Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Claire asked why I’d put in the technical stuff about 8 mill, in the famous two pages. On the pad on the bed table I jotted “Gulf of Honduras” and circled it.

I stood at the door and told Claire I wanted to show her something, wait there a second.

She was still holding her breath — a bad thing to do. She stayed where she was. I was on the move up the carpeted stairs.

Monty rang off. He was still at a distance. His lower face looked and perhaps itself was tired. I said I couldn’t go to eat with them. He was concerned. I said, Is Claire upstairs? He said upstairs? He went out of the room, did not call upstairs. On the floor beside the couch I found Claire’s roomy leather bag with its shoulder strap draped over it. I found a small ring of keys beside her money purse and I took the keys. A floor above me, Monty called to Claire, called down to Claire — so he wasn’t outside this room listening for a call to Sub. Below me, Claire called back, I’m here.

I snatched the pages off the desk and belted back downstairs. Claire was at my door. I kept my voice low and she did not object. I said rather fast, Do you believe this about Dagger forgetting which scene in Corsica we’d used b & w for and which we’d used color for? Do you believe Dagger could forget a thing like that?

I was of course using the two pages Jenny had typed (which had gone from hand to hand) as a cover for having nipped upstairs. Claire was caught between purposes, to defend Dagger’s intelligence or his honesty.

Having asked my question as cover, I heard again the cluck of coin in slot (or was it a thin-shelled New York egg breaking as my mind came down hard on it). There was indeed something else about one of those pictures upstairs, but all I could handle now was Jan Graf and the magic orange I had marked her London canvas with: if Dagger had ignored Savvy Van Ghent chasing the foul ball and instead paused as I thought deliberately upon the red-haired woman and the Indian who himself was a friend of Dagger’s idiot friend Cosmo, might Dagger not also know Jan Graf, who I was all but certain had painted that woman we’d filmed at the softball game even if I had had (if not for art’s sake) to supply her hair color not so very many hours ago on a Knightsbridge gallery wall?

Monty called again. Claire said she must go up. I asked why she’d been following Wheeler the first morning. She said, OK it was you, not Wheeler. She went up the stairs fast and preoccupied. I thought she was deciding how much to say to Monty.

If she was alarmed about what I might now be thinking of Dagger, then there was reason for me to think whatever I was thinking, though at this instant I was willing to unthink such dubious suspicions, for Dagger DiGorro was my friend. I only hoped Claire and Monty didn’t have a fight, for then she might not stay here tonight as I was sure she had last night, and in that case she would be more apt to find her keys gone. I thought of going back upstairs and taking her purse as a cover but Monty and Claire were already there, they were talking above me.

I took my toilet kit, a gift from Will, and at the top of the stairs Monty saw it and said where did I think I was going. I said I’d call him, never fear, I needed him but I wasn’t going to impose another night, I’d go to Sub’s where my suitcase was.

Monty said, Don’t you like Mexican food?

If Claire didn’t go away and find herself, something was going to happen to her.

An American proverb, said Monty, has it that there are only twenty-four hours in a day.

Maybe Monty didn’t know I’d been in London last night, yet he must.

I mentioned a Mexican place where I’d eaten with Tessa and Dudley Allott seven years ago.

Monty said he knew the place but knew a better place, more authentic.

Claire said, I know that name Allott.

I said I didn’t think she did, Tessa was Lorna’s friend and Dudley was here at the time working on the Maya or on someone who had worked on the Maya.

Maya? said Monty.

That’s right, I said; but they live in London, though they were here for the month of August.

Here? said Monty.

I said I was going to Sub’s. Monty suggested I return the phone call. But I didn’t.

They were stranded in the hall watching me open the front door. In one hovering moment, as if the distance between us were vertical, I detected something genuine: Monty cared about Claire.

The two films, said Claire, were meant to be complementary. I don’t know if Monty mentioned that. Yours was going to be part of Phil Aut’s.

That doesn’t sound complementary, I said, and saw Monty’s eyebrows jam his forehead wrinkles without any words to serve.

Gates winked all about me, but I held to my plan. I would not deal with Sub on the phone.

I was closing the door.

Monty said, Mayas, and Claire said, No.

No one seemed to be following me.

My cabdriver, a long-haired youth with a headband, drove bravely but with small knowledge of Manhattan. There was no picture of him displayed in the slot beside the police permit.

No one followed us.

However, anyone could have been hanging around Sub’s building when I got out. And there was no doorman.

It was six thirty. I’d give Outer Film another hour to be closed.

I had been deeper than I thought. Looking up into the shower had been like looking into the bottom.

The narrow keen smell of roasting lamb as I passed the lobby mailboxes gave way in the lift to my sweat and cigarette smoke. The circle of fluorescent light in the elevator roof was harder on the pallid leaden paint than on my transatlantic eyes shifting over the capital letters delivery boys had cut into the wall panels, one pair being my own initials. In the old open elevator that Ned Noble and I took slowly up to the fifth-floor stamp dealer in the early forties you looked through the gratings of the hinge-folding door and each floor’s hoistway door that did not fold but opened normally, and saw each dusky passing floor of that downtown Brooklyn office building, and no matter how much there was to say, which with Ned was a lot, you’d fall silent foreseeing the glass-topped case and the stamp tongs being laid down upon it, and the faint official scent of paper touching off in us visions of lozenge perfs and pale pastel windows with oriental rulers or the delicately antlered national animal of some now defunct country; and, somehow, the twenty-cent envelope of one thousand transparent glued peelable hinges put a scent upon the wind and the stamps themselves as if the micro-printing had been done on a grid like a TV scan, and the colors beyond any standard odor of ink gave off advance word. There was a triangular stamp Ned and I both wanted, and when I mentioned this to Will a year ago, all I could think of was Tannu Tuva, and he looked it up in his Faber atlas and said it didn’t exist, and in Sub’s elevator now thinking I hadn’t been much help to Sub in overcoming the distances and encroachments his life was weighted down with, the alternative name Will came up with fell into my head — Tanna, an island — and Will said that must be what I’d been thinking of and insisted with strange rigidity as if he wished to settle something and would settle it if need be by force; yet with that authoritative emotion that belongs to memory I knew that Tannu Tuva was the place all right, it wasn’t an ideal destination ideally far and purely possible, and if it wasn’t in Will’s English atlas then the world had changed. The stamp man’s elevator was different from Sub’s, which was a fast capsule with a small glassed port and all around me those metallic initials knifing through its shield of bilious late-night green not to the hoistway shaft or the passing floors but to a prior color hard to tell, and as the capsule came open at Sub’s floor and an old lady tried to get in before I got out, I saw inside the oblong Tanna Tuva frame a deer or gazelle with lyrelike horns, and a Costa Rican triangle but no color where I knew there had been color, and knew that Will’s alternative name Tanna had occurred not only because it was and is in the New Hebrides east of Australia, and through Jenny’s map of Lewis in the other Hebrides I continued to be at her mercy.