Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  She is on her stomach, hair over wrist, her behind white with a red dot and a pale mole across the way, her legs just open to show a fold of sex puffed downward. This shifts as she lifts the small of her back, and now I comb my nails up either side of the gates that space her spine. She sits up like a dancer slowly, I am behind her in the Japanese position. She settles on me like part of a multiple exposure of bending forward or back. My fingers out of sight catch what they must have forgotten: that the hair coming three inches from her cunt up onto her abdomen is in three plantings, with some of the skin between so the lines don’t feel trimmed. I raise a finger to her eye, it does not shut, it is lidless but there is a fold at the corner by her nose, I can see it.

  Before, when we came in the apartment and emerged from our clothes and she stood on the soft bed and then pointed her elbows at me and unhooked herself, these plantings seemed elegant—a sign of truth. Now, kneeling back on my heels behind her, I recall them with a hand and with a hand I fit myself under across an isthmus to hook in her as she bows for a memorable moment forward angling opener, and leans back as I lean forward into her back like this, I look at small shoulders rising, lowering by my mouth, and I can’t imagine her face and I move my hand from forking a nipple way down her belly to touch her slippery tab as big as her nipple seemingly and larger than some other memory told me, unlike a childhood place years later revisited that is smaller—but softer than nipple and without direction, and I put my other hand to her mouth and feel the mouth widen across dry teeth. A fingertip of each hand upon the tongues of two mouths. An eyelid shudders, it is mine; I think of the room as hers, but the bed’s dark footboard and beyond it a chair with a manila envelope extending off its edge and beyond that a chest of drawers all do not belong to anyone, she’s between me and them but I have nothing to tell them if she were a gate to them, they are not hers either. She has a pretty stone or two hidden under a sachet in the top drawer, for she has shown me. I lean back on my fists and I empty my head into my prick, this is this time more muscle than bright flood, for aimed up, and therefore I feel less sure of reaching her than if we are prone and she my horizon, though aimed up now and lifted over my inner ridge along my underside because I am behind her I feel she can’t get off me sitting right down on my pelvis even if she were conscious of not wanting to get off or away. Yet aimed up and become one of her muscles veined and vesseled can I get away? It is not worth thinking, she is straining her neck, arms up, I reach round, she’s looking blind toward the ceiling of this double bed, breast firmed upward, back now arched so for a time I am not so deep.

  She says, Hold me, which I was doing and as if I or it mercurial might launch her into an outside.

  Our being here hangs upon someone’s absence in a like time that goes at like rate but other kind. Whose is that absence, how many occupy it? What is the name of this woman I force forward and turn onto her right side doing what you want before you know what your will (that’s more at rest but more alive) does want, yet it is she your will who does what you didn’t until you got it know you wanted, rolling a hip beyond gravity and drawing knees to chin in honor of your arching back so now you lie face-to-face having pivoted along her thread to get here, her fingers doing bump after bump of your spine as if she is making the phone ring which is breaking you both up because it stops and starts again.

  Do you, she breathes lest the phone might find the bed, do you think of anyone else when you fuck me?

  What is she made of inside? I don’t answer her but begin circling, I have not much of a self only the change through which I drop and afterward don’t recall except in that other time zone parallel. Her question grips me and is answered as if later in that other time but maybe it is right now as my hardness is felt in these circles I describe.

  Someone else? Sure. With one person, have others; wife, think of friend; friend, think wife. Enemies? heavy.

  Tom cat, she says. She dabs with her tongue a point in my left hand where if the fingers were spread the thumb and index finger extended downward on two imaginary lines would meet. This touch for some beatific technical reason the Chinese have doubtless understood for centuries seems to trace a light fingernail up the longitudinal dividing line of my scrotum.

  Now, if you are thus between, then that accounts for your weightlessness, extended between bodies. But are you in fact weightless because she says you taste like custard.

  (I taste like custard.) She says or will say inside her you split her right up and she is real again. Hurt? Inner structure be damned; here’s a soft slot only.

  I am about to do something different, I feel it in my chest hairs, but as if again she is ahead and waiting she cries out or laughs or something, and is coming with a force like sound but as submerged as the words I didn’t speak answering her a moment but what a moment before, and I am not circling, I have come into her and time has come and gone by, into her and out her nose’s nostrils each now to be kissed. And her smooth knee.

  The phone is ringing once and once and once. A child is somewhere perhaps.

  Neither of us feels at home; we are thousands of miles from home.

  Phone is ringing. We are listening together. A person somewhere is concentrating on something.

  I can almost smell who that is, I say aloud.

  Tom cat, she says.

  I remember from a moment or a minute before that our hands came together for the first time when hers came up to clamp mine down, I think ah what if she were a doctor, think what those eyes and hands would know.

  There’s a Mexican restaurant a few blocks south. Not worth thinking about but it is there. Maybe the phone with its cartridges will feel like having a Mexican repast a bit later.

  She says, We’re going to Mexico in January.

  Enjoy it, I say.

  Plunging ahead, she says, you have to plunge ahead without thought.

  If you’re going to get what you didn’t know you wanted, I say.

  I rise over her and swing my beard down to the three lines of hair, look deep, close my eyes and think what if she were a lawyer, what would that be like? I remember when my daughter was born and when the doctor raised her by the feet her back to me and her genitals were puffed and I thought it’s a boy, and when he said, A beautiful girl, water broke over my eyes, I had wanted a girl maybe, and a nurse said cheerily, Every man should have a daughter.

  She was a young nurse, sexy but not beautiful I can attest to that, and I can’t remember if there was one of her or two.

  9

  This was not a return, except to my true whereabouts. And yet not wishing to go at once to Sub’s I did not for a while know where to go. I had no suitcase.

  It was a long time before I got to New York even though the time difference being what it is you could leave at ten and if the wind was right arrive at eleven, which would not have forced my own clock because Monday night I was still in that respect virtually in New York though in London. But my charter associate, who at 10 P.M. found himself grumpily discussing our future when all I wanted was a cheap seat on a New York plane, did get me on a Sydney-London-New York flight out of Heathrow, but it didn’t get off the ground of course until five in the morning—which is the trouble with these less popular lines that keep charter agencies in business—and by the time I buckled my seat belt to take off for New York my body was almost in London, which was why seven hours later I sat in an early morning cab riding the Van Wyck Expressway through South Ozone Park and with the very early commuter traffic (onto the Long Island Expressway) unable to tell the bearded driver with his Afro-pik stuck in the side of his head where I was going.

  Should I have been guilty about Lorna—regretted only what I’d missed? I’d seen us together, night, morning, my body clock going off every hour on the hour, heard in my daydream a phone ring, the second tenor calling a blind baritone’s wife smelling curry on the hob—earlier hearing Jenny come in with her new key, run upstairs, stop and call Lorna—and call me—or earlier still, Will come out and
wash and discreetly go down and get himself bacon and egg and fried bread and leave for school—earlier still touch a pearly scar on Lorna’s shoulder in the first light of Highgate dawn but as my cab bends down to the Midtown Tunnel toll booth (which for anyone east or west who does not know New York is on the Queens side) I can’t decide if I’m looking at Lorna’s scar from front or behind, and I know the only thing my daydream would certainly have heard: namely Will my son, and now as my driver tossed money into the toll bin and waited for the green light and I became aware of his radio just before the tunnel snuffed it out playing what used to be called in the fifties modern jazz, Will on the floor of his room waiting for his father raised my memory to a new power of decision and I gave the driver an address.

  Made up your mind sooner, I’d taken the Williamsburg Bridge. Six half dozen.

  I envisioned Sub’s apartment room by room by my remote closed-circuit telly till I reached his own set right near my suitcase, the window open, sounds entering Sub’s high apartment like the sounds my cab was driving through. But we were on Second, Broadway, Bleecker, through Washington Square Village with its giant Pablo (guarding NYU faculty families), Little Italy to the south, the Washington Square statue of Garibaldi to the north, then down Downing into Varick with the early morning trucks shaking over the cobbles, and my spirit for an instant shot ahead to the bail bond places way downtown off Varick where I and a lawyer I’d dug up on my own because I didn’t want to involve my father had gone to raise bail for Reb Needle, whom I’d not seen since we graduated from college and who’d given of all people my name sitting in jail in shock from having punched a fellow drinker half to death in an East Side bar—but my driver was finished with the Varick Street cobbles in a moment and was in King Street stopped in front of a fine brick house, four-story with a high stoop like the brownstones in Brooklyn Heights where I grew up.

  Well, Monty Graf was not exactly out on the stoop waiting. He’d been in bed, but everything about him when he opened the door was awake, his deliberate smile above the stubble veiled a mole at the fork of his chin cleft and below the middle line in his forehead that stops halfway across leading your eye still to the hair, and awake in some communicated sense of what he thought I might think of his stubble lip and uncombed hair, whatever I thought of him, and I didn’t know for sure, which was why I was zooming at all these surfaces. Awake enough to lead me past a half-open door to what was the dark living room and back to the white-tiled kitchen before he asked how I’d had the address, his phone was unlisted.

  Claire, I said.

  Well, he said, you’ve certainly been giving me the silent treatment.

  He wasn’t rushing things; he seemed to sense I’d come from far away; I did not know why I thought that, for I had no suitcase, only a raincoat and a toilet kit too big for my tailored pockets and I hadn’t given any indication that I’d come from Sub’s down here to Monty’s by way of London and Highgate; he said he was glad I’d come, I said I’d been up all night and was tired, he said we’d speak later, he pulled out of the fridge some pale grapes plastic-sealed and a half-gallon carton of homogenized milk, and said, Anything else you want, and swept his hand out gently so a hairy forearm slid out of his jet silk kimono sleeve.

  He gave me a garden room in the basement, there was a pad and pencil on the night table. I followed him back to the kitchen. He touched my arm and said Claire had not known Wheeler. I said, But you know him.

  I only knew that you did—and that he was hired because of you. Monty betook himself then upstairs to what sounded like the third-floor (American). I wolfed an apricot yogurt and some tight-wrapped square slices of boiled ham. I heard voices above but it could have been the radio. But it could be TV, a sudden thought, for I’d come from a country where radio is still equal if not superior.

  I did not go to bed.

  I was within walking distance of Soho.

  In the curtained living room on a desk I made out Jenny’s typing on the two pages I’d passed to Monty and Claire that rainy bluefish night. Because of the number of large and small paintings and photos fitted into every available foot of wall, I took the dark living room for granted.

  However, at ten o’clock after a shower and a shave downstairs I was walking along Prince Street and was aware of something on those walls I ought to notice.

  At Mercer I turned my attention south. But as I came abreast of the building where the man in glasses who had given me a cup of tea had his peculiarly genuine loft, I saw a phone far down the street and thought of the Xerox copies. If anyone had broken in while Lorna was asleep, there was no receipt to tell which Xerox shop had the copies of the film diary. It was difficult to phone transatlantic from a pay booth.

  I pushed the button by the nameless name slot.

  I passed through and upstairs as if someone was expected. I could not recall the trucks and their noise, and their mass tilted half on the sidewalk, but if Mercer Street had been as before full of trucks, I’d taken them for granted.

  If I say so myself I had at this time begun to happen in another spirit. I reach as through a glove port into quiet for the words, no doubt some the wrong words, in order to say what was then hard to feel and is now hard to tell though if I had and have this sense that at that time I had begun to happen in a new spirit or stage, you at least who read this have me even if you cannot perhaps reach inside.

  The young man in steel-rimmed glasses stepped back into his loft and I said I’d come back to hear about slit-scan screening. He moved toward the corner where the electric ring was, his hand stirred toward his kettle and electric ring six or eight feet to his left; the workbench was ten feet behind him to his right; the slit-scan track at the far end to my right and his left seemed altered, there was more equipment at the near end of the track, the camera end from which the camera would take off along the track toward the far end where the little screen was fixed through which the approaching camera received larger and larger and with infinitesimal displacement to one side or the other whatever tricks had been prepared behind the vertical slit in the screen.

  And behind and above the screen and in front of a black curtain that I thought had not been there last week stood a tall black girl. She was under one of the spotlights down there in tight white trousers and a bralike white top, and a black wire trailed from her hand off toward the floor, and now a white foot was raised to a ledge or stand to one side of the little screen, and her dark elbow came down to poise on the raised white thigh, and her mouth beneath a colossal Beefeater’s pile of dense hair lowered toward the hand, and her eyes widened toward me in a huge soft sound around me that carried a meaning irrespective of the words addressed into what she had in her palm—which was a mike, call it a princess mike.

  Her words I LIKE YOU I LIKE YOU I LIKE YOU swept through my knees and under my feet and came around behind to hold me with some delicately smacking breaths of unvoiced laughter.

  OK, June, said the man in glasses. I’ll be in touch, have a nice weekend.

  June smiled into her hand and said seductively, Baby it’s only Monday.

  She was enjoying playing with the public-address system.

  June smiled into her hand. The man in glasses still watching me reached behind him below the poster that had NAND at the lower right and switched on an amplifier. June spoke again and her new voice made the loft vast and the interview ahead real.

  He moved away toward her and I wandered to the bench and removed a pistol from behind a generator, and moved away from the bench.

  When she passed me on the way out scuffing her white shoes and having acquired somehow on her languid route a white jacket with padded shoulders, she gave my arm a nice little grab and said she really, really did like me.

  And when she was gone down the stairs outside I asked the man in glasses what he meant rifling my friend’s apartment right down to the kids’ toys and clothes, spreading crayons all over the place and mashing them into the carpet.

  He moved to the electric ri
ng and turned it on and asked with a little smile on his face like someone in the movies, what else he had done at my friend’s.

  I said he had smashed a television set. He said he had not smashed any television set, and then I noticed that the two sets that had been facing each other a yard apart had been moved somewhere.

  I moved closer and told him that his boss Phil Aut had had him do this, that he’d asked last time Who’s Phil Aut, but I knew he worked for Phil Aut, I knew he’d entered my friend’s flat first Thursday and encountered my friend’s wife, who let him in, and that some time Sunday between nine and four he’d got in again.

  The man in glasses said he was making a cup of tea, OK? and I moved closer feeling like the game called grandmother’s footsteps we played at Jenny’s and Will’s birthday parties where you move up when the person who’s it isn’t looking and the person turns around to catch you moving.

  My host let sugar out of a small square envelope like what you get in a restaurant, and he said he was drugging me.

  He offered me the cup and I said I didn’t take sugar.

  He handed me the other, I discovered a chair and set the cup down on it.

  He said he’d been afraid of this, and when I said of what, he sipped his tea and lowered his cup just a bit from his lip and said quietly Oh please, man.