Whoever left the number would phone again. But what would happen when I found out who it was and where, and then said Sorry, I was mistaken about the diary, I didn’t leave it at Claire’s after all.
In the sink there was steam but little water. I’d left the loose old drain open, and the detergent water had mostly found it. I reached to close the drain and burnt my knuckles on a plate. I turned on hot and cold taps and squirted soap.
I should have told Dagger to shoot a sinkful of dishes. But film could not have seen what I saw. We could have used Lorna’s unidentified hands reaching for a white plastic bottle of supranational Lux though her brand is Fairy Magic — her skin over each pair of delicately raised wrist bones so fine there seem no creases from pore to pore. The blue sponge I pushed across the top plate swept off the dried catsup that marked it as Sub’s and but barely eroded some sandy particles of bone and gristle tracked in congealed chop-fat leading into saffron crust which a green fleck revealed as broccoli butter.
Sub’s plate I stood up in the water against the stack it had been part of and lifted out Ruby’s with its three-fold fable licked clean last night but speckled now with greaselets launched by sink-water. Sub said Rose made fun of Ruby’s bone-phobia; Sub, when he took the chops out of the oven and Ruby said she was having no bones on her plate, told Tris to put away his comic and get the bread and butter out of the icebox. Sub cut pieces of dry pork off Ruby’s bone, arranged them on her plate, and kept her bone to chew on himself. I asked if I could dish out the broccoli.
But today where was that copper-bottomed broccoli pot? Not in the sink with the rest of last night’s dishes or on the stove or on the windowsill by the ashtray with the filter-stub of my own cigarette yesterday. When I picked Tris’s overturned milk glass out of the new submerged chop pan, my fingers found a slippery strip of fat the detergent hadn’t had a chance to cut but couldn’t have cut anyway without spreading the grease around the sinkwater. I lifted the pork pan out emptying the water. I found a spatula and shoveled up paths of fat which with my hand under to catch water drips I bore one by one to the garbage. Then I squirted detergent into the pan and ran water into it and placed it carefully again on the sink counter.
Yes I phoned the number.
The same man said he didn’t know where Claire was but I should come now to an address downtown. When I asked if he worked for Aut he said Who’s Aut? Then he said, quite finally, OK.
I said Sorry, I was mistaken, I didn’t leave my diary at Claire’s.
The man said as if it were a complete assertion, If you don’t want these two pages.
And hung up.
I was feeling I hadn’t learned much by this ruse of yesterday. When he rang off, the idea that had been shunted away when I’d hung up before circuited now in a neat eight-by-ten-inch rectangle the very size of that pile of my diary Claire had neatened on her table when she’d gotten up to answer her phone — and I’d come from her lavatory and had seen the pages had been neatened, and felt my hints had been heeded.
Now I rushed out of the kitchen through the hall to the living room. I clipped my shin on the steel corner of the day bed frame. I tore through the sheets on Sub’s desk and at once found, yes, two pages missing that I knew I’d had at Claire’s and that were not with others in my suitcase atop my wife’s compact packing.
I took a bus downtown undecided.
If I chose not to go to the peremptory man who’d hung up on me, I could go all the way to Wall and get the brochures for my son. The bus was almost empty.
The pages must have been copied by now so I’d have no difficulty obtaining them. They might make Aut want to see the rest. Claire might not have had the chance to tell him she’d picked these two virtually at random having to run to answer the phone and knowing I’d be coming out of the bathroom. But if Aut thought these two pages were the best I had to offer, he might not care about others. But for him — if he was even involved — what in these pages mattered?
It was a rough bus ride. We started and stopped and I slid left and right on the seat’s molded plastic. A pale-faced black-haired woman with blood-red lipstick dropped her fare into the machine and spoke to the black driver. I didn’t see him speak, and as she spoke again the bus broke forward as if something had rammed it and the woman lost her hold on the fare machine and was inertially thrust toward the rear of the bus, but she lifted her knees in such a lucky slow-motion she didn’t fall until, halfway down the length of the bus, I reached out.
I caught her so that she seemed about to learn to swim. She regained her slim long-calved legs and so involved herself in a magic smile to me and the immediate issue of whether to remove herself from me by sitting across from me or on my side and thus out of my normal line of sight, that she forgot the driver’s behavior. She settled on my side toward the rear, slung one leg over the other, and looked straight ahead. The driver was answering a radio call, giving his position.
But what did Aut want with the diary pages? That is, what there in my words might equal what had been thought to be in the film? Almost the first words were Dagger’s.
We were two miles east of Stonehenge among the great green and sand-pale grasses of Salisbury Plain, and Dagger slowing down nodded at the brown car on the shoulder ahead and said, Speak of the Devil, here’s our volunteer for the final scene, let’s change his tire.
But in fact we hadn’t been discussing this Druid whose flat tire we now changed.
We’d been reviewing the raw stock we’d used in the Beaulieu up to now. A motley lot, I grant — but Dagger of all people should have recalled that the camera was lighter without the magazine one very bright morning the second day in Corsica, for we’d used a roll of black and white that was only a 100-footer. I said it had been between the petrol station and the fortress, around the corner from Place Napoléon, and the glare and shade decided Dagger to use instead the less inherently contrasty black and white. He’d had a hundred feet of Anscochrome in the camera when we came into Ajaccio on the Marseilles car-ferry the day before and he’d let it all go on the white, pink, yellow, and sky-blue crowd watching from the pier; but at once he’d said he should have waited, the contrasts would have been clearer in black and white, though he added I hadn’t yet sold him on mixing color with black and white. In London I’d given him £12 to pay for six hundred feet of Anscochrome. He’d said Claire’s boss would foot that expense and gas to and from Corsica. But it was black and white he was using when the two men and a girl came up the street that crossed the end of ours. The fortress wall left almost no pavement to walk on—sidewalk is the word in America, not that pavement is exactly the word in Corsica, where the language is French.