I could have asked Mike and Jan who they thought I was.
She said she had known I would come. I did not tell her (what she might well know) that there was a chance I’d been set up. I had phoned June from Monty’s house saying I was at Sub’s and she’d said that’s where she’d thought I was, and when I asked at once if she knew Jan, she told me Jan would be at John’s loft in the afternoon. The shades were drawn as before. I wondered if she would mention the space of hair colored in — an open message like a signed blank check.
A heart-shaped face, thick pale eyebrows, eyes dark, red hair not long but in denseness of growth and hue not to be equaled even by Jenny’s magic marker.
This was the first time I’d seen her in a skirt — it was white and hung barely above her sturdy knees. A well-made not tall figure of a woman perhaps just out of her thirties who stood composed upon her feet, the workbench behind her, as I pushed the door further ajar and entering and seeing her green blouse felt the jaguar’s red weight in the pocket of the parka I had left at Monty’s.
I let her talk. I did not break in to say (what would have been a lie) that I knew all this. I sat in John’s straight chair and stroked my beard and hoped to seem patient hearing what she would think I largely knew.
So (she said) I wanted to stop whatever was happening, right? — but in the process I had stopped her plan too and whatever had been good about it. Hear her out, please, even if this was old stuff. Oh we do not know enough! — That was what a friend had said months ago and it had crystallized her idea and then her husband Phil my associate (she said) had strangely not turned it down. His interest was a pretext financial or other, but the end sustained itself and could even transform her husband’s motive.
What was the end?
I did not ask.
I had left the door open a crack to listen for steps on the stairs. John and others might wish to stop me.
But from doing what?
Mike seemed to fear not my stopping something but starting it. (Over again?)
Jan said her idea for the film was no secret but I mustn’t assume I understood Paul who to her was even more a hero now he’d opted out of the plans she knew I’d set out to stop. Paul was someone she would like her own son to emulate.
It seemed to me best she think me thoroughly acquainted with her film idea.
She even seemed to try to shock me with her knowledge of what she assumed I largely knew. Paul had opted out, she said, but not because of the big projects discussed — a symbolic war on children waged against school buses; or slowly, through many collaborators, assembling the parts of two bazookas in a Washington rooming house with a roof and shelling the President during a scheduled lawn function; or simply bombing the White House in order to precipitate martial law and with it consequences leading to change. No, on the contrary, Paul had made a mystic parallel between public political action and the family firm now so complex in its indirect holdings that possibly not even Jack had it all in his head. And since effective political action no longer seemed feasible, Paul had conceived a small community in New England which would be neither as remote as he had felt himself to be in that Hebridean hut nor as socially involved as he had really been both through his power in a movement and through his location so useful to certain American exiles.
Mike in the cab two nights before is likewise concerned with Paul. Not Paul some magical youngest brother in a tale of fortunes bequeathed and abandoned — but a man dangerous in his purity, and in danger like a Weatherman who doesn’t know enough but sets out to make an impact-bomb by turning TNT back into nitroglycerine. If you go a degree too hot, forget it.
Why did you take the red jaguar tonight? said Mike.
It made me think of Nash’s nosebleeds.
Did you expect to find Paul at the painter-woman’s?
These minicab drivers don’t know London half so well as regular cabbies, I said.
But Mike was getting close to the fictitious address I’d given him.
Could he think I was reviving the film?
Jan forty hours later said that on hearing I was interested in filming Stonehenge she’d thought that after all maybe she and I were not so far apart.
But why had she ever thought we were far apart? I said; was it some suspicion roused after Dagger and I accidentally found the Hawaiian hippie and his girl from Hempstead in that Underground tunnel?
The only accident, said Jan, was Dagger assuming his businessman friend Cartwright was just along for the ride. Well, I might see Paul from more clever angles than anyone else, she said, yet miss his core of personal vision, deeper than an island, than color on canvas, than violence, deeper than dynamite — (deeper than her words or mine?) — deeper than restructuring custom by blowing up cops.
Downstairs in the Mercer Street loft building a Bach chorale opened fire in mid-cry and at once stopped.
I said there were businesses and businesses, and before dismissing me, even if I lacked a core of personal vision, she should learn about liquid crystals which are organic chemicals having the uniform molecular patterns of crystal systems, yet in the way they flow to conform to their containers they seem not solids but liquids. Now when an electric field is played across an area of liquid crystal the molecules are upset and light is scattered which in technological application can be controlled so as, for instance, to create displays of numbers or letters.
Jan thought her husband and Jack Flint were producing a science film for children. Science was impersonal. There were no right angles in nature.
You see, I said, they bond together two glass plates but keep between the two a space one-third as thick as a human hair and fill it with liquid crystal.
She wasn’t interested in micro-spaces and mere completions. She had passed on lots of ideas. Many from Dagger, who tossed out too many ideas, some jokey. No, what was needed was life, growth. Afeni Shakur who was said to have planned to blow up the New York Botanical Gardens desired life and growth. Ahmed Evans whom Jan had met found energy in systems of the occult. She would like to meet Erika Huggins, and ask her one question.
The Bach blew on, was turned lower, but still would cover any but the nearest and heaviest of steps.
In earlier scenes Jan Graf Aut had receded over and over again vivid and possible. The friend of Krish and Dagger; sister of Monty, wife of Phil; mother doubtless of Jerry; intimate of Reid, rival of Jenny; intimate of Paul. Now she leaned back against the workbench as if against the one source of light in the dusky studio; for her head came between me and the green-glass pool-table shade hanging in front of the poster displaying formulaic sequences.
Gene the middle brother had been swayed (she said) by Paul to have nothing to do with the family business; then of course Gene had married money so he was free though Nell was giving him trouble; she had been to Wellesley and believed power most corruptible when it lay unused.
Gene, however, had grown. Phil had approached him no doubt at the urging of Jack, but Gene had turned down the substantial offer to come in with Phil and consented only to cooperate on a scene or two for Jan’s pan-human film. Gene disliked business because of the people, and film because it tended fatally toward entertainment (as Paul had often said) and so could not be used to convey a rigorous theme like Jan’s, i.e., in one ninety-minute peace-montage to bring together clashes of practice, doctrine, color, and geography among (and here, as I knew, for she assumed I knew, was the point) certain revolutionary groups: interviews, glimpses, faces sometimes only half-seen which Jan believed would say implicitly not just that their human aspirations were more kin than foe to each other, but more (and this to the ordinary audiences who would see the film if only on their television sets) that such groups were full of passionate love which might lean toward violence but only in answer to what there was no point in her spelling out. It was to be the deed of her life, plain black and white, Aristotle had said Man was a political being and a being endowed with speech — so a film of silent faces would not do — she left the execution to Phil and John and (though she had not pressured him herself) her son. A greater deed than a painting, or being a parent, or abandoning your family. It was this deed that I had stalled, from motives she said that even with her limited information she could guess had something to do with large amounts of cash rumor said Jack was handling lately — I had contaminated her vision and in spite of what I might think of the scene filmed in her studio, I had actually increased the chance of violence knowing full well that on camera Jim would speak of Paul and be hushed up and thus pushed even further by Bob, and she would like to have only pity for me but confessed to fear as well.