Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

I was half-dressed and toweling my hair when Claire came down to say we were eating Mexican tonight. She had had her black clogs on before, so I assumed her bag was in or near the living room, not in the upper reaches of the house where she had had her own bath.

Sub had phoned for me, she said, and Monty had called down but I’d been in the shower. I said I’d phone back.

She asked if I wanted the bedroom door open and when I kept rubbing my hair and let the towel hang half over my face, she closed the door as far as the latch but not air the way. There was a doomed impracticably in this and in some spirit of her behavior that made me half-expect her to say, We mustn’t disturb Monty on the phone.

He was in fact on the phone, I had come from the bathroom and found his voice but far away like a crossed line whose voices interfere but aren’t close enough to hear.

I put on my wrinkled shirt. I was ravenous.

Claire said, That story about Dagger, it gave the wrong impression.

I asked if she thought his laughing about the dead dog would make me think Dagger cruel — and she said she didn’t mean I wasn’t his friend.

I felt it wasn’t just that story that had brought her down to speak to me; yet, not to be too smart, I did think that that story was part of why she came.

I asked if she had quit Outer Film yet, and she said, Oh no, and please not to say anything about it — but then she grinned and receded into some cleft of herself saying, But who could you say anything about it to?

And so I opened my trousers to tuck in my shirt and I asked her if Dagger had known there were two films — after all, if Monty knew, Dagger must have known.

Claire ran that one through her vacuum tubes and decided as I hoped that last Thursday evening Monty had told me about the two films — surely if I said Monty, then Monty had mentioned two, and he would hardly have mentioned the two films and not explained what he meant.

Yet she said nothing and so either Monty had tossed out some menacing riddle for dessert or Claire found the real fact of two films impossible to talk about with me.

Instead she recurred to what I’d suspected was her real motive here, her rebuke upstairs when I impugned Dagger’s sensitivity: You know Uncle Dag as well as anyone and he knows things and goes his way and what he knows and doesn’t know is probably much more a mystery to me than you — right?

I let the two-film idea drop. I would check it out when I made the new move I’d decided on in the shower.

I discreetly opened my door and went back to the bureau where my necktie lay.

Claire was a very pretty girl who could be boring. I had her full attention now and she talked and talked while (like something else I couldn’t quite lay my fingers on) Monty’s voice continued upstairs giving me intimations of my own irrelevance that I did not exactly mind because I had Claire, though I had real feelings only in the shape of more Dagger. I did not regret bringing up Jenny in England. Not that she was going to be someone’s helpmate-wife, and I can’t imagine I ever wanted that for her; but she is succinct.

Dagger took Claire to Freehold. That’s in Jersey, quite near the shore; and there’s a track.

I said I knew.

She was thirteen, she’d never forget. Dagger was about thirty-five, he kidded her a lot and gave her the feeling he did anything she wanted to do but that wasn’t so, but it didn’t matter, only the impression. Her parents were breaking up and then not breaking up. Her father is a gum specialist in Philadelphia. They would talk behind closed doors so that she wouldn’t hear, except what she heard was even worse because she only half-heard it. Then they would sit down with her, they were always sitting down with her. Dagger took her to Freehold one weekend and saved her another sitting-down session with her parents, who would be murmuring behind closed doors, then emerge and call her and they’d sit down on some of the plastic-covered decorator furniture and she would be told gently and boringly the problems her parents were trying to work out, but she didn’t care or thought she didn’t or knew she didn’t know how, and she hadn’t had her periods very long but they stopped and her mother took her to her own doctor who phoned a shrink, but her father put his foot down; but that didn’t matter, she’d sit at these sitting-down sessions in which her parents would so patiently define some of their differences and like some kind of patient herself she could be told the true possibilities of the situation and all these months she never heard her parents fight. But for all their sitting down with her and opening up for her the problems, she’d have liked it better if her father had said I’m fucking someone else and I don’t want to fuck your mother and I haven’t for some time; but maybe she’d forgotten what it was like to be thirteen and all this was unfair to her mother in defense of her father with whom she knew she could take risks without spoiling what she felt for him. Still she always felt that this attention she was officially receiving was directed to some thing called Our Daughter Claire or called Claire, like from whom we will have no secrets, so she felt like really a thing instead of the mature person they stupidly hoped they were treating her as in their dull imaginations, and if everything was so out in the open why did she then not know what was happening? Were they splitting or weren’t they? And she now saw that Dagger took her to Freehold that weekend to get her out of the house, though at the time it was just a big thing and this was worth something too, it was fun, he took her to the races and up close the turf the trotters ran in seemed deep and soft as a farm and Dagger explained trotters and pacers, and they went to dinner at the American Hotel with all these horse trainers and a cute antique rocking horse and stately prints of horses, and Dagger introduced her to the owner of the hotel who lived up on Main Street in a big house with a long porch, and Dagger took her to visit a mad old man, the father of one of his school buddies who had disappeared down around the Gulf of Honduras, and Dagger bought her an onyx elephant and took her to the local Walter Reade movies and fell asleep, but what she liked best was having griddle cakes with him Sunday morning in the dining room of the American Hotel even more than his incredible long story of bringing ancient maps out of France wrapped round his leg so he had to walk stiff-legged with a cane and in front of the English customs man got such an itch inside his knee the sweat started out all over his face and he told the man his leg made him nauseous so the man decided to search Dagger’s suitcase.

Claire asked if I understood all this nonsense and before I could speak she said this was after Dagger had left New Orleans where he’d worked on a charter boat and lived with a girl who was on the Times Picayune and through her had sold to the paper a photo of a fishing accident in the Gulf and the picture won a prize. But the thing was that when they got back to Philadelphia Sunday, Claire’s father had left for good, and when Claire told her mother what a great time she’d had with Uncle Dagger, her mother said he was really only a cousin by marriage, but after that Claire got her periods again.

She asked if I worried about Jenny. There was something genuine in Claire’s asking, but something false in the moment of silence after.

Monty was on the phone. I asked how she’d met him. She said that was another long story. I asked why she’d asked about Jenny before, and Claire said No reason. I said You know the man in the Hebrides. Claire sat on the bed holding her breath. I said, If you remember I said Jenny had probably gone north.