Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  We needed more film. Dagger unscrewed the camera and tried to put it in my hands, but I said I’d go for the spools in the hall and Dagger indecisively said maybe we should reload out there, there was less light.

  Gene’s wife had disappeared. I heard her talking to Len upstairs, it didn’t sound good, her even sound sort of combing through his rising falling intensity. I thought, We’ve been unlucky, Dagger muffed it.

  I wanted people we could know, but this complaint found no place in the diary pages I gave Jenny to type.

  Eighteenth-century choral music came on upstairs.

  Elizabeth was engaged in a discussion of ends justifying means. John knew one of her dons. John was himself a technological consultant. He spent half the year in America and owned a house near Portland, Maine.

  Chad was on camera saying he had more to offer us as a ballplayer. The six scars, the paler palms opening and closing, the modest American demeanor cloaking muscle, and behind him someone’s pink ancestor in the wall: a series full of energy, though whose energy? And had one of the portrait eyes now blinked back its two-hundred-year-old pigment in favor of the human pupil of someone on the other side, the ghost of some grandmother somnambulist: and for us—energy of others—look out!—a chance of some experimental revelation on film which the commercial sector would get hold of and shrink to a neat train of erring or psychotic behaviors—and where was Sherman! Maybe just sitting, taking a bath, reading, all of these, or solemnly removing every item in his pack, his other jeans (not mentioned), his Minox (mentioned by Dagger), a photograph? (not mentioned), not the portable butane-cartridge mini-stove because he had given that away to a poor Scots couple after a bed and some porridge and not much sleep listening to them most of the night fight out their poverty and unemployment at the kitchen table rather than in bed.

  The English boyfriend of Elizabeth had moved to the hall doorway and was talking to Gene’s wife about the effect of this room’s shape; by rounding the corners you enlarged the space.

  Herma and Chad were discussing radical diets friends had gone on, and Chad wrapped one tube of buckwheat spaghetti around the tines of his fork and leaned over and put it in her mouth.

  The choral music stopped in the middle of a big note upstairs.

  John seemed redder and fatter, I looked forward to seeing him on Anscochrome. He rose in the middle of Elizabeth’s latest sentence saying thank God he wasn’t an undergraduate any more, looked at me, weighed my worth, and said, What were you after in Corsica? You went to Filitosa of course, I once met the lady who discovered the significance of the menhirs there, she had a lot to say about a face sculpted by superimposed V’s; you know all about that I suppose.

  I said going to Corsica had been Dagger’s idea and the only pure plunge of the whole plan, and Dagger had got expenses from a New York contact, and there was an ecology conference there with Americans, and Dagger’s wife Alba was French, and there are drugs up in Bastia and there was a little Franco-Italian contretemps we got onto film which takes you back to the wartime occupation and a little rumble involving French and American students which was too complicated to tell just with film, but nothing exactly political.

  But I didn’t ask about that, said John, I didn’t say anything about that.

  No one was talking and we heard steps coming down.

  John called out, Going somewhere, Len?

  I said I didn’t care if he’d asked or not, and I had almost a thing to say inspired by his dense dark hair almost as dark as Chad’s that made John’s mottled puss and the stiff one-piece movement of his corpulent torso seem prematurely old by contrast, but the thing just missed the circuit of articulation and he was saying You can go to hell, why would anyone pay your expenses to go make a film in Corsica, and spare me your—or were you in the war? Why I could tell you about real things do you hear, real forces and Corsica too while you’re at it.

  Christ, John, said Gene’s wife, but Len was in the doorway beside her raising a long-barreled pistol at John and saying OK what about a game of darts John, but Dagger’s quick pan to Len bumped into my shoulder as I moved slightly and Len fired twice into the dart board. Chad, John, Herma, Elizabeth, and the English boy dropped to the floor, I smelled the after-sound. Gene’s wife said, Christ, Len, who replied, Come on I want to talk to you.

  And that was pretty well that.

  I guess you could say that in professional parlance we got a few reaction shots.

  I smelled the shots.

  I wanted to be invisible and stay here and see what the relations really were, though film might have failed to do them justice. And what did Gene’s wife behave like with Gene?

  An American proverb says, Modest dogs miss much meat.

  The film, if only what was missing in it, was bringing on the very feelings that lay behind it.

  But we weren’t finished, though Gene’s wife preferred that we not use the living room.

  John and Len disappeared. Gene’s wife made buckwheat spaghetti with soy sauce and insisted we eat.

  Now that we were going, Gene’s wife touched Dagger and kissed him.

  The rain was trying to stop.

  Dagger got a ten-second wide-angle hand-held pan of house, patio, and grounds.

  We had more film, and we turned in at the vicar’s. He was a tall, thin, white-haired widower officially retired but serving as supply priest. His reversed collar gave his lean, loose old neck room and his gray serge hung on him gracefully. He gave us a tour of his mantelpiece, all the postcards and knickknacks ending with Marilyn, who had died while he was in America. He had brought this picture. He had given three sermons, one a year, on Marilyn Monroe, and they had been a great success because out here in the country we’d be surprised, he said, but people thought about America. The title of the last had been Marilyn Monroe and the Knights in Shining Armor.

  He showed us his set of Mark Twain and asked if we’d read “The Stolen White Elephant”—we had not.

  Dagger filmed him but we didn’t have sound, but I’d never have been able to forget the love in his Nordic blue eyes above the thin unhurried mouth that had spoken its brief Communion sermon this morning, even if when we said goodbye out in the drive in the Scotch mist he hadn’t told us—slipping the black-and-white postcard of Marilyn into his pocket—that he had a married daughter in Cincinnati and one here in a hospital.

  Elizabeth on the way back to London was of the opinion that Len was envious of John and having it off with Gene’s wife. And who was Gene?

  Dagger said I had almost gotten something interesting out of the scene when I baited John.

  I said I hadn’t baited him, John was just a bumptious bright Englishman rolled into one big mouth connected to a larger bowel.

  Someone made a ts-ts sound—English chiding—restrained condescension.

  Elizabeth wanted to know how long I’d been over, I said long enough, Herma asked where Sherman was, Dagger said Back loading his pistol.

  It was his? said Herma’s boyfriend.

  How does one know? said Elizabeth.

  I wondered what was on our film. A minor room mainly. A space containing persons English and American, possibly containing the outer spaces of field and farm and church and children in their glimmering slickers.

  Why would Outer Film pay us to go to Corsica? It had been an even longer ride back from Ajaccio. Now two weeks later I saw the Corsican venture had had an effect on Dagger and me. We were both venturing a bit further into the somewhat chance material.

  Or that had always been my idea.

  But Dagger had now returned to Yucatan, as if what had passed through the Beaulieu lenses onto film feeding across the camera’s gate had gotten him from the dwarf’s elevation into power, to now the present—or as if the Marvelous Country House hadn’t happened.

  Lorna started using the word marvelous a lot in 1958. The time of the first quickening of the Tessa relation. And terribly in that English or Anglo-Wasp sense of very. These words from Lorna’s mouth,
whether describing what Dudley looked like when she met him the Saturday they all (except me) went to South Pacific at the Dominion Cinema, or reporting Tessa’s facetious respect for Dudley’s historical researches, grew round them a conundrum importance that placed me between two fates: to be right in the wrong spirit, and to be wrong in the right spirit. I am confounding what already was a swollen cartridge but now has still not burst but billows with soft insistence into the creases of many times. My father oddly then in ’58 did not say Well as for me I’d sooner see the rest of America first, though he did imply Well what exactly are you doing there. My mother went further and wanted to know what she could tell two of her dear friends it was I was doing abroad. Staring through her tourist lens foreseeing transparencies (called slides in the States), she found an alien element in the invisibly circled square of lens-view and did not wish to pivot to something else, for what she wanted was right here: in background a band-shell and two hundred empty folding chairs, in foreground upright masses of gross red carnations and rain-fed green (the shrubbery that evoked country estate, the sward that threw up or unfolded in front of you English cathedrals, Lincoln, Wells, Salisbury—within smell of beer mugs and taste of Worcester in the tomato juice)—but there was son Cartwright with a new beard in ’58 and ’59 and his hands in his pockets pursing skeptical lips not setting the scene, not moving out of the way—I speak figuratively, in fact I have on occasion stepped to one side so a lady of some nationality in flat walking shoes could “get” what lay behind me. No, my father said, hell it makes sense for you. It’s a good life. And he told business associates about that good life of mine and my family’s, though my catch-as-catch-can methods of finding a living came out in his words as some culturally filtered mode of capital diversification.

  Lorna spoke about a country house. First back in New England. Then later nearer to home, as we increasingly thought of it.

  We had six hundred feet, mostly of that dining room. Over twenty minutes. Pretty extravagant I thought then and that night when I got started writing. But the film shrank and my diary account (which I had to stop working on when Lorna came in and I noticed I had a headache) began to seem a rightful decompression.

  The dwarf had told Dagger that after he’d killed the gobernador his mother died. But at another village there is an immeasurable well leading to a cave that goes miles and miles to another town, and in this cave by an underground stream an old woman with a snake at her feet sells small portions of water in return not for legal tender but for a tender criatura to feed the snake. And that old woman is the dwarf’s mother.

  Dagger slapped me on the right arm and I tried to be companionable and said I bet he’d made half of this up.

  A little editing, said Herma’s boy.

  One of the boys asked if Herma had read Vonnegut.

  I said my daughter had read him for days at a go.

  The dwarf when Dagger talked to him was pretty well off, but political changes had come and he was no longer top dog, but the locals were afraid of him and he is afraid to go down that well to see his mother because he is after all not much bigger than a criatura.

  When Dagger dropped me off in Highgate the summer light was still with us.

  Out of the back seat Elizabeth said, If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go live in America?

  I reached back and touched her leg and said I’d phone her, we were shooting Stonehenge in two weeks. As I straightened up outside the VW, Lorna and Will pulled up in the Fiat and Dagger waved frantically.

  Parting, I still had one big thing to myself. Dagger hadn’t mentioned it and I didn’t think he’d believe me. And the morning in Ajaccio when the three people passed the wall of the fort he hadn’t had the 12–120 zoom we borrowed, and then the three didn’t like being filmed and hurried away. If Dagger hadn’t seen it himself, he wouldn’t now believe me—that the skinny bald man in that threesome in Corsica had been Len—a face which (along with Tessa’s “moments”) I recorded early in the original diary of that day we shot the Marvelous Country House, but which now in this swollen uncartridge-like and maybe no longer so replaceable memory of day and diary I put practically last.

  I lay at length in our high-sided tub. Lorna knelt on the mat resting her arms along the edge.

  I watched my risen hair gather bubbles and thought how Will had likened Vietnam on the map to a somewhat misshapen seahorse and I had said it was even better if you threw in Laos and Cambodia. My fingers stirred under the water.

  I told Lorna that in Hindu thought Māyā has opposing qualities. It is a force of illusion, and illusion is inferior to truth, and truth lies beyond the senses. But Māyā is also a force of illusion that helps us to believe in this same world the senses give us, and this makes Māyā a force powerful, even good.

  Who told you that? Tessa?

  Lorna released one of her arms and took my flesh in her hand and lifted it above the water. I took the soap from the dish that is in the aluminum frame that rests athwart the tub on opposite edges, and I rinsed off the gray that Will invariably leaves. Lorna let her fingers slide up, and then let me drop, larger.

  No one told me, I said. I looked it up.

  Do you think they’ll get off tomorrow?

  Irwin and Scott? I said.

  It’ll be worth watching, said Lorna. We saw some today. Jenny even took pictures of it and Will made her mad.

  Lorna and Will had been to Kew with Tessa and Jane, who was now almost thirteen. To my surprise, Tessa and Dudley had had a long talk with Dagger and Alba, at a party the evening of the day Dagger and I got back from Corsica. Whose party Lorna didn’t know. Dudley was quite animated for him and had embarrassed Tessa by asking out of the blue if Dagger knew someone called Nash.

  Who was Mary Napier? Tessa said Mary knew Cartwright.

  Someone I met in Corsica. But why did Will make Jenny mad? Tell her a shot of the telly screen wouldn’t come out?

  No. That she ought to watch what was happening in front of her eyes instead of transferring it to a camera.

  I thought of our twenty-minute shot today and could not imagine it cut up, transposed, reduced.

  Tessa came to mind today, I said. There was unexpected violence on the set. It would have amused her.

  The bath ended, and the night began.

  The Sunday after Apollo 15 Dagger and I played softball in Hyde Park. Chad didn’t appear, but he seldom did. Our umpire Mr. Ismay had told me long ago that Chad had postponed his Rhodes to fulfill his ROTC contract, then had come to Oxford without returning home. Well, now he was an Oxford B.A. with an automatic M.A. to follow and maybe he had gone back to New York.

  Dudley Allott was not in right field.

  I gave Jenny the Marvelous Country House to type and said I had even surprised myself this time, there were people in it who were not on the film.

  I told Dagger the Allotts were at Cape Cod. Dagger said Dudley had been in New York checking out letters supposed to be in the possession of a relative of Samuel Cabot. Cabot was the physician-ornithologist who had traveled in Central America with Frederick Catherwood.

  I was surprised. Yet Dagger knows everyone eventually.

  What Dagger would not have known was that Dudley was not only tracking the elusive character of this Englishman Catherwood in his own unique drawings and in the words of his sponsor and companion the American John Lloyd Stephens and of others. Dudley hoped as well to solve a mystery heretofore accepted as part of Catherwood’s odd story. Destined to drown in a collision between the Arctic and the Vesta, Catherwood suffered a tragedy almost as great by fire. The night of July 31, 1842, at a rotunda in New York, Catherwood’s Panorama of Thebes and Jerusalem, together with hundreds of sepia drawings from his recent Central American trip with Cabot and Stephens and a treasure of pottery, sculpture, dated wooden lintels, and on them certain glyphs that were a revelation and precipitated a revolution in Central American archaeology, all burned, leaving Catherwood only his determination to embark again.


  But by now Dagger had more pressing interests. One of them was Alba. The week after the Marvelous Country House he took with his double-lens reflex a delicate nude of Alba in profile at the end of her eighth month.

  10

  The basement bath offered the best shower spray money might buy. It needled my scalp and hung my beard in mats and revived my eyelids when I turned my nose to the nozzle breathing the water which for all I cared could have come underground through sewers, then to be washed up into Monty Graf’s tanks by the free swing of interborough sludge. But under pressure the fine tines of water this Tuesday in October at 6 P.M. struck me like ozone, and I looked up into them.

  We have never installed a shower in Highgate. A hand nozzle and hose is what we have, and so we take longer to bathe but it is more relaxing, though on the other hand or knee we don’t bathe so often.

  I kneaded my buttocks and abdomen, there was an amber oval of Pears coal-tar soap, I did not care how deeply Monty Graf might be in conversation about me on the phone upstairs or if one call had ended and the phone had rung again and a new conversation about me or not about me had begun.

  I did not care, and yet the weightlessness had passed.

  And now I feared it I think.

  But I was glad about a thing I’d decided under the water, and those against whom I would now move would be unlikely to forestall me. What was known of me? Even from the diary what would Phil Aut know of me beyond certain technical interests or a difference between Dagger and me drawn so faintly Aut might guess at most that Dagger was impulsive and casual, I reflective, also imaginative, also plodding. Jerry and his friend John, the fellow in glasses, had made up their minds we were a couple of hacks. Anything of use must follow from that.

  I was half-dressed and toweling my hair when Claire came down to say we were eating Mexican tonight. She had had her black clogs on before, so I assumed her bag was in or near the living room, not in the upper reaches of the house where she had had her own bath.