My name is Cartwright, I said, and I don’t know what the stabbing has to do with me. I believe it’s important.
I went on: Because I’ve been making a film.
Gilda stared at the rug. Her eyes went relentlessly over it but her head did not move.
This film was destroyed before it was developed. Can you understand that? And I am finding out why. So I was on my way to see someone who’s involved when I happened into this stabbing, but the person I was seeing — who was as I said involved in the film and maybe its destruction — appears down the block behind me and when I see her she turns around and disappears.
That’s too bad about the film, said Gilda.
My voice said, What’s it matter, nobody reads any more.
I do. Why’d you say that?
They read more in England where we made the film.
Why were you making it in England?
It’s where I live.
You don’t live here?
I come here, I don’t live here.
Where am I, then? said Gilda.
She stood up looking toward the hall at an angle which if her eyes could have moved her would have led toward Sub’s bedroom.
I said, A friend’s.
Here I thought I was in your place. I saw the unmade bed.
Why did this man use my name, I said.
Gilda sat again and reached for my hand: What kind of film?
Why, if you want to know, it began with an Unplaced Room. Just a room that could be anywhere, that was the point, a point.
What kind of a point can you make out of that, said Gilda.
Well look at this room. What’s New York about it?
When’s your friend coming home?
My friend’s in Washington for the weekend.
Gilda stood up and walked to the hall. If you ask me, he called himself Cartwright because he wanted me to tell someone else that a man named Cartwright came asking about the murder.
Tell who?
She slid her right hand into a sleeve, and I found Dagger’s Beaulieu eye and at some key distance my naked eye triangulating upon a shimmering apex alternating into color and black and white as if between two ambiguously interesting lens focuses — and I went to Gilda instantly and held the other lapel so she could slip her left hand in.
She waited, not turning.
Helping you on with your flowers, I said.
Gilda still did not turn. You’re American, right?
As if she might want to get off with me but, while staring at (or toward) the big unmade bed in Sub’s room, wondering if I was circumscribed.
With my finger I drew a circle on her back beginning inside one shoulder blade, touching the neck and her spine above the small.
In the hall her green flowers were dark.
OK, she said, and was at the door. This is interesting, I’m trying to figure if I know something about this that you don’t.
She wanted Sub’s phone number and I wrote it down for her.
I stood in the open doorway waiting for her elevator, and we didn’t speak.
Have a good weekend.
I phoned Claire’s answering service and left a question for Monty: Why had he wanted to know if I had spoken to the stabber? Didn’t he know Wheeler as well as Claire and I did?
I had dinner alone out Friday and Saturday.
If you are, so to speak, in between people, New York can offer vintage solitude. Both nights I saw big frank films in color. One showed blood darting from a wound in a sheriff’s neck. The other looked back only thirty years to an Unplaced Beach (if I may) seen through a 235-carat haze of clear sun and aquamarine to a pair of amber nipples.
When Jenny and the Connecticut actor left the place where the Suitcase had been Slowly Packed, he carried it for her. Four legs and a gray case the contents of which I knew — and a door closing upon our footage. Dagger said, Nice couple.
Alba came out of her kitchen and asked if I’d like some fish soup.
Jenny got home late, but not to the sound of a motorbike. Not a cab either and it was long after the Underground finished, even allowing for a long walk up Highgate Hill from Archway Underground station. I heard what had to be the gray suitcase being set down and then, like stereo, the front door opening from outside and inside. Naturally I had too much else on my mind to be thinking about the snapshot. I had been lying awake for a long time. Lorna facing away from me toward the window said as if out of a little dream, Go to sleep. She could not have known I was awake unless some tempo in my breath opened me to her dream or of course to her own sleepless thought.
Phil Aut’s home number wasn’t in the Manhattan book.
I went through my own address book in vain.
My diary pages lay on Sub’s desk and I thought how sloppy and pompous the boys in the Unplaced Room were, swapping recipes for gelatin dynamite and Hong Kong hors d’oeuvres.
I think I straightened the pages and put my address book squarely on top as a paper weight for the night.
Sunday at 7 A.M. about a minute after I woke, Lorna phoned. Had I slept? What time was it in New York? She’d phoned twice yesterday. She was so tired, hadn’t had much sleep. Will had just gone to Stephen’s for lunch. My card had come and Jenny had laughed and said she’d in fact asked me to bring back a memory.
There was an expensive silence, the ocean-bed cable kept our pulses dry, Lorna didn’t like these calls, coming or going.
Why couldn’t you sleep? I said.
The house was broken into after lunch yesterday, she said. Jenny was out, Will was on his way home, I was at rehearsal. I feel so badly, the desk was rifled; what is happening?
They took the film diary?
The second drawer on the left is empty; I’m so sorry.
I did not tell Lorna what I felt. I saw her hair and her shoulders and heard her voice carry out of her eyes into my own voice, my mouth.
I said, I want you.
Lorna said, The young man, the second tenor I told you about who just joined us, he walked to the bus stop with me after rehearsal. He asked if I felt at home in England, I told him how long we’d been here. When I got home the door was open, there were snapshots on the rug and check stubs and letters and bills and stamps and stationery. My music on the piano hadn’t been touched, I don’t know why it would have been. The desk drawer you keep the diary in was empty. The police came. The lock was ruined and there are scrapes on the door frame. I thought of what that young man had asked me and I thought why the hell didn’t we go back years ago. Stupid to think that. Forgive me.
I said, What about the carbon in Jenny’s cupboard?
Lorna said, Oh thank God. I don’t think they went upstairs.
I want you.
Lorna may have sensed my excitement. I said, Didn’t Jenny mention the carbon?
She phoned last night to say she wouldn’t be home. I haven’t seen her since Friday.
Tell Dagger.
Lorna said, He phoned up. I told him. I said we’d had a card. He said Cosmo of all people had had one.
Did you get hold of a locksmith?
I finally got one through that young man the second tenor.
I didn’t tell Lorna what I was going to do. But she said, There’s no need to come back.
I said to go upstairs and look in Jenny’s cupboard in the box-file on its side underneath her laundry bag. If the carbon wasn’t there, phone back at once, screw the expense.
Lorna said, I miss you.
I said, I love you. I’ve got to think. I’ll be in touch in the next few hours.
I shaved and showered with the door open. I made a pot of coffee.
At nine I started to go for my address book but found I knew the charter man’s number. I phoned him. There was almost no time, as it turned out. I left my suitcase and day bed open and took only the Joni Mitchell Blue. I couldn’t find its paper bag.