Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

We listened to Will come upstairs. He walked around. From the head of the stairs to the hall beside my sister’s ghetto photos, his doorway, the bathroom (light on but at once off), hall down toward our room, back to the head of the stairs, his room, bathroom (again light on, off), his room, Jenny’s room, linen cupboard for some reason, and then his doorway.

He said, What’s the great circle route, Dad?

I’ll tell you in the morning.

OK.

I pictured the Cadillac dusting a village, shedding its muffler. Dagger had stories to get him from Casas Grandes to Chihuahua, from Tampico to Veracruz. Probably he’d been to Mexico. Lorna and I had not.

What must happen before anything else was that I must finish with Tessa’s moments. Lorna curled herself around behind me where I sat upright in thought — she had only her bra on — and I reminded her of the drink we’d all had in ’68. I’d had some jellied eel and three oysters in the street that afternoon, just passed a stall and had to have some. Then at six I got a stabbing pain below the belt just as we were sitting down with Tessa and Dudley to have a drink and wait for her father who was meeting us. It was one of those old pubs that have kept the three divisions, Public Bar, Private Bar, Saloon Bar. We were in the Private, a wedge of a nook that made you half recall a horse-drawn hansom you’d just pulled up in. In the normal course of accident and permutation, I’d never seen Dudley with his father-in-law, who had once so terribly opposed their marriage. Tessa’s father was an unassimilated German enclosing an assimilated Jew. When Dudley and Tessa made it doubly definite that they were getting married and that Dudley could not convert to Judaism, Tessa’s father put him through scenes of prophetic frenzy — rising to agonies of blood no rabbi’s indoctrination could have equalled, particularly for a young American scholar of modern European history, and descending to exhausted acknowledgment that Dudley was in fact circumcised. But before Tessa’s father arrived at the pub, my vitals attacked, and I left to go downstairs to the Men’s. The pain passed, but as I stood at the wash basin an old man with an enormous nose and hands and a baggy cloth cap and a louring face got hold of me to tell me his plan for a pub. He caught my arm as I reached for the paper towel and he wouldn’t let go and I let my hands just drip. His plan would cater to everyone, mind — it wouldn’t just be the jukebox and the rock-and-roll, there’d be a room for older people and then a room where you could bring a lady for a quiet talk and the dart-board room like the Public Bar now but no jukebox and there’d be room for the rock-and-roll records — I leaned gently away — and there’d be a family room where you’d bring the family for a sandwich and crisps of a Saturday, and maybe other rooms, but the plan would be radiating, see, radiating — you’d get your central bar in like a circle and all the rooms would radiate outward, see, like a wheel.

I said I’d think about it. He said, Right you are, Guv.

He didn’t leave when I did.

At the door to the Private Bar I heard Tessa saying, What would we have done without bombed houses! Her father put down his wine glass of neat whiskey to shake my hand. Lorna and Tessa sat snugly together on the leather cushions. Dudley was tamping his pipe and smiling at no one in particular. He said, That’s the trouble with London, no more bombed houses. Tessa’s father shook his head, no no we didn’t want any more bombed houses, no indeed, why when he came from Germany in ’38 he took a janitor’s job and every house on the other side of the road was demolished. When the planes came over, Tessa sat like an Egyptian cat in the Morrison Shelter. Tessa’s father seemed to be talking toward Dudley’s drink, a pint of beer; he described a Morrison Shelter, right-angle, dimensions — the density and strength of the steel mesh that hung down on all four sides like an oversize tablecloth.

It was Tessa, not her father, who’d told us about his law practice and the house in Munich and everything else that had been taken away except her mother, who had also been taken away. And about coming to England at nine and living for six months with a relation, not knowing till her father later told her that after she’d been sent to England he was picked up and would have died in a camp but as a World War I veteran he was excused so long as he left Germany at once. But her father now gave us a gentler, smaller picture to entertain us — of all the German Jews in North London trying to avoid the authorities who would intern them. They would be sent out by their wives first thing in the morning, and it was a sight, Tessa’s father said, all these German Jews with sandwiches in their long overcoats, hands behind them, aliens each on his own pacing Hampstead Heath all day till the coast was clear at home.

My pain stupidly returned and I was about to get up again, but Tessa cried out in something like a laugh and said, Guess what, sometimes they got home and the coast was completely clear — no house!

The barmaid put her head around the partition. Dudley lowered his pipe hand to the table: That was in bad taste, Tessa.

Tessa put her hand over Lorna’s where it rested lightly on the edge of the table and said, If I’m lucky, Dudley darling will buy me my dream house.

I said, Where? in Middle America?

Tessa snapped back, New York’s not Middle America — but we were all laughing, Lorna too, who several years before — though I’d not remind her now as she lay curled around behind my back with her knickers off — had been enough changed by her friendship with Tessa to find herself the following autumn, which would be ’58, plunging into the purchase of the house we now lived in.

I leaned to pull off my socks and looked around at a space of Lorna’s thigh that seemed tonight less routine and less real than the transoceanic clothes I was getting out of.

I said, I suppose the connection with the film scene wouldn’t mean as much to you as to me.

OK, so we laughed at Tessa but maybe I did because she had my hand clamped down.

Of course we all laughed at her — Dudley too.

She’d had a hard day.

I opened my belt and unbuttoned my shirt, which was the same blue as the trim on my teacup this morning when the maid at the Knightsbridge B & B brought my tray and I turned my bare shoulders and chest toward her and raised myself on an elbow and looked beyond her leg to my jockey shorts on the nearly napless oriental rug where they’d landed a few hours before directly below the Joni Mitchell record on the chair.

Diary and film parted and came together, hiding one another, parted and came together like some flesh breathing, an organ like a creature, and I must turn only to the ruining of the film, who did it, who had it done, and why. I would not tell Dagger a burglar had taken the original of the diary.

I turned and put my hand behind Lorna to unsnap her but found no snaps and drew the back of the bra upward toward her head. But she rolled around on her back preventing me from going further in that direction but seeming too to open herself to my feelings. But she rolled toward me and so I reached again to raise the bra over her head. But the phone was ringing downstairs and the ghost of some bad gag tiptoed away down our long-ago refinished stairs and I jumped up and followed, and passed my son standing in his doorway with a ballpoint in his hand.

And I picked up the phone hoping it was Dagger, and heard the male overseas operator telling me something I’d been told for years which I didn’t hear, then Sub’s voice approaching and receding down some drowned cable. And I must go back to America tonight.

I phoned my charter associate. He said I hadn’t a minute to spare.