Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  The gallery show had been of very young painters, and Millan had walked away at one point when his Irish friend wanted to introduce a blond giant in corduroy overalls who was one of the exhibitors. Lorna had barely spoken to me and had made the rounds of the pictures arm in arm with Tessa’s father. It was this—and the argument this afternoon that lay behind it about my sudden plan to fly to Pittsburgh to see a man about bringing Appalachian quilts into England—that had made me feel, among the white tablecloths and red cabbage and the plain munching stares we got from elder gentlemen in yarmulkas as we came into Blum’s and made our way to a table for six against the wall at the back, as if I were standing in line to cash a check at Chemical Bank in New York about to be observed (as if by a light angled in a corner where wall met ceiling) by one of four closed-circuit TV cameras that did not know (any more than the senior teller or the new black girl who when I get to the head of the line asks me to endorse my own check) that I don’t live in New York. (I heard Tessa say Of course I wasn’t lonely in New York, no one is lonely in New York, of course I had gentlemen callers!) Dudley did not describe those early scenes with Tessa’s father except to say that there was real passion despite its being also a formality; but Tessa had told Lorna that her father had shouted and wept and had let it be known through his confidante Mrs. Stone (who had lost two brothers and was living in Golders Green waiting for reparations) that Tessa was dead to him. Ned Noble’s father said anyone brought up in Brooklyn, except Brooklyn Heights, was Jewish and Ned repeated it to me as an instance of his family’s insanity. Tessa’s father did not want any coffee; he was telling Millan about Dudley’s achievements as a historian, speaking across me as if I weren’t present; and Millan was nodding dimly while trying to hold on to Christy Conn’s story of his sister’s butch girlfriend the xylophone player in an Armagh orchestra who got a message in the middle of a concert that her xylophone would explode during a solo and who had been thrown off ever since and might go into social work.

  And I was telling Tessa she would never be happy off in the country serving tea to the vicar’s wife even if she did now want a piece of the land. What would Dudley do? Oh, Dudley would love it, said Tessa. He could run, said Tessa’s father, the way I used to in Germany. Lorna laid her hand on Christy’s hand. Tessa wanted to know when I was going to New York, and I said Pittsburgh in two days. Tessa’s father was telling Millan the different fields his son-in-law had now published in and that he’d gone into Mesoamerican history with no background to speak of and had become an authority on the English artist and engineer Catherwood, and Millan with cherubic judiciousness said Catherwood’s Egyptian drawings were better than the Central American stuff. But, said Tessa’s father, the Maya work is the thing, and Millan smiled and said the camera lucida Catherwood had invented as a means of accurately drawing what he saw had met more curious problems in the Memnon monuments. Tessa’s father said offhandedly, Oh no. Millan smiled, he liked Catherwood’s temples on the island of Philae, especially now the new Aswan lake had covered them up except for a moment in July when you could still see the Temple of Isis emerge from the water. But, said Tessa’s father, Dudley is going to publish an article on Catherwood.

  Far away directly in the line of Tessa and me the waiter thought I was catching his eye and nodded and walked toward us taking out his pen. Tessa’s father held his finger up to the waiter and called for the bill and they exchanged pleasantries about the sweet and sour mackerel and the stuffed neck and when they’d finished turned their attention benignly to Tessa who was telling how she and she alone had pushed her husband into Maya history by telling him all the Middle American stories that had come over from China—the beautiful white woman who came down from heaven to a town in Honduras, built a palace painted with magic cats and dogs and heroes, built a temple with a stone in the middle of it that because of the mysterious glyphs on three sides enabled her to kill her enemies, and though she was a virgin like the moon she bore three sons to whom she left her kingdom when she had her downy bed carried to the top of the palace and vanished into heaven—but Dudley of course cared more about exactly how high the Mayas set the stone ring for one of their ball games because if it was thirty feet high and they hit the six-inch rubber ball with their buttocks how could they get it in even with the ring perpendicular to the ground, and Dudley would tell you about the legal loopholes you could use to escape death for adultery.

  At some point in this I had murmured that we should make a film about the White Woman and her three sons, but no one heard.

  Tessa’s father told the waiter his daughter’s husband was a historian, a professor; and when the tall distinguished waiter said Professor! and tapped his temple, Tessa’s father said Dudley was an American, and the waiter said his own son was an actor.

  Oh darling, said Christy covering Lorna’s knuckles (but his large lucid eye passed through me like a laser in a moment of recognition), adultery wasn’t at all gay among the Maya.

  I said very quickly, Think of what your sainted sister got away with in her nun’s habit.

  The businessman speaks, said Geoffrey Millan, a thing of quantums, quilts, and snatches.

  And bottles, boats, and stoves, said Lorna, hearing Millan’s tone—is there anyone like him?

  The pediatrician rose behind Lorna, and I said putting my hand on Tessa’s, You never know what I’ll do.

  But her father’s hand was underneath hers, and we all laughed.

  When we rose, Lorna brought her glass up with her and swallowed her wine. I said, shicsa is a goy, and Tessa’s father grinned and gripped my elbow as I tried to get past him around the end of the table.

  From a Glasgow hotel on a night in October 1971, that meal five years ago drew the straight fine of my possible form through its field of talk and just beyond to the trip I’d had to the gallery with Tessa eight stops on the Underground from Charing Cross (and Dudley’s hospital bed) to Whitechapel, but the input that was all I could add to Millan’s insult was the talk she and I secretly had during our nonsecret trip. For Lorna that afternoon had not simply objected to my going so soon again to the States, she’d heard some new growth or insertion in my words when I said hell she wasn’t jealous was she? and she said as if finding out something Yes, yes, maybe I am jealous, I’m going to ask Tessa what you were doing when she was there. But then she saw she couldn’t laugh that off so she left the room.

  These mean, mealy, missed moments in our unrevolutionary life on whatever side of the Atlantic thrust me out through a closed-circuit eye back or forth to the old lookout dream I’d never succeeded in having.

  Tonight in Glasgow I thought I might have it at last. I wanted a woman, but not in a hotel other than my own. My thighs were cranked tighter than the whiskey I had not drunk could have undone. My toes were part of the same thing. My four-course à la carte had filled me full of shrimp and some kind of cream soup and roast pork and a dark pudding lathered with that yellow custard sauce designed to combat the weather.

  The desk clerk said yes I could leave my suitcase tomorrow for a day or two. And he said I’d had a visitor, an Indian gentleman. Nothing more, no address.

  I asked if he’d been in a white high-neck pullover and the clerk said, Yes, under his mac.

  You could get up the stairs without the desk seeing so long as you could get into the lounge in the first place. Anyone coming in late would be spoken to and would find it impossible to sneak up. I checked the three corridors on my floor. A girl in a raincoat open on a short skirt was by a door and we stared.

  I’d seen enough movies to check my window ledge on either side. It was inaccessible from other rooms.

  I laid my map back on the bed where I could look at it comfortably. The stones of Callanish seemed days away from Mount Clisham to the south, and in Clisham’s vicinity there was hardly a hamlet where I might learn exactly where Paul’s hut was.

  I lay back on the bed with my legs on the map. But that map was a one-incher, so the distance from Callanish to C
lisham direct was less than twenty miles. I sat up to check.

  The distances were not great. Yet cross-country there was no telling how much of the peat moor among the dozens of lochs was blanketed with that spongy sphagnum moss that over the millennia replaced the trees of an earlier drier climate. The alternative was a roundabout road that went back toward Stornoway then wound down thirty-odd miles into the mountains of Harris.

  I took off everything and sat on the bed again. Jenny’s circle must mean something. That was where Paul was or had been. What if no one was there now? What if they were all behind me when I got there? Or at the rim of a wheel, with me at the center and a few spokes gone.

  Someone came by my door puffing.

  The Indian wanted me. That meant someone was in Lewis or Harris whom I was to be prevented from encountering.

  The Venetian Renaissance palace on the wall placed this room.

  I didn’t know what had been on the walls of the hotel where my grandfather died. Sub said one good thing now we were in our forties was that we couldn’t die young. I heard steps coming back but no puffing. In Monty Graf’s basement bedroom in the presence of Claire I had written Gulf of Honduras on a pad and circled it and then run upstairs on a pretext in order to pinch Claire’s keys. I expected her to look at the pad and think I was chasing a lead to do with Dagger’s missing school-friend whose deranged father she and Dagger had visited and if she thought what I wanted her to, she’d forget that a few minutes ago in Monty’s living room we’d been looking guardedly toward the Hebrides.

  This was a case for Ned Noble, who said at the time of his early death that he was designing a time machine. We were juniors in high school. Sub never liked him.

  Just keep going, said the boy deserter in the Unplaced Room.

  Ned’s diagram of steps for assembling this time machine was less like a sequence than a map; I had a glimpse of isometric sections and formulas familiar but altered, then Ned folded it up closing between its folds a sheet of paper also folded where he said he had drawn the time machine’s logo, which his father Hy Noble was going to get patented.

  And (said Ned Noble with friendly contempt for my peacemaking after I’d restored the autographed ball to poor serious Boyd four years earlier) you might find your little brain growing again—who knows?—so that whereas this time the hole in your left ear felt the draft of your mother swinging open your bedroom door and your right shoulder responded by launching you out the window to snare my shot, someday you will know how to turn your mind toward greater tasks.

  I lay on my Glasgow bed, kicked the map off, felt myself all over counting forty-one years by fives, tried once more to will into my sleep the lookout dream I had thought out so often in vain but hoped to dream in order to find a power. But each part of the dream turns me out and away. A building site at night in a great American city: the steel frame is up, concrete forms have been poured—but unfortunately one of the upper unfloored rooms corrupts the dream, for it is Lorna in one of three scenes I think and it’s afternoon not night (though no one is working at the site) and she has said I’ve no business traipsing out to Pittsburgh when she has a concert in four days and I was in the States just eight weeks ago. Out sounds like Australia, not Pittsburgh, and I try to get back to my housing site; but my word jealous turns the day up like a baring of light at one stopped point and next thing Lorna says she’ll ask Tessa what Tessa thought I was up to when she and Dudley saw me in New York—as if I were some snake in the grass, not the husband of Tessa’s best American friend. Which puts me between her and Tessa and returns me to my lookout dream where I am in another way between.

  Between two dangers: and again the mind of my hotel bed disperses but now into love space where the outer glaze on a lady’s eyes may also be a film on mine, I can’t recall a single wall of her flat that Monday in New York except far, far away in this same city pictures of the gods and their ruined houses that her husband was making it his business to get acquainted with; and when I bring my thumb from her thighs to my mouth and then the same distance to her mouth she says with a nip that this city will be the ruin of her. I don’t ask if I am better than a bombed house to play around, but I think it, and think of her mother whom Tessa will never settle, who was rolled into a concentration camp the week Tessa was eight, and never sent word: which returns me to my lookout site in a great American city through the gated areaways of Brooklyn Heights brownstones and pale gray clean old Dutch wood-planked town houses that were going in ’38 for as little as $10,000—back through those grassy yards (now cut off by a two-level parkway) like the yard behind Sub’s house that looked over Furman Street and its dock warehouses and the superstructures of freighters loading for the South American run, across the East River to a charmed range of financial skyscrapers whose steel rose stonily out of the old wood-frame theme of those certain houses of our neighborhood Sub took for granted till years later he found himself working in New York, compelled to inhabit Manhattan because the quieter Brooklyn Heights where we grew up was too deep down the substance on which all the forkings of his first life seemed printed and grounded, gated through the northern rectangular faces of our mothers and fathers in their respective Persian lambs and dark velvet-collared or herringboned Chesterfields rising up the steps of a red-brick house on Cranberry Street to a dinner party whose guest list contains two cultured Quaker Jews, contains the house itself on which is superimposed (like one of those dinner parties that traveled in evening dress course by course and drink by drink to different homes) a brownstone four blocks away where an eighteenth-century dinner table made in New Jersey by the host’s ancestors is discovered in a candlelit back wing flanked like an ancient apron stage on three sides by high-window exposures to the huge flickering harbor upon which in daylight from the roof of my apartment house I’d look out to find around the Statue the patterns of a continent winding and rewinding back to my lookout site through a neat field where in addition Rommel’s Egypt and Hitler’s Jewish law and haggard flyers on a raft in the Pacific and Goering’s nightly noise against England stood equal on some grid of weekly events to lone unlighted hands caught grabbing or waving out of a landslide of Polish rubble in a Saturday newsreel short at the St. George Playhouse on Pineapple Street and to my own boy voice assuring my sister who was sightreading bent tensely forward at the piano, that there would be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover: but I almost do not make it, and only long enough to see that at this night site of my undreamt dream where a building that’s a keystone in a master American plan is going up by day, I am a lookout, I am a lookout between two forces, not between Dudley and Tessa, or Dudley and Lorna, or Jenny and Cosmo’s Indian, but between forces: but they leave me so apart that my hotel bed concentration on the one hand or the other disperses as if over all the mustered parts of my open body to Tessa’s lips on a Monday afternoon in New York saying to my thighs Oh ho ho! you are a bearded god Kokulcan and you have been released to come to me, oh ho ho! because Dudley is watching your temple, oh Kokulcan I have seen you before in other places, other beards, you were the snake that came to feather me and I will bite you back.