle emptying into our Beaulieu lens and the hours and days we’d exposed and lost.

June and I were arm in arm on a platform bench. She crossed her legs. The top rim of one mauve boot stuck up away from the dark thigh so one saw down in. Like a banner signing an interesting entrance, a label hung from inside the rim half unsewn. I’d seen it before.

She wasn’t the same person as twenty-four hours ago, yet now seemed not to need the words
really really like you
, in order to show with the lean of her chic gray shoulder pad against me and the attentiveness of her whole eyes that moved all over my face as she spoke, that she really did need to act.

The matte softness of her skin could gather all her fear and brightness as if it were her person, at rest and accessible enough and still not different from the coasting flirting model who makes a white male feel unnecessarily good, but a firmer appearance of that person from yesterday. I could not help touching her lips with my own and she was friendly, no more, but eased from firm edges of curve to curve of the breathing space between us so the kiss did not seem unnecessary.

She said what she had to say with dispatch and grace and until I was safely on the plane to London I didn’t stop to think she’d said it all without a single uptown or downtown local or express intervening.

I was in danger, she said. From Jerry. From his father. From some others. And from still others she didn’t know. Did you always dream about being famous, baby? she asked.

Who are the others you don’t know, I said.

Maybe I’ll get to them, she said.

It seemed Jerry had been even madder to find that the person he’d wanted to get hold of had been standing right in John’s studio that he, Jerry, paid rent on (with his dad’s money, June added) and hadn’t even known that this was that person; and he’d been mad too that this Cartwright had been in secret conversation with John, and (she thought) worst of all this Cartwright had been in the studio when
she
had been there with John—like if anyone’s going to see John and her together Jerry wants it to be him because from the top of his Clairol scalp down to the taps of his shoe-shoes he is jealous as hell.

When I asked which hole Jerry had come out of, June said she’d thought that I of course knew that Jerry was Phil Aut’s son and knew about the hassle with Phil who wants Jerry in the business and Jerry’s never been near the office and what Jerry wants is to make far-out films with John who does jobs for Phil and who Jerry thinks has been tainted by Phil and some silent partner, though John couldn’t be corrupted by anyone, he’s too crazy about his thing which was what her brother had said about John long before she’d met him.

June said, when I asked where she was in all this, that she was friendly with John and with a girl in Phil Aut’s office, and a guy with an ocean-going-and-coming yacht who is interested in Phil Aut’s wife, and with some others I wouldn’t know.

I asked what else besides Jerry; and June talked straight through till we parted. One of her brothers coming through New York had read her palm and warned her a white man with a light brown beard might come from England asking questions and that she must absolutely say nothing, the white man would be taken care of, but answer none of his questions. She knew from John that I had come from England, but John didn’t know her palm had been read with this warning any more than he or Jerry knew her brothers. Jerry was a brat; her brothers could be violent; she’d liked the feel of my arm when she gripped it in John’s studio yesterday and felt an up-current trying to get through, and she’d liked how my smile was part of my face, and she was mad because her brother Chad used to be fun reading her palm and doing card tricks before he went away, but this time he took her hand and was very nice and suddenly started giving orders, but he had other long-range plans. There was a project, like five hundred people, organized by Berkeley and this university in England, a commune in Chile if the government approved, and it would be ecological and it would start in two to three years from now.

She had my hand, as if against the trundling waves of an approaching train. She got up and my hand followed and I.

How many brothers do you have? I said.

Many, many, she said, and leaned to me and kissed me. She turned then as if never to see me again, then turned back. Who is Allott? she said. He’s in your address book, right? And they
have
your book—you know that?

Allott, I said, is a friend of mine. Do you know Gene and Paul?

Those words from Corsica released in the letter in Claire’s desk that I’d left on Aut’s had come automatically with a feeling that I had to use the space left before the train came in like a cartridge filling its place.

They are brothers, said June. She stepped back and a little girl bumped through between us. June was no genie out of a flask, she had a warm mouth openly fluent to belly and brain.

Wait, I said, I don’t want to be the person your brother Chad warned you against, I mean asking questions. But where can I find this Paul? The platform was filling and June looked around her. Two people passed idly between us not seeing our conversation. June came close and said, I have heard that Paul is the most dangerous of all, he was supposed to be on an island off the coast of Scotland but they talk about him in New York and in London now like he was everywhere. He’s not old. Two kids I met were just setting out to go see him. I didn’t ask what it was about. One of these kids was a starry-eyed chick. I don’t know if they had a message for him. I don’t want to know.

Off the coast of Scotland? I said.

The Hebrides, she said. No one should go there, you understand me? No one.

The train was upon us and I couldn’t see why she cared about my going to the Hebrides, maybe now she’d turned strange and wasn’t thinking specifically about me. We had to talk loudly.

How did Aut get my address book?

He never had it.

She was gone in the crowd. I thought I heard men’s voices angrily retreating as if beyond her but they may have been inside the train’s noise.

Had June been in London? The white label with a gray oval inside a flat red triangle inside the rim of her boot was a London shop where Jenny had bought an expensive leather coat. I cared less what kind of brother Chad was than that he was the one I’d played ball with and the one at the Marvelous Country House where Gene and his wife and those kids in their olive and red and yellow slickers lived.

If Aut never had my book, then Jerry after breaking into Sub’s had either kept it or given it to someone else. But would vandalism like that go with pinching the address book? The name Allott linked the book with Monty to whom the name had meant something as I left his house. I had never trusted Monty but had enjoyed not trusting him.

For a second as she went swiftly up the stairs, June was visible down an aisle that parted through the crowd of people.

The Hebrides was where Jenny was going.

Back at Sub’s I put in a call to Highgate. Will answered, I asked what time it was there, he said five. What day? Wednesday.

I had a stitch in my heart, the time was getting away from me as if I were some tourist who’d spent a thousand dollars to arrive in Moscow or Osaka but hadn’t planned what to do then.

Will said I must have been mistaken, the Xerox shop said the job had already been picked up and when he’d shown the receipt they’d said they really didn’t know. I could imagine them saying they were sorry.

I’d been in New York thirty hours and I was going back to London.

Will read my mind: Dad, could we go camping in the Outer Hebrides?

During Easter hols, I said.

But I did not think to ask until I’d hung up what I then knew I need not ask and had I asked would have stated: You don’t use pencil do you.

No question. My son’s reply was in my head more intimately soon than if he had still been at the other end of our New York-London line, and the answer was a clean No.

I saw standing up on Jenny’s windowsill in a jar with a Victorian black-and-white flower design the pencils she kept sharpened with the silly machine I’d got her cheap through Dagger.

You see, I’d also seen a penciled ring drawn I knew by her and her alone, and while I was willing to bet the map had gone with her, I knew that on a duplicate of that Ordnance Survey map I would find the site of those standing stones whose designation in archaic letters she had circled.

LOOKOUT

Think if I found the source of my undreamt lookout dream. And turned a profit too. Think if I grew soft hardware out of grain and could sell it in Middle America.

I had been looking for what had happened to the film, and now some who were concerned were looking for me, taking from me. Dagger and Monty and I were looking out for ourselves. I did not know how much June knew; but as I went up the subway stairs forth into the street (which at once became not a roof of light but a walled floor) and crossed against the light and went down into the uptown side of the station, I knew that the film and my daughter’s welfare had come together through June.

Someday a formula could be named for me.

A thrown ball snared by someone’s instinct leaning way out of a fourth-floor window in Brooklyn Heights during the war does not come back down into the street. Much need not come back. Go ahead. That’s what an old English upholsterer told me America was: go-ahead.

June’s boots came from a London shop; had she gone to them or had they come to her? Her brother Chad had been in London; it was June who made me think he might be here instead. The starry-eyed chick—what if her last name was Cartwright and June knew? Did I trust June because I wanted to touch her under the label and she was warm?

A ceremonial plane slides into a corridor between New York and London, and I am on it.

My man Whitehead—my contact Red so call me Red!—at the scientific hobby firm that is growing and growing—pales into distance, an event whose key might not intrigue a young person enough to merit inclusion in a catalog offering Cartwright’s Analog Formula Kit.

Tessa once flew over that extreme southwest frontier of California near the Colorado River, not very high but high enough to make out on the ground a man 167 feet tall. So long is he that he wasn’t discovered till 1932 when an Air Force plane took his picture. Which was just thirty-three years prior to this Mexican trip of Dudley’s that Tessa went along on. Dudley was the one who had stomach trouble, Tessa said because she upset him with her theory of the epicanthic eye-fold linking the ancient Maya with the east Asian psyche, though she followed Le Plongeon who in the last quarter of the last century argued that the earth’s westward motion helped to account for the spread of Maya culture to the Nile and the Indian Ocean, the holy deserts and the Asian paddies, astronomy, art, words without prior roots—but, first and last, vivid violences disseminated over the earth until, like Maya language (falsely for example translated in one famous line,
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
when
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthami
is Maya for Now,
now, I am fainting; darkness covers my face
), these violences became diluted into the less vivid, more crude and calculated cruelties and routines and illusory surfaces of dominant East-West culture.

Maybe I’d find that the Picts—the tattooed people—planted evidences in some northern isle knowing someday someone named Paul would turn those evidences into power. I leave the Picts to Dudley Allott. Or more likely his wife, whose tabby cat Spirit proved so dangerous to Dudley’s lungs that he was on a bottle of allergy pills a week until Tessa gave Spirit away.

No—I leave the Picts and the laws of their mysteries to Tessa and leave her also those iron files of prime tribes she saw (much against Dudley’s judgment) trekking the top of the world by Bering’s isthmus so that—lo!—a fourth-century Maya calendar follows an old habitual rhythm from Tibet. Dudley did not believe all cultures kin; but for reasons of love and fear he did not discuss Tessa’s notions. Dudley tried to be more interesting than himself.

Reach into yourself even with kid gloves, you must find something. For instance, a ball that went up so accurately it didn’t come down. Or a Tessa kiss rising from Lorna’s dinner table.

Or Dudley’s appendix. It went into Charing Cross hospital acute. But then they decided to observe him. And after forty-eight hours, Dudley said he was now surrendering his appendix only because he’d wasted so much time. But why was I there? You don’t visit someone who’s about to have an acute appendix out. Well, there was the two-day delay. So he was more visitable. And then, as it happened, I knew Tessa was stopping in to see Dudley on the way to meet her father and Loma and Geoff Millan and an Irish mathematician who was doing a piece on Geoff’s work, and me. So I turned up in Dudley’s ward in time to see him stare at the other patients’ supper trays—he was being operated on that evening.

Tessa wasn’t there. Dudley accepted my
Evening Standard
. I was conscious of our accents, Dudley was the only patient with a visitor, and although it wasn’t like visiting the boy who threw the ball during the war that did not come back down into the street, to wit Ned Noble in Brooklyn Hospital years ago when he had to let his roommate and his roommate’s relatives crammed into the other side of a semiprivate hear his every acid witticism, Dudley was less alive than I to the fact that some of his ward-mates were listening with a certain digestive satisfaction.