Joseph McElroy: Lookout Cartridge

The big woman captured Dagger from behind. As when a lute is played, she said with her cheek against his shoulder, one cannot grasp the eternal sounds but by grasping the lute or the player of the lute the sound is grasped.

I was talking to the fellow from Kansas City who was explaining how the Indians would not let Sir Walter Raleigh in on the secret of pot that they smoked in the peace pipe but gave him tobacco instead to take back to the white man in Europe.

The little woman at this distance not so ruddy was close to me talking across me low and rather fiercely to Dagger: This is our place, we rent it, we are here only a small part of the year. We prepare now for the cosmic dance of the Dancing Siva tomorrow evening and no one outside the group is allowed here, I don’t know what you are doing to us.

And that, I said to Claire, looking up from a page of onion skin, is the dance that celebrates the end of the world, and when I said this to the woman, Dagger said, Well I don’t want to be here when it happens-he asked her name-a baby started crying-I said Elspeth , and he said, Do you go to the National Film Theater? Maybe you saw me there.

She only said, I do know you, and Dagger said, Dagger DiGorro, and this here is an untrustworthy merchant adventurer named Cartwright, a Common Market lobbyist. Now the cat chasing the sacred cow, is he dancing Siva tomorrow night?

She turned to go back to the fire. She seemed to sense we weren’t sticking around. Dagger said, Oh hell.

He didn’t like this after all, and I wasn’t sure why.

Mind you, I said, getting up and leaving on Claire’s table the onion-skin pages I’d had out, that was more than a cow-catcher, the piece of his face I did see.

Funny, said Claire.

In the bathroom Scotch-taped to the wall beside her beige toilet was a two-page glossy-spread of a stately mansion, Luton Hoo. To the viewer’s right of the pillared portico and one of those English lawns so vastly level green they seem artificial (and in a sense are) and under Dr. Samuel Johnson’s This is one of the places I do not regret having come to see , was an inset shot of the celebrated ivory casket whose deep surfaces hold twenty carved scenes from the lives of Virgin and Son.

Claire called out: Did you write down a description of him?

I reached for the silver flusher and then did not push it, and said without raising my voice, Somewhere.

And the phone rang.

On the inside of the bathroom door was a white felt heart and pinned to it a big button showing Claire in a floppy hat.

Peace, said Dagger, and we passed the fire heading for the hedge.

Why did I say to the newly initiated boy, Is it tomorrow you welcome the god?

The boy said, Every day.

Without thinking, I said, Every minute, and he said, Right.

Those few words weren’t in my diary and Dagger didn’t film them. The boy had a narrow face and a cowlick and sandy hair as light as Jenny’s. And real overalls. I bore down with all my weight and gentleness upon the bathroom doorknob.

In her bedroom Claire was saying, I knew he might be — that’s all.

My onion-skin pages in the living room were neater now. The enamel cross lay beside them.

Monty, I didn’t know , said Claire from the bedroom; then not so loud, That’s what I said.

The receiver rattled but she did not come out.

I had the diary pages stuffed back into my inside pocket with the others when she appeared in the bedroom doorway.

I picked up the cross.

Cloisonné, she said. The Japs imitate cloisonné but they cover up the metal.

She put her hands in her jacket pockets to cheer herself, and said, I’m afraid I have to make another call.

(If no, keep looping; if yes, proceed.)

I said, You still haven’t explained why I saw Jenny behind me today and then she turned into a camera shop and gave me the slip.

Claire took heart. I strengthened her. She shrugged and said, What do you want? You’re not going to believe this, but I didn’t know what to say to you seeing you there. I mean we had a date for half an hour later.

I asked what Outer Film was interested in at the moment, and she said a little bit of everything. I said I couldn’t think who would want our film destroyed. Claire said, Maybe a competitor who was making a film on the same subject. I said, Very funny. She said, We’ll go to the theater in London next time I’m there. I said I must go see Cosmo’s Indian, maybe he’d know what happened.

Oh don’t do that, said Claire ironically.

I let her feel she was making me go.

She asked me for Sub’s number and address. She said it was better than staying in a hotel, and I said my grandfather from Maine died in a hotel.

That fire, she said, and came away from the bedroom as I went to the front door. I put my hand on the knob.

That was the third part, I said. The first was in Hyde Park two weeks before. Too bad you never got any idea of all this.

But the fire, she said.

We’ll never know if Dagger got a good shot of what they were burning, I said.

I meant when the film got burnt on his table.

Oh it only got Alba’s Super-8 baby film.

But your film was destroyed there too, right?

Not burnt. Except by the light of day. Exposed. No, I meant the fire might have spread.

I held the front door. Poised concern in the tilt of her head, cigarette in her fingers, some melancholy immobility in the cheeks which next to my Anglo-American Jenny’s seemed bloodless.

I meant the film they missed that wasn’t on Dag’s table, I said. That’s what I meant.

How is he? said Claire, keeping me.

Older, well-covered, very strong, keeps open house, magical, more American than ever, a father now at last as you know. And in that film never mind how clumsy we were, we really saw something.

So did we, said Claire. I mean, we thought there was something in it.

I was over her threshold and let the door slip.

Too bad, said Claire softly. What’s Jenny up to?

Dying to try America. Has a new boyfriend. Plans to take A-levels in Latin, I hope.

Now Claire let me wait. What’ll you do with the film they missed?

Who’s they?

My chat with Geoff Millan recircuited Fast Forward; I heard nothing new.

Claire smiled: It’s your life; how would I know who they is? Going to make any more films?

I’m still working on this one. It’s all written down.

Who reads any more? said Claire.

Show an American girl London the day before the young bodies of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney are missing in Mississippi — which makes it summer solstice years ago. She rang you at home in Highgate, got your wife Lorna who passed the phone instantly to you even though you were twenty feet away.

Now you hear the girl again when the bearded desk clerk hands you the house phone. She’s running behind schedule, she says, would you like to come up.

OK, but what’s with her? It’s too early for a drink even if she had a bottle in her room. You don’t know her. Surely she doesn’t want you to listen to her brush her teeth.

The lift’s ornate ironwork opens each floor as you and the attendant rise past. It’s a lovely machine, ride all day, not a cage. You catch the eye of a chamber maid passing along a hall her arms full of last night’s sheets, then she’s out of sight below you.

Your college friend Sub’s wife’s former roommate this is: you forget the first name as you take her hand crossing the threshold, it’s a double room. A harpsichord steady and copacetic is coming from a little transistor on a plaid suitcase. Not a stitch of clothing adrift, not a half-slip, not a passport on the bureau’s glass top or a collection of change. Her bed is turned right down and a London A to Z is on the night table by a half full tumbler with bubbles at the bottom and up the side. She takes the tumbler into the lav.