Which returned me to the living room across from the projector to look behind the turntable on a bookshelf that extended outward at knee-level; there had been a couple of the Nagra tapes there once, but now they were gone. In the dark it may be harder to get angry. I did not know if I was looking successfully forward. Can one be angry about the future? Alba’s curtains were of fine Indian cotton, and the light that came through them sifted out the reds and oranges and purples but left the weave and the print as if on a shadow screen.
When the delicate splitting sound came from the back of the flat I went at once to face it. But in the balcony room I found nothing more than the draft stirring up the papers between the two typewriters across from the glass cabinet on the long work table that was in fact a hollow door. I closed the French windows and retrieved three sheets from the floor and one from the chair seat. A car stopped, but I did not go back where I’d come from to look. I lit Krish’s flame and read a letter evidently from an American telling Dagger they’d been through all this before and if he was willing to take the movie projector right now he could have it for a low low rock-bottom price. The second sheet was a note from Monty Graf under the monogram of a London hotel dated Thursday: “If, as you say, you are counting on Cartwright’s diary to advertise your film, perhaps I should see a piece of it.” Between the lines there was a familiarity: off to see a man in Coventry; back Saturday; Claire unnecessarily worried; Jan in retreat between Art and social life; that little actor’s to blame.
At that instant, like an axis, two sets of sounds joined street and garden: the slam of car doors; the clang of a dustbin lid; a voice I’d heard calling Hey Dag; and a cat’s yowl like an arcing nerve.
On my way to the living room I again hit the open door in the hall and this time slid the pack off onto the floor. On the living-room threshold I heard steps on the stairs, but I continued to the street window and saw, just soon enough to fall away beside the semitrans-parent curtain, a man who was not Cosmo leaning against Cosmo’s white three-wheeler in a heavy pale Faerile sweater, a man who I thought had a heavy, moustached cheer about him like a Games Master or like Dagger’s when he carved up a high roast of PX ribs or ran his motorbike the wrong way up a narrow noontime street in Soho benevolently greeting outraged pedestrian definitions of the law — for Dagger in some highly developed sense of the warning above the bar of a Hebridean pub
Please do not ask for credit
As a refusal often offends
took credit.
When the upstairs bell rang, then rang again, I wondered who would wake the DiGorros. I moved halfway across the living room.
There was the soft crack of a lock. I let myself down onto the couch and the papers crackled in my parka pocket when I curled up in a sleeping position. The hail light went on, and there was a bump of something being deposited on the floor which had to be near my pack which was against the wall by the hall closet. Before the front door closed again and the steps went downstairs, one of the stranger sounds I’ve ever heard came from Cosmo’s voice: it was my name with a question mark.
The objects in this flat might yield the film.
Cosmo and the other went away and I turned off the hall light and went back to Dagger’s table in the balcony room and with Krish’s lighter looked through the letters and bills and notes to himself that Dag had accumulated. There was nothing explicit on the film unless Monty had written the note Thursday of this just-ending week, and Dagger had told the truth, and my diary was advertising a real film, in which event the film existed. But still only in part? The Softball Game. Maybe more. What more? Why more? The 8-mill. cartridge? The one we’d added the night we came back from shooting the air base? The Unplaced Room unmentioned to Claire?
There was too much here: too much between Dagger’s pica standard and Alba’s elite portable; too much between on my left the poster blow-up of Trotsky in his tortoise-shell glasses with a very young man with an open face beside him (as if photographed together when in fact there was a panel line dividing them) and on my right across above the glass cabinet Mercator’s northern and southern hemispheres framed by Alba; too much between (at the balcony end on the far side of the French doors from me) a folded playpen (sandwiched between two suitcases) and (toward the hall door) several thigh-high piles of books and a stack of magazines staggering up from the floor; too much between (at that end of the room) the upright little oblong steel stove (about as high as the book piles) in which Alba (who would not have in her house one of the antique French stoves I’d been peddling) burned smokeless fuel — and (surprisingly yet somehow not awkwardly near the door to the hall) a huge white paper lantern ballooning down from the ceiling.
Too much even if you did not think of that playpen’s history in our Marylebone house and then as mere clutter in the Highgate house when we didn’t have a third child. Too much whether you knew or not that Dagger had once sold to a rich Swede a forgery identical to that framed forgery of that Map of the World executed by Mercator in 1538 just eight years before the set of observation instruments he had made for Charles V for his campaigns was destroyed by fire — the map lost for three centuries to be found in New York just thirty-six years after Catherwood’s Jerusalem holocaust, a mental montage which in the dark of this room might be more visible than the object itself behind the glass of Alba’s impeccably cut, narrow white frame.
Too much even if you did not place among the college youths who came down to Coyoacán to help guard Trotsky the New Yorker Bob Harte paneled with Trotsky in this poster visible to the eye of memory if not to the eye of Krish’s flame from where I stood at the balcony end of the balcony room looking on a table for a film.
The stiletto button touched my palm and I pulled out of my pocket the papers which the draft I had caused by leaving the French windows open had blown off the table. The third letter was from an Air Force sergeant alerting Dagger to a special sale of Super-8 in minimum large lots. I blew out Krish’s flame and strode out to the hall closet, Alba’s closet; for one piece of our film was the 8 cartridge shot the night we came back from the base, and the 8 that Dagger said had burned was the cartridge Alba had taken of a friend’s baby, but if Dagger was concealing the fact that the film had not been destroyed, and he’d slipped up somehow telling me the spoiled cartridge on the living-room table was the baby picture, why not put together the possible existence of our own Super-8 cartridge and the inviolate privacy of Alba’s closet — where, as I fit Krish’s lighter and pushed the closet door all the way open, I remembered Alba’s flippers were kept, for the morning we departed for Corsica I had neglected to remind Dagger of them. This closet, with perhaps more of Alba in it than the balcony room or the master bedroom, was exactly between the box and the rucksack, and roughly (along the warped axis aforementioned) between balcony room (or garden) and living room (or street).
In the shelf facing me were boxes of Pampers and layers of baby clothes, the sleeved little vests (that Dagger called smalls and that are undershirts in American), the nightgowns, the Baby-Gro stretch suits waiting for Michelle, and all the other stuff I’d forgotten about, stacks of blankets the size of towels, more than she’d ever use.