They were coming slowly up from the port in single file like tourists who’ve had their café crême. The girl pointed at us, her midriff blouse stark white. The blond man stepped off the pavement toward us but was recalled by the other young man, bony brown and bald. The three continued quite quickly along the fortress wall, the bald man now with his hand on the girl’s back where it was bare. We were less than fifty yards from the end of our street where theirs crossed coming up from the port, and Dagger who had been feeling into his pocket for a pack of Turns gave up and went down to the end of our street to look up after them. He wasn’t shooting. They turned into Place Napoléon out of sight. The blond man ambled behind. It was this incident we were disagreeing about on the road from Stonehenge a month later. Dagger insisted now on confusing that black-and-white footage with some Anscochrome we’d used the following day. We’d shot a naval encounter off the beach just three blocks from the École Normale where our American academic friend was putting us up. Aquamarine sea, three Corsicans in bikinis in one yellow inflated landing raft, three Americans in cut-off jeans and bright headbands in the other. And on the road from Stonehenge Dagger seemed to have forgotten the black and white he’d used to shoot the two men and the girl at the fortress in Ajaccio. I’d pointed out that the b & w he shot there was almost the last of the single-perforation b & w he’d bought cheap by mail order from Freestyle Sales in L.A. I described in detail the faces and clothes of the threesome, and how he had complained about his stomach and the École coffee and I’d said he obviously needed to change his diet. I reminded him they’d not wanted to be filmed and tried to get away fast, but when we went diving next day the same blond man was sitting with another girl in a port café and as soon as we were in the gray rubber raft that looked like French Navy surplus, I and the girl and the man who was taking us out, with our suits on and the air tanks yellow alongside our fins and masks and under the thwarts weighted belts like a sound-man’s power pack, and Dagger and the boy who worked for the boss got in and the boss got the outboard going, the blond man got up from the table and walked across the cobbles and stepped inside the trailer with something-Plonger painted on it, presumably to engage the boss’s wife in conversation about Dagger and me. The b & w in question was negative film, which is less adaptable to poor light than reversal film because if you’re using a lab that will push it, negative unlike reversal usually can’t be pushed in the developing to a higher emulsion speed as graded by the American Standards Association (ASA), whose system dating from 1943 was, I’m glad to say, adopted by the British in 1947, though the British use a logarithmic scale by degrees. In any case the last lot of b & w Dagger had had shipped from L.A. was ASA 200 but not with the magnetic stripe. The base price was $11.25 for four one-hundred-foot rolls, a saving of less than fifteen cents a roll at the single-roll price but much more if compared to prices elsewhere. Dagger and I, as we sighted the Druid and pulled over to help with the the, had been disagreeing not about Freestyle, or perforation, or magnetic stripe, or price, but about whether we’d used black and white for those three people Dagger didn’t recall having seen. So when he said, Speak of the Devil, I guessed that during our discussion he’d been thinking not of Ajaccio but of our dealings at Stonehenge minutes before with the very Druid we were now slowing down to help.
The woman with blood-red lipstick recrossed her legs. I looked over my shoulder at lower Broadway to see where I was. A door in a brown commercial building was shutting, but like a circuit for an instant open a hall was visible and a second doorway full of white, and a truth reached me: what I’d been recalling was more than the gist of the two pages Claire must have lifted; it was so closely aligned with those words as to be virtually verbatim.
In truth I had these pages by heart.
So what did it matter if the man on the phone gave them back or had something else in mind?
I had them in my head.
And so I reached over my head for the cord and bent a magical smile toward the dark and leggy woman who without really catching my eye smiled back less magically.
I took a step toward the exit and was staggered by the driver braking for my stop.
I was in Soho going east on Spring. I reached Crosby and knew I was wrong. I turned back west along Spring. A small Chemical Bank branch was out of place among the loft buildings and drab commerce muted despite the trucks cramming the southbound street ahead. At Mercer I turned right and there were not only the trucks moving down the center but parked trucks tilted solid either side up onto the sidewalk and taking over the sidewalks with thigh-level roller-tracks running to basement loading windows or platforms-wool stock, nightgowns, leather. There were green pillars and posts on the east side, a lingerie firm was by a sheet-metal machinery firm and almost next to that I found my address halfway up the block toward Prince.
But the verbatim alignment between diary and memory had come not only without my trying; I wondered as I pressed the top button beside a nameless slot if I’d have been even capable of other words when I recalled the Corsica we’d discussed on the road from Stonehenge.
The latch clicked in answer and I pushed through.
Somewhere above as I started up the stairs, “Let the Sun Shine In” sang forth like an old chorale.
No one came as I passed the dark landings. The music which had been building leveled off, and then dropped away just as a door at the fourth or fifth landing swung open, but the song seemed to be from somewhere else.
Cartwright.
Over the man’s shoulder to one side of the metal rim of his large round spectacles, two television sets in the room behind him faced each other a yard apart. Beyond them, across what must be the width of a loft, a workbench was against the wall with two green-glass pool-table lamps hung coolly above some tools, a generator, the uncovered tubes of a tuner, two or three small, cheap printed-circuit boards, a red box with a greasy-toothed gear leaning on it, and a tangle of looped wires arching up from a panel that lay flat.
What are the pages worth to you? the man said.
You’ve got the question turned around, I said.
The man backed into the loft and I stepped over the threshold and saw how long the loft was.
He snickered and said, No, man. Would I make you pay for your words?
I asked if I’d had any phone calls, I’d left word at the place I was staying that I could be reached here. The man snickered again and said, No phone calls, not even any mail.
The loft seemed to go clear through from Mercer to the next street west. At that far end was an extensive rig with a long track connecting a camera and some kind of focusing-plate gear. Areas around this imposing rig seemed in shadow because of the light on it from ceiling spots hung from two parallel socket-tracts.
I felt a third person but I didn’t look around. I didn’t have to see the man with the steel-rimmed glasses who’d greeted me with the voice I’d heard on the phone. The loft, the lights — the equipment I saw at once and the equipment I made out when I looked away from the lights — plus something genuine which seemed at odds with my teasing reception — all absorbed our words to spread their quotable sound into meanings I find now but found even then I could describe but not quote. But you who read this have me even though here I admit there are things I have heard that I didn’t have in my head exactly. Do not withdraw your hand from the glove port, you haven’t yet found what you imagine you’re not looking for.
I asked if Claire was here and when the young man in the glasses asked who Claire was, the third voice said to him, You never met her.