Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  But this fact remained, that Dagger had known that on Friday, May 28, the day after the day we’d planned to be on the south coast where I had to see a man about a boatyard, on Friday the 28th of May, after passing through Bristol to say hello to a mutual friend an actor in the repertory and to take another look at Brunel’s great suspension bridge on the Clifton heights, we would film a group in Wales which was to Claire the group. Had known as early as the 24th. Earlier.

  I snapped out the match, moved toward the partitioned-off cubicle, wheeled about, found Claire’s desk and retrieved Dagger’s letter, didn’t fold it lest it crackle, went again toward Aut’s cubicle wondering what I would do if I found him sprawled in his swivel chair dead, put down the letter, struck a match, heard the steps approach like two people with one unnatural rhythm, doubtless the two who’d paused to look at Outer Film’s door and the darkness on my side and might conceivably have seen my match.

  They didn’t stop. I was at what must surely be Aut’s desk. It was full. I went through drawers that told me nothing. I was meant to be here, to have come here from Monty’s via Sub’s, to Aut’s office, Claire’s desk, Aut’s.

  The phone had been ringing and ringing. I fingered letters, folders, scripts. I accidentally pushed something off onto the rug.

  I was holding the match so close to the files in a lower drawer that even though the fire flamed upward I may have singed a manila corner. My eyes still dumbly told me something. There was something looking at my eyes.

  My God it was the Unplaced Room. The morning of May 24 we’d shot the Unplaced Room, and here was my old friend Dag saying we’d had some practice that morning but as of the 24th P.M. we’d shot only the May 16 ball game.

  But this wasn’t what my inkling eyes meant. There was something else staring. However, I would run out of matches if I had to go through all of Aut’s stuff. I looked up from the lower drawer and just as the flame at desk-top level pricked my thumb, I found at the edge of this light what had been shadowing my attention.

  On the cubicle wall to the left of the desk were four framed black-and-white photos. One was a close-shot of a woman caught smiling thoughtfully, lips parted enough to show strong, unevenly spaced teeth with an animal gap in the middle, lips resisting this as if the smile had been got out of her against her will. I couldn’t have guessed her size if I had not known at once who she was: she was the red-haired woman who’d been talking to the Indian near our ball game and whom Dagger must have meant as one of the moments mentioned to Claire; and she was the red-haired woman who had seemed to my puzzled paternity yesterday morning in London to be competition with Jenny for Reid.

  The second, smaller picture was of two full-length figures, one a woman plump and pretty and seemingly gray-haired, the other a boy with longish hair and bluejeans seeming to suffer her arm around his shoulder—and he was indubitably Jerry, the friend of John, the man in glasses from the Mercer Street loft.

  The third picture was of the gray-haired woman now dark-haired and younger, full face close-up smiling almost to the point of laughing.

  The fourth was of the red-haired woman and Jerry, and Jerry’s fingers were peeking around her waist.

  My match had flared out without burning me. The flame, like a desire in my will, had turned the woman’s hair in the b & w photo red.

  Aut knew the red-haired woman.

  Aut knew Jerry, who I already knew disliked Aut.

  These were intimate pictures, and so Jan Aut was probably here; but must she be the red-haired woman?

  I lit a match and looked. A clank came in the hall. It was a bucket. I heard a key in a lock too close. I looked around my cubicle but saw nothing in the amber oblong. I memorized the face of the woman I didn’t know. The char wouldn’t know who belonged in the Outer Film office and who didn’t. But I would have to explain what I was doing in the dark. I could just be sitting still, like Cosmo when he answered my call in London. I must leave. The singing was now near my door. It went back into where it had been. You Are Everything and Everything Is You. I stopped near Claire’s desk thinking I might leave her keys. But I needed them to lock up. I got out into the hall and the doorknob was as quiet as a rheostat that turns light up or down as gradually as you want.

  I was right, the next door down was open, a bucket stood in the hall. I was not going to risk the sound of a key. I rubber-heeled my way to the elevator.

  At last the red light sounded its bell-note but a phone rang. The charwoman reached out for the bucket. Bending over, she turned her head and saw me. The phone was ringing. She stood up and took her key ring and said to me I wonder if I should answer that?

  I wouldn’t, I said, and my doors opened and I said goodnight and was inside, my heart swelling into a chill machine.

  The night watchman wasn’t dreaming. He looked me over.

  I bought a ballpoint and a pack of too many envelopes in a drug store in Claire’s block. I put her apartment number on one and with a question mark enclosed her keys. I watched the doorman from across the street. He talked on the intercom, the bill of his braided hat was importantly low on his forehead. He hung up the receiver on the cradle among the switchboard buttons. He disappeared. I went across the street and left the envelope on a stool by the three gray softly curved closed-circuit TV screens.

  Sub’s old movie went on in an hour.

  If the red-haired woman were Jan Graf Aut, the picture I’d defaced was a self-portrait.

  Sub asked if I would babysit, he’d changed his plans.

  June had phoned again. Sub raised his eyebrows and asked what kind of business I was on.

  I’d overlooked something, but I didn’t know what.

  In the P.S. about transcendental meditation, I saw the point of Dagger’s opening story. Claire had written him about the religious group.

  I did not like Dagger nullifying the Unplaced Room.

  I had decided the 8-millimeter cartridge was important. It had not been on Dagger’s table, and he hadn’t said anything about it. And the night we shot it he was reluctant and his friends who were sitting around talking to Alba when we came back from the air base were strange.

  Sub was ready to go. There was a humid scent of soap. I have not begun to suggest Sub. There hasn’t been the chance. He is, for all his domesticity and somewhere between duty and delusion, a heroic mind. There hasn’t been any need to show this. There is none now except that we are in his presence, or you are in mine and I in his, or his apartment. He once in Rose’s presence told her friend Connie that Connie answered not what people said but what she heard in their minds—which foreshadowed a trait of Tessa’s—and when Rose said Sub was speaking nonsense because he was just imagining what Connie did think was in other people’s heads, Connie sided with Sub, and Rose got mad, and a queer fracas ensued lasting between Rose and Sub several days climaxed by Rose’s admitting Sub should have said what he’d said not of Connie but of her, and Sub’s retorting that it wasn’t true of Rose, then Rose that this was simply because Sub wasn’t interested in her to find out. Sometimes duty and delusion closed over whatever was between, and Sub summed himself up—but I might fall into a description of his friends, his mad aunt, his mother, his father, for instance, who was the sort who’d be glad a school tennis match had been rained out or a museum closed unexpectedly on a Monday since it meant he’d missed nothing by not being there—Sub summed himself up with a swift delicate painful computation that would blind someone who did not know him to all he meant when he saw himself as someone who did what needed to be done. By which he meant getting Tris and Ruby to bed and to school, and listening to what they had to tell him when he came home, a lot of which concerned their mother. I convey none of this in these scenes with Sub, who now, bringing into the hall that scent of soap, said, May as well make yourself useful.

  Where will you be? I said.

  He wrote down a number. It’s up in the air at the moment.

  Sub locked the door from the outside, which saved me the trouble of
going and turning the inside latch. You could lock or unlock from outside or inside. The lock wasn’t automatic.

  I knew what I’d overlooked.

  I had left the letter on Phil Aut’s desk.

  CORSICAN MONTAGE

  The crowd on the approaching pier is pink, mauve, and brown—red, white, and yellow—green as blood when it flows under the sea—and the crowd is also blue, cornflower, cobalt, navy, chinks of blue in the white shirts, black kerchiefs, wild prints closing on us as if to leave behind them there parked on the pier beside a gray truck, a gray Volkswagen newer than Dagger’s belowdecks—but no blue is there on the pier quite like the space you call the sky, a blue you’d catch hold of only on film, where it still is nothing till processed and projected. But rewind the voyage back half an hour to where Dagger several miles offshore took a tilt shot of sky as if slowly raising a face to something prime and new, moving the 50-mm. lens from sun-silvered whitecaps up past the hazy earth of Corsica that’s sending out now white flecks which will come forward to become the brick and plaster of Ajaccio: he tilts the lens up into the Mediterranean sky whose blue unlike the sea leaves me full of blissful suspicion that thought matters no more than Napoleon, who does not come out in a launch one hand inside his greatcoat to meet us, matters no more than the random seabird that cuts through Dagger’s shot, survives, and is gone.

  Dagger has shot the Gulf of Ajaccio and, nearer in, a small beacon on the low extension of the breakwater that’s like a rampart. Then to the left he caught lines of white-hulled powerboats parked from the inner smallcraft dock by the cafés out toward us along the jetty to the breakwater. Gold letters on mahogany sterns tell my sharp sight that the girl who might be Claire basking above a bowsprit has come from Cannes, and the man in shorts pouring tea amidships for the man in jeans has probably sailed like our car ferry from Marseilles, and there’s Nice and scandalous St.-Tropez, Genoa and Palma de Mallorca, even Malmö, Sweden, and of course Algiers whence seventeen thousand pieds-noirs came to Corsica after the ’62 liberation. I see also a yacht from Cagliari and from the look of its striped awning aft and the gilt flash of its brass it could care less if Corsicans look down on Sardinians, for don’t mainland French of whom Dagger’s wife Alba is one look down on les Corses?

  Corsica is a département of France.

  This film is for the masses, murmurs Dagger.

  I mention only what we film. And now the crowd.

  The engines are turning us away from the crowd behind its barricade. My eyes have changed since May because of our camera. A middle-aged woman offers her beautiful profile, she is not looking our way, but off toward the smallcraft dock; the tip of her tongue is thinking, and her hair is gathered behind into a single plait and this is what I see even if, having never done Jenny’s hair when she was a child, I don’t know if it takes two strands or three.

  Dagger doesn’t switch off.

  I say to him, That’s enough, isn’t it?

  His American friend wrote that he would take the bus into downtown Ajaccio from the école and drive back with us. Dagger sometimes seems to use a camera like a spyglass to see what he can’t see with his own eyes.

  Any familiar faces?

  Dagger lays a hand on my shoulder. On the far side of the pier is a small van with something plonger on it, the local scuba man. Dagger says, Never know where you’ll run into an old contact from Berkeley.

  We go below for the car.

  Dagger has used a hundred feet of Anscochrome approaching Ajaccio.

  Calvi is said to be prettier.

  I will tape some Corsican French tomorrow. It has an Italian sound, but since the war you watch what you say about that.

  Dagger’s purpose, which in my view those hundred feet of approach shots won’t advance, is to parlay his entrée here, mix shots of Bastille Day observances three days hence and tourists lounging around Bonaparte’s birthplace plus the American, French, and English students reconnoitering Corsican ecology—our expenses paid by Claire’s boss. Family life is not a millstone round Dagger’s neck; but he sees Alba’s baby coming week by week and he is a forty-four-year-old male with quite a history and he is going to be a father, and a bit of distance just now gives a man a certain perspective he needs on the internal effects of such an event. Pudovkin said montage was linkage, Eisenstein collision.

  In the école garden Dagger shoots rich pink rhododendron blossoms and the heavy oval dark green leaves; he shoots the black iron fence down the slope and through the fence the street whose bright traffic he gives the same focus for a moment that he gave the rhododendrons, then adjusts so the blur of shine and color turns clear and exact and leaves the black iron fence softened at the edges as if instead of adjusting the focus Dagger has zoomed, and that’s something on the agenda, for we know—or he knows—a man who will lend us an Angenieux 12–120. Long shot of the street traffic through the école fence; I slip behind Dagger, who tracks right and through a pattern of leaves on our side of the fence to catch across the street a column of sea and sky between the pastel buildings at the foot of one of which is a greengrocer.

  Dagger cuts to the space of dirt and grass in front of the main four-story institutional edifice that houses dorm, dining room, and kitchen; there is a game of bowls in progress played with a small steel target ball and several larger ones, a Marseillaise game I learn and the traditional taunts and protest and boasting precede and follow the arcing toss and the thud of the ball onto the dust and its hushed roll too strong or weak, too much right or left. I will find out the name of the target ball. This footage is silent but I make a note to tape for it some of those shrill, hard, anguished songs you hear about, a rhythm I might pulse into phase and out with the flight and fall of those shotput-like tosses, the red tile roof high behind.

  The peace in the blue of the sky and the chalky hues of the pier crowd over the water comes again, a peace beyond Dagger’s prodigality with the Anscochrome (a minute still left), comes again in the blossoms, the green, a girl’s miniskirt, a maroon Renault broadside through the arcade hung with vines and blooms like New England wistaria mingled with tiny whites and yellows more like buds, the maroon of the car now sliding out of view leaving on the far side of the driveway a stone wall, but Dagger has switched off. Here comes his American friend with a tall woman. She is vivid, she has auburn hair and speaks with a Scots clip. I tell her I have a friend who goes up there all the time to visit a clan chieftain.

  The peace is in the color, and in the hope of something beautiful in the growth between authentic black and white and the color living in that strongest thing of all, surface. One of the American boys here—the one with the Sony recorder—will back us up against the wall before supper saying we’re crazy to mix color with black and white.

  Cut to morning. Next footage, b & w.

  Sublime morning, the sun has a smell, or compounds the sweet bark-burn of coffee and the thick breath of hot milk from the kitchen, last night’s wine bottles fish bread bougainvillaea Gauloises, exhaust fumes and sea two blocks away, it is not garbage, or even drains, but it is an unsieved odor of natural use—I can’t imagine Dagger caring to convey it.

  I mean to include here only what we film.

  We are in black and white, and side by side we shoot thirty seconds next door upstairs. An American girl, hair in rollers under a pink kerchief, bangs “Rhapsody in Blue” on an upright at the back of the classroom; there is on each desk a headphone-with-mike and a metal switch box; the simultaneous interpreter who is taking a six-week break from NATO is reading yesterday’s Ajaccio paper—how the students can listen to a lecture here with island sun glimmering through the upper branches of the école trees and white boats winking in the gulf and the beachboys hanging around last night’s café is beyond me, and bare legs morning-cool upon a metal and educational chair—the interpreter puts away his paper and with a wave at us spreads his headset, it’s hooked into the room’s system, and anything of him we pick up only through the omnidirectional I’ve place
d on an empty front-row desk. The last students have wandered in after breakfast, they put on their headsets and switch on their boxes, the professor from the Sorbonne has appeared in shorts, the girl in curlers relents and leaves her ringing piano. The class is depleted by a field trip. Dagger ignores the professor sitting at the desk on the podium and gets a close shot of a French girl and the American boy Dagger happened to know through Hampstead friends and spent a while with last night in our beach café down the street—I explain too much—while a group of us left our tables and swam out into the night.

  We swam far out, each stroke directly into darkness, though out ahead the lights across the bay seemed close; the phosphorescent life all round vanished to the touch, but I felt them holding me up, loafing, treading a hundred yards off the beach, girls’ shoulders slick under moonlight.

  When I came back with a sandy towel on one shoulder and the café was closing, the American boy (whose somber self-importance Dagger refused to be put off by) was saying he’d thought Dagger was someone else and Dagger asked if he’d been expecting someone; the American stood up and said No—as if he felt he’d talked enough or drunk enough cassis on top of the rosé we get at the école.

  This morning the girl Dagger shoots with that American boy is self-conscious; she takes her headphones off (her French is good), she keeps trying to stare at the professor (who is invisible except in my untranslated tape) but she keeps breaking her gaze and smiling first to her right at the boy—he’s around twenty—then left at us. Too late I think of using a spare headset to tape French and English simultaneously.

  We have our footage and the students watch it as we pack up and get out of there. They are sorry to see us go. The professor says L’année prochaine à Cannes.