Lookout Cartridge (34 page)

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.

Sub had phoned for me, she said, and Monty had called down but I’d been in the shower. I said I’d phone back.

She asked if I wanted the bedroom door open and when I kept rubbing my hair and let the towel hang half over my face, she closed the door as far as the latch but not air the way. There was a doomed impracticably in this and in some spirit of her behavior that made me half-expect her to say, We mustn’t disturb Monty on the phone.

He was in fact on the phone, I had come from the bathroom and found his voice but far away like a crossed line whose voices interfere but aren’t close enough to hear.

I put on my wrinkled shirt. I was ravenous.

Claire said, That story about Dagger, it gave the wrong impression.

I asked if she thought his laughing about the dead dog would make me think Dagger cruel—and she said she didn’t mean I wasn’t his friend.

I felt it wasn’t just that story that had brought her down to speak to me; yet, not to be too smart, I did think that that story was part of why she came.

I asked if she had quit Outer Film yet, and she said, Oh no, and please not to say anything about it—but then she grinned and receded into some cleft of herself saying, But who
could
you say anything about it to?

And so I opened my trousers to tuck in my shirt and I asked her if Dagger had known there were
two
films—after all, if Monty knew, Dagger must have known.

Claire ran that one through her vacuum tubes and decided as I hoped that last Thursday evening Monty had told me about the two films—surely if I said Monty, then Monty had
mentioned
two, and he would hardly have mentioned the two films and not explained what he meant.

Yet she said nothing and so either Monty had tossed out some menacing riddle for dessert or Claire found the real fact of two films impossible to talk about with me.

Instead she recurred to what I’d suspected was her real motive here, her rebuke upstairs when I impugned Dagger’s sensitivity: You know Uncle Dag as well as anyone and he knows things and goes his way and what he knows and doesn’t know is probably much more a mystery to me than you—right?

I let the two-film idea drop. I would check it out when I made the new move I’d decided on in the shower.

I discreetly opened my door and went back to the bureau where my necktie lay.

Claire was a very pretty girl who could be boring. I had her full attention now and she talked and talked while (like something else I couldn’t quite lay my fingers on) Monty’s voice continued upstairs giving me intimations of my own irrelevance that I did not exactly mind because I had Claire, though I had real feelings only in the shape of more Dagger. I did not regret bringing up Jenny in England. Not that she was going to be someone’s helpmate-wife, and I can’t imagine I ever wanted that for her; but she is succinct.

Dagger took Claire to Freehold. That’s in Jersey, quite near the shore; and there’s a track.

I said I knew.

She was thirteen, she’d never forget. Dagger was about thirty-five, he kidded her a lot and gave her the feeling he did anything she wanted to do but that wasn’t so, but it didn’t matter, only the impression. Her parents were breaking up and then not breaking up. Her father is a gum specialist in Philadelphia. They would talk behind closed doors so that she wouldn’t hear, except what she heard was even worse because she only half-heard it. Then they would sit down with her, they were always sitting down with her. Dagger took her to Freehold one weekend and saved her another sitting-down session with her parents, who would be murmuring behind closed doors, then emerge and call her and they’d sit down on some of the plastic-covered decorator furniture and she would be told gently and boringly the problems her parents were trying to work out, but she didn’t care or thought she didn’t or knew she didn’t know how, and she hadn’t had her periods very long but they stopped and her mother took her to her own doctor who phoned a shrink, but her father put his foot down; but that didn’t matter, she’d sit at these sitting-down sessions in which her parents would so patiently define some of their differences and like some kind of patient herself she could be told the true possibilities of the situation and all these months she never heard her parents fight. But for all their sitting down with her and opening up for her the problems, she’d have liked it better if her father had said I’m fucking someone else and I don’t want to fuck your mother and I haven’t for some time; but maybe she’d forgotten what it was like to be thirteen and all this was unfair to her mother in defense of her father with whom she knew she could take risks without spoiling what she felt for him. Still she always felt that this attention she was officially receiving was directed to some thing called Our Daughter Claire or called Claire, like from whom we will have no secrets, so she felt like really a thing instead of the mature person they stupidly hoped they were treating her as in their dull imaginations, and if everything was so out in the open why did she then not know what was happening? Were they splitting or weren’t they? And she now saw that Dagger took her to Freehold that weekend to get her out of the house, though at the time it was just a big thing and this was worth something too, it was fun, he took her to the races and up close the turf the trotters ran in seemed deep and soft as a farm and Dagger explained trotters and pacers, and they went to dinner at the American Hotel with all these horse trainers and a cute antique rocking horse and stately prints of horses, and Dagger introduced her to the owner of the hotel who lived up on Main Street in a big house with a long porch, and Dagger took her to visit a mad old man, the father of one of his school buddies who had disappeared down around the Gulf of Honduras, and Dagger bought her an onyx elephant and took her to the local Walter Reade movies and fell asleep, but what she liked best was having griddle cakes with him Sunday morning in the dining room of the American Hotel even more than his incredible long story of bringing ancient maps out of France wrapped round his leg so he had to walk stiff-legged with a cane and in front of the English customs man got such an itch inside his knee the sweat started out all over his face and he told the man his leg made him nauseous so the man decided to search Dagger’s suitcase.

Claire asked if I understood all this nonsense and before I could speak she said this was after Dagger had left New Orleans where he’d worked on a charter boat and lived with a girl who was on the
Times Picayune
and through her had sold to the paper a photo of a fishing accident in the Gulf and the picture won a prize. But the thing was that when they got back to Philadelphia Sunday, Claire’s father had left for good, and when Claire told her mother what a great time she’d had with Uncle Dagger, her mother said he was really only a cousin by marriage, but after that Claire got her periods again.

She asked if I worried about Jenny. There was something genuine in Claire’s asking, but something false in the moment of silence after.

Monty was on the phone. I asked how she’d met him. She said that was another long story. I asked why she’d asked about Jenny before, and Claire said No reason. I said You know the man in the Hebrides. Claire sat on the bed holding her breath. I said, If you remember I said Jenny had probably gone north.