The sun was on the bed, the bed was unmade but quite neat.
Claire had wanted me at her flat probably because I’d be trouble at the office. But who there knew me? And Phil Aut wouldn’t have had to see me.
I detoured seeking a record shop to get the Joni Mitchell for Lorna.
What if Claire had been told to do nothing more with this film matter but had felt she had to see me? Hence, the Friday cable. Lorna had ripped it open—Aha, Claire likes older men.
After I’d read it Lorna sat on the piano stool and read it again, languidly young in her white nightgown. She said nothing about the film.
Midafternoon Manhattan pressured my eyes so stepping off the curb at Park and Fiftieth looking into the blue fish-eye sky bordered by hard-edged tops of buildings and farther north a penthouse tree, I was sensitive to the words of a blind man whom I’d just stepped around: Could you help me? But a girl was already there with her hand on his arm asking if he wanted to cross. He said would she let him feel her. She nodded, and looked at me. Then he asked again, and she said Sure.
He held her shoulder, touched her cheek and hair and ear. He said Yes, and she said OK? and I followed them west across Park to the traffic island where because of their slow pace they ran out of green light and she stopped. He held on.
It would be different in the dark, for there the girl wouldn’t see either. To be blind making love in the light with someone not blind.
Quite different from being a lookout prevented from communicating what you see.
The girl put her free hand over his face and as she drew the fingertips down, she spread her thumb and little finger to miss his eyes. He gave her index a peck as it came by.
She looked at me, at the light, at me, and took the man across the rest of the way. She disengaged herself and said Bye, looked unsmiling at me, and swung off down the block toward Madison.
A frail, white-haired woman spoke to the man and passed on.
A girl was at the curb and they talked and then he touched her. They went east right back across Park but made it all the way in one light because she hurried him as if they had a mutual appointment. She didn’t touch his face, but she did look at me. With compassion. For him.
Being three blocks from the New York branch of the scientific hobby firm for which I periodically acted as U.K. sales scout reminded me I’d put off till later in the week my visit to them. I had to look over for the English Yuletide an enlarged 1500-watt three channel color organ that turns sound into light and can operate two hundred Christmas tree lamps and three 50-watt spots simultaneously.
I looked close into the blind man’s eyes and whether he smelled Claire’s soybeans in my teeth or had activated that spatial sense blind heads are known to possess; he said, So what are you looking at, pal? and was not about to feel my nose.
I said I’d just made the round trip across Park Avenue and wondered how far he usually got.
In an undertone so his eyes seemed to be putting up a front for an audience he didn’t want to hear this, he said, You know what you can do with your round trip.
God knows what flashback he saw when I looked into his pale squint. He was blind all right.
But what was I doing—I wasn’t here seeing sights—this round trip of mine was not routine and I seemed to be having a time getting uptown to my charter man whom I’d never met face to face. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure the drink with him was quite the casual drink he’d let it seem, even though he would continue to need someone at the London end. His predecessor, a portly youth, had graduated from City College and split to Hamilton, Ontario, and a part-time job at a travel agency run by a Genoese immigrant capitalizing on the considerable Italian community.
I told the blind man I’d stop by again if I was in the area if he didn’t mind and he said he did-and on the point of remembering what Jenny had asked me to bring back this trip, I set out again. But there were cloudy screens at many distances and all around in more directions than Gotham’s old grid seems to permit, and I myself a projection out of focus unless aimed at the right screen.
An oriental with a good camera snapped a dozen pictures from curb to curb crossing Park at Fifty-second and kept snapping even after a car honked him into a jump shot that I stepped back out of.
If I didn’t get to the charter man, I was still less than twenty-four hours past that twilight holding-pattern at Kennedy and if this throbbing horizontal gravity kept me from getting uptown to see the charter man today, I still had two or three weeks.
I could not know naturally that today was not the day I was going to be shoved down a dead escalator, as if some private-spirited mechanic at wit’s end were trying to prime those stopped steps with living feet. I couldn’t know for sure that Jim and Claire weren’t linked—hell, the people you know tend to do the same things as you—in New York you see a French bloke you haven’t seen in three years suddenly in the lobby at a festival of horror films contemplating popcorn through the glass counter, his hand detached below a leather sleeve; or in London at the end of a bad day you catch an Arts Council Show and in the first of its series of American interiors you sit down in a Vegas madam’s 1943 parlor that’s traveled from California to Germany and now here to London on the way back home and you listen to the authentic jukebox and you cross eyes with a blue-uniformed guard who looks away as you wonder if he ever heard “Don’t Fence Me In” during the Blitz, but now at eyelevel from Roxy’s seedy armchair where you’re sitting two new knees materialize and they turn out to be knees that followed yours at the Cinderella Ball in Brooklyn Heights a year later in ’44, for you move up past them to a Lincoln green wool hem and thence in a rush to Renee’s russet shag that is not russet now but hot San Francisco copper: Reneé—for Christ sake Renée-opens her bright mouth, moans, and reaches at you and as you incredulously get up almost falls into your lap there in the easy chair of your traveling brothel but a moving lap is hard to find and as Renee says quite loud, Missed it in L.A., had to see it here, the russet hair you mouthed on Brooklyn Heights flies back in your face here half a mile from Buckingham Palace at this summer show (where in Days of old, Knights were bold) and the same low-pitched voice you once kissed gives you a twenty-five-year résumé and when the Crosby changes in the bright dome of this jukebox that transcends nickles and dimes, the mouth takes a breath, its breasts rise, and it asks where you’re staying—and you don’t know where to start, here in Merry England, where Knights were bold and ladies not particular. You shrug (as if amused): I’m making a film—and she says, Oh you’re on location, and you say, No I mean I live here. She says, We’re going to Stratford tomorrow, and you say be sure and go over to Warwick Castle to see the peacocks.
What’s your film called? she says, and when you ask for ideas she says, Murder in Murmansk.
Where does time pass on a day in New York? Is that what my eyes were bucking? all that time-waste recycled as dirty air thus dense enough to be like the looking glass in some tale I read Jenny who was then Ginny in which if you wish you can see what’s happening somewhere else? I walked east and south and east again, I was between the first opening which had been mine and the next which had to be Outer Film’s.
I had cut back to Goody’s record store. I was shot at the entrance by a toy pistol that fired actual wooden cartridges. Down stairs I found the section and looked for the M’s. One of the big bands was into a fox trot of “I Remember You” but got rejected, and in the lesser noise of voices speaking, a German accent with the authority of a root canal specialist was lecturing a customer: Keep then your monaural but you ruin your stereo records if you don’t buy a stereo pickup. The customer was saying something, but now a crash of strung steel covered the ceiling and at once lowered itself upon us like a lid drummed by our own ears at a 4–8 shake tempo so established that the group seemed to have been playing sound-proofed till some Goody employee hunting a disc opened their door. This siege of feeling may have been the Stones, I didn’t ask, but Jenny gets Rolling Stone, and
between the instants at which I spotted the dark blue edge of Lorna’s album Blue and put my fingers on it and drew out the bluegloamed face, I knew again that all my daughter had asked me to bring her back was a goddarnned memory, she’d come upon the words Monday night while Lorna was upstairs packing for me. A farewell dispute—and Jenny knew her words bring me back a memory orphaned her in my eyes and lessened me. We had more than an argument. It was the first time Jenny—christened Virginia, called by us Ginny, changed by her to Jenny—hadn’t asked me to bring her something from the States and I gave myself so little leeway I pressed her hoping to calm her, but she held on to a signal she’d found in her just-uttered words, yet now not with a very young woman’s clear, spiky sex but a late adolescent girl’s subtler uncertainty as to how much she might have to hurt herself: as if the five words she’d come upon in cruel delight—bring me back a memory—had become a venture she must see through. Then with a friendliness I didn’t like she said, You and that film.
You can’t help, I said.
If I could only get away to my plane and to New York Jenny would be safer in London free of this nonsense about postponing A-levels and taking a job in San Francisco, where she’d never been, or New York, which she stuck in only so I’d think of her seeing her grandparents.
I paid Goody’s by check using an old Shell credit card and a New York driver’s license in whose fold a snap of Will had got stuck. The woman took card, license, and picture, turned my check over onto the cash register’s little counter, poised her pen and asked me my address as if she’d forgotten it, and I automatically gave Sub’s, the one on the license. Will had on a bikini and below his snorkel mask his mouth was grinning.
Back on Third I bought a pack of absorbent rings which give off sandalwood scent when the light bulbs they fit onto are lighted. How near the Outer Film office was I; I got out my wallet, my Manhattan address-locater, and as I finished dividing the first three figures by 2 and subtracting 12 for Avenue of the Americas I was accosted by a heavy-set black man in a lumpy overcoat and no socks who asked me for a dollar, and when I automatically said, Sorry I don’t have any change, he looked at my address-locater torn from some host’s Yellow Pages long ago, his hair was cropped close to his skull, he shrugged and I felt I had earned him his dollar and in the breeze carefully took it out of my wallet and handed it over. He didn’t thank me and as I looked at his splayed nose I got a spread of adrenalin in my face: I hadn’t paid Myrna the eighteen ten.
He said, Don’t go too far downtown, man, the wind is blowing the high buildings and they got these flakes of asbestos coming down like first snow.
I asked if he knew that at Mt. Sinai they’d found asbestos in someone’s uterus. His eyes followed my address-locater back into my wallet and he said, I believe you, man, that’s the important thing. Hard-hat fell thirty floors, you hear? I just got into town, I said, I’ve been away. I believe you, man, so you didn’t read it in the papers—fell thirty floors through a steel grate, some other cats are standing there but this hard-hat he just went right through, nothing left on the platform, only his helmet, right?
Right, I said, and he nodded and turned away.
The hem of his coat was coming down. He said over his shoulder, Got my back to the wall.
At the corner of one of those phone booths that expose you as if to single you out, I tried Myrna. I listened but heard only the traffic and wondered if these booths ever got hit. Two taps came on the glass, I listened some more and the tapping got heavy and there was a face close to me and I left the booth and left my quarter in the broken box unreturned.
If Tris and Ruby still liked bedtime stories I could tell them one tonight. How Sub and I when we were kids in Brooklyn Heights once burrowed a tunnel through a thirty-foot-long snowdrift and took our lunch in there and a friend of ours tried to wall us in; or how Sub got concussed in a doubles match against Brown, or how the Great Train Robbery got pulled off, or how Dagger got his name.
Instructions repeat: If something from Outer Film, go on through new open circuit.
If nothing, get looped.
I could tell them Beauty and the Computer.
Ruby wouldn’t like it.
If Myrna had gone and Ruby and Tris were spending the night with their mother Rose, and Sub was at the dentist, I could be freer with the phone.
When I got home Myrna was in the hall with her coat on.
I entered to the tune of a commercial in the living room and Sub’s angry voice. Myrna called, I’m going now.
I said, I have your eighteen ten.
The TV stopped and Sub’s voice was saying, If this room isn’t picked up there will be no TV period. I’ll take this discount portable which has proved its portability between here and the premises of our gifted repairman who specializes exclusively in new discount sets and I will drop it out of this living-room window.
Sub came into the hall, he had on a white T-shirt and bore a pile of folded laundry just high enough to touch his shaggy beard. Myrna said to me, Got my money right here in my bag.
I paid her, said Sub.
What if it hit somebody, said Tris offstage.
They’d put Daddy in jail, said Ruby.
Tris said, In the Tombs.
I wouldn’t let them, said Ruby.
Myrna left and Sub was facing me and in the light from behind him his dark glasses seemed darker. He needed to speak, and to an intelligent white adult roughly of his background; but I wanted to ask about phone calls and I saw myself waiting for a phone call and saw the two of us over the midnight hill and deep into late late time watching on TV King Kong we saw together during the Korean War about the time I entered the Coast Guard.
Facing me Sub was nonetheless addressing Tris and Ruby who were still out of sight in the living room so his voice was loud: Myrna gets two-fifty an hour plus carfare for, among other things, cleaning up this apartment, and you come home from a private school that’s costing me five hundred dollars a month and not only spread your printing press and uncapped magic markers over the indestructible rug your gifted mother bought when we moved in but also the caran d’ache Swiss modeling dreck with guaranteed highly perishable gouache colors she was good enough to buy you today.
We didn’t want to mess up our rooms, said Tris.
You were at the dentist, said Ruby.
Myrna had gone. When the panhandler had accosted me outside the record store I hadn’t quite reached the result of my division and subtraction but I thought it was forty-nine.
Sub hadn’t budged and now he was addressing me too.
My hands came out of my trenchcoat.
I phoned the dentist for two solid hours, he said. I couldn’t get in between the busy signals.
You were calling him? I said.
Rose phoned Myrna she was taking the children, so I wanted to come home and give them some money and see that Ruby had her asthma medicine, so I’ve got to put off the dentist, right? But I couldn’t get him, and rather than pay for a missed appointment I find a gifted cabdriver who immediately gets stuck in traffic, and I reach the dentist’s just as his girl’s getting a busy signal at my office or so she says, she’s been phoning patients half the afternoon, Doctor Wall went home at lunchtime with a colitis attack. When I get home I find Myrna tried to reach me at the office to say Rose won’t be taking Tris and Ruby after all—if you want to know why I’m suffering from brain damage—Rose came over earlier in the day with the caran d’ache for them and would have left it with the doorman because she is a mysterious fairy goodmother but we haven’t had a doorman this week because he had some trouble getting into his own apartment house uptown the other night, but Rose was in luck, only Myrna was here because the children’s bus was delayed at the garage getting new shocks according to Tris. And meanwhile you, I suppose, have signed a contract for another film.
Sub disappeared into Ruby’s room so I was alone in the front hall. Sub behind me to my left, the children around a threshold to my right, rustling, straight
ening, fitting.
Any messages? I said.
Sub’s voice was as if he’d put his head in a closet. All I’ve achieved today is provide a setting for you to receive phone calls.
They were on a pad in the kitchen next to a package of chopped meat the color of crushed strawberries.
The charter man had only been able to wait half an hour.
The other call had been a woman who said if I wanted the diary I’d called about, phone this number. Myrna had written it down. It wasn’t Claire’s flat or her office.
Who then is Monty Graf? Sub leaned into the kitchen, hands on the doorway.
I held up the pad.
It’s not there, said Sub, Myrna was in the john when he called, Ruby turned up the TV, my head was full of broken glass. But I know he said he’d meet you tomorrow night about the film and it would be in your interest to deal directly with him and you’d know what he meant. I think that’s right. It’s been a day.
Where did he say to meet?
Someone will call. Is this another film?
If anything happens, I said (and took a deep breath thinking in London call can mean come but here it means phone), remember the name Monty Graf.
Sub listened.
Two weeks ago tonight—which is just a week after the film was ruined—this American Cosmo who lives in Ladbroke Grove with a lot of other people tells Dagger that an Indian he’d mentioned Dagger to is still looking to borrow a movie camera. Cosmo’d phoned a week before, and Alba, who is Dagger’s wife, said Dagger and I were through filming. Cosmo told his Indian and the Indian said he’d phone Dagger the next day about the possibility of using his earner—
Hold it, said Sub, this is three weeks ago now.
Right. But the next day—which turned out to be the day the film was ruined—the Indian according to Cosmo forgets to phone Dagger, Cosmo says the Indian has no memory because he lives only in the present though he has a big white file cabinet and a big white flat in Swiss Cottage and works in a gallery in Knightsbridge so he can’t be so dumb—
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