And is for my Druid more mysterious than at this stage of my film inquiry it could quite have been for me. Yet for the sailor seeking some calculated haven beyond guesswork, Greenland could grow and grow till it covered the pole—what mattered was that you could draw a line from Cape Farewell straight to Norfolk and allowing for drift and other measurable accidents actually get there.
But weighing my head in the glass of the wrong (the uptown) bus, and touched by some words above in an ad that ran the length of the bus, I asked a question more appropriate to London than New York, and it was this: What will you have in your hand if you do get to the bottom of your film mystery?
I run into people in midtown Manhattan. Old acquaintances. People in a hurry, sort of like me, people I now began to list as I walked south thinking I could better bear the full threat of that London question if I met a casual handshake creased with the offspring of the years—and these you understand are many of them in my address book—people, not years, but years too in various colors of ink—and I phone them on some of my trips; but now what I wished was for one of these persons to happen without my dialing a number—as if there were nothing odd about my trip or about its enclosing me as so many of those things are enclosed that we know but put separate in their slots or soft portable places. But I did not run into such friends from school, from college, from Brooklyn Heights, from London, from the systems of business and entertainment. And I stayed west of Claire’s pastel flat and east of Gilda’s florist, I was inevitably east of Outer Film, then south, and inevitably north and then at last west of the man in glasses and Jerry who claimed to pay the rent; and I was, in my course, several directions from Brooklyn Heights, where at this time of year my parents may or may not have been—the directions to begin with all relative (as my father might say about many matters) since Manhattan is thought of as a north and south grid only by convention, and in fact moving south in Manhattan (or one should say most of Manhattan) is moving south-southwest, take it from there.
A newsstand headline said PROBE—but the rest as I swung by was half blocked by an oblong iron weight marked LIFE. The names and hastening faces in the thick city had begun to come at me one after the other clearing me like a fence. I might be early to get into Graf’s house. The day had turned warm. I passed south to Twenty-third and thus unintentionally missed one of my few chances for a diagonal through Madison Park, the south side of which I now traversed so I saw the statue with Lincoln’s body and Seward’s head. A bum was leaning forward gripping the railing as if being searched, and as I passed, thinking he was vomiting, I saw he was peeing into the scraggly grass inside the railing, no hands, and feeling my eyes he lifted his tan face and opened his mouth to say the words asking me for something but couldn’t bring it off in that position and looked back down. Two blocks north on the park’s west (or Fifth Avenue) side the Statue of Liberty’s right forearm, hand, and torch once stood displayed as if the rest of her had been buried by time. For several years money was raised for the pedestal and then in 1884 the arm returned to Paris.
I’d passed the Seward-Lincoln story on to Will when he was studying the assassination, but now as I walked down lower Fifth Avenue thinking I’d just take a turn into Tenth Street to look at where one of the Allott aunts had found Tessa and Dudley a flat in ’64, that bony bronze touched me. First executed as Lincoln for some middle American city that in the end would not pay for it, then capitally altered when New York wanted a Seward, the statue now seemed more curious than the bare fact featured in one of Will’s pages for his history teacher. It followed me down Fifth and went into Tenth and I was finding like my Druid currents from the quill in Lincoln’s right hand up to his Secretary of State’s fine frowning brow or from the long right leg (crossed over the left knee) through Lincoln’s lap up to Seward’s cool shaven chin, but wondered too if I had Sub’s brain dommage and was sinking forward after too many trips here from London into some incontinent tourism.
A penny dropped again, but one out of many, and though its slot took it with a snug cluck which is one of my minor pleasures in machines, its meaning was more potent than clear and all I had in my hand was Tessa’s hand, yes my wife’s best friend, and we were strolling across Union Square past black and white junkies doing their skits and old Jews who might have just come from the socialist book shop. Yes, autumn ’64, seven years almost to the day—and she was saying, Well you can see I’m at least trying to become a tourist, but saying it not so disconsolately as you’d expect after a bare two months settled sleepless in New York.
And curiously that was what the Druid had said to me now a fortnight ago in 1971 before I set out for America again to make inquiries about the film: But you try to become a tourist.
I was telling Tessa about the first Negro volunteers in 1864 presenting their colors in Union Square; but she squeezed my hand, stopped me, and looked up into my face, her pale brown eyes deceptive and lucid, and said with a flick of her hand, New York squares aren’t in fact square, I mean some of them are rounded.
She refilled a prescription on Sixth Avenue. She complained of the price but she couldn’t sleep. She liked the mail chute on each floor of their apartment building on Tenth Street and she liked the shower. Dudley was beginning a second week practically living at the Museum of the American Indian way uptown examining an eight-foot drawing of Maya ruins by Catherwood. Tessa complained about the taste of the water. She had a London A to Z on the desk. Her daughter was going from school to a friend’s house. Tenth Street wasn’t as noisy as Tessa said.
Not even seven years later, now in ’71. But the traffic was gathering when I turned south in Sixth. When I reached Graf’s house south of the Village I was drained.
But what happened now seemed even better than an informant telling the whole story. I stood at Monty Graf’s desk and beside me was Claire scenting the bright room with something liberatingly organic like the milked essences of safflower pistils, and in the kitchen Monty was fixing gin and tonic and I suspected getting ready perhaps in concert with Claire to make me an offer that would tell me even more than it promised me for my cooperation—and as Claire and I stared at Jenny’s typing and were amused, I found in one of Claire’s bare feet a new map that took me up to the Highgate room of Will my American son and his mother’s dark hair and what he was kneeling on—and I said in answer to Claire’s inquiry, No, I think Jenny will go north before she comes here if she comes here at all.
Black eyebrows, black alligator slippers (a gift from Claire), Monty came now in white crepe shirt and white bell-bottoms with a tray of glasses.
North? murmured Claire.
Monty passed glasses laced with bubbles. He raised his glass and said, To film.
Claire said to Monty, To make a long story short he spent part of one night with her and now she’s calling him transatlantic.
Monty said, So father and son do talk after all. I can guess why Jerry likes to think his friend was impotent with that girl.
I wasn’t going to tell Claire what I had found in her beautiful foot, which was what I had found all over again on my son’s floor. But so that it may be taken for granted in what follows I will make it clear: the map of Jenny’s that Will borrowed, and in which as if nearsightedly I’d seen merely Mr. Ogg’s gradients and my pride in Will’s grades, was mainly of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides; and while Jenny after all was not likely to go trekking seven hundred miles up there herself, she was involved with Reid and Reid with the red-haired woman and the red-haired woman through the gallery was connected with the Indian and perhaps with Aut and through the Softball Game with the Indian and with us. Now whatever the meaning of the black-haired chap’s whisper in the Unplaced Room that I had so attentively depictured before we began shooting, his friend the deserter whom he treated with increasing condescension which the camera must dramatically have caught, had explicitly lived in that northernmost part of the Hebrides that Jenny’s ordnance survey map covered (or was it Reid’s? Not mine because it
was too well used and I was sure I’d never bought one of Lewis).
It was necessary now to talk. We had had our sips, and now I had given thanks for hospitality and said how different this room looked with the northwest light let in past the opened blinds, and Monty had said I must be eager to get back to London and Claire could live there and he and she had talked about it.
Claire said Dagger had had the right idea. I asked if she’d give up her job with Aut or work for him abroad. She smiled at Monty, who was a very good twenty years older, and he said to me gently looking back at her that Outer Film didn’t do all that much in Europe.
I said, But Phil Aut.
Monty said Claire knew more than he about Phil Aut, but what he knew was simple: Phil Aut was his brother-in-law, he was doing OK but was having to support his operation increasingly with porn imports and educational films and Claire thought he had a new silent partner; Phil was younger than he looked, lived in Connecticut, had no contact with Monty, and had a cousin attached to the twelfth precinct.
Claire was looking like Jenny again, in a blue blouse and pale green jeans, her light hair parted in the middle and flowing down beside her eyes. Her feet were tucked under her and against the white couch she was more vivid than she had been last week, an autumn sacrifice plucked from the fingers of a god by Monty Graf, who knew how old he was now and how old he’d be in ten years.
He was talking oh so calmly, very quietly; King Street was as quiet as Highgate, a car ran by, Claire bent her head looking at nothing, Monty was explaining that she didn’t know as much as I thought but did know more than he did, and that now on the basis of what she knew, she reckoned the time had come to change.
On what she knows about what? I asked.
I want to do something creative, said Claire.
Right, said Monty, also she thinks it’s time for a change.
I asked if Aut was getting to be too much, and Claire had a sip and Monty opened his mouth but Claire said, Lately we haven’t talked much.
Monty came to the point, though if it was the true point my name is Graf, his Cartwright. Well, what I’d said about the aim of the film that I’d made with Dagger had stayed deeply imbedded in his mind, he said, brows scoring key words which may have been just sounds.
And had this, I asked, aroused our Claire’s creative instincts?
She may not have liked the sound of my words; her only movement was to purse her lips.
Monty said he’d loved the ideas I’d outlined—and I heard something genuine in what he thought he was saying—and, he said, if I could give him a clearer picture, then he and Claire might be prepared to make me a proposal.
I said to tell me the proposal, I’d give him a picture to suit it.
But I felt I had to let go of something. I was tired.
Monty smiled and said all he could say was it had to do with beginning with the rush Dagger and I still had and the sound, and the 8-millimeter cartridge I’d mentioned we’d shot between air base and Stonehenge—was it destroyed? (no reply from me)—and then to build on the original purposes as uncompromisingly as Dagger and I had tried to the first time through.
Claire said, Did we ever pay your gas to Corsica?
I didn’t like her tone. She was still working for Aut.
I said to Monty as far as I could tell we’d stuck to our guns whatever had gone on at this end, and I thought Dagger would agree. When Monty pressed me, I went beyond what Dagger would have been able to accept. I said yes: power poached on or tuned in on when it lacked direction but had momentum. The religious group circling the fire but not united on what they all surely believed and the agitation and energy which the camera called forth was also part of this power poached on. Likewise the Hawaiian with the steady guitar seen as if by a series of travelers who were moving down the corridor toward a ticket booth out of sight, toward stairs, the train platform—the camera passing again and again at different speeds to suggest different persons but going over the same stretch of corridor, bobbing, leaning toward the swelling cheekbones of the large-eyed boy and his girl from Hempstead, Long Island, in her wool sergeant’s jacket over a plaid shirt with the tails out over her bluejeans rocking in the London chill clapping hands, swinging her long tangled wheat-colored hair—their energy spent on those passers-by but protected by Dagger’s saving Beaulieu 16-millimeter camera. To see Claire’s reaction I mentioned the color snap briefly seen in the Suitcase Slowly Packed, a flickering glimpse of a person then instantly packed between a black sweater and something else—well, the power angle was just part. But through all the scenes mingling England and America and deliberately unplacing the scenes, there was a cool theme of America itself—
Monty said Yes, yes. And the 8 between air base and Stonehenge?
—the softball, the space shot ignored on the rainy terrace, a NATO First-Strike Base in the English countryside. But Dagger, I said, didn’t know that all or exactly this was coming into his camera, and it doesn’t matter that he didn’t know.
Claire had risen suddenly. She wanted a cigarette but she had risen because of me: And likewise, she said, there are things in the film that he knew and you don’t. Right?
No doubt, said Monty, reaching her a cigarette like a wand and she fell back into the sofa and murmured, No doubt; indeed no doubt.
A new weightlessness was upon me, the circle of Clahe’s light body filming the strong square of mine, erasing without a trace so that attachments to our film or even Outer Film, wife or friend, pearl scar or narrow Jewish shoulders, went like a radar weather-scope, and came again and went. My heart beat hard and a sweat cooling the roots of my moustache brought my empty glass to my mouth and then Monty’s hand to my glass.
Claire said, But is Stonehenge so American?
Somewhere a cartridge grew and melted into its system, and though I did not know where, I was glad. It might have been a unit of protected memory. It might. It might have been Connecticut, Jenny’s Reid’s Connecticut, which on the map seems so much smaller than its space when you hear of all the prosperous people who live there on their own land, though my gravity just now was shaky and my concern for Jenny raised Connecticut to some north-bound Mercatorized acre as great as Greenland; and my words to Claire and hers to me and my thirty-odd-block walk with too few diagonals weakened me, especially as it was toward some new strength I may not have had the equipment for and another longer way lay behind me that I could not quite recall and either that way itself or my unlikely hardship recalling it weakened me too, but in the direction of this new strength like a salmon finding that unlikely electric path upstream generated by the downstream rapid.
I said that long before the first night we seriously talked about doing a film, Dagger had wanted Stonehenge and had said if we couldn’t buy it and ship it to Berkeley we could at least shoot it. But he was full of passing tricks and he forgot about Stonehenge. One July 4th he had got a box of fireworks through an air force friend and had set them off in Hyde Park to the delight of Will and some other children and played as background a cassette of “My Country ’Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty,” which my son of course called “God Save the Queen” just as he called cherry bombs thunderclaps. I had first opposed including Stonehenge. I pictured a fed-up American couple having a public argument at the altar stone, I pictured a midwestern small businessman with rimless glasses (and gray suedette loafers and four children in bright shorts and a pretty wife) saying, Excuse me, sir, to a guard he was about to ask the age of the stones—it was the old tourist thing, and both too well known and too immeasurably dubious, what did it mean? And this was even before television commercials were showing Sunset through a Stone Age Doorway, Dawn at the Henge, the Beginning of Time Told Round an Ancient Clock, the Holy Slice of Druid Sacrifice, the Mystery of Life. A void.
But then I’d gone there on my own for the first time, with Jenny, with our cameras, staying the night in Salisbury across the road from the Cathedral Close, driving over to Stonehenge in the morning but not ea
rly enough to climb the barbed wire unobserved. I found it then. By myself. Without any but the unavoidable advance word you get over the years about sun worship and remains and calendars and, of late, computers. I let Jenny know more than I. Lorna had complained that I’d been unable to persuade Will to come.
What I found was a ground so old and powerful I could not be lessened by others’ relation to it. In the midst of the partly ruined circle I knelt to draw my hand over a fifteen- or sixteen-foot-long gray-brown stone that must surely once have been standing; it was neither rough nor smooth, and there were glints of something else in it, and I let myself feel at peace touching it where there were no initials to be seen, a fresh touch upon a thing thus real, a feeling like one of those days in the fifties when I sensed that without being in any way exiled Lorna and I were going to stay in England. And when Jenny reappeared stepping inside a circle, her slender back to me, to take a picture outward through one of the linteled arches, and I heard but ignored the imprint upon the earth of steps behind me, I gently clawed this gray-brown rock and felt that Stonehenge had been planted here in my planet turning about the sun so as to use the constant-bearing energy of the earth-turn as if Stonehenge were a mind. And as the light footprint behind me coughed, my daughter wheeled to me radiant and excited and slightly vague of eye and said, It’s a message! and I fancied the earth fading like your green-edged blue fingerprints on a dark sheet of encapsulated liquid crystals when you put it on a cool window—fading to leave, all by itself in space, Stonehenge and its revolutions as together as an orbiting station. But the cough cleared into a voice, a man in a plastic mac who wanted to tell me that they called this stone here that I was touching the Altar Stone, though without any reason in the world, it had probably been standing back there—he pointed to a huge trilothon arch near us on the far side from Jenny—and there were two horseshoes of stones where we were in the middle of the circle and the circle was really two circles though you couldn’t easily tell unless you knew, the Sarsen Circle outside the Bluestone Circle, and the diameter across the Sarsen was ninety-seven feet, and most of the lintels of the Sarsen Circle were gone and only sixteen of the original thirty standing stones in the Sarsen were here now but they were ten feet apart if you measured from the centers and each was thirteen feet six inches high. The man gave us many more measurements, a high narrow face and full lips and a narrow red-veined nose, and before we got away he had altered my consciousness of what was here, and Jenny had giggled because as she later said I was nodding so much and all of that could be found in the guidebook and she wondered if he expected to be paid because of my American accent.
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