Speedboat

by Renata Adler

  We have all, of course, had childhoods. I do find that the person with the clearest, least self-serving simply pays. I remembered another Matthew, an unpleasant child. He came from many miles away to our place, where there was a lake with fish. Matthew never caught one. We went trolling from a rowboat, casting from the shore. Sometimes, we used a bamboo pole and worms. We all caught fish but Matthew. He talked. We rowed him. Nothing happened. At first it was a triumph. Then we were embarrassed. Finally, my brothers had a thought. My older brother said that the secret of fishing in that lake was paper bags. Matthew said Oh, as though he had always known it. I rowed. My brothers put half a worm on Matthew’s hook—around that, a paper bag, with a fish concealed inside. In a few minutes, Matthew said he thought he had a bite. He reeled in. He was ecstatic with his half-dead perch. We never told him. Last year, I saw that Matthew, with his children, running for office in Chicago. He spoke of his boyhood, fishing, and of that afternoon when he caught that grand pike, casting. No harm in it. Lucky memory on his part; on my brothers’, picking up that check.

  A girl at our table said she had had to steal two blouses, that afternoon, at Bloomingdale’s. She had had no time to wait. “I never used to have to hustle,” her escort kept saying bleakly, “till now. Till now.” There was a disturbance at the bar. The waiter, a frail man with hair down to his shoulders, held a huge, ill-tempered, and obstreperous writer face down on the floor in a few seconds flat. The whole restaurant grew quiet for a minute, hummed again. The writer began another scuffle. The waiter dragged him out into the street. Squad cars arrived. Most people at the tables went outside to watch, then came back in to talk. Matt took me home. There was some sort of petition, or document, or word of sponsorship lying upstairs on my desk for signing. I am not a signer. I would like to take the high road, if there is a high road. When I went upstairs, I wondered what it was I had meant to do.

  QUIET

  THAT SLUM of the air, the 747, was waiting its turn. The food had been awful, the babies had wailed, seventy-two headsets had broken down before the start of the movie. The top third of the screen was, as usual, cut off at the ceiling. Little air vents had blown into the passengers’ eyes for nine hours; there had been sneezes all over the aircraft, and cries of “Salud.” The washrooms had broken down halfway through the flight, also as usual. The stewardess was still walking the aisles, spraying scent. The waiting-room music, designed for calm during dangerous minutes, had played during takeoff, and now began droning for landing. We landed. As always, the passengers, having felt the squalor, the suspense, the scale of confinement, applauded when the wheels touched the ground. Some got to their feet, and were immediately admonished, in terms of great sarcasm, by the purser, that they had no right to stand until the plane had come to a complete stop. The complete stop itself, as usual, was never announced. An escalator had already reversed itself in Oakland, dumping everyone onto a concrete cellar floor. Some of us had been driving those underserviced crates of steel all the agencies now rent as cars. There were smoke inhalations from derailed subways, and fragments of airport hand grenades. There had been so much travel, we knew someone was going to die.

  “It is the sirocco,” someone said, looking pale on the boat deck, and passing the aspirin. “No, no,” the owner of a shore boutique said. “It is the mistral.” A deckhand, politely passing Bloody Marys, said he thought it was the tramontana. “Hangovers,” the English horseracing columnist said, quite firmly. “Always blame the wind. Depressions.” A Frenchman said that, in any case, he had a grand cafard.

  I found a quarter yesterday, in a puddle, in Wilmington. I have a history of finding coins—a penny on the sidewalk one spring morning on Park Avenue, a dime that afternoon; the next day, on the bus, eleven cents, exactly. It seemed a sign. I have found coins abroad. Leaving aside minor jackpots hit in pay phones (which seem only fair, considering the change one loses when those things are out of order), last month I found a quarter in the back seat of a cab. Nobody saw. I have no regard for the law in these matters, as in several others. By law, I think, it now belonged to the owner of the cab. He was not there. A passenger had clearly lost it. He was gone. In the end, having noticed that the driver of the cab was black, I gave in. I said, “Excuse me. I think you have lost this quarter.” He said, “Thanks.” An old friend, who teaches, these days, at a seminary, had the fine solution. He said I should have given a different quarter to the driver, kept the one I found. I wish I’d thought of it. I find that many city people give their most minute attention to the ethics of found objects, small.

  It is not even that I much believe in magic. I did not for an instant, for example, think yesterday’s puddle quarter was the cab quarter of last month returned to me perhaps by air in Wilmington. No. Another friend, a reporter at the paper, makes lists, with numbers, of what he has to do that day and even what he wants to talk to me about. He once sent me a letter from Chicago with the P.S. “What is your zip-code number, please?” He travels often. There they sit, though, the people who are so free and easy with their disapproval, at their table in the restaurant, crunching the little bones.

  Many English girls one meets abroad are called Vanessa. When a Van, or a Ness, in New York shut the cab door on her thumb, Sam called me from the emergency ward of the hospital. He had taken me home. He had dropped off Nessa next. Then she slammed the door that way, and he took her to the hospital. It was two a.m. He called me because he thought it might help to have a woman around. I put on jeans and a shirt. I took some Scotch along. The emergency ward was full of the slightly injured, mainly knife wounds at that hour, and Sam. Nessa was having her thumb set. We of the emergency ward passed around the Scotch. When Nessa came out, with the intern who had put a cast on her thumb and wrist, it was 3:15. On the way out of the hospital, I thought I was going to faint. Then, I thought how unseemly it would be to have to be carried back into the hospital. I think you are not altogether American unless you have been to Mississippi; you are not a patriot if you start to faint when somebody breaks her thumb. Anyway, I never faint.

  Most of the cars that tried to run us down were off-duty cabs. Sam finally found a cab to take Nessa home. On account of her thumb, she needed help with her keys, so we walked her to the door. As Sam put the key in the lock, her mother-in-law stood there, distraught. She looked at Sam, with his rimless glasses and his beard, and at me in my shirt and jeans. She screamed. Then she started to cry. She looked at Nessa. “I knew it,” she said. “What have they done to you?”

  Last night at dinner, a man said that, on principle, he never answers his telephone. Somebody asked him how he reached people. “I call them,” he said. “But suppose they don’t believe in answering, either?” I thought of phones ringing all over New York, no one answering. Like people bringing themselves off in every single adjoining co-op of a luxury building. Or the streets entirely cleared of traffic, except ambulances. We spoke of a friend of ours who had died the night before, at forty-three. “But my God! I’m forty-one,” a bearded banker said. “Don’t worry,” his wife, who is German, answered. “There is no order. It is not a line.” I often meet people who do not like me or each other. It doesn’t always matter. I keep on smiling, talking. I knock at the same door once, three times, twelve. My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing. The same smile. I knew someone who used to go to sleep counting, not sheep, but people against whom he had grievances—bullies from childhood, kindergarten teachers, back to nannies even, bosses, employees, anybody awful up to the preceding day. When they were rounded up in his mind, he would machine-gun them down. If it turned out he had left out anybody, he would have to start all over. Round them up. Gun them down again. Slept without difficulty. Judgment Day may be compiled of private arsenals like these.

  Four-leaf clovers. I have one that somebody who always finds them gave me and one I found myself. Many children take a stem from one three-leaf clover and a stem and a leaf fro
m another and tie the stems together, in full consciousness that it is not the same. I know that. When I was last at my wit’s end, I dreamed I parked my car on my way to my stabled horse and found the country roadside absolutely strewn with silver. It was also overgrown with poison ivy, vicious, three-leafed, shining. It was by no means a parable about capitalism and making money. I believe in both, and would not think of dreaming against either. Anyway, I do not dream in parables.

  But poison ivy. Many people, particularly children, have had poison ivy very often, very badly. They speak of it. They do not forget it. But there is an outer limit, a kind that passes any question of degree. Those who have utterly had it instantly recognize each other—like the Jews and homosexuals in Proust. It has no dignity whatever. There are no poison-ivy heroes. As homesickness, at camp or school, can be a first intuition of death and bereavement, this creeping thing is most nearly a child’s premonitory sense of mortal illness. I had it once when I needed to be led blindly to the school infirmary by a girl who had the flu. I put two fingers around her wrist so she could lead me. The next day there was a neat circle of poison ivy around her wrist. That was a friend. There are other such cabals, reverse elites of outer limit, junkies, sufferers from migraines, the truly seasick, soldiers’ fear in wartime, certain cramps. Many people suffer from cramps severely, turn quite silent, green, and shaky. Someone offers them a glass of gin. But there are cramps of an entirely other order, when even hardened doctors—knowing it is not important, only temporary, just a matter of hours—reach for the Demerol and the needle. It must be so in each lonely degrading thing from which one comes back having learned nothing whatever. There are no conclusions to be drawn from it. Lonely people see double entendres everywhere.

  There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your hair, whether you marry, whether you insist that your child take piano lessons, what are the brand names on your shelf; all these become political decisions. At other times, no act—no campaign or tract, statement or rampage—has any political charge at all. People with the least sense of which times are, and which are not, political are usually most avid about politics. At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and frayed sweater to buy a quart of milk. A tourist bus went by. The megaphone was directed at him. “There’s one,” it said. That was in the 1960’s. Ever since, he’s wondered. There’s one what?

  In covering fires, murders, blasts, quotidian disasters, raffle winners, just walking through the streets, like everyone, I often meet a beggar. I always, always give a quarter or a dime. In recent years, always. I once met a girl called Yael in Beersheba, very poor, who always did, without reflection—gave a little something to each beggar, even ones she passed twice, even the most devastated. She did not look around to see who noticed, simply gave. Now every tin cup—with or without pencils, voice, accordion—stops me. It is not a bribe to my own fortunes any longer. Even lighting candles in a church, I have never prayed quite in specifics. It is just a habit now.

  “Forget it,” says the drunken voice outside. “What’s it for? Throw it away.”

  My life began, really, at college, where I nearly always slept. Waking, I studied—clinical psychology. We ran rats in mazes by the hour, checking whether rats rewarded learned things faster. At the end of half the mazes, the cheese stood alone. We also ran tests on each other—lie detectors, free-word associations with a stopwatch; the point turned out to be not what you said but just how long you stalled before you said it. Weekends, I took trains. You never knew whom you might meet. There was a man who peddled cigars, cigarettes, and what he pronounced “magazynes” outside the Philadelphia station, and a dining-car waiter who offered you among other cheeses, “camemberry.” I never did meet anyone.

  I was going to be a doctor and an analyst, but in my third year an odd thing happened. There was a group of friends by this time, an improbable, warm set of debutantes and scholars—girls who liked each other, dated each other’s brothers, cousins. I belonged. One night, climbing a brick wall to the dorm long after hours, I got poison ivy. Totally. Again. Those ivy-covered walls. My case, however, was diagnosed as an allergy to something in the chemistry laboratory. I knew just what I did have, but I didn’t argue long. My work had started to be awful. I allowed myself to be persuaded just to drop it. After graduation, we were all many times each other’s bridesmaids. The marriages were in Maryland, Boston, New Hampshire, California, Georgia, Maine.

  Just south of the Mason-Dixon line, on several weekends, young men—clean-cut, friendly, slightly tipsy—from Princeton or the University of Virginia Law School would rise late in the evening and propose a toast to the N.L.A. We all drank to it. I finally asked, and learned it was the Nigger Lynching Association. My friends from those days have changed as much as all the world has. We are still friends. In those days, too, there was the matter of religion, which tended both to start and to inhibit conversation. Once, the father of my roommate asked me whether I had gone to the same boarding school as his daughter. I said no. There was a pause. He asked me how long I had known her. I said a year. There was another pause. Finally, he made another try. “Do you,” he asked, “know Eddie Warburg?” But it turned out all right. Another bridesmaid, this one from Alabama, had brought an Argentine boyfriend from the Catholic University in Washington. He was very rich, with more profound good manners than any Anglo-Saxon I have met, but he had not troubled much with haircuts. After we had all swum awhile outside, the bride’s mother asked me in confidential tones whether I thought she ought to drain the pool.

  “Well, you know, you can’t win them all,” the old bartender said. “In fact, you can’t win any of them.”

  Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener. She would spend hours in her straw hat and gloves, bending over the soil. When somebody walked past her in her work, she was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes, with an air of resolute courage, as though she had shot them herself.

  Will and I once went for a few days to the Caribbean, where we chartered what was called a yacht. He is married to his work, but there we were. Most of the boats had been rented by people from Chicago or Milwaukee. They were bossed around by the crews and owners. They wore strange shirts and shorts and drank a lot of rum. Our boat, however, was a question of expediency. We wanted to get as quickly as possible to an island which had no airfield. The boat was run by three Swiss—Hans the father, Hans the son, and the mother, Trude, I think, or Hannelore. We tried to find out, in our few hours, why three Swiss happened to be running a yacht in the Caribbean. It turned out that Hans the father had owned a gas station in Geneva. He had sailed, with his family, on the lake there. Then he bought a larger boat and tried the Atlantic. They barely made it. Hans sold the boat in Florida. They went back to Geneva. The family started feeling landlocked. They bought another boat from their profits on the first one, crossed the sea again, and began doing charters. They were not like the lounging, bossy owners. They were still, in fact, scandalized by their last charter—a priest and what he said were his two sisters. It was not the more obvious situation that appalled them. It was that, their boat having no refrigerator, the wife of Hans the father kept the vegetables in the bathtub. The priest, without removing even the lettuce, had taken his showers in that tub, over what was going to be half of dinner. They could not get over this. They thought of selling their boat again and returning to Geneva. The jet, the telephone, the boat, the train, the television. Dislocations.

  The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.

  My new life has its contrasts. One weekend, I was sent to cover a hospital in Brooklyn—municipal, enormous, patients mostly black. My subject was the emergency ward on weekends, but a middle-aged black doctor, graduate of Howard in the thirties, took me on a tour. The wards were jammed—diseases, fractures, burns. The severely burned had a little ward room of their own because they so depress the oth
er patients. Wounded criminal suspects had semiprivate rooms with police outside them. These were luxury accommodations. All patients—even those about to “slip away,” in the doctor’s euphemism—were silent, except one white lady who screamed occasionally from senile psychosis. It was as though the entire place were drugged.

  One lady patient, very ill, had been put in the corridor, her bed alongside the wall, blocking the water cooler. Every intern and nurse, rushing harassed and anxious down that hall, would absent-mindedly pull the bed aside along its casters, take a drink of water, slam the bed against the wall again. All else was silent. I thought I’d had my tour when the doctor, returning to his office, noticed a silhouette through his glass-paneled door. “Oh,” he said. “This will interest you. You mustn’t miss this.” Then he told the young black man waiting in the office that his sister was about to slip away. We went down the ward to see the sister. I was introduced and said, “How are you?” She said, “Fine thanks. How are you?”