No, I said, the beginning would have been a bare room and the only things on the film besides a couple of straight chairs and a vivid blue-red-and-umber Turkish floor cushion were the two guys we were shooting, plus whatever Dagger got of me with the mike: just a quick cut, then back to the faces.
We told them to go ahead, maybe not mention England, just say for example “here,” so the room as I conceived it with plain plaster walls that we’d depictured would be just an unplaced room. Dagger went along with this.
Who were they? said Graf.
One’s an American corporal from Heidelberg, skipped to Sweden, later crossed into Norway, stopped off with his sister’s girlfriend who’s teaching at an English Institute in Trondheim. Well, then he shipped on some American’s yacht looking for sanctuary perhaps and wound up in the Faeroe Islands between Iceland and the Shetlands and waited while his employer, a dilettante geologist, fished for trout. But our deserter apparently couldn’t wait. He made it to the Hebrides with a fisherman and there I happen to know he lived in a hut near Mount Clisham.
The other? said Monty Graf.
Friend of the first, according to Dagger.
How did Dagger know? said Graf.
Most of what I told Graf was in a desk drawer in Highgate. Earlier today London time Lorna rested her arm on that desk writing a check for her yoga class and would look up with that blank eye when Jenny came in the living room having descended from her own desk upstairs where she might well have been studying A-level Latin. And being asked by Lorna how it had been going, Jenny tossed her head and blew hair out of her eyes which comes right back down again over her cheek like Claire’s.
Does Jenny stay in the living room with Lorna or cross to the kitchen or go back upstairs to Will’s room to borrow a quid if he’s home, or go back to her room? Or go across the road to the new Americans she’s friendly with who she says are so interested in her? It’s suppertime. But why then is Lorna sitting at the desk?
I’ve been hard on Claire, maybe she was serious about throwing up her job and moving to England.
Graf sipped, then spoke with patient elocution. An unplaced room and you took the pictures down before you shot the scene. And a blue, red, and umber Turkish floor cushion. What did they talk about?
In my ear my voice seemed loud, though I kept hitting on the idea that Graf didn’t exactly hear me, but this was perhaps his New York eye, not me.
The film’s aim, I said, was a sort of power.
Over who?
No. Power shown being acquired from sources where it had momentum but not clarity.
What does that mean, said Graf.
Preying on power. Saving power from itself.
Did it have a story? said Graf.
For me it had. For Dagger I don’t know. For him it was a documentary, he said, and he said it would come clear in the end, which was what I thought myself but from my angle.
Political power, said Graf, returning to my other remark. He was looking into his glass, an ice cube had a fog of milk over it.
Any power in the right sequence, I said.
The fire now, said Monty Graf.
Power with momentum but not clarity, I said. The fire? Imagine filming that, filming the dissolution of the film, the burning, filming the burning of even the raw stock running through your own gate, the fire from Dagger’s table leaning out toward the camera you’ve got running in your hand.
There’d be no film then, said Monty Graf. But I didn’t mean that fire; I meant the bonfire.
Plenty of energy there, I said. But the membership was pretty shifting, and from what we saw there were five or six religions there, not one. But we took the whole image.
Was this film of yours about a quest for identity?
Chewing my bluefish, I closed my eyes as if looking for a bone. I remembered many things. I swallowed, smiled, drank half my beer.
Interesting idea, I said. There was a man in the trees there who thought our film was a quest for him.
Did you preserve him for posterity? said Monty Graf.
You know I did, I said.
So that’s the footage that didn’t get burnt.
No.
Let’s move on, said Graf. What’s your next scene?
We might have shuffled the order in the editing.
But it got burnt first.
Right, I said.
Monty Graf wanted a rundown of scenes. That was nice. And as I forked out the stuffing rich with onion, damp with blackened mushroom, separately so I didn’t get a bone, I wondered what I’d achieved in the time since I landed at Kennedy, which seemed long because it had been short but full — but full of what? There was green in the stuffing. I ate some more preceded on the prongs of my fork by a vinegary beet slice (in England called beet-root and sold in the greengrocer’s already boiled but why?). Why would Monty Graf care what had been on a film that no longer existed?
Well, he said, could you take what you rescued from the fire and start over and make a similar film? I mean with expenses.
I chewed.
He was still hoping, but maybe not for the diary. The blonde in the next booth gave me her profile, I could almost smell the orange and blue-green eyeshadow. Monty had talked of the film, not the diary. Preserved for posterity? or from.
The man in the grove had come from the darkness of trees not really into my sight but into flickering shades, and Jenny had typed the page that told how when he broke from the grove he seemed to come from behind a tree much too slender to hide him, so he seemed to unroll from its trunk. I dabbed a parsley fleck off the silver side of my fish with a fork prong and a bit of chive off the plate.
I could forget the film. And Cosmo’s Indian. And someone named Jan Aut. And Claire. And the camera jamming when we didn’t allow enough loop in the left-hand side of the film feeding from the sprocket-wheel around into the slot between the film gate and pressure plate.
Back over my shoulder I found the man in the steel-rimmed glasses who’d made me a cup of tea looking our way.
Would he be here if Monty was in with Aut? Could I be sure the man in glasses worked for Aut? The boy Jerry had opinions on Aut, and as for the man watching me here from the crowded bar, hadn’t he told Jerry to shut up?
I looked; he seemed to be smiling, but he was alone; I’d seen several people around Manhattan walking along smiling for no outwardly visible reason, not only the blind man — the toucher — also the knapsack girl on Mercer Street smiling up at the lofts.
It was after nine. There was a waitress I hadn’t seen, and she was laughing while she wrote on her order pad. There wasn’t a table or booth vacant.
OK, I said. For what it’s worth. A Softball game in Hyde Park, a bonfire in Wales, a Hawaiian hippie and his girlfriend from Hempstead, Long Island, playing guitar in the London Underground. A suitcase slowly packed. People in a marvelous country mansion doing things inside and outside and ignoring a moonshot on a television set under a table umbrella out on a rainy patio. A Corsican montage featuring an international seminar on ecology. Toward the middle of August, Stonehenge. In the end a U.S. Air Force base. A quick 8-mill. cartridge of some pals of Dagger’s the night we got back from shooting at the base.
You left out the beginning, said Graf.
OK, I said.
The two men in the Unplaced Room. Do they come in again?
No. But yes. They do come in again. They were at Stonehenge.
Sounds a peculiar film. Power, you said?
Power poached on when it had momentum but not focus.
In England.
Some bits maybe had focus. Objects, cuts, quickies, objects for music and voices. A bridge I like.
Objects? What about the pictures in the Unplaced Room?