Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

The gallery show had been of very young painters, and Millan had walked away at one point when his Irish friend wanted to introduce a blond giant in corduroy overalls who was one of the exhibitors. Lorna had barely spoken to me and had made the rounds of the pictures arm in arm with Tessa’s father. It was this — and the argument this afternoon that lay behind it about my sudden plan to fly to Pittsburgh to see a man about bringing Appalachian quilts into England — that had made me feel, among the white tablecloths and red cabbage and the plain munching stares we got from elder gentlemen in yarmulkas as we came into Blum’s and made our way to a table for six against the wall at the back, as if I were standing in line to cash a check at Chemical Bank in New York about to be observed (as if by a light angled in a corner where wall met ceiling) by one of four closed-circuit TV cameras that did not know (any more than the senior teller or the new black girl who when I get to the head of the line asks me to endorse my own check) that I don’t live in New York. (I heard Tessa say Of course I wasn’t lonely in New York, no one is lonely in New York, of course I had gentlemen callers!) Dudley did not describe those early scenes with Tessa’s father except to say that there was real passion despite its being also a formality; but Tessa had told Lorna that her father had shouted and wept and had let it be known through his confidante Mrs. Stone (who had lost two brothers and was living in Golders Green waiting for reparations) that Tessa was dead to him. Ned Noble’s father said anyone brought up in Brooklyn, except Brooklyn Heights, was Jewish and Ned repeated it to me as an instance of his family’s insanity. Tessa’s father did not want any coffee; he was telling Millan about Dudley’s achievements as a historian, speaking across me as if I weren’t present; and Millan was nodding dimly while trying to hold on to Christy Conn’s story of his sister’s butch girlfriend the xylophone player in an Armagh orchestra who got a message in the middle of a concert that her xylophone would explode during a solo and who had been thrown off ever since and might go into social work.

And I was telling Tessa she would never be happy off in the country serving tea to the vicar’s wife even if she did now want a piece of the land. What would Dudley do? Oh, Dudley would love it, said Tessa. He could run, said Tessa’s father, the way I used to in Germany. Lorna laid her hand on Christy’s hand. Tessa wanted to know when I was going to New York, and I said Pittsburgh in two days. Tessa’s father was telling Millan the different fields his son-in-law had now published in and that he’d gone into Mesoamerican history with no background to speak of and had become an authority on the English artist and engineer Catherwood, and Millan with cherubic judiciousness said Catherwood’s Egyptian drawings were better than the Central American stuff. But, said Tessa’s father, the Maya work is the thing, and Millan smiled and said the camera lucida Catherwood had invented as a means of accurately drawing what he saw had met more curious problems in the Memnon monuments. Tessa’s father said offhandedly, Oh no. Millan smiled, he liked Catherwood’s temples on the island of Philae, especially now the new Aswan lake had covered them up except for a moment in July when you could still see the Temple of Isis emerge from the water. But, said Tessa’s father, Dudley is going to publish an article on Catherwood.

Far away directly in the line of Tessa and me the waiter thought I was catching his eye and nodded and walked toward us taking out his pen. Tessa’s father held his finger up to the waiter and called for the bill and they exchanged pleasantries about the sweet and sour mackerel and the stuffed neck and when they’d finished turned their attention benignly to Tessa who was telling how she and she alone had pushed her husband into Maya history by telling him all the Middle American stories that had come over from China — the beautiful white woman who came down from heaven to a town in Honduras, built a palace painted with magic cats and dogs and heroes, built a temple with a stone in the middle of it that because of the mysterious glyphs on three sides enabled her to kill her enemies, and though she was a virgin like the moon she bore three sons to whom she left her kingdom when she had her downy bed carried to the top of the palace and vanished into heaven — but Dudley of course cared more about exactly how high the Mayas set the stone ring for one of their ball games because if it was thirty feet high and they hit the six-inch rubber ball with their buttocks how could they get it in even with the ring perpendicular to the ground, and Dudley would tell you about the legal loopholes you could use to escape death for adultery.

At some point in this I had murmured that we should make a film about the White Woman and her three sons, but no one heard.

Tessa’s father told the waiter his daughter’s husband was a historian, a professor; and when the tall distinguished waiter said Professor! and tapped his temple, Tessa’s father said Dudley was an American, and the waiter said his own son was an actor.

Oh darling, said Christy covering Lorna’s knuckles (but his large lucid eye passed through me like a laser in a moment of recognition), adultery wasn’t at all gay among the Maya.

I said very quickly, Think of what your sainted sister got away with in her nun’s habit.

The businessman speaks, said Geoffrey Millan, a thing of quantums, quilts, and snatches.

And bottles, boats, and stoves, said Lorna, hearing Millan’s tone — is there anyone like him?

The pediatrician rose behind Lorna, and I said putting my hand on Tessa’s, You never know what I’ll do.

But her father’s hand was underneath hers, and we all laughed.

When we rose, Lorna brought her glass up with her and swallowed her wine. I said, shicsa is a goy, and Tessa’s father grinned and gripped my elbow as I tried to get past him around the end of the table.

From a Glasgow hotel on a night in October 1971, that meal five years ago drew the straight fine of my possible form through its field of talk and just beyond to the trip I’d had to the gallery with Tessa eight stops on the Underground from Charing Cross (and Dudley’s hospital bed) to Whitechapel, but the input that was all I could add to Millan’s insult was the talk she and I secretly had during our nonsecret trip. For Lorna that afternoon had not simply objected to my going so soon again to the States, she’d heard some new growth or insertion in my words when I said hell she wasn’t jealous was she? and she said as if finding out something Yes, yes, maybe I am jealous, I’m going to ask Tessa what you were doing when she was there. But then she saw she couldn’t laugh that off so she left the room.

These mean, mealy, missed moments in our unrevolutionary life on whatever side of the Atlantic thrust me out through a closed-circuit eye back or forth to the old lookout dream I’d never succeeded in having.

Tonight in Glasgow I thought I might have it at last. I wanted a woman, but not in a hotel other than my own. My thighs were cranked tighter than the whiskey I had not drunk could have undone. My toes were part of the same thing. My four-course à la carte had filled me full of shrimp and some kind of cream soup and roast pork and a dark pudding lathered with that yellow custard sauce designed to combat the weather.

The desk clerk said yes I could leave my suitcase tomorrow for a day or two. And he said I’d had a visitor, an Indian gentleman. Nothing more, no address.

I asked if he’d been in a white high-neck pullover and the clerk said, Yes, under his mac.

You could get up the stairs without the desk seeing so long as you could get into the lounge in the first place. Anyone coming in late would be spoken to and would find it impossible to sneak up. I checked the three corridors on my floor. A girl in a raincoat open on a short skirt was by a door and we stared.