I did not know.
Coventry jail, Civil War, he said, the citizens of Birmingham sent a passel of Royalists away to Coventry; I’m an Anglophile, he said. He asked me what I’d drink. I was thinking it wasn’t quite true that the English were reserved. How can you live so long there and not know if they’re reserved or not? Think of the stranger, the bank clerk who came up behind you at Stonehenge and gave you a little talk unsolicited complete with weights and measures.
I said by the way I had indeed seen the new Coventry Cathedral, but speaking of Anglophilia he wasn’t the one who phoned yesterday afternoon, was he?
He didn’t seem to make the connection of Anglophilia with the phone call, but he did shake his head.
I asked if he was with Outer Film; he said No though he’d heard of them. Our film didn’t include Coven try, did it — or had I said I knew someone in Coventry.
An engineer, but I don’t think I mentioned him to you.
Automobiles?
I nodded.
Monty Graf sipped through a short straw a New Orleans gin drink made with milk and fresh-cracked ice, sugar, and white of egg.
He’d come in from London this morning, he said.
I said I’d guessed that.
He took another sip and said he’d learned — in London — that a film I’d made was very interesting and that I hadn’t sold it yet.
I said we’d lost most of it so there was virtually nothing to sell.
He said according to his information we still had some significant footage.
I said what could you do with a few minutes of 16 mill?
Monty Graf drew gently on his gin and milk and looked beyond me phrasing the next move.
I asked if he had a settled place of residence, and he smiled and said sure he had a house south of the Village, I could come and stay any time; he mentioned the address.
Two fish platters came by and were placed before the ash blonde and the man. I’d been brought a dark beer by mistake. I said I didn’t realize the kitchen was back there — and I turned around and saw light through the swinging door opening for the other waiter also in white shirt and white apron and as my eye further along the bar and off by the door thought it found the profile of the man in glasses who’d tried to serve me a cup of tea, I became aware of the jukebox playing later Dylan, and Monty Graf said he didn’t know if I’d eaten but this was just a neighborhood place but pretty good pot luck and he could recommend the osso buco and the stuffed bluefish.
Who had he heard about the film from? I asked.
He passed right through that question and said (headed toward me like a devoted skin doctor), I’d like to hear about your film from you.
I wondered how Dagger would take the question. Lately Dagger didn’t seem to care, though I will say for him that he seemed deliberately to want not to talk about the loss. He was considering the States, he had even assembled a job-application vita.
The truth was that there were in a way two films — his and mine.
That would be of little interest to this man waiting across the table in a black double-knit blazer.
You decide to reach, and before you’re half into it the thing you want has taken you in hand and said wait here keep an eye out while we get through the window and look around inside, we’ll be out in ten minutes unless you whistle.
Or your wife says to some visiting American who’s asked if she’d like to go back to the States, By now it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other, but it would be a change — though you think that when she looks over at you she remembers you inside her, recalls looking forward and backward to it, looks forward to it. (Why are English not called expatriate when they settle in the States?)
Or you say to your friend Dagger, We’ll make a film, and you tell him what’s on your mind. But later the film seems not yours, not his either, but just to have happened — and it’s not what you dreamed of, but it’s something.
You get an inkling one day that the ruination of the film was something someone decidedly reached out to effect: and you get on a plane to New York, leaving behind an encounter with your seventeen-year-old daughter and looking ahead beyond the East where you’ll be to a California she says she is settled on going to perhaps even before she takes her A-levels.
But you were coming anyway on business, and the last time you made love to Lorna it rose through your head in clear blue-green bubbles of smiling sound that that amateur film had not after all been necessary.
But life is not so disappointing as such passages of consolation seem to conceal. You’ve spent forty-eight hours in New York and someone is coming to you wanting to know what you have, though who is hand in glove with whom is hard to say. You haven’t picked up those Wall Street brochures for your son or was it a book about the market — then over your cheeseburger you saw Will hadn’t made it clear, maybe was just giving you something to do. Your frothy vanilla malted flowed down and was gone — such a malted.
You haven’t had your cigarette today.
Monty Graf waited and now broke his lips to speak but I was in ahead of him: There are two films really, what my friend Dagger DiGorro wanted and what I wanted. He’s good on the hardware. I mean, he never made a serious film but when we shot the naval engagement in Corsica in slow motion he knew it wasn’t just a matter of turning the frame knob up to 64, there was the little power switch below and the ASA gauge above.
Could I have heard about him on the grapevine? said Monty Graf.
I turned to wave at a waiter and look the man in glasses in the corner of his profiled eye. He was the one who’d made me a cup of tea all right.
The idea was this, I began. But I couldn’t mention Claire. Graf must be the Monty that Claire was talking to on the phone, for she’d already mentioned Monty Graf to me. I had slipped into other circuits, and Graf must know Aut too if Jan Graf was any relation, but if he knew Claire he must at least know of Aut; but Graf would not know Dagger, for Dagger would have mentioned him — still, through Claire Dagger must have become known to Graf, though what Claire could have told Monty Graf remained to be seen and Claire knew only what Dagger had told her plus my bait yesterday; but if Jan Graf was a relation, did Monty therefore know the Indian who worked in the Knightsbridge gallery, or even Cosmo? But that kid in the loft Jerry might know Claire, the way he said You never met her to the man in glasses.
So to be at least myself, I decided to tell Monty Graf what the idea had been and still in some form was. Graf widened his eyes as I said Bluefish to the waiter, who raised his eyebrows when I said beets or carrots instead of french fries, and as he was going away I said light beer.
For example, said Monty Graf, the footage that survived the fire, why a rush of that? Was that the beginning of the film and you wanted to see how you were doing? You shot that in London? Someplace else, I forget.
You didn’t forget, I said, you were never told.
The waiter brought a coffee-colored dark beer with a thick head like rusty marshmallow. I pointed to my companion’s milky champagne glass and the waiter said Right, and went away.
No, I said to Graf, it wasn’t the beginning. I’ll tell you about the beginning; we never did see it printed; but this is what happened.
I did not describe my effort to get Chaplin to let us film an interview with him and it would have been too hard to explain to Graf what I’d had in mind vainly urging Dagger to shoot a hundred frames or so of a letter lying, say, on Dagger’s worktable that I in fact wrote to Chaplin.