Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  Sub had phoned for me, she said, and Monty had called down but I’d been in the shower. I said I’d phone back.

  She asked if I wanted the bedroom door open and when I kept rubbing my hair and let the towel hang half over my face, she closed the door as far as the latch but not air the way. There was a doomed impracticably in this and in some spirit of her behavior that made me half-expect her to say, We mustn’t disturb Monty on the phone.

  He was in fact on the phone, I had come from the bathroom and found his voice but far away like a crossed line whose voices interfere but aren’t close enough to hear.

  I put on my wrinkled shirt. I was ravenous.

  Claire said, That story about Dagger, it gave the wrong impression.

  I asked if she thought his laughing about the dead dog would make me think Dagger cruel—and she said she didn’t mean I wasn’t his friend.

  I felt it wasn’t just that story that had brought her down to speak to me; yet, not to be too smart, I did think that that story was part of why she came.

  I asked if she had quit Outer Film yet, and she said, Oh no, and please not to say anything about it—but then she grinned and receded into some cleft of herself saying, But who could you say anything about it to?

  And so I opened my trousers to tuck in my shirt and I asked her if Dagger had known there were two films—after all, if Monty knew, Dagger must have known.

  Claire ran that one through her vacuum tubes and decided as I hoped that last Thursday evening Monty had told me about the two films—surely if I said Monty, then Monty had mentioned two, and he would hardly have mentioned the two films and not explained what he meant.

  Yet she said nothing and so either Monty had tossed out some menacing riddle for dessert or Claire found the real fact of two films impossible to talk about with me.

  Instead she recurred to what I’d suspected was her real motive here, her rebuke upstairs when I impugned Dagger’s sensitivity: You know Uncle Dag as well as anyone and he knows things and goes his way and what he knows and doesn’t know is probably much more a mystery to me than you—right?

  I let the two-film idea drop. I would check it out when I made the new move I’d decided on in the shower.

  I discreetly opened my door and went back to the bureau where my necktie lay.

  Claire was a very pretty girl who could be boring. I had her full attention now and she talked and talked while (like something else I couldn’t quite lay my fingers on) Monty’s voice continued upstairs giving me intimations of my own irrelevance that I did not exactly mind because I had Claire, though I had real feelings only in the shape of more Dagger. I did not regret bringing up Jenny in England. Not that she was going to be someone’s helpmate-wife, and I can’t imagine I ever wanted that for her; but she is succinct.

  Dagger took Claire to Freehold. That’s in Jersey, quite near the shore; and there’s a track.

  I said I knew.

  She was thirteen, she’d never forget. Dagger was about thirty-five, he kidded her a lot and gave her the feeling he did anything she wanted to do but that wasn’t so, but it didn’t matter, only the impression. Her parents were breaking up and then not breaking up. Her father is a gum specialist in Philadelphia. They would talk behind closed doors so that she wouldn’t hear, except what she heard was even worse because she only half-heard it. Then they would sit down with her, they were always sitting down with her. Dagger took her to Freehold one weekend and saved her another sitting-down session with her parents, who would be murmuring behind closed doors, then emerge and call her and they’d sit down on some of the plastic-covered decorator furniture and she would be told gently and boringly the problems her parents were trying to work out, but she didn’t care or thought she didn’t or knew she didn’t know how, and she hadn’t had her periods very long but they stopped and her mother took her to her own doctor who phoned a shrink, but her father put his foot down; but that didn’t matter, she’d sit at these sitting-down sessions in which her parents would so patiently define some of their differences and like some kind of patient herself she could be told the true possibilities of the situation and all these months she never heard her parents fight. But for all their sitting down with her and opening up for her the problems, she’d have liked it better if her father had said I’m fucking someone else and I don’t want to fuck your mother and I haven’t for some time; but maybe she’d forgotten what it was like to be thirteen and all this was unfair to her mother in defense of her father with whom she knew she could take risks without spoiling what she felt for him. Still she always felt that this attention she was officially receiving was directed to some thing called Our Daughter Claire or called Claire, like from whom we will have no secrets, so she felt like really a thing instead of the mature person they stupidly hoped they were treating her as in their dull imaginations, and if everything was so out in the open why did she then not know what was happening? Were they splitting or weren’t they? And she now saw that Dagger took her to Freehold that weekend to get her out of the house, though at the time it was just a big thing and this was worth something too, it was fun, he took her to the races and up close the turf the trotters ran in seemed deep and soft as a farm and Dagger explained trotters and pacers, and they went to dinner at the American Hotel with all these horse trainers and a cute antique rocking horse and stately prints of horses, and Dagger introduced her to the owner of the hotel who lived up on Main Street in a big house with a long porch, and Dagger took her to visit a mad old man, the father of one of his school buddies who had disappeared down around the Gulf of Honduras, and Dagger bought her an onyx elephant and took her to the local Walter Reade movies and fell asleep, but what she liked best was having griddle cakes with him Sunday morning in the dining room of the American Hotel even more than his incredible long story of bringing ancient maps out of France wrapped round his leg so he had to walk stiff-legged with a cane and in front of the English customs man got such an itch inside his knee the sweat started out all over his face and he told the man his leg made him nauseous so the man decided to search Dagger’s suitcase.

  Claire asked if I understood all this nonsense and before I could speak she said this was after Dagger had left New Orleans where he’d worked on a charter boat and lived with a girl who was on the Times Picayune and through her had sold to the paper a photo of a fishing accident in the Gulf and the picture won a prize. But the thing was that when they got back to Philadelphia Sunday, Claire’s father had left for good, and when Claire told her mother what a great time she’d had with Uncle Dagger, her mother said he was really only a cousin by marriage, but after that Claire got her periods again.

  She asked if I worried about Jenny. There was something genuine in Claire’s asking, but something false in the moment of silence after.

  Monty was on the phone. I asked how she’d met him. She said that was another long story. I asked why she’d asked about Jenny before, and Claire said No reason. I said You know the man in the Hebrides. Claire sat on the bed holding her breath. I said, If you remember I said Jenny had probably gone north.

  Claire asked why I’d put in the technical stuff about 8 mill, in the famous two pages. On the pad on the bed table I jotted “Gulf of Honduras” and circled it.

  I stood at the door and told Claire I wanted to show her something, wait there a second.

  She was still holding her breath—a bad thing to do. She stayed where she was. I was on the move up the carpeted stairs.

  Monty rang off. He was still at a distance. His lower face looked and perhaps itself was tired. I said I couldn’t go to eat with them. He was concerned. I said, Is Claire upstairs? He said upstairs? He went out of the room, did not call upstairs. On the floor beside the couch I found Claire’s roomy leather bag with its shoulder strap draped over it. I found a small ring of keys beside her money purse and I took the keys. A floor above me, Monty called to Claire, called down to Claire—so he wasn’t outside this room listening for a call to Sub. Below me, Claire calle
d back, I’m here.

  I snatched the pages off the desk and belted back downstairs. Claire was at my door. I kept my voice low and she did not object. I said rather fast, Do you believe this about Dagger forgetting which scene in Corsica we’d used b & w for and which we’d used color for? Do you believe Dagger could forget a thing like that?

  I was of course using the two pages Jenny had typed (which had gone from hand to hand) as a cover for having nipped upstairs. Claire was caught between purposes, to defend Dagger’s intelligence or his honesty.

  Having asked my question as cover, I heard again the cluck of coin in slot (or was it a thin-shelled New York egg breaking as my mind came down hard on it). There was indeed something else about one of those pictures upstairs, but all I could handle now was Jan Graf and the magic orange I had marked her London canvas with: if Dagger had ignored Savvy Van Ghent chasing the foul ball and instead paused as I thought deliberately upon the red-haired woman and the Indian who himself was a friend of Dagger’s idiot friend Cosmo, might Dagger not also know Jan Graf, who I was all but certain had painted that woman we’d filmed at the softball game even if I had had (if not for art’s sake) to supply her hair color not so very many hours ago on a Knightsbridge gallery wall?

  Monty called again. Claire said she must go up. I asked why she’d been following Wheeler the first morning. She said, OK it was you, not Wheeler. She went up the stairs fast and preoccupied. I thought she was deciding how much to say to Monty.

  If she was alarmed about what I might now be thinking of Dagger, then there was reason for me to think whatever I was thinking, though at this instant I was willing to unthink such dubious suspicions, for Dagger DiGorro was my friend. I only hoped Claire and Monty didn’t have a fight, for then she might not stay here tonight as I was sure she had last night, and in that case she would be more apt to find her keys gone. I thought of going back upstairs and taking her purse as a cover but Monty and Claire were already there, they were talking above me.

  I took my toilet kit, a gift from Will, and at the top of the stairs Monty saw it and said where did I think I was going. I said I’d call him, never fear, I needed him but I wasn’t going to impose another night, I’d go to Sub’s where my suitcase was.

  Monty said, Don’t you like Mexican food?

  If Claire didn’t go away and find herself, something was going to happen to her.

  An American proverb, said Monty, has it that there are only twenty-four hours in a day.

  Maybe Monty didn’t know I’d been in London last night, yet he must.

  I mentioned a Mexican place where I’d eaten with Tessa and Dudley Allott seven years ago.

  Monty said he knew the place but knew a better place, more authentic.

  Claire said, I know that name Allott.

  I said I didn’t think she did, Tessa was Lorna’s friend and Dudley was here at the time working on the Maya or on someone who had worked on the Maya.

  Maya? said Monty.

  That’s right, I said; but they live in London, though they were here for the month of August.

  Here? said Monty.

  I said I was going to Sub’s. Monty suggested I return the phone call. But I didn’t.

  They were stranded in the hall watching me open the front door. In one hovering moment, as if the distance between us were vertical, I detected something genuine: Monty cared about Claire.

  The two films, said Claire, were meant to be complementary. I don’t know if Monty mentioned that. Yours was going to be part of Phil Aut’s.

  That doesn’t sound complementary, I said, and saw Monty’s eyebrows jam his forehead wrinkles without any words to serve.

  Gates winked all about me, but I held to my plan. I would not deal with Sub on the phone.

  I was closing the door.

  Monty said, Mayas, and Claire said, No.

  No one seemed to be following me.

  My cabdriver, a long-haired youth with a headband, drove bravely but with small knowledge of Manhattan. There was no picture of him displayed in the slot beside the police permit.

  No one followed us.

  However, anyone could have been hanging around Sub’s building when I got out. And there was no doorman.

  It was six thirty. I’d give Outer Film another hour to be closed.

  I had been deeper than I thought. Looking up into the shower had been like looking into the bottom.

  The narrow keen smell of roasting lamb as I passed the lobby mailboxes gave way in the lift to my sweat and cigarette smoke. The circle of fluorescent light in the elevator roof was harder on the pallid leaden paint than on my transatlantic eyes shifting over the capital letters delivery boys had cut into the wall panels, one pair being my own initials. In the old open elevator that Ned Noble and I took slowly up to the fifth-floor stamp dealer in the early forties you looked through the gratings of the hinge-folding door and each floor’s hoistway door that did not fold but opened normally, and saw each dusky passing floor of that downtown Brooklyn office building, and no matter how much there was to say, which with Ned was a lot, you’d fall silent foreseeing the glass-topped case and the stamp tongs being laid down upon it, and the faint official scent of paper touching off in us visions of lozenge perfs and pale pastel windows with oriental rulers or the delicately antlered national animal of some now defunct country; and, somehow, the twenty-cent envelope of one thousand transparent glued peelable hinges put a scent upon the wind and the stamps themselves as if the micro-printing had been done on a grid like a TV scan, and the colors beyond any standard odor of ink gave off advance word. There was a triangular stamp Ned and I both wanted, and when I mentioned this to Will a year ago, all I could think of was Tannu Tuva, and he looked it up in his Faber atlas and said it didn’t exist, and in Sub’s elevator now thinking I hadn’t been much help to Sub in overcoming the distances and encroachments his life was weighted down with, the alternative name Will came up with fell into my head—Tanna, an island—and Will said that must be what I’d been thinking of and insisted with strange rigidity as if he wished to settle something and would settle it if need be by force; yet with that authoritative emotion that belongs to memory I knew that Tannu Tuva was the place all right, it wasn’t an ideal destination ideally far and purely possible, and if it wasn’t in Will’s English atlas then the world had changed. The stamp man’s elevator was different from Sub’s, which was a fast capsule with a small glassed port and all around me those metallic initials knifing through its shield of bilious late-night green not to the hoistway shaft or the passing floors but to a prior color hard to tell, and as the capsule came open at Sub’s floor and an old lady tried to get in before I got out, I saw inside the oblong Tanna Tuva frame a deer or gazelle with lyrelike horns, and a Costa Rican triangle but no color where I knew there had been color, and knew that Will’s alternative name Tanna had occurred not only because it was and is in the New Hebrides east of Australia, and through Jenny’s map of Lewis in the other Hebrides I continued to be at her mercy.

  Now the smell was the bristling rough moist salt of pork chops, a smell that sneaks beneath the tongue unlike lamb whose essence winds among stomach, eyes, and sinus first, and Ruby was unlocking and opening the door as Sub was yelling Who is it and then was suddenly behind her, then abruptly six strides back into the kitchen to the stove and I was looking not at him but out past the hall into the living room where Aut’s (if it was Aut’s) burglar had been—and as I said No in answer to his question had I eaten, I stepped through an invisible gate into that living room and barely registered Tris engrossed in a new or at least smaller TV set because I was seeing something else near my suitcase and seeing it with such completeness you might have thought that I was in a position to take for granted the rest.

  The thing was a Halloween jack-o’-lantern, fired up and grinning through its mad half-evolved teeth, fat and in its healthy meridian grooves seeming symmetrical, and it said to me that I must have lost a week or ten days somewhere in my flights. Mad but po
ssible.

  Ruby had one hand in mine and the other through my legs. She didn’t want me to color, she wanted a story about me and her daddy. But though I loved her, the supple backbone the wide eyes taking whatever there was to take, the smudge of magic marker blue below one cheekbone, loved the flesh smell of a child (which was also Jenny’s smell now she’d stopped using a spray) as I loved Tris for his tongue-between-lips arrest absorbed in what he was seeing and thus seeming tenderer in that force you feel even in an older boy that you imagine isn’t in a more self-possessed girl, even a little girl, loved them because they were my friend Sub’s children, loved them because they could be entertained quite simply, though in the circuits of the last few days I could not recall just what I had told them by way of a story, it had come out of my head unplanned and restored itself to its spot under a baffle in a corner of my head at once it was finished—loved them because they were my own children a few years back in the multiplied accelerations of alien time that no record can begin to measure of the presents brought home to them from America (even those encapsulated or nonencapsulated liquid crystal kits acquired for Will from my scientific firm that were a steal at the price, or black-and-white moiré patterns or kinetic-art-kit mobiles for Jenny in all the colors of English wildflowers). Love, yes: but not this time, not right now.

  I could eat and get to Outer Film in an hour, and if I let it go till later there’d be a night watchman I imagined downstairs tilting back in his chair behind the glass street-doors of the building reading the News and drinking coffee out of a cardboard container; but if I went soon I could be still part of the working day.

  There were calls for me, and this had no doubt been why Monty wanted me to phone Sub before I left. Gilda. Claire. Monty Graf. My mother. Monty Graf again. June. Monty again.

  Sub, if I asked him about his work, said it would bore me and if I said I’d like to know what he knew about computers, he’d say don’t waste your time they’re unbelievably dumb, and I could not push it because I might not be competent to tell why I thought computers part of a strange, seductive chance that was beyond the useful, and in fact I had failed more than once to make this clear to Lorna and to Geoff Millan, yet always I felt not so much because I didn’t know enough as because I had failed to make use of what I already had. I would like to give a compressed explanation to Tessa that she would not be able to anticipate with a look or a word and that would be as sly and lucid as she. And at this instant, hearing Sub come out of the kitchen and stand on the threshold of the littered living room and not speak, I found that though my power to prove my feeling about computers—about miles of memory, or abstract numbers switched out of the blue into the real angular turns of a machine or the actual relation of two electric currents—stirred inchoate though contained inside a circle of broken connections that could get long or short or acquire right angles and stern diagonals while being still this chele of known emotions and words and people, my power to turn that inchoate into a statement was, as if half unwilled, finding itself in the new movements after the ruin of the film that my pulses from moment to moment were deciding to make. I grant that if you let all this boil it might boil down to being selfish, spending money that wasn’t only mine, using friends and their phones. But if there was a glinting mass I could not frame, it seemed now to be becoming an argument that was my life. If my life was becoming an argument my mind could not frame, at least I was in that argument. Tessa’s lost mother played Schumann at night to her when she was going to sleep. After her mother wasn’t there any more she didn’t herself try to play. But she listened, she knew what was coming, she gave Lorna the letters of Clara Schumann, she loved to listen to Lorna because the sound communicated with the lost wandering sound waves of her mother’s playing and in 1958 and 1959 this gave Lorna a reason to play. But there was music in Tessa’s circle. Dudley said, The Jews own the violin. Tessa seemed not intimate enough with Dudley to say jokingly, You bigot.