Yet the phone did ring in that apartment and I went toward it and turned off Sub’s FM which had modulated from a gallant lunch-time suite for clavecin into news as if the set’s selectivity or frequency control failed to hold station. The Bach sweatshirt lay on the threshold of the bathroom. What with shrinkage Alba’s baby could wear it in four or five years.
If the charter man was calling, it wouldn’t be to break news about some alteration in our arrangement, for he’d sooner do that by mail. I put my hand on the smudged white wall phone in the kitchen within reaching distance of the supper and breakfast dishes I’d said I’d do — but maybe instead of Monty Graf it was Dagger from London in my imagination announcing that the fugitive footage we’d had a rush of weeks ago and that had escaped destruction had now vanished from behind the Acoustic Research turntable and he figured it would be dumped in some north London dust bin in the next few hours all seven minutes plus of it and so we were dead.
Not quite, said my imagination. I took the receiver and recognized Rose.
If I phoned Dagger in London to warn him, why was there more danger now than two weeks ago when his flat had first been visited? That fugitive footage was in my notes too and some of the pages were right here at Sub’s in my suitcase. Why, in this imaginary transatlantic call, had I not asked him where he’d stashed the 8-millimeter cartridge of ours that he’d been against shooting. Was I afraid that if I asked, the cartridge would be gone.
Rose accepted my presence. Myrna there today? Rose was calling to say the kids could come tonight, Thursday, and did I know when they’d be home from school because yesterday they were late. Rose has the fine, rather long English face that can make the switch from literate sparkle to sharp sexual sobriety, not that she isn’t in her view a sex object either way. Her call seemed one of many she was making, and so her message to Sub sounded recorded though also unrehearsed, you could practically hear the beeps. I said why didn’t she call him at work and she said she had a hard time getting through to him, she couldn’t just hold. And oh yes she wanted to say hello to me anyway, and she thought Myrna was there today. She asked if I’d shown any unsuspecting American girls around London lately. I said, Women, not girls. She said Sub had told her all about my film and ah well maybe something like that would happen to Sub. I said did she mean have his film destroyed, and she laughed and said abruptly So long, and hung up.
I phoned Sub. The children were going to a school friend’s until Sunday night.
Maybe phone Dagger at that. From me Claire now knew there was more film. How many people in London and New York were thinking about our film? Anyone but me? Could Claire have deceived someone she was so fond of?
I could just see the Empire State very close from an angle of Sub’s bedroom window. But what if they did find out about the print and break into Dagger’s again and take it?
But I’d forgotten the negative! There was that.
Dagger hadn’t said where it was. His friend in the Soho lab was unknown to me. But someone could get to the negative there too.
My card to Cosmo, in quivering 3-D, had the Empire State in color like tin syrup.
There was something going on near the top, two figures at the base of a boom, then one straddling it, inching backward, the hundreds of tiny red window frames caressed my eyeballs.
Sub’s bed looked like a stage set of rough terrain. I should leave the apartment as if the call from Monty Graf would take care of itself, whip down to the Stock Exchange to pick up the things for Will though it had already occurred to me he could have written. Stop off for a strong Szechwan lunch on the way back, be here again by two.
The ring now came, but when I went to the kitchen the stupid oversight I suddenly saw in my house-bound meditations nearly distracted me from the mild voice speaking.
So as soon as Messrs. Graf and Cartwright had taken tonal soundings and he’d said he was in the film business from time to time, and said he’d like to know more about the footage we still had, I told him that some of what had been destroyed had been on negative film but this rush we still had that had been developed was reversal film.
For this, you see, was what I’d remembered on the way to the phone.
I didn’t add that, rather than workprint the original, Dagger had saved the money for the time being and so the reversal print he had was our only print. The earlier bonfire scene had been on negative film, and the day after we got back to London Dagger and I had a little dispute about it. I said let’s try projecting the negative itself, and he said the faces would come out masked, and I said so what, the snowy look would be haunting, and he said well anyway he wasn’t going to get it processed yet. But Cosmo arrived and I said We’ll talk about it later.
Monty Graf seemed uninterested to hear that what was left was a single reversal workprint. He called the conversation to a halt and said 8 P.M., gave me an address, and as a sort of afterthought asked where we had shot this particular footage. I skipped the question and thanked him for the address. But, he said, what did I think he was calling for.
I dialed last night’s number on the pad. A man answered. I couldn’t think and hung up. But I couldn’t think because the man’s voice had for an instant completed some circuit which could not tolerate further contact and so while my inability to think seemed to save me from something, the successful impulse to hang up broke the new circuit and shunted away its idea. Unfortunately, to be between does not necessitate being constantly connected with what one is between.
By the time the hot tap was running even lukewarm, the water was rising around the pans and plates and dishes and mugs. I inserted my hand under a leaning stack passing two fingertips along a submerged blade and opened the drain to let out the cold.
The oatmeal saucepan should have had cold water in it soaking the pasty remains. I hadn’t got out of my living room day bed till Sub and the children had left. The supper dishes should have been at least rinsed.
Under two plain bone-china dinner plates was the black rim of Tris’s white but smaller though thicker plate. The water had reached the rim just as I twisted the drain. Under and around these three plates were assorted silver, and on its side lay Tris’s milk glass from last night.
Against the stack leaned like a big-hubbed wheel a blue-and-white cereal dish on which in turn leaned a child-size plate I knew had a faded pink and brown view of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. Sub said Ruby was too old for it. She wasn’t.
The water came steaming hot now and some of the pink gook I squeezed in gathered in a chipped cavity in the lip of a cheap old mug whose mineral and dilute pale-green took me along secondary blacktops in southern Maine and back streets of Bridgeport and Flat-bush and brought me from a drippy spigot at the base of a steel coffee urn that bitter worn liquid whose black-brown surface on a cool roadside night floats fine-sheened splotches of grease reminding you you are in a greasy spoon. This mug, framed by glistening space and multiplied by time, at once overflowed into the cereal dish it sat in which then overflowed suds around the base of the center stack. This was the mug I had poured water into for Myrna. Three others were in the sink, the large willow-pattern mug Sub used, Ruby’s red-green-and-blue alphabet mug which had been a baby present, and Tris’s gray, gravelly textured mug which Rose had made in a pottery class the last winter she lived with Sub and which Tris had had hot chocolate in last night. A fourth mug was in the living room on a large blotter next to the diary pages I’d been looking at on Sub’s desk a few feet from the open day bed.