But listen to this. At ten I saw my daughter Jenny. I saw her come out of the Knightsbridge gallery. The door was held by the Connecticut actor Reid, but because of my angle across the road I didn’t see in.
At the bus stop he kissed her and a bus came and he kissed her again and then she didn’t get on and seemed to nod back down the block. They walked back slowly past the gallery and I window-opped, and then Jenny kissed him quickly and as I expected entered the Knightsbridge tube station. Piccadilly Line to Holloway Road, 271 bus to Highgate Village. She might be going home.
Reid walked back toward the gallery. He went in. Then he came out followed by a red-haired woman in a bright blouse, short suede jacket, and bluejeans whom I’d seen somewhere. At the bus stop they happened to stop. They were arguing. Reid kissed the woman and she gripped his hand. They were arguing. They moved on. When he talked he looked at her and she looked straight ahead. When she interrupted and-turned to him he looked straight ahead. He put an arm around her, she leaned on him, kissed his cheek or neck, then broke away and flagged a cab and left him at the curb with his hands up. She got in and the cab went on in the direction of the tube, and in an antique-shop window (so as to have my back to Reid) I saw Cosmo’s Indian come out of the gallery and automatically flag the cab but then drop his shoulders, perhaps seeing that the yellow top light wasn’t on, yet he seemed also with one now pointing finger to show he saw who was in the cab. Then it stopped and the red-haired woman I think hailed him and he ran and got in.
Reid watched, but as the cab pulled off for the second time and he turned to go on, his eyes crossed me and I turned to my shop window just in time to see that he looked my way an extra second.
The Indian had had on a heavy white turtle-neck, dark trousers; the woman inside the cab on the edge of her seat had become shadowy as if stripped of the flashing green of her blouse and the deep, once-washed look of her denim-blue and the flash of her hair. And my own Jenny, a quite gray delicacy in her light long hair, had had under her arm the black zippered portfolio I’d brought her from New York two years ago, but when she’d turned to be kissed her inky slicker opened to show a sky-blue high-neck mini-dress I’d never seen. As for her guerrilla-theater actor Reid, I know him as you can only know someone you’ve deliberately watched but never shaken hands with, never met except once in passing at second base. He’d spent two years at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh and he lived now in a Victorian square in Chalk Farm in the basement of a house scheduled for demolition, and the third thing I’d ascertained while standing on second base after my hit to right field and an instant before discovering that Dagger had broken his promise not to film me, was that Reid (who as you may recall was Cosmo’s second baseman and who seemed somehow not to know I was Jenny’s father) spoke of London with that tone of the American who’s had a year maybe and knows the ropes and will tell you a few tricks and get off a remark about English laziness or the future of the Labour Party or if you mention the British Museum, not having gone there in ages, or (to show intimacy with London) this Camden Town pub whose Saturday night talent show (with a transvestite climax) where he’d taken two slumming Foreign Office friends and made the mistake of mentioning to a couple of hostel shoppers in the Underground who were living out of a guitar. Reid’s long, slow strides gave the illusion of height. He seemed too swarthy for Ridgefield, Connecticut. He had the beginning of a pony tail. Where was his motorbike? He was the only one left to follow. When he turned back toward the art gallery once again — this time from the bus stop rather than the tube side — I thought maybe he was going to pick up a third female, say with lustrous silver hair dyed black. But he went on to the corner where he bought a paper, lit a cigarette, looked at the headlines, and suddenly entered the Knightsbridge tube station.
It was all as vivid as you could want, like a form — two becoming one. And like some imminent revelation that disarms us in order that we may then think we see it, it seemed not to require understanding. It was also like some future after you are dead and you see as if aesthetically. But you see, I knew who the woman was. She was the red-haired woman Dagger’s Beaulieu paused upon when Savvy Van Ghent was chasing the foul.
If Phil Aut knew my face, was he in that gallery right now? It was his gallery.
I seemed to lose Reid on the Underground platform. I got into a car with the brandlike No Smoking red-circle-with-a-blue-bar across it in the windows. Hyde Park Corner. Green Park. The words open and close like ideas. Piccadilly. Leicester Square. Syllables more layered than pictures. Covent Garden, the ballet-stop when I took Jenny. Holborn, near the Home Office, where aliens renew visas and the stop also for my broker met by chance taking an American girl to see St. Paul’s. Russell Square, where Cosmo’s right-fielder in our film got off for the British Museum in quest of Frederick Catherwood. King’s Cross, under whose acre of Victorian greenhouse roof Dagger entertained twice monthly when he taught at the U.S. base Chicksands. Then Caledonian Road, then Holloway Road. Ten nonsmoking Underground stops that made a clear avenue from Phil Aut’s art gallery within striking distance of the Queen’s preferred department store Harrod’s to the broad jumbled itemized working-class life of the road that you associated both with Holloway Prison — not in fact in that road at all — and with Friday and Saturday’s shopping list even if you were Lorna Cartwright coming down from Highgate or Geoff Millan, who lived closer, between Holloway and Highgate in the area called Archway (because of a high overpass further up Archway Road preferred occasionally by suicides), an area like Holloway, though Geoff lived off a church corner in a road so cleanly hushed you might have been abducted through a tunnel of compressed atmosphere into a capsule as private as any residential English quintessence like where we lived on the west side of Highgate three-quarters of a mile on and three hundred feet higher past Whittington Hospital and the Singapore nurses from good polygamous families who used to babysit, and the railed little podium up the Hill enshrining the famous bronze cat.
I got off at Holloway Road. I waited for the lift rather than climb the long, spiraling stairs. I rode up thinking, Well I’m here, I may as well take my bus home to Highgate and see Jenny even at the risk of giving away too much.
But there boarding my 271 was Reid.
The bus had waited a few seconds for him as he ran out of the tube station, and this gave me the chance to catch it, but if he hadn’t gone up to the top deck at once he might have turned and seated himself and seen me pay the driver and stare at his narrow black change-tray like a tourist who has learned shillings only to find a decimal system, or as if a power to which my brain is normally raised had been lowered and an avenue had not opened its usual alignment. I don’t mean I was seeing nickels, dimes, and quarters, but I must have been tired; yet now another and tangential alignment opened and closed in the form of whether returning, say, as early as tomorrow to Sub’s in New York would not only counter the drag between my body-clock and transatlantic time but pass me into a second, other New York. I at once recycled this thought, for it was not an avenue, at best an alley with the littered vividness only of dustbins upset, orange peel rocking, green wine bottles, and brown roses too ripe to get rid of their petals — and Reid was topside with his newspaper, and the bus’s erratic motion had swung me right round the silver pole I held and I must sit where Reid wouldn’t see me when (as I readily assumed) he came downstairs to get off at the last stop, the top of Highgate Hill, Highgate Village so-called.