Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  LOOKOUT

  Think if I found the source of my undreamt lookout dream. And turned a profit too. Think if I grew soft hardware out of grain and could sell it in Middle America.

  I had been looking for what had happened to the film, and now some who were concerned were looking for me, taking from me. Dagger and Monty and I were looking out for ourselves. I did not know how much June knew; but as I went up the subway stairs forth into the street (which at once became not a roof of light but a walled floor) and crossed against the light and went down into the uptown side of the station, I knew that the film and my daughter’s welfare had come together through June.

  Someday a formula could be named for me.

  A thrown ball snared by someone’s instinct leaning way out of a fourth-floor window in Brooklyn Heights during the war does not come back down into the street. Much need not come back. Go ahead. That’s what an old English upholsterer told me America was: go-ahead.

  June’s boots came from a London shop; had she gone to them or had they come to her? Her brother Chad had been in London; it was June who made me think he might be here instead. The starry-eyed chick—what if her last name was Cartwright and June knew? Did I trust June because I wanted to touch her under the label and she was warm?

  A ceremonial plane slides into a corridor between New York and London, and I am on it.

  My man Whitehead—my contact Red so call me Red!—at the scientific hobby firm that is growing and growing—pales into distance, an event whose key might not intrigue a young person enough to merit inclusion in a catalog offering Cartwright’s Analog Formula Kit.

  Tessa once flew over that extreme southwest frontier of California near the Colorado River, not very high but high enough to make out on the ground a man 167 feet tall. So long is he that he wasn’t discovered till 1932 when an Air Force plane took his picture. Which was just thirty-three years prior to this Mexican trip of Dudley’s that Tessa went along on. Dudley was the one who had stomach trouble, Tessa said because she upset him with her theory of the epicanthic eye-fold linking the ancient Maya with the east Asian psyche, though she followed Le Plongeon who in the last quarter of the last century argued that the earth’s westward motion helped to account for the spread of Maya culture to the Nile and the Indian Ocean, the holy deserts and the Asian paddies, astronomy, art, words without prior roots—but, first and last, vivid violences disseminated over the earth until, like Maya language (falsely for example translated in one famous line, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? when Eli, Eli, lama sabachthami is Maya for Now, now, I am fainting; darkness covers my face), these violences became diluted into the less vivid, more crude and calculated cruelties and routines and illusory surfaces of dominant East-West culture.

  Maybe I’d find that the Picts—the tattooed people—planted evidences in some northern isle knowing someday someone named Paul would turn those evidences into power. I leave the Picts to Dudley Allott. Or more likely his wife, whose tabby cat Spirit proved so dangerous to Dudley’s lungs that he was on a bottle of allergy pills a week until Tessa gave Spirit away.

  No—I leave the Picts and the laws of their mysteries to Tessa and leave her also those iron files of prime tribes she saw (much against Dudley’s judgment) trekking the top of the world by Bering’s isthmus so that—lo!—a fourth-century Maya calendar follows an old habitual rhythm from Tibet. Dudley did not believe all cultures kin; but for reasons of love and fear he did not discuss Tessa’s notions. Dudley tried to be more interesting than himself.

  Reach into yourself even with kid gloves, you must find something. For instance, a ball that went up so accurately it didn’t come down. Or a Tessa kiss rising from Lorna’s dinner table.

  Or Dudley’s appendix. It went into Charing Cross hospital acute. But then they decided to observe him. And after forty-eight hours, Dudley said he was now surrendering his appendix only because he’d wasted so much time. But why was I there? You don’t visit someone who’s about to have an acute appendix out. Well, there was the two-day delay. So he was more visitable. And then, as it happened, I knew Tessa was stopping in to see Dudley on the way to meet her father and Loma and Geoff Millan and an Irish mathematician who was doing a piece on Geoff’s work, and me. So I turned up in Dudley’s ward in time to see him stare at the other patients’ supper trays—he was being operated on that evening.

  Tessa wasn’t there. Dudley accepted my Evening Standard. I was conscious of our accents, Dudley was the only patient with a visitor, and although it wasn’t like visiting the boy who threw the ball during the war that did not come back down into the street, to wit Ned Noble in Brooklyn Hospital years ago when he had to let his roommate and his roommate’s relatives crammed into the other side of a semiprivate hear his every acid witticism, Dudley was less alive than I to the fact that some of his ward-mates were listening with a certain digestive satisfaction.

  A sister swished by, came with a thermometer and Dudley opened his mouth. She slipped it in, Dudley closed his eyes. The sister—she was oriental—went to another bed to plump the pillow of a pale old man with a sharp profile. Dudley, now mute, opened his eyes and Tessa appeared at the bedside dressed like a spy in tailored brown trenchcoat and brown floppy hat, a cigarette in her mouth. After a day in the open city you arrive at a hospital bed and feel the passive undress of the patient, as if your energy were ink entering a blotter. Tessa thrust her Evening Standard at Dudley and when he did not move she put it down beside his leg and touched his hand lying pale, hairy, and separate on the sheet where the edge had been turned down over his dark gray blanket. She gave him a letter from a New York lawyer Dudley had barely known until after they’d come back to England earlier this year of ’66 who was curiously interested in the Catherwood holocaust and had in his possession a copy of Catherwood’s 1844 portfolio of drawings. Tessa asked if Dudley was in pain; he shook his head. She’d left Jane with the Indian neighbors. Dudley nodded; she said there was a letter from his mother but she’d left it home, and Dudley nodded and smiled and the thermometer leaned with his smile; the sister called from the other bed to hold it in place.

  There was a teardrop of some kind in the corner of Dudley’s eye, and Tessa looked at me next to her as if just noticing me and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

  We were going to an opening in the old Jewish quarter of Whitechapel Tessa’s father once fervently described to me as a great early immigrant ghetto full of heroic poverty and vivid roots. Then we were going to Blum’s which is almost next door to the Whitechapel Gallery.

  The sister—Cambodian I recall—held the thermometer up, smiled at Dudley. Nothing, dear, she said. Dudley asked when it would be, and she said, Eight thirty.

  She turned away and Tessa asked if there was a lav. The tailored trenchcoat made her taller and neater yet more fragile. The sister answered.

  Tessa said to Dudley, At eight thirty we’ll just be finishing the sweet and sour mackerel. Is the lady doctor going to operate after all?

  Dudley did not smile; he was beyond objecting. He said, I cannot help it. He raised up on an elbow, had a spasm and doubled forward and lay back. He said he hadn’t believed his feelings, he was a rational man, but if it was the case it was the case: he didn’t want her going into his insides.

  A big ruddy man two beds away said, You’ve got the best surgeons in the world in England. Still, it’s all hormones.

  The pale hawk next to Dudley said to the ruddy man, It’s that she’s a woman, that’s what it is. You only came in today.

  The old man had the beak and the post-mature sandy hair of my grandfather who died in a hotel bedroom.

  Tessa and I stood above Dudley’s bed. He said, I’m over it now. I simply didn’t want a woman surgeon. Crazy. But I’ve got one.

  The ruddy man said, I’ve known women doctors.

  I’ve got to pee, said Tessa softly and strolled away.

  Dudley had neatly torn open his letter. I asked why he’d ever got interested in Catherwood.

&nb
sp; He said, I can’t explain it—(and at once I knew he was not replying to what I’d said). It must be like killing, you don’t know till you’re face to face with it. I just could not stomach a woman surgeon sticking her rubber gloves into me.

  He looked again at the letter from New York, read a bit and stopped. His eyes were glazed-looking. Nothing happened.

  I missed you at the pool today, I said.

  Dudley seemed to be talking low, not from discretion but fatigue.

  Sometimes out of his bulky body and methodical mind he’d say something so frank it made my lack of naïveté seem immature. But he’d been lying in bed in front of me and his wife—and something had touched him, like a telephone ring you think you heard, or someone else’s pain or pleasure that may be yours but you don’t know.

  He said, Do you ever think Loma isn’t experiencing as much pleasure in sex as she pretends?

  How do you know she pretends? I said.

  Actually, Tessa doesn’t. Not now.

  Dudley’s cheek was lying on a corner of his letter and his eyes dropped from me to the lines of type as if at that slant he might turn up something.

  I should have learned from my life, he said, but I didn’t see how. I mean there I was. Till at last I was with the most fascinating woman you’d ever want to meet on the Orient Express and I suddenly felt odd and looked back. I was an only child, you know.

  I said, My sister and I fought like hell, so what you missed may not have been better than what you had.

  Did you ever want to have intercourse with her? (Unmediated first words from Dudley.)

  We snuggled, I said.

  What was she like?

  My sister could sit like a cat staring away from me for a long time. She had a couple of beautifully placed moles.

  So has Tessa, I think, said Dudley.

  Sure, I said.

  An only child feels a primacy, you see, said Dudley. But it can go either way. I felt alone, hence odd; I came to feel second-rate.

  Tessa hadn’t reappeared.

  But, said Dudley, here was Tessa, here was I, from a good Episcopal school in Ohio, a couple of universities, here was her father who thought he’d wanted to be a scholar—and Tessa laughed at me first time we met when I said I’d be happy to stay in England. Later she said it was that she could tell I didn’t say things like that. Which was true. When my mother came over and wanted to go to Windsor, Tessa took her on a canal boat from Little Venice to the zoo, and when they got there my mother said, This isn’t Windsor. Tessa and I used to walk all night, did you know that? I had more stamina. It was what she’d done when she was eighteen and drifting into the University of London and not especially wanting to. It was before Aldermaston, not that she cared in that way.

  My sister drifted like that, I said, only into marriage.

  I don’t understand Tessa, said Dudley, do you know that? I understand Catherwood better. Sometimes she seems to be replying not to what I say but to what’s in my mind. Do you ever go to a college reunion? I don’t, but I read my alumni reviews—people I never even knew to speak to.

  I said as a matter of fact there were some alumni reviews in a stack somewhere at home but I never read them.

  We heard Tessa’s heels coming down the ward aisle’s slippery lino. She took my arm.

  She and I watched Dudley in bed.

  We were about to leave. Tessa kissed Dudley on the forehead and patted that pale hairy hand that stirred then to grasp the letter from New York. I gave Dudley my hand. He said, Have a nice opening. Tessa said, Jane asked where an appendix is. Dudley said, Give my best to your father. Tessa said to me, My father thinks he’s crazy about all those stuffed things at Blum’s—stuffed neck, Kreplach, kishkes, I used to try to cook them but they don’t agree with him.

  He never gets fat, said Dudley.

  Maybe, said Tessa, the lady surgeon will tuck some hormones into you tonight. I’ll phone later. You’ll probably be asleep.

  Dudley gave a grin. Bring Janey tomorrow, he said. And to me he said slyly, What did you do with her?

  Mainly dreamt of what I’d do, I said, knowing he meant my sister and wondering if she had come back to mind through Jane, whom I have not introduced seriously to you who have me—a humorous peculiar child just seven then, I think, and growing up between two unfairly married people from whom she seemed to try to learn (and reflect love) equally. When she was six she came into the bedroom one morning and lectured Tessa saying it was bad enough that she herself had to sleep alone but that with Daddy on the couch in the living room now all three of them were sleeping alone and something had to be done about it, and then she went into the huge living room and gave the same lecture with the same giggles.

  But it was the twelve- or almost thirteen-year-old Jane whom Jenny thought of when typing the parts about the Hawaiian Hippie and the Suitcase Slowly Packed. For she and Reid had met Jane and Dudley in the half-mile-long pedestrian passage that leads from outside the Science Museum down under it to South Kensington Underground station (the dusky tunnel that makes Will think of Behind the Iron Curtain, echoing commuters from one part of the machine to another—I don’t know where Will gets his anticommunism, maybe from me) but Jenny was in any case with Reid and so no doubt happy, but as she said the evening she finished typing Hawaiian Hippie and Suitcase Slowly Packed, earlier at 5 P.M. there approaching from the Science Museum end were the Allotts, father and daughter, and when Jane hailed them and they all came together, Dudley with a small plaid suitcase, Jane showing what she claimed was Dirk Bogarde’s autograph on the cast on her arm and suddenly looking like a woman Jenny said in the calm attention her eyes gave you and she didn’t walk from the shoulders any more like Dudley, and her legs seemed older and Tessa had bought her a pair of low-heeled Italian shoes which Jane wore without that slight pigeon-toed gauche schoolgirl shyness she’d had—though Jane did have her mother’s figure—and the point was that when Reid took Dudley’s ballpoint and Jenny introduced them all, Jane said I know you—in the boldest adult way—just as Jenny noticed under Dudley’s raincoat, which Jane had undone the top button of to get a ballpoint, a V-neck sweater just like the one Jenny with her own hands had packed in our filmed suitcase. Jane said, Don’t I know you? Reid said, Not unless you’re from Ridgefield, Connecticut (which, said Jenny, was nonsense because Reid in fact had masses of friends in London). But Jane said, In the park once and once in Regent Street—and she changed the subject to Jenny, whom she had to show the smashing moccasins her grandma had sent from Massachusetts, and Dudley like a magician’s helper had to hold the suitcase in his arms while with her good hand Jane released the catches and without undoing the ruffled, garterlike ties neatly removed from under a green pleated kilt in one neat-packed side a red-white-and-blue-beaded moccasin like the moccasins in Suitcase Slowly Packed. But Jenny said anybody could buy those right in London. Jenny had been in Scotland with Tessa and had just flown in. Jane, resnapping the case, added that being at the Cromwell Road Air Terminal her father had thought of something he had to check at the Science Museum and so as Reid and Jenny found them here she, Jane, had just (you might say) taken her good boy to the museum—

  But not, said Dudley, to press the buttons in the children’s section in the basement. To which Jane retorted that there were buttons everywhere, not just in the basement—and Dudley in his sober way added that it was not for buttons that he’d wished to visit the museum today, and Jane said, Bye bye Jenny and Reid, though Reid hadn’t been introduced except by his signature which from Jane’s side was upside down.

  At which point on the night Jenny finished typing SSP and HH, she stopped the story with a shrug—I still think because she’d let herself be frank to me about Reid, like letting me take pictures of her during this fugitive period when she said she hated her looks and took (she said) nauseating pictures (which was exactly what Loma had once often said in the late fifties)—and Jenny said, well the tunnel and the sweater and the moccasins were just one of those coinci
dences and it wasn’t as if a hippie’d been playing a guitar with his chick in the tunnel, though in fact two chaps were suddenly having a loud argument as they got further and further away which looked like developing into a fight, but as suddenly as their argument had blown up it subsided, and Jenny stopped abruptly again but no shrug. Reid had had a headache and she had come home.

  Geoff Millan’s Irish mathematician would have given me a formula for such a coincidence if I’d asked, for at that supper the night of Dudley’s operation five years earlier, the Irishman had had something for everyone, was the star, carried his brain with such levity that when I asked (thick-tongued with the Moselle Tessa’s father had ordered from next door) what university this Pythagorean savant taught at, he banged his head into his fist, and said he could not remember for the life of him the name of the insane place but there was a buttery and a brand new landscape laid on he believed by helicopter but as for him he would like to hear more about my boats on the south coast, if there were hire boats what could my margin be?

  Formula for coincidence? Take a year off and study some system that makes the probable seem improbable. Oh the best I could do was add, to Jenny, that a book had been knocked off the chair when her filmed hands had snatched up those moccasins and that a bookmark had fallen from the book—and I couldn’t recall the name of the book but did recall the bookmark.

  Jenny said it was one of Reid’s books and said it with such simple finality that the subject lapsed into the field of home conversation and Lorna practicing and Will on the phone; and anyway, at that stage—just June—I’d had no reason to quiz Jenny about the bookmark which she’d picked off the floor and slipped in the Suitcase Slowly Packed between the V-neck sweater and the green-and-white plastic bottle of shampoo she’d started using. A picture of Reid? I came to think it might be of someone important.

  On the plane—where because Tourist had been overbooked by a Senior Citizens’ group I’d at the last minute been installed for the same reduced rate in First Class—I made a small collection of Japanese slippers and chopsticks and plastic envelopes of duck and soy sauces (plus a couple of kimonos when the steward wasn’t looking), to take to Sub’s children when I got back to New York. Should I have worried about money? About how many gross of Red Whitehead’s liquid crystal sets I could peddle? Being on a time that was neither American nor English I had tricked my body into a new exploratory line that might lead to intervals differing as the Maya sacred and solar calendars differ, the one holding within 260 days the full permutation of twenty day names and thirteen numbers, the other ordering itself into eighteen months of twenty days with five days at the end during which who knows what they did, perhaps meditated on what must have seemed in effect a cog-wheel (like an analog computer) fitting solar to sacred (tenon to mortise) so a rotation of 18,980 days or fifty-two true years would embrace all the variations or alignments of greater and smaller circles. The Irish mathematician would understand, for he seemed the night of Dudley’s appendectomy to be free-floating between gravities.