Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  I don’t have much time, she said. She was different today. We looked at each other’s knees. I thought I was at last at the beginning, and I thought of the Unplaced Room which, if our film had not been destroyed, would have come first.

  Listen, I said. I know.

  She turned to me and when she spoke the rust-colored enamel butterfly glinted: You want to know what the insurance man asked me?

  Yes.

  He was insurance like you’re the family doctor.

  She described him.

  She was talking about Monty Graf, who I’d thought must have found the accident scene through Claire but who Gilda said had come with a couple of plainclothesmen and a uniformed sergeant. Monty Graf had identified himself as an insurance investigator but not in the hearing of the policemen. Gilda had offered nothing about me at first and her brother-in-law the proprietor didn’t recall me. But Monty Graf had asked if a bearded man in a trenchcoat with a small mole in the middle of his forehead had been at the accident and Gilda added to this that the man had come back again after lunch. She didn’t know why she answered nor why her questioner had bothered to identify himself, she liked his soft voice, it seemed to be telling her things but afterward she knew little more that was new than the name Cartwright. She’d said I was concerned about the stabber, what he looked like, what happened to the car, and it sounded as if her questioner wanted to make sure I had not spoken to the stabber.

  Did he tell you anything else besides my name?

  What name?

  Cartwright.

  Oh, she had thought that was his, for he’d said so. She put her raincoat across her lap. She wasn’t the same person as before in the florist shop and on the street corner. She wasn’t amused, though not against me either.

  My name is Cartwright, I said, and I don’t know what the stabbing has to do with me. I believe it’s important.

  I went on: Because I’ve been making a film.

  Gilda stared at the rug. Her eyes went relentlessly over it but her head did not move.

  This film was destroyed before it was developed. Can you understand that? And I am finding out why. So I was on my way to see someone who’s involved when I happened into this stabbing, but the person I was seeing—who was as I said involved in the film and maybe its destruction—appears down the block behind me and when I see her she turns around and disappears.

  That’s too bad about the film, said Gilda.

  My voice said, What’s it matter, nobody reads any more.

  I do. Why’d you say that?

  They read more in England where we made the film.

  Why were you making it in England?

  It’s where I live.

  You don’t live here?

  I come here, I don’t live here.

  Where am I, then? said Gilda.

  She stood up looking toward the hall at an angle which if her eyes could have moved her would have led toward Sub’s bedroom.

  I said, A friend’s.

  Here I thought I was in your place. I saw the unmade bed.

  Why did this man use my name, I said.

  Gilda sat again and reached for my hand: What kind of film?

  Why, if you want to know, it began with an Unplaced Room. Just a room that could be anywhere, that was the point, a point.

  What kind of a point can you make out of that, said Gilda.

  Well look at this room. What’s New York about it?

  When’s your friend coming home?

  My friend’s in Washington for the weekend.

  Gilda stood up and walked to the hall. If you ask me, he called himself Cartwright because he wanted me to tell someone else that a man named Cartwright came asking about the murder.

  Tell who?

  She slid her right hand into a sleeve, and I found Dagger’s Beaulieu eye and at some key distance my naked eye triangulating upon a shimmering apex alternating into color and black and white as if between two ambiguously interesting lens focuses—and I went to Gilda instantly and held the other lapel so she could slip her left hand in.

  She waited, not turning.

  Helping you on with your flowers, I said.

  Gilda still did not turn. You’re American, right?

  As if she might want to get off with me but, while staring at (or toward) the big unmade bed in Sub’s room, wondering if I was circumscribed.

  With my finger I drew a circle on her back beginning inside one shoulder blade, touching the neck and her spine above the small.

  In the hall her green flowers were dark.

  OK, she said, and was at the door. This is interesting, I’m trying to figure if I know something about this that you don’t.

  She wanted Sub’s phone number and I wrote it down for her.

  I stood in the open doorway waiting for her elevator, and we didn’t speak.

  Have a good weekend.

  I phoned Claire’s answering service and left a question for Monty: Why had he wanted to know if I had spoken to the stabber? Didn’t he know Wheeler as well as Claire and I did?

  I had dinner alone out Friday and Saturday.

  If you are, so to speak, in between people, New York can offer vintage solitude. Both nights I saw big frank films in color. One showed blood darting from a wound in a sheriff’s neck. The other looked back only thirty years to an Unplaced Beach (if I may) seen through a 235-carat haze of clear sun and aquamarine to a pair of amber nipples.

  When Jenny and the Connecticut actor left the place where the Suitcase had been Slowly Packed, he carried it for her. Four legs and a gray case the contents of which I knew—and a door closing upon our footage. Dagger said, Nice couple.

  Alba came out of her kitchen and asked if I’d like some fish soup.

  Jenny got home late, but not to the sound of a motorbike. Not a cab either and it was long after the Underground finished, even allowing for a long walk up Highgate Hill from Archway Underground station. I heard what had to be the gray suitcase being set down and then, like stereo, the front door opening from outside and inside. Naturally I had too much else on my mind to be thinking about the snapshot. I had been lying awake for a long time. Lorna facing away from me toward the window said as if out of a little dream, Go to sleep. She could not have known I was awake unless some tempo in my breath opened me to her dream or of course to her own sleepless thought.

  Phil Aut’s home number wasn’t in the Manhattan book.

  I went through my own address book in vain.

  My diary pages lay on Sub’s desk and I thought how sloppy and pompous the boys in the Unplaced Room were, swapping recipes for gelatin dynamite and Hong Kong hors d’oeuvres.

  I think I straightened the pages and put my address book squarely on top as a paper weight for the night.

  Sunday at 7 A.M. about a minute after I woke, Lorna phoned. Had I slept? What time was it in New York? She’d phoned twice yesterday. She was so tired, hadn’t had much sleep. Will had just gone to Stephen’s for lunch. My card had come and Jenny had laughed and said she’d in fact asked me to bring back a memory.

  There was an expensive silence, the ocean-bed cable kept our pulses dry, Lorna didn’t like these calls, coming or going.

  Why couldn’t you sleep? I said.

  The house was broken into after lunch yesterday, she said. Jenny was out, Will was on his way home, I was at rehearsal. I feel so badly, the desk was rifled; what is happening?

  They took the film diary?

  The second drawer on the left is empty; I’m so sorry.

  I did not tell Lorna what I felt. I saw her hair and her shoulders and heard her voice carry out of her eyes into my own voice, my mouth.

  I said, I want you.

  Lorna said, The young man, the second tenor I told you about who just joined us, he walked to the bus stop with me after rehearsal. He asked if I felt at home in England, I told him how long we’d been here. When I got home the door was open, there were snapshots on the rug and check stubs and letters and bills and stamps and statio
nery. My music on the piano hadn’t been touched, I don’t know why it would have been. The desk drawer you keep the diary in was empty. The police came. The lock was ruined and there are scrapes on the door frame. I thought of what that young man had asked me and I thought why the hell didn’t we go back years ago. Stupid to think that. Forgive me.

  I said, What about the carbon in Jenny’s cupboard?

  Lorna said, Oh thank God. I don’t think they went upstairs.

  I want you.

  Lorna may have sensed my excitement. I said, Didn’t Jenny mention the carbon?

  She phoned last night to say she wouldn’t be home. I haven’t seen her since Friday.

  Tell Dagger.

  Lorna said, He phoned up. I told him. I said we’d had a card. He said Cosmo of all people had had one.

  Did you get hold of a locksmith?

  I finally got one through that young man the second tenor.

  I didn’t tell Lorna what I was going to do. But she said, There’s no need to come back.

  I said to go upstairs and look in Jenny’s cupboard in the box-file on its side underneath her laundry bag. If the carbon wasn’t there, phone back at once, screw the expense.

  Lorna said, I miss you.

  I said, I love you. I’ve got to think. I’ll be in touch in the next few hours.

  I shaved and showered with the door open. I made a pot of coffee.

  At nine I started to go for my address book but found I knew the charter man’s number. I phoned him. There was almost no time, as it turned out. I left my suitcase and day bed open and took only the Joni Mitchell Blue. I couldn’t find its paper bag.

  At Kennedy I thought of some of the people who didn’t even know I’d been in New York.

  On Cosmo’s 3-D card of the Empire State Building I had Written CLAIRE WANTS TO KNOW WHERE I SAW YOUR INDIAN FRIEND BEFORE.

  The plane was like an Unplaced Room.

  A beauty across the aisle had a new soft-yellow tea-rose stuck through her green pullover, the petals like a bud’s tight-shut though with the merest flare at the top.

  CARRIAGE

  Your train like a tunnel draws you home to London from different times, to London from England, home from a small station destined to be defunct near an airbase where Dagger sometimes teaches northeast beyond Ipswich; home less recently from Axminster in the soft southwest coast; or still less recently from the seductive mid-sixties, from Liverpool north and west of London and in a second-class uncompartmented carriage where the cadence of the roadbed drags at the Beatle rock coming from somewhere in the car: your train takes you home to London, the switches up ahead pivot where necessary, bend your thrust so your train, your tunnel makes straight for its terminus, and an avenue is open to its end in High-gate, where your American family live and wait for their American father, a circuit even more open when your eyelids like NAND valves are shut and you are a tunnel in a tunnel.

  The South African in his Liverpool bank by the thick waters of the River Mersey was impressed with your care for detail and your ease about the future—you’re one of his Americans—and he names two factory towns and two with new universities—if it’s to be a group of, say, five or six bookshops. But dad in Capetown who likewise believes in the new reading public here in the mid-sixties puts up ten thousand pounds only if you deliver what you said, concessions Stateside and from two paperback distributors in London, one of whom you know through a friend of Millan’s. But about the other business which your South African associate knows you were up in the Liverpool area for anyway, no questions asked and just as well; it was the subject of more than one letter to your own father back in Brooklyn Heights and easy to discuss in great detail and pleasant for your father to mention to his friends for it sounded so concrete; it was an American-style drive-in cinema, that’s all your young South African banker knows. He doesn’t know, as your train runs on to London, that the answer after weeks of possibility was negative. The English twilight did it, not the weather, not the thought of all those windscreen wipers sweeping away the rain like a scan on a radar scope so the audience could get through that out-of-focus shield to the adventure and emotion—no, not even the competition from the box, or even inertia (for Liverpool is not only the Beatles). No; after weeks of consideration, it was the long twilight. You are looking forward to a bottle of something Dagger got you from the U.S. armed forces cellars, and looking forward to joking with Lorna about this twilight because it does after all appeal to the imagination. There just are not movie projectors that can adjust to this long twilight. The Merseyside kids in the car park with their transistors in their laps would peer through a light too great for them to see what the projector cannot competitively convey onto the 100 by 60 screen, the American hero and heroine move as if in and out of a clear pastel substance that seems film itself but is the awkward light.

  Famished (for there’s no buffet on this train), you drowse through distance; there must be two transistors tuned to the same station, one in front, one behind you—and you are the station!—as you drowse, that word film becomes flim your son is at the word-game stage, tiresome, so you drowse toward Euston Station but your train like your son is not tired, nor is Euston, which the planners threaten to give a face-lift but now moves: it is the first railway station on wheels—the space it occupies has become interesting and strange and Cartwright is the one who thought it up and rubber tires at that—but the wheels backfire and the station recedes, and famished you will never get there, not till you (as the teacher once said) go out and come in again, not from Liverpool in the mid-sixties but from Axminster, 1968.

  Is there then a River Ax, as at Exeter a River Exe (hence Exmouth, Exminster)? You have been driven through Axminster too preoccupied with other things to look or ask for the minster of Ax if there was one then or now. Minster (You will tell Will this August of ’68 three months hence as you pass again through Axminster) comes from Latin for monastery and means a monastery church but may mean cathedral; hence the great cathedral at York is Yorkminster, which is also the name of the so-called French pub in Soho where Will’s parents have a drink on a night out in a corner in front of an iron table among framed photographs of prize fighters. Whence cometh Munster cheese, asks Lorna in August crammed in a country taxi under a bag of beach things she couldn’t get into any of the cases that are in the boot. Ah, also hence, say you: no doubt a clutch of German monks busied themselves in the crypts filling bags full of curd and punching them till they swung (back and forth) like dripping bells in the cool and sacred air—hence, Munster cheese. I don’t believe it, says Jenny, looking out at the rounded seaside pastures of the Devon-Dorset border, but she doesn’t care, we are all thinking of the pebbly strand and a lunch of fish and too many moist chips and the cold water English and damp even beyond its wetness and the great bay into which a prince once sailed hoping to overthrow a king, and thinking too of the boatyard that you suddenly by accident have a small piece of, which was why three months ago in May you visited that sea village with its senior citizens laboring up its lanes, one so steep there’s a railing to haul your heart up hand over hand—and why, having settled £2500 in that boatyard you taxi back to Axminster through the warmth of May 1968 and take the return train. You lunch at a stand-up bar in the buffet car with a Lyons businessman who knows everything. The explosive events in Paris were inevitable, les événements; but De Gaulle must survive. You object: De Gaulle will not survive. The Frenchman has been to Bristol, has seen Brunel’s suspension bridge above the Avon gorge at Clifton, merveilleux, from below it is very high, for its time ambitious, for any time beautiful. Its thrust, you say, is stunning. Correct, says your companion, though one must add that this span embodies engineering mistakes quite incredible for which he is glad to say his fellow-countryman Brunel never had to pay. It was (you point out) his father who was French, while Isambard Kingdom Brunei the son was English, though perhaps arguably in the great line of nineteenth-century French engineers. That is correct, says your companion
, whose moustache you become aware of. It was (you say) the father who built the Thames Tunnel that kept caving in. That is correct, says your companion, and with curled lip declines a thin white sandwich the barman imagined him to be looking at. The Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars cut into the program of French technology (you point out)—many engineers were on the wrong side at the wrong time. Your companion orders a second whiskey. Business is a taxing business. Will the Paris événements change anything? Your companion resolutely channels the talk to New York. He has been there last year—’67—and he will go again: for business, for pleasure—formidable. On the other hand (you continue, eyeing the siphon on the bar) the naval blockade in the 178o’s that cut France off from the supplies of soda required in making glass and sundry other necessities stimulated the birth of chemical engineering in Le Blanc’s soda process. Perhaps your undergraduates are true symptoms, not just trying something on. The Frenchman smiles mechanically: Liberty is the crime which contains all other crimes—that was one of their mottoes, correct?

  Through the filmed glass, meadows and cricket fields and new towns and the unnetted bare white frames of soccer goals are seen as if from a breakneck canal. The Frenchman asks, For how many years have you lived in England? You don’t quite answer, you are wondering if you could take Will up to see the Clifton Bridge in August when you and he and Lorna and Jenny come down to the seaside town where the boatyard is that you have a piece of. What do you think of Nixon? your French companion says, and with a finger and a nod decides to have that thin flat white triangle (called a round) after all. Going on fourteen years, you say, and ask for another can of Guinness.

  In Victoria Station, the Gateway to the Continent, the schoolboys are copying train numbers neatly into their pocket notebooks. This is what Will did the whole of his tenth year. The man in a bowler carries himself well. Does anyone except you look up to the cast-lion and glass roof? It is a bridge for the light to rest on, though now begrimed. You have not enough time to make it worthwhile bussing home, bucking the early rush in the Underground or even turning toward the Thames and paying a quick visit to the Tate to look at Turner’s tiny black train submerged in the artist’s godlike steam of color, but almost too much time before you meet Lorna and friends in a pub, the Salisbury, before the theater; so wondering about the total effect of a bomb dropped through the vast delicacy of this roof, you decide to kill an hour, you feel like eating a bit of jellied eel. You may have to walk a ways for it.