Speedboat

by Renata Adler

  Toward early morning, activity in the emergency ward accelerated, a catastrophe a minute, mostly victims of knife fights whom other hospitals—uneasy with police cases—had simply passed along. Two interns were Hungarian refugees who had had full practices in Budapest, two were young Egyptians, all were gray with tiredness. A case arrived upon a stretcher. Two policemen asked routinely who had cut him. He said he did not know. Two hours later, still waiting for an operating room for him to become empty, the cut man’s wife saw a young man enter at the far end of the room. She said quite softly to an intern, “That’s him. That’s the man that did it.” The intern called a policeman.

  The wife told of her husband’s being held against a tub in the hall bathroom of their building and cut, for reasons she could not explain. The young man himself had come in to have a knife wound on his right palm treated. When confronted with the story, and the evidence of his own wounded hand, the accused young man denied it. The police brought him to the man upon the stretcher. He leaned solicitously over the weak man and said, “I didn’t do it, did I? Tell them.” The weak man looked up and said, “Yeah, man. You did. You cut me.” Then he shut his eyes. They wheeled him to the operating room to fix him up.

  I am not technically a Catholic. That is, I have not informed or asked the Church. I do not, certainly, believe in evolution. For example, fossils. I believe there are objects in nature—namely, fossils—which occur in layers, and which some half-rational fantasts insist derive from animals, the bottom ones more ancient than the top. The same, I think, with word derivations—arguments straining back to Sanskrit or Indo-European. I have never seen a word derive. It seems to me that there are given things, all strewn and simultaneous. Even footprints, except in detective stories, now leave me in some doubt that anyone passed by. People who are less happy, I find, are always consoling those who are more. At table, there are often one or two people who stammer. The well-bred stammer that pretends the speaker is not quite firm in what he’s stated, is still open to suggestion—open mind. And the real stammer that bears down so hard on language that it seems absolute, a way to occupy airwaves, until the speaker has quite formulated his transmission. I have noticed that stammerers talk a lot. The chaplain, though, who was the best interpreter in the history of the monastery at the border, had a violent speech disorder in his native tongue.

  We had been standing outside his tent for eleven hours. The crowd was large. When at last he came out, the guru stared, then threw an orange, savagely. He returned to his tent. That was all.

  The other night, I interviewed a controversial diplomat, an ex- and future politician with strong ideas on air pollution. He took me home. By the time I had answered the telephone ringing in my bedroom, he had started an enormous fire in the fireplace of my living room. I only have two rooms, kitchen, and bath. He had taken off his jacket, fixed himself and me a drink, and sat upon the sofa. He was so good at all this that for the first time in months I felt at home. For an hour and a half, I did not tell him that I had a deadline. By that time, the fire was blazing firmly and correctly. The diplomat had been a country boy. When I finally did mention my deadline at the office, he looked surprised, then said good-naturedly the brownstone would catch fire if we left the fireplace in flames. It was quite true. I asked him how to put it out. He said, “Sand, baby.” I have no sand in my apartment. We poured water from every pan and kettle in the kitchen. It took some time. We also drenched the carpet. When I woke up at noon the next day, the wet wood and ashes with a kettle still beside them looked like some desolate form of art.

  In Paris, where I studied anthropology (the structural, not field work), some American anthropologists on Fulbrights gave a party for some Africans, in my apartment. The Africans were all students at the École Normale Superieure. They might one day all be prime ministers. A student from the Ivory Coast said he had as many names as the midwife could reel off in the moments when he was actually being born. The daughter of a former British high commissioner in Nigeria danced the high life with a student from the Belgian Congo. A small, blond French-Canadian girl left the party early, to go to bed with one of the Americans. She asked him later when they would see each other again. He said, “Don’t break the magic.” Afterward, he left for Mali. Most people left the party very late. It was a year when it was rumored that Life was going to do an article on American expatriates in Paris. Perhaps there is that rumor every year or two. In any case, the Americans stopped washing their hair, wrote poetry, and were seen much in cafes, complaining of publicity. At the party, though, they stayed so long I left and took a room in a hotel.

  The doctor we all loved in high school set fractures at the foot of the ski slope. He also worked part-time at the prison. Except for a spectacular, unsolved murder in the forties, committed by someone we all knew, the prison is the thing for which our town is known. It used to be known for its Main Street—which was an infuriating obstacle to traffic between New York and Boston. But now there is a highway. The prison is important. We have had every major federal offender anyone can remember—corrupt, embezzling politicians while they were being re-elected, conscientious objectors, all sorts of federal offenders, radical clergy, spies. The prison baseball team plays with teams from the local stores and factories. On sports pages, the prison line-ups differ from those of local teams only by the omission of last names. Tom J., from the prison, for example, pitched, and so on. Anyway, the doctor we all loved in high school went on from setting fractures to a flirtation with homeopathy. He could not bear suffering. When patients called to say they had colds, he would whistle and say God, I can hear it. When they had sprained ankles, he would inhale and say that he knew how it hurt, he had had sprains himself. Homeopathy failed him. He became a great internist, orthodox, modern. Then, he went to Tennessee, and found himself faced with victims of hexes. They were in comas. They seemed to be dying. He tried orthodox medicine. They got worse. He got angry. Then he gave in. He started circling their beds three times, with lighted candles. That was the accepted practice in the region, and it worked.

  I have often been in hotels alone. It is no good unless you’re on assignment. One sits in the lobby, the bar, or worst of all the restaurant, with a book, and pretends to be preoccupied. One gets soup or vegetables on the pages, and they stick. One summer, in Malta, I took a book from my hotel room to the beach. The beach was full of English tourists, grocers already tanned from fingertips to wrist, from hair to collar line, standing in bathing suits and shoes and socks, with arms folded across their chests, staring out to sea. Also blond divorcées, deeply brown, lying in beach chairs, with a transistor and perhaps one small weedy child digging in wet and littered sand. At the post office, there was an enormous lady with a considerable mustache, who took grave pleasure in slavering on all the stamps whenever anyone brought in a letter. I took off for a smaller island, Gozo, which was quieter. There was a sign quite near the water: CAUTION. DO NOT TOUCH OR PICK UP STRANGE OBJECTS FOUND ON THE BEACH. REPORT THEM IMMEDIATELY TO THE POLICE. Mines. Malta and Gozo had a rough time in the war.

  Our obituary writer is an extreme, pedantic gossip. He gets things wrong, but he gets them in detail. I had just started working at the paper. He thought I was an alcoholic; he told it to a man on night rewrite, who told it to all the people in the newsroom, who told it to the people at the culture desk. It is not so troubling to be thought an alcoholic; still, I preferred not. When he asked me out to lunch, I gladly went. His parents are from Poland. His name is Standish Hawthorne Smith. We went to a Greek restaurant. When we sat down, he held my hand. He asked me whether Will has his divorce. I did not know quite what to say. I asked about his work. He smiled. He asked what I would like to drink. Nothing, I thought. Then I remembered that nothing would be the order of an alcoholic on the wagon. My normal Scotch and water would not do. I asked for an ouzo. No alcoholic in his right mind, I thought, would have an ouzo. I had two. Standish walked me home. He said he wrote, and read, a lot of poetry. When we got to my doo
r, he asked whether he might use the phone. He made three phone calls, going to the kitchen now and then, to pour himself another vodka. I sat in the living room, with a glass of wine. I had altogether lost my sense of purpose in the situation. After his hour or two of phone calls, he came to the living room. “Do you know,” he said, “three things are said to be true of every Polish houseguest. First, he raids your icebox. Then he reads your mail. Then he fires the maid.” He walked to a window, pulled the curtains, asked whether I would like him to fire the maid. He finally read some poetry instead. Anyway, Will’s gone.

  I used to live with a graduate student of political science, a kind of Calvinist in reverse; that is, he was uncompromisingly bohemian. His mother was a dancer. His father was a judge. Our mattress was on the floor. We had no lights or telephone. Each morning when he left, I cooked a meal according to a recipe, most carefully, then tasted it and found it good, and threw it out. A trial run. In two hours, he would be back from the library. We would have beer, two sandwiches, perhaps a nap. Then he would go back to the library. All afternoon, I would cook the meal again, with better confidence, studying the cookbook with the concentration I still had from graduate school. It would be supper this time, practiced, complicated, natural—after cigarettes and gin, which we drank neat.

  He had an intimation, a skepticism of all this domesticity. It seemed to me one of the minor deceptions, though most fraught. My friends, after all, were married—to men whose hours were already set. Adam might come home from his books or his little office at the university at any time. The food waste would have appalled him, the deception even more. He lived on frankness and economy. He wrote sometimes: “The first sentence can be like the rapping of a gavel, or it can sidle up to endear itself. It can thump you on the back with fraternal heartiness, or it can tap you for a loan. There are writers like prosecutors, and others with a bedside manner, and others still, with that particular note of instruction which can drive you up the wall. The thing is, I recognize every literary style at once, and I detest them all.” So on. I was trying translations of some sort of diaries. “An appointment is less romantic than a rendezvous. A rendezvous is more clandestine than a date. How to explain, then, that I saw my lover yesterday, that he is a prince, an assassin, a masterspy. And also my immediate boss. No, no.” I simply could not cook. Logic seemed to require those trial runs in the kitchen, which were entirely alien to his cast of mind, entirely natural to mine. I was prepared to go to lengths. I guess I overdid it. My sense of limit in these things was shot. I got a job reporting. Then we left each other. Here I am.

  In the first year, the Standard sent me to those poor sensational families, until they had become so commonplace they were no longer news but subject for political reflection by our feature writers. Anyway, there was the Movement in the South. Then, there were demonstrations against so many things. I went to a meeting of black school principals in Anacostia, Washington, D.C. I went as a reporter and Consultant. A consultant. By that time, any journalist who had stuck a while with unsensational blacks was accepted as of their number in that way.

  At lunch the first day in the cafeteria of the University of Maryland, where the conference was, a one-armed black teacher asked me to cut his meat. I have the shakes a good part of the time (which interferes no end with taking notes). I tried to cut his ham steak. I was shaking quite a lot. I think he thought it was because of his lost arm. He said, “Sweetheart, you need a drink.” That part of Maryland is dry. He offered me the key to his room, in which he had a fifth of bourbon. The number on his room key was the same as mine. It turned out that by some bureaucratic mix-up at least four people had the same single-room assignment—two ministers, the teacher, and I. We all found rooms elsewhere. I called old friends in Bethesda.

  When the meetings were over, around midnight, there were of course no cabs. A small, kind black Anacostia parent, owner of a funeral parlor, offered to drive me to Bethesda—which he graciously said was only twenty minutes out of his own way home. Two hours later, we were still driving. I thought he was lost. Then I thought he wasn’t. Suddenly, he pulled over to the side of the highway. I thought, Good grief, I am over twenty. I am a liberal. I should have thought it through. But does it need to be right here beside four lanes of nighttime traffic? A white state trooper had pulled up behind us. The Anacostia parent turned off the ignition. “We’ve done something wrong, I guess,” he said. I thought, But we haven’t. The trooper shined his flashlight through the windshield. He said, “Folks, you made a wrong turn at that last turnoff. Lots of people miss it.” We drove on to Bethesda. The Anacostia parent had been truly lost.

  In his small, airless apartment the sportswriter served local wine, cheap Scotch, and beer. His wife, and the other sportswriters’ wives, four of them pregnant, two not apparently so, sat in the bedroom, drinking the Almaden, with ice. They discussed rents. The sportswriters, hitting the Scotch and the beer, sat in the living room, talking of books they planned to write but never would. The pressures were wrong. There was just enough money and not enough time. No one was rich. No one was poor. No one was ever going to do anything of any consequence. We were talking about No, No, Nanette. I said I thought there was such a thing as an Angry Bravo—that those audiences who stand, and cheer, and roar, and seem altogether beside themselves at what they would instantly agree is at best an unimportant thing, are not really cheering No, No, Nanette. They are booing Hair. Or whatever else it is on stage that they hate and that seems to triumph. So they stand and roar. Every bravo is not so much a Yes to the frail occasion they have come to make a stand at, as a No, goddam it to everything else, a bravo of rage. And with that, they become, for what it’s worth, a constituency that is political. When they find each other, and stand and roar like that, they want, they want to be reckoned with.

  Joe said, Isn’t it possible they just want to say that they are having a good time? It’s possible; one ought perhaps to take into account that it is fun to be part of an audience that wants to roar. Norma asked whether Joe had seen it. He said no. Norma said, “Well, then you don’t know. It’s not a musical audience roar. It’s not an avant garde roar. It’s a march roar. A rally roar. A parade roar.” Joe said, “You mean a lynch roar.” Norma said, “Now that’s going too far.”

  Just two nights ago, I went to a party with three large dinner tables. It was mixed, the rich and famous and the reporters who had helped them on their way. There were some intellectual sharks, some arrivistes, some sheep, good souls, professors, editors, some radicals, who themselves invite poets, novelists, sophomore rioters, and visiting Englishmen to dinner, which is served by maids. This party was given by two kind, intelligent Americans I knew from college. They wanted to do good and to know, like people out of E.M. Forster or Henry James. The purpose was for the senior senator of an American liberal state and an Indian dignitary, a woman, to meet a cross section of American opinion. They met it. The first course was aspic. The dignitary thought somebody was going to attack her for Indian educational policies in Kerala. No one knew anything about India at all. She relaxed and grew bored. The senator thought he was going to meet the young and learn about them. I was sitting next to him. I said I thought he and I might be among the last three people in the room who still believed in the electoral process. He said, “Thanks, sweetheart.”

  Suddenly, after dessert, a lady at my table—a donor to controversial social causes, now half persuaded to devote her money to the cause of saving art—said she thought the dinner would be wasted if the conversation did not become general, if it was all private bon mots spliced together, or just gossip. She thought we ought to talk about America today. She called first on one of those social academics, a man who had vecu a bit, whose bow tie was perpetually atilt, perhaps to show himself at an eccentric angle to the dinner jackets that he wore, what they implied. He rose, red-faced and angry, to his feet. He said he felt this country now was the world’s most murderous and corrupt. He happened to know, he said, of two deaths at Ke
nt State that had not been reported, and of other grave matters he was not at liberty to disclose. He felt the only hope for humanity now lay in the vitality and idealism of the third world.

  The lady who led the discussion, unperturbed, asked a tireless, self-effacing worker in the cause of civil rights whether he had anything to say “about all this.” He leaned his head against the wall, then stood up. “Bertram,” he said, “I am so offended by what you have just said, I don’t know what to say to you.” He sat down. The lady called upon a poet, a surrealist who, with clear reluctance, got to his feet and said, turning to the Indian lady, “I think in this country we need to disburden ourselves of our, our burden of rationality.” He sat down. It did not seem exactly India’s problem.

  A liberal reporter of military affairs was called on. He said he didn’t want to discuss the morality of it, but that anyone who had covered the military would know…;“I know something about the military,” another reporter, younger, fiercer, gray with anger, said, rising to his feet and interrupting. Then he said he knew that the fabric of our whole society was stretching very thin. The editors—one local popular, one national radical—talked well when they were called on, discursive, rambling. It was as though they had a repressed and abiding wish to have their say, in their own words for once. The party ended the only way it could. A McLuhanite apostle, revered as a physics genius in these circles, spoke. He was in his seventies, extremely hard of hearing. He spoke long and loudly. He continued speaking. “I’m sorry to have to interrupt,” the lady moderator said, after geologic time spans passed. He did not hear her. He went on.

  “I’m very sorry to have to interrupt,” she said, more loudly. He heard nothing. He continued speaking. She kept trying. Finally, some clear-sighted soul rose to propose a toast. “All stand,” he said. Everyone stood. For a few moments the clear-sighted soul and the deaf genius were speaking in duet. Then the genius, looking around, subsided. “The reason we are gathered here is to honor our hostess,” the good soul said, and drained his glass. So did we all, and then went home with all deliberate speed. I took a cab home. The driver ranted. We passed three men, two beating up a third. They had pulled his sweatshirt up over his eyes. He could not see them. A crowd had gathered, interested. Suddenly a young man got out of the cab beside mine. “That’s enough!” he shouted. The scene froze a minute. Then it started up again. After all, he was unarmed; nobody knew him. He moved closer. He said, “That’s enough,” again. The whole thing stopped, dissolved. The beaten man pulled his sweatshirt down over his injured face, put his arms inside the sleeves, and limped away. The crowd disintegrated. I thought, What a phrase from some past time I can remember. That’s enough.