Speedboat

by Renata Adler

  A problem with the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted List, however, is that, like the Bureau itself, it is designed to trace criminals who look a certain way. A glower, a scar, a tattoo, a maniacal stare, but a plain white male criminal way. When it comes to blacks, or to white students gone underground from campuses, the Bureau just can’t find them, or, more specifically, can’t tell them apart. Can’t tell the blacks apart. Can’t tell the loose, straight-haired college girls apart. It is a source of great embarrassment. Finding Dohrn, Alpert, Boudin, or even Hearst, when other people are constantly seeing them, is just not what these men are good at. Only last week, the Bureau announced that one of those fugitive girls might be “feigning pregnancy.” It struck me as a strange idea of what constitutes disguise. Whiskers, I would have thought, yes. Sunglasses even, a wig; but pregnancy, no. Jim says I misunderstood what the Bureau meant. The “feigned pregnancy” was considered, not as a disguise, but as a means of getting people not to shoot. I don’t know. Anyway, though they did find those California fugitives, in their purple jogging shorts, Mattie’s brother-in-law, so far as is known, has not even been seen.

  Seven years ago, I bought a rifle. When I took it home from the sporting-goods store, I found in the box, not the fully assembled thing, which I had weighed, and tested, and shot, but two pieces—one, almost the whole rifle; the other, a little firing mechanism that had to be attached to it. There was also a little pamphlet, with a half page of instructions for putting the rifle together, six pages of instructions for joining the National Rifle Association. I could have figured out how to join the N.R.A. without those instructions, particularly since the pamphlet included an application for membership. But I could not, no matter how slowly or how often I read that first half page, or at what hour of the day, understand how to attach the firing mechanism to the other part. Anyone can do it. Any child who hunts squirrel, any hunter who cannot read without running his finger along under the words, any psychotic halfwit who wants to shoot some stranger through the head. I could not fathom the problem in any way.

  I finally put the rifle, both parts, under a couch, where they gathered dust for years. One winter night, when the gas and electricity had been blown out of service by the wind, a man from the power company came by to restore light and heat. I waited, in the dark, while he did his job. When the lights were on, I mentioned the rifle. I said I’d forgotten how to assemble it. He asked to see it. I brought it out. He squinted down the barrel and, with a single motion, clicked the second part in place. I use that rifle often now. I have always liked to shoot—not living things, but targets, and matchboxes and cans. But putting the damn thing together was and, I guess, always will be one of those simple operations of life that seem to complicate themselves altogether out of my range.

  Three of us used to take tennis lessons at the armory at eight-thirty every weekday morning. The light from the dusty bulbs was yellow and bad. The courts consisted of creaky floorboards overlaid with a thin sheet of rubber, which was cracked and patched with tape. We three first met, through our lessons, in September. We all played each day, with a crash-program fanaticism. For months, the instructors had pointed out that we would all save money if we gave up our separate lessons. We all refused. Jane even played on weekends at the armory. Fran stayed home with her kids. On weekends, I simply moved my eight-thirty lessons out to the country. I played with Stewart, who is the coach out there. He started to take me to see professional tennis matches, sometimes to a movie, once to a concert by the local piano teacher, who would have had a grand career but for his nerves. By summer, there were four mornings of tennis lessons with Stewart, four evenings for going to see movies or just driving around. He had a mustache and a beard, and gruff good manners. He was thirty-two. He wanted to work for mankind. He wanted to teach children. He felt bohemian stirrings. Altogether a good, confused man. On the courts, he never shouted, almost never spoke. None of the “Racket back,” “Watch the ball,” “Run, run, run” that drives one to distraction, although some people do not seem to mind. Once, at the armory, I heard the coach shout incessantly, for a solid hour, at the mayor. The most Stewart would say on the court was, every third lesson or so, an almost inaudible “Backhand.” He would slam the ball to the forehand side. That was his little joke. Once in a while, he said “Nice shot.” I used to say thanks, or mutter. Then, Stewart said the proper thing to say was nothing, or at most, un huh. So I said un huh. For the rest, he just kept hitting the ball to the outer limit of his students’ ability to return it. They were run ragged. Their tennis improved. I have been wrong about a lot of things. I still have his tie.

  In the bar of his father’s hotel, with the leather chairs that give one the feeling of sitting in a wallet, Dommy has introduced a new drink, Last Mango in Paris. A steep decline.

  Of the four baby birds in the barn, three had learned to fly and one stood on the floor, looking stupid and making flapping motions. Now and then, it would walk out in the driveway, where it was dive-bombed by its siblings and snapped at by its parents. Then it would walk back into the barn again. The people in the house checked under the wheels of their cars to avoid running over this bird, and otherwise wished it well. On the third day, the children minced a worm and tried to feed the bird themselves. By the fourth day, one adult or another, thinking himself unwatched, would lean over the bird and mutter, and flap his arms in what he hoped was an exemplary way. On the fifth day, the bird was sitting on a high rafter of the barn with the rest of its family. It has not yet been seen to fly. Perhaps it walked up there.

  Like most lonely women, like most women of all kinds, Margaret Dageman had an imaginary lover, with whom she entered the conversation and even the gossip of her friends. I used to think this sort of lover was specific to girls or women who were left out. An imaginary lover explained it. He was married. He was in Korea. He was married and in Korea. He was not married or in Korea, he was nearby, but he worked odd hours. He was not nearby, he was at the end of some line where a train must be taken. Wherever he was, he was not placed to appear or to walk them to the door. I used to think it was only lonely women who, according to temperament, flatly said, or shyly intimated, or just insisted that they had, in fact, this lover, this escort, this beau, this young man, this fiancé, whatever they called him, whom social necessity had obliged them to invent. But it is not so. It is not so. Most women have had them, at some time in their lives, or all their lives. And I do not mean the private man of daydreams or psychoanalytic literature. It is of the nature of this invented lover that his existence be a matter of public knowledge and, with luck, belief. If a woman were able to manage her own news to perfection, he would be thought to be her profoundest secret, the steady center of her emotional life.

  I have known a woman’s own husband to be the central character in such a fantasy; quite often, in the lives of intelligent or worldly women, the man himself is real. Quite often too, like most thoughts and suspicions, the fantasy has truth in it; the invention may be reciprocal, or shared. In fact, the only thing this secret lover has in common with any classic rape fantasy is this: that it is important that this story seem to come out in spite of a woman’s reticence and discretion, against her will. This leads to any number of false confidences, any number of lies told in the false confessional mode. It is a way for a romantic temperament to generate its story line, its lifelong plot. He may be elusive. He may be importunate. He may be neither, or both. He can be anything. The major difference between Margaret Dageman’s imaginary lover and anybody else’s was only that she engaged in a bitter, an epic quarrel with him.

  The mangy dog in the hallway had a grieving look and a furrowed brow. He had been picked up in the street by a lady who attracts animals. Once, a large, rare bird had flown directly from the zoo, on the board of which the lady was, and perched on the lady’s window sill. She called the zoo. The keepers had just noticed at that moment that the bird was gone. They came with a large and elaborate net to pick up the bird. The whole incident came to b
e regarded as an uncanny moment in the zoo’s and the lady’s history. Anyway, she had now attracted this mangy dog. He was not full-grown. The lady’s own dog, shiny, adult, well-fed, had an affronted look. I offered to take the stray. I regretted the offer the next morning. If people were always to cancel on the basis of the next day’s regrets, no contracts would go through. Three days later, the lady and both dogs arrived at our brownstone. When they got to the living room, they all sat down. “Now, think pleasant thoughts, Luke,” she said to the grieving dog. “We named him Luke,” she said to me. “Don’t you think he looks like a Luke? We have tried to get him to think pleasant thoughts. You must remember to medicate his ears.” Luke moved in. Ben, our photo editor from Georgia, said Luke looked like what is called a coon hound in the South. The great lady philosopher said, “Now, never mind. That’s an authentic dog.” Within a month of Luke’s arrival, and during the convalescence of his ears, he moved next door. I don’t know how he managed it. The designer who owns that house already had two Afghan hounds. He’s happy there. “Beards within beards,” the designer sometimes says of city life. “Well, never mind.”

  Joel Seidington thought when he knew what a thing was called, he had it nailed. Or rather, a thing burned more brightly for a second when he held its name to it; then it was ash. Joel thought, in particular, that he understood other people’s pleasures when he had found the word for them. That’s a tango, he would say, with considerable satisfaction, to the girl he had brought to sit beside him at a prom or, years later, in a night club. That’s a lindy, now, and there’s a waltz. They would sit. He would smile. They would watch. He would name what went by. It was the same in Joel’s work, and in everything else with which he had to do. An elegant exposition, Joel would say, when one of his colleagues in the chemistry department had just set forth a breakthrough in a lifetime’s experiment. Or, Al has just birdied the sixth, that’s an inside straight Tim is holding, Martin’s daughter has taken up dressage. That’s the B-minor Mass, that’s a fado, they’ve been raising black angus, they’re called collard greens, actually, Kate and Martin still seem enamored of each other, don’t you think. This insistence on calling things something had little to do with true pedantry, an obsession for getting things right. Almost any formulation would suit him. It was a more primitive instinct, in some ways—as though to name a thing were to cut its nails and hair, and pocket them, and put the adversary in his power. In another way, the instinct was entirely modern: to impress on everything that passed his way Joel’s word for it, his personal bureaucratic rubber stamp.

  Edith Piaf was in one of her many, absolutely last concerts at the Paris Olympia. She was singing “Je ne suis pas folle.” She ended the song, as always, with maniac laughter. On this particular evening, someone way back in the theater echoed that laughter. At first, it was thought to be a prankster, or at least a heckler. Then it was thought to be part of the performance. But when that insane laugh continued, bitter, chilling, on Edith Piaf’s precise note, like one tuning fork of madness responding to another, three ushers and six members of the audience escorted the laughing lady, with infinite courtesy, to the street.

  Joel was the only man I ever knew whose car had a seat belt on only one side, his. There was something about him that made it unthinkable to laugh, or even to dislike him after all. In my first year of graduate school, I found myself, for instance, in Joel’s car, for what he called a rallye at his motor club. Whatever I thought he meant, it never occurred to me that Joel was going to drive in it. The race turned out to be as much for mileage as for speed. Fifteen points on the map were to be driven to in any order. The car that reached all fifteen points the fastest was to be one sort of winner. The other winner would be the car that reached them all by travelling the fewest miles. At the end, the judges would decide between these winners for the trophy. I did not understand what other standards would apply. Also, I cannot read maps; my sense of direction is so poor and unstable that maps somehow make it worse. They bring on confusions not only of east-west, north-south, but also of left and right. Joel, who had no way of knowing that, explained the race to me, told me to navigate, handed me the map, fastened his seat belt, and drove. We never saw any of the other cars again. We reached the first point in three hours, the second never. All through the afternoon and into the evening, Joel, pale, would say to me, from time to time, in a flat, strained voice, which had its gallantry, “It’s all right. I’m not competitive.”

  We went skiing. We had not gone in years. We drove for hours through a blizzard, in the car of the natural athletes—jumpers on trampolines on Mondays, squash players and ice skaters on other week nights, and just to top the note of general health, players of string quartets on Thursday afternoons. The athletes were impatient with the snow that slowed the driving. They approached a cliff en route and climbed it, in an interim show of fitness. We barely followed. It was ice. Then the athletes whooped, dived and slid headfirst down the cliff. It was steep. The athletes seemed invigorated. They drove on. When they reached the ski hut, everybody put on snowshoes. After ten steps, I thought I might not make it. Skiing was worse. With great effort, I maintained a slow and trembling snowplow recalled from childhood, side to side, graceless, across the mountain, worried by passing schussers, cold. “It won’t hurt you, you know,” one of the athletes said, as though he were imparting useful information, “to point your skis downhill.”

  Downhill. One of the President’s closest friends was interviewed, at length, on television. He repeatedly spoke of the President as a witty man. He stressed the wonderful sense of humor of this President. The interviewer asked him for an example. The President’s friend demurred. The interviewer suggested that the friend could surely think of one instance of it. The friend, beginning to smile, declined. The interviewer pressed for just a single example, just one remembered time. The President’s friend was beginning to suppress what was obviously great mirth, as he started on this anecdote:

  The President, and this friend, and another friend were on an island. “And we had,” the friend said, “this pair of rubber legs, you know?” He said this as though everyone had a pair of rubber legs. “This pair of woman’s rubber legs. And a wig, you know.” His amusement and anticipation were such by now that he could hardly hold his laughter back. “And the President, the President suggested that we put them”—here a laugh—“in the bed. So we put the wig on the pillow, and a blanket, you know, with just the rubber legs sticking out”—from here on, the laughter began to escape control—“and he told me to hide behind the curtain, so when Bob came in”—by now, he was laughing so hard he had to pause—“I was hiding behind the curtain. And he showed Bob the bedroom, and the bed had the wig and those rubber legs, you know. The President didn’t say anything about it. And Bob, well, I thought Bob was going to…” That was it. It was not just his laughter that indicated the anecdote was over. It was clear that, whatever he had thought Bob was going to, the President’s friend’s account of the President’s sense of humor seemed to him complete. Well, I voted for him. Not twice, but once. I did vote for him. I don’t see any reason why a President should be a witty man, or a man responsible for the assumptions of his closest friends about his wit. He’s out, as Manuel said, “Mr. Nixon has go out.” He’s not at his desk. He’s in a meeting. We worked for that, too. And that sort of anecdote doesn’t come into it at all. It was just the exoticism I was not prepared for. The most natural thing in the world, a pair of rubber legs.

  A tall man was beginning a Tiny Tim sort of grateful frenzy—covering his ears, and shaking his head and saying, shrilly, often, how wonderful to him everybody was, how wonderful. Once, at a Christmas party on Park Avenue, when somebody was reading, beautifully, aloud from Dickens, I began to giggle, uncontrollably. It was that classic Tiny Tim and his damn crutch. I have always thought of the other, singing Tiny Tim as serious. Elva Miller, Frances Foster Jenkins, but Tiny Tim especially—being somehow bent to play out the American freak triumphant, to sing in f
alsetto about tulips, when what he longs to do, knows how to do, does seriously, is sing in exact imitation of 78 r.p.m. records, complete with scratches, old forgotten songs, in exact imitation of the voices of the dead. There he was, then, Tiny Tim, on the talk shows, in no sense a comedian but a loser meant to win it for the losers. The underside, a fifties person. Or rather, contra-fifties, in his peculiar way. For years now, there have been other, sounder contra-fifties people. Against all that modesty, domestication, niceness—Joe Namath, Bobby Fischer, Mark Spitz, Jimmy Connors, Bobby Riggs, Muhammad Ali. For the ladies, well, for the ladies, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Diane Arbus, Janis Joplin, Anne Sexton, and, after all on another racetrack, Ruffian.

  All those unendearing braggarts and, on the distaff side, the suicides. Books about Ali. Ten years earlier, the preoccupation with Monroe. But there was a day, or there came, as Sam Dash would say, a time, when an actual Evel Knievel metaphor appeared—in an event that was inconsequential, small. The proposition was deep. It virtually spun. People were invited to see somebody ride his motorcycle over a canyon gap. That was what it was said they had been invited to pay to see. An early truth of the matter was this: it could not be done. The performer and his sponsors knew what he was going to do. The people who paid their admission knew what they were coming to see. By the end, the morally spinning proposition was this: when, by some miscalculation, the motorcyclist was actually exposed to a danger which he had not foreseen, when his parachutes almost failed so that he nearly did get killed (not, it is true, in a manner that had anything to do with the alleged hazards of his ride, but rather by being slammed by his parachutes into the sides of cliffs), when, in short, the escape procedure became the menace, were the members of the audience entitled to feel cheated in any way. They had paid to see him die. He had arranged to escape unharmed. There was nothing of the old-style prestidigitator-understanding in this thing. In their separate ways, neither party ever seriously entertained any notion that the motorcycle could rocket successfully over that canyon gap. What did, then, occur; what was the event? A performer and an audience conspired that someone should be misled. The performer intended a motorized parachute jump. The audience paid to see a suicide. No fifties teamwork or nice-guy qualities in it anywhere. Nothing went according to plan. The question was who was misled, whom were they conspiring to mislead? Why, history. For a perfect moment it was like almost every other event in public life.