Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

That was a past all right but barely a remembrance even for those who shot it, certainly not for the stars. These were the two Cartwright children, a curly blond three-year-old boy named Me in light-colored jersey shorts that came out stony gray, and a five-year-old girl my sister in nothing but a rubber life-ring, the frames in those days so few per second that the pretty little girl in the film’s grainy snow hops into and out of a shallow canvas lawn-pool like a swallow dipping its beak and wings in a birdbath. The little boy jerks down his elastic-waisted shorts, he pushes them to his ankles, stands free and bends menacingly at the camera, then erect turns profile and with a dynamic faraway look like a lookout but looking merely at his pretty sister, he forgets his hobble and starting off falls flat on his elbows.

The film (released from New York now) seemed a waste. Lorna said, A manly boy. Will said, There’s no sound. Dagger, stationed at his projector, said, A remarkable film for its period. Alba said, You were enchanting, I recognized you right away. Jenny said, It’s raised a lot of new questions, I must say.

Everybody laughed when Jenny said that. But her pleasantly insignificant quip with the film still running set some new deadline the meaning of which must come clear before the reel ended, and then it raced on and the leader whipped off and flapped clear leaving on Dagger’s screen a glare without clear scale, and like a deadline set just on principle the thought came, with the end of these images of the thirties that weren’t after all so distinctively of the thirties, that this film should not have been taken away from the creaky, spider-inhabited American attic, for someone would have to pay for its removal. The canvas pool is an ancestor of today’s collapsible vinyl-lined Doughboy pools that have their indispensable counterparts in England and can even be heated from the point at which the pool’s filter cartridge is located.

Unlike the three-year-old Virginia who said Daddy bring back a present, the seventeen-year-old Jenny said something else killingly sophisticated to her international businessman father: Bring back a memory.

Motives? Others would come after the film was done, even later — even now — leaving or holding out possibility like a lunar depression or one of a series of superimposed transparencies, even that ultimate form, the shape of that slot-space visible through various contents.

Let me convey Monty Graf’s face, confirm his rather still voice. A mixed face and a dark mild voice that doesn’t so much confide as pass on to you some prior confidence reached with someone else. Between nostril and upper lip an area very ample, sensitive, and ambiguous. Absolutely black eyebrows, thick and trimmed. And a vocabulary.

When he spoke to me his zinc-gray eyes widened sharply on certain words— Stratford, Soho, Handel, Coventry, brain-drain .

To see what it was like I widened my eyes the same way on two of mine— Knightsbridge and Stonehenge .

The narrow healthy nose and the eyebrows and eyes so vitally differed from the rest of his face they seemed a section jammed down to fit the rest as if that were a receptacle — pocked sallow cheeks, a pudgy, brief though not recessive chin jabbed by a mole at the fork of a center cleft, which was less an event than a surplus fold.

Dagger’s camera could glibly sum up this face: a wary, half-sensual indeterminately beat-up forty-six soon to be much older.

Three deep lines cross Monty Graf’s forehead no matter what happens lower down. The second stops midway across, but your eye goes on as if drawn between the upper and lower wrinkles to the far temple and its softly combed swell of gray and black hair, and my eye went still further to the ash blonde with her back to me in the next booth and to the right of her hair and above the back of the booth the eyes of the man she was with.

Monty Graf went through Coventry during the war and still knew someone in munitions there; the new modern cathedral was a great experience I should be sure not to miss — bitter experience, Coventry, but of course the English were pretty reserved — but I must know all about that, having lived there.

You said it, I said, they’re so reserved there’s a postman none of his coworkers have spoken to in three years.

Monty Graf picked that right up, said not he thought in Coventry but someplace else, it was due to a strike the postman hadn’t joined, and did I know where that phrase sending to Coventry came from.

I did not know.

Coventry jail, Civil War, he said, the citizens of Birmingham sent a passel of Royalists away to Coventry; I’m an Anglophile, he said. He asked me what I’d drink. I was thinking it wasn’t quite true that the English were reserved. How can you live so long there and not know if they’re reserved or not? Think of the stranger, the bank clerk who came up behind you at Stonehenge and gave you a little talk unsolicited complete with weights and measures.

I said by the way I had indeed seen the new Coventry Cathedral, but speaking of Anglophilia he wasn’t the one who phoned yesterday afternoon, was he?

He didn’t seem to make the connection of Anglophilia with the phone call, but he did shake his head.

I asked if he was with Outer Film; he said No though he’d heard of them. Our film didn’t include Coven try, did it — or had I said I knew someone in Coventry.

An engineer, but I don’t think I mentioned him to you.

Automobiles?

I nodded.

Monty Graf sipped through a short straw a New Orleans gin drink made with milk and fresh-cracked ice, sugar, and white of egg.

He’d come in from London this morning, he said.

I said I’d guessed that.

He took another sip and said he’d learned — in London — that a film I’d made was very interesting and that I hadn’t sold it yet.

I said we’d lost most of it so there was virtually nothing to sell.

He said according to his information we still had some significant footage.

I said what could you do with a few minutes of 16 mill?

Monty Graf drew gently on his gin and milk and looked beyond me phrasing the next move.

I asked if he had a settled place of residence, and he smiled and said sure he had a house south of the Village, I could come and stay any time; he mentioned the address.

Two fish platters came by and were placed before the ash blonde and the man. I’d been brought a dark beer by mistake. I said I didn’t realize the kitchen was back there — and I turned around and saw light through the swinging door opening for the other waiter also in white shirt and white apron and as my eye further along the bar and off by the door thought it found the profile of the man in glasses who’d tried to serve me a cup of tea, I became aware of the jukebox playing later Dylan, and Monty Graf said he didn’t know if I’d eaten but this was just a neighborhood place but pretty good pot luck and he could recommend the osso buco and the stuffed bluefish.

Who had he heard about the film from? I asked.

He passed right through that question and said (headed toward me like a devoted skin doctor), I’d like to hear about your film from you .

I wondered how Dagger would take the question. Lately Dagger didn’t seem to care, though I will say for him that he seemed deliberately to want not to talk about the loss. He was considering the States, he had even assembled a job-application vita.

The truth was that there were in a way two films — his and mine.

That would be of little interest to this man waiting across the table in a black double-knit blazer.

You decide to reach, and before you’re half into it the thing you want has taken you in hand and said wait here keep an eye out while we get through the window and look around inside, we’ll be out in ten minutes unless you whistle.