Lookout Cartridge (63 page)

Catherwood, said Dudley. How odd! I took up Catherwood to interest Tessa. Can you feature that?

I’d known this as far back as New York in ’64—the first flush of Dudley’s interest. I told him so, and he looked at me. I looked down at his belly flapped over his bathing suit. He spoke at length, and I leave you who have me to imagine my occasional responses and the washing of pale green chlorine waves clearer in their refractions than hard crystal.

Whatever was between us, said Dudley (meaning himself and Tessa), it came to take solid forms.

Stones. Violence. Mexico.

The Maya, their sacrifices, their underground rivers in Yucatan, the noses and the lips, the legends. I made her come with me to the British Museum to see what she’d seen on her own before—the wooden lintel from a temple in Guatemala with the
halach uinic
, the religious chief, seated holding the round shield and the manikin scepter, one of whose legs ends in a serpent’s head; and I’d read about Tikal, the ancient city the lintel came from, and I said someday let’s go see its pyramid temples which are the highest man-made things in Maya country ranging from 143 feet to 229 measuring from the ground to the roof comb, and in fact she’d seen a painting of Tikal, an enclave of powerful structures shadowed by time and perspective into a forbidding scene held off from the viewer who feels he might lose out if he tried to enter—at which point Tessa says Dudley, do me a favor and stop trying to be a poet; she cared about the method of sacrifice and I was unable from my rudimentary reading to say for sure if the heart-excising ritual was common to Tikal or not and she wandered away to look at Egyptian antiquities. I took her to Switzerland, I know you remember, when she had a bad chest but principally to surprise her with the Maya lintels at Basel which are the finest. You can guess how I made the same bloody mistake over and over. I took her to Holland to see the Leyden Plate which is just a hunk of jade 8½ inches by 3 from Guatemala in a shape like a little chisel implement they call a
celt
—the Leyden Plate was unearthed in 1864 and of the highest importance though not for the ferocious sleepy profiles of animals or gods—the enormous-nosed, dollop-lipped, retreating-chinned profiles Tessa loved—and the captive under the warrior’s sandal. I read Bishop Landa. I read Stephens’
Incidents of Travel
. I gave it to Tessa. I tried to intercept her—you know her—but then again
I
know her. And if it was ever physical it had little to do with whether I took regular exercise or studied breast-beating in the
Kama Sutra
. For a time I virtually gave up European history except to lecture on it. I took up Catherwood (said Dudley) because I wanted a German Jewish refugee who was obsessed with her mother’s disappearance in a death camp.

Catherwood was between us, the friend of Keats and Shelley, Prescott and Wilkinson, and no one except possibly Wilkie Collins in
The Woman in White
described him, and there the character Hart-wright goes off to Central America and is a draftsman and the rest of it may not be Catherwood at all—the star-crossed lovers (for he
was
married)—but the honesty and legality in Hartwright does seem right for the man I find in Stephens’
Incidents
and in the drawings; he was a great draftsman and the first to use daguerreotype to record Maya remains, but there is no picture but the self-portrait vaguely self-effacingly at the center of his picture of the Tulum ruins where he’s either paying out or pulling in surveyor’s tape, possibly the same reel they used for the ruins in Jerusalem.

Tessa would of course interrupt me (said Dudley) in the presence of her father and others when I would speak of my Catherwood inquest. She would say Dudley is counting the fifteen-foot-long rungs of the famous eighty-foot ladder that runs down the well of Bolonchén but the real current is the underground river that feeds the well; Dudley is working out what Catherwood’s camera lucida was and just how he used it between his eye and the paper to bring Egyptian temples and obelisk carvings and Alexander’s grand cock jutting along from wall to wall at Karnak down to the right proportions and perspective—while
my
Catherwood is finding in a ruined city his friend paid fifty dollars for, a Maya idol he instinctively knows is a blood relative of Egypt.

You know her. Why do I tell you all this? In ’64 Catherwood instead of being a means to a juncture became a subtle passion. To me. Tessa begged off the Brooklyn Museum and the Natural History Museum. She reminded me that because of her in the Natural History in London I’d said I’d never set foot there again with or without her. On a mad detour en route to Yucatan she could fly around southern California looking out her window for the 167-foot man, but she wouldn’t come uptown in Manhattan to see the vaults of the Museum of the American Indian, though on the other hand she always made me feel I’d done well when I took her to a restau rant as I did that night, there was a Mexican place in the Village, but you must recall it—and even as early as ’64 I knew it was hopeless and at this time Catherwood got larger in my thinking, a mystery man, exile engineer, impromptu physician to the Indians—how much of Collins’ Hartwright is Catherwood?

And Catherwood stayed between Dudley and Tessa but for Dudley as a memory of his need for her and an mkling of discovery. And when a lawyer was interested in Cabot and the rotunda burning of Catherwood’s Maya drawings and the Jerusalem panorama, Dudley consulted him about a divorce.

Her disparagements ceased to touch him, he said. The Leyden Plate tells us how early the Maya calendar systems and the associated hieroglyphics and astronomy were developing in Yucatan: but Tessa turns away to tell tales of dwarves looking out of windows, and widows underground selling river water in exchange for babies in order to feed pet snakes—did Dagger really go to Yucatan?—not to mention the feathered serpent god, the exile Kokulcan, who seemed to go away but who landed further down the coast—or she confuses Kokulcan Quetzlcoatl with the extended snake-head foot of the manikin scepter somewhat as she confuses fourth-century Maya calendrics with animal cycles in Tibet.

I, Cartwright, sitting on an edge of the Swiss Cottage pool, had been following the stroke of a girl lap after lap. Dudley’s unprecedented talk moved steadily ahead through a hotel in Merida, North Yucatan: Tessa suddenly got nice when they talked of going southwest to find the hundred-foot-high terrace where two giant cottonwood trees originally from India spread their great roots thirty yards outward to bind down the ruined stone structures—and Dudley didn’t touch the water or the beans and still got cramps.

The swimming girl passed close, twisting her head to breathe automatically as if in a sleep, and Dudley passed through a Welsh farmhouse with two long-haired cats that filled his allergic lungs and itching chest and a gentleman farmer friend of a Scottish friend of Tessa’s took her off on long walks and got drunk and amused Tessa with the jumbled tale of how Lord Cardigan of the Light Brigade had been responsible for the
r-w
defect politely imitated by his officers and bequeathed now to certain members of the upper middle class, and Dudley asked where in Wales Cardigan was and the gentleman farmer asked Dudley questions he’d asked a half hour before about what kind of sanitation they had in the stone castles along the Wye and the Usk and whether there were any castles in America, where the Allotts were about to return, and Tessa and their host were still up when Dudley was in bed asleep.

But on the round edge of Alba’s bathtub I’d seen or heard through outward curves like someone else’s fingerprint of my life Dudley fibbing to Jane: This man Dudley in the probities of resolved habit would not go to that museum in London any more; I’d heard him say so. It hadn’t been the
museum
he wanted to stop at after they left the nearby air terminal. The museum was a pretext.

Reid had been in the pedestrian tunnel then with Jenny, had been recognized by Jane, and had suddenly changed his mind.

Jenny had wended her way home and typed two parts of my film diary, the Hawaiian Hippie and the Suitcase Slowly Packed.

In the hall I lifted the carton Cosmo had left; it didn’t feel like wine, not heavy enough nor, in its lines of stability, vertical. Nor did it clink.

Cars passed. I switched off the kitchen light. Pushed in the drawer I’d left out. Switched on the light to see if I’d left a knife out. Then switched off.

The worldly goods of Alba and Dagger had conveyed themselves to me in my rounded fingertips and rising memory. Man and woman, let them together cleave. They might come back. The place had cloven itself first from garden to street:

But was the comb along that axis between garden and street? No. It was in the bathroom: and it turned me: or I was turned to it by the leveled contents of Alba’s closet which itself was off or barely on that axis that now rotated. Round and round I turned looking out to these dark things that were also all (especially in Dagger’s “exciting” absences) Alba’s. Well, Dagger had dropped into my house one day when I wasn’t there and taken some magazines—Lorna didn’t know which. At eye-level across from the forged Mercator, the fresh face of Bob Harte murdered in May 1940 (in part because he lent away the key to Trotsky’s gate) thickened to the lips of Mick Jagger peeling down off Jenny’s wall, blinding in turn into my own merchant mouth nosing Lorna’s calf toward twelve thirty to confuse anger if not only to please the object of my desire, but having lost that axis to a turn and having turned less clearly yet more smoothly borne past faces two, three, four, six times familiar, not just a father and a daughter approaching a daughter and an actor, but (cleaving watery distances) others, round through origin after origin, still the building site my people were wiring to blow up while I stood guard is alone with me, and the absence of them (for they have gone) and of the others whose approach I was to intercept but who now may not come softens the fore-and-aft axis where I stand between, to a conglomerate of foreign fields surrounding me on all sides belonging to other after other after other, hence seeming to decrease probabilities, hence seeming static, yes parts of a wheel I have not wholly made myself, in turn a conveyance I’ve also partly made, like the Nagra spools I’ve added to the weapons in my pockets, like ideas for a film whose idea was also Jan’s, like my dream on the Glasgow plane which a preclassic Maya shrink deglyphs as a rueful record of Tessa who acted out for me the old Maya price of cuckolding a noble—the belly opened, the intestine coaxed forth into the temperate air loop by loop, a trout’s dream of fish heaven, but here too the cuckold-executioner with his hand on the real inner thing which yet escapes him for under its belly-flesh it has so often turned over when stroked lightly by the adultress his wife. But what did Tessa ever say about Lorna? Nothing!

Not, Why do you fuck your wife’s friend?

Not, What would she feel if she knew? or feel if she did not know?

Between rucksack and carton in Dagger’s hall I felt the slow thump of steps. Not many. As many as the steps behind me Wednesday in New York (though they were odd) and as I went to the living-room couch and curled up in a self-defense Napoleonic or godlike in the casual will to really sleep for plausibility’s sake, I was still deeper into the wheel which was a new, less violent between.

So that I was an axled part not just of objects where I’d hoped to find the film, not just among objects which, in proper light, film they say can best reveal, nor of a wheel merely solid; for the things in this flat swelled my head like a lung or the ripples round a disturbance, out through what the objects meant in the DiGorros’ life, beyond to Catherwoods and Cartwrights that abandoned such darkly solid household effects as these to pass so far out in this cycle as to reach then an inner not an outer vacancy to be filled with words which (let me finish) may yet turn up bodily parts like the Maya limbs hired machetes unearthed while John Lloyd Stephens “leaned over [them] with breathless anxiety” not knowing what he’d got hold of—in fact a city he would presently buy for a record fifty dollars still not knowing what he had.

Red Whitehead watched a fourth-quarter screen-pass unfold on his TV and reached blindly for the pack of filters on the table between a beer can and a hand-painted plate of crumbs. I must abandon my subservience to minor moneys, and make my fortune in America. My mind was a live liquid. A Xerox lay under a wet stone at Callanish. OK, let it advertise the film. Phone the Indian-boned Calvinist widow and ask her to retrieve it. Let Jack and Aut, Reid and the boy named Sherman who had helped roof Reid’s dome in Ridge-field with Reid’s parents’ phonograph discs, let Incremona and Gene and others fear the film through the words of mine that lay between them and it.

A piece of flesh in Lorna’s firm fingers.

Pachisi, the backgammon Hindus play with cowry shells—which is like Mexican Patolli.

From Prescelly, Pentelicon, Aswan, the Copan quarries, the great stones (how, one does not know) sometimes without the wheel, moved through the four ages of the world, Maya, Hindu, other.

So that the world comes to be believed in, between us and the truth.

An illusion the Hindus call Māyā.

Felt even more in the partly separated blocks that never quite made it out of the mountain-top quarry and that Stephens and Catherwood scratched their names in.

Catherwood with his hand moved column-idols thirteen feet high all over the world. Stephens arranged the digs, studied the finds. Catherwood went on sketching.

Māyā is the world this side of the truth.

Dudley did not make it up to the Museum of the American Indian that Monday to look at the Catherwood drawings in the vault. The place was closed. On that Monday, Catherwood grew between Dudley and Tessa. In the evening he took her to a Mexican restaurant and they ate baby cactus, and it is quite likely that Tessa did not think of what she had had that afternoon. Dudley knew.