I hadn’t needed to say I had those two pages in my head.
Well, I asked Sub what sort of day it had been. He stretched, and said Rose had been livid. I shook out a cigarette and wondered if Jenny had thought about the pages she’d typed. She might be able to help after all.
Sub got up and turned off the telly. Rose was fit to be tied, he said, she came for Ruby and Tris and nobody was here. Almost.
You said you’d phone her, I said.
I almost meant to and forgot. Talking to Ticketron about going to work for them, Rose went right out of my head.
Rose keeps in touch, I said.
She’s not threatening a comeback, said Sub.
She have a key?
That’s almost what I wanted to ask you.
You said she was livid.
By phone and in the note she scrawled me.
Sub was leaning back on the couch that turned into my bed. I looked for an ashtray. On a bookshelf stood some old coffee tins painted purple.
Who’d you give your key to? said Sub.
I let myself in, didn’t you notice?
The labels on the coffee containers read PENCILS, PENNIES, BUTTONS, SHELLS, STRING, MISC. There was a slit in the plastic top of the PENNIES tin. My ash dropped on the carpet. I found an ashtray between two glass candlestick holders.
You see, said Sub, a man said to Rose you’d lent him your key.
To Rose? I said — which lucky for me was just about what I’d have wanted to say.
Rose came here expecting to find the children, said Sub, and when she didn’t find them she phoned me but couldn’t get through. So she phoned the school and found out what had happened. She was writing me a note when the buzzer went. She asked who it was and the man said a friend of Cartwright’s and he had your key but didn’t want to startle anyone if there was anyone in the apartment. Rose let him in. He said you’d been tied up at a studio and were meeting him later and had asked him to get something out of your suitcase. Rose couldn’t care less.
Perhaps, I said, I shouldn’t have.
She said he had a suede fringe outfit and big round glasses.
That’s him, I said. Steel-rim.
And said he was in films, that was how he knew you.
I’ve been running around all day, I said. New York confuses me. I didn’t think you’d mind.
Sub had gone into the kitchen. The fridge door smacked.
Want a beer? I got Heineken’s.
I said no thanks.
They might never tell me what it was they wanted in my pages.
Sub leaned against the doorway. He was tired. He tipped the bottle up.
I hoped he would say something else. I got my suitcase up onto the couch and got my pajamas.
I said I appreciated this — it was much more than a place to crash.
Saying the words I found them true.
But I’d begun to say them because Sub had had another lousy day; and he might say something else about the man, and I couldn’t very well ask without weakening my position. But the uttered words brought up the real feeling and real years. I was sorry Sub’s marriage had busted up. But why?
Sub nodded.
He turned toward his bedroom and I mentioned that Will had got interested in Babbage. Sub had once written something for a house organ on that peculiar English genius and his proto-computers. Sub murmured, Drain Babbage, brain dommage.
But then from his bedroom he said, Rose asked who he was, and he said Monty Graf. But you know it was Monty Graf.
My fingers were on my diary but from some lower layer of packing an odor as of Lorna reached me; I felt and found a waxy ball of her pine soap; it was American.
Sub came back: But didn’t this man with the suede fringe tell you he ran into Rose?
It was a good question and I kept my hands moving.
The pages were all there except the two I’d had in the envelope an hour ago. I said, He left the key for me in an envelope so I didn’t see him to talk to.
Sub turned away toward his room and I grabbed my trench-coat pocket and to my relief found Sub’s key. But why not?
Imagine the man in glasses taking it when I was in the loft; imagine him cutting a duplicate and returning mine to me in the envelope I then passed on to the real Monty Graf. But what would I have let myself in with just now?
Monty might be right. About my being in trouble.
Sub came back. He said, It’s not so much your life I envy as the changes in it. Hell, I said, you’re going to Washington tomorrow. Sub said he had watched a mystery movie tonight which had had little enough suspense and they had a trick of showing you shots of the big scenes before the thing started.
Dagger had just sent in a vita to Washington. He had given me the envelope with Health, Education, and Welfare on it to mail one day. Out of sight, out of mind, he said.
Much later I put my pages in my case.
I had an unmemorable dream but I know that as my thoughts were dissolving in the perpendicular laps of some Black and White Panther concubines, I was about to tell Ruby a bedtime tale of how her dad got the name Sub.
DAGGER-TYPE CASSETTE
At signal read vita: One winter Dagger camped on a Bahama beach. One Sunday morning some black boys who sometimes played on the beach came racing out and pretended to crucify one of their number near Dagger’s lean-to.
Read slowly but not so slowly it is not clear: Dagger was known on the Bahama isle as a colorful character from California. He said, I fill a need here.
At signal, read vita; begin with latest position, work backward: Dagger lived on the beach at the bottom of an incline of tough-bladed dune grass that was the seaward end of a strip an eighth of a mile wide that lay between Sea View, a hotel, and Spindrift, a guest house with motellike units below the main building.
At night he sat cross-legged before his fire. He borrowed a rubber raft from the lady who ran Spindrift and with a snorkel-mask spear-fished a hundred yards offshore where there were rocks and a barrier reef. Once from a boat he caught a thirty-pound grouper and sold it to the proprietor of Sea View, who had been in films and displayed on a wall by the desk a photo of himself on a date with Elizabeth Taylor. At Christmas and then occasionally after that Dagger filled in as bartender at Sea View.
Some nights cross-legged before his fire he’d open a cube of over-priced Spam, and if the island schoolmaster was there they’d look at the sizzhng mold of browning pink meat and the schoolmaster would tell what a treat Spam had been in England during the war. Dagger took his supper off the coals and offered the schoolmaster some Bacardi and told him about folk life in New Jersey when he was growing up. He’d just missed War II and had matriculated his way out of the Korean. The schoolmaster, a burly man in shorts who was strong in maths, Empire history, and games, would allow that he too had missed the war in that sense of having been just too young to serve; he’d been evacuated north and still recalled looking down over his chin at his identity badge. His wife had been evacuated too and the separation from her mother and father had left in her something permanent she couldn’t quite put her finger on. The schoolmaster was at present much concerned about the British government’s renewing his two-year contract.
Read vita at signal; list positions in reverse order beginning with most recent: One warm February morning before he was awake enough to switch on his transistor to get the Bahama Islands weather and the Nassau news, he heard (as if all around him) the boys’ familiar cries and a clattering of wood muted by open air, and for a second — for he saw he was still dreaming of California — he thought the boys were hammering up something out of all the driftwood he had looked at but never picked up off the beach in California when he was busy reading political theory in the San Francisco bay area, yet simultaneously had the thought that dreams are a species of sleep-teaching with a key difference that Dagger unfortunately lost just as he found it in his retreating dream. But he rubbed the sand from his eyes and dug at the salt in his bushy dark eyebrows thinking of two girls from Philadelphia in the hotel bar last night to whom he said he would be constant.