Speedboat

by Renata Adler

  The line stuck with me, though—I guess I’m just neurotic. Nothing else seemed to work quite so well, to be so serviceable and friendly. You don’t care to. I don’t care to. It isn’t a New York obligation. There’s already somebody. I don’t like the way you talk to waiters. I’m not an agency. You’re not an agency. Whatever. Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation. Other ways, of course, are straighter. I don’t know. An old friend—the physicist, in fact, before he married—once told me that a sister of a friend of his had sexual problems. I said, oh. He said that, when they had both been in Bolivia at a meeting, he’d made a pass at her. She wasn’t interested. He asked her why. She said “You just don’t attract me physically.” That was it. For him, the inference was problems. Maybe there is no polite way. There don’t seem to be many instances of the pure straightforward. And yet. Will is away a lot. I have my work. There is a passage in Dante when he and Virgil, traveling through the Inferno, stop beside a man buried to his neck in boiling mud. He does not care to speak to them. He has his own problems. He does not want an interview. Dante actually grasps him by the hair and gets his story. Some sort of parable about reporting there, I think. In fact, I know.

  In May, 1959, Bootsy Garn, from Houston, Texas, refused to get out of the bus near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Her hair was shiny and blond. Her nails were extremely long and red. She was wearing silk trousers and pumps. She looked at her fellow students in sneakers and jeans, with their canvas sacks and pickaxes, and at the slate cliffs they seemed prepared to go straight up. She declined. “I just don’t see the sense of it,” she said. Bootsy got off the bus all three nights, did her nails, set her hair, and slept in the dingy hotel above the movie house with the rest of us. She was by no means one of the great refusers. Not an existentialist hero, or a Rosa Parks, or even a Bartleby. She simply did not see the sense of it. It would have been an outrage, even in the highest traditions of scholarship, to force Bootsy too far into the out-of-doors. She knew it, and she kept her dignity. In 1959.

  She spent the three days of that field trip aboard the bus. She nearly flunked geology, defaulted the science requirement, and lost her college degree. A quiet exception had to be made. She passed. The rest of us climbed the cliffs and hills, looked at entrenched meanders, terminal moraines, glacial detritus, relief maps of the Delaware Water Gap, and outcroppings of the Wissahickon Mica Schist. None of it has since been of much use to me. I can tell an entrenched meander to this day. It means that the riverbed is old and that the river has doubled back to cut its own deep loops. But that’s all. I can’t tell one rock from the next, or recite ten lines from Faust, or recall the whole Preamble, or do one Old Slavonic text. Not one. It is all gone, after childhood knowledge of myths, constellations, baseball scores, dinosaurs, and idioms of the tennis court and athletic field. There are outcroppings of the old vocabularies still. Pinnies from field hockey. Heels down. Bad hop. Sorry. My fault. So sorry. Provide for the common defense. Meanders slip my mind. And of college there is so little, although that little does flare, like the Jesuit poet’s embers, gash-gold vermilion, when I remember it at all.

  “The score,” the megaphone on the ferry around Manhattan said, from time to time, without further explanation, “is one to nothing.” To the foreigners, unaware perhaps that a World Series was in progress, this may have seemed an obscure instruction, or a commentary on the sights. “In the top of the fifth,” it said, with some excitement, as we rounded Wall Street, “the score is five to one.”

  When Gregor Imelda from San Diego arrived at the wedding breakfast outside Greenwood, Mississippi, we realized what a mixed group we have become. Imelda itself is not Jones exactly, but we were doing introductions by first names. “Gregor, this is Inge. Inge, Greg. Gregor, Carlo, Didi, Dibo, Idris, Jude, Vlad, Ara, Si, Matt, Dommy, Elio, Gregor. Arne.” It sounded like a countdown on Ellis Island, or in Babel. Or one of those nonsense marching chants for the tribes of boys in summer camp. My brothers’, I remember, was Hippta, minnega, zinnega, honnega; Zopta bumbalaya hoc. Jude and Vlad are married to each other, which makes it hard to tell just from their names which one is which. Gregor sorted it out. He had eggs and bacon. There was kudzu growing outside the veranda. Beyond that, tall pines and Spanish moss. There were plaques commemorating dead dogs on many flagstones. “Morton, Great Dane, 1937.” “Muffie, Spaniel, 1941.” Dommy, whose mother was a maid, or a domestic, or whatever they then called it, was uneasy about the blacks, whom we seemed to be calling staff or help. None of us is leading quite the life we were at all prepared for. We were born in Beirut, Boston, Albuquerque, Rome, the Bronx, Antibes, Ontario, Tel Aviv. Vlad is a resident in orthopedic surgery. He has a scar on his hand from the day an eccentric surgeon in a temper slapped him with a scalpel. Some of us are vegetarians. Some drink. Some take pills. It is possible that we have, separately, acquired the capacity to say a qualified No to any going, too going, concern.

  Dispersed as we all are, though, what we seem to have entirely in common is a time, a quality of meaning no harm, and a sense that among highly urban and ambitious people we are trying to lead some semblance of decent lives. Marriages of the second house break up. A couple may study blueprints for this second house, and build it, or they may buy a farmhouse that is very old. A trailer, or a diner, or a diner in a trailer, always seems to materialize across the road from this second house. Even if it doesn’t, by the end of summer, wife and children do return to the first house in the city. The husband borrows an apartment or moves to a hotel. Not in every case, of course. In a lot of cases. None of us is, however, at all one of those stencil bohemians who live in the Village, cultivate for their public lives something leftish and for their private lives a guru or an analyst, who are likely to be by birth and accent New York, and who are likely at parties to have somewhere in the room a stereo; elsewhere a baby, pale and whimpering, until its mother, having until last week breast-fed it at just such parties as this one, mashes a little Phenobarbital into its bottle and around its pacifier; elsewhere still one large Cuban or Jamaican, who is cooking something difficult, which includes rice and bananas and which, since it is very late and is the only supper, makes it certain that everyone will be joylessly, sickly drunk all evening on the Gallo wine and sangria in paper cups. No. On the other hand, we are all linked to lives of all sorts. Phoebe Aaron, a medieval scholar at our university, used to be listed in the phone book as P. Aaron. She was always being called by heavy breathers. Recently, she moved out to Chicago, as a full professor. She decided to list her full name, Phoebe Aaron. The first time her phone rang in her new place, it was just another breather, Middlewestern. “Hello, Phobe?” he said.

  Vlad, who wants to specialize one day in surgery on adult hands, finds himself these days working on babies. There is a relatively new surgical procedure that, if it is performed within fourteen hours of delivery, will keep alive a baby who would otherwise have simply, surely died. After the lifesaving procedure, Vlad gets the baby. He does what he can for it with orthopedic surgery. It is perfect practice for a future with delicate, adult hands. Vlad thinks that, like so many valuable learning experiences, it cannot, cannot in the end ever be or have been worth it. I once saw, however, what might have seemed an altogether hopeless old man on crutches, making his way out of Disneyland, with a large Mickey Mouse balloon.

  In Bootsy Garn’s final college year, my first, the girl across the hall from me bought a snake. The girl’s father had been a famous American fascist in the thirties. It was assumed the girl had problems. But pets were not permitted in the dorms. The college knew nothing of the snake. The girl in the room next door to mine bought an alligator. Her father was head of a chemical corporation in Cincinnati. The girl was beautiful. She held séances. She had an Austrian boyfriend, older than she by enough to have been a true Nazi in his time, who threw stones through her window and shouted “Annelise, Annelise,” in a kind of whisper-shout each night while she fed her little alligator halves of worms
. Her name, in fact, was Anne. The girls in another dorm bought ducks. The girl three rooms down the hall from me had an orgone box. She believed in silence at breakfast, and used to enforce it by staring craftily at a bread knife with jam on it. An African princess, in her third year and wildly in unrequited love, tried to kill herself one evening by taking an overdose of Epsom salts. She fell in convulsions in front of the dining-room door. Rumors had begun to reach the dean’s office. Something amiss. Anne asked me to hide her alligator in my room for a night or two. I thought, This must be college, what the hell. Three nights I heard dry feet and scales dragging forlornly across my floor. The creature missed the damp. I took it to the bathtub in the early-morning hours. The third day, I left it there. Just before nine, the fascist’s daughter decided to let it be known that her snake was lost. It must have crawled out through its mesh. She thought it had entered the radiator and was now at large in the heating system. It was a very small snake, red, yellow, and black. Bootsy went straight to her room, locked the door, and screamed. For thirty-six hours, she refused to come out. The rest of us, rather dreading the emergence of the snake from our own radiators, avoided our rooms. Bootsy just stayed, and then, the following evening, came quietly out and took a bath. Neither the alligator nor the snake was seen again. Those of us who were studying the English Drama Until 1642 (Excluding Shakespeare) resumed our course. And now I’m here.

  The girl in the hallway of Sam’s building, as I was rushing home, was much too fast asleep. She did not look sick. She was not unkempt. She just did not seem entirely alive. “Hey,” I said. “Excuse me. Are you all right?” She just sat there, hands clasped in her lap, large purse by her side. A man walked in from the street. “Excuse me,” I said. “Does this girl look all right to you?” He looked at her a while. She made no flicker of a move. “Do you know her?” he asked. “No,” I said. “Do you?” He shook his head, crossed the hall to the elevator, got in, and was gone. I went back upstairs and rang Sam’s bell. I said, “There’s something wrong with a girl who’s sitting in your hall.” Sam came downstairs with me.

  “Hey,” he said, shaking her shoulder a bit. She just sat there, asleep. Sam took one of her clasped hands, lifted it, and let it drop. “Do you think we should call an ambulance?” I said. “Maybe we should look in her bag first, and see who she is,” he said. “Maybe she wouldn’t want an ambulance.” I said, “If you look in her bag, though, they’ll think it has something to do with you.” It was the first time I had ever used this sense of “they.” We stared at the girl. She woke up. She was all right. She went home.

  I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort. Some people get a jump on the morning in other ways—speeding on the highways, making money, doing crossword puzzles, a darker tan, a whiter wash, accumulations of various kinds. The thing about doing the Sunday crossword is that halfway through you may find yourself tracking a mind you loathe. I begin, like most people, with the gap definitions, “53 Down rara—,” and continue with the words I know for sure. I find that if I can manage to fill the upper left-hand corner very early, I am never able to complete the rest. I don’t know why. Crosswords start for me in the middle, or they don’t work out. I have never been any good at bridge, chess, or Scrabble, either. Some people gain momentum on envy or rage. I tend to blast myself out of bed into situations that are drastically odd, with a moral edge, perhaps, and an element of risk. I took a plane once from an Angolan island of eccentrics to what was then Biafra, on a Joint Church Aid load of fish. In the thunder and lightning, and Valium and a sense of incongruity, it was fine.

  There were only three journalists there then, in the penultimate days of Biafran misery. We had been told to bring cans of food, jerry cans of gasoline, and a lot of Scotch. One evening, we drank some of the Scotch in a bungalow, which was several miles from mine. At sunset, I thought I should go home, meaning my bungalow. One of the journalists said he knew the way, even in the dark. We could walk there later. The rain was total. We got lost. I could not quite believe it. Planes overhead somehow. We kept bumping into sentries, who could not believe it, either. Finally, we found my bungalow. I’m out. We’re still here. Biafra’s not. Before the Six-Day War, I had bought a Patek Philippe watch and a Chanel suit. I don’t know why. They had a song on the Biafran roads. “He is dead. Got to bury him. He died in a state of courage. May his soul rest in peace.”

  The truth, I would like to say here, is as follows. But I can’t. In some places, it may already have begun, the war of everybody against everybody, all against all. “The Great Game,” the lady philosopher used to say, quoting from Kipling, “is finished when everyone is dead. Not before.”

  I often wonder about the people who linger over trash baskets at the corners of the city’s sidewalks. One sees them day and night, young and old, well dressed, in rags—often with shopping bags—picking over the trash. They pick out newspapers, envelopes. They discard things. I often wonder who they are and what they’re after. I approach and cannot ask them. Anyway, they scurry off. Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. That “writers write” is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

  I visited the University of California at Santa Cruz once. It was rich, and near the sea, and full of redwoods. The students who did not care to walk to class were conveyed by surreys with fringes. There was no real way to stage a student strike, since most things were permitted. Attendance in the classes was not taken. The only way to be on strike was to attend a class, and wear a black, identifiably striker’s armband. The students wanted to strike on behalf of the local people of Santa Cruz—who loathed them. The strike was a boycott of grapes. The students picketed the local stores that sold grapes. The locals bought up all the grapes and waved them in the students’ faces. There seemed to be no understanding among anybody. The troopers were there to protect students from club-bearing locals. The students thought the locals were oppressed by troopers. Education, perhaps, in its own way, suffered. “The only way you can get even a quorum of a class here,” a professor told me, “is with a class in Sensitivity Training or Transcendental Meditation.” I left soon.

  One night, in Paris, during the last days of the Algerian crisis, I was studying in a common room at the Cité Universitaire—where I used to live and where four apparently interchangeable Americans incessantly played bridge. A bomb went off. The explosion was enormous. Windows smashed. Doors fractured. The reception desk blew up. The lights went out. The first words after the thunder and reverberations in the darkness were an imperturbable, incredulous, “Two hearts. “ Another night, one of the intermittent bridge players wandered, barefoot, into the common room. She was known for her casual, oddly violent Guess Whats. “Guess what,” she said. The other players, noticing that even her feet, on the dusty, littered floor, were an uncharacteristic, American high school clean, guessed she was having an affair. No one in that place, that year, except Southern girls and narcissists seemed to wash any more thoroughly than life required. But the Guess Whats always made an immediate claim; they never passed quite safely until someone guessed correctly or everyone gave up. Bathtub running over, pregnancy, expulsion from a Sorbonne class were guessed. Then wisps of smoke were drifting down the corridor. Nobody moved. More guesses. The girl’s roommate made three no trump. Then she choked, and guessed a fire from a hot plate underneath a mattress in the room they shared. Correct. The fumes were poisonous. The room had been half smoldering, half in flames. “Oh, Ruth,” the girl said, like some reproachful loser in a mindless chess game, “you always guess.”

  Elaine’s was jammed, full of young women looking tired and their escorts, ignoring them in droves, talking to each other, man to man. The bachelor regulars brought a different girl each night
or week or so, and then around midnight, dropped them flat. The beauty point was made. The men could talk, of royalties, pot, sex, screenplays, and politics. The girls, left to each other, girl, space, girl, space, girl, space—four girls at most tables and four empty chairs—looked quite vacant, scared. The general male reluctance seemed to be to go to bed. There was also quite a thing about the check. Some regulars appeared to believe that the check did not exist. “Reach for the check,” my father said to his sons, in one of his rare speeches of that kind to them. “Whatever happens, make sure that you pay that check.” In a family with siblings, there is a constant war of reflexes. Nothing to do with checks—the opposite. A child is sitting there, with a toy or comic book. Flash. Gone. It takes a wary eye and an instant tightening of the grip, or the thing is gone. The gentlemen at the place are flashes with that check. The others—perhaps only children?—always lose or look away.

  Matthew, the man I had arrived with, was drinking brandies. I was drinking gin. Suddenly, my zabaglione vanished, cream, cup, strawberry, and all. I had a distinct, an eidetic memory of seeing it there before me. It was gone. I looked for it. Matt looked for it. It was nowhere. Somebody’s handbag was on the floor beside my chair. I felt that a whole zabaglione could not have fallen, tidily, into a stranger’s handbag. I couldn’t search in a stranger’s handbag, anyway. We stopped thinking about it. Matthew said that he had been very fat as a small boy. He read a lot. He ate. When he noticed how alarmed his parents were at how fat he was, he obediently laid his chocolate bars aside. Then, his parents were called to the school. It was a friendly, permissive, finger-painting sort of place. There was a huge papier-mâché policeman in the hall. The policeman’s knee had begun to erode. Matthew had been eating papier-mâché. He denied it at the time. He is quite slim now.