Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

I did not recall losing faith in Dagger, yet I had been quite capable of loosening Claire’s faith in him when on Monday over drinks at Monty’s I’d told her the only film developed had been the Bonfire — knowing that Dagger if he’d told her anything about developed footage would have mentioned the Softball Game but not the Bonfire.

Why did he never ask about the diary?

Even when I said Jenny was typing it.

I would have asked Jenny then and there the night she finished typing Hawaiian Hippie and Suitcase Slowly Packed — June 27—what she thought of my speculations on the snap so quickly shot; but she gave me the pages so glumly all I could do was look into her face and murmur, Is it Reid?

My words seemed to move Jenny’s feelings into view: she said there was no telling with Reid, they’d been all around London that day and he had said they were going to the cinema, but after they left Jane and Dudley, Reid had decided he had to split — he’d call her — and Jenny said to me that if she was being punished she’d like to know for what. But when I prolonged that question, she kissed me and went up. And on the 4th of July a week before we set sail for Corsica, Dagger said his lab man had gone on holiday to America but it mustn’t hold up, and when Cosmo who I’d never thought had a key to this flat drove me home in that three-wheeler that looks as if it would take off or tip over he asked if Aut had sold the film to TV, and the question (more interesting than I gave it credit for) passed by in my then strangely released exasperation: I said I was beginning to wonder if Dagger was ever going to get our film processed.

Would Krish have heard my gripe from Cosmo?

Could Reid have heard it from Jenny?

I had not found the film in the things of Alba’s household; I had only three tapes and they could be Stonehenge, Unplaced Room, HH, MCH — the minute hand of the bedroom clock had swept from the straight line of ten twenty round into the acute angle of ten fifty-five. I slid back the long door of the clothes cupboard and felt among neat-stacked boxes behind hanging wool and silk. Alba made a smooth bed. I was beginning to think she and Dagger had gone away. Again I tried the bathroom, stepped over the comb, reached behind some plastic bottles lined up in the window-inset — the tub had a puddle near the drain — the small plastic tub leaning against the wall under the sink was dry. That was the baby’s tub. I had forgotten all that. I remembered Lorna standing legs apart on the pebbly strand, Lorna stroking steadily out through the dark damp sea. I saw her from the boatyard where my partner was trying to buy me out. Lorna stroked beyond the children and out past the pale fat breast-stroker with thick dark hair, Lorna’s steady crawl learned in a New England lake thirty years ago was young and beautiful, and even you who have me would not have guessed that the night before at twelve thirty by my wristwatch she was demanding to know what Stonehenge had to do with “draft deserters” (from one sagging B & B single bed to another across a turquoise carpet on the second creaking floor of that B & B) and then demanded why I had not taken Jenny to Stonehenge. And I had to have something repeated by my boatyard partner, who then observed that I was distracted by the girls bathing, and when granddad the old wheelwright came up and remembered me I had to have something else repeated, being between in more ways than Reid’s with Jan and Jenny (to judge from that curious scene along the gallery street in Knightsbridge, the kisses, the bus stop, the Underground): Jan and Jenny might have in common that he was less or otherwise interested in them than they in him. I sat on the tub-edge and looked at the comb so out of character there dropped on the lino and saw in the still gloam from the kitchen down the hall the tuft sprouting in a tiny languorous arc, and wishing to reach for it I felt the slippery porcelain under my new jeans, and Dudley Allott and I, bare thighs on the tiles of Swiss Cottage pool, shared an illusion of April intimacy that I now see was also intimacy’s authentic shiver, at least for me who was between: for it was the closest he’d come since the night of his appendix forked saffron off a Jewish table into my jaws with (at differing gates and distances) Tessa, Lorna, and the pediatrician’s wife who had not then done her children’s book and who now (as I sat on Alba’s clean tub and listened to Dudley naked the last day of April) sat conversing with animation at a small party at Geoffrey Millan’s, and (as you who have me may know if you can now lay your hand on and insert a flash-forward printed-circuit cartridge heartfelt or cryptic) before the night was over I was to put in an appearance at Geoff’s party:

Catherwood, said Dudley. How odd! I took up Catherwood to interest Tessa. Can you feature that?

I’d known this as far back as New York in ’64—the first flush of Dudley’s interest. I told him so, and he looked at me. I looked down at his belly flapped over his bathing suit. He spoke at length, and I leave you who have me to imagine my occasional responses and the washing of pale green chlorine waves clearer in their refractions than hard crystal.

Whatever was between us, said Dudley (meaning himself and Tessa), it came to take solid forms.

Stones. Violence. Mexico.

The Maya, their sacrifices, their underground rivers in Yucatan, the noses and the lips, the legends. I made her come with me to the British Museum to see what she’d seen on her own before — the wooden lintel from a temple in Guatemala with the halach uinic , the religious chief, seated holding the round shield and the manikin scepter, one of whose legs ends in a serpent’s head; and I’d read about Tikal, the ancient city the lintel came from, and I said someday let’s go see its pyramid temples which are the highest man-made things in Maya country ranging from 143 feet to 229 measuring from the ground to the roof comb, and in fact she’d seen a painting of Tikal, an enclave of powerful structures shadowed by time and perspective into a forbidding scene held off from the viewer who feels he might lose out if he tried to enter — at which point Tessa says Dudley, do me a favor and stop trying to be a poet; she cared about the method of sacrifice and I was unable from my rudimentary reading to say for sure if the heart-excising ritual was common to Tikal or not and she wandered away to look at Egyptian antiquities. I took her to Switzerland, I know you remember, when she had a bad chest but principally to surprise her with the Maya lintels at Basel which are the finest. You can guess how I made the same bloody mistake over and over. I took her to Holland to see the Leyden Plate which is just a hunk of jade 8½ inches by 3 from Guatemala in a shape like a little chisel implement they call a celt —the Leyden Plate was unearthed in 1864 and of the highest importance though not for the ferocious sleepy profiles of animals or gods — the enormous-nosed, dollop-lipped, retreating-chinned profiles Tessa loved — and the captive under the warrior’s sandal. I read Bishop Landa. I read Stephens’ Incidents of Travel . I gave it to Tessa. I tried to intercept her — you know her — but then again I know her. And if it was ever physical it had little to do with whether I took regular exercise or studied breast-beating in the Kama Sutra . For a time I virtually gave up European history except to lecture on it. I took up Catherwood (said Dudley) because I wanted a German Jewish refugee who was obsessed with her mother’s disappearance in a death camp.

Catherwood was between us, the friend of Keats and Shelley, Prescott and Wilkinson, and no one except possibly Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White described him, and there the character Hart-wright goes off to Central America and is a draftsman and the rest of it may not be Catherwood at all — the star-crossed lovers (for he was married) — but the honesty and legality in Hartwright does seem right for the man I find in Stephens’ Incidents and in the drawings; he was a great draftsman and the first to use daguerreotype to record Maya remains, but there is no picture but the self-portrait vaguely self-effacingly at the center of his picture of the Tulum ruins where he’s either paying out or pulling in surveyor’s tape, possibly the same reel they used for the ruins in Jerusalem.