Lookout Cartridge (73 page)

Nor would you trace my
shtip
one thing at a time as fast as a gun crew’s range computer in a sequence of digital trivia thus: (1) Precisely because I had mentioned my dream of a moving terminal (for monorail or other unspecified conveyances) to Dagger in the car coming back from filming the air base, it was the moving terminal that occurred to him that August evening at his flat as a topic calculated to keep me quiet when I was about to shoot the little group including the three men and I inspected the exposure ring on Alba’s Super 8 and challenged the f-number and Dagger said, It’s all set, man; (2) but set wrong (and at the cost of a cartridge): because he did not trust me: had not since that morning two months before when I amazed him by urging for our location the very Underground passage he himself had planned for us to use; so he automatically judged my motives dangerous even if akin to his own; and (3) of at least as long standing: or so I learned in this terminal week in October from my no longer so jolly swashbuckling pal forty hours after my talk Thursday with Monty Graf: for, driving the old Volkswagen with its faulty windscreen wipers to South Ken that June morning (to film, as Dagger thought I must know, the Hawaiian and his girlfriend), Dagger’s swift, mechanical hindsight now credited me with having known of this pedestrian passage under the Science Museum even before he—indeed as far back as Nash’s nosebleed precipitated by Cosmo as if Cosmo’s indiscreet taunt from the pitching rubber were a valve flipped by Krish’s watchful silence across the diamond behind third, a taunt which had led Dagger that night of May 16 in a redecorated Hampstead Village pub to bribe out of Cosmo the following facts: (1) that Savvy Van Ghent had been followed from his health club in the Finchley Road, watched at his flat in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, phoned by his UPI superior in New York and asked if he’d had dealings in hash or with Americans lacking passports, and had since then smelled reassignment in the wind: which, he’d told Alba, had just plain disoriented him, he’d always thought he could just pack up his books and his banjo, his shrunken head and his catcher’s mitt (which he was ruining playing softball) and sell his motorbike and weigh anchor on as short notice as a University of Maryland “regular” on a two-year contract (who, unlike the resident part-timers who took what they could get from the U.K. director at 3rd Air Force H.Q. South Ruislip at the start of each of the five eight-week terms, had to be ready from term to term to fly off whenever courses had materialized and a teacher was needed—Madrid, a base in Verona, or a mountain vale in Germany); (2) that Nash had been instructed to use as a point of contact the Hawaiian Bill Liliuokalani whose cover was his guitar and his emaciated girlfriend from Hempstead, Long Island, whom you glanced at if you could bear her pallor and bad posture so fast you never lost sight of the end of the tunnel; and (3) that a U.S. Army deserter named Jim Nielsen from Heidelberg via Sweden had slipped into London and found help through the Hawaiian, and had been through hell, and Krish could not tell Cosmo how to go about meeting this cat (because Cosmo would like to rap with him) but when Cosmo named a pub in Camden Town where Nielsen had been seen, Dagger rose to go to the bar for two more pints of best bitter and privately guessed that Nielsen knew a certain American with dark kinky hair, who lo and behold as if from the magic print of Dagger’s index finger dialing one two three local or trunk calls the following day became Nielsen’s co-star in the Unplaced Room a week later on May 24.

Cosmo’s silence at the outset Sunday night, May 16, had drawn from Dagger like a warm little confession an offer of a carton of blank cassettes on which to record some collector’s-item jazz Cosmo had said Dagger was holding out on him. But Dagger’s silence when he came back to the table with two more pints drew from Cosmo a blank, blanched stare and a stammering announcement that he did not want the cassettes after all.

No, the
shtip
I felt at Monty’s words went beyond your ordinary schemer’s adrenal spurt blinking at danger.

It went beyond my blow to Dagger that June morning that set off some servo-circuit beeping him back to what we had seen and done in Wales: back to the Notting Hill Gate flat that he wrongly thought I knew was Jan’s: back to May 16 and Nash’s nosebleed: back to New York, Claire, and Aut where the servo having found no resolution could only loop, and my blow to Dagger signaled him also instantaneously then forward to all he did
not
know about Bill Liliuokalani and Bill’s Long Island girl Ronnie. But Dagger betrayed nothing except to Alba who confided in Cosmo who told Krish while Alba crossed the Channel alone that June weekend of her seventh month. Now these were the days which marked Monty’s first involvement in the films, for Claire phoned him to report her Uncle Dagger’s alarm call from London and to ask of Monty what she’d never asked before—his advice on a business matter. Which may have joined (by warmly mingling) the two divisions of his face, for as he told me about the moving moment of Claire’s call, the pocks seemed to fade from his cheeks into some vibrancy received from the black eyebrows and his voice, and the chin deepened and the mole made its cleft seem as ample or sensual as the area above his lip beneath the nostrils of his fine nose; yes the parts seemed to join now, warmly mingling, but not gently—for whether or not he had felt from the bar the flash of young John’s steel-rimmed glasses whom Monty in this restaurant two weeks ago had taken prophetically for my associate, Monty now faced not Claire but a strange antagonist.

Oh cash, credit, regret, nostalgia—my
shtip
was more than these. It was more than computable gossip tracing Nash’s nosebleed in its causes and effects or sampling Cosmo’s cold sweat under the eye of a lean-chopped sun-burnished man in a beret staring through the window of that pub on Hampstead High while Dagger’s large, broad shape stood at the bar bending its brown suede elbow patches and making the barmaid laugh—and my
shtip
was more than some measure of Reid’s utter coolness in the pedestrian tunnel running into a young girl he didn’t really know who gaily linked him to the wife of Gene Flint and asked Reid to sign her cast just where it curved between Dirk Bogarde and W. Cartwright.

No, my
shtip
might seem to you who have me to have been merely sparked by what you could afford to lose sight of (knowing I would not)—to wit, Graf’s news that Dagger was diversifying in a survival program designed to maintain some of his established ventures (the carton of audio gear and no doubt old maps) yet pushing also to a new job at H.E.W. in white, monumental Washington, and toward new chances in a declining land or at any rate a very tricky economy: but Graf’s words were not themselves the cause of my
shtip
(not an unexpected absence that like a
NAND
valve’s zero sets off in the South Ken tunnel conversely a positive pulse in Reid’s temple, for he’d expected someone who is not there); no, these words concerning Dag came as some mere percussion.

Like Savvy or Dudley pasting a Sunday fastball to deep center.

Like Gilda depressing automatically the keys of her brother-in-law’s old cash register (to complete a transaction which went on ending for two or three minutes more between her brother-in-law and florid Father Moran come in person on this Wednesday to face up to what he called after all the one-to-one relationship we so rarely enjoy with the people we do business with, and to complain about the price of glads and chrysanthemums which he said might necessitate breaking his church’s long tradition with its neighborhood florist [such as the neighborhood was] to buy instead from the wholesalers on Sixth Avenue—and then suddenly he was not at all amused despite himself by this Jew from Kew Gardens way the hell out in Queens who expressed the belief that when it came to the flowers of the field not even the Pope could work an economic miracle), but Gilda had sensed as she rang up the priest’s post-dated check that the pair now entering the shop as if in response to the cash register weren’t after flowers—the much heavier man in the beret with bristly thick silver hair who didn’t say a word, and the much younger man, tan and totally bald, with a short sharp nose and fleshy lips, a mean sinewy attractive man who shoved some folded newspapers into the hands of the white-haired man and spoke softly but could never have persuaded Gilda the man they knew she knew whom they were looking for was a
friend
of theirs—only that the man was Cartwright (she believed that) and she was known to have visited him (she guessed that) at the apartment with the big unmade bed (
I
guessed she recalled
that
) and he had said he was meeting a mutual friend yesterday but—(Claire, I said) and as Gilda looked at the long brown hand (of Incremona, no guesswork) gripping the top of the register with the thumb-nail so short (news to me) the thumb seemed to be missing half an inch and the fingers coming down over the four white numerals of the priest’s bill, Gilda had a sensation of falling: and not down but forward: and the priest said But you people gild the lily, and her brother-in-law went to close the door left open by the big man in the beret—and when I said to her Wednesday night with a pronounced intimacy pushed into the phone by my lips, Did it give you a
shtip
(and she said, Where do
you
know Yiddish), I was saying more than I’d known how to.

For my
shtip
exemplifies the multiple and parallel sorties which raise our brain above the digital computer to which it is akin; the digital computer works its yes and no operations faster than the brain yet is confined to serial single-file one quest-at-a-time circuit-seeking; but the human natural Body Brain (as my Druid terms it) sends countless of these single files not one at a time but all at once circulating down the deltas, through the gorges and moving targets and (like parties of Indians—Brooklyn, Hindu, Maya, Hollywood or, as the English call the American,
Red
) athwart the axes of all pulsing fields.

When the phone rings, Tessa’s father waiting at his dining-room sideboard steps away. Queenie Stone brushes her well-corseted front by me where I stand hungry and dumb at the kitchen doorway. But before she can answer the phone, Jane has come from the living room. At the first ring Tessa has turned from a pot of thick vegetable soup and she pauses at my face which has turned from her father to her; she cannot see her father.

The third ring completes her move to the kitchen table. It wasn’t my face ringing, but the phone. Jane gives her grandfather’s number. The call is for Tessa. Tessa is lifting onto a china platter pieces of mackerel in a jellylike sweet-and-sour sauce. She tells me to tell Dudley to take the call. Across the table set for lunch, I tell Jane this. She has heard her mother.

Leaving the dining room Jane murmurs, It’s Edinburgh.

Will calls out from the living room, We give up!

Jane with her strong oval face and straight hair seems older.

Queenie Stone lays a gold-brocaded white cloth over the chala. Its crust is glossy along glazed arcs of the plaited weave which will seem to disappear when the first slice shows the inside. It is our contribution. Lorna picked it up at our Highgate bakery where the very cheerful women—one of whom is as phony as the English lower middle-class can be—have never sold us a chala before; they are very busy Saturday. Tessa’s father does not answer the phone on the Sabbath. I pull in my stomach and Queenie Stone’s bosom brushes my chest.

Tessa’s father points at the phone receiver on the sideboard. Whoever he is, he’s talking.

Dudley strides into the dining room and without looking at anyone reaches for the phone before it is quite within reach. Tessa’s father does turn the lights on and off on the Sabbath, but when he goes to
shul
or to Dr. Zeidel’s for tea on the rare Saturdays the Allotts are not here, he travels only by foot. Dudley turns his back to us and says into the phone, Yes?

I did not see Tessa’s father place his black silk silver-brocaded yarmulka on the flat, fine hair that covers the back of his head behind the high receding forehead like a larger yarmulka silver-white. He calls toward the hall that leads to the living room but actually right into Dudley’s neck, We’re ready!

Dudley turns his head as if he has heard something strange. Lorna is heard laughing in the living room.

Dudley puts down the phone, comes around the dinner table to the kitchen door: It’s the chieftain, he says, from Edinburgh.

Tessa says without looking away from the mackerel platter, I’ll call him later. Then, feeling Dudley’s tread move away, she says, It isn’t as if it’s been so long.

Which makes him halt and turn, but he’s several feet into the dining room so it’s me he looks at, not Tessa.

A huge green-and-blue kilt swings in a breeze of Hassidic beards dancing to bells full of wind and whiskey. I move to a place at the table and Dudley brushes me returning to the phone.

When we are all at table, Tessa’s father blesses the bread in Hebrew he learned from Queenie after the war. We are Will, Lorna, Jane, Dudley, Jenny (who is not saying anything today), and now Queenie Stone and Tessa from the kitchen. Tessa’s father uncovers the bread and folds the white-and-gold cloth. He cuts two slices and cuts them into little pieces. He salts each and passes them one by one on the end of the serrated bread knife. We take a sip of Israel Tokay, after all of us except Jenny and Will say
l’chayim
.

Tessa’s father nods at Dudley. He says, My son.

At the end of the meal Tessa’s father recites a long grace in what sounds like precisely articulated Hebrew. Then he and Queenie, with Tessa singing some of the words, sing the end of the grace, and Lorna hums along.

Later we find ourselves in the living room. The children are in the garden. Their fathers are non-Jews—or almost, though Dudley disputes his father-in-law’s pleasantry to me that all born New Yorkers are Jews. I am a wandering New Yorker, I say, but Tessa disputes that (with a finger on my knee): You don’t wander much.

How would you know? says Lorna. She turns away from the window. Will turns in the middle of the front garden as if cogged to Lorna; the knees of the man who is flat on his back under his red Humber across the street don’t move. He doesn’t travel just to New York, says Lorna, and he doesn’t always have married friends to organize him.