Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  But what she said now did not fit: Be serious, she said.

  She might well ask, I said, why these and others who had connections to hide should let themselves be filmed at all. Surely with what they stood to lose it was strange to consent.

  Kate had to claim something for herself. She said that everyone knew how persuasive Jan could be.

  I agreed with my mouth full, but having swallowed the last soft lump of grainy crust and held out my wine glass, I said there were things Jan could not understand. Nor Phil either. Did Kate know John? Ah well, John had a curious relation with Phil. John wasn’t into this other side of the film either.

  Kate did not ask what other side. She carried my plate out.

  I had put on my parka, and in a second, with one eye on the crack of darkness showing from the Unplaced Room, I added the heavy red jaguar to my stock of other people’s weapons. The phone rang and I moved to the foyer, looked suddenly at the Unplaced Room, lifted my pack around the corner out of sight, opened the front door—and letting it close hard I concealed myself beside the hall closet. Consequently I could not hear, except a word that sounded like gallery. I put my head around the corner; the door to the Unplaced Room had not stirred. I caught Kate looking at me around the door of the kitchen. She disappeared and closed the conversation saying, I’ll tell her you called.

  Beside the painting to which I had added was a large blue-red-and-umber cushion which had figured in the otherwise drab Unplaced Room.

  I had proposed that we drop to eight frames a second here and there because when eventually projected these moments would introduce an agitation into Dagger’s flat vérité.

  Kate had stalled me here without being one thing or the other.

  What I could have told her—fast forward, sixty-four frames a second—was that the Unplaced Room was precisely the footage Dagger had not told Claire about; the letter I had left on Aut’s desk left me no doubt about that. For Dagger there was something in the scene worth withholding. The scene held more for me. Jan’s whiskey had spread to my shoulders and fingertips. What I could have told Kate at 64 fps was the precise color of eggshell-cream I painted a room in our first house in 1955 that was to be my study. There was a golden Goya guitar—not to be confused with the two twelve-string guitars I bought in Germany the following year and sold to Americans in London—and the door was closed and window open, and when I laid down my roller I would pick up the Goya and strum my four chords and sing a ballad. “Sir Patrick Spens” was one I sang. They are out of fashion now and in all these years in England I never met anyone not American who sang them. That room was where the children wouldn’t come. Will was a baby, Jenny went half days to a play group in a church basement. I had a table and two chairs and only what I needed. Sometimes not even the paper. And Lorna had the balance of the house to herself. The old pub across the road hadn’t yet been tarted up; the prefab panels and light cubes and chrome trim were three years off. But while I liked to make space, so to speak, by piling things rather than letting them spread, objects in quantity passed through that room and sometimes stopped for considerable periods. My father had unearthed in the country several old Shell Oil bottles 14½ inches high with fancy embossing, and because I’d been struck with the tall, thin beauty of these old bottles that had jeen used to hold a quart of motor oil, I had interested a young Portobello Road shopkeeper in having (on a percentage basis) a serious bottle corner. This corner soon acquired a name for its nobly seductive American wares, though the strangely reassuring Mason jars and blown-in-the-mold medicine bottles with the four indented circles embossed on the side, the cobalt-blue witch hazels and the whittle-marked Moxie Nerve Food bottles—long ball neck, strap-sided, and (a mark of pre-1900 work) the applied lip—were mingled as you’d expect with a deceptively large sampling of non-American work—free-blown Persian saddle flasks, aqua-colored Jamaican gingers, Italian cordials with embossed suns, French perfume and English gin. And there were times when such objects as these would accumulate in that precious room of mine where Lorna would always knock before she entered. She picked up the guitar overnight and now can really play but never does. She would sit down in the bare room and I would close my manila folder over my lists, plans, and letters and she would tell me the old lady in the furnished room on the ground floor next door with access to the garden (hence a view across into ours and up to my study window) had told her her life story this morning, Miss Topp, a sitting tenant whom the new land-lord (an actor no one had ever heard of who had made some money on a film) was dying to evict along with Mrs. West on the third floor (who could barely move now, she was so fat), and Miss Topp after a tale of complaints and small revelations said, I see your husband up there busy doing his correspondence. But Lorna then heard that Miss Topp had been saying that I didn’t work, that all I did all day was correspondence, and the police-woman had come because I was living off my wife’s immoral earnings. Indeed the police-woman had come, to check our green cards, but the old lady as I pointed out to Lorna gave us credit for more imagination than we probably had—Miss Topp had heard from old Mr. Sharpe the gardener that Lorna was English, which gave her the right to take a job without going through red tape, and from the dustman that there were a number of Americans resident in the area, just living. This was off the Edge-ware Road a half a mile from Marble Arch in a little one-block street of neat, narrow, often dilapidated three-story Georgians in the borough of Marylebone since then absorbed into Westminster—and just round the block from a public baths with marvelous seven-foot tubs Lorna and I used in shifts during a water crisis our first winter, listening to the locals hollering pop songs from cubicle to cubicle. My room that I had painted off-white and at first kept free of possessions was not, as you may imagine, like an interrogation chamber—though at first it was as bookless as the early life of a 1954 draftee whose G2 loyalty check proves his mom and fiancée to have had no traffic with communists—and newspapers did pile up with occasional unread alumni reviews; and the security of that room, and of that rented house (and of that year 1955 in England featuring the autumn debate in Commons on the defectors Burgess and MacLean when Eden with Senator McCarthy in mind asked how far “we” were to go in pursuit of greater security) I see now was haunted by some secret and possible heroism, and a college friend Reb Needles from Chicago wrote that I. F. Stone had done a piece on the Watkins Committee report as a great antifascist event and in listing the Senate honor roll of Fulbright, Flanders, and Morse, Hayden, Hennings, and Hendrick-son—not to forget Benton who first looked into that demented American’s financial affairs—the writer had called them all (even Jenner) Senator but had singled McCarthy out again and again as just McCarthy, which may have seemed to say it all but said still more and left the man alone and distinct.

  But a briefly fast 64 fps if you ever get it developed comes out of your 24 fps projector slow motion.

  Babysitters were thirty cents an hour, chars sixty. Lorna began to want a job, but an interesting one. The children were still too young. We bought a better piano. By the time we moved to High-gate to a house that despite the corruption of its roses is worth nine times what we paid for it in ’58, I was glad to leave that plain white room bare again, a possibility for someone else, and Dagger DiGorro on May 24 would not have understood my sense of the room we filmed—a room anywhere, a future.

  Jan Aut’s marmalade cat walked slowly out of the Unplaced Room and made its way to the kitchen. The phone had rung again, so I waited. Kate had said Speak of the…when she picked up; then she said, Her brother; then a succession of yeses; and then: I’ll tell him.

  When she came out she was the gallery girl again, and so, picking up her last remark before the phone calls, I said, Jan’s persuasive all right but she needs a helping hand.

  I nodded at the picture leaning against the piano leg. Kate looked pretty well through me, but found a smudge of foreign matter and could not look further.

  Where are you off to now?

  Back to New York, I
said, some work that Paul’s involved in. I’ve hardly been away.

  Kate’s hand found the collarbone, but no connection occurred, and I wondered if she had tried two glasses of warm water and a good vomit first thing before breakfast.

  She couldn’t quite let me go. What limit would my going put upon her? She ran her words together: Just as well this film was lost, p’raps you’ll try another someday.

  I took two steps to her, my hands at my sides: Who says it’s lost?

  Beyond her shoulder I saw the door to the Unplaced Room stir but it was only my angry imagination fueling the fire of my diary with a chair seat and a table leg or two from the absent brother’s hut.

  I had a hand on her shoulder and did not let her move. I asked what the devil she knew about an Unplaced Room, or Māyā, or a Hawaiian Hippie playing a guitar under the Science Museum and his little girlfriend from Long Island in a U.S. sergeant’s jacket swaying from one boot to the other above a dirty yellow felt hat on the ground with a coin in it. What had such a thing to do with Kate’s job in a gallery, with a green, stone-walled private school? What was West Hempstead, Long Island, to Kate? Not even a suburban town that supplied an entrant for the Miss New York State contest. Had Kate any feeling for a couple like that? the boy’s father in the iron business in Honolulu County, the girl’s father in the carbon business; the girl as American as a Duncan Hines brownie, the boy as American as a quart can of pineapple juice, a dropout on the move represented in the 1960 tattoo on Savvy Van Ghent’s strong arm by one star no newer than the star that stands for that ancient and fundamental signatory state Virginia. There was a simple power in the two of them together that Kate could disparage as boring and American and even unsavory—

  Wait, she said without removing her shoulder from my hand, oh wait, half my friends are Americans.

  I said what could Dagger’s rhythm of approach mean to Kate. Without a dolly he had had to level his walk as if with a sort of slow-motion gear astonishingly well-coordinated, the camera like a quart of trinitro-glycerine—though the different speeds at which he went by the two young people did not include actual slow-motion, though after five or six passes we set up right in front of them so pedestrians who’d been our camera point of view would now be separate and pass between us and the two kids—

  I may not know what you mean by Māyā but I do have some feeling for fine things—

  —and now at my urging (for two bowlers and two rolled black umbrellas came bobbing and capering toward us respectively down the passage) we went to 64 frames a second so in the print the Hawaiian Hippie’s fingers would be dream-slow and the girl’s bending and swaying might hint of girls in grass skirts and thick swinging leis performing to make compatriot tourists feel right at home under a sunny volcano just as the bowlers and brollies marched darkly past in a sudden resumption of the sound of the hard authentic unsweetened version of “Both Sides Now,” and Dagger had made the preceding series of approaches from the Science Museum end of the tunnel with the South Ken Underground end facing us beyond the boy and girl almost as if we were trying again and again to make someone appear at that end and come toward us, but I had inserted a silence without telling Dagger, just switching off the little Nagra we were using while creating a silence between the music so the music would ride on with its own momentum or the viewer could suddenly find he’d been making his own music all the time, or silence would plunge him into meditation. Dagger had said when we started out that American kids playing in Undergrounds around London could be a good little scene and Jenny you see had spoken a day or two before of how she and I and Will used to go to the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum and so I suggested that pedestrian tunnel and there we found this boy and girl but they weren’t there when Reid and Jenny ran into Dudley and Jane in the same tunnel three weeks later.

  The same tunnel? said Kate, and I removed my hand from her shoulder. I was between her and something that was going on outside this flat.

  Yes the same tunnel, I said, and Dudley Allott was wearing a black V-neck pullover under his mac exactly like one that was packed in a later scene of our film.

  But wasn’t it a coincidence their meeting?

  They were bound to meet someday, I found myself saying. Like Dudley and your employer’s brother-in-law Monty Graf who have been on the blower discussing Maya within the last seventy-two hours. Like Nash and the deserter at Stonehenge.

  Kate backed away and sat down by the table from which I’d taken the red jaguar. That was Monty Graf just now, she said, and I had the sense (which I felt then that no formula could validate) that I’d drawn her into a moment of freedom where accelerations had equaled one another and she would give me anything I wanted, even the knowledge of what it was I wanted. The door of the Unplaced Room moved. The cat, having come out of the kitchen, walked across a rug. Put the two shots together, rig the illusion of an adventure, and the viewer like some attentive victim-to-be of terrorism could be made to see the cat as moving the door instead of the real event which was the wind from the window of our May 24 film scene which at that moment of increasing weightlessness and vision I inclined to see as my own presence in that Unplaced Room plotting my way, glad of my young wife’s willingness in the fifties to live abroad for a while, listening to Will somewhere in that first house screaming while I watched Miss Topp and blue-nosed Mr. Sharpe with his pruning shears in the adjacent garden standing like conspirators by the smoking incinerator into which he had stuffed refuse, and the two of them then turn to catch me watching from my study which in ’58 I was to abandon for the Highgate house where my study had none of that free unspecified air in which as in our film much was possible.

  Or for that matter (I said) me and Phil Aut’s cameraman who wouldn’t have understood the silence I inserted like a breath of seawater waxed in your ears.

  The words came unchosen, and I added, Oh we ran him ragged at Stonehenge, he didn’t have a clue.

  There’s not much John misses, said Kate.

  For one thing, I said, he sometimes misses Incremona’s moods. Which is about as risky as you can get. Now that was a coincidence, I said (thinking that that bumptious John of the Marvelous Country House had certainly not been the other man with the movie camera at Stonehenge).

  What was? asked Kate.

  Running into Incremona in Corsica, I said.

  But the other coincidence, said Kate, as if not wanting to change the subject—who is Jane?

  I was picturing John the man in glasses from the Mercer Street loft holding a camera in the lurid flashes of our Stonehenge night. That cameraman hadn’t been wearing glasses, and this John of mine on the loft floor where I’d dropped him had been half-blind till he got his steel-rims back on. I told Kate Jane was the daughter of the man that Monty had been phoning for information, and I remarked that the real coincidence was that Jane knew Reid.

  But my words were again almost too much for the occupant of that Unplaced Room amid the circuiting dark of many degrees of past: for hoping to look only out ahead, wherever I looked was back—the tunnel of pedestrians impeding our scene in static twilight while the boy from Honolulu banged his steel strings, the tunnel bearing me home from the fact of English twilight which that afternoon I had learned must preclude any undertaking to launch a Drive-in cinema in the Liverpool area, the tunnel of Beatle rock in my carriage drowsing me toward that mobile terminal the wheels of which are paved with peat but which recedes from what Ned Noble once called my pedestrian imagination, so maybe I will never except in daydreams catch it and patent it or in some weightless or depictured bare unsituated room plan it down to each revolution of each wheel, but there is no revolution, the wheel is at Yarner’s Coffee Shop in Upper Regent Street and it is a huge elegant coffee-grinder wheel for show, and Jane to be precise had said merely that Reid had waved passing the window: but to Tessa? or to the other woman? what was her name? Hunt, Winston, she was American, Simpson, Flint, it was Flint.

  Oh Reid knows everyone, said Kate
.

  You didn’t know him when I asked you Monday.

  Kate’s hand skipped her collarbone and went to her eyes. She crossed her legs.

  I would try one more thing, then give up here in order to preserve momentum. I was going to Dagger’s to find out why he was holding the Unplaced Room out from Claire, why he’d wanted to put the Hyde Park Softball Game between the Hawaiian and the Suitcase; to find out if in fact the film I’d seen unwound and tangled on Dagger’s table (of even less value now than the strips of adhesive tape that had been used to seal the silver cans) had been our film, and if not, why not—and to find out where the sound was, that Monty outside my New York cab had suddenly thought of when the headless bike-rider whipped by. Also I had to cash a check.

  I moved toward the foyer and asked, without looking back, if Kate would be surprised to know with whom Paul and Jan might be staying in Scotland.

  Kate was close behind me, her steps left the rug and touched the floor.

  You knew she wouldn’t be here, didn’t you! Why did you come?

  I turned to Kate in the foyer and over her shoulder the crack of dark into the Unplaced Room flickered like a Highland chieftain’s thigh or Tessa’s, or like Dudley’s detached elbow in the pool lane parallel to mine, or like my face retracting from the bare window of my room in the Marylebone house in ’55 when Miss Topp and Mr. Sharpe the gardener looked around from the incinerator, or like the mystery snap packed quick as a blink between sweater and shampoo.

  You don’t know Mary’s brother, I said, who used to be a force in the Scottish Nationalist Party.

  I had the door open. I didn’t feel the weight of my pack. I had been editing the film as if it existed. Did I want it to exist? In my dream, miles of film paid out of my abdomen into the light as someone walked away holding the leader.