Speedboat (7 page)

Joe said, Isn’t it possible they just want to say that they are having a good time? It’s possible; one ought perhaps to take into account that it is fun to be part of an audience that wants to roar. Norma asked whether Joe had seen it. He said no. Norma said, “Well, then you don’t know. It’s not a musical audience roar. It’s not an avant garde roar. It’s a march roar. A rally roar. A parade roar.” Joe said, “You mean a lynch roar.” Norma said, “Now that’s going too far.”

Just two nights ago, I went to a party with three large dinner tables. It was mixed, the rich and famous and the reporters who had helped them on their way. There were some intellectual sharks, some arrivistes, some sheep, good souls, professors, editors, some radicals, who themselves invite poets, novelists, sophomore rioters, and visiting Englishmen to dinner, which is served by maids. This party was given by two kind, intelligent Americans I knew from college. They wanted to do good and to
know,
like people out of E.M. Forster or Henry James. The purpose was for the senior senator of an American liberal state and an Indian dignitary, a woman, to meet a cross section of American opinion. They met it. The first course was aspic. The dignitary thought somebody was going to attack her for Indian educational policies in Kerala. No one knew anything about India at all. She relaxed and grew bored. The senator thought he was going to meet the young and learn about them. I was sitting next to him. I said I thought he and I might be among the last three people in the room who still believed in the electoral process. He said, “Thanks, sweetheart.”

Suddenly, after dessert, a lady at my table—a donor to controversial social causes, now half persuaded to devote her money to the cause of saving art—said she thought the dinner would be wasted if the conversation did not become general, if it was all private bon mots spliced together, or just gossip. She thought we ought to talk about America today. She called first on one of those social academics, a man who had
vecu
a bit, whose bow tie was perpetually atilt, perhaps to show himself at an eccentric angle to the dinner jackets that he wore, what they implied. He rose, red-faced and angry, to his feet. He said he felt this country now was the world’s most murderous and corrupt. He happened to know, he said, of two deaths at Kent State that had not been reported, and of other grave matters he was not at liberty to disclose. He felt the only hope for humanity now lay in the vitality and idealism of the third world.

The lady who led the discussion, unperturbed, asked a tireless, self-effacing worker in the cause of civil rights whether he had anything to say “about all this.” He leaned his head against the wall, then stood up. “Bertram,” he said, “I am so offended by what you have just said, I don’t know what to say to you.” He sat down. The lady called upon a poet, a surrealist who, with clear reluctance, got to his feet and said, turning to the Indian lady, “I think in this country we need to disburden ourselves of our, our burden of rationality.” He sat down. It did not seem exactly India’s problem.

A liberal reporter of military affairs was called on. He said he didn’t want to discuss the morality of it, but that anyone who had covered the military would know…;“I know something about the military,” another reporter, younger, fiercer, gray with anger, said, rising to his feet and interrupting. Then he said he knew that the fabric of our whole society was stretching very thin. The editors—one local popular, one national radical—talked well when they were called on, discursive, rambling. It was as though they had a repressed and abiding wish to have their say, in their own words for once. The party ended the only way it could. A McLuhanite apostle, revered as a physics genius in these circles, spoke. He was in his seventies, extremely hard of hearing. He spoke long and loudly. He continued speaking. “I’m sorry to have to interrupt,” the lady moderator said, after geologic time spans passed. He did not hear her. He went on.

“I’m very sorry to have to interrupt,” she said, more loudly. He heard nothing. He continued speaking. She kept trying. Finally, some clear-sighted soul rose to propose a toast. “All stand,” he said. Everyone stood. For a few moments the clear-sighted soul and the deaf genius were speaking in duet. Then the genius, looking around, subsided. “The reason we are gathered here is to honor our hostess,” the good soul said, and drained his glass. So did we all, and then went home with all deliberate speed. I took a cab home. The driver ranted. We passed three men, two beating up a third. They had pulled his sweatshirt up over his eyes. He could not see them. A crowd had gathered, interested. Suddenly a young man got out of the cab beside mine. “That’s enough!” he shouted. The scene froze a minute. Then it started up again. After all, he was unarmed; nobody knew him. He moved closer. He said, “That’s enough,” again. The whole thing stopped, dissolved. The beaten man pulled his sweatshirt down over his injured face, put his arms inside the sleeves, and limped away. The crowd disintegrated. I thought, What a phrase from some past time I can remember. That’s enough.

In the South, in simpler days, I remember a middle-aged gentle black worker speaking to his son who had insomnia. “When you can’t sleep,” he said, “just tell yourself the story of your life.” Now sometimes when I can’t sleep, I wonder. A twenty-four-hour curfew every day, for everybody. Suppose we blow up the whole thing. Everything. Everybody. Me. Buildings. No room. Blast. All dead. No survivors. And then I would say, and then I would say, Let’s just have it a little quiet around here.

T
HE CAMEL
, I had noticed, was passing, with great difficulty, through the eye of the needle. The Apollo flight, the four-minute mile, Venus in Scorpio, human records on land and at sea—these had been events of enormous importance. But the camel, practicing in near obscurity for almost two thousand years, was passing through. First the velvety nose, then the rest. Not many were aware. But if the lead camel and then perhaps the entire caravan could make it, the thread, the living thread of camels, would exist, could not be lost. No one could lose the thread. The prospects of the rich would be enhanced. “Ortega tells us that the business of philosophy,” the professor was telling his class of indifferent freshmen, “is to crack open metaphors which are dead.”

“I shouldn’t have come,” the Englishman said, waving his drink and breathing so heavily at me that I could feel my bangs shift. “I have a terrible cold.”

“He would probably have married her,” a voice across the room said, “with the exception that he died.”

“Well, I am a personality that prefers not to be annoyed.”

“We should all prepare ourselves for this eventuality.”

A six-year-old was passing the hors d’oeuvres. The baby, not quite steady on his feet, was hurtling about the room.

“He’s following me,” the six-year-old said, in despair.

“Then lock yourself in the bathroom, dear,” Inez replied.

“He always waits outside the door.”

“He loves you, dear.”

“Well, I don’t like it.”

“How I envy you,” the minister’s wife was saying to a courteous, bearded boy, “reading
Magic Mountain
for the first time.”

The homosexual across the hall from me always takes Valium and walks his beagle. I borrow Valium from him from time to time, and when he takes a holiday the dog is left with me. On our floor of this brownstone, we are friends. Our landlord, Roger Somerset, was murdered last July. He was a kind and absent-minded man, and on the night when he was stabbed there was a sort of requiem for him in the heating system. There is a lot of music in this building anyway. The newlyweds on the third floor play Bartok on their stereo. The couple on the second floor play clarinet quintets; their kids play rock. The girl on the fourth floor, who has been pining for two months, plays Judy Collins’ “Maid of Constant Sorrow” all day long. We have a kind of orchestra in here. The ground floor is a shop. The owner of the shop speaks of our landlord’s murder still. Shaking his head, he says that he suspects “foul play.” We all agree with him. We changed our locks. But “foul play” seems a weird expression for the case.

It is all weird. I am not always well. One block away (I often think of this), there was ten months ago an immense crash. Water mains broke. There were small rivers in the streets. In a great skyscraper that was being built, something had failed. The newspapers reported the next day that by some miracle only two people had been “slightly injured” by ten tons of falling steel. The steel fell from the eighteenth floor. The question that preoccupies me now is how, under the circumstances, slight injuries could occur. Perhaps the two people were grazed in passing by. Perhaps some fragments of the sidewalk ricocheted. I knew a deliverer of flowers who, at Sixty-ninth and Lexington, was hit by a flying suicide. Situations simply do not yield to the most likely structures of the mind. A “self-addressed envelope,” if you are inclined to brood, raises deep questions of identity. Such an envelope, immutably itself, is always precisely where it belongs. “Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative. But “joking with nurses” fascinates me in the press. Whenever someone has been quite struck down, lost faculties, members of his family, he is said to have “joked with his nurses” quite a lot. What a mine of humor every nurse’s life must be.

I have a job, of course. I have had several jobs. I’ve had our paper’s gossip column since last month. It is egalitarian. I look for people who are quite obscure, and report who is breaking up with whom and where they go and what they wear. The person who invented this new form for us is on antidepressants now. He lives in Illinois. He says there are people in southern Illinois who have not yet been covered by the press. I often write about families in Queens. Last week, I went to a dinner party on Park Avenue. After 1 a.m., something called the Alive or Dead Game was being played. Someone would mention an old character from Tammany or Hollywood. “Dead,” “Dead,” “Dead,” everyone would guess. “No, no. Alive. I saw him walking down the street just yesterday,” or “Yes. Dead. I read a little obituary notice about him last year.” One of the little truths people can subtly enrage or reassure each other with is who—when you have looked away a month, a year—is still around.

The St. Bernard at the pound on Ninety-second Street was named Bonnie and would have cost five dollars. The attendant held her tightly on a leash of rope. “Hello, Bonnie,” I said. Bonnie growled. “I wouldn’t talk to her if I was you,” the attendant said. I leaned forward to pat her ear. Bonnie snarled. “I wouldn’t touch her if I was you,” the attendant said. I held out my hand under Bonnie’s jowls. She strained against the leash, and choked and coughed. “Now cut that out, Bonnie,” the attendant said. “Could I just take her for a walk around the block,” I said, “before I decide?” “Are you out of your mind?” the attendant said. Aldo patted Bonnie, and we left.

DEAR TENANT:

We have reason to believe that there are impostors posing as Con Ed repairmen and inspectors circulating in this area.

Do not permit any Con Ed man to enter your premises or the building, if possible.

THE PRECINCT

The New York Chinese cabdriver lingered at every corner and at every traffic light, to read his paper. I wondered what the news was. I looked over his shoulder. The illustrations and the type were clear enough: newspaper print, pornographic fiction. I leaned back in my seat. A taxi-driver who happened to be Oriental with a sadomasochistic cast of mind was not my business. I lit a cigarette, looked at my bracelet. I caught the driver’s eyes a moment in the rearview mirror. He picked up his paper. “I don’t think you ought to read,” I said, “while you are driving.” Traffic was slow. I saw his mirrored eyes again. He stopped his reading. When we reached my address, I did not tip him. Racism and prudishness, I thought, and reading over people’s shoulders.

But there are moments in this place when everything becomes a show of force. He can read what he likes at home. Tipping is still my option. Another newspaper event, in our brownstone. It was a holiday. The superintendent normally hauls the garbage down and sends the paper up, by dumbwaiter, each morning. On holidays, the garbage stays upstairs, the paper on the sidewalk. At 8 a.m., I went downstairs. A ragged man was lying across the little space that separates the inner door, which locks, from the outer door, which doesn’t. I am not a news addict. I could have stepped over the sleeping man, picked up my
Times
, and gone upstairs to read it. Instead, I knocked absurdly from inside the door, and said, “Wake up. You’ll have to leave now.” He got up, lifted the flattened cardboard he had been sleeping on, and walked away, mumbling and reeking. It would have been kinder, certainly, to let the driver read, the wino sleep. One simply cannot bear down so hard on all these choices.

What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind. Sometimes the point is a momentum, a fact, a quality, a voice, an intimation, a thing said or unsaid. Sometimes it’s who’s at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life. But if you are, for any length of time, custodian of the point—in art, in court, in politics, in lives, in rooms—it turns out there are rear-guard actions everywhere. To see a thing clearly, and when your vision of it dims, or when it goes to someone else, if you have a gentle nature, keep your silence, that is lovely. Otherwise, now and then, a small foray is worthwhile. Just so that being always, complacently, thoroughly wrong does not become the safest position of them all. The point has never quite been entrusted to me.

My cousin, who was born on February 29th, became a veterinarian. Some years ago, when he was twenty-eight (seven, by our childhood birthday count), he was drafted, and sent to Malaysia. He spent most of his military service there, assigned to the zoo. He operated on one tiger, which, in the course of abdominal surgery, began to wake up and wag its tail. The anesthetist grabbed the tail, and injected more sodium pentothal. That tiger survived. But two flamingos, sent by the city of Miami to Kuala Lumpur as a token of good will, could not bear the trip or the climate and, in spite of my cousin’s efforts, died. There was also a cobra—the largest anyone in Kuala Lumpur could remember having seen. An old man had brought it, in an immense sack, from somewhere in the countryside. The zoo director called my cousin at once, around dinnertime, to say that an unprecedented cobra had arrived. Something quite drastic, however, seemed wrong with its neck. My cousin, whom I have always admired—for his leap-year birthday, for his pilot’s license, for his presence of mind—said that he would certainly examine the cobra in the morning but that the best thing for it after its long journey must be a good night’s rest. By morning, the cobra was dead.