I asked if he had a settled place of residence, and he smiled and said sure he had a house south of the Village, I could come and stay any time; he mentioned the address.
Two fish platters came by and were placed before the ash blonde and the man. I’d been brought a dark beer by mistake. I said I didn’t realize the kitchen was back there—and I turned around and saw light through the swinging door opening for the other waiter also in white shirt and white apron and as my eye further along the bar and off by the door thought it found the profile of the man in glasses who’d tried to serve me a cup of tea, I became aware of the jukebox playing later Dylan, and Monty Graf said he didn’t know if I’d eaten but this was just a neighborhood place but pretty good pot luck and he could recommend the osso buco and the stuffed bluefish.
Who had he heard about the film from? I asked.
He passed right through that question and said (headed toward me like a devoted skin doctor), I’d like to hear about your film from you.
I wondered how Dagger would take the question. Lately Dagger didn’t seem to care, though I will say for him that he seemed deliberately to want not to talk about the loss. He was considering the States, he had even assembled a job-application vita.
The truth was that there were in a way two films—his and mine.
That would be of little interest to this man waiting across the table in a black double-knit blazer.
You decide to reach, and before you’re half into it the thing you want has taken you in hand and said wait here keep an eye out while we get through the window and look around inside, we’ll be out in ten minutes unless you whistle.
Or your wife says to some visiting American who’s asked if she’d like to go back to the States, By now it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other, but it would be a change—though you think that when she looks over at you she remembers you inside her, recalls looking forward and backward to it, looks forward to it. (Why are English not called expatriate when they settle in the States?)
Or you say to your friend Dagger, We’ll make a film, and you tell him what’s on your mind. But later the film seems not yours, not his either, but just to have happened—and it’s not what you dreamed of, but it’s something.
You get an inkling one day that the ruination of the film was something someone decidedly reached out to effect: and you get on a plane to New York, leaving behind an encounter with your seventeen-year-old daughter and looking ahead beyond the East where you’ll be to a California she says she is settled on going to perhaps even before she takes her A-levels.
But you were coming anyway on business, and the last time you made love to Lorna it rose through your head in clear blue-green bubbles of smiling sound that that amateur film had not after all been necessary.
But life is not so disappointing as such passages of consolation seem to conceal. You’ve spent forty-eight hours in New York and someone is coming to you wanting to know what you have, though who is hand in glove with whom is hard to say. You haven’t picked up those Wall Street brochures for your son or was it a book about the market—then over your cheeseburger you saw Will hadn’t made it clear, maybe was just giving you something to do. Your frothy vanilla malted flowed down and was gone—such a malted.
You haven’t had your cigarette today.
Monty Graf waited and now broke his lips to speak but I was in ahead of him: There are two films really, what my friend Dagger DiGorro wanted and what I wanted. He’s good on the hardware. I mean, he never made a serious film but when we shot the naval engagement in Corsica in slow motion he knew it wasn’t just a matter of turning the frame knob up to 64, there was the little power switch below and the ASA gauge above.
Could I have heard about him on the grapevine? said Monty Graf.
I turned to wave at a waiter and look the man in glasses in the corner of his profiled eye. He was the one who’d made me a cup of tea all right.
The idea was this, I began. But I couldn’t mention Claire. Graf must be the Monty that Claire was talking to on the phone, for she’d already mentioned Monty Graf to me. I had slipped into other circuits, and Graf must know Aut too if Jan Graf was any relation, but if he knew Claire he must at least know of Aut; but Graf would not know Dagger, for Dagger would have mentioned him—still, through Claire Dagger must have become known to Graf, though what Claire could have told Monty Graf remained to be seen and Claire knew only what Dagger had told her plus my bait yesterday; but if Jan Graf was a relation, did Monty therefore know the Indian who worked in the Knightsbridge gallery, or even Cosmo? But that kid in the loft Jerry might know Claire, the way he said You never met her to the man in glasses.
So to be at least myself, I decided to tell Monty Graf what the idea had been and still in some form was. Graf widened his eyes as I said Bluefish to the waiter, who raised his eyebrows when I said beets or carrots instead of french fries, and as he was going away I said light beer.
For example, said Monty Graf, the footage that survived the fire, why a rush of that? Was that the beginning of the film and you wanted to see how you were doing? You shot that in London? Someplace else, I forget.
You didn’t forget, I said, you were never told.
The waiter brought a coffee-colored dark beer with a thick head like rusty marshmallow. I pointed to my companion’s milky champagne glass and the waiter said Right, and went away.
No, I said to Graf, it wasn’t the beginning. I’ll tell you about the beginning; we never did see it printed; but this is what happened.
I did not describe my effort to get Chaplin to let us film an interview with him and it would have been too hard to explain to Graf what I’d had in mind vainly urging Dagger to shoot a hundred frames or so of a letter lying, say, on Dagger’s worktable that I in fact wrote to Chaplin.
No, I said, the beginning would have been a bare room and the only things on the film besides a couple of straight chairs and a vivid blue-red-and-umber Turkish floor cushion were the two guys we were shooting, plus whatever Dagger got of me with the mike: just a quick cut, then back to the faces.
We told them to go ahead, maybe not mention England, just say for example “here,” so the room as I conceived it with plain plaster walls that we’d depictured would be just an unplaced room. Dagger went along with this.
Who were they? said Graf.
One’s an American corporal from Heidelberg, skipped to Sweden, later crossed into Norway, stopped off with his sister’s girlfriend who’s teaching at an English Institute in Trondheim. Well, then he shipped on some American’s yacht looking for sanctuary perhaps and wound up in the Faeroe Islands between Iceland and the Shetlands and waited while his employer, a dilettante geologist, fished for trout. But our deserter apparently couldn’t wait. He made it to the Hebrides with a fisherman and there I happen to know he lived in a hut near Mount Clisham.
The other? said Monty Graf.
Friend of the first, according to Dagger.
How did Dagger know? said Graf.
Most of what I told Graf was in a desk drawer in Highgate. Earlier today London time Lorna rested her arm on that desk writing a check for her yoga class and would look up with that blank eye when Jenny came in the living room having descended from her own desk upstairs where she might well have been studying A-level Latin. And being asked by Lorna how it had been going, Jenny tossed her head and blew hair out of her eyes which comes right back down again over her cheek like Claire’s.
Does Jenny stay in the living room with Lorna or cross to the kitchen or go back upstairs to Will’s room to borrow a quid if he’s home, or go back to her room? Or go across the road to the new Americans she’s friendly with who she says are so interested in her? It’s suppertime. But why then is Lorna sitting at the desk?
I’ve been hard on Claire, maybe she was serious about throwing up her job and moving to England.
Graf sipped, then spoke with patient elocution. An unplaced room and you took the pictures down before you shot the scene. And a blue, red
, and umber Turkish floor cushion. What did they talk about?
In my ear my voice seemed loud, though I kept hitting on the idea that Graf didn’t exactly hear me, but this was perhaps his New York eye, not me.
The film’s aim, I said, was a sort of power.
Over who?
No. Power shown being acquired from sources where it had momentum but not clarity.
What does that mean, said Graf.
Preying on power. Saving power from itself.
Did it have a story? said Graf.
For me it had. For Dagger I don’t know. For him it was a documentary, he said, and he said it would come clear in the end, which was what I thought myself but from my angle.
Political power, said Graf, returning to my other remark. He was looking into his glass, an ice cube had a fog of milk over it.
Any power in the right sequence, I said.
The fire now, said Monty Graf.
Power with momentum but not clarity, I said. The fire? Imagine filming that, filming the dissolution of the film, the burning, filming the burning of even the raw stock running through your own gate, the fire from Dagger’s table leaning out toward the camera you’ve got running in your hand.
There’d be no film then, said Monty Graf. But I didn’t mean that fire; I meant the bonfire.
Plenty of energy there, I said. But the membership was pretty shifting, and from what we saw there were five or six religions there, not one. But we took the whole image.
Was this film of yours about a quest for identity?
Chewing my bluefish, I closed my eyes as if looking for a bone. I remembered many things. I swallowed, smiled, drank half my beer.
Interesting idea, I said. There was a man in the trees there who thought our film was a quest for him.
Did you preserve him for posterity? said Monty Graf.
You know I did, I said.
So that’s the footage that didn’t get burnt.
No.
Let’s move on, said Graf. What’s your next scene?
We might have shuffled the order in the editing.
But it got burnt first.
Right, I said.
Monty Graf wanted a rundown of scenes. That was nice. And as I forked out the stuffing rich with onion, damp with blackened mushroom, separately so I didn’t get a bone, I wondered what I’d achieved in the time since I landed at Kennedy, which seemed long because it had been short but full—but full of what? There was green in the stuffing. I ate some more preceded on the prongs of my fork by a vinegary beet slice (in England called beet-root and sold in the greengrocer’s already boiled but why?). Why would Monty Graf care what had been on a film that no longer existed?
Well, he said, could you take what you rescued from the fire and start over and make a similar film? I mean with expenses.
I chewed.
He was still hoping, but maybe not for the diary. The blonde in the next booth gave me her profile, I could almost smell the orange and blue-green eyeshadow. Monty had talked of the film, not the diary. Preserved for posterity? or from.
The man in the grove had come from the darkness of trees not really into my sight but into flickering shades, and Jenny had typed the page that told how when he broke from the grove he seemed to come from behind a tree much too slender to hide him, so he seemed to unroll from its trunk. I dabbed a parsley fleck off the silver side of my fish with a fork prong and a bit of chive off the plate.
I could forget the film. And Cosmo’s Indian. And someone named Jan Aut. And Claire. And the camera jamming when we didn’t allow enough loop in the left-hand side of the film feeding from the sprocket-wheel around into the slot between the film gate and pressure plate.
Back over my shoulder I found the man in the steel-rimmed glasses who’d made me a cup of tea looking our way.
Would he be here if Monty was in with Aut? Could I be sure the man in glasses worked for Aut? The boy Jerry had opinions on Aut, and as for the man watching me here from the crowded bar, hadn’t he told Jerry to shut up?
I looked; he seemed to be smiling, but he was alone; I’d seen several people around Manhattan walking along smiling for no outwardly visible reason, not only the blind man—the toucher—also the knapsack girl on Mercer Street smiling up at the lofts.
It was after nine. There was a waitress I hadn’t seen, and she was laughing while she wrote on her order pad. There wasn’t a table or booth vacant.
OK, I said. For what it’s worth. A Softball game in Hyde Park, a bonfire in Wales, a Hawaiian hippie and his girlfriend from Hempstead, Long Island, playing guitar in the London Underground. A suitcase slowly packed. People in a marvelous country mansion doing things inside and outside and ignoring a moonshot on a television set under a table umbrella out on a rainy patio. A Corsican montage featuring an international seminar on ecology. Toward the middle of August, Stonehenge. In the end a U.S. Air Force base. A quick 8-mill. cartridge of some pals of Dagger’s the night we got back from shooting at the base.
You left out the beginning, said Graf.
OK, I said.
The two men in the Unplaced Room. Do they come in again?
No. But yes. They do come in again. They were at Stonehenge.
Sounds a peculiar film. Power, you said?
Power poached on when it had momentum but not focus.
In England.
Some bits maybe had focus. Objects, cuts, quickies, objects for music and voices. A bridge I like.
Objects? What about the pictures in the Unplaced Room?
Brunel’s Clifton Bridge, for instance. We shot it on the way to Wales. Isambard Kingdom Brunei. And hands laying out TNT like a xylophone and then standing each stick up carefully, and fingers dismantling a kitchen timer. The times we live in.
Faces?
Some negative stills too. I was planning to splice them in, printed as negatives. People with black faces and white hair. Stills with voices. Ever think of the sound that goes with a snapshot?
Did you mean a movie sequence using stills?
A few. It’s destroyed.
That negative stuff is a cliché of course.
The black and white might have had a point.
Was this to be a picture of American life abroad?
That may have been Dagger’s idea, I said.
He was in charge of equipment, said Graf.
I was the one who wanted to use slit-scan screening.
I leave the hardware to the filmmaker, said Monty Graf. My thing is collaboration, sort of a mating of the aesthetic and the financial.
You might be of help, I said.
What about Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park? said Monty—he was being humorous. He sensed something wrong and knew it wasn’t the bleeding beets or glistening bluefish fast disappearing, or my distrust of him. His own task was too tricky for him to see the simple truth that my table of contents had depressed me. I thought of the death camps, of Belsen, of certain photographs—and knew that as an issue or concern in my heart all the dead Jews were cold—what was the matter with me?
What happened at Stonehenge?
Just before the Stonehenge scene, I said, we were going to cut in an elevator down a coal mine in Wales; shoot the sky from a hundred feet down. You have to cut in a shot of a pile of slag or a coal trolley underground, a miner with a headlamp, else that shot of sky could just as well be the end of the Severn Railway Tunnel.
Monty Graf had gotten the waiter to bring a third gin and milk. I imagined dripping a beet into his wide, pure glass. I hadn’t thought until now about the deserter’s reappearance in the unpleasant Stonehenge scene at the end of the film. He and his friend just seemed like the usual supernumerary acquaintances who turn up at Dagger’s parties; I’d noticed them and accepted them.
You said momentum, before, said Monty Graf—so where’s the momentum in the coal-mine shaft?
I don’t know, I said. You want too much consistency.
Just interested. It sounds different. I mean, you never k
now where you’re going to find the real thing. Always on the lookout. I had a piece of a Swedish film. I promote an annual exhibition at the Coliseum. I do a little real estate.
I’d finished my fish and Monty Graf wanted to know what footage we’d actually had developed. Maybe there was a point of departure there, he was saying; and I was on the point of asking if our friend with the steel-rims was still at the bar, when Monty Graf said, Seven minutes is a lot, you know, even unedited, possibly quite a substantial basis in terms of what you can show on film in terms of time.
He sipped, and I wasn’t sure if I would need him.
I was about to ask where he’d heard seven minutes, but he said, Look I really like the England mingled with America idea, I mean it’s got possibilities right now what with the war and the recession and as it were the decline of America.
I said, I didn’t say anything about seven minutes.
The top part of Monty Graf’s divided face seemed to command the rest to fade and though I was even less sure who he was I believed now that he was convinced the film was worth knowing about but that he knew no more than what Claire chose to tell.
I had an impression of New York, but it passed.
I did not say to Monty Graf, What’s Phil Aut to you?
Instead I said wearily, There were two films.
That I know, said Monty Graf.
Oh you know that, do you? Well do you know that also there are two films? The film and my recollection of it.
All right, you mean your diary, said Graf. But I’m afraid I meant two real films. That is, before yours got burnt.
What’s the other?
Don’t you really know?
I put a ten-dollar bill on the table and Monty Graf reached and pushed it into my lap and I took it and got up.
Let me see the print, Mr. Cartwright, I’m with you, he said.
I lifted my coat off the hook and walked between two tables toward the bar wondering what would happen and wishing I’d waited for a coffee. Monty Graf was right behind me.
The man who’d made me a cup of tea was still at the bar. I said hello and as Graf arrived I looked at the two of them, but Monty didn’t seem to know him. He wore a fringed pale buckskin jacket and a dark purple neckerchief and a dark denim shirt with pearl snaps.
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