Speedboat (16 page)

The reporter had arrived at the catastrophe without his notebook. He wrote down everything he could on the backs of blank checks. Long after midnight, when he had finished phoning in his story, he stopped, on his way home, at the neighborhood liquor store. He bought Scotch. He asked the clerk, who knew him well, to add on ten dollars cash; he made out his check for the total. “My, my, what’s this?” the clerk said, as he started to put the check in the cash register. “I can’t cash this check. There’s endorsements or something all over the back.” The reporter mumbled wearily that they were story notes, that they were on the backs of all his checks that night. “Gosh,” the clerk said, when he had gotten the check approved by the owner of the liquor store. The owner added, “You must have been in a poetic mood.”

Mattie was married in those days to a man who was, in effect, her brother-in-law. Mattie’s youngest sister, who worked in Manhattan, was still a citizen of Trinidad. She had met a Jamaican newspaper reporter. They wanted to marry. Mattie was a U.S. citizen. She married him. He went straight from the wedding to live with Mattie’s sister, which was the idea. Some months after I met Mattie, this brother-in-law became a fugitive from justice. This husband, really, since they had never bothered to divorce. Mattie was by this time planning to be seriously married, to the lawyer who took over her building’s tenants’ case. There she was, married to a fugitive from justice. Within weeks, he was on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted List. Mattie pretended to be bitterly pleased by this development. If the F.B.I. managed to find him, she would be able to find him, to arrange for divorce. Everyone who had known him had thought of him, anyway, as married to Mattie’s sister. The sister hadn’t liked him or seen him in years.

A problem with the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted List, however, is that, like the Bureau itself, it is designed to trace criminals who look a certain way. A glower, a scar, a tattoo, a maniacal stare, but a plain white male criminal way. When it comes to blacks, or to white students gone underground from campuses, the Bureau just can’t find them, or, more specifically, can’t tell them apart. Can’t tell the blacks apart. Can’t tell the loose, straight-haired college girls apart. It is a source of great embarrassment. Finding Dohrn, Alpert, Boudin, or even Hearst, when other people are constantly seeing them, is just not what these men are good at. Only last week, the Bureau announced that one of those fugitive girls might be “feigning pregnancy.” It struck me as a strange idea of what constitutes disguise. Whiskers, I would have thought, yes. Sunglasses even, a wig; but pregnancy, no. Jim says I misunderstood what the Bureau meant. The “feigned pregnancy” was considered, not as a disguise, but as a means of getting people not to shoot. I don’t know. Anyway, though they did find those California fugitives, in their purple jogging shorts, Mattie’s brother-in-law, so far as is known, has not even been seen.

Seven years ago, I bought a rifle. When I took it home from the sporting-goods store, I found in the box, not the fully assembled thing, which I had weighed, and tested, and shot, but two pieces—one, almost the whole rifle; the other, a little firing mechanism that had to be attached to it. There was also a little pamphlet, with a half page of instructions for putting the rifle together, six pages of instructions for joining the National Rifle Association. I could have figured out how to join the N.R.A. without those instructions, particularly since the pamphlet included an application for membership. But I could not, no matter how slowly or how often I read that first half page, or at what hour of the day, understand how to attach the firing mechanism to the other part. Anyone can do it. Any child who hunts squirrel, any hunter who cannot read without running his finger along under the words, any psychotic halfwit who wants to shoot some stranger through the head. I could not fathom the problem in any way.

I finally put the rifle, both parts, under a couch, where they gathered dust for years. One winter night, when the gas and electricity had been blown out of service by the wind, a man from the power company came by to restore light and heat. I waited, in the dark, while he did his job. When the lights were on, I mentioned the rifle. I said I’d forgotten how to assemble it. He asked to see it. I brought it out. He squinted down the barrel and, with a single motion, clicked the second part in place. I use that rifle often now. I have always liked to shoot—not living things, but targets, and matchboxes and cans. But putting the damn thing together was and, I guess, always will be one of those simple operations of life that seem to complicate themselves altogether out of my range.

Three of us used to take tennis lessons at the armory at eight-thirty every weekday morning. The light from the dusty bulbs was yellow and bad. The courts consisted of creaky floorboards overlaid with a thin sheet of rubber, which was cracked and patched with tape. We three first met, through our lessons, in September. We all played each day, with a crash-program fanaticism. For months, the instructors had pointed out that we would all save money if we gave up our separate lessons. We all refused. Jane even played on weekends at the armory. Fran stayed home with her kids. On weekends, I simply moved my eight-thirty lessons out to the country. I played with Stewart, who is the coach out there. He started to take me to see professional tennis matches, sometimes to a movie, once to a concert by the local piano teacher, who would have had a grand career but for his nerves. By summer, there were four mornings of tennis lessons with Stewart, four evenings for going to see movies or just driving around. He had a mustache and a beard, and gruff good manners. He was thirty-two. He wanted to work for mankind. He wanted to teach children. He felt bohemian stirrings. Altogether a good, confused man. On the courts, he never shouted, almost never spoke. None of the “Racket back,” “Watch the ball,” “Run, run, run” that drives one to distraction, although some people do not seem to mind. Once, at the armory, I heard the coach shout incessantly, for a solid hour, at the mayor. The most Stewart would say on the court was, every third lesson or so, an almost inaudible “Backhand.” He would slam the ball to the forehand side. That was his little joke. Once in a while, he said “Nice shot.” I used to say thanks, or mutter. Then, Stewart said the proper thing to say was nothing, or at most, un huh. So I said un huh. For the rest, he just kept hitting the ball to the outer limit of his students’ ability to return it. They were run ragged. Their tennis improved. I have been wrong about a lot of things. I still have his tie.

In the bar of his father’s hotel, with the leather chairs that give one the feeling of sitting in a wallet, Dommy has introduced a new drink, Last Mango in Paris. A steep decline.

Of the four baby birds in the barn, three had learned to fly and one stood on the floor, looking stupid and making flapping motions. Now and then, it would walk out in the driveway, where it was dive-bombed by its siblings and snapped at by its parents. Then it would walk back into the barn again. The people in the house checked under the wheels of their cars to avoid running over this bird, and otherwise wished it well. On the third day, the children minced a worm and tried to feed the bird themselves. By the fourth day, one adult or another, thinking himself unwatched, would lean over the bird and mutter, and flap his arms in what he hoped was an exemplary way. On the fifth day, the bird was sitting on a high rafter of the barn with the rest of its family. It has not yet been seen to fly. Perhaps it walked up there.

Like most lonely women, like most women of all kinds, Margaret Dageman had an imaginary lover, with whom she entered the conversation and even the gossip of her friends. I used to think this sort of lover was specific to girls or women who were left out. An imaginary lover explained it. He was married. He was in Korea. He was married and in Korea. He was not married or in Korea, he was nearby, but he worked odd hours. He was not nearby, he was at the end of some line where a train must be taken. Wherever he was, he was not placed to appear or to walk them to the door. I used to think it was only lonely women who, according to temperament, flatly said, or shyly intimated, or just insisted that they had, in fact, this lover, this escort, this beau, this young man, this fiancé, whatever they called him, whom social necessity had obliged them to invent. But it is not so. It is not so. Most women have had them, at some time in their lives, or all their lives. And I do not mean the private man of daydreams or psychoanalytic literature. It is of the nature of this invented lover that his existence be a matter of public knowledge and, with luck, belief. If a woman were able to manage her own news to perfection, he would be thought to be her profoundest secret, the steady center of her emotional life.

I have known a woman’s own husband to be the central character in such a fantasy; quite often, in the lives of intelligent or worldly women, the man himself is real. Quite often too, like most thoughts and suspicions, the fantasy has truth in it; the invention may be reciprocal, or shared. In fact, the only thing this secret lover has in common with any classic rape fantasy is this: that it is important that this story seem to come out in spite of a woman’s reticence and discretion, against her will. This leads to any number of false confidences, any number of lies told in the false confessional mode. It is a way for a romantic temperament to generate its story line, its lifelong plot. He may be elusive. He may be importunate. He may be neither, or both. He can be anything. The major difference between Margaret Dageman’s imaginary lover and anybody else’s was only that she engaged in a bitter, an epic quarrel with him.

The mangy dog in the hallway had a grieving look and a furrowed brow. He had been picked up in the street by a lady who attracts animals. Once, a large, rare bird had flown directly from the zoo, on the board of which the lady was, and perched on the lady’s window sill. She called the zoo. The keepers had just noticed at that moment that the bird was gone. They came with a large and elaborate net to pick up the bird. The whole incident came to be regarded as an uncanny moment in the zoo’s and the lady’s history. Anyway, she had now attracted this mangy dog. He was not full-grown. The lady’s own dog, shiny, adult, well-fed, had an affronted look. I offered to take the stray. I regretted the offer the next morning. If people were always to cancel on the basis of the next day’s regrets, no contracts would go through. Three days later, the lady and both dogs arrived at our brownstone. When they got to the living room, they all sat down. “Now, think pleasant thoughts, Luke,” she said to the grieving dog. “We named him Luke,” she said to me. “Don’t you think he looks like a Luke? We have tried to get him to think pleasant thoughts. You must remember to medicate his ears.” Luke moved in. Ben, our photo editor from Georgia, said Luke looked like what is called a coon hound in the South. The great lady philosopher said, “Now, never mind. That’s an authentic dog.” Within a month of Luke’s arrival, and during the convalescence of his ears, he moved next door. I don’t know how he managed it. The designer who owns that house already had two Afghan hounds. He’s happy there. “Beards within beards,” the designer sometimes says of city life. “Well, never mind.”

Joel Seidington thought when he knew what a thing was called, he had it nailed. Or rather, a thing burned more brightly for a second when he held its name to it; then it was ash. Joel thought, in particular, that he understood other people’s pleasures when he had found the word for them. That’s a tango, he would say, with considerable satisfaction, to the girl he had brought to sit beside him at a prom or, years later, in a night club. That’s a lindy, now, and there’s a waltz. They would sit. He would smile. They would watch. He would name what went by. It was the same in Joel’s work, and in everything else with which he had to do. An elegant exposition, Joel would say, when one of his colleagues in the chemistry department had just set forth a breakthrough in a lifetime’s experiment. Or, Al has just birdied the sixth, that’s an inside straight Tim is holding, Martin’s daughter has taken up dressage. That’s the B-minor Mass, that’s a fado, they’ve been raising black angus, they’re called collard greens, actually, Kate and Martin still seem enamored of each other, don’t you think. This insistence on calling things something had little to do with true pedantry, an obsession for getting things right. Almost any formulation would suit him. It was a more primitive instinct, in some ways—as though to name a thing were to cut its nails and hair, and pocket them, and put the adversary in his power. In another way, the instinct was entirely modern: to impress on everything that passed his way Joel’s word for it, his personal bureaucratic rubber stamp.

Edith Piaf was in one of her many, absolutely last concerts at the Paris Olympia. She was singing “Je ne suis pas folle.” She ended the song, as always, with maniac laughter. On this particular evening, someone way back in the theater echoed that laughter. At first, it was thought to be a prankster, or at least a heckler. Then it was thought to be part of the performance. But when that insane laugh continued, bitter, chilling, on Edith Piaf’s precise note, like one tuning fork of madness responding to another, three ushers and six members of the audience escorted the laughing lady, with infinite courtesy, to the street.

Joel was the only man I ever knew whose car had a seat belt on only one side, his. There was something about him that made it unthinkable to laugh, or even to dislike him after all. In my first year of graduate school, I found myself, for instance, in Joel’s car, for what he called a rallye at his motor club. Whatever I thought he meant, it never occurred to me that Joel was going to drive in it. The race turned out to be as much for mileage as for speed. Fifteen points on the map were to be driven to in any order. The car that reached all fifteen points the fastest was to be one sort of winner. The other winner would be the car that reached them all by travelling the fewest miles. At the end, the judges would decide between these winners for the trophy. I did not understand what other standards would apply. Also, I cannot read maps; my sense of direction is so poor and unstable that maps somehow make it worse. They bring on confusions not only of east-west, north-south, but also of left and right. Joel, who had no way of knowing that, explained the race to me, told me to navigate, handed me the map, fastened his seat belt, and drove. We never saw any of the other cars again. We reached the first point in three hours, the second never. All through the afternoon and into the evening, Joel, pale, would say to me, from time to time, in a flat, strained voice, which had its gallantry, “It’s all right. I’m not competitive.”