Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Gilda came early. Before she came I phoned Outer Film. I couldn’t get Phil Aut and I passed on the message that one of his employees had broken into a friend of mine’s apartment and I was getting the police on it through an influential person of my acquaintance named Monty Graf. The secretary said Mr. Aut was flying to London tonight.

I phoned the charter man at four and just as he was saying What else do you do to keep busy at that end? the doorbell went and before I could shelve the receiver I said, If I wanted to could you get me a charter-rate flight sooner than the return I’ve got?

Gilda wore a flowered raincoat. She looked all around her.

Back on the phone I said, I mean like a charter within a charter.

The charter man said, You could get to be my best customer.

He gave his home number and I said I’d be in touch.

Gilda’s green-flowered mac lay between us on the brown couch which concealed inside its folded day bed mattress my blanket. I knew the blanket to be the same magenta as the fitted carpet Rose had paid a lot of money for. Gilda stared at it. Upon the carpet’s magenta ground was a fine labyrinth of apricot lines that gave a kind of Moslem chic.

I don’t have much time, she said. She was different today. We looked at each other’s knees. I thought I was at last at the beginning, and I thought of the Unplaced Room which, if our film had not been destroyed, would have come first.

Listen, I said. I know.

She turned to me and when she spoke the rust-colored enamel butterfly glinted: You want to know what the insurance man asked me?

Yes.

He was insurance like you’re the family doctor.

She described him.

She was talking about Monty Graf, who I’d thought must have found the accident scene through Claire but who Gilda said had come with a couple of plainclothesmen and a uniformed sergeant. Monty Graf had identified himself as an insurance investigator but not in the hearing of the policemen. Gilda had offered nothing about me at first and her brother-in-law the proprietor didn’t recall me. But Monty Graf had asked if a bearded man in a trenchcoat with a small mole in the middle of his forehead had been at the accident and Gilda added to this that the man had come back again after lunch. She didn’t know why she answered nor why her questioner had bothered to identify himself, she liked his soft voice, it seemed to be telling her things but afterward she knew little more that was new than the name Cartwright. She’d said I was concerned about the stabber, what he looked like, what happened to the car, and it sounded as if her questioner wanted to make sure I had not spoken to the stabber.

Did he tell you anything else besides my name?

What name?

Cartwright.

Oh, she had thought that was his, for he’d said so. She put her raincoat across her lap. She wasn’t the same person as before in the florist shop and on the street corner. She wasn’t amused, though not against me either.

My name is Cartwright, I said, and I don’t know what the stabbing has to do with me. I believe it’s important.

I went on: Because I’ve been making a film.

Gilda stared at the rug. Her eyes went relentlessly over it but her head did not move.

This film was destroyed before it was developed. Can you understand that? And I am finding out why. So I was on my way to see someone who’s involved when I happened into this stabbing, but the person I was seeing — who was as I said involved in the film and maybe its destruction — appears down the block behind me and when I see her she turns around and disappears.

That’s too bad about the film, said Gilda.

My voice said, What’s it matter, nobody reads any more.

I do. Why’d you say that?

They read more in England where we made the film.

Why were you making it in England?

It’s where I live.

You don’t live here?

I come here, I don’t live here.

Where am I, then? said Gilda.

She stood up looking toward the hall at an angle which if her eyes could have moved her would have led toward Sub’s bedroom.

I said, A friend’s.

Here I thought I was in your place. I saw the unmade bed.

Why did this man use my name, I said.

Gilda sat again and reached for my hand: What kind of film?

Why, if you want to know, it began with an Unplaced Room. Just a room that could be anywhere, that was the point, a point.

What kind of a point can you make out of that, said Gilda.

Well look at this room. What’s New York about it?

When’s your friend coming home?

My friend’s in Washington for the weekend.

Gilda stood up and walked to the hall. If you ask me, he called himself Cartwright because he wanted me to tell someone else that a man named Cartwright came asking about the murder.

Tell who?

She slid her right hand into a sleeve, and I found Dagger’s Beaulieu eye and at some key distance my naked eye triangulating upon a shimmering apex alternating into color and black and white as if between two ambiguously interesting lens focuses — and I went to Gilda instantly and held the other lapel so she could slip her left hand in.

She waited, not turning.

Helping you on with your flowers, I said.

Gilda still did not turn. You’re American, right?

As if she might want to get off with me but, while staring at (or toward) the big unmade bed in Sub’s room, wondering if I was circumscribed.

With my finger I drew a circle on her back beginning inside one shoulder blade, touching the neck and her spine above the small.

In the hall her green flowers were dark.

OK, she said, and was at the door. This is interesting, I’m trying to figure if I know something about this that you don’t.

She wanted Sub’s phone number and I wrote it down for her.

I stood in the open doorway waiting for her elevator, and we didn’t speak.

Have a good weekend.

I phoned Claire’s answering service and left a question for Monty: Why had he wanted to know if I had spoken to the stabber? Didn’t he know Wheeler as well as Claire and I did?

I had dinner alone out Friday and Saturday.

If you are, so to speak, in between people, New York can offer vintage solitude. Both nights I saw big frank films in color. One showed blood darting from a wound in a sheriff’s neck. The other looked back only thirty years to an Unplaced Beach (if I may) seen through a 235-carat haze of clear sun and aquamarine to a pair of amber nipples.

When Jenny and the Connecticut actor left the place where the Suitcase had been Slowly Packed, he carried it for her. Four legs and a gray case the contents of which I knew — and a door closing upon our footage. Dagger said, Nice couple.

Alba came out of her kitchen and asked if I’d like some fish soup.

Jenny got home late, but not to the sound of a motorbike. Not a cab either and it was long after the Underground finished, even allowing for a long walk up Highgate Hill from Archway Underground station. I heard what had to be the gray suitcase being set down and then, like stereo, the front door opening from outside and inside. Naturally I had too much else on my mind to be thinking about the snapshot. I had been lying awake for a long time. Lorna facing away from me toward the window said as if out of a little dream, Go to sleep. She could not have known I was awake unless some tempo in my breath opened me to her dream or of course to her own sleepless thought.

Phil Aut’s home number wasn’t in the Manhattan book.

I went through my own address book in vain.

My diary pages lay on Sub’s desk and I thought how sloppy and pompous the boys in the Unplaced Room were, swapping recipes for gelatin dynamite and Hong Kong hors d’oeuvres.