Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  Not the point either; but maybe I’m thinking that Lorna never in any way described Tessa. Instead she would say—which was quite true when I had been with Tessa—that while Tessa sitting knees together and seeming in her narrow high shoulders tense or formal would never seem to do the talking, you might sometimes feel after she got up and went home that it was she who had moved the conversation—from Jews in New York, say, to Jews in London and the Brooklyn College girl who stayed with the Allotts one summer in the sixties who was surprised to find Tessa, a Jew, speaking with an English accent; yet Tessa brought us out—yet sometimes I discovered in myself, even in words I was using to tell anecdotes arising out of Tessa’s easy transitions, an idea that our lives had been parallel and what I was telling had happened to Tessa, who sat listening till Lorna would go to the piano and ask her to sing.

  Tessa and the film—not just parts of one’s life sensing one another in that spirit of exhilaration called manic in someone deranged. Yes: Tessa and, in particular, the Marvelous Country House. But in the abbreviated form in which Lorna began but then was kept from finishing my section, the link with Tessa may be clear only to me. And what I now tried to tell the person who sat beside me, her soft dry hand half-closed in mine, was part what she’d read, part what she hadn’t reached, and part what I added out of courtesy. I looked at her—at all except her eyes, the governing powers of her face which gave person to her bones, though in themselves those eyes if you forgot everything else and saw only them were impersonal, both mechanically animal for all their flecked textures, and wildly opaque—and then I looked right at two things in our room as if I could look at them both at once—and thinking of Tessa and the tiny fold at the inner angle of each of her eyes, I thought why didn’t I include in my account of Tessa’s connection with the film these two things. One is a cigarette burn in the northwest quadrant of our carpet. The other is a jagged blue-green hunk of rock salt Tessa brought from the Bavarian Alps when she at last brought herself to visit Germany in 1963.

  The second came to us accompanied by the remark that this was the color Tessa had wanted her eyes to be instead of watery pale brown. I pointed out that in black and white her eyes looked blue. She said Dudley had told her to buy herself some of these new colored contacts, just as he had once told her to go ahead and get another cat—she smiled and shook her head, and Lorna said, You don’t wear glasses, and Tessa said, I’d rather long for the eyes than have the contacts, it isn’t that Dudley misses the point, he gets the point but he thinks why say so, though he’s probably right that the rock salt must have come from Saxony, not where we were.

  Tessa’s cigarette burn occurred in 1970, just a year before Dagger and I began shooting. She would hold her cigarette for a minute or two as if she’d forgotten it, then take a deep stabbing drag and as if in the same motion sweep her cigarette away and tap it—but this time she tapped off a sizable coal, but more interesting than what it did to the carpet was her interest in what it did, the calm, the objectivity which in me and in Lorna and in three others in the room seemed to come from Tessa’s—we sat and watched the spot smoke and settle out into a smudge of burnt nap and as if it were a nostalgic winter blaze or a hypnotic peephole we looked and looked until Lorna laughed and said, Tessa you bloody cow!

  Beside me on the newly resprung couch as I troubled to show Tessa’s place in the Marvelous Country House, Lorna seemed now incapable of such a frank outburst.

  Why did you read the diary?

  I thought it was about time.

  I listened for Jenny who was still upstairs. After Reid had seen me across the street in Knightsbridge he might have told Jenny (no doubt also saying Don’t look)—and now she was not sure what to do next. But I was sure I had to settle with Lorna before going on. Celibacy was one thing in Manhattan, another in Knightsbridge.

  Lorna shook her head but held my hand. She wondered what the three moments I’d put in had to do with the film, and she said even if Will hadn’t surprised her in the dark house and she’d read through the second and third of these “moments,” she still would not have understood.

  In the first of these moments, I come home to find not Lorna alone at stove or piano or with Jenny or Will, but at the kitchen table with Tessa, who taps ash onto a blue willow-pattern plate in the center of which is an uncut red-waxed Edam cheese. Someone has just said something; I think Lorna. Smiling silence ensues because of me. It might be just Her Beloved Man Arrives, but I don’t take it quite that way. Lorna pours me a drink from what’s left of the bottle. Dagger got me the case. Lorna doesn’t ask how things went in Liverpool. Tessa now continues, and I’m stupidly thinking, Tessa is English, what the fuck am I doing here—dumb things to think when you are dealing with a mind and body as tenuously demanding as Tessa’s. Yet she was German. And her mother had been Rumanian, and the shape of her eyes was east of Rumania.

  So to make a long story stop (she says), my uncle woke up blind—woke up being blinded—and never saw the dawn of that day, and he was, as I’ve already told you, unaccustomed to opening his eyes before ten in the morning. But to the day of his death he was as filled by the dreams he had just before waking as if the new house they entered several years later had been really the house he’d dreamt of that night—which was only one of his dreams asleep in that bed before the accident—as influenced as if he’d been seeing that future home and thinking about it just as he was (say) killed—and dying seemed never to end but to be an endless continuation of that. So there. That’s immortality: just concentrate hard enough when you’re dying but you have to know you’re dying. Uncle Karl still dreamed, of course. But the dreams that night were to him like the last things he saw.

  Tessa rested. It was precise and seductive. But I did not ask for what I had missed of the story. How, for instance, had her uncle been blinded? Which uncle was this one? Most of her uncles were cousins or old refugee friends of her father. Had a burglar groped her uncle’s eyeballs?

  Dudley (she said) had said that it merely showed how we must keep our eyes open as it might be our last look. But, picking up her intonation though I still hardly knew Dudley, I asked did she mean Dudley had no real right to this truth he spoke. And Tessa at once said, Anyone has a right to it, don’t you think? I said enforcement was one thing, right another, and no I didn’t think just anyone had a right to it, her story was a good one, I said, I’d once dreamt I was making love to Lorna and woke up and I was—but she was only just beginning to wake up.

  Tessa said, Maybe you’re the one that needs the shrink.

  Tessa’s uncle I said must have been able to find his way around that house he later bought even better than his wife or whoever he was living with, even though he was blind and they weren’t.

  Tessa at once said, Ah but you’ve hardly a right to that yourself, having not heard the whole story; and she put her cigarettes in her bag, put a hand on my wife’s wrist, and said, as if in thanks: Lorna.

  But I had already risen. I said I was tired and hungry and was going up to wash my hands. Tessa murmured, Americans are so explicit, as if she didn’t know me pretty well. Jenny called me overhead as I put a foot on the stairs, and Lorna called that there was shepherd’s pie in the fridge, and Tessa said—just audibly—You know your place, darling, and Lorna said, I do not.

  There had been a nasty pale brown cigarette mark on the cheese plate. I thought, Tessa is a European, she would not normally think of eating cheese with an apéritif, much less Dutch cheese.

  The second “moment” described in my film diary, because it seemed to me to bring Tessa into the Marvelous Country House, was in Tessa’s flat. In her bedroom. And it should have been no more difficult for Lorna seven years later sitting on our resprung couch holding hands to understand why I’d associated that moment with my film, than it was for me to guess why Jenny still did not come down from her bedroom even though she must be curious why I’d come back from New York like this.

  The second “moment” is 1964. Tessa packs her thir
d or fourth suitcase, stops to add to a list for the Belgian couple who are going to be living there with her pictures and furniture for the next year while she and Dudley and Jane are in New York. She is into her packing, but in her references to Dudley she makes me feel she is more waiting for him (for he and Jane are not here) than packing for America: Lorna on the bed curled around a corner of the suitcase Tessa is filling: I upright in a straight chair holding a peculiar grayish stone that was on the night table on a Michelin Guide to New York City—and Tessa asked me to feel it and see if I liked it, and when I grinned stupidly at her she said, Go and take it.

  I in my manner express maybe a trifle too much sympathy for Tessa, who does not want to leave London and says there must be something wrong to be going to New York where she knows no one and leaving here in London a New Yorker who is her best friend.

  It was 1964, because that autumn I saw them when I passed through New York and I had a ride with a cabbie who said what if Goldwater did escalate, better be blown sky high than find the Chinese sailing their junks under the Golden Gate one morning. Tessa brought me a beautiful aquamarine drink in an overblown glass constructed like a tulip or rose blown with overlapped petals, and murmured flatly, I suppose we’ll see you. Lorna lay on her side, elbow on the bed, palm under jaw; she said she would hate to be leaving her house to strangers, Tessa said she wouldn’t have anyone but strangers, but said it in a way that made me feel that of all people I was the one making her live out of England—as if some oceanic conspiracy of refractions so multiplex as to render the person who was fascinated by them in fact passive had got hold of her who was not fascinated by them, and it was my fault, I had let it happen. We heard the front door of their spacious flat unlock and open, and Tessa’s little girl call Mummy, and heard Dudley her father say something to her; and Tessa on some blinding impulse came at me as if falling on me from far away and at a long low angle—and plucked the gray stone from my hand that was loosely pleasurably holding it, flew it into Lorna’s hand, said it was a very special present, and then put her hand on Lorna’s hair and said, I mean if you were living here I’d hate to think of you here in this flat without me—you see that’s not something you would feel about a stranger.

  But now in 1971 on a resprung couch and holding a hand and not waiting for miracles because I was always beyond that, I found a thing I hadn’t written down which might seem immaterial since Lorna in Jenny’s closet last night hadn’t read beyond the first “moment,” and it was that at that other moment in August of ’64 less than twenty-four hours before they boarded a Holland-America ship at Southampton, the intimacy Tessa’s flat had for Tessa seemed located in Lorna, her lap curved about an angle of the suitcase. Dudley entered the bedroom with his fingers up in a V, and Tessa said, Of course Dudley wants a house in the country when we come back to England, and Lorna said, teasing, If you come back.

  I recall we talked about the three bodies unearthed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Dudley predicted there would be indictments but no convictions; he had been talking to an American at the British Museum.

  Dudley said that in New York Tessa must have a cat again, and Tessa said he wouldn’t be able to breathe and she didn’t want to go through the same old disappointment.

  What could a camera show; what for that matter could Jenny see if Lorna and I right now in the fall of ’71 were exposed together holding hands on a resprung couch in Highgate? What could a camera know of that stone Tessa gave Lorna that was in fact a rather special piece of spotted dolerite from Wales?

  Lorna took her hand away and patted my leg. She laughed: You didn’t seriously think Tessa and I had something going? But why would anyone want to break into this house to steal one of those moments?

  I said I was going to find out. I said I was glad we had been able to sit quietly like this; I said she mustn’t be afraid. She said heaven knew our life had always been pretty quiet. I asked if the young second tenor had been helpful, and she said Very.

  She asked about the third “moment.” I asked where Jenny was. Lorna seemed relieved. Then the doorbell rang.

  She can’t get in now the lock’s changed.

  I thought Jenny was upstairs, I said, which seemed to wish Jenny there, for a moment later when Lorna let her in, there she went, and on the run; I’d risen as Lorna went into the hall, and through the doorway, as if only by watching Lorna vanish would I see it, I saw on the hall wall the old enlargement of my children that I hadn’t looked at since that mellow morning at eleven just after the County Council man left and just before I followed Lorna up to bed.

  Now Lorna had said, Daddy’s here.

  But Jenny must be checking her closet or going to the lavatory or avoiding me, for she hadn’t stopped.

  Lorna was in the doorway again, saying quietly, Jenny stayed with the actor this weekend, she phoned last night, she was upset about the break-in but she didn’t come home.

  Did you mention her carbon in the cupboard?

  Strange I didn’t. Neither did she.

  Lorna seemed to lose me again; she leaned her head on the door post and stared at me as if I were some bloke who’d just presented a staggering estimate on a domestic repair whose importance suddenly escaped her. She looked at my knees. She said I didn’t think the burglar was after my recollections of Tessa, did I?—and thereupon giggled. It’s been quite a life, she said, hasn’t it. Friends dropping in. Dagger dropping in when you were out, poking around our magazines, borrowing a couple. It’s been a good life here.

  But Jenny came downstairs.

  She asked if the phone man had come and Lorna said no. Jenny pushed past Lorna and reached for me. She was slighter than Claire in the high short blue dress, her hair was in my eyes, she wore no scent, her scale felt smaller than Claire’s. I could trust Jenny; but to do exactly what? Her emergence from Aut’s Knightsbridge gallery had passed parts of my body into sheer sheathing of unknown mass, I felt things I could see yet with a touch and sight unknown to each other.

  Her excitement seemed love. And love was in her arms. But she let that excitement too naturally accept my homecoming. After all, my homecoming was abortive, or not a homecoming at all, and here she acted as if I’d gone through with my trip and been away a long time.

  Yet I could not reason myself into believing that Jenny was in with those who seemed to be trying to liquidate the film Dagger and I had shot.

  Maybe there were bad miracles too.

  If Dagger was right when he kidded Jenny that time at lunch—though maybe without a right to be right—maybe loyalty was just a code waiting for a message. Suppose Jenny had told someone about the film diary in the desk drawer.

  London you depend on. Lorna and I sometimes went to the Camden Town area to a Cypriot family restaurant with a telly and had a drink first in an Irish pub full of men who looked either out of work or temporary. We never felt known there. The young bartender was sometimes drunk at seven, which is fairly strange for London. Three young workingmen in brown suits and no ties huddled at the table, another approached and nodded and disappeared downstairs to the men’s loo. Two of the huddlers followed. After a time a new one came up from the loo and nodded curtly to the one at the table who joined him, and the two disappeared downstairs. Lorna and I holding our rich dark halfs of draft Guinness decided they were I.R.A. We amused ourselves. We wondered why the I.R.A. didn’t blow up an Underground station—maybe they just didn’t want to—we amused each other softly—two men came up out of the loo, talked together seriously for a moment, then one returned downstairs—we almost believed our speculation that they were I.R.A. The leather bench cushions seemed luxurious, the Irish bartender tipped over a shot glass and a big black man at the bar stood up to avoid being dripped on, we didn’t think he was a regular. Our Cypriot restaurant was less than thirty seconds away. We might take American visitors there but not here. The second hand of the big clock jumped. One of the Irishmen came up out of the loo, his hair standing up all over his head, and without looking at
anything but the door he walked out.

  What did you bring me back, said Jenny, and released me.

  Something happened to my face as I recalled forgetting Lorna’s Joni Mitchell Blue in my hotel room, and then Jenny, seeing whatever it was in my face—fatigue, gloom, madness—said, No no I’m kidding, and she seemed about to cry as I heard right on top of her words Lorna saying, My God the poor man’s had things to do.

  Which had a warmth that made me grin. I said to my daughter, I brought you a memory but it’s not exactly a present.

  Is it your memory or mine?

  Mine, maybe yours. It was on our softball film, but it’s not in the diary.

  What is it?

  It’s a red-haired woman. She was at the softball game we filmed. She was sitting nearby. She got up and walked away. Later your friend the actor walked away in her direction. Then I lost them both behind a tree.

  That’s possible, said Jenny.

  Have you seen a red-haired woman? I asked.

  No, of course not.

  Lorna was in the kitchen, I heard her.

  Your diary is safe, said Jenny.

  There’s some more of it in my head, I said.

  I can’t help you there.

  You could.

  Jenny had the same patient look I’ve seen, and it is mainly patience with herself and it meant she was containing herself. Now if she’d come out of the gallery just before the red-haired woman, it stood to reason she had encountered this red-haired woman. But I might lose what Jenny could tell me if I told her now that I’d seen the red-haired woman walking intimately with Reid the actor.