Speedboat

by Renata Adler

That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I find, are the ones learned in your sleep.

The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.

Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.

But here. I used to wonder why the victims of some small sensational tragedy—the parents of a little girl who had just been thrown from the roof of her tenement by a deranged older boy, or the family of a model son who had just gone clear out of his mind and murdered a friend—never shut the door in my face when I came for an interview. They never do. They open the door; they bring out the family album and the baby anecdotes. I used to think it was out of a loyalty to memory, or a will to have the papers get it right. I still think it’s partly that, and partly being stunned by publicity and grief. But now I know it’s mostly an agony of trying to please, a cast of mind so deep and amiable that it is as stark in consciousness as death.

To promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity—I believe all that. I go to parties almost whenever I am asked. I think a high tone of moral indignation, used too often, is an ugly thing. I get up at eight. Quite often now I have a drink before eleven. In some ways, I have overshot my mark in life in spades.

It is strange to think that most of the children under six whom one knows and loves, gives presents to, whatever, are not going to remember most emotional events of those first years, on the couch, or in jail, or in a bank, wherever they may find themselves when they are twenty-five.

My own mind is a tenement. Some elevators work. There are orange peels and muggings in the halls. Squatters and double locks on some floors, a few flowered window boxes, half-dressed bachelors cooling on the outside fire steps; plaster falls. Sometimes it seems that this may be a nervous breakdown—sleeping all day, tears, insomnia at midnight, and again at four a.m. Then it occurs to me that a lot of people have it. Or, of course, worse.

“Any dreams?” the doctor asked his patient softly, tentatively, as we used to say in the child’s card game, “Any aces? Any tens?”

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.

She was a dynamite girl and he was an aces fellow. On the day he at last agreed by phone to marry her, the switchboard operators were overjoyed. For six months they had listened, in sympathy and indignation, to the tears, the threats, the partings and reconciliations. They were so unequivocally for the girl that only the purest professionalism kept them, at times, from breaking in. On the day Tim, after calls to his best friend, his first wife, and his therapist, gave in at last, the oldest operator, who had been on the switchboard for twenty years, actually wept. The other two told the receptionist, at lunch. All four ladies had a drink, and then bought a card of slightly obscene felicitations. They had wavered toward the sentimental, but rejected it as basically unswinging. They did not sign the card. Tim and his girl, who had been breaking up once again on the day they received it (she was packing; they were in his apartment), were appalled. As a result of the card, and discussions of what to do about it—what it implied, who knew and who didn’t—they married.

There is a passage in Dante when he and Virgil, traveling through the Inferno, stop beside a man buried to his neck in boiling mud. He does not care to speak to them. He has his own problems. He does not want an interview. Dante actually grasps him by the hair and gets his story. Some sort of parable about reporting there, I think. In fact, I know.

None of us is leading quite the life we were at all prepared for.

Dispersed as we all are, though, what we seem to have entirely in common is a time, a quality of meaning no harm, and a sense that among highly urban and ambitious people we are trying to lead some semblance of decent lives.

I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.

The truth, I would like to say here, is as follows. But I can’t. In some places, it may already have begun, the war of everybody against everybody, all against all. “The Great Game,” the lady philosopher used to say, quoting from Kipling, “is finished when everyone is dead. Not before.”

That “writers write” is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

The bachelor regulars brought a different girl each night or week or so, and then around midnight, dropped them flat. The beauty point was made. The men could talk, of royalties, pot, sex, screenplays, and politics. The girls, left to each other, girl, space, girl, space, girl, space—four girls at most tables and four empty chairs—looked quite vacant, scared.

We have all, of course, had childhoods.

My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.

Lonely people see double entendres everywhere.

There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your hair, whether you marry, whether you insist that your child take piano lessons, what are the brand names on your shelf; all these become political decisions. At other times, no act—no campaign or tract, statement or rampage—has any political charge at all. People with the least sense of which times are, and which are not, political are usually most avid about politics.

My friends from those days have changed as much as all the world has.

“Well, you know, you can’t win them all,” the old bartender said. “In fact, you can’t win any of them.”

Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener. She would spend hours in her straw hat and gloves, bending over the soil. When somebody walked past her in her work, she was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes, with an air of resolute courage, as though she had shot them herself.

“This will interest you. You mustn’t miss this.” Then he told the young black man waiting in the office that his sister was about to slip away. We went down the ward to see the sister. I was introduced and said, “How are you?” She said, “Fine thanks. How are you?”

People who are less happy, I find, are always consoling those who are more.

A small, blond French-Canadian girl left the party early, to go to bed with one of the Americans. She asked him later when they would see each other again. He said, “Don’t break the magic.”

At the party, though, they stayed so long I left and took a room in a hotel.

The sportswriters, hitting the Scotch and the beer, sat in the living room, talking of books they planned to write but never would. The pressures were wrong. There was just enough money and not enough time. No one was rich. No one was poor. No one was ever going to do anything of any consequence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The point has never quite been entrusted to me.

The problem is this. Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in the literature.

“All babies are natural swimmers,” John said, lowering his two-year-old son gently over the side of the rowboat, and smiling. The child thrashed and sank. Aldo dived in and grabbed him. The baby came up coughing, not crying, and looked with pure fear at his father. John looked with dismay at his son. “He would have come up in a minute,” John said to Aldo, who was dripping and rowing. “You have to give nature a chance.”

All the service staff on campus in those days were black. Many of them were followers of Father Divine. They took new names in the church. I remember the year when a maid called Serious Heartbreak married a janitor called Universal Dictionary.

The host, for some reason, was taking Instamatic pictures of his guests. It was not clear whether he was doing this in order to be able to show, at some future time, that there had been this gathering in his house. Or whether he thought of pictures in some voodoo sense. Or whether he found it difficult to talk. Or whether he was bored.

The party was in honor of the poet, who celebrated the occasion by insulting everyone and being fawned upon, by distinguished and undistinguished writers alike.

For the severely depressed, the paranoids, and the hallucinators, our young psychiatrists prescribed “mood elevators,” pills that were neither uppers nor downers but which affected the bloodstream in such a way that within three to five weeks many sad outpatients became very cheerful, and several saints and historical figures became again Midwestern graduate students under tolerable stress.

My grandfather said that some people have such extreme insomnia that they look at their watches every hour after midnight, to see how sorry they ought to be feeling for themselves.

don’t think much of writers in whom nothing is at risk.

One polishes a case, a tense, a comment. The subject passes. Just as well. There are, however, people who just sit there, silent. A question is addressed to them. They do not answer. Another question. Silence. It is a position of great power. Talkative people running toward those silences are jarred, time after time, by a straight arm rebuff. A quizzical look, a beautiful face perhaps, but silence. Everyone is exhausted, drinks too much, snarls later at home, wonders about the need for aspirin. It has been that stubborn wall.

Last year, Aldo moved out and went to Los Angeles on a story. I called him to ask whether I could come. He said, “Are you going to stay this time?” I said I wasn’t sure. I flew out quite early in the morning. On the plane, there was the most banal, unendurable pickup, lasting the whole flight. A young man and a young woman—he was Italian, I think; she was German—had just met, and settled on French as their common language. They asked each other where they were from, and where they were going. They posed each other riddles. He took out a pencil and paper and sketched her portrait. She giggled. He asked her whether she had ever considered a career as a model. She said she had considered it, but she feared that all men in the field were after the same thing. He agreed. He began to tell off-color stories. She laughed and reproached him. It was like that. I wondered whether these things were always, to captive eavesdroppers, so dreary.

He’s doing a political essay. It begins, “Some things cannot be said too often, and some can.” That’s all he’s got so far.

Talent was blazing through the columns and onto the coffee tables. The physical-assault metaphor had taken over the reviews. “Guts,” never much of a word outside the hunting season, was a favorite noun in literary prose. People were said to have or to lack them, to perceive beauty and make moral distinctions in no other place. “Gut-busting” and “gut-wrenching” were accolades. “Nerve-shattering,” “eye-popping,” “bone-crunching”—the responsive critic was a crushed, impaled, electrocuted man. “Searing” was lukewarm. Anything merely spraining or tooth-extracting would have been only a minor masterpiece. “Literally,” in every single case, meant figuratively; that is, not literally. This film will literally grab you by the throat. This book will literally knock you out of your chair. “Presently” always meant not soon but now.

The jig was never up. In every city, at the same time, therapists earned their living by saying, “You’re too hard on yourself.”

Admitting women into his club, the chairman now said, “would be as inappropriate as,” he paused, “as introducing a trumpet into a string quartet.”

Escape procedures, however, were in full force. Some people, in a frenzy of antipathy and boredom, were drinking themselves into extreme approximations of longing to be together. Exchanging phone numbers, demanding to have lunch, proposing to share an apartment—the escalations of fellowship had the air of a terminal auction, a fierce adult version of slapjack, a bill-payer loan from a finance company, an attempt to buy with one grand convivial debt, to be paid in future, an exit from each other’s company at that instant.

We may win this year. We may lose it all. It is not going as well as we thought. Posterity, anyway, does not know everything. The simplest operations of life—voting in a booth, filling out returns, remembering whether or not one has just taken a pill—are very difficult.