Not even seven years later, now in ’71. But the traffic was gathering when I turned south in Sixth. When I reached Graf’s house south of the Village I was drained.
But what happened now seemed even better than an informant telling the whole story. I stood at Monty Graf’s desk and beside me was Claire scenting the bright room with something liberatingly organic like the milked essences of safflower pistils, and in the kitchen Monty was fixing gin and tonic and I suspected getting ready perhaps in concert with Claire to make me an offer that would tell me even more than it promised me for my cooperation — and as Claire and I stared at Jenny’s typing and were amused, I found in one of Claire’s bare feet a new map that took me up to the Highgate room of Will my American son and his mother’s dark hair and what he was kneeling on — and I said in answer to Claire’s inquiry, No, I think Jenny will go north before she comes here if she comes here at all.
Black eyebrows, black alligator slippers (a gift from Claire), Monty came now in white crepe shirt and white bell-bottoms with a tray of glasses.
North? murmured Claire.
Monty passed glasses laced with bubbles. He raised his glass and said, To film.
Claire said to Monty, To make a long story short he spent part of one night with her and now she’s calling him transatlantic.
Monty said, So father and son do talk after all. I can guess why Jerry likes to think his friend was impotent with that girl.
I wasn’t going to tell Claire what I had found in her beautiful foot, which was what I had found all over again on my son’s floor. But so that it may be taken for granted in what follows I will make it clear: the map of Jenny’s that Will borrowed, and in which as if nearsightedly I’d seen merely Mr. Ogg’s gradients and my pride in Will’s grades, was mainly of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides; and while Jenny after all was not likely to go trekking seven hundred miles up there herself, she was involved with Reid and Reid with the red-haired woman and the red-haired woman through the gallery was connected with the Indian and perhaps with Aut and through the Softball Game with the Indian and with us. Now whatever the meaning of the black-haired chap’s whisper in the Unplaced Room that I had so attentively depictured before we began shooting, his friend the deserter whom he treated with increasing condescension which the camera must dramatically have caught, had explicitly lived in that northernmost part of the Hebrides that Jenny’s ordnance survey map covered (or was it Reid’s? Not mine because it was too well used and I was sure I’d never bought one of Lewis).
It was necessary now to talk. We had had our sips, and now I had given thanks for hospitality and said how different this room looked with the northwest light let in past the opened blinds, and Monty had said I must be eager to get back to London and Claire could live there and he and she had talked about it.
Claire said Dagger had had the right idea. I asked if she’d give up her job with Aut or work for him abroad. She smiled at Monty, who was a very good twenty years older, and he said to me gently looking back at her that Outer Film didn’t do all that much in Europe.
I said, But Phil Aut.
Monty said Claire knew more than he about Phil Aut, but what he knew was simple: Phil Aut was his brother-in-law, he was doing OK but was having to support his operation increasingly with porn imports and educational films and Claire thought he had a new silent partner; Phil was younger than he looked, lived in Connecticut, had no contact with Monty, and had a cousin attached to the twelfth precinct.
Claire was looking like Jenny again, in a blue blouse and pale green jeans, her light hair parted in the middle and flowing down beside her eyes. Her feet were tucked under her and against the white couch she was more vivid than she had been last week, an autumn sacrifice plucked from the fingers of a god by Monty Graf, who knew how old he was now and how old he’d be in ten years.
He was talking oh so calmly, very quietly; King Street was as quiet as Highgate, a car ran by, Claire bent her head looking at nothing, Monty was explaining that she didn’t know as much as I thought but did know more than he did, and that now on the basis of what she knew, she reckoned the time had come to change.
On what she knows about what? I asked.
I want to do something creative, said Claire.
Right, said Monty, also she thinks it’s time for a change.
I asked if Aut was getting to be too much, and Claire had a sip and Monty opened his mouth but Claire said, Lately we haven’t talked much.
Monty came to the point, though if it was the true point my name is Graf, his Cartwright. Well, what I’d said about the aim of the film that I’d made with Dagger had stayed deeply imbedded in his mind, he said, brows scoring key words which may have been just sounds.
And had this, I asked, aroused our Claire’s creative instincts?
She may not have liked the sound of my words; her only movement was to purse her lips.
Monty said he’d loved the ideas I’d outlined — and I heard something genuine in what he thought he was saying — and, he said, if I could give him a clearer picture, then he and Claire might be prepared to make me a proposal.
I said to tell me the proposal, I’d give him a picture to suit it.
But I felt I had to let go of something. I was tired.
Monty smiled and said all he could say was it had to do with beginning with the rush Dagger and I still had and the sound, and the 8-millimeter cartridge I’d mentioned we’d shot between air base and Stonehenge — was it destroyed? (no reply from me) — and then to build on the original purposes as uncompromisingly as Dagger and I had tried to the first time through.
Claire said, Did we ever pay your gas to Corsica?
I didn’t like her tone. She was still working for Aut.
I said to Monty as far as I could tell we’d stuck to our guns whatever had gone on at this end, and I thought Dagger would agree. When Monty pressed me, I went beyond what Dagger would have been able to accept. I said yes: power poached on or tuned in on when it lacked direction but had momentum. The religious group circling the fire but not united on what they all surely believed and the agitation and energy which the camera called forth was also part of this power poached on. Likewise the Hawaiian with the steady guitar seen as if by a series of travelers who were moving down the corridor toward a ticket booth out of sight, toward stairs, the train platform — the camera passing again and again at different speeds to suggest different persons but going over the same stretch of corridor, bobbing, leaning toward the swelling cheekbones of the large-eyed boy and his girl from Hempstead, Long Island, in her wool sergeant’s jacket over a plaid shirt with the tails out over her bluejeans rocking in the London chill clapping hands, swinging her long tangled wheat-colored hair — their energy spent on those passers-by but protected by Dagger’s saving Beaulieu 16-millimeter camera. To see Claire’s reaction I mentioned the color snap briefly seen in the Suitcase Slowly Packed, a flickering glimpse of a person then instantly packed between a black sweater and something else — well, the power angle was just part. But through all the scenes mingling England and America and deliberately unplacing the scenes, there was a cool theme of America itself—
Monty said Yes, yes. And the 8 between air base and Stonehenge?
— the softball, the space shot ignored on the rainy terrace, a NATO First-Strike Base in the English countryside. But Dagger, I said, didn’t know that all or exactly this was coming into his camera, and it doesn’t matter that he didn’t know.
Claire had risen suddenly. She wanted a cigarette but she had risen because of me: And likewise, she said, there are things in the film that he knew and you don’t. Right?