Speedboat

by Renata Adler

  When the law changed, Ned had to consider these and other enormous pressures. He decided to make no concession whatever to that change. He needed the money. He had ten years of Thursday-night patients as evidence that, when they needed him, he was a good and kindly man. Patients trusted him, just as they always had, just as they should have. When a girl or a woman now came to him, not wanting to be pregnant and believing that she was, he told her to come to his office Thursday night. In a very short time, he found himself instructing patients to do this, whether the tests showed they were actually pregnant or not. He justified this to himself in a number of ways. He was busy. They were anxious. For patients beyond their early twenties, the operation might be advisable anyway. Or he could use the occasion to install an intrauterine device.

  The result of this rationalization was that, on Thursday nights, Ned’s waiting room was a perfect anachronism. The women, girls usually, who arrived there were nervous, embarrassed. They did not want to be seen by the others. At the same time, each thought that the others looked legitimate. Perhaps they really were there for that intrauterine device. The receptionist had a bright and unwavering poster smile. She sat there, with country-and-western music blaring from her transistor, checking people in. By eleven-fifteen, when the last patient had usually come in, the receptionist left.

  On any given Thursday, there might be a fifteen-year-old, shy, not pretty, accompanied by an overbearing, overcheerful mother; another young woman, perhaps a grade-school teacher, evidently religious, miserable, praying, removing her rosary from a purse and then replacing it, uncertain whether she could use a rosary on such a day or not. One young, engaged couple. One apparently adulterous young wife, alone. But whereas what had brought people to Ned’s office before the law changed was usually something savvy, something knowledgeable in having gotten such an address at all, what the people in Ned’s office now had in common was ignorance, and perhaps shame. Just as he put each one of them to sleep, with his own special intravenous formula, he said, “Just you wait. You’ll find this a kind of high.” Then he worked on his patients, one by one, through the night. None of them had complications. None of them died. The jet, the Xerox, the abortion law, and of course, of course, the tape recorder—these advances in terms of the reversible and the irreversible are one line, one still fuzzy line, between our set and the last set and the next.

  There are only so many plots. There are insights, prose flights, rhythms, felicities. But only so many plots. At a slower pace, in a statelier world, the equations are statelier. The mayor has run off with the alderman’s wife, and it was to be expected if one looks back. The mayor and the alderman won’t confide in each other or be doubles partners any more. The other consequences, it will turn out, might have been foreseen. In three households and two generations, and the treehouse instantly, the track, to a degree, can still be kept. But here, the inevitable is being interrupted by strangers all the time. Seven people go off into the sunset, and the eighth is the custodian of the plot. There were so few variations. I had begun to believe that a story line was a conceit like any other. One has only to take to bed, though, with a Seconal and a thriller, racing toward their confrontation, for it to become clear that this is not quite the case. The plot of things converging, as in Appointment in Samarra, as in love stories, as in any story where a rendezvous must be kept. The plot of things separating, not so common, disintegration, breaking up. The plot of one thing following in the track of another, as in thrillers, chases. The plot of things parallel. Suspense, which has time as an obstacle to a resolution in the future. Nostalgia, which has time as an obstacle to a resolution in the past. Maybe there are stories, even, like solitaire or canasta; they are shuffled and dealt, then they do or they do not come out. Or the deck falls on the floor. Or a piece of country music, a quartet, a parade, the flag—all the things one ought by now to be too old for—touch, whatever it is.

  A few years ago, the wire services reported that, on account of a defective latch, the cargo door on a DC-10 opened, in flight. A coffin fell out. A lady at work in her flower garden saw what she took to be a coffin fall from the sky into a neighboring field. Having been recently widowed, the lady made the obvious inference. She put down her trowel, drove to the nearest state asylum, and committed herself. When reporters reached her, to tell her the thing had really happened, and to ask her reaction to it, the lady said she preferred to stay right where she was. There has been no further news of her, or of the lady in the supermarket. Twenty years later, however, the kid accuser in the supermarket may be gaining seniority as a congressman.

  The Begum played Scrabble. Morning, afternoon, and night, on the beach, aboard the boat, in the harbor night club, with ordinary sets, or Scrabble dice, or cleated letters for use on jolting surfaces, the Begum played. The Russians had smuggled in a cheese, of which they were proud. Nobody else cared much for it. Apparently, as in the matter of wines, there exists an international body of experts, which rates cheese. Last year, for the first time, the Soviet Union invited this committee to come and test its cheeses. The committee had pronounced itself unable to distinguish between any single Russian cheese and any other—except one, which, on the basis of its smell and general appearance, the committee members unanimously declined even to taste. The Russians on our island always passed around this cheese.

  We sat on the beach. The Queen was an inexhaustible swimmer. Somebody had to be with her at all times to see that she did not feel lonely or drown. She talked while she swam. Ralph, who could make conversation while swimming, was with her. He was subject to chills; when he came out of the water after one of these long swims, he would stammer with cold. His girl and her brother were sitting beside us. Being naturally fair, they were now very sunburned. They stayed wrapped in their towels, and did crosswords, or tuned in to their program of news from the mainland, or did whatever else seemed amiable, or kind, or polite.

  When Jim’s friends from the days when he was in the O.S.S. first settled there, they tried to raise cattle, for milk. There were already small herds of wild cattle, from past generations, at large in the hills. Within a few weeks, the wild cows, having entered the pastures by night, had lured the tame cattle into the hills with them. Now wild cows and tame cows, side by side, would come thundering through the palms of an evening, churning up the few flower beds and grazing on the few lawns there were. People began to surround their lawns with enormous rolls of barbed wire. Every carefully watered green thing was now fortified against the cows.

  At City Hall, as on the campus, negotiations are in progress. It is not at all clear to me what a negotiation is. Union and management, say, terrorist and foreign minister, buyer and seller, kidnapper and F.B.I. agent, husband and wife, at least two parties anyway, disagree. They exchange views. A strike, perhaps, a war, a bankruptcy, a murder, a divorce impends. One side begins, and claims it can accept no less. The other responds, saying it can afford no more. It is clear to both sides, from the start, that both positions are false.

  They proceed to bargain then, in what is called good faith. Bad faith exists when a side takes both positions to be absolutely true, then deals with something other than negotiation in its heart—stalling for time, for instance, so that friends can arrive and bomb the house. Good faith negotiation requires a liar’s margin of some sort. “I can’t stand it,” somebody says. “I can’t help it,” someone else replies. Justice is called upon, as well. At City Hall, when they negotiate, the parties get a little sleep on the floors of rooms across a hall. Night after night. In Teheran, in the oil negotiations of 1971, a representative of the companies absent-mindedly left a memo on the bargaining table during the lunch break of the first day. The memo outlined the companies’ fallback position on any compromise that they could consider tolerable. A reporter bought the memo from a janitor. It was published in the paper the next morning. The fallback position became the position at which the talks began; the remainder of the negotiation entailed the companies’ retreat from their or
iginal last stand. The absent-mindedness, almost everyone agreed, was real.

  In the matter of jobs, I think I know nine spies. Eight are American. One is foreign. One has dual citizenship. It is hard to know what they do, exactly, except that they are inexhaustibly gregarious. It is not thinkable that any of the nine could learn, or for that matter keep, a secret. I am certain that they do not hover over microfilms or denounce friends. Two date starlets. One lives from time to time with debutantes, now divorced, whom he has known since boarding school. I guess what these spies—if they are spies, and I’m sure they are—are paid to do is observe trends. Why any government should pay them to observe trends is not clear to me. It may be that there are times when any information about anything whatever seems to have a reassuring, valid quality. More likely, spying is one more featherbedding, overpaid bureaucracy. Certainly all nine are snobs, with manifold, even catholic, snobberies: class, money, power, fame, fad, culture, byline, notoriety. They are all best men at controversial second weddings; escorts of abandoned wives; godfathers of very late litters of children; fixtures at black-tie dinners for convicted forgers who have published memoirs and for rehabilitated dope pushers and stranglers who hold visiting professorships of Urban Planning and Reform.

  Each of the nine seems to be liked by everyone except the other eight. Our agents are fluent in at least a second language, but then we all are. I don’t know why we were not all asked to be agents, but we weren’t. The only one who claims he was and who now drinks and talks a lot about it is Lane Prell, who needs to be an authority on most matters. Whenever the C.I.A. is mentioned, and Lord knows it is mentioned often, Lane becomes nostalgic, confidential, cynical. His point is that, when he was with the Agency in some exotic country, which he is not at liberty to name, the Agency was not even competent to arrange an abortion for a young, highly valued contact, whom, on that account, it lost. True or false, this anecdote evidently means a lot to Lane. He seems to find in it an immense, a universal relevance. “Guatemala,” he’ll say. “Don’t tell me about Guatemala. When I was with the Agency, do you know we couldn’t even arrange…,” or “Clandestine activities. Don’t make me laugh. When I was with the Agency, we couldn’t even manage…” Apart from Lane, though, we all regard as fraught, and even graceless, allusions to such personal concerns as race, religion, income, politics, sexual proclivities, and now: institutional affiliation.

  “Are you shaky on ladders?” Jim said. It had crossed my mind just then. I had never been shaky on ladders in my life before. I looked down the three flights of ladders to the cement floor. I laughed. “Hell, no,” I said. “Not at all.” “It would be O.K.,” he said. “Fears are such a personal thing.” I would not have been scared, I think, if I had been wearing sneakers and jeans. But climbing around a construction site in high heels and all, I was beset by an extreme proposition of What if. What if I just cleave to the rungs and hover here, without looking down at the concrete. Nothing could be done. If Jim were to hold out his hand from the rungs above, it wouldn’t help; if I leaned back, the entire ladder would probably fall. The thing is to eradicate the What if, or at least postpone it, until it becomes an appropriate, theoretical speculation, on the stable ground.

  The idea of hostages is very deep. Becoming pregnant is taking a hostage—as is running a pawnshop, being a bank, receiving a letter, taking a photograph, or listening to a confidence. Every love story, every commercial trade, every secret, every matter in which trust is involved, is a gentle transaction of hostages. Everything is, to a degree, in the custody of every other thing. Blackmail, kidnapping, then, are among the extreme violations of the deal. Anyway, I seem to be about to have Jim’s child; at least, I think I will, and the thing is I haven’t mentioned it to Jim.

  “Far from it.” There he is again. “Don’t dwell on it.”

  In any group of two or more, it seems, somebody is on trial. Sometimes more than one person is on trial. Sometimes everyone is. But not for long. Under the law, a person can be said to plan alone or to plot alone, but not to conspire alone. There are other things, of course, no one can do alone: be a mob, or a choir, or a regiment. Or elope.

  We had been heading for it all afternoon. Every time we all decide to do something out of doors, we begin the day with a sense of exuberant good health, followed by a slow intoxication of danger. Often it ends mildly. Somebody barefoot steps on broken glass, or one of the beer drinkers cuts himself on the tin. One year, somebody’s guest from Palo Alto actually inhaled a cinder of his marijuana. Other times, someone missteps serving at tennis, falls, turns gray. In every case, it winds up in the emergency room. When this happens, it is always past four in the afternoon. Whoever is hurt, if he is conscious, apologizes. The form is from school days. The boy who got carsick and made the school bus stop, the girl who had a tantrum and then high fevers on the way to the museum, always spoke of spoiling it for everyone. Counting the wounded at the end of an afternoon these days, as they still apologize for spoiling it for everybody, we often find that the wounded outnumber the one or two hale whom they seem to think they have spoiled it for.

  When Dan rode his bicycle over a cliff, we all behaved in characteristic ways. We were in Central Park. There was intense competition for calm, for sane instructions. Cover him, take his pulse, call a doctor, get an ambulance, stand back, raise his head, don’t move him, leave him room and air. He had been riding his bicycle at full speed, with a kind of Western-yodel whoop, over the cliff edge. It had been a dare. He was out quite cold. In the rush to help, Jeff and Lee—who are the nicest of us, really—quietly returned all the bicycles, including Dan’s, with its bent frame and mangled wheel, to the store from which we had rented them for the day. Two uniformed men appeared. They told Dan to get up. He opened his eyes. “Lie still,” we said. “Wait for the ambulance.” One of the uniformed men said, “Hey, man, we are the ambulance.” Dan blinked. He tottered up a steep hill to their car. He sat on a stretcher. They let him sit up, occasionally bumping his head lightly against the roof, all the way to the hospital. He mumbled apologies. Ralph’s girl, in a helpless daze of solicitude, held Dan’s shoe in her lap. Situps aside, it is possible that we are really a group of invalids, hypochondriacs, and misfits. I don’t know. Even our people who stay fit with yoga seem to be, more than others, subject to the flu.

  “Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language. “Good morning,” says the poet’s wife, quite sunny-natured. “Do you realize,” the poet replies, “how angry you sound?” The poet’s wife, confused, pacific, says she isn’t at all angry. He repeats his question. Three more disclaimers on her part; on his, three more apparently calm and deadpan repetitions, and she is in fact beside herself. We are all, from time to time, too—well, too vehement. But there doesn’t seem to be much anger in our set. Nor much of the happy faculty of saying, This is mine, and this is mine, and this too is mine, by right. When it is not. In the idiom of our class and generation, we said, Maybe we could lie down for a minute.

  On a charter flight, I once met a middle-aged black man from Georgia, who had served in World War II, put himself through school, and then through college in the South. His oldest son had won a scholarship to Yale. At the end of his junior year, the son dropped out. He was going to travel across the country, play the guitar, and find himself. In less than twenty years, in short, and by an accident of historic time, that family had lived through the whole circle of the dream, in which the sons throw away what it has been the sole hope and effort of the grandfathers to amass and to consolidate. Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in one generation, in these times, perhaps. Or the boy might become a star and send all his own sons to Yale.

  Jim has in his mind, I think, one erratically ringing alarm clock, one manacled dervish, one dormouse, replete with truisms, and one jurist with a clarity of such an order that I tend to love his verdict in most things. So, there is the question of this hostage, if that’s what it is, and there is the fact of my
not having mentioned it to him. These days, Jim says, very often, “Well, I had to make a decision. In my judgment, it was the right one; I’ll stand by it.” Every politician seems to like to say that. I don’t care for it. Having somebody’s children is not, of course, the sort of thing that yields much to consultation. There it is. One simply does it. On the other hand, there seems to me no time, simply no time, even years from now, when such a decision is not subject to review. Leaving aside the more gothic possibilities, what if one’s son (or, and this seems unimaginable, daughter) simply, from the first and in every way, doesn’t turn out right, or is unhappy all his life, what then? I don’t know what then. “You can’t miss it” always means you’re never going to find it. The shortest distance between two points may well be the wrong way on a one way street. All the same, all the same, I think there’s something to be said for assuring the next that the water’s fine—quite warm, actually—once you get into it. You can’t miss it. It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime.

  AFTERWORD

  “I WANTED to write the kind of book I like to read,” Renata Adler said, “which is narrative, thrillers, with plots, suspense, and dialogue, with characters and things going on, things which you wish to happen and things you do not. I found I didn’t seem to be doing that. I thought, ‘Well, now what do I do?’”