Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  Anon, leaving the far side of the Square you point out the film companies and for some reason say you want to make a film. About England sort of. When she asks if you have any experience, she seems quite alone.

  To reach Blake’s house you cut through quiet St. Anne’s Court where, nodding at the male window-shoppers, you ask if she wants a little bedside reading, and she giggles. At the corner of Broadwick and Marshall down the block and across the street from the pub named for the pioneer anesthetist Dr. Snow, there is the sign on the small house, and you both read it. She says, Blake’s wife was totally uneducated. Let’s see, what would he have said about pornography?

  You tell her a hat-designer friend of yours is just round the corner, and Carnaby Street’s a few steps further down Canton, but she asks if St. Paul’s is near Aldermanbury Square, she promised to say hello to an associate of Daddy’s. You say, That’s getting down into the City; she says, Where are we now then? and you explain the City with a capital C.

  Her father’s associate is of course a broker. He is plugged into a New York Stock Exchange computer but of course when he plays with it to show what it can do the quotation on the read-out panel is yesterday’s closing because it’s only 6;30 A.M. in New York. He cashes a travelers check for Connie.

  Children roam St. Paul’s. They pass under arches and look up into Wren’s Roman dome. Leave the Whispering Gallery to them. You show your guest the gold American chapel from the war, and she says she sometimes forgets if Churchill is dead yet or not and you say he wouldn’t appreciate that in his present state, and she says, Of course I wouldn’t say it to him, and giggles as if she’s chilly. She wants to see John Donne in his winding sheet and you tell her where it is and say you’ll wait.

  In a small antique pub where every varnished line seems out of plumb you buy her a late lunch. You tell how Wren couldn’t get his way after the Great Fire, the Parisian unity of radiating axes offended the English mind, so London remains neighborhoods. Yes, instead of a baroque wheel (you say, wondering about another pint and about Connie), or for that matter say a grid like Manhattan, you say—but then you say Oh Christ and with a smile raise your mug and she touches and says, Thanks for riding down in the elevator with me, and she means it. You say she could have walked down, and she says she has several times.

  You bear two halves of best bitter back to your lanterned nook thinking that Lorna said, Don’t you dare bring her home for dinner.

  Connie asks if you have money of your own.

  You return to the elevator. She says they just terrify her, that’s all there is to it, it’s her only neurosis.

  She wants to see the London Stone, she isn’t sure why. The what? you say. We’re quite warm, she says, her finger on square 2B page 62 of her A to Z.

  You say, Something to tell my English friends about, I mean whoever heard of the London Stone?

  It’s stuck, in fact, into the outside of the Bank of China. The Cannon Street traffic grinds by, and she reads the plaque out loud, you watch her lips pucker on a couple of w’s and the tip of her nose takes a delicate dip-and plaque and A to Z mingle in the mind—this relic moved here 1962 from Church of St. Swithun’s south wall where it had been since 1798 (whip out your box and snap it onto Kodachrome), piece of original limestone once fronting Cannon Street Station, something about 1188 Henry Son of Elwyn de Loudenstone later Lord Mayor, this hunk is the stone the Romans used to measure all distances from London.

  She’s a real walker, but when you find a little church she seems glad to go in and sit. She says things are so bad with Sub and Rose she doesn’t like to visit them; Sub gets a second wind and is charming to Connie and Rose accuses Connie of taking sides. Too bad Rose is pregnant again.

  You suggest tea at Connie’s hotel. Can’t I buy you a drink? she says.

  Pubs aren’t open till five thirty.

  And I’ve got my train to catch, she says.

  You think, Well that’s that.

  Salisbury by dusk, she says, maybe wear myself out so I can sleep.

  Can’t sleep?

  Not in the normal course of things, she says.

  You push a bit: the normal course of things?

  She turns in the pew and contemplates your lapel before dismissing you.

  I could have given you Raymond Chandler, you say, The Big Sleep.

  Travel books, she says, they’re wonderful drugs.

  You ask if they put her to sleep, and she says almost but not quite.

  So, out of bed tomorrow morning in Salisbury; meet friends, drive to Stonehenge, get ahead of the crowds. Do you believe the Druids used it? she says. Why not? they use it now. Well, do you believe they sacrificed human people there? she asks. Maybe. Have you been? Never. The raincoat has parted over her thighs, are those patterned stockings tights? Two black copies of the Book of Common Prayer stand in the rack. You put your hand on hers and look her in the eye and say, Do you believe Merlin was buried alive under one of those megaliths at Stonehenge?

  I’ll have to see, she says.

  At her hotel she declines your help saying she’s got to get organized.

  You wonder if Lorna rang up the garage, they’ve had the bloody car ten days. You buy an Evening Standard at the tube.

  3

  Before I could wait for Outer Film I had to make sure they’d take action. Under the timeless tungsten of the tenth-floor hall, I felt in my pocket through English and American change for the key that Sub had given me, but then Myrna let me in. Her dark face broke the momentary glare of a living-room window which for a second took even her eyes into blackness. She must have heard my steps and looked through the peep hole. She scuffed back to Sub’s room. Her stockings were laddered each in exactly the same way. She’d had her hair conked but then fluffily curled so it looked like an Afro I’d seen on a white girl in Claire’s elevator.

  On Sub’s bedpost hung a towel or two maybe still damp after the drier. Wash quilted the big bed, a week of Sub’s and his children’s things. Over a bunched sheet lay what looked from where I stood in the hall like the Johann Sebastian Bach sweatshirt I’d brought Billy from the States the spring JFK beat Humphrey. When Billy out grew it Lorna passed it back across the Atlantic.

  I would phone Outer Film.

  Between the fridge and the kitchen table the ironing board had been set up and on it was a blue glass of water and the iron on end, its cord taut across the adjacent counter to the plug. Water in a saucepan had come to a bubble; I turned the flame off, found a glove-potholder and poured, and the teabag label popped into the mug. I phoned the charter man to see if he wanted to have a drink, though we could have settled our business on the phone—it was the England holdovers on New York-to-Sidney charter flights: people had complained. I asked him to speak up; he said it was the connection. Myrna stepped around me to rescue her tea.

  I phoned Outer Film and there was a voice talking before the ring could start. I asked for Mr. Aut, my gamble worked, and I settled for asking a woman to tell him I’d called and then as if as an after thought added that I’d left part of a diary at Claire’s flat and would Claire mind mailing it on. I said I’d just got in from London and was in a rush. I hung up.

  Suspicion is a comfort. I was able to like Claire even less having made this phone call, though now again infused with that uncertain languor I’d felt as I came from the lav and visualized her lying along or across her bed on her belly or her back. But she might almost as well have been talking to some Man from the Moon as talking about me to the Monty Graf who’d inspired inarticulateness in her earlier.

  Myrna’s tea mug was on her News. She was older than when I’d seen her in April, it was her smart hair—but there was her long, very bare neck sustaining the brown eyes, and her forearms lay smooth and rich. She sighed and slowly without looking up said, Mr. Cartwright you a regular globe-trotter.

  Just another commuter, I said, and she sighed with a little tittering catch in her throat.

  The second before I’d hung up, the s
ecretary hadn’t tried to pass me on to Claire, which might mean Claire hadn’t got back there yet. I had to allow for the chance that Phil Aut might not get the message I’d left for Claire, but then again he might.

  I wrote one for Myrna to give Claire if she phoned. She might any minute.

  Myrna pushed her chair back and said she had her ironing. The phone rang and I handed her my message telling her who it might be and what to say.

  But it was Sub. Myrna passed me the receiver. Sub had a late appointment at the dentist, would I pay Myrna eighteen ten. I said, What about the children. Sub said, There’s a slight though tantalizing chance Rose will take them tonight, she knows I have to be in Washington this weekend so this week she wants them on a week night. But Myrna’s there when they get home and I’ll be home no more than an hour after she leaves no matter what happens. It’s exciting, said Sub. He wanted to know if I’d be in for dinner. Myrna was scanning my note.

  At a drug store I bought some 3-D cards, the Americana Hotel, Empire State, George Washington Bridge, World Trade Center, Grant’s Tomb. One I sent to my family adding that I’d forgotten what I was to bring home for Jenny. At the soda fountain counter recalling all those lemon cokes after Scout Troop meetings Friday nights, I was so near recalling what she’d asked for that I at least knew it was peculiar and I imagined now that so had been her tone and I suspected I’d done something peculiar with her request, I had my finger almost on it but the thin, heavily made-up elderly woman behind the counter came toward me drying her hands and said, Yes? and I thought and said BLT on white toast, forgetting about American bread.

  On my way back to the scene of the accident I stopped in a record shop and looked through the bins of cassettes all tumbled together on sale. An old gent in a camel’s hair overcoat asked me the difference between a cassette and a cartridge—but a girl in a khaki cape and blue-smoked glasses spoke up and said a cassette gives half an hour on each side, an eight-track cartridge means you can flip from the middle of one track to the start of another. When he said he didn’t know why his niece would do that, I added that cartridge and cassette were alike in that you inserted both into solid state systems, and the girl said to the old man, I get it mixed up myself sometimes. He had a drooping white moustache.

  A recording ended that I’d barely noticed; rock you’d have to call it, with southern accents and a lot of falsetto—the girl touched the old gent’s sleeve and told him the group was English.

  Now You Are Everything and Everything Is You came on and like a sacred loop awaiting release repeated the title words and repeated. And I left the shop convinced the gift I’d forgotten wasn’t anything to do with cassettes.

  Halfway down the block I knew Lorna wanted the new Joni Mitchell record.

  A trip like this can get away from you and in the middle of a giant traffic that, unlike Lorna, I’d never left though never lost because never gained, you believe that there in a Manhattan avenue, as if at the bottom of some poor type-compositor’s dream surrounded by three-and four-and five-hundred-foot sticks of type, the trip’s idea has been by some regulatory betrayal fed back to your point of departure. But the idea wasn’t just there back in London, any more than you have to come to New York to shop to the music of cassettes. Any more than Dagger’s movie began as we drove across Waterloo Bridge in the middle of the night after a marathon showing at the National Film Theatre, and Dagger said as he often had said, Let’s make a film: and I said, I’ve got an idea.

  I know what it is for a trip to drift away from you. I wasn’t exactly showing myself around New York this trip. It’s always a less clear place than the New York of the English papers where key statistics lurk well behind crisp narratives of snipers and rapists and the junky whose luck it was to pinch a wallet full of hot bills.

  Sub had to go to Washington this weekend, a rush call to design a program for a new client. I didn’t know what he was doing about the children.

  On Third Avenue a library looked ready to open where a car park had been; a carton labeled Encyclopedia Americana was stacked on other cartons in the dusty vestibule. At a sidewalk taco counter next door to a bar I looked the Puerto Rican proprietor (if he was Puerto Rican and the proprietor) in the eye and decided instead to get a bite when I met the charter man.

  The scene of the stabbing when I arrived was just another intersection. People brushed past me when the light changed. In the florist’s I asked what had happened to the victim’s car. The proprietor said the man was dead by the time the ambulance got through, they’d covered him up. The phone rang and turning toward it he said, You didn’t think they’re going to leave a car in the middle of the street. I said, I’m in the aerial business, I want to know why that one broke. But the proprietor had picked up and was talking. There were a few deep red sweetheart roses in the refrigerator case and I wanted to take some.

  But now a woman with a handful of dark green leaves was standing next to the refrigerator, and some pom-poms behind the glass were the same rusty orange as the enamel butterfly on her breast.

  I asked who had covered the man up.

  The sweetheart roses were tight and alive.

  The woman’s cheekbones were abnormally wide, her chin narrowed nearly to a point. Her gray-black hair was parted in the middle and drawn down close upon her temples and over her ears. She might be thirty-eight, she wore no rings, her lips broke with a light exhalation and her laugh was not only happy it was the laugh I’d heard just after someone said Jersey plates and just as the driver was coming around his car to have it out with the man I was certain was Jim.

  You laughed just before the accident, I said.

  Call the precinct if you want to know about the car, she said, but they’ll want to know why. You can tell them you’re in the aerial business.

  The woman couldn’t help smiling again. She turned her profile to me. In profile you might have thought her face narrow.

  The proprietor was saying, But Father Moran, that’s been our price.

  The woman said, It was no accident. She reached to close the door she’d come through from the dark storeroom.

  Neither blood nor skid tracks marked the site of the stabbing. A garter snap was imbedded in the tar street just beyond the curb. I figured the woman in the florist’s would do something.

  A cab waiting at the light had a black rubber-looking bumper with button like plugs all along it and a woman driving. The cab moved on, and a little girl in a blue coat kneeling on the back seat waved to me. My eyes came back to the garter snap and the tar.

  The woman was next to me and I was exactly where Jim had been before he stepped into the street. She didn’t talk like a gossip.

  Someone brought a piece of canvas out of one of these buildings and covered him, but not his face. The man who killed him just stuck the aerial out not even in self-defense, you know what I mean? He didn’t seem shocked. And when he turned and walked away I saw you and you looked like you saw something over your shoulder and you turned around and got out of here in a hurry. It didn’t seem like it was just to miss the crowd. I remember you. That raincoat.

  You saw the man’s face.

  He turned right at me, he walked past the window, and I looked him over. Good-looking man.

  The florist was in his doorway by the pussy willows calling her. Her name was Gilda.

  You’d know him again?

  Got a picture? She put a hand on my arm. You’re not police and you’re not an aerial salesman. You don’t feel like insurance either.

  You’d know me again, eh Gilda?

  Now I would.

  I stepped off the curb and looked to see if a car was turning. But my light was now red and a crosstown car blew past. I stepped back onto the curb; the woman Gilda was reentering the florist shop. Instead of crossing I turned and walked the way Jim had gone, and Gilda smiled at me in the window.

  I was walking as if that handsome woman had put into my head that I could catch up to Jim even here two and a half hours past the stabbin
g. For-as if it were somewhere in my body-I felt a tissue of collaboration between Claire and Jim. The trench coat snug across my shoulders, I would go to meet the charter man on foot rather than hop a bus stopping every other block or relax in the back seat of a cab held in mid afternoon traffic. A flag out over the sidewalk signaled a post office and I dropped off my postcards. Our more observant neighbors in London would have been interested to see Lorna clipping rose bushes today as she’d told me she would, for our garden was notorious not only for its roaming tortoise but also for its untended growth. The London County Council man who called on us unexpectedly during the summer after I’d failed to answer letters wished us good morning and asked to see the garden behind the house, and when he’d done so he said they’d have the grass cut at our expense if I didn’t have it done. At the front door as he was going and the hall clock rattled as if about to disintegrate, and began to chime, he mentioned the tortoise. Its lawn-droppings had been reported by neighbors who cited our erratic fencing, but must have seen the tortoise as something from the States when in fact a couple of years ago Lorna had simply come upon it solid and headless, a brown and patterned stone, in a permanently spongy portion at the far end. The L.C.C. man as he left hesitated ill our front doorway in late-morning light, I halfway between him and Lorna, Lorna at the other end of the marble-floored front hall on the first step of the curving stairway whose pale oak we’d scraped layers of white paint off and refinished up to the landing where there was a leaded red-and-yellow-stained floral window that kept one from seeing the disgraceful garden in back. He wondered if the tortoise could be contained. Then he said, You’ve been over here now for…? And in response to his breathing I said, Let’s call a turtle turd a turtle turd, and behind me Lorna laughed. He reemphasized that the lawn was the first priority; it was eleven, the final stroke had been flung out, and as the door scraped gently to, I turned toward Lorna and my eye passed a large photo of Jenny and Billy running downhill in Water low Park ten years ago but I wasn’t thinking exactly that at this moment they were in school. I felt in the old way American, American with Lorna—who now asked me if I would like to come upstairs.