Lookout Cartridge (19 page)

Between engagements you have time in your hands. You would not say to one of those airmen in 1970 go out and come in again, even if you were really a teacher at the NATO first-strike base where the University of Maryland’s worldwide contract with the Defense Department to supply college courses finds particular embodiment in the large and cheerful presence of Dagger DiGorro for whom you substituted this evening. He arranged it with the sergeant, who would in any case not tell the U.K. program-director, not that there is anything to tell except that Dagger and his French wife Alba are visiting her parents in La Frette near Paris this weekend, and you have nothing to do here at Bentwaters Air Force Base (having come by tube, train, and official car a considerable but enclosed distance) except discuss with the men (and one captain’s wife) the effects of technology on government and then for the bulk of the period give Dagger’s exam, for all of which he’s paying you twenty-five dollars American plus expenses but you won’t take it. A Bauer upright piano stands against the wall near the door behind you. You’ve done stints for him before but you have never felt a base as you feel this one tonight, the American security of a capsule suburbia with trees in the right places and prowling station wagons and street signs. The captain is taking his wife to Covent Garden to the opera next week, she is quiet and fluent and tough and content; three kids in the class are going home, with two years of college credit packed away somewhere. After class they were courteous and probably drew conclusions from your beard. You told them Mr. DiGorro would discuss their exams with them next period. The evening drew these people away to their duty-jobs, to barracks, to off-base housing, and then there was your Air Force station wagon and your driver, a black man who didn’t say much coming and doesn’t say much going, except that he’s driving you to Ipswich not Wickham Market, which will be better for you, you won’t have to change—and you imagine better for him in some unstated way too, though it is perfectly possible that he is sitting down passing time. He brakes smartly at the guard gate. You ask if he comes to London, how long he’s been in, what he thinks of the war, and you get the briefest possible answer and chuckle to each as if he’s been trained how to talk to spies. You do not ask him where he comes from, but he tells you New York and adds that he’s got a mechanic’s job waiting for him there. He calls you sir. He wants to talk now—but it’s too late, your train is coming in.

Your train like a tunnel draws you home to London from England, from America, from nowhere, from another tube, from an official station wagon piloted by a Negro chauffeur. On the train you wonder how easy this easy life in England really is, and you wonder how on a couple of hundred feet of relentless film you could find the quality of American life at Bentwaters. Or, now you think of it, at Alconbury, where the U.S. Air Force has brought in falcons to countervent the starlings that threaten the flights.

7

I had never come back so soon. Five days Stateside, less. I have come home to London in January and from the lower deck of a red bus have seen through shop windows tradesmen in their long, light brown workcoats or from the high-slung roominess of a taxi felt, like some intricate certifying of my own privacy, the route the driver’s awesome knowledge of London zig-zags down unheard of residential streets but here (more often called
roads
) that curve into crossings I didn’t know I knew where I’ve changed buses on the way home a hundred times or looked at a locksmith’s or passed a medallion portrait of a glistening horse in the window of a betting shop, or contemplated a bank of Cox’s at the sight of which like the mottling streams of rose down the pale honey skin, saliva springs under the tongue-roots, for Cox’s Orange Pippins, however dry they sound when you shake them and hear unique among apples the rattle of seeds at the core, hold round each drop of fleshly sugar a sheen of tart no New York apple yellow red or even green as far back as those high-shouldered pale-streaked Red Delicious of the thirties and forties my mother chose on Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights ever had—zags in, zigs out—the London cab corners up one spoke of the map, down another, and on from one to another of the city’s interior circumferences as if swung into the next neighborhood—women queueing at a Request Stop, dun brick semidetacheds, an obscure shoe shop, a corner pub with a promising name in gold, a radio rental, then just before the inevitable Indian restaurant, a news agent who sells Cornish ice cream.

London villages, almost.

Once not long ago I came back from the other direction, from Dieppe, and at Newhaven it was as if everyone was on grass, a calm like slow-motion. Anything to declare? A wave of my hand, two hundred fags, a bottle of claret. Thank you. Thank you.

Then’
k you
again, for even here at the Newhaven boat-train pier where after the watchful French these people seem Ruritanian, they don’t want not to be the last to say thanks. And I let them. I like them. What is the matter with me?

Jenny falls to the ice of the Queensway rink and her hand splays out and Lorna calls from behind us, Her fingers!

I have come home to London in the spring. In spring rain. In St. Louis there was a rainbow when I left. Coming home I have heard the rain touching the leaves in our square, and when Lorna opened her mouth to kiss me and then sent me out again to the Express Dairy, the big wheezing Welshman didn’t even know I’d been gone three weeks and when he put a packet of biscuits and a small marmite like a jar of dark brown ink out of my school past down on the counter he said, Well then, what do you hear from the States?

But now, though I knew that the burglary and Phil Aut’s trip meant I had to be in London, I was aware of having been drawn away from an equal scene that made a demand that was equally immediate, and as I tried to have a few hours of sleep Sunday night in a bed-and-breakfast hotel in Knightsbridge and my teenage son Will was saying in my sleep, What English word has six consonants in a row? I counted 16-mm. spools on Dagger’s work table, but they moved so I lost count but in the dark confusion of losing count of all those thousands of tangled frames a sound came clearly off the optical print repeating like some vehicular cadence (in nights of old when lays were cold and castles not particular, they lined her up against the wall and did her perpendicular; but can you be two places at once?). And just before the maid knocked at seven with my tea I woke muttering, Unless you’re Phil Aut.

But listen to this. At ten I saw my daughter Jenny. I saw her come out of the Knightsbridge gallery. The door was held by the Connecticut actor Reid, but because of my angle across the road I didn’t see in.

At the bus stop he kissed her and a bus came and he kissed her again and then she didn’t get on and seemed to nod back down the block. They walked back slowly past the gallery and I window-opped, and then Jenny kissed him quickly and as I expected entered the Knightsbridge tube station. Piccadilly Line to Holloway Road, 271 bus to Highgate Village. She might be going home.

Reid walked back toward the gallery. He went in. Then he came out followed by a red-haired woman in a bright blouse, short suede jacket, and bluejeans whom I’d seen somewhere. At the bus stop they happened to stop. They were arguing. Reid kissed the woman and she gripped his hand. They were arguing. They moved on. When he talked he looked at her and she looked straight ahead. When she interrupted and-turned to him he looked straight ahead. He put an arm around her, she leaned on him, kissed his cheek or neck, then broke away and flagged a cab and left him at the curb with his hands up. She got in and the cab went on in the direction of the tube, and in an antique-shop window (so as to have my back to Reid) I saw Cosmo’s Indian come out of the gallery and automatically flag the cab but then drop his shoulders, perhaps seeing that the yellow top light wasn’t on, yet he seemed also with one now pointing finger to show he saw who was in the cab. Then it stopped and the red-haired woman I think hailed him and he ran and got in.

Reid watched, but as the cab pulled off for the second time and he turned to go on, his eyes crossed me and I turned to my shop window just in time to see that he looked my way an extra second.

The Indian had had on a heavy white turtle-neck, dark trousers; the woman inside the cab on the edge of her seat had become shadowy as if stripped of the flashing green of her blouse and the deep, once-washed look of her denim-blue and the flash of her hair. And my own Jenny, a quite gray delicacy in her light long hair, had had under her arm the black zippered portfolio I’d brought her from New York two years ago, but when she’d turned to be kissed her inky slicker opened to show a sky-blue high-neck mini-dress I’d never seen. As for her guerrilla-theater actor Reid, I know him as you can only know someone you’ve deliberately watched but never shaken hands with, never met except once in passing at second base. He’d spent two years at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh and he lived now in a Victorian square in Chalk Farm in the basement of a house scheduled for demolition, and the third thing I’d ascertained while standing on second base after my hit to right field and an instant before discovering that Dagger had broken his promise not to film me, was that Reid (who as you may recall was Cosmo’s second baseman and who seemed somehow not to know I was Jenny’s father) spoke of London with that tone of the American who’s had a year maybe and knows the ropes and will tell you a few tricks and get off a remark about English laziness or the future of the Labour Party or if you mention the British Museum, not having gone there in ages, or (to show intimacy with London) this Camden Town pub whose Saturday night talent show (with a transvestite climax) where he’d taken two slumming Foreign Office friends and made the mistake of mentioning to a couple of hostel shoppers in the Underground who were living out of a guitar. Reid’s long, slow strides gave the illusion of height. He seemed too swarthy for Ridgefield, Connecticut. He had the beginning of a pony tail. Where was his motorbike? He was the only one left to follow. When he turned back toward the art gallery once again—this time from the bus stop rather than the tube side—I thought maybe he was going to pick up a third female, say with lustrous silver hair dyed black. But he went on to the corner where he bought a paper, lit a cigarette, looked at the headlines, and suddenly entered the Knightsbridge tube station.

It was all as vivid as you could want, like a form—two becoming one. And like some imminent revelation that disarms us in order that we may then think we see it, it seemed not to require understanding. It was also like some future after you are dead and you see as if aesthetically. But you see, I knew who the woman was. She was the red-haired woman Dagger’s Beaulieu paused upon when Savvy Van Ghent was chasing the foul.

If Phil Aut knew my face, was he in that gallery right now? It was his gallery.

I seemed to lose Reid on the Underground platform. I got into a car with the brandlike No Smoking red-circle-with-a-blue-bar across it in the windows. Hyde Park Corner. Green Park. The words open and close like ideas. Piccadilly. Leicester Square. Syllables more layered than pictures. Covent Garden, the ballet-stop when I took Jenny. Holborn, near the Home Office, where aliens renew visas and the stop also for my broker met by chance taking an American girl to see St. Paul’s. Russell Square, where Cosmo’s right-fielder in our film got off for the British Museum in quest of Frederick Catherwood. King’s Cross, under whose acre of Victorian greenhouse roof Dagger entertained twice monthly when he taught at the U.S. base Chicksands. Then Caledonian Road, then Holloway Road. Ten nonsmoking Underground stops that made a clear avenue from Phil Aut’s art gallery within striking distance of the Queen’s preferred department store Harrod’s to the broad jumbled itemized working-class life of the road that you associated both with Holloway Prison—not in fact in that road at all—and with Friday and Saturday’s shopping list even if you were Lorna Cartwright coming down from Highgate or Geoff Millan, who lived closer, between Holloway and Highgate in the area called Archway (because of a high overpass further up Archway Road preferred occasionally by suicides), an area like Holloway, though Geoff lived off a church corner in a road so cleanly hushed you might have been abducted through a tunnel of compressed atmosphere into a capsule as private as any residential English quintessence like where we lived on the west side of Highgate three-quarters of a mile on and three hundred feet higher past Whittington Hospital and the Singapore nurses from good polygamous families who used to babysit, and the railed little podium up the Hill enshrining the famous bronze cat.

I got off at Holloway Road. I waited for the lift rather than climb the long, spiraling stairs. I rode up thinking, Well I’m here, I may as well take my bus home to Highgate and see Jenny even at the risk of giving away too much.

But there boarding my 271 was Reid.

The bus had waited a few seconds for him as he ran out of the tube station, and this gave me the chance to catch it, but if he hadn’t gone up to the top deck at once he might have turned and seated himself and seen me pay the driver and stare at his narrow black change-tray like a tourist who has learned shillings only to find a decimal system, or as if a power to which my brain is normally raised had been lowered and an avenue had not opened its usual alignment. I don’t mean I was seeing nickels, dimes, and quarters, but I must have been tired; yet now another and tangential alignment opened and closed in the form of whether returning, say, as early as tomorrow to Sub’s in New York would not only counter the drag between my body-clock and transatlantic time but pass me into a second, other New York. I at once recycled this thought, for it was not an avenue, at best an alley with the littered vividness only of dustbins upset, orange peel rocking, green wine bottles, and brown roses too ripe to get rid of their petals—and Reid was topside with his newspaper, and the bus’s erratic motion had swung me right round the silver pole I held and I must sit where Reid wouldn’t see me when (as I readily assumed) he came downstairs to get off at the last stop, the top of Highgate Hill, Highgate Village so-called.