Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  A man and a girl were on the courtyard wall of a pub waiting for it to open. As I looked, it did.

  I met no one I knew.

  When it rains you don’t think of the leaf shapes.

  One should stay in one place.

  My house seemed unusually close to the square. I came uncertainly abreast of the steps and the door lock cracked and I automatically decided not to arrive. I wanted to touch Lorna’s spine.

  Walking on, I crossed the road and stopped by a tree to light my cigarette of the day.

  My angle of observation was poor so I saw only Lorna’s arm. Her cardigan.

  Perhaps you have not been here and so don’t know what my eyes, my feet, my feelings took for granted, standing in, seeing through. But I have in my head things I may not exactly have seen, just as you who read this have me.

  Lorna said, You really can go now, and then she said something I missed.

  I moved dangerously far and she had her back to the street. I moved further and bent away lighting another match.

  Lorna was facing into the hall, facing a man blond, young, and clean-shaven. Above his head at the landing above the rear end of the hall, light from the garden smudged the leaded compartments of our florid stained glass.

  He would be the second tenor, but Lorna’s lock was fixed.

  I could not tell if the second tenor looked past Lorna. There wasn’t a picture of me in the house.

  He was there to reassure her. He liked her. She was alone and had been burglarized.

  He came and kissed her on the forehead. She was wearing trousers.

  She could not have had eyes in the back of her head.

  Between my eyes or in my throat a space spun so slow I could barely code its message that to pass through Lorna to reach this other person whom I desired to erase from my hall might open something else again behind him.

  Which was Jenny. Or what lay behind her.

  You can understand my state.

  Under the hall table next to Lorna’s visitor was the three-dimensional noughts and crosses I’d constructed out of my head that in spite of the illuminated variations on O and X I’d drawn on the little four-by-four placards like options on a typographer’s chart tended, Lorna said, to look like someone’s three-tiered sandwich-server. For teas we’d never got in the habit of.

  The door had closed, and the second tenor was still inside.

  I took a turn down the block. Again I heard a door shut. I saw the second tenor turn away toward the bus.

  Looking at me before she hugged me, she said, Marriage is an act of faith.

  Her cheek against mine seemed to bear in to wear away the flesh. She smelled of pine soap that she said smelled like her parents’ camp in Maine, and when she said, Say something, I could think only—in rapid sequence—of the white candles during the power cuts—white as marble in our dark, cheerful, chattering rooms—of the brown turtle in the green garden, of Jenny’s dress, and Lorna’s record I’d left in the Knightsbridge B & B this morning.

  I’m glad after all, said Lorna. I thought I didn’t want you to come.

  You didn’t phone back, I said.

  Lorna’s dark hair parted in the middle fell softly down each temple. She spoke with a new readiness and simplicity: It’s all there, I’d say.

  She stepped back and looked at my feet and my raincoat. I’d left my suitcase, which Lorna had slowly packed.

  Lorna said, I even started reading it.

  We went and sat in the gray velvet medallion sofa in the shadow of the piano and held hands. Everyone knows something, but not enough, and still we wear gloves. Why did I not go right upstairs to Jenny’s room?

  Lorna and I held hands and talked quietly as if to be private and looked at each other and I thought her face even more like Will’s than I usually do. Pale and dark with Will’s blue Celtic eyes. If I had shut my eyes I could not have told you just then what color cardigan she had on. It was one of those heavy-smooth-knit English cardigans, dark brown with a pale brown trim at the collar.

  After she asked if I thought she was afraid, and I shook my head thinking her question and its tone erased the second tenor and her not mentioning him, and I recalled her state of mind in the late fifties—how afraid I was, and how fearfully far she had drifted past what I would know as fear—she now asked if all that background was actually in the film, she’d looked at the pages in Jenny’s closet and almost couldn’t stop.

  I said, Well you see I had to explain some of what the film couldn’t have shown. Also, the film couldn’t have been shown in words without all that explanation.

  It was the middle of the night. I’d phoned you and you weren’t in. Billy was asleep. He’d looked at the new lock and said no lock is fool proof. Then he went to bed.

  Proof against a fool, I said, and kissed Lorna’s cheek, and thought that Jenny could not know how she was involved in the theft. I wanted to stay with Lorna. I wasn’t sure how to go on to Jenny. I looked back over my shoulder at the door from living room to hall, for the old pendulum clock had begun hissing and shifting getting ready to strike.

  Come on, she said. It was the middle of the bloody night and I felt like a burglar in Jenny’s closet and so I stayed there reading by that little light you put in rather than bring the pages out into the room. And being in the closet must have done something to the acoustics because I heard a door unlatch and couldn’t tell if it was up or down.

  Will.

  Of course, but I didn’t know that, and he’d heard me and thought it was someone in Jenny’s room because I’d told him the carbon was in the closet. So he had a tennis racket and a flashlight he was going to switch on only at the last moment, holding it out from his side so the burglar wouldn’t know where he was. Well, after all that, my heart was really going; he’d had his racket up for a serve, but all I saw was a glare and his voice saying, Lucky I’ve got my torch.

  What with my call to you, and Billy after me with his new tennis racket, and I’d been reading that strange account of the room you filmed, which is stranger reading it in a closet in the middle of the night, why I stayed awake till I heard the church clock strike five and five minutes later the hall clock so I could see every inch of the hall, and I was tired of actively not worrying about Jenny, you know what I mean, and I kept seeing that hideous warped old racket that you won’t throw away but this wasn’t a dream.

  Lorna stopped abruptly and said nothing for some time. I looked at our things in this room where we live—shells, flowers, two pewter ashtrays, stacks of magazines, a dark gold guitar leaning in a corner behind a shapeless low wide soft deep, now too deep upholstered armchair, then a pastel chalk self-portrait of my sister that makes her look like a million other eighteen-year-olds and not especially of 1945, and then over above the other Victorian sofa a 1759 French map of the Thames estuary with the Suffolk, Essex, and “Comte de Kent” coasts in blue, yellow, and red with the sandbars pricked out like live shadows—and I listened to a car rev past and then another and thought what after all was American or English or anything else here except the rectangular plugs with the tiny fuses inside and three prongs, that you won’t see in America and seem big but are better made. Lorna was scared. I looked over my shoulder again as if the old clock would go on beyond twelve. I wondered why Jenny didn’t come downstairs. Since Lorna had got into the Unplaced Room, I’d go on and tell her what had been said; but then the penny dropped, as they say in England—or a penny—and there was that bare table Dagger and I had set between two windows that gave light but were not on camera, and over that bare table the U.S. deserter, speaking of the northern islands to his friend, said, Listen, I almost stayed up there, I mean you know how he is: and the deserter’s friend at once said, These rich sailors they’re all the same, and the deserter protested that wasn’t what he meant and the friend whose control I now felt in my monitoring ears (even more than the Beaulieu could have seen in his almost too quiet hands palms down upon the table) interrupted blatantly, Of course I know
how it is. And as I recalled that exchange now in a room holding hands with my wife, I could not be sure if he had stressed the word it—for if so he might have been trying with the most insidious rhythm of naturalness to cancel out whatever the deserter’s previous he had stood for. Monty Graf would never believe I’d done nothing about the sound track after the film was destroyed. But I could hardly believe that Dagger had not brought it up. But like that other New York that I now sensed as a new circumstance from which I necessarily followed, a medium other than our white-and-black phone dial was what stood between me and Dagger, and I would not ring him up yet.

  At last Lorna said, What was on that film? What’s my friend Tessa got to do with your Marvelous Country House? I was reading the scene you call Marvelous Country House, right? And suddenly I’m in the middle of my friend Tessa. But then Billy went bump in the night and I didn’t go back to the closet.

  Oh, it was the Marvelous Country House, I said.

  The dining room was strange in your description, was it like that? Jenny told me once you’d surprised yourself. But Tessa? You went into her life. But she wasn’t there.

  If it’s dynamite they’re looking for, they won’t find it in what I say about Tessa.

  Is that why you went to New York?

  I’m in New York right now, I said; but I heard an old signal in Lorna’s questions.

  She drew her legs up and crossed them and kept my hand. Tessa Allott was Lorna’s friend and our friend. First, Lorna’s. From the bad time in the fifties.

  That was when we lived day to day like a blind couple who know they blame it on each other, as if blame were the solid furnishings of the rooms they move about in. And Lorna then was buried somewhere parallel to me, which during that eerie period in her life was still stranger because we didn’t really stop making love.

  What it was—it was that she’d been telling herself for these first three or four or five years it was OK in England; and while she did miss the States (which means nothing phrased that way—missed the East, missed New York, missed Maine), in London the cost of living, the calm, the church music at Temple Church among many others, the magic nearness of the Continent, the informality of a shopkeeper who gives you the radio someone else left to be repaired even though you’ve lost the receipt and the tradesman doesn’t know you; the privacy of private life, the trousered legs sticking out from under a small car on a Saturday morning along some garden street, the café that will not serve you a sandwich five minutes before noon; privacy haunted by the straight unbending, hence averted eyes she felt she passed shopping in the Village, so on an unlucky day she might feel like Lorna in Underland wondering if indeed it was privacy that was being preserved—all these seeming amenities and the lush parks and theater tickets at a dollar and less apiece (theater which we made a point of going to at first, Shaw, Shakespeare), and a foreign country where you spoke the language—and something else whose vagueness I hesitate to let into this Chinese box reflection (Tessa within Lorna within the American Cartwrights abroad), to wit a rich option of returning home which if we’d been living in Portland, Maine, and thinking about New York we could never have entertained in the same grand style—all these things settled us—we even felt we were or had become superior Americans.

  Lorna when she shopped felt she earned our dinner choice by choice; it was those little paper bags she acquired at the various Highgate Village shops (apples, runner beans, new potatoes, small ripe Guernsey tomatoes, hunks of pale yellow or dull orange English cheese), bags so full you couldn’t hold them by the top even if you had hands enough to hold them all and so you left the top twisted closed at either side and held the bag under the bottom. Lorna placed them all with a pound of newspaper-wrapped mincemeat (in the seventies at last sometimes called hamburger and now wrapped in plain white butcher’s paper) in her then recently acquired string bag which when you set out shopping next day you carried folded up in your hand.

  But during the bad time in the late fifties, if I offered to cook she said it was one of the things she actually did. When Jenny and Will were in bed—Jenny the messy sleeper, Will neat, both snugly small asleep in bed—Lorna would stare at the blue air letter on the kitchen table or at the honey-varnished oak surface, or at an alumni review I never read which she might read, and if I came in for coffee she’d give me an ironic smile. Said I was keeping an eye on her.

  She said her hair came out. I couldn’t see it. It was long, it was dark, it seemed thick. She had it cut and had a rat of her own hair made saying she expected to need it in a couple of years.

  She said why did I begin my letters home Dear Mother and Dad when I didn’t write Mrs. and Mr. on the envelope.

  She took her underwear off and stood at the mirror. She ran her hand along the pearly stretch-marks above her groin and said she was finished. I told her she was twenty-eight, she wouldn’t hit her prime for ten years. Holding her, I felt protective in my clothes. (A touch of porn too whole for film.) I said, You’re small—it was what I’d felt from the first. She said, Oh I’m not, I’ve never felt I was small. I squeezed her: But you are, and the only reason you don’t think so is that you were tall for your age till you were twelve.

  All this is not the present point. Which is that into this ungrounded but so slowly spinning wheel came Tessa. She was not a friend of anyone we knew, though later I found that her American husband had known someone at the Embassy who knew Dagger.

  Lorna met Tessa one Sunday at Kew. The ducks pedaled in toward Billy who had crawled near the water, I can barely see him he’s so small, though I was not there. Then Jenny who was then Ginny was trotting off toward two boys who were throwing grass and sassing a fat groundskeeper who seemed to be equipped with a slow fuse, while a third, in an attempt to hew down a tree, was hitting its trunk with a wooden sword. I was at home in Highgate. An elderly woman in a little round hat was saying—as if to anyone or to herself though in hopes of Lorna—that weren’t those boys terrible, got no respect—and instead of replying as she’d normally do no matter how she felt, Lorna turned away and spoke to a woman on her other side—asked what she was reading—and the woman said it was about a man who had collected 267 cowbells. But she said it without looking up from the book, so it came with the eeriest intimacy, neither English matter-of-fact friendliness nor anything else Lorna could think of except that Tessa—for this was Tessa—was a close friend (Lorna examined her), or a sister, with whom Lorna had come to Kew today. But after a while Tessa did look up; she looked at Jenny and Billy off playing, but not at Lorna; then she said, I’ll tell it you when I’m finished.

  What passed between them that day I think I never learned. When Lorna came back she seemed less aware of me, indifferent though in a casual family way as she hummed through two stacks of music looking for something. And through her preoccupation which seemed to express a feeling she’d come home with, I saw she was elated. Whatever I don’t know, I know when she’s miserable and when she’s not. I took Jenny upstairs to wash and bandage her arm where one of the grass throwers had scratched her rather badly. When I came downstairs Lorna was empty-handed in the middle of the living room, behind her my sister’s photograph just above her shoulder, and the house seemed to be trying to return Lorna to the state she had seemed to be released from by the event of the afternoon, which as I’ve said was Tessa Allott. Lorna said she’d been repelled by the first woman trying to start a conversation in Kew Gardens and as soon as Lorna had turned to speak to the other person, a woman with the palest brown eyes—and indeed as if it could not happen until Lorna stopped watching Jenny—she got thrown down by one of the boys, thrown down again with some swiping motion that dug nails into her soft arm so it bled, and no doubt dirty nails.

  There was apparently no place in my account of the Marvelous Country House for any of this—like later when Lorna was way past that trouble of the late fifties her remark that for her to meet Tessa, Jenny had to suffer that infected arm—septic, the English say—for it became infected—who k
nows where a nine-year-old’s nails have been?—Jenny would peel up the bandage to show Billy the scab crusting and would inform us over our lasagna that there was some white around the blue and the bloody-red—the tracks of the scratches were like whip-welts—Jenny was absorbed: She picked and picked, and the little disk of scab pried away too soon and what was left itched and she scratched it till it bled and Lorna had to take her back to the doctor.

  Which is again not the point. The link of Tessa with the Marvelous Country House thirteen years later was too strong to omit in my diary. The meeting in Kew was May 1958. Ronald Colman died a year later in California—my mother devoted a letter to him. If you had told Tessa that Ronald Colman was born in Richmond, Surrey, she would have looked away with a wild smile and said with a quiet quiver you might mistake for a put-down, My goodness.

  In June Lorna took Tessa to Royal Festival Hall to hear Menuhin—our neighbor in Highgate whom Tessa’s father had known for years—play Mozart and Bach concertos with the Festival Chamber Orchestra. On June 21 they took Billy and Ginny to the West End to South Pacific at the Dominion Cinema. I know, because summer solstice brought Stonehenge to mind—which we hadn’t even known was in Wiltshire—and with it all the other wonders of Britain that after four years’ residence we still had not seen. Ask a New Yorker if he’s seen the Chrysler Building lobby or any American tourist abroad if he’s been nearer the brink of the real Grand Canyon than an insurance company calendar. Well, in the paper next day was a report of Druid daybreak observances which Geoff Millan says have as little to do with Stonehenge as Welsh chapel services or Geoffrey of Monmouth’s erroneous account of the Dance of the Giants—though Geoff Millan can describe for me from New York Franz Kline’s great black forms against white canvas which seem some secret cross between ancient wood growths and the magic lintels in Wiltshire.

  That June 21, 1958—scarcely a month after Lorna and Tessa had met at Kew—Tessa’s husband joined them at the movie and had a fit of sneezing in the middle of “Bali Hai.” The British Museum is only four blocks from that St. Giles Circus intersection where Tottenham Court Road, Charing Cross Road, and Oxford and New Oxford streets end and begin—and that was one of his Reading Room Saturdays at the BM. So after lunch instead of going somewhere to draw an old building in his sketchbook, Dudley Allott met them at the Dominion, and Lorna described him to me that evening. She was not sure what was between the Allotts, but she had this odd feeling Tessa was pregnant.