Sub seemed to know I was awake. He asked from the kitchen if I wanted a cup of tea.
Lorna mouthed my lower lip. She said, Is Jenny in?
I said I hadn’t seen her since suddenly not seeing her at the game, and I blamed Cosmo because he needn’t have said she had to wait three innings to get into the game. Lorna said it wasn’t Cosmo who brought her home on the motorbike last night. I said, That actor’s at least twenty-five.
Dagger phoned just as Jenny was coming in at 1 A.M. He’d lined up two surprising guys, he said, and we would let them sit at a table and rap. I said I hoped he could get hold of a Nagra unit and an omnidirectional mike and he said he didn’t know about a Nagra but we’d do a tape, never fear, and he said he’d known from the beginning I was a born sound-man and he thought it was great that I’d dreamed up this idea of the Unplaced Room, and he told about his Uncle Stan in Yonkers who got one of the old wire recorders before the war and when he heard his voice on it he got a whole other idea himself, grew a moustache, and left his wife and went to live in New Jersey where he became a phone salesman for encyclopedias. Dagger asked if Jenny had come home and I said Why and he merely said, We’ll put her in the outfield next Sunday, I think she’s got ability. I wondered what made our filmed softball game either typical or on the other hand one particular softball game and not another.
Jenny was in bed, lights out, by the time I hung up and went upstairs, though I wasn’t so sure what I wanted to ask about the Connecticut actor, just sure I should speak to her, whatever came out. I didn’t put the upstairs hall light on.
I opened Jenny’s door (I never do) and she said in the dark, Did you know Reid’s from Ridgefield, Connecticut? His father’s in real estate. Oh, I said, his name’s Reid—you mean the actor. I’ve never been to Connecticut, said Jenny.
I looked into the dark, my daughter wasn’t waiting for me to speak.
Reid built a dome on his parents’ property. I want to see it. He never studied acting.
She wasn’t waiting for me to speak, she was contemplating probably a number of things, how he swung a bat, or walked, or stepped down on the starter pedal, or stood when speaking lines onstage though I’d heard guerrilla theater was something else—how he listened to her, or took off her shoes, pulled off her American bluejeans that I’d paid for. I said goodnight and shut the door, turning the knob not to make a sound as if that would smooth a cut to some new footage of our film.
Lorna was near the doorway of our room in a blue bra, her near thigh in shadow, the light behind her setting the skin aglimmer beneath her Venus hair. She said, You’re betting your soul on this film. Why?
I went to her and murmured something to the effect that she was my Connecticut, my California, my Hawaii. I undid the top hook but she turned away and moved swaying to the cupboard, and reached over her shoulders to get the other hook.
Was I asleep? I felt the knob and lock of Sub’s front door turn so finely he could have been entering, not leaving.
What did he do weekends?
The Beaulieu, as I had hoped, had caught the name of Umpire Ismay’s tobacco tin just as a flake of leaf fell to the English grass. If I knew these things and had even for mood’s sake recorded in my diary what Savvy Van Ghent had said to Dagger after the game, still I did not know exactly what Claire was up to with Monty Graf, whether she knew of the 8-mm. cartridges we’d saved, what my man in glasses posing as Monty had hoped to find in my diary when he went through my suitcase, whether Cosmo’s Indian who’d shown an interest in the Beaulieu had known Dagger and Alba’s flat was empty the morning the film was destroyed, and how close Phil Aut’s connection was with the Knightsbridge gallery he owned exhibiting his wife Jan Graf’s work, and happening to employ the very same Indian. As for meeting Claire at the scene of the strange murder Wednesday—not to mention being for a moment bound between Claire and Jim—I’d decided I’d also know more about that.
The woman Gilda had seemed to locate me significantly at the event.
The charter man when I eventually got a phone call through to him had left a message to phone him at four. I had to be around for a call from Aut so I could turn down the inevitable lunch with my man Whitehead at the science-hobby firm. I called him and he talked nonstop about liquid crystals and a firm in Bristol that his file showed I had never mentioned, and now they’d written direct to New York for a wholesale price on Encapsulated Liquid Crystals in the sheets that show temperature variation by color, and the discs that do roughly the same but are advertised as a Wet Show. Whitehead had told them they should try also the Non-Encapsulated LC Kit which gives you great freedom in experiments with air density, friction heat, and thermal fingerprints. He couldn’t quote them a wholesale price because he himself got the liquid crystals practically retail from a warehouse right in New York. He didn’t see why the Bristol people hadn’t gone through me. Evidently I hadn’t gotten to them. The market over there wasn’t looking so good; how did I explain that? Somebody’d said liquid crystals were revolutionary in the market, keeping pace with what was happening in several branches of science, he forgot exactly, it was a space spinoff. But like, think of those English kids in that famous school system, and the scientific tradition in Britain (Breaking the Sound Barrier had a rerun on TV), and all those kids with their insects and their microscopes and their three-inch reflectors ruining their eyes—liquid crystals for crying out loud were a natural for that market—well what did I think? vat vass der problem (he laughed), brain-drain? (He laughed.) Better joke than he knew—and he’d forgotten that that somebody who’d said LC displays were of revolutionary significance was me. But while Whitehead went on to retail to me as if I did not know then the practical applications and the fun things a boy could do with liquid crystals like testing the warmth of your fingerprint by the colors that emerged on the encapsulating plastic sheet, it was plain that Whitehead for all his happy LC slogan “DIGITAL COLOR CALORIZING!” had no feel for the real inner properties of liquid crystals: structure of a solid but mobility of a liquid, structure ordered clearly yet not rigid in the normal course of three dimensions, molecules bonded like a liquid’s, other properties complex and marketable. Whitehead was saying again “So call me Red,” and he was saying “So why you’re so formal? You’re in England too long.”
I know where I am. And it is something of a mystery. His name’s Whitehead like mine is Rap Brown. The New York “So call me Red” didn’t fit the firmly modulated warning in what he said about Bristol. I was potentially redundant. But nothing seemed inevitable yet.
Or was I envisioning from my Sub-encapsulated headquarters a casting off of everything inessential to the film? I asked what was new. He said some audio-visual stuff for schools. I said did he know a Phil Aut. There were two rings and then he said, Can I put you on Hold, and I said, I’ll be in touch.
But if Phil Aut phoned, what could I offer him in the way of a threat? Tell him what happened in the Unplaced Room and guess what it was he didn’t want to hear? I became the film’s sound, not at all an echo but (from a written diary) a delayed voice now printed on the original image’s absence, though Aut could not know if the Unplaced Room had survived the fire. I was figuring he knew through Claire that a fraction of the film did still exist.
A lot had not happened.
It was well to be at last at the Unplaced Room. I must find its proper audience. You can’t just recall something, like Savvy after the Softball Game telling Dagger he was afraid UPI might reassign him to St. Louis.
A lot never happened in England.
Jenny took Dagger to a shop near us one lunchtime to pick up a couple of emergency wine glasses—she liked to be baited by Dagger and she may have told him things she’d not tell Lorna—and the two proprietors of this smart shop with its window full of casseroles and design mugs and French vegetable choppers were locking up—a white man and a black girl—and they refused to make the sale—closed one to two—so Dagger said what would happen if they broke their rule and the m
an said, We couldn’t have lunch together. But across our own lunch table Jenny afterward turned on Dagger saying, Fair enough, after all they’ve a right. Dagger got right to her saying, No one has any rights, Jenny, and as for fairness, that’s the great empty virtue; and when Jenny said, But fairness is in fact why you like living in England, Dagger laughed and said she was so right, fairness was like loyalty, and Jenny got mad and said he didn’t take her seriously. She took her glass and as she drank, Dagger said, I’ll drink a toast to not taking you seriously, and he drank and I drank and Jenny drank her whole glass, which was an old-fashioned glass, and Will asked if Dagger could get some thunderclaps again this year for July 4th.
But Dagger’s footwork, however prone to seasonal gout, seemed unconvincing when we lost our film. Look, he said, if we could get it back, then sure let’s go after it, but we can’t.
I said, We might get something—like what was the motive?—passing vandal breaks in when you just happen to be out, leaves I don’t know how many camera lenses and a miniature telly and a hundred pounds cash in a cupboard he’s taken the trouble to jimmy open, and three new Sony cassette-recorders unopened in their boxes—but wait, this fellow is a cinephobe, smells film in quantity, and passing your house that morning his crazy nostrils inflated scenting twenty-five hundred feet of movie film and up he came to your flat and, if I may reverse the likeness, saw like a tourist-vampire what he could smell.
Something may happen yet, said Dagger, but so we find out who did it, what then? Beat up on him? confiscate his wife?
Maybe my friend was getting tired. But hadn’t he cared as much as I? Think how he’d darted from face to face at Stonehenge, from robes to giant stone to bluejeans, from one of the new Druids to the American mute with his green beret to the American Indian we’d dragooned through the little long-haired English woman at the bonfire in Wales—back to the midnight mumbo-jumbo which in some sentimental transcendence engrossed the lay cast into a scene not false, not trivially tourist, that through a luck like magic seemed then—and even now when I know some of what else was going on—to complete our film, so I almost thought Dagger’s sense of it was like mine. Such intentness, the on and off of the Beaulieu motor, the certain passionate defensiveness of rhythm, the concentration of forehead, mouth, wrist, shoulder that framed Dagger off from all the others there who unlike him were, until the last invisible sprocket, potential for these last feet of our film. No, I could understand in his later resignation only fatigue, not reason. For he had been as much into that film as I.
At least he didn’t say now, Well anyway we shot it.
Yet if I failed here now in New York, that’s what I’d be saying: At least I tried.
But if I took the gloves off, my openings might disappear and there’d be nothing to get hold of.
Well, as I was checking to see if in the pages I’d brought there were any references to the Unplaced Room, Monty Graf phoned. Had I thought about his proposition? I said I thought I might sell the diary as a scenario for a feature film. He said Very funny, and said by the way I didn’t expect him to believe we’d only had one small rush and the rest hadn’t been processed. For why have that and nothing else?
It’s certainly implausible, I said.
I think your film isn’t destroyed, he said.
I would like to think that, I said.
And you and DiGorro are holding out for something.
If so, I said, why have I had no offer from Aut?
You haven’t fed him enough of the diary.
Haven’t fed him any of it.
The guy who gave you those pages works for Aut. But OK, how does the stabbing fit the pattern?
Claire can’t have seen much of it, I said.
But you seem to have seen a lot in it, Cartwright.
I looked at the phone receiver by my chin thinking the gloves were coming off.
I was not speaking while thinking. I was only thinking, while there was either silence on the line or Monty Graf speaking, mentioning again that we were holding out for a big payday (but not suggesting we were blackmailing anyone), mentioning the time of the stabbing (but not mentioning the florist’s). I was thinking Sub would be in the nation’s capital till Sunday, and Monty Graf seemed to conceal more about my presence at and interest in the stabbing incident than I thought Claire (unless she had information beyond her own actual experience) could have given him to conceal.
So he had gotten to Gilda.
But her position had to be merely an accidental observer’s.
Gilda, if Gilda, was an opening to an avenue opened only through other openings. Your vehicle passes at speed and one slot open shows another slot beyond so long as you glimpse at the instant your vehicle comes into line.
What opened Gilda to Graf?
All right, I said before summarily hanging up, you yourself said I was in trouble. So I need someone I can trust.
I phoned the florist’s at the accident corner hoping Gilda would answer.
She said little except she’d drop up on the way home after work. I didn’t think the florist was her husband.
I could no more have asked Graf how he’d arrived at Gilda (as I was sure he in fact had) than I could quite explain why we’d put off processing our exposed film except that we’d tacitly wanted to get it all together first (maybe worried too about how good it was, though to judge from the rush the focusing and light were right), and twice Dagger’s man in Soho whom I’d not met and who was going to give us a break on price had said Hang on till Monday week, and then besides we were on the move a bit, and on our own respective businesses in addition to the film, Dagger part-time teaching for the University of Maryland at the U.S. base at Bentwaters, I among other things arranging for five seven-foot leather chesterfields to be made and shipped to the States, my price only a little more than a third the New York retail for the same sofa—and all this made the delay in processing the film seem natural enough.
In the diary pages I’d packed for the trip there were only the two references to the Unplaced Room. One was the last-minute thought that lavalier mikes round the neck might give more presence to each speaker and even be easier to hide. But Dagger borrowed an omnidirectional and we stuck it behind an earthen ewer, ran the cable off the back of the table and around the outer legs of the deserter’s chair, which took the evidence pretty well off camera. We told our principals please not to pour.
The other reference was in my record of an explanation some weeks later to my son Will the night before our climactic Stonehenge; he’d asked how the Nagra sound unit kept in phase with the Beaulieu and I told him—albeit with mere terms—that the camera has in its motor a sync pulse generator whose output frequency is exactly proportional to the camera’s optical record. But finding this second reference on a diary page I found also something else and it was in my head, not on paper: it was something I remembered: that in the midst of this clear abc given to my serious son—in fact I believe exactly between reflecting on the banality of what was said in the Unplaced Room and on the other hand wondering (a) what even Will whose electricity puts mine to shame would be able through these technical terms to know in the moist isobars of his fingertips, and (b) if my own idea for the Stonehenge scene would survive on film—I had seen again (and now for more than that instant of actual glimpse) a thing that the featured hands in Suitcase Slowly Packed had slipped between the black V-neck sweater and the green-and-white plastic bottle of shampoo which Lorna and I use: the thing was a face, a snapshot of a man’s face which had been apparently a bookmark in a paperback that had been knocked off the adjacent chair when the hands picked up a pair of red-white-and-blue beaded moccasins and the snapshot had fallen out. I’d been close enough to glance but not really look, for I was holding a mike just off camera close enough to catch the voice of the hands. The actor from Connecticut arrived just as we finished shooting and I forgot to ask Jenny about the snapshot—for it was Jenny whose hands packed that immemorial suitcase and who decided what to pack.
Later when Dagger was praising her for a steady but unrehearsed-looking naturalness, I thought maybe he was thinking how when the book dropped the hands casually picked up the snapshot and packed it, then the shampoo, then the book. And days, weeks later the eve of Stonehenge the picture came back with Will in our garden and the technical explanation I reeled out for him as we both stared down at our tortoise in the twilight, its claws and snake-head withdrawn into the stone of its shell—for that afternoon Dagger had said we’d use the Suitcase Slowly Packed not on its own but as a cut-in shot in the middle of the following scene, the Marvelous Country House. I hadn’t liked the idea, I guess partly because it subordinated Jenny’s role, but I figured we could negotiate when we came to the editing. It was a dark snapshot but I wouldn’t swear it wasn’t color.
Gilda came early. Before she came I phoned Outer Film. I couldn’t get Phil Aut and I passed on the message that one of his employees had broken into a friend of mine’s apartment and I was getting the police on it through an influential person of my acquaintance named Monty Graf. The secretary said Mr. Aut was flying to London tonight.
I phoned the charter man at four and just as he was saying What else do you do to keep busy at that end? the doorbell went and before I could shelve the receiver I said, If I wanted to could you get me a charter-rate flight sooner than the return I’ve got?
Gilda wore a flowered raincoat. She looked all around her.
Back on the phone I said, I mean like a charter within a charter.
The charter man said, You could get to be my best customer.
He gave his home number and I said I’d be in touch.
Gilda’s green-flowered mac lay between us on the brown couch which concealed inside its folded day bed mattress my blanket. I knew the blanket to be the same magenta as the fitted carpet Rose had paid a lot of money for. Gilda stared at it. Upon the carpet’s magenta ground was a fine labyrinth of apricot lines that gave a kind of Moslem chic.
Lookout Cartridge Page 13