Joseph McElroy: Lookout Cartridge

I forgot, said Claire, to ask about Lorna and Jenny and Billy.

He wants to be called Will.

That’s wonderful.

He went on a school trip to Chartres.

That’s great.

The long room held little in it-only beige and cream and pale orange and light lavender tones amid which Claire in a brown pants suit possessed the sinister vividness of the only painted thing in a drawing. Dark lip gloss thinned her mouth.

Newhaven, Dieppe, Rouen, Chartres, I said.

Imagine.

Coming back, Rouen, Dieppe, Newhaven.

Recently?

Oh no. A year ago.

But I’ve seen you since then.

The news has had time to age.

Claire wanted me to get on with it. She had avoided me forty minutes ago in the street, no question. It hadn’t been my daughter Jenny who’d turned into that camera shop; Jenny was in London and she did not wear lipstick, though she looked a bit too much like Claire.

Claire was saying we’d arrived in Chartres.

On the table before me was an enamel cross, the colors irregularly partitioned by tiny strips of metal.

I thought I would press her further. I described the English guide, quite a young man, who lives in Chartres eight months a year and knows everyone of the 176 windows inside out, and he told Will’s group about things way high in Chartres meant only for God, and Will’s friend Stephen said they weren’t all that high.

Oh Christ, said Claire, I could throw it all up and go live in England.

But I want to know what Claire knows, however little that is, and I am fresh from London and in New York, and Dagger DiGorro’s film is in my head.

Brighton, said Claire.

The Pavilion, I said.

All that campy orientalia, she said.

I said my mother’s dentist who lives on Brooklyn’s Park Slope had hosted a cocktail party at the Brighton Pavilion for an international group of dentists.

Claire drummed on the sofa arm.

I had come all the way from London. If she didn’t want to talk she could have canceled. Fine by me: no film, no deal. Instead, I was here in her lunch hour in the pastel clarity of her fiat which seemed oriental partly because of what hung horizontal behind her — a poster three times the size of its subject which in the grainy blow-up seemed slow-motion even more than enlargement, a slim arm — elbow to finger-tips — Claire’s I sensed (though I do not know why) — and a free margin all round.

Granted, I’d have looked Claire up cable or no cable.

I told her how Will was half talking to himself one night in the kitchen and was muttering something about pulley blocks and hoisting yourself up in there to see some of that stuff meant only for God, and Lorna had reached into the fridge bent way over and Will had eyed her behind and the ceiling and without shifting his gaze had slid his arm off across The Radio Times to reach a chocolate digestive biscuit.

Claire did not get it. Maybe I was showing a very dull domestic scene.

Chartres made an impact on him, said Claire. She drummed on the sofa arm.

I explained that it was the engineering, I thought, more than any religious meaning, that for Will it was the hoisting and the getting up there more than the actual seeing, that for instance he would take suction boots to walk up the wall and didn’t believe that that stuff way up there wasn’t meant for people to see.

Claire dropped her wrist to see the tie. Where was I staying? I said Sub, and she said the man with the children, and I said an old friend.

From Brooklyn Heights?

And college.

And later life?

And he asks all the right questions and has an idea my life abroad is exciting.

Claire wanted to know what questions. I said, Not only about the film, and she said Oh, and I said, Like why you wanted to see me when I have no film to show, and why the cable.

Claire got up, and I said, He’s about my only connection with college now. Claire sauntered around behind me and then in front Swinging her wide, high-cuffed trousers. She stopped and took a deep breath and said softly didn’t I understand she felt bad about Dagger’s film. I said I wouldn’t be surprised one way or the other.

She went and fell back into her sofa under the six-by-eight poster and said if I really wanted to know, she’d thought I was coming anyway on business and she’d felt kind of bad about Dagger and his film, she loved Dagger-and wasn’t the film mine too?

She kept raising her voice slightly only to drop it, and there was a difference between her chic and the sound of her words.

I said that as for business, if she meant business Dagger’s film was pretty much ruined and only me left to tell the story.

Claire said well no she’d thought I might bring Billy over again if I came on business.

She was filling in while she thought.

I said that once Will had asked me to bring him back a book on building a twenty-eight-bit computer, he even went out and got a big tin for a drum and some doweling for an axle and put on side supports, but it ended there. He was a great admirer of Brunel and Babbage. She didn’t know Brunel? The famous engineer of French extraction Isambard Kingdom Brunel, I explained, who once in a nursery entertainment for his little nephew Ben happened to swallow a coin that stuck in his windpipe and thereupon in danger of choking designed a centrifugal pivot board on which he had himself strapped and swung round and round till the half-sovereign came up out of his mouth. The same Brunel that designed the Great Western Railway.

I said that last year I had gotten Will a digital computer kit through an American firm I occasionally represented complete with input sliders, circuit changing, and a read-out panel that lights up, but that now he was into shares and was planning a world stock exchange, which should not bore me but did.

You’ve always got Jenny, said Claire.

I thought I saw her go into a camera shop near here, I said.

Claire seemed to ease herself when I said that, as if it told her that she was in New York and I was not. She said, who is the fairest of the fair, is it Jenny or is it Claire? and I said the difference in looks was uncannily small and decreasing as Jenny approached twenty, and I wondered if Dagger and I were related.

You’re not Jenny’s uncle, said Claire.

I said Claire must be getting to know a lot about film distribution, and she said, Enough. I said didn’t she ever want to make a film, and she said, Distribution’s creative too, I should see what some of my experimental geniuses were ready to do for a buck. I said, Why my?

I grinned. She may have seen not the friendliness I know wasn’t exactly there but rather the domestic male expatriate gently downing her by paying real attention to her, yet the guard I guess I had up worked almost accidentally, for such a guard was one thing she’d wanted to see, so for a moment now she stopped looking for something else . She burst out, Oh I could tell you a tale or two about your own London.

You sent that cable.

Only knowing you were coming anyway.

Claire pulled a foot up under her; she hadn’t said quite what she’d wanted to.

I could have written you what I have to say.

Look, said Claire, I’m in business. Mr. Aut’s got like all three phones triangulating on him in his office and in the outer office it’s very complex — you don’t know Monty Graf-look, last April I thought we might be able to do you a favor, that’s all.

You look, I said, speeding things up but now splicing into some circle of which I was the center the stabbing I’d seen and the young woman who’d been behind me when I turned (namely Claire) — the film we shot is not lost just because people think it’s destroyed.

Think? said Claire, and tapped the middle finger of her right hand on the sofa arm.