What did you bring me back, said Jenny, and released me.
Something happened to my face as I recalled forgetting Lorna’s Joni Mitchell Blue in my hotel room, and then Jenny, seeing whatever it was in my face — fatigue, gloom, madness — said, No no I’m kidding, and she seemed about to cry as I heard right on top of her words Lorna saying, My God the poor man’s had things to do.
Which had a warmth that made me grin. I said to my daughter, I brought you a memory but it’s not exactly a present.
Is it your memory or mine?
Mine, maybe yours. It was on our softball film, but it’s not in the diary.
What is it?
It’s a red-haired woman. She was at the softball game we filmed. She was sitting nearby. She got up and walked away. Later your friend the actor walked away in her direction. Then I lost them both behind a tree.
That’s possible, said Jenny.
Have you seen a red-haired woman? I asked.
No, of course not.
Lorna was in the kitchen, I heard her.
Your diary is safe, said Jenny.
There’s some more of it in my head, I said.
I can’t help you there.
You could.
Jenny had the same patient look I’ve seen, and it is mainly patience with herself and it meant she was containing herself. Now if she’d come out of the gallery just before the red-haired woman, it stood to reason she had encountered this red-haired woman. But I might lose what Jenny could tell me if I told her now that I’d seen the red-haired woman walking intimately with Reid the actor.
Does anyone know you’ve got that carbon up in your cupboard?
How would anyone?
At the door Jenny gave a bad imitation of an afterthought: What brought you back so soon?
I’m not really back. I’d prefer you not to tell anyone. Not even Reid.
Would he care?
Are you staying with him these days?
Not really.
Lorna was behind Jenny and instead of asking Jenny if she’d met a red-haired woman this morning, I said, Does Reid know an Indian?
I wish you’d leave my private life alone. Jenny got past Lorna into the hall and went upstairs.
Lorna said, You know Reid’s dome that he built on his parents’ property in Connecticut? He’s shingling it with old LP’s.
Lorna held her hands out to me. She dropped her hands. I saw something so obvious I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before, as obvious as the sloppy paint splotches along the edge of white traffic lines in New York streets — you assume the line, so you don’t see the splotches, till suddenly you look.
What I saw now when I looked at my wife Lorna was that the Indian, Cosmo’s Indian, the Knightsbridge gallery Indian, had been one of the two men with dark hair and white shirts sitting on the grass with the red-haired woman when we filmed the softball game. Yet having expressed this I was now not sure.
I turned away from Lorna, and on the table with Tessa’s hunk of rock salt was a bowl of apples, not Orange Pippins but Sturmers that are like small ordinary rough orchard apples you see by the bushel in the fall in New England.
Lorna said, There must be an awful lot on the film only you could know.
UNPLACED ROOM
Both ask anonymity. Anscochrome color will make the drab hues here threatening, like a strangely rich black and white. Windows in our Unplaced Room symmetrically on either side of and behind the table are not quite on camera; they give a light other than our overhead globe. Dagger thinks the effect may be expansive. Globe? says the deserter. Bulb to you, says his costar.
The deserter’s hair is fair and long, down over his slanting neck as he stares at his hands on the table. In front of the table a blue-red-and-umber floor cushion. His friend’s dark hair is longer than its clutching kinkiness indicates. Dagger has a tripod this morning; I didn’t know he had one. He says he’ll be ready to move laterally but wants, as we agreed, to keep it if possible still and at most play with focus, like on the near hands (deserter’s left, friend’s right) which are in a plane closer than the heads whose plane is not so delicate really because Dagger’s distance gives a depth of field that easily includes in focus ear and nose.
My headset on, the mike hidden on the table, the Nagra spool spinning, I hear the first exchanges and see no significant movement.
I don’t mind, says the deserter apparently in reply to something his friend asked just as I got the phones on before switching in the voices.
The friend, who must have said, Where were we? now says to the deserter Shoot.
I can hear the Beaulieu all too clearly.
The deserter tells a considerable opening tale; much of it I recall.
This boy — he is twenty-one tomorrow — moved out with his company from Fort Dix when he had just been best man in a wedding at the beautiful modern chapel, and they were all relieved to be going to Germany.
Why’d you let yourself get drafted? snapped his friend.
Everybody gets drafted, it’s what you do with it that makes the difference.
You’re just beginning to know your own power. You have to be shown. For example, you got drafted; I didn’t.
You cut your finger off.
My face.
The deserter says No wonder — but the dark-haired one waves his hand as if to say get on with it.
The deserter says with a bit of lonely drama in his voice that all this is like months and years ago, another time, and the dark-haired one says evenly, It’s the same only more so.
The deserter tells how the belly-aching black soldiers at the base bugged him with their challenges about nothing, so the news from Nam got on his nerves and letters came from his mother about chapel attendance and from his sister who he is hung up on and she was splitting from her husband and had a good job as a computer programmer, and a guy in quartermaster said the bombing in Southeast Asia would go on till 1980 till we were just touching up our own craters and it looked like the moon, and our deserter heard of an underground antiwar paper being put out by two GI’s in England but it wasn’t pushing counter-action like Roger Priest’s Om, and he didn’t at the time know why he did it but a black first lieutenant who’d never been channeled into vocational school like him gave him an address up north in Kiel — clean-cut liberal black (both laugh at this), ROTC, scholarships, did card tricks and read palms, the whole bit but now getting out — and before our costar knew it he’d extended a furlough, slipped the Danish Coast Guard, landed on the east Swedish coast south of Kalmar (which is not much of a secret any more), and was hitching toward a lake three hundred miles north where there was a community—