Monty called again. Claire said she must go up. I asked why she’d been following Wheeler the first morning. She said, OK it was you, not Wheeler. She went up the stairs fast and preoccupied. I thought she was deciding how much to say to Monty.
If she was alarmed about what I might now be thinking of Dagger, then there was reason for me to think whatever I was thinking, though at this instant I was willing to unthink such dubious suspicions, for Dagger DiGorro was my friend. I only hoped Claire and Monty didn’t have a fight, for then she might not stay here tonight as I was sure she had last night, and in that case she would be more apt to find her keys gone. I thought of going back upstairs and taking her purse as a cover but Monty and Claire were already there, they were talking above me.
I took my toilet kit, a gift from Will, and at the top of the stairs Monty saw it and said where did I think I was going. I said I’d call him, never fear, I needed him but I wasn’t going to impose another night, I’d go to Sub’s where my suitcase was.
Monty said, Don’t you like Mexican food?
If Claire didn’t go away and find herself, something was going to happen to her.
An American proverb, said Monty, has it that there are only twenty-four hours in a day.
Maybe Monty didn’t know I’d been in London last night, yet he must.
I mentioned a Mexican place where I’d eaten with Tessa and Dudley Allott seven years ago.
Monty said he knew the place but knew a better place, more authentic.
Claire said, I know that name Allott.
I said I didn’t think she did, Tessa was Lorna’s friend and Dudley was here at the time working on the Maya or on someone who had worked on the Maya.
Maya? said Monty.
That’s right, I said; but they live in London, though they were here for the month of August.
Here? said Monty.
I said I was going to Sub’s. Monty suggested I return the phone call. But I didn’t.
They were stranded in the hall watching me open the front door. In one hovering moment, as if the distance between us were vertical, I detected something genuine: Monty cared about Claire.
The two films, said Claire, were meant to be complementary. I don’t know if Monty mentioned that. Yours was going to be part of Phil Aut’s.
That doesn’t sound complementary, I said, and saw Monty’s eyebrows jam his forehead wrinkles without any words to serve.
Gates winked all about me, but I held to my plan. I would not deal with Sub on the phone.
I was closing the door.
Monty said, Mayas, and Claire said, No.
No one seemed to be following me.
My cabdriver, a long-haired youth with a headband, drove bravely but with small knowledge of Manhattan. There was no picture of him displayed in the slot beside the police permit.
No one followed us.
However, anyone could have been hanging around Sub’s building when I got out. And there was no doorman.
It was six thirty. I’d give Outer Film another hour to be closed.
I had been deeper than I thought. Looking up into the shower had been like looking into the bottom.
The narrow keen smell of roasting lamb as I passed the lobby mailboxes gave way in the lift to my sweat and cigarette smoke. The circle of fluorescent light in the elevator roof was harder on the pallid leaden paint than on my transatlantic eyes shifting over the capital letters delivery boys had cut into the wall panels, one pair being my own initials. In the old open elevator that Ned Noble and I took slowly up to the fifth-floor stamp dealer in the early forties you looked through the gratings of the hinge-folding door and each floor’s hoistway door that did not fold but opened normally, and saw each dusky passing floor of that downtown Brooklyn office building, and no matter how much there was to say, which with Ned was a lot, you’d fall silent foreseeing the glass-topped case and the stamp tongs being laid down upon it, and the faint official scent of paper touching off in us visions of lozenge perfs and pale pastel windows with oriental rulers or the delicately antlered national animal of some now defunct country; and, somehow, the twenty-cent envelope of one thousand transparent glued peelable hinges put a scent upon the wind and the stamps themselves as if the micro-printing had been done on a grid like a TV scan, and the colors beyond any standard odor of ink gave off advance word. There was a triangular stamp Ned and I both wanted, and when I mentioned this to Will a year ago, all I could think of was Tannu Tuva, and he looked it up in his Faber atlas and said it didn’t exist, and in Sub’s elevator now thinking I hadn’t been much help to Sub in overcoming the distances and encroachments his life was weighted down with, the alternative name Will came up with fell into my head — Tanna, an island — and Will said that must be what I’d been thinking of and insisted with strange rigidity as if he wished to settle something and would settle it if need be by force; yet with that authoritative emotion that belongs to memory I knew that Tannu Tuva was the place all right, it wasn’t an ideal destination ideally far and purely possible, and if it wasn’t in Will’s English atlas then the world had changed. The stamp man’s elevator was different from Sub’s, which was a fast capsule with a small glassed port and all around me those metallic initials knifing through its shield of bilious late-night green not to the hoistway shaft or the passing floors but to a prior color hard to tell, and as the capsule came open at Sub’s floor and an old lady tried to get in before I got out, I saw inside the oblong Tanna Tuva frame a deer or gazelle with lyrelike horns, and a Costa Rican triangle but no color where I knew there had been color, and knew that Will’s alternative name Tanna had occurred not only because it was and is in the New Hebrides east of Australia, and through Jenny’s map of Lewis in the other Hebrides I continued to be at her mercy.
Now the smell was the bristling rough moist salt of pork chops, a smell that sneaks beneath the tongue unlike lamb whose essence winds among stomach, eyes, and sinus first, and Ruby was unlocking and opening the door as Sub was yelling Who is it and then was suddenly behind her, then abruptly six strides back into the kitchen to the stove and I was looking not at him but out past the hall into the living room where Aut’s (if it was Aut’s) burglar had been — and as I said No in answer to his question had I eaten, I stepped through an invisible gate into that living room and barely registered Tris engrossed in a new or at least smaller TV set because I was seeing something else near my suitcase and seeing it with such completeness you might have thought that I was in a position to take for granted the rest.
The thing was a Halloween jack-o’-lantern, fired up and grinning through its mad half-evolved teeth, fat and in its healthy meridian grooves seeming symmetrical, and it said to me that I must have lost a week or ten days somewhere in my flights. Mad but possible.
Ruby had one hand in mine and the other through my legs. She didn’t want me to color, she wanted a story about me and her daddy. But though I loved her, the supple backbone the wide eyes taking whatever there was to take, the smudge of magic marker blue below one cheekbone, loved the flesh smell of a child (which was also Jenny’s smell now she’d stopped using a spray) as I loved Tris for his tongue-between-lips arrest absorbed in what he was seeing and thus seeming tenderer in that force you feel even in an older boy that you imagine isn’t in a more self-possessed girl, even a little girl, loved them because they were my friend Sub’s children, loved them because they could be entertained quite simply, though in the circuits of the last few days I could not recall just what I had told them by way of a story, it had come out of my head unplanned and restored itself to its spot under a baffle in a corner of my head at once it was finished — loved them because they were my own children a few years back in the multiplied accelerations of alien time that no record can begin to measure of the presents brought home to them from America (even those encapsulated or nonencapsulated liquid crystal kits acquired for Will from my scientific firm that were a steal at the price, or black-and-white moiré patterns or kinetic-art-kit mobiles for Jenny in all the colors of English wildflowers). Love, yes: but not this time, not right now.