The phone rings. A shtiy in hertz, says Queenie, putting her hand there and smilng a tight theatrical smile.
Hartz, says Zeidel.
I rise.
A heart attack, says Lorna brightly and looks to me.
A pang for goodness’ sake, says Tessa’s father as if from long familiarity.
I’m at the door. My interests are diversified. A new smoking device still on the drawing board which a small design-research firm of young people fresh out of Central School want to sell to an American tobacco company. I’m holding acreage in the Norfolk Broads. There are still boutiques. Boats. Liquid crystals. And now kids’ marbles, the old kind.
When did your father take his digitalis, the intern asked Lorna, and Lorna turned to her mother.
I wish to stay in Tessa’s father’s living room, but I wish to go. I have had help in my omnipotence. My hand is on the door knob.
What, says Dudley to Tessa, is shtip in Scots?
It doesn’t mean pushing in where you’re not wanted, says Tessa.
And then there’s shtip a goy, I say, and leave the room closing the door.
It is Dagger on the phone, and now with Monty on a Thursday in October I recall not wishing to speak with Dagger. He’s two hours late phoning.
He can’t make it tonight. Got to pick up a carton of stuff and take it over to Cosmo’s. It crosses my mind to tell him there’s a big market for American kids’ marbles in England, but I say nothing.
I tell Dagger Lorna’s riddle. I shorten it. A boy and his father. A terrible accident. The ambulance takes them to the hospital. The father is dead on arrival. The boy is rushed to Emergency. The surgeon takes one look at him and says, I can’t operate. He’s my son.
Dagger can’t make it tonight. Why does a stop at Cosmo’s take so long? Well, Dagger’s got to see the man he knew in the Bahamas whom he wants to fix up with an introduction at H.E.W. but who is meanwhile exploring the feasibility of an American-style alumni mag to serve the Old Boy network — oh by the way, says Dag, I gave him a couple of copies of your alumni review that Lorna let me have one quiet afternoon, did she ever mention it?
A door opens, I think the living room. The steps are familiar.
Also, Corsica is off, says Dagger.
Diversity in the other room collapses into one tiny prick of light fading.
I may have to go anyway, I find myself saying. I sound convincing.
There is a pause in which Tessa soundlessly appears at my side.
Dagger doesn’t seem to know if I’m kidding. He says slowly, by rote, You may have to go anyway.
Yes, to Corsica, I say, holding my hand out. Tessa licks my palm.
There’s more than a film in Corsica, Dag. You know me.
My scrotum tingles. I turn my palm to Tessa’s cheek — oh tell the schoolmaster from the Bahamas he can keep those alumni reviews — I hang up on Dagger who’s saying, I’ll tell him when he gets back—
When I’m halfway down the hall I hear her placing a call to her Scottish chieftain. It is much less perhaps than Dudley thinks. The front door swings in, and Will is not with the girls. They go ahead of me into the living room. Dudley has made Lorna unhappy. Jane shows Lorna the autograph of a stranger on her cast. Dudley asks me where Tessa is. Will appears, and he is furious. Lorna says, You’re bleeding.
His accent which I felt all over again at the Softball Game is so deeply London it screws around into Cockney now and then, no doubt colored by school.
It is a nasty scratch above Will’s nostril; the blood is red. Queenie Stone observes that it could be dangerous if it goes septic.
I say, without thinking, Goodbye, Mrs. Ashkenazy.
And there it is — that’s her name.
Having created a new Corsica out of anger, I might go there.
Dudley is explaining patiently that German Jews on the whole cared nothing for Yiddish; if it had depended on them Yiddish would have died. Zeidel is tense, no doubt because it is Dudley.
A tiny child scratched Will’s nose when he bent down to return the child’s ball that had rolled away. But this is not why Will is furious. Jenny is pale and the trouble is there.
But the formula?
Monty would not let me push through to a formula. A formula for mutual fields. Do you hear me peddling mutual fields up under the casements of Lincoln’s Inn lawyers? John the young man in the glasses I’d once knocked off stepped away from the bar, as if to leave.
I had to be at Sub’s in case Gilda called again; she would not let me call her in Queens.
A shtip in time, says an old Māyā proverb I adapt from the Hindu, may well have to be its own reward. And like a shtip within a shtip, or like teeth meshing the small and large wheels of the short and the long Maya calendars so that even Tessa’s beautiful violence of the sacred cardiectomy atop a Yucatan pyramid waits upon the mechanical program of named and numbered cogs, I was drawn by Monty and the thought of Dagger away from multiple sorties ex-emplified in my sense of that Sabbath Saturday in Golders Green, away from what you’ll by now have seen to be my fitful trip toward an emptiness in order to fall ahead to where Ned Noble would by now have been, and drawn away into the one-track trivia of a dangerous plot I was supposed to be near the heart of. But what was this shtip, this sense of other people’s lives? Was it not also a word in someone else’s language? And on the point of seeing if not my formula the meaning of my power, I was cut short by Monty and the thought and threat of Dagger’s letter — but suddenly thereby received a gift.
And this was the thought that I had indeed dreamt my lookout dream the other night, Tuesday night in this terminal October week, the night I’d last seen Jenny. The night of the afternoon I’d found her between me and Reid and found myself between her and the Frenchman.
But I saw now it might not matter if those perpendiculars had survived from sphere to flat or flat to sphere, any more than it mattered if I could sense some rendezvous between Andsworth’s armchair globe with its crackling shellac and Dagger’s facsimile Mercator hung directly across the long axis of his and Alba’s balcony workshop from the poster of Trotsky with his pointed beard and lofty brow and the young American of good-will the hapless Bob Harte — any more than it mattered that I had forgotten all about that lookout dream I’d had at last except that I’d had it.
My words go single-file, but many files which if blessed by the right angle are others’ words in other times, a future Monty phoning transatlantic Thanksgiving Day just to talk, and still seemingly sleepwalking because he had no one to sleep with, blinded by passion, or in a terribly special sense its absence, found therefore the attention to tell me in case it might somehow matter two facts he now recalled he’d had from his dear dear Claire: that the man she later learned must have been Wheeler had been accosted by a driver while shadowing apparently me on foot, had had words with the driver then passed on leaving the driver stuck in that thick traffic, had walked suddenly past me when I stopped to look through a coffee shop window, and moments later had been overtaken and cut off by the same driver.
My words go single-file, but Monty’s this Thursday before Halloween had not stopped. But in the interlude of my shtip no time had elapsed. Next time I might not be so lucky. With John’s housekeeper in Coventry Monty had left word that he was coming in the late afternoon; the housekeeper had said only that John would be in for dinner, not that he was leaving for the States — maybe Monty had dialed Coventry direct and she did not know he was coming from London. John was talkative and tense. He must stop in London to persuade a lady to come along to the States with him this time; he must eat; and he could not stand train food. He and Monty talked. They dined. They continued their talk in the London train. The long and the short of it was John’s fear of Cartwright, whose name he hadn’t even noted when they met on the day of that silly filming.