by Renata Adler
The coffee table seemed to be whale vertebrae, laminated, or enclosed in Perspex. All around the wall, there were tusks. A disagreeable cat and an old gray rag were lying on the piano. A bulldog, wrapped in a blanket, wheezed on the sofa, beside the spot where a drink had been spilled. The bachelors and divorced fathers sat, with their drinks and their girls, on the floor. It was late. Now and then, someone would get up to restore circulation. Immediately, the host’s fine, hard-breathing bloodhound would bound into the room. “Down,” Max would say as this creature attempted to wrap himself around the leg of another guest. “Albert,” I said. “Down.” There would be the sound of ice in glasses, canine panting, Max and others saying “Down,” and “Shame,” and “Sit.”
All the men in the room had drinks in both hands. They had tried to extricate themselves from conversations by saying, “I guess I’ll have another drink. May I get one for you?” The trouble with this method is that it takes people right back where they came from; it is impossible to approach with one lady’s gin and tonic another lady who may be drinking Scotch. Escape procedures, however, were in full force. Some people, in a frenzy of antipathy and boredom, were drinking themselves into extreme approximations of longing to be together. Exchanging phone numbers, demanding to have lunch, proposing to share an apartment—the escalations of fellowship had the air of a terminal auction, a fierce adult version of slapjack, a bill-payer loan from a finance company, an attempt to buy with one grand convivial debt, to be paid in future, an exit from each other’s company at that instant.
The inside-dopester, having been, according to the morning paper, wrong again, was ranting slightly. Edith, whose nine-year-old has polish on her nails and a silver electric chair on her charm bracelet, was on the floor in contortions, trying to endear herself to a child. “Warren Burger,” the baby-food tycoon was saying to the assassination theorist. “He’s no friend of the Establishment.” A young professor from Iowa, who was in the city for a lecture series on Wordsworth and the Lake Poets, spoke of his closeness to his own students, with several of whom he had had affairs, although he did not believe, in the academic context, in shacking up. He was preoccupied with his brightest student, a girl, with whom, during office hours, he engaged in—he wished there was an Anglo-Saxon word for it—fellatio. I said I thought it was sort of a metaphor for education, wasn’t it. Then I thought I had gone too far. But no. He said, “Exactly.” We all watched the “Eleventh Hour News,” which went on, of course, at the Twelfth Hour. Jim and I drove out to the country. It was very late. We stopped for coffee at an all-night dairy-and-diner on the way. A man got out of a truck, came in, ordered a milkshake, put his wallet on the counter, and mumbled something. Then he left, looking angry. “He asks me for a package of rubbers,” the man behind the counter said. “I mean, this is a dairy.” When our car broke down near the highway exit to the farm, a boy with a sign reading BOSTON trotted over. He thought we were slowing to give him a lift.
We may win this year. We may lose it all. It is not going as well as we thought. Posterity, anyway, does not know everything. The simplest operations of life—voting in a booth, filling out returns, remembering whether or not one has just taken a pill—are very difficult. Jim leads an exemplary life, and I can’t cook. As is clear from the parking regulations, however, there are situations in which you are not entitled to stop.
ISLANDS
THE DRIVER of the island’s only taxi was a tall, thin man, with almost invisible eyes and a sparse, brown, asymmetrical mustache. He drove his rickety old car in a kind of drunken weave, from one side to the other of the road. Shrill, improbable cries of “Taxi! Taxi! Taxi!” rang out from behind the rocks and hills, and from the sea. It turned out that the man was a ventriloquist. This cry of “Taxi!” was his talent, and his only joke. He required, every few seconds, to be praised for it. “Taxi!” he would scream from a passing motorbike or donkey cart. “Taxi!” from behind a cow. He insisted that his passengers laugh, turn around, look astounded, incredulous. He kept right on. If passengers resumed a conversation of their own, or gave any sign that their attention had lapsed, he would speed his car into a wilder weave, his voice into more and shriller screams. Some thought him a charming eccentric. It had never occurred to me, though, what an oddity, intellectually, ventriloquism on the radio used to be.
At the end of that summer, none of us any longer spoke any known language. Sometimes, in the presence of a Spaniard who spoke French but not English, two Americans would spend an evening talking French to him and each other. Sometimes, in the presence of an American, who naturally spoke no Portuguese, six Brazilians spent an evening talking Italian to him and each other, although the American didn’t know Italian, either. Sometimes, by mistake, or having made a habit of the effort, everyone spent an evening in a language which was native to no one and inconvenient to everybody. We were under a strain. Once, a heavy man, with a thick accent or combination of accents, was brought by a young French actress to dinner. He was introduced as Boris. He said he was a doctor. When someone asked what sort of doctor, he said “mnnh, mnnh, an healer,” with an “h” as though someone had thrown him a medicine ball. His work, he said, made use of what he must call the most mnnh, mnnh healing words in any language. “The Lord is my shepherd,” he began. “I have not want. He teach me to lie down in the green. Vast, He leads me still to the water. He restore there my soul. Mnnh, hah, yea though…” he rumbled profoundly through to the end. Nobody knew quite what to say to him. Later, when I found myself sitting beside him on a couch, I asked him what his nationality was. His answer was long and deep. I did not understand a word. I asked him what his first language had been. Another intense monologue. I didn’t get it either. I tried another route. What language now, I asked, came to him most easily. “Mnnh, mnnh, ah,” he said, sipping his vodka and managing to breathe, at the same time, insinuatingly, “I speak the language of love.”
The island had no trees. Rocky and bleak, with patches of living scrub and patches of burned and blackened scrub, it floated in the ocean like a worn-out Brillo pad. There were bandits in the interior, and farms with goats that fed on the few green things in the dry dirt among the rocks. The islanders did not care for the coast. They feared the sea. They did not fish. They could not swim. They thought of the sea as a source of malaria. Forty years ago, American scientists on a grant had eliminated malaria from the place. Still, the island fathers, distrustful for generations of the shore, always left to their sons the goat-farming interior lands, and to their daughters the unfarmable coast. The result was that, when the jet outriders came, with their boats, and their architects, and their search for an unspoiled sea, the island women began to sell their beaches and became extremely rich. They still dressed in black, and their teeth were bad. But they travelled, by plane, to the mainland from the new airport. They shopped in Ostia, Torino, and Rome. Within ten years, their sons and husbands had spent all the rest of the money, on cars, appliances, and schemes to become richer still. They were poor again.
The jet outriders had, by this time, built their houses. The rest of the coastline was owned by consortiums. Hotels were going up. The island sons and daughters now took jobs in the tourist hotels. Bandits remained active in the interior. On the coast, in the houses of the outriders, a Communist party formed. The party swept through the staff of the hotels too, of course; but hotel employees ran a risk of being fired, which was not shared by servants in the private houses. The owners spent so much of the year away. The uniformed couples in those lovely houses, then, became the party leadership. Hotel waiters, waitresses, maids, bell captains and porters, party members all, remained wary of management, of mandarins in the front office, and above all, of the cooks. The cooks were mad, short-tempered, morose, individualistic, and elitist to the core. But, particularly in the off-season, the hotel cadres found it possible to come to the meetings, in the kitchens and living rooms of the absent rich, of their party cells.
We did not see Boris again after the night
we met him. We did not see the actress again, either. Mixed as we all were on our coast, and in our house, we began to take a shine to expressions, adopting words and phrases from each other all the time. “Écoute,” Marge Brown would say to her four-year-old and to her husband. “Écoute, Bunny. Joe, please. Écoute.” Everyone swore continuously. English was the language for that. Elio Kahn’s French was perfect, except for his accent, which was terrible. He cultivated this terribleness. It suited his humor. His precise French, pronounced in flat-out American Southern, also gave what he said a kind of slow burning quality, as though his words had their own built-in double take. One evening, when we were on a neighbor’s terrace, one of the coast’s most beautiful young wives walked dreamily by. Marge remarked that she looked older. Joe said she looked dissolute. Even Greg, who seldom talks at all, said it seemed she’d put a lot of mileage on. And Elio, Elio just leaned back and said, “Well, yes. She does look un peu défraîchie.” Greg, who had spent the winter in a Patmos monastery, had a single Greek word: Oreia. It seemed to be an exclamation of approval or joy. He used it incessantly, in a tone so flat, bleak and despairing that we all began to like it. Oreia, we would say, when the waiter, after four hours, brought our dinner. Oreia, when, after nine straight days, the rain stopped. Oreia, when the radio, which was dead most nights, woke up and spoke the news.
We were not exactly hated on the island—or if we were, it was likely that everyone else was hated more. We were not exactly home-owners, not tourists, not celebrities, expatriates, or hippies, not exactly anything. We were not always there at the same time. None of us ever stayed long. We were not there out of boredom. We had all been coming there, from our separate directions, for so many years.
The first year I ever came to the island, there was no phone and no hot water. Since there was no electricity, there were no lights. I was alone; I had rented a house. During the month in which I had the house, the road was being moved. Electricity and telephones, it was said, could not be installed even in town until the road was done. My house, for some reason, was built straight down a hill, in a kind of shaft. One entered through the kitchen, the highest point, and then almost immediately fell down three flights of stairs. The walls on the sides of the stairs were covered with framed, glass-enclosed butterflies. Three mornings a week, a woman came to clean. What she spoke was not exactly Italian, not exactly Spanish, not exactly anything. It was local, a result of all the many invasions and immigrations the island had undergone since before the Crusades. She was squat and, normally, sullen. She wore a wide black skirt, a black blouse, sandals and woolen socks. The only sign of animation she ever gave occurred when she spoke of the men who were working on the road. They were from the interior. Darkly, she mentioned their violent, wrathful dispositions, their criminal natures, the atrocities it was their custom to commit. It was a matter of absolute necessity to them, she would assure me, a matter of absolute, hideous, interior, criminal necessity for these men to commit atrocities. For example, and here her own face would assume an almost maniacal slyness, for example, I might have heard chanting on certain mornings, at sunrise? I might have heard it? On such days, the men in the work crews were strangling a cat. No, she could not believe it either; the children had seen it. Here she called Antonio, her nine-year-old. Yes, he had seen it. From their interior, criminal necessity, these men required, at dawn sometimes, to strangle cats. And so, this was her normal peroration, I should take care. That was all, that was what she would say to me: I should take care.
Private Aufrichtig was the son of immigrants from Rumania. He had graduated from a yeshiva and from college in Queens. He was planning to become a C.P.A. Private Lehmann was the son of a famous novelist and an opera singer. He had gone to Exeter and Harvard. He wrote plays. Both men, one through his brother-in-law’s contacts with a local politician, the other through his father’s friendship with a retired army general, had managed to avoid the draft, with just four months’ active service in the National Guard. Their names had been jumped to the top of the lists at their local armories. There they were. At five o’clock on a morning in February, their third morning as Guardsmen, Privates Aufrichtig and Lehmann had been ordered to clean the barracks floors and stairs. They had already been working forty minutes, on two flights. The mops and brushes, even the soap and water, seemed, like the rest of the Guard equipment, worn and obsolete. Both men were haggard and tired. Both men were cold. On a step near the top landing, Private Aufrichtig turned to his colleague, sighed deeply, and spoke his first words of the morning. “Ach, Lehmann,” he said. Private Lehmann replied, without hesitation, “Ach, Aufrichtig.”
Aufrichtig, Lehmann, all the recruits at the base had been through three weeks of their training; they had marched, and stood guard, and cleaned up, and attacked, and marched more. They were tired and fit. They had also sat through evenings of lectures. On their third Thursday, they were lectured on venereal disease. There was a long talk by a sergeant. There were slides and a movie. The movie was harrowing in its physical detail. When the movie was over, the sergeant returned to the platform. “All right, men,” he said. “Now, Dessalines has had this thing, haven’t you, Dessalines? Dessalines, stand up.” A stocky recruit, looking foolish, stood up. “You’ve had this thing, haven’t you, Dessalines?” said the sergeant. “Yes, sir,” the recruit replied. “Sit down,” said the sergeant. Dessalines sat down. “All right, men,” the sergeant said. “Be alert.”
Be alert, near the army base; on the island, take care. When Lehmann, Dessalines and I were still at the same public school, Miss McKenny used to conclude each year’s American History Week, in every senior class, with a discourse. It ranged in subject from the treachery of Roosevelt in getting us into that war to save his Russian friends to the sinister effects those Russians, and their colleagues, and their co-religionists, must already have upon our thoughts. And so, class, was her yearly final sentence to us, Don’t say you have not been warned. We never said it. Nobody I ever met who grew up in the fifties, Lord knows, would have said it, could properly claim on any subject whatsoever not to have been warned.
The Europeans, having tried various spas in their lifetimes—Ischia for its mudbaths and nightlife, Baden-Baden for its hotel and waters—came to the clinic of Doctor Schmidt-Nessel out of a new conviction that the best evidence for the soundness of a cure must lie, after all, in the longevity of the man by whom it is run. Doctor Muehsam, who had died the previous summer, not of his extreme old age, but of a mysterious fall down six flights of stairs in his clinic (mysterious because, since the flights were separated by landings, Doctor Muehsam must have continued his fall around corners; also, because he had left the clinic, not to his wife, who had helped him to run it, but to his directress of gymnastics, a nurse), had disappointed them, by dying. However, he had always looked a frail and burning man. Doctor Schmidt-Nessel, who was bearded, vigorous, and by his own account well over ninety, gave no sign of ever passing on.
Schmidt-Nessel, whose waiting list was long, believed most strongly in the therapeutic, life-sustaining properties of dew—to be, in serious cases, drunk at breakfast, and in all other cases, skipped around in, on the lawn. He believed also in the efficacy of chants. As a result, just before dawn each weekday morning, all patients of whatever age lined up, barefoot, in the Alpine grass, in a sort of conga-line formation, and skipped together, chanting Nu Na Neu Won (short for Nun Nahen Neue Wonnen, Now Near New Raptures), and Wir Stammen Von Dem Liebesquell (We Spring From the Love Source) to the morning sun. A young woman, whose husband had sent her to the clinic because of her asthma, began to laugh at the second chant, on her second morning. She was expelled. Laughter, however, was one of Schmidt-Nessel’s remedies; he required only that it be in prescribed and chanted form. A schoolteacher, who had come because of her nerves, arrived a few minutes late for the Laugh Chant on her first morning. Not having been apprised of there being such a thing as a Laugh Chant, and hearing a unison of derisive laughter when she came through the door
way, she took it that she was being laughed at, and went to pieces entirely.
Every Tuesday night, however, Schmidt-Nessel had a special cure for the Nervous Cases. One of his beliefs was that people in the modern world do not breathe properly; that one of the ways to get them to breathe properly is to make them gasp; and that one way to make them gasp is to hit them. On Tuesday nights, Schmidt-Nessel dealt with the Nervous Cases in the cellar, where he sprayed them, one by one, with a high-powered hose. The schoolteacher, who had not been told about this ritual, either, found herself, first, lined up naked in a concrete room full of naked strangers, then alone with the doctor in a small cubicle, where water slammed her against one wall and another until she began to cry hysterically. Two patients from Albuquerque, worried, sent someone downstairs to ask what the trouble was, and whether Schmidt-Nessel was quite certain that this treatment was right. Doctor Schmidt-Nessel, sitting, immense, in his black bikini, on a cinder block in the steam-filled cubicle, did not deign immediately to answer. Later, when he was dressed, he pointed out to the couple from Albuquerque that if he were a surgeon they would not presume to put to him questions of this sort. They thought it over, and set out for home the following evening. The schoolteacher pulled herself together, presumably breathed deeply, and left by the same train. In the end, in Albuquerque, the schoolteacher married Harry’s and May’s oldest son. That’s Aldo’s friend and partner back in Hartford. Often, when we are not on this island, they are here.
There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience. “I remember you. In first grade, you told Miss Hennebery that Dan Frayne, the class albino, and I had been whispering during Silent Meditation. The next winter, you showed me a wino exhibitionist in our local railroad station. You said he had VD, which was the day we won the war in Europe, and that my Uncle Jean, who had fought in France, would be just like him. I went away to school for some years. In 1954, you ran over my dog. We did not meet again until after college, when we were both in love for a time with the same man at the law office where I worked. Since then, you have told any number of false and vicious stories at my expense. Now we meet again,” is not to say, “Know each other? Gosh, we’ve been close for thirty years.”