Joseph McElroy: Lookout Cartridge

A cab waiting at the light had a black rubber-looking bumper with button like plugs all along it and a woman driving. The cab moved on, and a little girl in a blue coat kneeling on the back seat waved to me. My eyes came back to the garter snap and the tar.

The woman was next to me and I was exactly where Jim had been before he stepped into the street. She didn’t talk like a gossip.

Someone brought a piece of canvas out of one of these buildings and covered him, but not his face. The man who killed him just stuck the aerial out not even in self-defense, you know what I mean? He didn’t seem shocked. And when he turned and walked away I saw you and you looked like you saw something over your shoulder and you turned around and got out of here in a hurry. It didn’t seem like it was just to miss the crowd. I remember you. That raincoat.

You saw the man’s face.

He turned right at me, he walked past the window, and I looked him over. Good-looking man.

The florist was in his doorway by the pussy willows calling her. Her name was Gilda.

You’d know him again?

Got a picture? She put a hand on my arm. You’re not police and you’re not an aerial salesman. You don’t feel like insurance either.

You’d know me again, eh Gilda?

Now I would.

I stepped off the curb and looked to see if a car was turning. But my light was now red and a crosstown car blew past. I stepped back onto the curb; the woman Gilda was reentering the florist shop. Instead of crossing I turned and walked the way Jim had gone, and Gilda smiled at me in the window.

I was walking as if that handsome woman had put into my head that I could catch up to Jim even here two and a half hours past the stabbing. For-as if it were somewhere in my body-I felt a tissue of collaboration between Claire and Jim. The trench coat snug across my shoulders, I would go to meet the charter man on foot rather than hop a bus stopping every other block or relax in the back seat of a cab held in mid afternoon traffic. A flag out over the sidewalk signaled a post office and I dropped off my postcards. Our more observant neighbors in London would have been interested to see Lorna clipping rose bushes today as she’d told me she would, for our garden was notorious not only for its roaming tortoise but also for its untended growth. The London County Council man who called on us unexpectedly during the summer after I’d failed to answer letters wished us good morning and asked to see the garden behind the house, and when he’d done so he said they’d have the grass cut at our expense if I didn’t have it done. At the front door as he was going and the hall clock rattled as if about to disintegrate, and began to chime, he mentioned the tortoise. Its lawn-droppings had been reported by neighbors who cited our erratic fencing, but must have seen the tortoise as something from the States when in fact a couple of years ago Lorna had simply come upon it solid and headless, a brown and patterned stone, in a permanently spongy portion at the far end. The L.C.C. man as he left hesitated ill our front doorway in late-morning light, I halfway between him and Lorna, Lorna at the other end of the marble-floored front hall on the first step of the curving stairway whose pale oak we’d scraped layers of white paint off and refinished up to the landing where there was a leaded red-and-yellow-stained floral window that kept one from seeing the disgraceful garden in back. He wondered if the tortoise could be contained. Then he said, You’ve been over here now for…? And in response to his breathing I said, Let’s call a turtle turd a turtle turd, and behind me Lorna laughed. He reemphasized that the lawn was the first priority; it was eleven, the final stroke had been flung out, and as the door scraped gently to, I turned toward Lorna and my eye passed a large photo of Jenny and Billy running downhill in Water low Park ten years ago but I wasn’t thinking exactly that at this moment they were in school. I felt in the old way American, American with Lorna — who now asked me if I would like to come upstairs.

The sun was on the bed, the bed was unmade but quite neat.

Claire had wanted me at her flat probably because I’d be trouble at the office. But who there knew me? And Phil Aut wouldn’t have had to see me.

I detoured seeking a record shop to get the Joni Mitchell for Lorna.

What if Claire had been told to do nothing more with this film matter but had felt she had to see me? Hence, the Friday cable. Lorna had ripped it open — Aha, Claire likes older men.

After I’d read it Lorna sat on the piano stool and read it again, languidly young in her white nightgown. She said nothing about the film.

Midafternoon Manhattan pressured my eyes so stepping off the curb at Park and Fiftieth looking into the blue fish-eye sky bordered by hard-edged tops of buildings and farther north a penthouse tree, I was sensitive to the words of a blind man whom I’d just stepped around: Could you help me? But a girl was already there with her hand on his arm asking if he wanted to cross. He said would she let him feel her. She nodded, and looked at me. Then he asked again, and she said Sure.

He held her shoulder, touched her cheek and hair and ear. He said Yes, and she said OK? and I followed them west across Park to the traffic island where because of their slow pace they ran out of green light and she stopped. He held on.

It would be different in the dark, for there the girl wouldn’t see either. To be blind making love in the light with someone not blind.

Quite different from being a lookout prevented from communicating what you see.

The girl put her free hand over his face and as she drew the fingertips down, she spread her thumb and little finger to miss his eyes. He gave her index a peck as it came by.

She looked at me, at the light, at me, and took the man across the rest of the way. She disengaged herself and said Bye, looked unsmiling at me, and swung off down the block toward Madison.

A frail, white-haired woman spoke to the man and passed on.

A girl was at the curb and they talked and then he touched her. They went east right back across Park but made it all the way in one light because she hurried him as if they had a mutual appointment. She didn’t touch his face, but she did look at me. With compassion. For him.

Being three blocks from the New York branch of the scientific hobby firm for which I periodically acted as U.K. sales scout reminded me I’d put off till later in the week my visit to them. I had to look over for the English Yuletide an enlarged 1500-watt three channel color organ that turns sound into light and can operate two hundred Christmas tree lamps and three 50-watt spots simultaneously.

I looked close into the blind man’s eyes and whether he smelled Claire’s soybeans in my teeth or had activated that spatial sense blind heads are known to possess; he said, So what are you looking at, pal? and was not about to feel my nose.

I said I’d just made the round trip across Park Avenue and wondered how far he usually got.

In an undertone so his eyes seemed to be putting up a front for an audience he didn’t want to hear this, he said, You know what you can do with your round trip.

God knows what flashback he saw when I looked into his pale squint. He was blind all right.

But what was I doing — I wasn’t here seeing sights — this round trip of mine was not routine and I seemed to be having a time getting uptown to my charter man whom I’d never met face to face. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure the drink with him was quite the casual drink he’d let it seem, even though he would continue to need someone at the London end. His predecessor, a portly youth, had graduated from City College and split to Hamilton, Ontario, and a part-time job at a travel agency run by a Genoese immigrant capitalizing on the considerable Italian community.