Lookout Cartridge (4 page)

Oh no. A year ago.

But I’ve seen you since then.

The news has had time to age.

Claire wanted me to get on with it. She had avoided me forty minutes ago in the street, no question. It hadn’t been my daughter Jenny who’d turned into that camera shop; Jenny was in London and she did not wear lipstick, though she looked a bit too much like Claire.

Claire was saying we’d arrived in Chartres.

On the table before me was an enamel cross, the colors irregularly partitioned by tiny strips of metal.

I thought I would press her further. I described the English guide, quite a young man, who lives in Chartres eight months a year and knows everyone of the 176 windows inside out, and he told Will’s group about things way high in Chartres meant only for God, and Will’s friend Stephen said they weren’t all that high.

Oh Christ, said Claire, I could throw it all up and go live in England.

But I want to know what Claire knows, however little that is, and I am fresh from London and in New York, and Dagger DiGorro’s film is in my head.

Brighton, said Claire.

The Pavilion, I said.

All that campy orientalia, she said.

I said my mother’s dentist who lives on Brooklyn’s Park Slope had hosted a cocktail party at the Brighton Pavilion for an international group of dentists.

Claire drummed on the sofa arm.

I had come all the way from London. If she didn’t want to talk she could have canceled. Fine by me: no film, no deal. Instead, I was here in her lunch hour in the pastel clarity of her fiat which seemed oriental partly because of what hung horizontal behind her—a poster three times the size of its subject which in the grainy blow-up seemed slow-motion even more than enlargement, a slim arm—elbow to finger-tips—Claire’s I sensed (though I do not know why)—and a free margin all round.

Granted, I’d have looked Claire up cable or no cable.

I told her how Will was half talking to himself one night in the kitchen and was muttering something about pulley blocks and hoisting yourself up in there to see some of that stuff meant only for God, and Lorna had reached into the fridge bent way over and Will had eyed her behind and the ceiling and without shifting his gaze had slid his arm off across
The Radio Times
to reach a chocolate digestive biscuit.

Claire did not get it. Maybe I was showing a very dull domestic scene.

Chartres made an impact on him, said Claire. She drummed on the sofa arm.

I explained that it was the engineering, I thought, more than any religious meaning, that for Will it was the hoisting and the getting up there more than the actual seeing, that for instance he would take suction boots to walk up the wall and didn’t believe that that stuff way up there wasn’t meant for people to see.

Claire dropped her wrist to see the tie. Where was I staying? I said Sub, and she said the man with the children, and I said an old friend.

From Brooklyn Heights?

And college.

And later life?

And he asks all the right questions and has an idea my life abroad is exciting.

Claire wanted to know what questions. I said, Not only about the film, and she said Oh, and I said, Like why you wanted to see me when I have no film to show, and why the cable.

Claire got up, and I said, He’s about my only connection with college now. Claire sauntered around behind me and then in front Swinging her wide, high-cuffed trousers. She stopped and took a deep breath and said softly didn’t I understand she felt bad about Dagger’s film. I said I wouldn’t be surprised one way or the other.

She went and fell back into her sofa under the six-by-eight poster and said if I really wanted to know, she’d thought I was coming anyway on business and she’d felt kind of bad about Dagger and his film, she loved Dagger-and wasn’t the film mine too?

She kept raising her voice slightly only to drop it, and there was a difference between her chic and the sound of her words.

I said that as for business, if she meant business Dagger’s film was pretty much ruined and only me left to tell the story.

Claire said well no she’d thought I might bring Billy over again if I came on business.

She was filling in while she thought.

I said that once Will had asked me to bring him back a book on building a twenty-eight-bit computer, he even went out and got a big tin for a drum and some doweling for an axle and put on side supports, but it ended there. He was a great admirer of Brunel and Babbage. She didn’t know Brunel? The famous engineer of French extraction Isambard Kingdom Brunel, I explained, who once in a nursery entertainment for his little nephew Ben happened to swallow a coin that stuck in his windpipe and thereupon in danger of choking designed a centrifugal pivot board on which he had himself strapped and swung round and round till the half-sovereign came up out of his mouth. The same Brunel that designed the Great Western Railway.

I said that last year I had gotten Will a digital computer kit through an American firm I occasionally represented complete with input sliders, circuit changing, and a read-out panel that lights up, but that now he was into shares and was planning a world stock exchange, which should not bore me but did.

You’ve always got Jenny, said Claire.

I thought I saw her go into a camera shop near here, I said.

Claire seemed to ease herself when I said that, as if it told her that she was in New York and I was not. She said, who is the fairest of the fair, is it Jenny or is it Claire? and I said the difference in looks was uncannily small and decreasing as Jenny approached twenty, and I wondered if Dagger and I were related.

You’re not Jenny’s uncle, said Claire.

I said Claire must be getting to know a lot about film distribution, and she said, Enough. I said didn’t she ever want to
make
a film, and she said, Distribution’s creative too, I should see what some of my experimental geniuses were ready to do for a buck. I said, Why
my?

I grinned. She may have seen not the friendliness I know wasn’t exactly there but rather the domestic male expatriate gently downing her by paying real attention to her, yet the guard I guess I had up worked almost accidentally, for such a guard was one thing she’d wanted to see, so for a moment now she stopped looking for something
else
. She burst out, Oh I could tell you a tale or two about your own London.

You sent that cable.

Only knowing you were coming anyway.

Claire pulled a foot up under her; she hadn’t said quite what she’d wanted to.

I could have written you what I have to say.

Look, said Claire, I’m in business. Mr. Aut’s got like all three phones triangulating on him in his office and in the outer office it’s very complex—you don’t know Monty Graf-look, last April I thought we might be able to do you a favor, that’s all.

You
look, I said, speeding things up but now splicing into some circle of which I was the center the stabbing I’d seen and the young woman who’d been behind me when I turned (namely Claire)—the film we shot is not lost just because people think it’s destroyed.

Think?
said Claire, and tapped the middle finger of her right hand on the sofa arm.

I recall it absolutely, you see.

I get your point, said Claire, and cast a look out the far window beyond her circular dining table as if fifteen floors up she might see a secretary if she had one waving an urgent message.

I said I recall it absolutely.

How do you promote a film that doesn’t exist?

That’s
my
line, I said.

The soft angles of my eyes were soiled with grains of the bright haze outside that either was the product of a sievelike process or was the sieve itself, and must be both the substance beyond which stood what you wanted to see and the abundant ground that was all you were going to see.

She kept looking and I said, So you see your Uncle Dagger’s film isn’t wholly destroyed.

Do you mean there’s still you? Is that what you mean? I haven’t heard a thing from him since it happened. Where were you shooting besides England and Corsica?

It began with a fire, you know that.

Claire shrugged. A helicopter sounded close enough to be outside her clean window. She said she couldn’t care less how the film was destroyed, and I said I meant the bonfire, we’d wanted a bonfire and it was there in a foggy midnight field in Wales ready for us sooner than Dagger expected.

Claire got up again and went and stood looking out toward the East River and fuel storage tanks like giant drums beyond in Queens, and the sound down in the street seemed to increase. She said something about vandalism everywhere, even in London; and I thought, How sure am I the stabber was Jim? Very sure.

I went on through the foggy midnight field making it graphic for Claire, and the sun was in her long straight hair that seemed to have had a gray or heathery tone rinsed through it so it wasn’t as sandy-bright as Jenny’s. I was telling about the ditch, how Dagger switched off the lights fifty yards before he pulled over to the right side and how he half-tilted us into a ditch. He reached into the back, needed two hands, turned all the way round. He said he didn’t know about the light. He hauled the Beaulieu out of the sponge-lined aluminum case. It had the zoo-foot magazine screwed to the top. To find the mechanical button to unscrew so he could pistol-grip the light meter independently of actually running the camera, Dagger needed more light. So he pushed the door handle down but the dome light would have advertised us and I stopped him with my penlight. I said, Wait—we want eight frames a second for this light. Dagger was trying to make out the light meter’s hair-line Maltese Cross. He said I’d been reading the wrong books, he was going to stick to twenty-four.

I flicked the overhead switch. He opened the door. The dome light stayed off.

Claire looked back from the window. In my light, I said, every black hair of Dagger’s moustache was distinct, and the lowered eyelids when he looked from me down to that French camera in his hand showed some tiny red and blue dots from all the Beaujolais and the good times that just seemed to come to him the first years in those Hampstead pubs or later when he was married and pubs were too public for him and he wanted to know who he was drinking with.

He gets his way, said Claire, and I could tell she loved him.

Dagger was in profile against the fire in the field, and I turned off my penlight.

I was telling Claire an odd, graphic tale, yet some knowledge I hoped she had could put a secret pivot in my own story to which meanwhile she seemed indifferent.

He looked straight out the windscreen, the heavy nose, the cheek bone, the mouth a bit open on his overbite. He said he’d had enough trouble loading the Beaulieu why didn’t we load it with color, here we were in the dark and a great fire and probably someone from Berkeley over there in the ring-they couldn’t all be Welsh hippies and what have we got but black and white. I said they probably weren’t Welsh, they were probably from London, and I said overall we’ll mix color and black and white, we’d be wasting color here, we need fast film.

Well even before we reached the hedge he was shooting, hand-held, and I said Steady. We stood in soft earth that gave but wasn’t mud. The inevitable stone farmhouse must have been nearby but the inevitable dogs must have been friendly or deaf.

Where’s yours? I said to Claire.

Hospital, she said, and came back from the window to the sofa.

Jenny’s crazy about dogs. I guess she’s quite English.

Manhattan’s crawling with dogs, said Claire.

It’s different, though, I said. You never see children.

I
never do.
You
probably see plenty.

London’s more of a family city.

You must be right.

You get the picture, I said. Fog damping the sound. The chanting soft, close.
Māya Māya
. Somewhere not in the circle a guitar drummed alternating chords like somebody learning. I couldn’t see where it was.
Māyā Māyā Māyā
was one word. The others I didn’t understand. Hell, I didn’t understand
Māyā
either. Not then. But I could make it out and I said it in Dagger’s ear. We’re in South Wales. How we got there is plausible enough. I had business on the Dorset coast. Then we drove up past Bristol where we had a mutual actor-friend. So far, Dagger was the casual traveler. I was the one talking about the images we needed to go with what was then the third section of the film. But when we got into South Wales and night had come into the soft farm valleys above Newport and dew chilled the manure and sweet grass and we were running snug between hedgerows, Dagger was scooting around curves and shifting down and accelerating as if now he had a purpose. And now he’s saying let’s find a bonfire to film—which seemed right to me because I’d said in the beginning that we ought to find visions intermingling England and America so you wouldn’t be able to tell. And here we were between villages hunting for a bonfire, though Dagger was also now saying he was looking for a roundabout that would get us onto the A-40 east to London.

Claire was looking at her hands wedged between her thighs.

The fog partly hid Dagger and me from these people. Claire didn’t yet know I was recalling my diary. Fog stood here and there as far as the edge of the ring. But passing through the ring the fog became something else gassy and jumped and bent through the forms of those people into the inner circle where it passed into the fire but freshened and inflated the colors of their clothes, the woven oranges and denim blues, a brown cloak, some yellow, some olive green.

A baby’s cheek flashed on a girl’s back. Dagger tracked a little boy in overalls who as he walked stared at the blaze they were all circling. The camera’s drive motor seemed loud, a softer or more musical dentist’s drill, a buzz saw under water. Dagger switched off and focused on one corner of the ring and shot till they’d all gone by once. I whispered wouldn’t it be funny if some were Americans. When he said, Recognize someone from Berkeley? he may not have been kidding, though he often speaks of his old bailiwick and feeding some friend who later became an official in Washington, for Dagger unlike me keeps up with the old Alma Mater. A big woman with a red and yellow blanket over her shoulders burst from her place and surged across the circle to hug and kiss the boy in overalls—and they all shouted something. And she, in a glad tantrum of head-wagging, stood aside till her spot in the circle came by.