Joseph McElroy: Lookout Cartridge

I phoned Outer Film and there was a voice talking before the ring could start. I asked for Mr. Aut, my gamble worked, and I settled for asking a woman to tell him I’d called and then as if as an after thought added that I’d left part of a diary at Claire’s flat and would Claire mind mailing it on. I said I’d just got in from London and was in a rush. I hung up.

Suspicion is a comfort. I was able to like Claire even less having made this phone call, though now again infused with that uncertain languor I’d felt as I came from the lav and visualized her lying along or across her bed on her belly or her back. But she might almost as well have been talking to some Man from the Moon as talking about me to the Monty Graf who’d inspired inarticulateness in her earlier.

Myrna’s tea mug was on her News . She was older than when I’d seen her in April, it was her smart hair — but there was her long, very bare neck sustaining the brown eyes, and her forearms lay smooth and rich. She sighed and slowly without looking up said, Mr. Cartwright you a regular globe-trotter.

Just another commuter, I said, and she sighed with a little tittering catch in her throat.

The second before I’d hung up, the secretary hadn’t tried to pass me on to Claire, which might mean Claire hadn’t got back there yet. I had to allow for the chance that Phil Aut might not get the message I’d left for Claire, but then again he might.

I wrote one for Myrna to give Claire if she phoned. She might any minute.

Myrna pushed her chair back and said she had her ironing. The phone rang and I handed her my message telling her who it might be and what to say.

But it was Sub. Myrna passed me the receiver. Sub had a late appointment at the dentist, would I pay Myrna eighteen ten. I said, What about the children. Sub said, There’s a slight though tantalizing chance Rose will take them tonight, she knows I have to be in Washington this weekend so this week she wants them on a week night. But Myrna’s there when they get home and I’ll be home no more than an hour after she leaves no matter what happens. It’s exciting, said Sub. He wanted to know if I’d be in for dinner. Myrna was scanning my note.

At a drug store I bought some 3-D cards, the Americana Hotel, Empire State, George Washington Bridge, World Trade Center, Grant’s Tomb. One I sent to my family adding that I’d forgotten what I was to bring home for Jenny. At the soda fountain counter recalling all those lemon cokes after Scout Troop meetings Friday nights, I was so near recalling what she’d asked for that I at least knew it was peculiar and I imagined now that so had been her tone and I suspected I’d done something peculiar with her request, I had my finger almost on it but the thin, heavily made-up elderly woman behind the counter came toward me drying her hands and said, Yes? and I thought and said BLT on white toast, forgetting about American bread.

On my way back to the scene of the accident I stopped in a record shop and looked through the bins of cassettes all tumbled together on sale. An old gent in a camel’s hair overcoat asked me the difference between a cassette and a cartridge — but a girl in a khaki cape and blue-smoked glasses spoke up and said a cassette gives half an hour on each side, an eight-track cartridge means you can flip from the middle of one track to the start of another. When he said he didn’t know why his niece would do that , I added that cartridge and cassette were alike in that you inserted both into solid state systems, and the girl said to the old man, I get it mixed up myself sometimes. He had a drooping white moustache.

A recording ended that I’d barely noticed; rock you’d have to call it, with southern accents and a lot of falsetto — the girl touched the old gent’s sleeve and told him the group was English.

Now You Are Everything and Everything Is You came on and like a sacred loop awaiting release repeated the title words and repeated. And I left the shop convinced the gift I’d forgotten wasn’t anything to do with cassettes.

Halfway down the block I knew Lorna wanted the new Joni Mitchell record.

A trip like this can get away from you and in the middle of a giant traffic that, unlike Lorna, I’d never left though never lost because never gained, you believe that there in a Manhattan avenue, as if at the bottom of some poor type-compositor’s dream surrounded by three-and four-and five-hundred-foot sticks of type, the trip’s idea has been by some regulatory betrayal fed back to your point of departure. But the idea wasn’t just there back in London, any more than you have to come to New York to shop to the music of cassettes. Any more than Dagger’s movie began as we drove across Waterloo Bridge in the middle of the night after a marathon showing at the National Film Theatre, and Dagger said as he often had said, Let’s make a film: and I said, I’ve got an idea.

I know what it is for a trip to drift away from you. I wasn’t exactly showing myself around New York this trip. It’s always a less clear place than the New York of the English papers where key statistics lurk well behind crisp narratives of snipers and rapists and the junky whose luck it was to pinch a wallet full of hot bills.

Sub had to go to Washington this weekend, a rush call to design a program for a new client. I didn’t know what he was doing about the children.

On Third Avenue a library looked ready to open where a car park had been; a carton labeled Encyclopedia Americana was stacked on other cartons in the dusty vestibule. At a sidewalk taco counter next door to a bar I looked the Puerto Rican proprietor (if he was Puerto Rican and the proprietor) in the eye and decided instead to get a bite when I met the charter man.

The scene of the stabbing when I arrived was just another intersection. People brushed past me when the light changed. In the florist’s I asked what had happened to the victim’s car. The proprietor said the man was dead by the time the ambulance got through, they’d covered him up. The phone rang and turning toward it he said, You didn’t think they’re going to leave a car in the middle of the street. I said, I’m in the aerial business, I want to know why that one broke. But the proprietor had picked up and was talking. There were a few deep red sweetheart roses in the refrigerator case and I wanted to take some.

But now a woman with a handful of dark green leaves was standing next to the refrigerator, and some pom-poms behind the glass were the same rusty orange as the enamel butterfly on her breast.

I asked who had covered the man up.

The sweetheart roses were tight and alive.

The woman’s cheekbones were abnormally wide, her chin narrowed nearly to a point. Her gray-black hair was parted in the middle and drawn down close upon her temples and over her ears. She might be thirty-eight, she wore no rings, her lips broke with a light exhalation and her laugh was not only happy it was the laugh I’d heard just after someone said Jersey plates and just as the driver was coming around his car to have it out with the man I was certain was Jim.

You laughed just before the accident, I said.

Call the precinct if you want to know about the car, she said, but they’ll want to know why. You can tell them you’re in the aerial business.

The woman couldn’t help smiling again. She turned her profile to me. In profile you might have thought her face narrow.

The proprietor was saying, But Father Moran, that’s been our price.

The woman said, It was no accident. She reached to close the door she’d come through from the dark storeroom.

Neither blood nor skid tracks marked the site of the stabbing. A garter snap was imbedded in the tar street just beyond the curb. I figured the woman in the florist’s would do something.