Lookout Cartridge (70 page)

But the steps of Nash and the Frenchman went up the loft stairs toptoe in unison drawn by the prospect of Cartwright. The escalator was in my pocket in red ink. From two things Jan had said, I knew I had been unjust to John; he had not been the breaker of Sub’s TV and Sub’s window, nor had he pinched the pennies out of a recycled tin. And the hands that had shoved me down the escalator likely belonged to the person whose fingers must have found my letter on Sub’s kitchen table beside the phone pad this morning (the letter itself having come yesterday Monday) because Sub on his way to work at 9:15 digging in his jacket for a token so as not to have to stand in line at the subway change booth might leave some of his mail where he found it in the postbox in the lobby—though lately it is never distributed until ten—but he would never go back upstairs just to leave, say, a letter that had come for me. The unison toes passed above me. I had the ponderous street door open and my other hand in my raincoat for Dagger’s letter. Mother and son were into the next block north, still on Mercer; once I got past two trucks parked pointed south with their right-side wheels up on the sidewalk, I could see diagonally ahead of me on the other side of the street also walking north and looking it seemed diagonally ahead to Jerry and Jan who were on my side of the street someone I should have been seeking but was not, yet someone who did not act as if she might be in danger but was trailing two people I thought would be willing to harm her.

I wanted to catch up and ask her the whole sense of her note on the top page of the manuscript Gene had burned in the peat fire Saturday. If I quoted the Sorbonne poster
TAKE YOUR DESIRES FOR REALITY
in order to ask Jenny what she took mine to be, she might know at once, better than I. I had dismissed our film yet made it what it was, composed a parallel diary yet incited its theft, suffered this girl ahead on the other sidewalk (this Virginia Ginny Jenny in a U.S. Army corporal’s tunic and a high-crowned blue denim hat Lorna had had made by a theatrical hatter in Soho) to become my English hostage, yet I’d let her be drawn toward the claws of a confusion that could use her as a hostage against me.

In turn the four of us turned west and when Jan and Jerry hit a light and he started to dart across but she wouldn’t go he stopped and waited, and when she turned to look back I was already in a phone booth hoping Jenny had not seen me.

I dialed June who at once complained that her brother Chad had been using her; I told her she had set me up for Nash but Nash was by now sorry he’d tried to jump me.

The fight changed, the sky was clouding over, I turned away and as Jan looked back in the corner of my eye I felt a figure stop or turn or in some way change; June was saying it was Paul’s fault what had happened to Chad and she only wanted to help me, not harm me, and she didn’t know anything except about taking the heart out of the red jag and putting a bomb in instead and she didn’t know what that meant but had heard it only when Chad asked what she knew about it.

I said I was slowing things down and was getting several pictures different from before and would ask her and her nice friends to my Halloween slide show. Meanwhile, I said, find out more about the jag, it would help Chad—and Chad needed help, I had come back from the Hebrides and I knew. Stay there, I said, and hung up.

The four ahead were moving.

Jan turned south, then west, then north, then west again. Three trucks got tied up and I could not see Jenny.

At a light Jan looked back and I stepped into a café that was closing. A headline said the U.N. had seated Peking. I phoned June. She had gotten new information awfully fast, it seemed to me. Gene had told Chad only what sounded to her like a riddle, that Paxton had passed the heart at Stonehenge and that I had hidden it in a hole I’d bored in a red jaguar but I had taken it out and inserted plastic but the way he said it it sounded like a trade name.

I think someone’s coming, I said; stay there. I hung up; but folding back the booth door, stepping out and pulling back, I knew I had made a prophetic projection in what I’d said; for through the café’s plate-glass front I’d seen passing at a slow springy tread the figure of Reid across the street who if he had been watching me might have lost me when the trucks got tied up. So we were now five, and I in possession of the rear and no longer between Reid and Jenny though now forced further behind Jan who was leading me to Paul.

But from Macdougal and Bleecker I saw her cross the cobbles of Sixth Avenue chased then by the sudden northward swarm of cars and trucks, a blue bus full and a green right behind it empty, and a wildly high-slung old gypsy cab skipping the potholes. Jan and Jerry turned south.

Jenny waited at the light, which held up Reid who was halfway between Bleecker and Sixth in the doorway of an electrical shop eyeing me. The expulsion of Taipei did not affect the flow of cheap umbrellas from Hong Kong.

That Paul was holed up in the same house as my parka and my suitcase was so improbable I accepted it, and when Reid looked away I ran south on Macdougal to the corner of East Houston where I followed the high, wire-mesh playground fence and saw that my right-angle shortcut parallel to Jan’s course on Sixth and risking a loss of visual contact had left me closer than Jenny and Reid, almost too close, for as Jan and Jerry increased speed (and just before they turned into King) Jan looked round again but I automatically like a soldier given the order “To the rear, march!” reversed my direction and was approached without enthusiasm by two old Italian ladies, all in black. Then I crossed East Houston and pursuing Jan and Jerry from my own angle I reached a phone in a cleaning establishment across Sixth from King Street whence I saw what my daughter and her boyfriend were not in time to see but what I’d imagined and did not need to see: Jan ascending with her son the stoop of her brother Monty’s house, the address Dagger had expressed the air letter to.

June asked where I was. A helicopter came from the Hudson so slowly the distance seemed greater,
IMAGINATION TAKES POWER
a Sorbonne poster said in May of ’68.1 could only think of my posterity yet not as that but as my daughter and my son to whom I had probably done little. They are English, and there is something and nothing in that.

What was Will doing at Stephen’s? Lorna urged him to go. Did he and Stephen speak of Ogg the mapman? of Chartres and its 176 windows? No more likely than of the New York Botanical Garden with its 70,000 panes of glass. Less likely than of cricket. I didn’t know.

Now, under this helicopter, I was less certain I’d brought him back the Wall Street brochure than that Lorna had got him out of the house for a reason; less certain I’d given her the Joni Mitchell
Blue
than that on July 18 when the DiGorros had met the Allotts and Dudley had embarrassed Tessa by asking persistently about someone named Nash, Dagger had mentioned Mary Napier from Edinburgh; more sure that Will left the bath soap smeared with gray than that Gene had picked up his astonishing statement about me and the red jaguar in part from Nell his wife who to Jan was a Wellesley girl but to me had been the mistress of a house I was let into like a mover come to pack the best bone china and de-leg the ancient grand; but I was less sure what my son had in mind when he eyed Lorna’s behind as she bent to reach into the fridge and he spoke of a pulley-block hoist maneuver to check in Chartres some cryptic stained glass, than I was sure that it was through that muscular mystery Savvy Van Ghent who ran into Dudley in the British Museum that Nell knew Tessa, who would have told Savvy anything or nothing (you never knew).

But of course: I had indeed gotten Will’s Wall Street material; for I’d said so over Sub’s phone some time in the last few days, and Will had asked if I had any enemies and if I was going to Lorna’s choral concert, which I had forgotten more than once.

He closed his door a lot lately. He did it the night I sat down to write the Softball Game. He was brave; he had prowled through the dark house with his new metal tennis racket and had been disturbed only that his mother took him for a burglar though he had taken her for me. Did he think of Jenny when he masturbated? I thought of my sister Stonehenge night in a creaky hotel room with a naked lady in a green beret whose great concern with real estate during that trip may have spread the passion of her fantasies that night, but nothing like the reluctance of the man she tried and failed to tug through the Sarsen Circle into the light of our camera (and who knows whence else) and who she (like most of us there) may still not know was the youngest of the three Flint brothers, Paul, come imagining he’d find there his uncertain middle brother Gene the integrity of whose life Paul rightly believed was in danger. So Tessa’s unnamed Paul (who stumbled over his lines and could only say with stammering grace and amusement that he was a
t
ourist
m
oved by the
d
istances these ssstones had come) met my sister (her round cheeks and happy hungers so unlike Tessa) in a new bed of an ancient room over the road from Salisbury Cathedral Close. Children were near my phone and the proprietor of the cleaning establishment flung open his door and snapped his fingers at them to get, expressing his impatience with the alleged emergency that was my excuse for using his phone. June asked where I was.

Jenny turned into King Street, hesitated as if under direction, and began to run up the north side, receding, as June said, Please.

Jenny had run beyond Monty’s house (which I, even more than you who have me, remember is on the south side) when I saw Reid, and when he reached the corner of King she had turned the far comer at the end of the block no doubt wondering where Jan and Jerry were.

Where’s Chad? I said into the phone.

The English guy John said he’s supposed to be in the city.

Did you set me up?

I
like
you. Don’t I
like
you?

June was more visible than Reid. I heard the helicopter flapping somewhere and asked June if I could have an overseas call from a pay booth charged to another phone, and I realized as I said the words not mentioning the dreaded Hebrides that Jack with his connections could tie me up royally if he found Krish dead in the peat bog.

June had asked where it was I wanted to call.

I said, Incremona hasn’t caught up with John yet; so maybe I can help Chad.

June was complaining warmly that this morning I wouldn’t tell her where I was, and I wouldn’t now. She’d said she worried about me like Claire worried about Monty.

Reid reached Monty’s and vanished into the areaway.

June said, Please, baby, all I know is what I said—someone blew the whistle and John said my brother was to do nothing but nothing except contact John.

I said I was meeting Claire and was phoning from near Claire’s (which in fact was thirty blocks north and east of my present position). I looked behind me but saw only children.

You know I love Claire, said June.

I said I’d get John’s number from Claire, but then June said please not to ask Claire, she didn’t want her getting into Chad’s problems, she had enough of her own—was that a deal?

As June said the number—slowly, twice—Jenny reappeared at the end of the block looking back down in the direction of Monty’s house and me, and Reid popped out of the areaway and ran up the front steps, probably seen by Jenny.

I told June she had set me up.

The helicopter swayed back toward the Hudson but it looked bigger. The blades have to swivel to develop horizontal thrust and they could not swivel without a swash-plate that wobbles on the rotor shaft. Prince Philip is a competent chopper pilot.

June was protesting that when I’d asked her this morning to find Jan, she had phoned Claire and Claire had quietly flipped out and said Monty didn’t like her dog and what was she going to do, her uncle was out walking the dog right now and she felt she had started something she couldn’t finish.

Jenny had started back down King toward me, and I felt the lower circle of the phone receiver beaming on my Adam’s apple, and I observed to June that Claire wasn’t the only one who felt that way and I for one was trying to just go with events, and Saturday night in the Western Isles I had not foreseen that forty hours (clocktime) later I’d be here in New York.

Her uncle thought you were still in London, said June.

I said I’d call from Claire’s, and then instead of asking how she had known where to reach Nash and his nasty companion, I hung up just as Jenny turned around and started running back to the far corner; but now too late I caught the sense of June’s last words. The helicopter swung off up the Hudson like a glider tuned at will to any wind in a field of winds, and as I made my move wondering if in the twilight Jenny with her fine pale hair and broad-brimmed blue hat had been seen from Monty’s house when she’d stopped opposite it, I saw in simple form that it would be harder to make my move than I had registered looking west along King and glancing behind me here and there at children vaguely aware of me; and the simple form was a right angle whose two lines meeting at me came east from Jenny, who had run now almost out of sight, and south from (speak of the devil) Nash’s white-haired Frenchman who had stationed himself near the playground. The chopper slid sideways and lower, lower, it may not have been the same one, it made a great clatter that would have competed with the northbound traffic had that not by now thinned.

I recall hearing on BBC a witty speech Prince Philip gave to some science body and wondering who’d written it and being smartly put in my place by Tessa who said all his speeches were written by Philip himself.

Prince Philip with his engineering and nautical interests may remember enough cartography to know the law of deformation: which is that there will always be at least two pairs of directions perpendicular to each other at a given point on the globe that will reappear when that curved surface is turned into a flat map.

Monty Graf when he and I caught up with each other Thursday found this law less urgent than the right angles that gave rise to my memory of it. But persisting, I said that Tuesday opposite King Street I suddenly had not known whether I’d moved from sphere to plane or plane to sphere, which was a discomfiting application of my Druid’s thought—