Lookout Cartridge (8 page)

I had cut back to Goody’s record store. I was shot at the entrance by a toy pistol that fired actual wooden cartridges. Down stairs I found the section and looked for the M’s. One of the big bands was into a fox trot of “I Remember You” but got rejected, and in the lesser noise of voices speaking, a German accent with the authority of a root canal specialist was lecturing a customer:
Keep
then your monaural but you ruin your stereo records if you don’t buy a stereo pickup. The customer was saying something, but now a crash of strung steel covered the ceiling and at once lowered itself upon us like a lid drummed by our own ears at a 4–8 shake tempo so established that the group seemed to have been playing sound-proofed till some Goody employee hunting a disc opened their door. This siege of feeling may have been the Stones, I didn’t ask, but Jenny gets
Rolling Stone
, and between the instants at which I spotted the dark blue edge of Lorna’s album
Blue
and put my fingers on it and drew out the bluegloamed face, I knew again that all my daughter had asked me to bring her back was a goddarnned memory, she’d come upon the words Monday night while Lorna was upstairs packing for me. A farewell dispute—and Jenny knew her words
bring me back a memory
orphaned her in my eyes and lessened me. We had more than an argument. It was the first time Jenny—christened Virginia, called by us Ginny, changed by her to Jenny—hadn’t asked me to bring her something from the States and I gave myself so little leeway I pressed her hoping to calm her, but she held on to a signal she’d found in her just-uttered words, yet now not with a very young woman’s clear, spiky sex but a late adolescent girl’s subtler uncertainty as to how much she might have to hurt herself: as if the five words she’d come upon in cruel delight—bring
me back a memory
—had become a venture she must see through. Then with a friendliness I didn’t like she said, You and that film.

You can’t help, I said.

If I could only get away to my plane and to New York Jenny would be safer in London free of this nonsense about postponing A-levels and taking a job in San Francisco, where she’d never been, or New York, which she stuck in only so I’d think of her seeing her grandparents.

I paid Goody’s by check using an old Shell credit card and a New York driver’s license in whose fold a snap of Will had got stuck. The woman took card, license, and picture, turned my check over onto the cash register’s little counter, poised her pen and asked me my address as if she’d forgotten it, and I automatically gave Sub’s, the one on the license. Will had on a bikini and below his snorkel mask his mouth was grinning.

Back on Third I bought a pack of absorbent rings which give off sandalwood scent when the light bulbs they fit onto are lighted. How near the Outer Film office was I; I got out my wallet, my Manhattan address-locater, and as I finished dividing the first three figures by 2 and subtracting 12 for Avenue of the Americas I was accosted by a heavy-set black man in a lumpy overcoat and no socks who asked me for a dollar, and when I automatically said, Sorry I don’t have any change, he looked at my address-locater torn from some host’s Yellow Pages long ago, his hair was cropped close to his skull, he shrugged and I felt I had earned him his dollar and in the breeze carefully took it out of my wallet and handed it over. He didn’t thank me and as I looked at his splayed nose I got a spread of adrenalin in my face: I hadn’t paid Myrna the eighteen ten.

He said, Don’t go too far downtown, man, the wind is blowing the high buildings and they got these flakes of asbestos coming down like first snow.

I asked if he knew that at Mt. Sinai they’d found asbestos in someone’s uterus. His eyes followed my address-locater back into my wallet and he said, I believe you, man, that’s the important thing. Hard-hat fell thirty floors, you hear? I just got into town, I said, I’ve been away. I believe you, man, so you didn’t read it in the papers—fell thirty floors through a steel grate, some other cats are standing there but this hard-hat he just went right through, nothing left on the platform, only his helmet, right?

Right, I said, and he nodded and turned away.

The hem of his coat was coming down. He said over his shoulder, Got my back to the wall.

At the corner of one of those phone booths that expose you as if to single you out, I tried Myrna. I listened but heard only the traffic and wondered if these booths ever got hit. Two taps came on the glass, I listened some more and the tapping got heavy and there was a face close to me and I left the booth and left my quarter in the broken box unreturned.

If Tris and Ruby still liked bedtime stories I could tell them one tonight. How Sub and I when we were kids in Brooklyn Heights once burrowed a tunnel through a thirty-foot-long snowdrift and took our lunch in there and a friend of ours tried to wall us in; or how Sub got concussed in a doubles match against Brown, or how the Great Train Robbery got pulled off, or how Dagger got his name.

Instructions repeat: If something from Outer Film, go on through new open circuit.

If nothing, get looped.

I could tell them Beauty and the Computer.

Ruby wouldn’t like it.

If Myrna had gone and Ruby and Tris were spending the night with their mother Rose, and Sub was at the dentist, I could be freer with the phone.

When I got home Myrna was in the hall with her coat on.

I entered to the tune of a commercial in the living room and Sub’s angry voice. Myrna called, I’m going now.

I said, I have your eighteen ten.

The TV stopped and Sub’s voice was saying, If this room isn’t picked up there will be no TV
period
. I’ll take this discount portable which has proved its portability between here and the premises of our gifted repairman who specializes exclusively in new discount sets and I will drop it out of this living-room window.

Sub came into the hall, he had on a white T-shirt and bore a pile of folded laundry just high enough to touch his shaggy beard. Myrna said to me, Got my money right here in my bag.

I
paid her, said Sub.

What if it hit somebody, said Tris offstage.

They’d put Daddy in jail, said Ruby.

Tris said, In the Tombs.

I wouldn’t let them, said Ruby.

Myrna left and Sub was facing me and in the light from behind him his dark glasses seemed darker. He needed to speak, and to an intelligent white adult roughly of his background; but I wanted to ask about phone calls and I saw myself waiting for a phone call and saw the two of us over the midnight hill and deep into late late time watching on TV
King Kong
we saw together during the Korean War about the time I entered the Coast Guard.

Facing me Sub was nonetheless addressing Tris and Ruby who were still out of sight in the living room so his voice was loud: Myrna gets two-fifty an hour plus carfare for, among other things, cleaning up this apartment, and you come home from a private school that’s costing me five hundred dollars a month and not only spread your printing press and uncapped magic markers over the indestructible rug your gifted mother bought when we moved in but also the caran d’ache Swiss modeling dreck with guaranteed highly perishable gouache colors she was good enough to buy you today.

We didn’t want to mess up
our
rooms, said Tris.

You were at the dentist, said Ruby.

Myrna had gone. When the panhandler had accosted me outside the record store I hadn’t quite reached the result of my division and subtraction but I thought it was forty-nine.

Sub hadn’t budged and now he was addressing me too.

My hands came out of my trenchcoat.

I phoned the dentist for two solid hours, he said. I couldn’t get in between the busy signals.

You were calling him? I said.

Rose phoned Myrna she
was
taking the children, so I wanted to come home and give them some money and see that Ruby had her asthma medicine, so I’ve got to put off the dentist, right? But I couldn’t get him, and rather than pay for a missed appointment I find a gifted cabdriver who immediately gets stuck in traffic, and I reach the dentist’s just as his girl’s getting a busy signal at
my
office or so she says, she’s been phoning patients half the afternoon, Doctor Wall went home at lunchtime with a colitis attack. When I get home I find Myrna tried to reach me at the office to say Rose
won’t
be taking Tris and Ruby after all—if you want to know why I’m suffering from brain damage—Rose came over earlier in the day with the caran d’ache for them and would have left it with the doorman because she is a mysterious fairy goodmother but we haven’t had a doorman this week because he had some trouble getting into his own apartment house uptown the other night, but Rose was in luck, only Myrna was here because the children’s bus was delayed at the garage getting new shocks according to Tris. And meanwhile you, I suppose, have signed a contract for another film.

Sub disappeared into Ruby’s room so I was alone in the front hall. Sub behind me to my left, the children around a threshold to my right, rustling, straightening, fitting.

Any messages? I said.

Sub’s voice was as if he’d put his head in a closet. All
I’ve
achieved today is provide a setting for you to receive phone calls.

They were on a pad in the kitchen next to a package of chopped meat the color of crushed strawberries.

The charter man had only been able to wait half an hour.

The other call had been a woman who said if I wanted the diary I’d called about, phone this number. Myrna had written it down. It wasn’t Claire’s flat or her office.

Who then is Monty Graf? Sub leaned into the kitchen, hands on the doorway.

I held up the pad.

It’s not there, said Sub, Myrna was in the john when he called, Ruby turned up the TV, my head was full of broken glass. But I know he said he’d meet you tomorrow night about the film and it would be in your interest to deal directly with him and you’d know what he meant. I think that’s right. It’s been a day.

Where did he say to meet?

Someone will call. Is this
another
film?

If anything happens, I said (and took a deep breath thinking in London
call
can mean
come
but here it means
phone
), remember the name Monty Graf.

Sub listened.

Two weeks ago tonight—which is just a week after the film was ruined—this American Cosmo who lives in Ladbroke Grove with a lot of other people tells Dagger that an Indian he’d mentioned Dagger to is still looking to borrow a movie camera. Cosmo’d phoned a week before, and Alba, who is Dagger’s wife, said Dagger and I were through filming. Cosmo told his Indian and the Indian said
he’d
phone Dagger the next day about the possibility of using his earner—

Hold it, said Sub, this is
three
weeks ago now.

Right. But the next day—which turned out to be the day the film was ruined—the Indian according to Cosmo forgets to phone Dagger, Cosmo says the Indian has no memory because he lives only in the present though he has a big white file cabinet and a big white flat in Swiss Cottage and works in a gallery in Knightsbridge so he can’t be so dumb—

Hold it, said Sub, who’s Cosmo?

An American who’s always over at Dagger’s eating little round slices of special Austrian wurst that Dagger buys at the Air Force PX. Well now a week after the film was ruined the Indian asks Cosmo to inquire about the camera. Dagger says sorry he gave the Beaulieu back, it was a liability after last week. So you can see I wondered if the Indian wanted just information, and I wondered if the Indian had phoned Dagger’s the morning the film was destroyed while Dagger and Alba were at the PX shopping.

I hope my brain damage isn’t catching, said Sub, and something was happening in the living room.

I looked at the pad. The woman would not be Claire. But was she phoning for Claire, or did Claire at least know about the call, or had Claire herself not received my bait?

I’m trying to entertain you, I said to Sub, but heard in the dark side of my head looping at too few revs per moment in my first words,
if anything happens
. So listen, I got the name of the Knightsbridge gallery and went. I didn’t see any Indian. I liked a picture signed Jan Graf. Wondering where the Indian was, I asked the girl at the desk who Jan Graf might be.

Monty Graf’s grandma, said Sub.

Who but the wife of the gallery owner. And the owner is Mr. Aut, an American. Not
Phil
Aut, said I. Yes indeed, said the girl. But the visit isn’t over. For on the way out I bump into an Indian or Pakistani—probably
the
Indian; and I am sure I’ve seen him before only he looks bigger now in the gallery.

Ruby screamed and started to cry, and Sub jumped.

I have written too much. I have moved too slowly. If only I could have reduced my talk with Sub to a single picture framing say diary pages of mine lying in an open suitcase on a couch recomposed by Myma and a cluttered corner of Sub’s desk with his personalized checkbook open beside the portable radio he gave Rose for her birthday once which this very morning I had been able to reach without getting out of my day bed.

Tris was saying in the living room, Now you’re a member of the secret group, and Ruby said, Look what he put on my hand.

Sub said, I told you to put away the printing set.

He sounded calmer.

I asked if he got our college alumni review. He said he threw it away instantly.

I heard again the urgency of Dagger’s words phoning in the middle of Jenny being difficult Monday night: Let Claire alone, she’s got her job. Our film made trouble for her. She doesn’t know all that’s going on.

I could have told Dagger about Claire’s cable. But I didn’t.

YELLOW FILTER INSERT

Between Ruby and Tris on Ruby’s bed, I am also between them and their father, who is in the living room on the day bed couch having a stiff whiskey.

Ruby in a canary nightgown and broad-brimmed white straw hat with cornflowers round the crown wants me to tell about when Sub and I were children. Tris, who goes to bed later and would not normally be in Ruby’s room at this hour, wants to hear how Dagger got his name. Really Tris wants some extensive conversation he can’t quite envision. He has heard that Dagger is the one I made the film with, that Dagger was a police reporter in California, a beachcomber in the Bahamas, and in the Med a dealer in certain articles including semipriceless eighteenth-century French maps of the Thames estuary. Tris leans back against the bedside wall, his hiking boots of unfinished hide crossed just beyond Ruby’s blanket; on his lap is a king-size paperback open at diagrams of home-made booby traps.