Speedboat

by Renata Adler

  Constituency. Dennis, a rich, unintelligent, and not particularly well-meaning man, revelled in his favorite expressions. When he was certain of something, he said it was sure as God made little green apples. When he wanted no interference from someone, he would ask him to keep his cotton-picking hands off. When he felt superior to someone, he said he ate that sort of fella for breakfast. Since a good part of Dennis’ day consisted in being certain, deploring interference, and feeling superior, he had occasion to use all these idioms, which he thought gruffly witty, several times a day. His appointments secretary, in whom he confided his impressions, of business, his home life, his diet, had a recurrent dream that she shot him.

  Lewis, the barber, discouraged conversation. Over the years, by keeping his face vacant and refusing to reply even to the direct questions of his customers, he managed to impose his own silence upon them. Florian, who worked the next chair, spoke incessantly and even sang sometimes. He flourished his towels. He gave advice. He danced around the little flames with which he scorched the hairstyles of his customers. As far as anyone could remember, Lewis addressed the subject of Florian only once. “Someday,” he said, “I’m going to kill him.”

  About money. When we had come from our public schools and our private schools, and our travels abroad, and our own education to our first solid jobs in the city, one of our golden couples gave a party to raise funds. The cause was desperate and just. Five haggard members of the group whose cause it was spoke eloquently on the terrace, sang sad songs, and afterward stood among us in the living room. There were servants. There was a bartender. The first odd thing was that the cups were plastic, and the brands of Scotch, gin, bourbon, even beer, were unknown brands. We knew that charities ought not to waste money on overhead. But when the awkward moment of collection came, our most successful lawyer reached into his pocket and came up with change. One of the wives, who was just becoming known in fashion circles for her clothes, opened her purse, hesitated, and brought out a crumpled dollar bill. Checkbooks came out on every side. Checks for three dollars, two dollars, even a check for four dollars and eighty-two cents, were signed with a flourish and passed along. It became clear: nobody under forty gives anything to charity. Martin and Iris do contribute to the arts, but Martin wants to be on boards of trustees with the fathers of friends he went to Harvard with. A lot of the under-twenty-fives give every cent they have to weird sects they want to get their head together in. But nobody, as a matter of course, any longer tithes.

  The Art people, then, met our people, regarding Space. The meeting began quietly enough. “I particularly resent,” Mel said, leafing to the fourth page of a nine-page memorandum the Art people had sent that morning, in reply to his own eleven-page memorandum of the night before, “your use of the word ‘unconscionable.’ It is inappropriate in a memoranda of this sort.” “Memoranda” in all departments of our university is singular, “memorandums” plural. “Phenomena” is another singular, taking the plurals “phenomenas” and “phenomenae.” I have also heard “phenomenums.” Usage, for those of us who went to colleges and universities of other sorts, is always odd. A change of grade, for example, after semester’s end, requires of the professor a signed slip. The professor must, without the help of Miss Fiotti from Fringe Benefits, fill in the line: Reason for Change of Grade. The Dean had such a form before him as we met. “Reason for Change of Grade,” it read. “Cleracal Error.” It was signed “Professor Leora J. Smith.” Leora is our Permanent Head.

  Within three wrathful hours—in which, at one point, our people understood the Art people to have implied our people were unqualified to teach a course our people heard as Spaces, Goldwyn-Giotto: Film and Fresca—we had resolved the question of Space on Film. It will be taught jointly, by our people and their people, in a seminar next spring. It will be listed under our people in the catalogue. If anything goes wrong, the featherbedding illiterates in our department will join the reactionary pedants in theirs to blame it on Open Admissions, the program by which the university now lets all interested high school graduates in. “Open Admissions” sounds like an outdoor confessional. It is another faculty excuse for doing less and earning more. “Standards are down,” the H.B.A.s and holders of degrees in Film and Oral Science will say. “We have Open Admissions, after all.” I won’t be here next spring.

  Talent was blazing through the columns and onto the coffee tables. The physical-assault metaphor had taken over the reviews. “Guts,” never much of a word outside the hunting season, was a favorite noun in literary prose. People were said to have or to lack them, to perceive beauty and make moral distinctions in no other place. “Gut-busting” and “gut-wrenching” were accolades. “Nerve-shattering,” “eye-popping,” “bone-crunching”—the responsive critic was a crushed, impaled, electrocuted man. “Searing” was lukewarm. Anything merely spraining or tooth-extracting would have been only a minor masterpiece. “Literally,” in every single case, meant figuratively; that is, not literally. This film will literally grab you by the throat. This book will literally knock you out of your chair. “Presently” always meant not soon but now.

  Sometimes the assault mode took the form of peremptory orders. See it. Read it. Go at once. Sometimes it sidled up disguised as musing, in unanswerable-question form. Shall I tell you how much I…Should I even attempt to describe…Or, should I say unequivocally …A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit. Many sentences carried with them their own congratulations, Suffice it to say…or, The only word for it is…Whether it really sufficed to say, or whether there was, in fact, another word, the sentence, bowing and applauding to itself, ignored. There existed also an economical device, the inverted-comma sneer—the “plot,” or his “work,” or even “brave.” A word in quotation marks carried a somehow unarguable derision, like “so-called” or “alleged.” It was hard to remember yesterday’s polemic, to determine whether today’s rebuttal was, in fact, an answer to it. Recalling arguments in order genuinely to refute them was an unrewarding exercise. A lot of bread, anyway, was buttered on the side of no distinction. God was not dead, but the Muse was extremely unwell.

  “Mutual” meant common, shared, together, both, or simply somehow two-ish, as in our mutual hope, our mutual burden, mutual decision, mutual interest, mutual advantage, perhaps mutual camping trip. “Agony” could mean anything—usually, pending indictment; physical agony, in hospitals, was called discomfort, normally. “Problem” and “personal tragedy” meant crimes. “Serene” and “out of touch with reality” meant a given speaker trying to clear himself by intimating that the boss was crazy. “He has suffered enough” meant if we investigate this matter any further, it will turn out our friends are in it, too. A sufficiency of suffering, in public life, consisted in a loss of face perhaps, or office, or, earlier, in getting caught, or having lived in dread of being caught, or in committing crimes, or having wanted to commit them. And if the real sufferer was the public man in violation of the criminal law, and a sufficiency of suffering lay in his various states of mind, then it was perhaps everyone else who got off too easily. When a new President brought our national nightmare to an end by asking us to “bind up the internal wounds,” we knew that we were almost in the clear.

  While people tagged up on these public codes and incantations, baby talk took over private conversation—naughty and cranky, in particular. Personal treachery and acts of violence were naughty. Citizens in the middle of small betrayals or murder trials described themselves as in a cranky mood. Murders, generally, were called brutal and senseless slayings, to distinguish them from all other murders; nouns thus became glued to adjectives, in series, which gave an appearance of shoring them up. The concept of the jig itself being up, however, had retreated into thrillers. Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn�
��t remember it, but if they had done it or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether. It was in the interest of absolutely nobody to get to the bottom of anything whatever. People were no longer “caught” in the old sense on which most people could agree. Induction, detection, the very thrillers everyone was reading were obsolete. The jig was never up. In every city, at the same time, therapists earned their living by saying, “You’re too hard on yourself.”

  The frail, serious four-year-old boy stood, arms outspread, at the foot of the staircase. He looked at his infant sister, who stood three steps above. “Jump, baby,” he said, gravely, encouragingly. She summoned her courage, let go of the banister, and jumped. He caught her, but since she was quite plump, she flattened him. “Good baby,” he said, when his breath had returned. Then he went to his room, put on his pajamas, and lay down for his nap. Every day, when he got home from school, they repeated this process. It was his way of taking her education in hand.

  At twenty-six, Kate, though not promiscuous, had slept with most of the decent men in public life. When our first campaign spokesman returned from a press conference saying, “My dears, I’ve never been so buffeted,” Kate left her job at the museum and took over a lot of the campaign’s hardest work. On a summer Monday, after a morning rally, Kate was walking along Forty-second Street from the subway station. She saw a tall, young, scholarly-looking man obviously about to say something to her. “Excuse me,” he said at last. He said he was from the Stanford urban-contaminations study. Kate said nothing. “Sidewalks,” he went on, frowning slightly. “Sidewalk contamination.” He said they were working on the right shoes of pedestrians. He wondered whether he might take a slide from hers? Kate nodded. She felt a flash of unease the moment she leaned against a wall and raised her foot to take the shoe off. He was already on the sidewalk, quietly licking the sole. No passerby took any notice. In another moment, he had stood up and walked away.

  Our committee, which means well but has as yet no name, no charter, and no acronym, meets every month. We drink and talk, and plan, and have dinners that begin with sherry watered down in turtle soup. At our last meeting, our distinguished painter, who is also rich, suggested that, for our next public symposium, we invite poets to speak, in prose, of their views of the contemporary world. The painter spoke at length of the unique vision poets have of things, their lack of veniality or institutional affiliation; their quality, in short, of divine ecstasy.

  “Have you known many poets, Mr. Hardemeyer?” our distinguished historian, a lady, asked.

  “Stacks,” Mr. Hardemeyer replied.

  It had been a bad day at nursery school. One of the class’s six Kevins had been left in the Park. The children had been out there for an hour. The teacher noticed what she took to be a disreputable lingerer in the bushes near the pond. She went for the police. Kevin went to the statue of Alice and sat down. The teacher returned and put the children on the school bus. When they got back to the classroom, the teacher noticed she was one child short. Hysterical, she called the precinct and the mother. The officer on duty thought it best to have the mother wait at the station, while a patrolman and the teacher went back to the Park to look.

  Kevin, it turned out, had climbed down from the statue of Alice and found no one. A man, probably the original lingerer in the bushes, had taken him for a walk and bought him an ice-cream cone. Kevin had not wanted an ice-cream cone especially. Having incurred enough losses in one day, he respected his obligations in the matter of adults. He returned, with his cone, to the statue, and waited to be found. The patrolman and the teacher did find Kevin. They brought him to his mother, who had behaved admirably from the first. It turned out that every single child on the school bus had known that one of their Kevins was missing. They had not mentioned it to the driver, or their teacher, or each other. They took it that Kevin had been left, forever, for some reason, which would become clear to them, with patience, in the course of time.

  Here’s who, of course, is out there in this city: all those Kevins (the class also includes four Wendys), the teacher, the mother, our staff at the paper, Myrnie, Lothar, the Cardinal, the committee, Lewis the barber, Mel, the unions, Bernstein, O’Malley, Garcia, Jones.

  Lothar was on the board of a museum, two projects in urban renewal, a television network, a public utility, a college, a film institute, and a foundation, which, after several disheartening experiences with projects that became “controversial,” confined itself to very expensive, highly critical studies of other foundations’ work in dealing with the problems of the poor. Lothar knew, and was consulted by, many politicians, whom he numbered among his closest friends. When, not infrequently, two such politicians were running against each other, Lothar was asked which one he favored. “All I can tell you,” he would say, “is that they are both among my closest friends.” If, however, there was a considerable difference in age between two friends running for a single office, Lothar gave one to know that, consistent with his openness to ideas, he preferred the younger man.

  Lothar permitted—in fact, encouraged—his wife to take an interest. Myrnie liked to travel in the South. She took part in almost all of Lothar’s public-service projects. Sometimes, rarely, she had occasion to worry about Lothar’s state of mind. Lothar’s early upbringing had been religious, fundamentalist. He was high-church now, and had not been, in forty years, devout. An office building that he owned distressed him. It was vacant. It had been vacant for a long, long time. Myrnie noticed that Lothar was sleeping badly. It was not so much the money. Creative problem-solving had been the pride of Lothar’s youth and middle age. There was, of course, the money question, too. Myrnie gave the matter thought. One evening when Lothar was at his health club, Myrnie invited the Cardinal for a drink. Myrnie and the Cardinal had met at board meetings of one sort or another. They had weathered scandals. They had been relieved, together, when the museum scandal was so rapidly replaced by the Equity Funding scandal, the Queens District Attorney Ponzi racket scandal, the famous restaurants with sanitary violations scandal, the Boy Scouts of America local chapters padded enrollment scandal, the Biaggi testimony before the grand jury scandal, the Soap Box Derby scandal, the firemen’s union strike-vote scandal—in fact, so many scandals, local, personal, and national, that it was hard to sustain attention to any single one.

  Myrnie was not certain, in the case of the vacant building, what she expected the Cardinal to do, exactly. With some idea that he might levitate the building, or dissolve the spell upon it, or simply exercise his metaphysical authority in its direction, she waited for him. The Cardinal arrived, urbane, interested, but not, thank heaven, prying. He settled easily with his bourbon. With her characteristic delicacy and frankness, Myrnie outlined the problem to him. Over his second drink, he had it solved. A syndicate, of doubtful rectitude but of unquestioned financial stability, was run by an inhabitant of the diocese, who, though he had not specifically mentioned any need for an office building, most probably had such a need. One more drink, and the Cardinal departed. One more week, and the building was bought—as a headquarters for enterprises in jukebox rental, private garbage collection, and parking lots.

  Lewis was an excellent barber. His customers—Lothar, Jim, Dennis, the Dean, and the Cardinal among them—held him in high regard. There was also an eight-year-old boy whose hair Lewis had been cutting once every three weeks for five years. Last week, Lewis, having completed his haircut, removed the towel from the boy’s shoulders and said, “You know, you’ll have to pay me.”

  The boy stood with his hands in his pockets. “I can’t,” he said. “Dad’s meant to pay.”

  “Hasn’t paid me in six months,” Lewis said.

  “He won’t,” the boy said. “Ever since he moved out, he says it’s Mom’s business.”

  “Your ma will have to pay, then,” Lewis said.

  “She says, under the settlement, Dad’s got to pay.
”

  “Please don’t come back, then,” Lewis said, “until somebody pays.”

  I was sitting next to the chairman of the committee, our renowned biographer. The dinner was, as it is quite often, at his club. The club is for men who have good manners and a connection of some sort with arts and letters. Twice a year, and throughout the year in selected dining rooms, the club waives its rules and lets escorted ladies in. For two courses, the chairman had pointed out to me paintings and other objects associated with high moments in the club’s long history. By the cheese and salad, we had hit a lull. Mr. Hardemeyer, on my right, was muttering about “the wonderful insights of our African friends about nature.” On the chairman’s left, our married nun, member of the City Council, was taking down the phone number of the black psychiatrist on her left. Conversation had lapsed—definitely. The chairman and I inhaled to speak at the same moment. “You were saying?” I said. “No, please,” he said. I asked whether women’s groups had ever protested the exclusion of women from the club. “Ah, no,” he said. “No, no. Our wives and colleagues have their own club, don’t you see.” “Oh,” I said. The subject had been a mistake. There just aren’t so many subjects. “Well, I didn’t mean your wives and colleagues so much…” He looked alarmed, then inspired. He offered to sponsor me for membership in his wives’ and colleagues’ club. This involved a misunderstanding so profound that it reminded me of the time when, to surprise me on a cheerful day, Jim’s brother took me, without warning, to a full performance of Parsifal. Admitting women into his club, the chairman now said, “would be as inappropriate as,” he paused, “as introducing a trumpet into a string quartet.”