Speedboat

by Renata Adler

  “She feels she doesn’t want to anchor the hat.”

  “I’m not talking about now. Now is different.”

  “Whatever it is they want from him is not what is there.”

  The freshmen, who had been at the top of their classes through high school, got C’s on their first college midterms, and felt the world tilt. Within months, they had caught on to serious study, had learned to set forth information, with that last, original fillip of the expert mind. In default of the fillip, when invention failed them, they used the fail-safe method for undergraduate work at any solid institution: take two utterly unrelated things or matters and show that they are, if not in fact identical, actually related in the most profound and subtle sense. A paper of this sort would demonstrate, not only the highest tradition of the scholar, but also the signature of the alert undergraduate, her mark. For lectures, the intense, off-the-beat academic flirtation: the animated face, the gaze at the instructor, the lowered eyes when that look was returned; the secret smile at anything that could remotely be construed as felicitous or comic; the hastily scribbled work in notebooks, not when points were being made in order or by number, but at some demonstrably arbitrary moment, when the instructor had not realized that his lecture had reached such a highly interesting point. The crude strategies of the years preceding college, the raised hand, the eager question, were despised, and rightly. “Tell Thorne to shut up,” on a scrap with a fragment of a doodle, was passed, in complete consensus, all the way across the room to Bronx Science graduate Thorne. Having refined her display of rapt attention to changes rung on silence, Thorne went on to marry a tycoon and run a clinic for unmanageably disturbed children. The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.

  “So for these purposes, digitalis, adamantine, apple orchard, gonorrhea, labyrinthine, motherfucker, flights of fancy, Duffy’s Tavern, Halley’s Comet, birthday present, xenophobic are all synonyms,” the great professor said. “Synonyms, in terms of meter, that is.”

  “I see.”

  “And words that rhyme,” he said, “are synonyms, in terms of rhyme, with all the words they rhyme with. Cat, gnat, flat. Fang, sang, sprang, you see.”

  “Yes.”

  “So that in the study of poetics, we have. Rhyme synonyms. And meter synonyms. I leave aside pure synonyms of meaning. There are not really very many. And there are other factors, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “In tests of free word association, we find that some people respond in ways that reflect what we might call the cast of mind of synonyms. You might say trap. They say snare. You say dog. They say cat. More or less equivalences, don’t you see.

  “Other people have what we call the turn of mind of context. You say trap. They say door. You say cat. They say hairs. Contextual associations. Can you give me another rhyme synonym for flat, Miss Miller?”

  “Sprat.”

  “Yes. And another meter synonym for apple orchard, Mr. Elkin?”

  “Vigilante.”

  “And a free word association, in the line of synonyms, to church, Miss Wheelock?”

  “Temple.”

  “And a context response to church, Mr. Cook?”

  “Apse.”

  “Exactly. Fine. You will see at once that every choice in language is determined, on every plane, rhyme, meter, meaning, other planes, by a factor of synonymy. And one of contexture. If you do not see it, I refer you to your Jakobson and Halle.

  “At first, we thought the distinction of no practical importance. Then, we found that, in cases of severe speech disorder, the absolute extremes turn out, in fact, to be, at one end, cases of pure synonymy, and at the other, pure cases of context. In disorders of synonymy, the same word is repeated, endlessly. Repetition. At the extreme of context, we have words rambling, with no apparent coherence. What we have come to call a word heap.”

  “A word heap.”

  “Yes.

  “Now, if we turn from poetics to other fields—anthropology for instance—we find surprising applications. I draw your attention to the Haida, a tribe of Indians in the Northwest. The normal process of elimination seemed to them a sad thing; when they encountered droppings or dung in the fields or forests, they said a little prayer of condolence to the animal they thought it lost to. The first brave of the tribe, in the first times, was courting one of two sisters. The other sister was jealous and forlorn. On the path to the sisters’ home, this brave one day noticed a pile of excrement which, in the course of his many journeys, had grown nearly to his own size. He asked it, as it were, to pull itself together and marry the other sister. It did so. From the marriages of the two sisters, the tribe descends.”

  “Really.”

  “Now, what we have here might be considered a disorder of synonym in the name of context. Marriage, usually, is a matter of synonymy, equation. Husband, wife. Boy, girl. In some cases, brother, sister. But here we have a marriage of a person with an object with which that person is, as it were, only contextually associated. There are other considerations, of course. But wherever we look—poetics, psychology, anthropology, linguistics—the two ideas, synonymy and contexture, are among the key structures and processes of the mind.”

  On the other hand, our local controversy is whether we ought to require the ability to read at an eighth-grade level before we let any university student in. I can’t understand how that is the question. Surely we are obligated to give them, at least, an eighth-grade education while they’re here and before we send them out. “I found the whole work disappointing,” Nina Valindez, a student in one of my own courses, here in the city, wrote, in her paper last term. “It was more theatrical than filmic. It did, however, remind me of many nineteenth-century novels such as Vanity Fair by Thakkry. And many of the better novels of Jane Austen.” Pat Gertz, one of my best students, wrote a paper on “The Sorted Love Affair in Fiction of the Forties.” The paper expressed all the views that a student of my generation might have held, of which affairs were and which were not to be considered “sorted.” And yet. And Shelley Muess. Ms. Muess, who had received a passing grade, left many agitated messages last term, after midnight, on my answering service. She warned that she would have to take our case to the Student Faculty Grievance Committee and enter a Denunciation/Demerit against my record with the Faculty Appraisal Board. I called her back. I asked what the trouble was. She said she had never received less than honors grades before. Since it had been a matter of some importance to me that I not actually flunk anybody in this intellectual swamp and rip-off I mentioned that the exam had only required each student to list the films shown in the course. Students were allowed to help one another with it, to take it home and turn it in the following week. Since Shelley Muess had missed most of the films, and misspelled the ones she got, a passing grade seemed to me not ungenerous. “Well,” Shelley said, hardly able to breathe with indignation, “I’m not an English major.” The chancellor of our branch of the university once asked me what I thought of the head of our division now. I said I thought he was a thug. “Ah,” she said, with a chiming laugh and a lilt, clapping her hands just once. “You writers! What a way you have with words.” For the most part, the students treat me with grave, gentle concern, as though I were something strange—a giraffe, say—among them, or an apprentice on a tightrope, or one of their own on a bad trip.

  They were saying “Make peace, not war,” and so, the Commander of the Ohio State National Guard testified in the course of the Kent State trials, he threw a rock at them.

  Dinner was over. Almost everybody had gone home. Jim and I were clearing the table. Benjamin, a tousled young journalist who was covering the negotiations at City Hall, was happily drinking up what remained in everybody’s butter dish. He did this without comment, as though it were the ordinary thing to do after a dinner that included melted butter. When he had finished, he drank what remained in three cups of coffee, and sat down on the sofa, with a perfect grin.

&nbs
p; The girls were always running out of money, out of cash, precisely, to pay taxi drivers, train conductors, men who delivered pizzas after dark. They borrowed cash, normally, upon arrival. They borrowed passions—Wallace Stevens, Joseph Conrad, Mozart, hiking, the Bible—from each other, as girls of another generation borrowed clothes. At the great universities in those years, everyone who was not doing philosophy, in the mode that liked to think of itself as Ordinary Language, was in one of the other jargons, usually the social sciences. The philosophers at the great universities were, without exception, failed mathematicians. When they were not examining much of the vocabulary of civilized discourse to conclude that it, after all, lacked meaning, they muttered Gödel, Russell, Hilbert, liking to imply that they themselves had chosen philosophy over mathematics to give themselves a wider, though related intellectual field. With an intoxication they derived otherwise only from drinking a little sherry or from being in the presence of somebody English, they required and flunked their undergraduates, year after year, in a course called Symbolic Logic, much as the social scientists, who didn’t understand mathematics either, liked to flunk their students in a course called Statistics 101. Many students had been frightened by even the mention of algebra or numbers, ever since their first struggles with long division, and ever since someone first told them, most often wrongly as it turned out, that their skills were verbal skills. The predicament of these students enabled professors in all the departments that were a disgrace to the humanities in those years to claim for their work a strong mathematical base. The serious colleges for women were, by contrast, solid. They taught the same courses, without fuss and with a small sigh; they taught other foolish courses, notably in education, that way too. They reserved their serious efforts for the medievalists, the true scientists, linguists, other scholars, even the pre-law and pre-medical students, all of whom went out, degree in hand, into the world, and were asked, like their predecessors, whether they could type.

  “Can you have dinner Thursday night?” Simon asked. Jim was in Atlanta. “It will be very late. Have a sandwich or something before. I’ll pick you up at seven. Don’t ask where we’re going. It will be a surprise.” The surprise was a five-hour performance of Parsifal. This implied a misunderstanding so profound that I kept looking at Simon from time to time to see whether he meant it as a shaggy-dog sort of joke. Mostly, he was asleep. Whenever he woke up, he was so evidently happy to be there, at that interminable spectacle in that vast auditorium with too few aisles. He would grin. I would grin. He would go back to sleep. The worst part, I think, comes near the end, when the hermit sings to Parsifal about how wonderful it is that Parsifal has brought the Spear, which will, after so many years, relieve the suffering of Amfortas, the Fisher King. The aria itself lasts many years. One is aware of Amfortas, waiting in pain, while this long-winded hermit and Parsifal exchange congratulations and amenities. Narrative conventions do make it quite impossible for them to bring the king the Spear, and then, when he is no longer in pain, sing on about their sympathy for him, in all those years, and their great gladness that a remedy is at hand. The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with. Yet there one is, with an emotional body English almost, wishing that pole-vaulter over his bar, wanting something to happen or not to happen, wishing somebody well. Amfortas was not even on stage. In fact, there was no Amfortas. Yet, more than I wished that I were elsewhere, more than I wished that the opera were over, I did wish that they would bring that king his Spear. When it was over, Simon, who is really a musician, woke up, cheered, applauded. He is also chief resident in surgery at a city hospital. When he isn’t on call, he studies voice. “Wasn’t it wonderful,” he said.

  The athletes among us were extremely delicate, subject to injuries and colds. Avalanches fell on them. Their stomachs were easily upset. When Ralph’s girl left him for a year in Paris, he, after two beers, leaped over a cliff and missed whatever he muzzily thought of as his destination, and hit a tree, and broke his jaw in sixteen places. His girl returned to him. His jaw was wired. He got the flu. When we were younger, we all thought we liked to swim. Tired, shivering, we pleaded to stay in. Now, at the fifth stroke of what begins as a brazen crawl, my feet sink. I have to swim some other stroke. Once, Alice, a true and natural athlete, jumped into the pool of a hotel outside Palermo and swam her crawl. She had already played an hour of tennis, and ridden one of the furry island horses. She felt that her exercise for the day was not complete. So she swam. At her third lap of the long pool, an Italian, who had been lying in the sun, simply could no longer stand it. He dived in, began the crawl. They did two laps, Alice in the lead. At her fifth lap, he was already half a pool behind her. He speeded up. His feet were lagging. At her nineteenth lap, he gave it up. He was enraged. In her energy, her good nature, her athleticism, Alice sometimes forgets that we are not all alike. Just recently, she took Idris to the kitchen to show him what she called a beautiful surprise. Idris is the most cultivated, gentle, pacific man we know; he also is a vegetarian. Alice opened the refrigerator door and there, looking alert and almost confiding, was, from her last hunt, the head of a decapitated fox.

  The child of nature, with a sunburned stomach and dirt on its wrists, had followed the wrong fur sleeve at the supermarket. He was now quite lost. He began to sob, wetly, hysterically—not like a scared, lost child but in the manner of a tyrannical, mean, accusatory brat. “You’re not my mother,” he began to shout, a natural informer, at the pale, wrong lady in the near fur coat, and then, “She’s not my mother,” when he had gathered a sympathetic little crowd. “Lady, are you this kid’s mother?” the supermarket manager asked the lady. She said she wasn’t. He said, “Well, then why don’t you leave him alone?” When Sally, one of our legal reporters, went to the hospital for a hysterectomy, we visited her by turns. Carl was there on the second afternoon. When the nurse asked him to leave the room for a moment, he naturally left. “Now, Mother, here we are,” the nurse said. She brought somebody’s baby in. Sally, who does have two children, was confused. She said, “Wait, just a minute.” The nurse cooed. Sally pointed out that the baby wasn’t hers. “Now, Mother,” the nurse said, “in large hospitals we often think that. But baby knows. Baby has a wristlet.” Then she looked at the wristlet, said “Oh, now,” one last time, and, holding the baby, walked out.

  “Harry,” the blonde said, waving her drink and putting out her cigarette, “do you realize you have made yourself into a person that one has to lie to?”

  “Janine,” he said, “you know I’m very tired of your aperçus?”

  What was mortifying was the limbo dancing. What was mortifying was the fat, hot, drunk, sunburned and flattered man at whom the calypso lyrics were directed. What was mortifying was the way his wife danced with the famous, tense, witless insult comedian. What was mortifying was the insinuating child who recited “Horatio at the Bridge” in its entirety. “Sweetie,” the blonde screamed from the dance floor to her adolescent grandson, “isn’t this fun?”

  I never liked him, and now he is dead. Perhaps I should wish that I had liked him better. But I do not wish it. And I did not like him. I was not asked, which is just as well. What he was, was asleep. So they should not have buried him. Hindsight is easy. Mistakes will happen. It was one of a series of errors that marked his whole life. Not the last error, it now seems. His will is under litigation. The penultimate error, perhaps.

  It was his misfortune to die during the strike of the Cemetery Workers and Greens Attendants Union—oddly enough, in this city, Local 365. I covered the meeting at which the strike ended. The men had not tended a grave or buried a body in months. The head of the local, in describing his problems, with the diocese, the bereaved, the bureaus of public health and sanitation, spoke eloquently of “this tragic backlog” and “this extra grief.” At Mount Carmel, Calvary, Cyprus Hills, there had been vandalism. The unburied coolly bided their time. The trouble is he was our candidate, Jim’s candidate really. It can’t
be helped. That is all.

  Our anachronism. The young uptown doctor found his standard of living drastically threatened by the change in the law. He had worked hard through his schooling, internship, and residency. He had married a girl he had met at a mixer, at Goucher. They had settled in Rye. Every Thursday night, beginning at midnight and ending at eight in the morning, he had been performing abortions, for years. The rates he had charged had not been steep, when compared with the cost of a trip to some other country. Occasionally, for a young actress out of work or some other demonstrably poor patient, he had done the operation for free. On some Thursday nights, there were only two patients. Sometimes, in the fall, there were seven. His preferred number for any Thursday night was four. He called all his patients—the Thursday night ones and those in his regular practice—by their first names. He insisted that they call him Ned. When abortion in New York became legal, Ned, never having thought of the problem in these terms, faced the prospect of having his income reduced by two thousand dollars a week, cash.

  He had never been a man without scruples. The legal risk he had taken, through the years, for his patients, a sense that sane, prosperous men did not pay taxes on cash income, and a vague liberal perception that it was not altogether right to support an already too powerful government—these had combined in Ned’s thoughts into a moral certainty that his Thursday-night income was not subject to the income tax. He had, anyway, of late been taking losses in the market. Sheila, his wife, was in analysis. His two daughters were in therapy. His son—he did not know what to think about his son. At five, the boy already lacked stamina, lacked ambition. He seemed a happy little boy, but there was no question that he was far behind Doug and Netta Forster’s five-year-old in intellectual development and motor control. He was also far less tall. Doug was Ned’s best friend, and Ned had hated him since their earliest childhood. Doug had been something of an athlete. Doug had won full scholarships for college and medical school. It was true that Ned had not required scholarships, but the fact was that he had not had them. In the Army, Doug had met somebody with whom he had invested in real estate in Arizona. Ever since, it seemed clear that he was marginally richer than Ned had ever been. To conceal this fact, this disparity, had so far been the most expensive proposition of Ned and Sheila’s lives.