The third picture was of the gray-haired woman now dark-haired and younger, full face close-up smiling almost to the point of laughing.
The fourth was of the red-haired woman and Jerry, and Jerry’s fingers were peeking around her waist.
My match had flared out without burning me. The flame, like a desire in my will, had turned the woman’s hair in the b & w photo red.
Aut knew the red-haired woman.
Aut knew Jerry, who I already knew disliked Aut.
These were intimate pictures, and so Jan Aut was probably here; but must she be the red-haired woman?
I lit a match and looked. A clank came in the hall. It was a bucket. I heard a key in a lock too close. I looked around my cubicle but saw nothing in the amber oblong. I memorized the face of the woman I didn’t know. The char wouldn’t know who belonged in the Outer Film office and who didn’t. But I would have to explain what I was doing in the dark. I could just be sitting still, like Cosmo when he answered my call in London. I must leave. The singing was now near my door. It went back into where it had been. You Are Everything and Everything Is You. I stopped near Claire’s desk thinking I might leave her keys. But I needed them to lock up. I got out into the hall and the doorknob was as quiet as a rheostat that turns light up or down as gradually as you want.
I was right, the next door down was open, a bucket stood in the hall. I was not going to risk the sound of a key. I rubber-heeled my way to the elevator.
At last the red light sounded its bell-note but a phone rang. The charwoman reached out for the bucket. Bending over, she turned her head and saw me. The phone was ringing. She stood up and took her key ring and said to me I wonder if I should answer that?
I wouldn’t, I said, and my doors opened and I said goodnight and was inside, my heart swelling into a chill machine.
The night watchman wasn’t dreaming. He looked me over.
I bought a ballpoint and a pack of too many envelopes in a drug store in Claire’s block. I put her apartment number on one and with a question mark enclosed her keys. I watched the doorman from across the street. He talked on the intercom, the bill of his braided hat was importantly low on his forehead. He hung up the receiver on the cradle among the switchboard buttons. He disappeared. I went across the street and left the envelope on a stool by the three gray softly curved closed-circuit TV screens.
Sub’s old movie went on in an hour.
If the red-haired woman were Jan Graf Aut, the picture I’d defaced was a self-portrait.
Sub asked if I would babysit, he’d changed his plans.
June had phoned again. Sub raised his eyebrows and asked what kind of business I was on.
I’d overlooked something, but I didn’t know what.
In the P.S. about transcendental meditation, I saw the point of Dagger’s opening story. Claire had written him about the religious group.
I did not like Dagger nullifying the Unplaced Room.
I had decided the 8-millimeter cartridge was important. It had not been on Dagger’s table, and he hadn’t said anything about it. And the night we shot it he was reluctant and his friends who were sitting around talking to Alba when we came back from the air base were strange.
Sub was ready to go. There was a humid scent of soap. I have not begun to suggest Sub. There hasn’t been the chance. He is, for all his domesticity and somewhere between duty and delusion, a heroic mind. There hasn’t been any need to show this. There is none now except that we are in his presence, or you are in mine and I in his, or his apartment. He once in Rose’s presence told her friend Connie that Connie answered not what people said but what she heard in their minds — which foreshadowed a trait of Tessa’s — and when Rose said Sub was speaking nonsense because he was just imagining what Connie did think was in other people’s heads, Connie sided with Sub, and Rose got mad, and a queer fracas ensued lasting between Rose and Sub several days climaxed by Rose’s admitting Sub should have said what he’d said not of Connie but of her, and Sub’s retorting that it wasn’t true of Rose, then Rose that this was simply because Sub wasn’t interested in her to find out. Sometimes duty and delusion closed over whatever was between, and Sub summed himself up — but I might fall into a description of his friends, his mad aunt, his mother, his father, for instance, who was the sort who’d be glad a school tennis match had been rained out or a museum closed unexpectedly on a Monday since it meant he’d missed nothing by not being there — Sub summed himself up with a swift delicate painful computation that would blind someone who did not know him to all he meant when he saw himself as someone who did what needed to be done. By which he meant getting Tris and Ruby to bed and to school, and listening to what they had to tell him when he came home, a lot of which concerned their mother. I convey none of this in these scenes with Sub, who now, bringing into the hall that scent of soap, said, May as well make yourself useful.
Where will you be? I said.
He wrote down a number. It’s up in the air at the moment.
Sub locked the door from the outside, which saved me the trouble of going and turning the inside latch. You could lock or unlock from outside or inside. The lock wasn’t automatic.
I knew what I’d overlooked.
I had left the letter on Phil Aut’s desk.
CORSICAN MONTAGE
The crowd on the approaching pier is pink, mauve, and brown — red, white, and yellow — green as blood when it flows under the sea — and the crowd is also blue, cornflower, cobalt, navy, chinks of blue in the white shirts, black kerchiefs, wild prints closing on us as if to leave behind them there parked on the pier beside a gray truck, a gray Volkswagen newer than Dagger’s belowdecks — but no blue is there on the pier quite like the space you call the sky, a blue you’d catch hold of only on film, where it still is nothing till processed and projected. But rewind the voyage back half an hour to where Dagger several miles offshore took a tilt shot of sky as if slowly raising a face to something prime and new, moving the 50-mm. lens from sun-silvered whitecaps up past the hazy earth of Corsica that’s sending out now white flecks which will come forward to become the brick and plaster of Ajaccio: he tilts the lens up into the Mediterranean sky whose blue unlike the sea leaves me full of blissful suspicion that thought matters no more than Napoleon, who does not come out in a launch one hand inside his greatcoat to meet us, matters no more than the random seabird that cuts through Dagger’s shot, survives, and is gone.
Dagger has shot the Gulf of Ajaccio and, nearer in, a small beacon on the low extension of the breakwater that’s like a rampart. Then to the left he caught lines of white-hulled powerboats parked from the inner smallcraft dock by the cafés out toward us along the jetty to the breakwater. Gold letters on mahogany sterns tell my sharp sight that the girl who might be Claire basking above a bowsprit has come from Cannes, and the man in shorts pouring tea amidships for the man in jeans has probably sailed like our car ferry from Marseilles, and there’s Nice and scandalous St.-Tropez, Genoa and Palma de Mallorca, even Malmö, Sweden, and of course Algiers whence seventeen thousand pieds-noirs came to Corsica after the ’62 liberation. I see also a yacht from Cagliari and from the look of its striped awning aft and the gilt flash of its brass it could care less if Corsicans look down on Sardinians, for don’t mainland French of whom Dagger’s wife Alba is one look down on les Corses?
Corsica is a département of France.
This film is for the masses, murmurs Dagger.
I mention only what we film. And now the crowd.