Lookout Cartridge (61 page)

I climbed the two half-flights of carpeted stairs.

I looked around the DiGorros’ door for a key.

When I went back downstairs I heard an engine fade. I found a ground-floor hall through to the rear and a door to the dark garden. The far end of the garden seemed higher than my end perhaps because of the mound of compost and junk that crested thornily above the low fence dividing it from the bottom of the opposite garden and two lighted windows at the back of the house beyond.

I got into a shed and hauled myself with surprising ease because it was dark onto a balcony. Behind me I heard a movement in the garden. The garden would be called a back yard in America. In the late summer sun I had had a drink on this balcony with Dagger and the baby and Alba nursing her. The French windows opened when I depressed the handle, and I was in the big room they used for everything except sleeping and entertaining. Dagger used this wonderfully full yet clear and open room to work in, but he often worked in the living room on the street side at the fatal table which you who have me may by now remember, if by now but dimly.

The familiar sweet and dairy-sour scent of the baby grew stronger in the hall. Yellowish light from a street lamp came through the baby’s room to where I stood as if projected in the hall with the doorway of Dagger and Alba’s bedroom behind me. Their bed was smoothly pale; a dial glowed, and by looking off-target I could tell it was ten twenty.

On a table in the balcony room my fingers found a coolness I knew to be a sheet of mica. I had bought some stained sheets cheap and had given Dagger two to try as makeshift insulation under the base of a living-room amplifier that was heating up. A strip of this flexible mica sensitively inserted could have sprung the lock of the front door for me. We had not been reimbursed for Corsica. A god does not think twice about an overdraft, but I thought again about the science-hobby exec Red Whitehead at this moment watching pro football at home in Long Island; my cut from him was small enough, but Nixon’s devaluation which in itself mattered little more to me than to a rich tourist touched off familiar reflections on the cost of living and the rising price of land. There was apparently a cat in the garden scratching in the compost or fishing from the rim of a half-open dustbin. A car engine arrived suddenly on the street side and died and I was through the hall brushing some half-open door on the way and into the living room looking out, but in the street no one moved. Matters were not exactly crystal clear. But they were neither as distant nor as shifting as a week ago. In the dim gleam of the table by the window where I had seen hundred-foot and two-hundred-foot spools and their cans and lids strewn and film cork-screwed everywhere and draping off onto the carpet, my fingertips hit a slender cigar and then picked up a sticky patch, perhaps a dried wine spill Alba had not seen late at night when she was in bed and Cosmo and Dagger were batting around the future of Allende or the death penalty or Ted Kennedy. Across the room in front of the round, carburetor-like slide-projector my hands found the red bowl of Jaffa oranges and soft leathery tangerines, and stiff-stemmed, hard, wax-paper-smooth apples green, yellow, or red, I couldn’t tell, that Alba, with her fear of not having fresh fruit and vegetables, invariably overstocked. My toe hit something heavy, it was the offending amplifier which Dagger had moved down from its stand. I could see he had removed the lattice cover, under which, as I could feel, the tubes were not all bare, some had metal housing over the glass.

Back in the balcony room I lit Krish’s lighter before a large glass-fronted cabinet of shelves. Inside were five cigarette lighters, three flashlights standing like the TNT that had got onto our film in August, a dozen little cigar-packs, and a cubic cache of Kodak and Agfa-35 film. In a lower shelf were four brand-new Japanese lenses in their boxes, four lens-dusting blower-brushes, a few flat yellow boxes of 4X movie film. In the shelf below—and as I bent, my pack slipped up like the yellow air tanks in the Gulf of Ajaccio—was a goodly trove of Beaujolais and Teachers scotch, and in front three Sony 110 tape recorders brand new in their boxes flanked by a stack of cassettes in theirs and a stack of typewriter ribbons in their boxes, a dozen or more.

Which returned me to the living room across from the projector to look behind the turntable on a bookshelf that extended outward at knee-level; there had been a couple of the Nagra tapes there once, but now they were gone. In the dark it may be harder to get angry. I did not know if I was looking successfully forward. Can one be angry about the future? Alba’s curtains were of fine Indian cotton, and the light that came through them sifted out the reds and oranges and purples but left the weave and the print as if on a shadow screen.

When the delicate splitting sound came from the back of the flat I went at once to face it. But in the balcony room I found nothing more than the draft stirring up the papers between the two typewriters across from the glass cabinet on the long work table that was in fact a hollow door. I closed the French windows and retrieved three sheets from the floor and one from the chair seat. A car stopped, but I did not go back where I’d come from to look. I lit Krish’s flame and read a letter evidently from an American telling Dagger they’d been through all this before and if he was willing to take the movie projector right now he could have it for a low low rock-bottom price. The second sheet was a note from Monty Graf under the monogram of a London hotel dated Thursday: “If, as you say, you are counting on Cartwright’s diary to
advertise
your film, perhaps I should see a piece of it.” Between the lines there was a familiarity: off to see a man in Coventry; back Saturday; Claire unnecessarily worried; Jan in retreat between Art and social life; that little actor’s to blame.

At that instant, like an axis, two sets of sounds joined street and garden: the slam of car doors; the clang of a dustbin lid; a voice I’d heard calling Hey Dag; and a cat’s yowl like an arcing nerve.

On my way to the living room I again hit the open door in the hall and this time slid the pack off onto the floor. On the living-room threshold I heard steps on the stairs, but I continued to the street window and saw, just soon enough to fall away beside the semitrans-parent curtain, a man who was not Cosmo leaning against Cosmo’s white three-wheeler in a heavy pale Faerile sweater, a man who I thought had a heavy, moustached cheer about him like a Games Master or like Dagger’s when he carved up a high roast of PX ribs or ran his motorbike the wrong way up a narrow noontime street in Soho benevolently greeting outraged pedestrian definitions of the law—for Dagger in some highly developed sense of the warning above the bar of a Hebridean pub

took credit.

When the upstairs bell rang, then rang again, I wondered who would wake the DiGorros. I moved halfway across the living room.

There was the soft crack of a lock. I let myself down onto the couch and the papers crackled in my parka pocket when I curled up in a sleeping position. The hail light went on, and there was a bump of something being deposited on the floor which had to be near my pack which was against the wall by the hall closet. Before the front door closed again and the steps went downstairs, one of the stranger sounds I’ve ever heard came from Cosmo’s voice: it was my name with a question mark.

The objects in this flat might yield the film.

Cosmo and the other went away and I turned off the hall light and went back to Dagger’s table in the balcony room and with Krish’s lighter looked through the letters and bills and notes to himself that Dag had accumulated. There was nothing explicit on the film unless Monty had written the note Thursday of this just-ending week, and Dagger had told the truth, and my diary was advertising a real film, in which event the film existed. But still only in part? The Softball Game. Maybe more. What more? Why more? The 8-mill. cartridge? The one we’d added the night we came back from shooting the air base? The Unplaced Room unmentioned to Claire?

There was too much here: too much between Dagger’s pica standard and Alba’s elite portable; too much between on my left the poster blow-up of Trotsky in his tortoise-shell glasses with a very young man with an open face beside him (as if photographed together when in fact there was a panel line dividing them) and on my right across above the glass cabinet Mercator’s northern and southern hemispheres framed by Alba; too much between (at the balcony end on the far side of the French doors from me) a folded playpen (sandwiched between two suitcases) and (toward the hall door) several thigh-high piles of books and a stack of magazines staggering up from the floor; too much between (at that end of the room) the upright little oblong steel stove (about as high as the book piles) in which Alba (who would not have in her house one of the antique French stoves I’d been peddling) burned smokeless fuel—and (surprisingly yet somehow not awkwardly near the door to the hall) a huge white paper lantern ballooning down from the ceiling.

Too much even if you did not think of that playpen’s history in our Marylebone house and then as mere clutter in the Highgate house when we didn’t have a third child. Too much whether you knew or not that Dagger had once sold to a rich Swede a forgery identical to that framed forgery of that Map of the World executed by Mercator in 1538 just eight years before the set of observation instruments he had made for Charles V for his campaigns was destroyed by fire—the map lost for three centuries to be found in New York just thirty-six years after Catherwood’s Jerusalem holocaust, a mental montage which in the dark of this room might be more visible than the object itself behind the glass of Alba’s impeccably cut, narrow white frame.

Too much even if you did not place among the college youths who came down to Coyoacán to help guard Trotsky the New Yorker Bob Harte paneled with Trotsky in this poster visible to the eye of memory if not to the eye of Krish’s flame from where I stood at the balcony end of the balcony room looking on a table for a film.

The stiletto button touched my palm and I pulled out of my pocket the papers which the draft I had caused by leaving the French windows open had blown off the table. The third letter was from an Air Force sergeant alerting Dagger to a special sale of Super-8 in minimum large lots. I blew out Krish’s flame and strode out to the hall closet, Alba’s closet; for one piece of our film was the 8 cartridge shot the night we came back from the base, and the 8 that Dagger said had burned was the cartridge Alba had taken of a friend’s baby, but if Dagger was concealing the fact that the film had not been destroyed, and he’d slipped up somehow telling me the spoiled cartridge on the living-room table was the baby picture, why not put together the possible existence of our own Super-8 cartridge and the inviolate privacy of Alba’s closet—where, as I fit Krish’s lighter and pushed the closet door all the way open, I remembered Alba’s flippers were kept, for the morning we departed for Corsica I had neglected to remind Dagger of them. This closet, with perhaps more of Alba in it than the balcony room or the master bedroom, was exactly between the box and the rucksack, and roughly (along the warped axis aforementioned) between balcony room (or garden) and living room (or street).

In the shelf facing me were boxes of Pampers and layers of baby clothes, the sleeved little vests (that Dagger called
smalls
and that are
undershirts
in American), the nightgowns, the Baby-Gro stretch suits waiting for Michelle, and all the other stuff I’d forgotten about, stacks of blankets the size of towels, more than she’d ever use.

Alba made friends easily in London. She said she could get excited by Dagger’s absence, but the truth was she had many resources beyond her life with him, friends he hardly knew, a Milanese couple who designed furniture, a Greek engineer with twelve toes, an American golfer who had found life in England married to a Spanish girl congenial, several Italian, French, and Swiss
au pairs
, and an old Rumanian Yiddish poet more personally anarchist than his ideologue friends from the Whitechapel of 1914, a good poet who was said except when he was with Alba to speak only Yiddish, who drank anything and sang, and whom Alba had thrown out on one occasion for pissing on the bathroom floor.

She kept her stationery supplies here in this cupboard, not at the long and vulnerable table where her typewriter kept its distance from Dagger’s. In the large lower space from waist-level down she kept her heavy equipment. An olive green tool box, planes, a drill, a level whose window blinked its bubble at Krish’s flame, and hanging from the sides and from the underside of the shelf saws that glinted like swords—then right above a shellacked box marked
BITS
(and beside a hammer) a brace fixed angular on the wall, in shape like the zig-zag crank of the Angenieux zoom we’d used to shoot the naval engagement in the very bay for whose depth I had used flippers hired in the sight of Incremona’s blond sidekick sitting with a girl in a port café across the cobbles from the
plongeur
van. Alba’s flippers—bought for her by Dag—lay one on top of the other at the back of this neat dark closet forgotten the day we left for Corsica and recalled with Corsica tonight. Alba’s Super-8 camera came into view at another cavelike level of her closet. The cartridges in their little yellow cartons were all unexposed, for you could not imagine Alba not having a cartridge developed as soon as she’d shot it; in fact, she rarely used the camera. The cartridge of baby film bizarrely burned by a brief ray of radiance through the atmosphere, through a bright clean windowpane, and through the lens of a magnifying glass had been on its side when I arrived in response to Dagger’s call. There were burn marks on the sides; my feelings I had thought at the time were like the 16-mill. corkscrewed around the table but may have been more like the ruined 8 still acrid and even (I thought for a moment, visibly) smoking inside—a cartridge browned at the edges but not noticeably harmed.