Pitch Dark

by Renata Adler

  In London, I said, But can we live this way.

  Quanta. Well, but I, don’t you see, I had just taken the shuttle from Boston to LaGuardia, the ordinary shuttle. There was a blizzard, but we took off. When we had been flying for about an hour, the pilot said, Sorry, folks, there’ll be a delay of about twenty minutes; the runway’s closed. So we circled LaGuardia a long time, waiting for them to clear the runway, and finally turned back. In Boston, we all ran through the snow for cabs to the railroad station. The rumor passed among us that another shuttle, from Washington to LaGuardia, in that blizzard, crashed. Then we heard that the plane that crashed was not a shuttle. I had settled, though, in my seat on the train, with my little suitcase, and some Scotch, and three bags of potato chips that I’d bought with what remained of my cash, from the bar car. I had settled, wondering how long the train would take. A couple came toward me. The woman was Amy, whom I had not seen since she married the man her parents preferred. I knew she had been divorced, not many years later; that she had two children; that she had become a college professor. I knew her parents, and the boy with whom she had been in love when we were children. She introduced the man she was with. She said they were going to spend the semester break in Guatemala. They had been on the same shuttle flight as I. When she came back from their seats to talk for a while in the seat beside me, she said she had met the man she was with at a college where she used to teach, and where he was the dean. Then we talked for a long time. The blizzard outside was the most dense I remembered, and the train was several times delayed. After a while, I said, Amy, how has it been in your life with unhappiness, did it come in days, months, decades, years? Softly but without hesitation, she said, Quanta. Quanta. There were all the intervening years, and the professorship. There was the dean. Quanta. Not here. She had loved him with the operatic intensity of a basset. Or a diva. Or a child.

  Here’s what I think is wrong with boring people to no purpose. It’s not just that it corrupts their attention, makes them less capable, in other words, of being patient with important things that require a tolerance, to some greater purpose, of some boring time. The real danger lies, I think, in this: that boredom has intimately to do with power. One has only to think of hypnosis, of being mesmerized. Monotony, as a literal method of enthrallment. So this claim to find art in boredom, for its own sake or as one of the modes of alienation, is not simply a harmless misunderstanding, which finds it avant garde to stupefy. Deliberate, pointless boredom is a kind of menace, and a disturbing exercise of power. Of course, that is not always our problem here.

  I said, But it’s you who always leave. You’ve just come back from your island. And next week, you’ll go again. And anyway. He said, Those are just excuses. The fact is, You’ve left. I said, I could never really leave.

  But, in London, after all, there were the phone calls. And after that. And in the matter of the Irish thing.

  This is about the Chinese hypnotist. Here is exactly how it was. I had gone back, after all these years, to the university, and I had six papers due, that last year, near the end. So did all the other students, so I guess have all students since the sixties; but they were going to do them in the end, and I was not. I had, I might as well mention this, a long history of not doing papers. In my first year of college, we all had to do a paper every week. After the first few weeks, I didn’t do them, couldn’t do them. There were no dropouts, though, in those days, I think. When, at the end of the spring term, the dean said, Miss Ennis, the college requires papers; I suggest, in fact I must insist that you see a psychiatrist this summer. I did. I took a train from Red Hill, where my parents lived, and arrived, two hours later, with a change of trains, in New York. I walked to the office of a tall, pale man, who swept the doily of the previous patient off the couch, replaced it with a relatively fresh one, and said, Well, Miss Ennis, what have we been thinking and feeling. After a week of this, one of my brothers said, This is absurd, you can’t keep taking the train to see that fool, this is August, it’s too hot. And he wrote my papers. My brother, I mean, wrote my papers. Let me say that I know of few instances where someone has been rescued from something in quite this way. But there it was. More than twenty papers, the weekly ones and the long term papers for other courses. My brother wrote them all. And then, of course, I realized that they were not exactly right; he had not, after all, gone to the same courses or college; so I wrote them, and went with relative serenity through the following years. No, that’s not true, the serenity. But the weather changed for me. And the fact is that, had there been nothing to rewrite, I would have been stranded. I would have become, well, I don’t know, someone with whom to avoid eye contact, on the subway or the street.

  But here I was, twenty years later, with six papers overdue, and this time there was no way for my brother to write them. So I did the uncharacteristic part. I went to a hypnotist, a Chinese hypnotist. Well, I almost did not go, but when somebody gave me his name and phone number I made an appointment. The voice at the other end of the telephone line was Oriental, and the name, as I understood it, was Dr. Hoy Lee. By the time I decided to cancel, I had lost the number, there was no Dr. Hoy Lee in the phone book. I kept the appointment. The doctor was Oriental but his name was Hoyle Leigh. What makes you think I can help you? he asked. I said, Well, you can help people to stop smoking, to lower their blood pressure. It is not a reasonable expectation of life to write sonnets, but it is more natural than not to write papers for school. He said, all right, but no more than one visit, two visits at most. The odd thing was this, it almost worked.

  The truth was, there was something in the ice cube. I don’t like this mode. Tell about the scandal at the tennis courts, Smiley, the handgun. Helplessness, your professional capacity. I mean, has she no occupation, what does she do for a living? Well, she frets. Fretting is not an occupation. Yes it is; for a spy, a reporter, a scholar, many people. Dayshift. Nightshift. Watchers of soap operas. Can the Rich Write. Tell about lunch with the vedette; and Ben, and the garland, and the swami with the baby in his arms. And, in the matter of the Irish thing. But do you sometimes wish it was me?

  The punchline can remain in families when the joke, such as it was, has long eroded. Where is my poison, my father used to say, every single morning, as he took the mild medication that had been prescribed for his arthritis. He believed his tablets to be very strong, however, and took them with considerable ceremony. Where is my poison? he would say, quite loudly, and my mother would hand him the small bottle of pills. One weekend, in my junior year at college, Sally came to visit. At breakfast, we spoke of the dog, Bayard, the Great Dane; never having been much of a watchdog, he had barked a bit the night before. Where is my poison? my father said, and Sally, who was in considerable awe of him already, leaped to her feet and, crying No! upset her cup of coffee.

  Long years later, in fact quite recently, I had what may have been a similar misunderstanding, though without, so far as I could tell, any ingredient of horror. I was in an English country house, on a shooting weekend. Everything, the house, the trees, the countryside, the dogs, the river, was beautiful. The retrieving dogs were all enormous Labradors. The hostess’s personal pet, however, was a small, golden spaniel, which for the most part trotted by her side. Several times, the lady mentioned that this spaniel’s front teeth were missing. I felt some response or comment was expected of me. She had found these teeth embedded in the rear end of a three-legged greyhound, another of her pets. She found it remarkable that so small a spaniel should manage, or even try to bite so much taller a dog as this three-legged greyhound. When she actually bent down to show me the spaniel’s jaw, where the teeth were missing, I asked, Did you remove them? Heavens no! she said; its congenital, a calcium deficiency. And I realized that she thought I had asked whether she had removed the fourth leg of the greyhound. No, No, I meant the teeth, I said; did you remove them? And she said, Why yes, as soon as I found them. But the exchange was relatively calm.

  Here’s how matters stand at the
tennis court. I have played there since I was ten, when there was just one court, outdoors, clay, surrounded on three sides by a wire fence. Now there are five courts, one under a large wooden structure, two under bubble tops, and two outdoors between the old court and the long, sloping meadow, where the backboard used to be. The meadow stretches some distance, right down to the firehouse. All the town’s ambulances are still run, not out of the hospital but out of the local firehouses, and manned not by doctors but by firemen. Two years ago, I came into a little house where the court phone and office and showers are, along with the Coke machine, on top of which there is a television set that kids of the players, kids of the pro, kids waiting for lessons watch all day long, I walked in and saw on the couch a man so pale, and obviously ill, and sweating that I asked at once whether I could do something, and only realized seconds later that I knew him, that he was Morty Stone, the young internist who, when he first came to town, brought with him, along with his clear contempt for the local general practitioners, the modern notion of telling people, frankly, whether they wanted to know or not, what the prognosis was, whether they were dying, along with the old commitment to keep them alive, by whatever means, at whatever cost and in whatever pain. There was Morty, then, who had treated my grandmother, in fact, and wanted to tell her the worst and then operate and hold down on the drugs, but who was, quite simply, overriden by Dr. Mills, our family doctor, in actual charge of the case. It was Morty, then, who lay there. What he had done, actually, was just to dislocate his shoulder. The friends, all doctors, with whom he had been playing, were out on the court again, where, with the fifth of their group, they had resumed their Wednesday doubles. I thought this heartless of them, but they had done what they could for him, and I guess they could not bear to watch him now, with that look, the cold, the unmistakable pallor, of a man who, though his injury is minor in every sense but one, is badly hurt. He didn’t want company in any case. What he wanted, all he wanted, was morphine. The pro’s young son had run to the firehouse, the ambulance was on its way; in due course, Morty was on his way to the hospital and his shot of morphine. I don’t know whether or how it affected his dealing with patients, but I suspect Morty had never been in that kind of pain before. In any event, though he dropped in at the court three days later, with his arm in a sling, and though he had played every Tuesday and Thursday for years, and though the injured shoulder healed completely, he never quite brought himself to play tennis again. Never to this day, I mean. Maybe someday he will start again.

  But now, here’s how matters stand at the tennis court. There is the scandal, in which all of us are, to some degree, taken up. And at the firehouse, there has been a tragedy in the course of which two men, the first in the town’s history to be killed in the line of duty, are, as it turns out, with perfect futility and for no reason, dead. The two men, friends since high school, were in their late thirties, legendary. One had been a football hero; the other, the smaller of the two, was famous, miles around, for this: he was able to eat eleven wieners in twenty-two bites. The way the two men died was this. A roof and three floors of a factory fell on them. They had gone in to rescue a man who ought to have been in there but was not. And in the matter of the Irish thing.

  I said, But can we live this way.

  A moment here. A moment here for a topic. Sentimentality in the work of Gertrude Stein. A real contempt and aversion for sentimentality, too, of course, an attempt to expunge the conventional and easy from her work. But, say what you will, A rose is a rose is a rose is not an unsentimental line. All right, on the other hand, Thomas Wolfe. Obviously, unremittingly, concededly sentimental, Look Homeward, Angel, You Can’t Go Home Again. But Gertrude Stein, I suspect, rather despised her life, and Thomas Wolfe was rather proud of his. Free of constraints, reserve, hesitations, he was free to go sentimentally on and on. She went on and on, too, of course, but only in a state of tension: drawn to the sentimental rhythm and the sentimental substance, but mocking and concealing it, reining it back. A rose is a rose is a rose is a joke, after all, and a truism, and a pointing out of something. But whatever else it is, it is not in spirit so remote from a stone, a leaf, an unfound door, and all the forgotten faces, which is Thomas Wolfe’s. A great hollow wind blows through both of them, and both are on the verge, undeniably, of tears.

  All right. I can’t read her either.

  This is my little disquisition about football: the quarterback, the center, and the towel. On the rare occasions when I went to football games in high school, they were night games. Saturday nights, of course, when it was cold and dark, with a little rain or snow perhaps, while people huddled under their blankets and drank beer. In those days, I wore my glasses only when I had to, and my sight was better than it is now; but even with my glasses on, and no matter where in the stands I sat, I could not see or understand a single play. It seemed to me there were moments when the players stood about, moments when they crouched in opposition, a moment of rising tension, then a thud or scuffle, and they all fell down. After each play, I usually knew what must have happened, either because somebody told me or from the changed position on the field. But that was it. I never saw the ball or knew who had it, even on passes or the longest runs. With television, naturally, I can see and understand the play; and even in the days when I couldn’t see it, I had always liked the game. But as often as I’ve watched football on television, and as much as I’ve come to appreciate some of the beauty of it, there is always, inevitably, repeatedly, a moment that strikes me as wonderfully bizarre. It is the moment, at the line of scrimmage, when the quarterback wipes his hands on a towel draped over the crouching center’s rear. I understand it, obviously; the quarterback, to be sure of getting a firm grip on the football, needs to dry his hands. But, as often as I’ve asked about it, nobody has gone beyond that explanation, delivered, always, as though nothing could be more ordinary. Whereas what interests me, what I simply cannot imagine, is how the particular custom came into existence, the history of it, the history that is, of the quarterback, the center, and the towel. My brothers admit that they remember no such custom in their day, others have said the same. Was there, then, a moment, on a very wet day, when the first quarterback, muddy and soaked through, saw no further avail in wiping his hands on the back of his own uniform? The ball kept slipping out of his hands, say. Then, the center having perhaps been injured, another center, in a fresh, dry uniform, ran out onto the field, crouched at the line of scrimmage. This happened, perhaps, many times. Many times, on soaking wet days, with second-string centers in fresh, dry uniforms, quarterbacks began, perhaps absently and in desperation, to wipe their hands on the back of the centers’ pants instead of their own. And the first center, or perhaps many centers, startled, said, Hey, cut that out; or perhaps, though they were not startled, they were embarrassed; or with the advent of television, somebody, the center, the quarterback, the coach perhaps or the television producer, thought it looked embarrassing, maybe that’s what happened, to have one man wiping his hands on the seat of another man’s uniform. Or maybe, since the first-string center, presumably as wet as any of his teammates, could not serve in this drying capacity, maybe someone thought long and came up with something dry, a towel. Where to put it? And the answer was what we have. Or maybe the first quarterback said to the first center, when they were both soaked through, Look, Mo, I know this sounds silly, but could you carry some Kleenex or something? And Mo said, Are you out of your mind? The fact is, I just can’t imagine it. The conversation that produced the first few instances of what subsequently became that particular custom on the field.

  Look here.

  This is about the old couple, weaving back and forth across the road, looking for eagles, who told us about the air controllers’ strike.

  Before I resume my torts songs, I’d like to mention what I did not always know: what an act, what a prolonged state, of bitterness, hatred, stamina, rage, grim aggrieved persistence it requires to sue. More often, people mention money. It is tru
e that, here, lawsuits are expensive. In Germany, a woman leaning over her back fence insults a neighbor with an epithet. The neighbor sues for slander. At issue may be twenty marks. The loser pays the winner’s legal costs. The lawyer takes his cut. And that is that. Here, on the other hand, with an ingenuity that should take an entrepreneurial schemer’s breath away, there has evolved the following proposition: that a legal job no sooner comes into existence than it generates, immediately and of necessity, a job for a competitor. I can think of no other line of work where this is true. Even in something as apparently two-sided as, say, tennis, where you would think one competitor’s initiative inevitably entails work for another, there is not the same degree, or relation, of necessity. It is always possible, that is, that a tennis player will serve a ball and no one will return it, or issue a challenge and no one will respond. But, if a lawyer has been employed to sue, you must employ another to defend, or else you lose. And to have such a profession highly paid, and paid for the most part not on commission but by the hour, meaning the longer it takes the more it costs, with no objective measure (as in mining, say, or the construction of a house or of a coronary bypass) of just how much work is done; well, it is a dream.

  Freudian analysis had, for a time, its own inspired market thesis: that the cost was part of the treatment; that part of what you were paying for, in other words, was the overprice. And surgeons are thought to be well paid, particularly when the surgery is unsuccessful and the patient dies. But in neither case is what the professional is paid to do the undoing of what is being done, at the same time, in the same forum, by an equally well-paid professional. And even in fields where there exists a symbiosis, or at least an ambivalent dependence, between what are, professionally, antagonists—crooks and detectives, prisoners and prison guards, in one sense social workers and the poor—the dependence is one way. Detectives and prison guards need criminals, social workers require that people should continue to be poor; there are, in short, many workers with a vested interest in the failure of institutions that employ them, and in the insolubility of problems they are paid to solve. The perfect instance occurs in the narcotics laws. A substance, cheap to manufacture, is addictive. It is outlawed. Being outlawed, it becomes rare and expensive. Immediately, and for the first time, it becomes profitable for someone, the seller, to make people addicted to it. The law generates a criminal apparatus which in turn generates a law-enforcement apparatus. With time, their personnel become the same. But the nearest analogue, as a business, to the law lies not in business but in the military, as it prepares for war. If I build a bomb I virtually assure that my adversary must build a bomb; but no one would maintain that anything valuable, conceptual or moral, within our system rests upon this symmetry, as it is said to rest on the adversary system in the law. Last year, the amount spent on lawyers in this country was approximately eighty billion dollars. Much more, of course, was spent upon defense. Whose voice is this? Not mine. Not mine. Not mine.