Lookout Cartridge (59 page)

But Tessa was simply a good fuck in ’64 and ’65—and in ’71 in a green beret and nothing else but some enigmatic chit-chat queries about our other film-scenes, was there one in Wales? one in South Kensington Underground? and what was the American blow-hard professor really doing there?

But I was afraid time would stop if I didn’t get to Jan Aut’s and beyond.

I did not need to buzz Jan’s flat to get in downstairs. I hadn’t noticed the old house, its outside, what it was made of. I was in Notting Hall Gate.

Maybe
I
was the message.

Cartridges stayed hard when out of touch with other cartridges but when in touch opened and shifted—even to glows of high hue or even varying grays with a black as lush as Lorna’s suede gloves so richly wrinkled, from finger to elbow setting out for our first and last Embassy cocktail party where a matter-of-fact madam’s orange hat and blue-green eyeshadow or a patronizing young parliamentary secretary’s machine-matched mauve tie and snotrag stood out like senseless data next to my Lorna with her gray wool dress that showed her wholeness, her high waist and her hips and stomach, and with her dark almost black hair alive around the gray-blue eyes. I was proud enough of her not to get mad afterward in a cab when she said, You like that crap more than you admit.

The door wasn’t open when I reached the second landing. There was no key under Jan’s mat. The last time I’d come with a friend, two others, a camera, and sound.

Lorna did not know how near I was.

There was a new lock on our door in Highgate. Had Jack had our house broken into? I couldn’t tell on the phone from New York how badly Lorna had felt about it—scared, unready, sad. Her tears were never hot pools on the carpet (where Tessa had dropped her butt) but slow and steady as if measured out.

And as I heard a hand on Jan Aut’s doorknob, I knew I was still between—for I knew (for how could I not have seen that)
lock
in Jenny’s cryptic note had an
h: a loch to look at, a cross to bear:
whatever waves I’d made had traveled on ahead to here, but back as well to Callanish behind me where my American daughter had saved the other remaining copy of the diary.

14

Which put me between again.

But with what in front?

Godlike I saw through Jan Aut’s door before it opened. She was fresh from a bath, a twist of towel round her hair. But she’d been up on Lewis with Paul. She might be anywhere, South Uist, Edinburgh, Wales.

The turban was still a towel, but no—she looked like Jenny; that was it. I was ahead of my own sound, I could have been still asleep three nights ago in my Glasgow hotel. I reached out to her still feeling for Jenny, and in the instant that I checked the impulse Claire accepted my embrace and I blocked the new wish to draw back, and was glad because I knew I could not help her. But no: Claire’s dog had just come out of hospital and she hadn’t settled her affairs at Outer Film and there was no reason to think Monty would want her here in London with him on business. But why did I think Monty was in London tonight—because he’d phoned Dudley? because if this system, whosever it was, was closed, the probabilities were that things should be beginning to come together?

But I was rehearsing; and, even irredeemably between, I knew my power lay in not rehearsing; and so as the door came open I would still proceed as if I had a plan even if I were no god.

It was Kate, the girl from the gallery. Her hand, the fingers of her tanned hand, went to her collarbone. She’d been in no mood to imagine me a god when we’d first met. I inserted myself sideways past her, bumping my pack, saying Jan expected me.

My pack stood next to the brown velvet chesterfield; my parka I laid over the arm so the pockets rested on the cushions.

Of course, said Kate.

The portrait of Jan’s to which I had added leaned against the leg of a baby grand. The piano was a Yamaha, the firm that makes motorbikes and flutes.

There was no one here. I fell into the chesterfield. The room was full of things chosen over a long period of time one by one. It had not been right for what we’d wanted when we’d filmed here. I said this to Kate, who stood at the foyer entrance, one ankle almost touching my pack.

You filmed here?

Yet looking around at a delicate brown bowl, a solid red jaguar some ten inches by four, a silver belt of ornately worked links lain across a bright-woven shawl thrown over a table, I felt that this room impossible to unplace. May 24 was personal not local. That is, you would not have looked at it and said England. There was a turtle. There was a color photo of Jupiter on the music stand above the keyboard.

I got up and walked away from Kate to a doorway. It was evening. A blanket or two lay on the floor beside a large bed with dark green sheets twisted and draping. I turned away to a further door that was almost closed.

What did you film? said Kate.

I don’t know any more, I said.

The Unplaced Room of our film was dark through a crack, and I did not go in. I remembered morning light through the top of a green tree. A bold bright portrait of someone with long lustrous hair leaning against the wall near where I stood. Large open windows with those peculiar screw locks at the middle and along the sash. The garden didn’t appear in the film. Pale clouds were filling the early blue when Dagger and I and the featured performers arrived. The sky in New York is gross, it is a blue land that will get you.

She’s not here, as you can see, said Kate. She was by the couch now. She started to lift my parka but I stopped her.

I said, Saturday night. I need a bath. I’ve just been up to Paul’s.

Why had she said Of course when I’d come in?

She sat on the piano stool. It’s Sunday, she said.

In the corner of my eye something moved, inanimate. Kate’s small mouth dimpled, in a quiver not a smile. She did not point out that as of Monday I hadn’t known Jan Graf. Either she thought I’d faked ignorance then, or she was doing something very special now.

I asked if she’d been at the gallery the day Aut’s man filmed; I said I knew Jan and the four men had been in it, but I hadn’t heard Kate mentioned.

When she shook her head—almost as if she couldn’t speak—I put my head back and closed my eyes and intoned like a list of heroes the names of Reid, Gene, Sherman, Incremona. I sighed and said it was a sordid thing, this commercial competition, utterly cutthroat.

Take my film diary, I said, my eyes still closed; it was incinerated in Paul’s hut on Mount Clisham yesterday. So that’s that. A regular trade war. What’s the use?

I sighed. Even Paul got demoralized, I said—he stopped caring about all the deserters coming through Norway and the islands.

I let myself seem tired. Kate nodded once. My mind played in a field of someone else’s inventing, more than one someone, I thought. Maybe I was as tired as I was seeming. I rolled my head toward where the inanimate movement had been, and saw it again. The door to the Unplaced Room swayed. I said there was a draft, and with a groan I leaned forward but Kate was up, crossing to the Unplaced Room, saying she’d close the windows, but I said just shut the door, and she did, stopping short of it so she had to reach out for the knob, and pulling it to so quickly—as if she had other duties to pass on to—that I felt she’d never meant to go in there and close the windows. I asked for Jan; Kate said she was here looking after the cat while Jan was away. That was like a past part of the truth. Kate was being careful. I asked for a drink. I’d been dreaming in the plane from Glasgow, I said, I was wild, I had all the passengers looking back at me. What a dream! Could I tell Kate about it?

Please do.

It must have come from the daydream I’d had
before
I dropped off: to wit, putting Paul and Chad together; plus the deserter’s dark-haired friend when we filmed here and Nash’s nosebleed when Cosmo accused him of planning to blow up the Underground. Plus Len’s angry trigger at Paul’s brother’s house.

Kate passed me a wine glass of whiskey and asked if that had been my dream, and I said it might as well have been. The door of the Unplaced Room was open a crack again but there was no draft, as if interrupting the current of air had lowered the windows automatically like the line-and-pulleys I’d rigged from my bed when I was twelve. I carried my parka into the bathroom, and Kate laughed but I didn’t believe her. But I said, Got some plastic explosive I’m carrying around.

I unlaced my boots.

I asked if she had anything to eat.

I was into a stationary area again. But area might be so only by me. I wanted what Kate knew.

I said I had been launched down a dead escalator as part of an international power struggle. My words made my hands sweat.

Kate tried to speak, reached for her collarbone, decided to slouch with a hand on her hip.

Was that your daydream, she said, the power struggle?

I half-closed the bathroom door. I said she knew of course that Sherman was very dangerous. However, they were waiting for him in New York. Paul had had a strange violent effect on Chad. (I turned on the shower. A clear plastic shower cap hung over a tap handle.) Paul had opted out of the violent project and was in danger like me. Reid’s plans went ahead. (I turned up the water and lowered my voice.)

I was easing into the water. I might have been standing in my Tuesday shower at Monty’s.

Yes, I called out, it was my daydream, but I’m adding.

Outside the fall of my shower Kate’s silence seemed not to be paying much attention to me. She wouldn’t know much. Somewhere Mummy would be hoping she’d meet someone suitable.

As for Chad, I called out—and the phone rang and I turned off the shower.

I thought Kate said—the children.

I know she said, Can I give him a message?

I would let
her
bring this up. I flapped the shower curtain, sang a riff from a Brandenburg, ran water hard in the basin, flushed the toilet and soundlessly closed the bathroom door.

I didn’t hear her speaking. I tiptoed wetly out and carried my pack back. I didn’t see her. The phone was in the kitchen. How did I know that?

I dressed.

I called from the bathroom, As for Chad—and then came out to my sandwich—well I see Chad as the black second lieutenant in Heidelberg who helps that kid skip to Sweden and has work for him when they meet again in London a long time after. It was Paul’s hut the kid stayed in—that’s no dream either. Only one film now. Plus a piece of ours with Paul on it, a Bonfire in Wales. When we caught him there he was already backing out of the big one, the big project, and he’d gone down to Wales. To see Elspeth, yes. I suppose you don’t know Elspeth. She was at Stonehenge. In my daydream Jan helps Paul escape from his two older brothers, who fear him. Jack has risky business up in the Hebrides anyway—yes, with a rich dilettante geologist who has gotten in too deep because the deserters and other Americans he’s ferried over from Norway are involved in a little bit more than mere exile, and this rebounds upon him and he wants out, and at this point Jack can’t afford to let that happen. Ditto the diary, so it has to be burned. I can understand. I’m not in arms about it. Nash was brought together with Krish in one scene and this could have led who knows where. Likewise Nash and the deserter at Stonehenge. Likewise in Corsica Mike and Incremona. The project will probably go through. But I’ve got to see Jan. She wouldn’t be at the Community with Paul? You know the Community?

I don’t, said Kate. I don’t think she’ll be back tonight.

You’ve been looking for adventure, Kate.

To you who have me, it may have been patent by now that I sensed a third person. If probabilities were as I imagined, this person closeted doubtless in the Unplaced Room would be someone who had already figured in my experience of the system. If it was a lover, even Kate was not so uncool as to hide him. If Jan, then why Kate’s nerves? On Jan’s behalf? Doubtful. If Paul, where was Jan? Why would this person wish not to be seen? And by me in particular? Or by anyone? But why would Kate not discourage me from staying? Either because she or the other person felt me to be dangerous or because the other person had signaled her to have me stay.

But what she said now did not fit: Be serious, she said.

She might well ask, I said, why these and others who had connections to hide should let themselves be filmed at all. Surely with what they stood to lose it was strange to consent.

Kate had to claim something for herself. She said that everyone knew how persuasive Jan could be.

I agreed with my mouth full, but having swallowed the last soft lump of grainy crust and held out my wine glass, I said there were things Jan could not understand. Nor Phil either. Did Kate know John? Ah well, John had a curious relation with Phil. John wasn’t into this other side of the film either.

Kate did not ask what other side. She carried my plate out.

I had put on my parka, and in a second, with one eye on the crack of darkness showing from the Unplaced Room, I added the heavy red jaguar to my stock of other people’s weapons. The phone rang and I moved to the foyer, looked suddenly at the Unplaced Room, lifted my pack around the corner out of sight, opened the front door—and letting it close hard I concealed myself beside the hall closet. Consequently I could not hear, except a word that sounded like
gallery
. I put my head around the corner; the door to the Unplaced Room had not stirred. I caught Kate looking at me around the door of the kitchen. She disappeared and closed the conversation saying, I’ll tell her you called.

Beside the painting to which I had added was a large blue-red-and-umber cushion which had figured in the otherwise drab Unplaced Room.

I had proposed that we drop to eight frames a second here and there because when eventually projected these moments would introduce an agitation into Dagger’s flat
vérité
.

Kate had stalled me here without being one thing or the other.

What I could have told her—fast forward, sixty-four frames a second—was that the Unplaced Room was precisely the footage Dagger had not told Claire about; the letter I had left on Aut’s desk left me no doubt about that. For Dagger there was something in the scene worth withholding. The scene held more for me. Jan’s whiskey had spread to my shoulders and fingertips. What I could have told Kate at 64 fps was the precise color of eggshell-cream I painted a room in our first house in 1955 that was to be my study. There was a golden Goya guitar—not to be confused with the two twelve-string guitars I bought in Germany the following year and sold to Americans in London—and the door was closed and window open, and when I laid down my roller I would pick up the Goya and strum my four chords and sing a ballad. “Sir Patrick Spens” was one I sang. They are out of fashion now and in all these years in England I never met anyone not American who sang them. That room was where the children wouldn’t come. Will was a baby, Jenny went half days to a play group in a church basement. I had a table and two chairs and only what I needed. Sometimes not even the paper. And Lorna had the balance of the house to herself. The old pub across the road hadn’t yet been tarted up; the prefab panels and light cubes and chrome trim were three years off. But while I liked to make space, so to speak, by piling things rather than letting them spread, objects in quantity passed through that room and sometimes stopped for considerable periods. My father had unearthed in the country several old Shell Oil bottles 14½ inches high with fancy embossing, and because I’d been struck with the tall, thin beauty of these old bottles that had jeen used to hold a quart of motor oil, I had interested a young Portobello Road shopkeeper in having (on a percentage basis) a serious bottle corner. This corner soon acquired a name for its nobly seductive American wares, though the strangely reassuring Mason jars and blown-in-the-mold medicine bottles with the four indented circles embossed on the side, the cobalt-blue witch hazels and the whittle-marked Moxie Nerve Food bottles—long ball neck, strap-sided, and (a mark of pre-1900 work) the applied lip—were mingled as you’d expect with a deceptively large sampling of non-American work—free-blown Persian saddle flasks, aqua-colored Jamaican gingers, Italian cordials with embossed suns, French perfume and English gin. And there were times when such objects as these would accumulate in that precious room of mine where Lorna would always knock before she entered. She picked up the guitar overnight and now can really play but never does. She would sit down in the bare room and I would close my manila folder over my lists, plans, and letters and she would tell me the old lady in the furnished room on the ground floor next door with access to the garden (hence a view across into ours and up to my study window) had told her her life story this morning, Miss Topp, a sitting tenant whom the new land-lord (an actor no one had ever heard of who had made some money on a film) was dying to evict along with Mrs. West on the third floor (who could barely move now, she was so fat), and Miss Topp after a tale of complaints and small revelations said, I see your husband up there busy doing his correspondence. But Lorna then heard that Miss Topp had been saying that I didn’t work, that all I did all day was correspondence, and the police-woman had come because I was living off my wife’s immoral earnings. Indeed the police-woman had come, to check our green cards, but the old lady as I pointed out to Lorna gave us credit for more imagination than we probably had—Miss Topp had heard from old Mr. Sharpe the gardener that Lorna was English, which gave her the right to take a job without going through red tape, and from the dustman that there were a number of Americans resident in the area, just living. This was off the Edge-ware Road a half a mile from Marble Arch in a little one-block street of neat, narrow, often dilapidated three-story Georgians in the borough of Marylebone since then absorbed into Westminster—and just round the block from a public baths with marvelous seven-foot tubs Lorna and I used in shifts during a water crisis our first winter, listening to the locals hollering pop songs from cubicle to cubicle. My room that I had painted off-white and at first kept free of possessions was not, as you may imagine, like an interrogation chamber—though at first it was as bookless as the early life of a 1954 draftee whose G2 loyalty check proves his mom and fiancée to have had no traffic with communists—and newspapers did pile up with occasional unread alumni reviews; and the security of that room, and of that rented house (and of that year 1955 in England featuring the autumn debate in Commons on the defectors Burgess and MacLean when Eden with Senator McCarthy in mind asked how far “we” were to go in pursuit of greater security) I see now was haunted by some secret and possible heroism, and a college friend Reb Needles from Chicago wrote that I. F. Stone had done a piece on the Watkins Committee report as a great antifascist event and in listing the Senate honor roll of Fulbright, Flanders, and Morse, Hayden, Hennings, and Hendrick-son—not to forget Benton who first looked into that demented American’s financial affairs—the writer had called them all (even Jenner)
Senator
but had singled McCarthy out again and again as just McCarthy, which may have seemed to say it all but said still more and left the man alone and distinct.