But a briefly fast 64 fps if you ever get it developed comes out of your 24 fps projector slow motion.
Babysitters were thirty cents an hour, chars sixty. Lorna began to want a job, but an interesting one. The children were still too young. We bought a better piano. By the time we moved to High-gate to a house that despite the corruption of its roses is worth nine times what we paid for it in ’58, I was glad to leave that plain white room bare again, a possibility for someone else, and Dagger DiGorro on May 24 would not have understood my sense of the room we filmed — a room anywhere, a future.
Jan Aut’s marmalade cat walked slowly out of the Unplaced Room and made its way to the kitchen. The phone had rung again, so I waited. Kate had said Speak of the…when she picked up; then she said, Her brother; then a succession of yeses; and then: I’ll tell him.
When she came out she was the gallery girl again, and so, picking up her last remark before the phone calls, I said, Jan’s persuasive all right but she needs a helping hand.
I nodded at the picture leaning against the piano leg. Kate looked pretty well through me, but found a smudge of foreign matter and could not look further.
Where are you off to now?
Back to New York, I said, some work that Paul’s involved in. I’ve hardly been away.
Kate’s hand found the collarbone, but no connection occurred, and I wondered if she had tried two glasses of warm water and a good vomit first thing before breakfast.
She couldn’t quite let me go. What limit would my going put upon her? She ran her words together: Just as well this film was lost, p’raps you’ll try another someday.
I took two steps to her, my hands at my sides: Who says it’s lost?
Beyond her shoulder I saw the door to the Unplaced Room stir but it was only my angry imagination fueling the fire of my diary with a chair seat and a table leg or two from the absent brother’s hut.
I had a hand on her shoulder and did not let her move. I asked what the devil she knew about an Unplaced Room, or Māyā, or a Hawaiian Hippie playing a guitar under the Science Museum and his little girlfriend from Long Island in a U.S. sergeant’s jacket swaying from one boot to the other above a dirty yellow felt hat on the ground with a coin in it. What had such a thing to do with Kate’s job in a gallery, with a green, stone-walled private school? What was West Hempstead, Long Island, to Kate? Not even a suburban town that supplied an entrant for the Miss New York State contest. Had Kate any feeling for a couple like that? the boy’s father in the iron business in Honolulu County, the girl’s father in the carbon business; the girl as American as a Duncan Hines brownie, the boy as American as a quart can of pineapple juice, a dropout on the move represented in the 1960 tattoo on Savvy Van Ghent’s strong arm by one star no newer than the star that stands for that ancient and fundamental signatory state Virginia. There was a simple power in the two of them together that Kate could disparage as boring and American and even unsavory—