Speedboat

by Renata Adler

  “Now, class. Now, seniors,” the high school principal said, interrupting the Pledge. “It’s one nation. Under Gawd. Indivisible. Some of you are saying under Gahd. In fact, most of you. What are the parents going to think? What are your teachers going to think? What are the visitors from Hartford going to think? This is very important. Many of you are college bound. Now say with me, please. Gawd. Again. Gawd. Under Gawd. Indivisible. Good. Now let’s resume. Give it the feeling you’re going to give it on graduation day.” Her name was Miss Crosby. Crawsby, not Crahsby. We let it pass.

  From her earliest childhood, Jametta Anna Scozzafava had mysterious sources of information about what holiday it was. No school tomorrow, she would say—often quite late for a small child to be up on a cold evening: Scragg Day, or Teachers’ Records Day, Moss Day, State Commemoration Day, or High School Bus Repairs. Mysteriously, these holidays did exist, although few of them recurred from year to year. Jametta also knew holiday nights: Chalk Night, Garbage Night, Crab Night—and, I think, Teachers’ Records Night, although I am not sure. Chalk Night and Garbage Night were clear enough. I never knew what were the right observances for Crab Night and, one year, for Seven Moon. From third grade on, Jametta spent most of her classroom hours either whispering with Moose Natale, or absent altogether with the Passcard. In her senior year, however, Jametta sat in front of one Alvin Benso, in the first row of Miss Keane’s English class. We were doing our required Shakespeare play. The state seemed to require of its students one half year of world history, Mesopotamia to the present; one half year of American history, Jamestown to the present; one solid year of Biology, in which one earthworm and one frog must be dissected; and, somewhere in four years of English classes, a Shakespeare play. Miss Keane’s method of teaching Shakespeare was to assign parts for reading by row, characters in order of appearance: first seat, first row, first part, and so on along the rows. The class was doing The Merchant of Venice, Miss Keane’s favorite. Miss Keane had done her disquisition about Shylock—a villain she found comparable, and perhaps even related, to all the many traitors in our own time, our own country, brainwashing our boys abroad, flashing subliminal messages on television, stealthily approaching, if they did not already have, our minds. Miss Keane had subsided. The reading started. Jametta was Portia. It fell to Alvin to read Lorenzo. “Lorenzo Benso!” Jametta shouted. “Lorenzo Benso!” swept the classroom. It was our first political slogan, and the witticism of Jametta’s academic life.

  “Far from it,” the shuffling man is muttering to himself again. “Far from it.”

  The Albany legislator wept as he cast his vote. His brother-in-law was up for a judgeship. He had no choice. “I will hear no ill spoken of Rosa Addio,” the head of a local school board said. “She is a fine Christian woman.” The lobbyist for the teachers union blanched. “Now, on the Alabama resolution,” the convention speaker said to the delegates in caucus, “you can vote your conscience. Or with your union.” “Ah, jobs, jobs in the ghetto,” said the tenured pedant on the investigating committee that, yearly, covers up corruption in our branch of the city university. “Ghetto jobs is our bête noire. Excuse me.”

  The clerk of the morgue of this paper is an irascible man. Reporters are always taking his files away, forgetting to sign for them, keeping them, losing them, throwing them away. Over the years, it has made the clerk ill. I signed for a file, took the folder to my desk, and then took it home. Everybody does it. It is against the rules. After four days, I brought the folder back. The clerk of the morgue was incensed. What, he demanded to know, if the man whose file it was had died in those four days; what, in the absence of the file, would the obituary have been constructed from—had I considered that at all? Well, I said, since I had signed for the file, if the man whose file it was had died, somebody could have called me up. I would have brought the folder back. True, the clerk said, but there were questions of another sort. What if, in those four days, a new fact about the man had come to light, a fact that ought quite surely to be added to the file; what, in the absence of the file, was there to add the fact to, what rubric, category, or place was there to put the new fact in—had I considered that at all, had I given it one moment’s thought? I said I had not. The clerk, becoming pale with rage, said he might have to raise the matter with management. People seem to be unhappy in so many different ways. I’ve always liked the wrathful keepers of the files.

  “What you say is true,” the professor said, staring through his study window at the sky, “but not so very interesting.”

  He ran up the stairs and they were after him. He fumbled with his keys, opened the door, slammed it behind him and listened for their breathing and for their steps. He heard their steps first, heavy feet on the carpeted stairs; then, he heard breathing. He looked through the peep-hole in his door and saw, as usual, nothing. He turned suddenly, caught his own reflection abruptly in the mirror, and nearly scared himself to death.

  “I have a collect call for anyone from…”

  “Yes, operator. That’s fine.”

  “Miss Fain in Wash…”

  “That’s fine, operator. I accept the…”

  “…ington, D.C. Will you accept the charges?”

  “Thank you. Yes.”

  Sometimes cooperation impedes the gist. Someone, many people probably, had urinated in the phone booth. That is common. Many things serve something other than their original, unarguable purpose. The left lane, for example, on the highway. Some people use it because they prefer it. Some people use it because it looks like any other. Some people use it for some other reason. But the thing is, you are supposed to be driving faster if you use that lane.

  “Hello, Jim?”

  “Hi.”

  “Just a moment, please. I have a collect call for anyone from…”

  “Yes, operator. That’s fine. I accept the charges.”

  “Hello, Jim. I’m…”

  “Go ahead, please. Your party is on the line.”

  The slowest-talking man I know tends to loom in elevator doors, in hallways, booths, and other narrow places. He coughs, nods to himself, begins a sentence, continues nodding to himself in all the pauses along what he has to say. Eating with him is a problem. He chews so thoroughly. He raises his fork, speaks, pauses in midsentence, nods, takes what is on his fork, meditates, chews. When he swallows, one thinks he is about to say his sentence to the end. But no, he loads his fork again, eats, nods in silence, has a little sip of coffee and another mouthful before going on. One tends to drink a lot on these occasions. Agreement stalls him. Sometimes, when it has been clear for several phrases just what Moe is going to say, when one has been standing, for example, in the rain beside a taxi one had hailed at the very instant Moe loomed, one tries to complete his sentence for him. It slows him down. He waves his hand irritably, as though warding off a swarm of gnats, before his face. He moves his head like a pitcher shaking off a signal that he does not like. Then he starts again, nodding, waving, pausing, finishing his sentence in his own good time.

  “Hello, Jim. I guess they’ve fired me.”

  “They have?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, it just isn’t our day, then. I’ve just been chased all the way up the stairs from the hallway, by what looked like two crazies.”

  “You ought to call the police.”

  “No. They’re gone. I heard the outside door shut.”

  “Well, then. How are you?”

  “O.K. And you?”

  “Fine, I guess. Unemployed.”

  “Oh, well. You can always…”

  “The number you have dialed is not in service at this time. Please place your call again or dial your…”

  “…teach or something.”

  “I guess so. This isn’t…”

  “…operator, and she will be able to help you.”

  “…much of a connection.”

  “No.”

  “The number you have dialed…”

  “Hello, hello. Ida. Will you d
rop it?”

  “And my client feels that unless there has been substantial compliance by…”

  “…Rotunda. Thank you, Ron. WCBS Newstime is four…”

  “…and Muriel. Overnight. Enough. Never, frankly, have I…”

  “Jim, I think we better…”

  “Is this Washington 225-8462?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Could I speak with Ramón.”

  “…but the highest respect for him close quote, paragraph.”

  “Iss no here.”

  “Would you read me that again, please? Beginning…”

  “Allo, allo. Ramón?”

  “Iss no here.”

  “Jim, I’ll try…”

  “…and costly litigation. Moreover, there is nothing…”

  “…on hold for twenty-two minutes. I don’t call that stepped out. I call that…”

  “…or anybody else. I won’t drop it. Let him drop it. If they…”

  “…freezes over close quote, paragraph. Do you get the…”

  “…such rudeness. Well, she hung up. But I made the…”

  “…in the second sentence?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Ramón? Ramón? Allo…”

  “Iss no here.”

  “…simple question. Is it dead, or isn’t it? I have been…”

  “Jim, this connection is really…”

  “Mark you, Mr. Ambogewe. We will not subscribe to any such…”

  “…awful.”

  “Yeah.”

  The restaurant on Jim’s corner has three pillars, one at the back, one near the entrance, one in the middle of the wall behind the bar. On the pillar nearest the entrance, there is a dart board. You have to pass behind that pillar to enter or to leave the restaurant, to use the phone, to hang and to pick up your coat. In front of the pillar, people throw their darts. The pillar, it is true, is broad. The dart board has now been on it for six months. Nobody seems to mind or mention it. I try not to look in that direction when we’re there. The owner of the restaurant, who used to be an editor on night rewrite, is an extremely literal-minded man. He would be reluctant, for example, to infer from rabbit tracks in a forest that, not just four rabbit’s feet, connected in a manner yet to be established, but, in all probability, an entire living rabbit has passed by. This made working with him, when he was still at the paper, a little slow. It also means that he will not move that dart board until he has hard evidence that is what he ought to do.

  “Don’t dwell on it,” the shuffling man is now saying to himself. “Don’t dwell on it.”

  Jim works for the candidate just about full time now. I’m surprised that I hate it, but I do. For a time, our people used to mill about, saying “The system works. The system works”—the way kids used to run off the field shouting “We won. We won. We won,” when the game had been called on account of rain, or darkness, or because somebody had decided to take his baseball home. I am sure it does work, or I hope it does, and I used to think it did; but I was glad when we could all stop saying that.

  I am the Paul Revere of the morning phone call. There are social ladies one may call at 8:45 a.m.; their lines are busy. Two minutes earlier, one wakes them up. Most people at the paper sleep till eleven or noon. Jim has breakfast at six. When I used to go to Washington, I took the first morning shuttle. In phone calls, I am somehow always, always on the early side.

  “My daughter, you see,” said the drunk man, who had not yet quite mastered the idiom, “is a Jesus creep.”

  “Freak,” said the girl on his right.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Jesus freak,” the girl said, politely.

  “Yes. That’s what they call it. So I said to my wife, Look here. Saint John was a Jesus creep. Saint Paul was a Jesus creep. Saint Francis was a Jesus creep.” (He sent these italics bravely leaning off into the wind.) “Why, everyone doing God’s work is a Jesus creep. It’s a new way of saying Christian, that’s what it is. Mother said, Be that as it may. I don’t care for it.”

  There is a flower shop in the arcade under the Pentagon. A whole floor of the Pentagon is filled with stores, clothing and camera shops, bookstores, boutiques. In the days when our staff resignations began, I sent Phil Eisen, our boss, and his girl African violets from that flower shop, after a dinner at their house. Since it would be awkward to call and ask, Did you or did you not receive those Pentagon African violets, I guess I’ll never know whether they received them or not. Then Phil resigned. I had a drink with him the night he left. When I first met him in Washington, Phil was the fattest man I’d ever seen. That night, he was extremely thin. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I said, “Phil, you’ve lost weight.” He said he had gained ninety pounds in fifty days, he had been so very angry in his work. Then, he had become angrier still, and lost a hundred thirty-two. The change had come when he began to write a book. Every piece of news, any turn of events at all, had this quality: it depressed him utterly. I asked whether his book was done. He said it was. I asked how long it was. “Eight hundred and ninety-seven pages,” he said. Then he added, earnestly, “You don’t suppose they’ll think I wrote it in a fit of pique.”

  “It’s not so bad,” the professor said. “It only isn’t wonderful. Nobody has an obligation to be wonderful.”

  My argument with the psychiatrist of Jim’s younger brother, Simon, was as follows: whether the natural gait of the horse is, in fact, the gallop or the trot. I said it was the trot. He said it was the gallop. Or the other way around. The point is that we insisted, all through dinner; we pursued it for a long, long time. It is not an argument that ramifies much. Within the first few seconds one has said about all there is to say. There are many such questions, which, once they are stated, are completed. Does Macy’s tell Gimbel’s, for example, does not ramify. You have got no further if you go on to Does Saks tell Bendel’s, does Bonwit’s tell Bergdorf’s, does Chanel tell Givenchy, does Woolworth tell Kresge’s, does Penn Station tell Grand Central, does Best’s tell Peck and Peck? You are no longer expounding a proposition. You are having a tantrum. Simon’s psychiatrist and I pursued our tantrum, in duet, all evening long. The horse might have two natural gaits, the Charleston and the entrechat, for all it mattered. I meant, I didn’t like the man and I thought that, within twenty years, his profession would have vanished, leaving no artifacts of any interest except a dazed memory of fifty years of ineffective and remunerative peculation in the work of a single artist, Freud. I also meant I didn’t like his flowered shirt. He meant, I think, he didn’t like me, either.

  “Sarah now is twenty-one, twenty-one, twenty-one,” we used to sing in the dining room. “Sarah now is twenty-one. And safe from King Farouk.” On days when it was nobody’s birthday, we sang something that went “My father killed a kangaroo. Gave me the gristly part to chew. Wasn’t that a terrible thing to do. He gave me to chew the gristly part of the kangaroo.” It was not clear why this particular lament should be sung so often in a distinguished academic institution. Perhaps it was for relief from the plainsong, the madrigals, the lovely, authentic, but somehow wildly misplaced old ballads we were always singing, in the cloisters, in the dining rooms, at the foot of the bell tower, wherever some tradition or other required that these songs be sung.

  “All acts are acts of aggression, we know that,” the professor said. “The point is to give them other properties.”

  The wallflower sat reading in the Paris restaurant. There used to be so many categories of wallflower: the anxious, smiling, tense ones who leaned forward, trying; the important, busy, apparently elsewhere preoccupied ones, who were nonetheless waiting, waiting in the carpeted offices of their inattention, to be found. There were wallflowers who clustered noisily together, and others who worked a territory, resolute and alone. And then, there were wallflowers who had recognized for years that the thing was hopeless, who had found in that information a kind of calm. They no longer tried, with a bright and desperate effort, to sustain a c
onversation with somebody’s brother, somebody’s usher, somebody’s roommate, somebody’s roommate’s usher’s brother, or, worst of all, with that male wallflower who ought—by God who ought—to be an ally, who could, in dignity and the common interest, join forces to make it through an evening, but who, after all, had higher aspirations, and neither the sense nor the courtesy to conceal it, who, in short, scorned the partner fate and the placement had dealt him, worst of all. The category of wallflower who had given up on all this was very quiet, not indifferent, only quiet. And she always brought a book.

  The wallflower, then, was reading in her neighborhood Paris restaurant. The regular customers sat at their accustomed tables. It was nine-thirty on a busy night. She had finished her meal and ordered coffee. The light in the restaurant was pleasant. She read on. A tall, blond, shaggy man had been coming to the restaurant almost every evening of the autumn. He always sat at a small table near hers and ordered a single cup of coffee. He sat, with that single cup of coffee, most nights from nine until the restaurant closed. He was there, as usual, this evening. Her coffee did not come. She read. Her awareness of the shaggy man was, as it was of the restaurant in general, peripheral. In addition to his coffee, he had ordered brandy. He seemed altogether somehow less poor. Suddenly, though quietly, he offered her a cigarette. She upset her wineglass. “Ça vous scandalise?” he said.