Speedboat (19 page)

The whole courtroom is filled with judges. Each one presides. Perhaps there will be a defendant today, although we are not sure. Scholars and intellectuals make bad jurors, I believe. Their attention span is short. They get bored with the point. They overvalue the original. A hunting dog is not an intellectual. There is a mystery in lawyers’ expressions. False and misleading statements, for instance. Always together. False and misleading. Can’t understand what the “misleading” is doing there. It’s always there. And I’ve found, I think, the strongest “or” in language anywhere. It’s the lawyers’ phrase: as he then well knew or should have known. Well knew or should have known. The strongest or.

Travelers by jet, like subway commuters, tend to arrive on board at the exact last minute. Intercity bus riders take their seats with lots of time to spare. I was the last, in fact the only, passenger on a special late-night bus from Miami to Key Biscayne. “Sister, be calm,” the driver said, as he drove through the darkness. “Jesus is up front here, with me.” One of those, I thought. The ride from Miami Beach to Key Biscayne has a drawbridge in it. The ride is long. “Are you nervous?” the driver went on. “You must be from New York.” I said nothing. He said, “Yes.” I said, “Yes.” A long silence. He repeated, “Yes.” He suddenly turned in his seat and offered me a battered red book. “Turn to page 324,” he said. There seemed no reason not to. I took the book and turned to page 324. “Read it aloud,” he said. What the hell, I thought. It wasn’t dark. I read aloud, what might have been a hymn. When the driver said the first few lines along with me, I thought it was because he knew them by heart. But it was clear he was dissatisfied; I was doing something wrong. I started reading lines, and pausing. He would say the next lines, in the pauses. It turned out that we were meant to read responsively. We did that page. I gave him back his book. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I have a glorious future. In this life or in the next, it doesn’t matter.” Pause. “Yes.” He asked why I didn’t go to church, or read the Bible, or learn to untamp the spiritual power. “Do you pray?” he asked. I said, sometimes. We drove a long time. “I pray twenty-four hours a day,” he said. When we had driven quite a lot further, he said, “Yes.” Then his voice fell. “Something tells me,” he said, “that we have missed our exit.” He turned the bus, crossed the divider and found the way.

“I’ve been doing tunes. I’ve been doing melodies. I’ve gone back to it,” the kind composer said. “After doing atonal music for twenty years.” I asked him what the equivalent of staleness to the point of witlessness in his field was, or whether, in music, such a thing exists. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Pitch fatigue.”

T
HE BOAT
was old. The food was boiled. The berths were not sound. The passage took more than a week. The class in all cabins, on all decks, was tourist class. On the ninth day out of New York, the night before Cobh, there was, near the engine room, a talent show. A girl from Briarcliff tap-danced to a hymn. Three boys from Tufts played “Aloha-Oe” with forks on water glasses filled to various heights. A couple, returning to Bavaria after twenty years, sang “Du, du liegst mir am Herzen” seven times. A clerk from Albany did imitations, turning his back to the audience to compose his face before each one. A Scoutmaster from Tenafly rode his unicycle around the floor. The Bavarian couple’s daughter, having been at first reluctant to perform, sang an operatic German favorite, which translated, turned out to be “Fritz, Rejoice! Fritz, Rejoice! Tomorrow We Are Having Celery Salad.” And then an Indian student from McGill, who had boarded the ship at Montreal, slowly, deliberately wound a turban around his head. That was it. He did not win the prize—a pastoral scene in marzipan—but he gave one to think what talent is. Such an interesting conception of it did not come my way again until, years later, in a trench in the Sinai, an Israeli soldier, born in Yemen, chewed up and swallowed a razor blade to impress Yael Dayan.

That year, a Fulbright to Paris had somehow found his way to a band of street fighters in Budapest. A Florence Fulbright had died with a party of tourists he had been leading through the desert in Libya. The Americans were not staying put. Students on grants abroad lost permission to receive their checks by mail. Showing up to be paid kept them, once a month at least, in place. Back home, a group of students, driving a car across the country for its owner, whom they did not know (an agency made the transaction), sped for hours through the desert. It was nearly sundown. They had seen no other cars since noon. Then, in the distance, with the setting red sun just behind it, they saw a car, at the world’s edge, coming toward them. They laughed and kept driving. For several minutes, the two cars raced in their lanes toward each other. Drivers and passengers began to smile and wave across the desert. A few more seconds—laughing, shouting, waving—the two cars collided. There were twelve occupants in all, and none were dead when it was over. A seventeen-year-old boy regained consciousness in the air, caught and sustained by telephone wires. He was too startled to be scared. He climbed down the telephone pole rungs calmly. His arm was slightly broken. The others, only bruised, were scattered along several yards of highway. They picked themselves up gradually, looked at what remained of the two cars, shuddered, and sat down together.

The arthritic Chihuahua, with cast, glazed eyes, walked among the plates and glasses on the tablecloth. We were in a restaurant near the Banque de France. Madame Devereux was telling her experiences of the war. She had rolled bandages. She had suffered privations, inconveniences. She had endured reports of the conditions at the front. At first, word of the ghettos in Eastern Europe had caught her sympathies. But then she was appalled. They, she was told on high authority, had stolen all the doorknobs off the ghetto doors, and sold the knobs. They were such salesmen; she had been naïve. But when, as Monsieur Devereux had known they would, they turned around and sold the bandages, Madame could roll no more. She caught our eyes. “
N’est-ce pas, mon petit,
” she said, stroking a tufted bald spot behind her Chihuahua’s ear. He wheezed and stretched. A wineglass overturned. “
N’est-ce pas, mon petit, qu’ils allaient trop loin.
” It was not one of us who overturned the glass. It was the dog. We were trying so hard. Maybe it was our French we were uncertain of.

We had lined up. We had crossed the Atlantic on a small, old boat of the French line called the
Flandre,
which we called the Flounder—partly for the joke but mainly to avoid in each other’s presence that attempt to pronounce the French
r,
which seemed of such importance to us then. We had lined up for the
carte de séjour
and the identity card, for student accreditation and for the certificate of equivalence to our American degrees. Having stood in one line long enough to reach the bureaucrat whose job it was to issue one document, we learned that the prerequisite for it was another. At the end of the line for this other, we learned from its bureaucrat that he could not issue his document without evidence that we had already obtained the first, or a third, perhaps others or both. It was the fall of 1961. French students—and, for all we knew, students of every other nationality—were already burning American flags in the Sorbonne courtyard, on behalf, they said, of Cuba. It was clear they hated us. We stood. We smiled. We had gone abroad with the American smile. We were very serious. Only the least serious of us roamed the streets at night, chanting “
La Paix en Algérie
” with one student crowd, or “
Algérie Française
” with another, until the two groups filled the boulevards, converged, and, with the help of massed policemen swinging weighted capes, rioted. On the same night the Marquis de Cuevas was borne by litter to a performance of ballet at the Opera, where he was strewn with rose petals, Bonbon Wechsler of Santa Barbara, who had already acquired a small Moroccan boyfriend and was chanting with him to improve her French, lost track of the boyfriend, and, being carried along by the demonstration, at its edge, was accidentally pushed through the window of a bookshop on the Rue Bonaparte, where she nearly bled to death among the old, incomplete sets of tarot cards. The complete sets had been bought up by American students of
The Waste Land
right after the war.

“Far from it,” the man who cleans up this office after hours keeps muttering to himself. “Far from it. Far from it.”

The most important line, the longest and the most embittered, was the line for the student restaurants. Some people stood in it for forty-six straight hours. The restaurant card required that all other cards and documents be in order. Quite often, an American or other foreign student would arrive with his completed file at the desk and be met with the stare, the shrug, and look of perfect insolence which characterizes, everywhere, the bureaucrat who likes his power to obstruct. Many students wept. Most of them persisted, with that flat determination to understand the country and the language which took them in so many different ways. In no other language, for instance—certainly not our own—were we so improbably familiar with the vocabulary of churches, with naves, Flamboyant Gothic arches, apses, capitals, transepts; or with the words of medieval hymns and songs of courtly love. We spoke of the quality of the blue in the stained-glass windows of Chartres, which modern science had not been able to reproduce, as though the medieval craftsman who had produced it were a colleague. He had, we knew, billed his diocese for the purchase of sapphires ground up to create that color. Modern science had, at least, established that sapphires played no part in its composition at all. It was our first, most scholarly appreciation of the padded expense account.

The fashion models walked down the ramp, surveyed the audience with utter, unamused contempt, turned, sauntered out. For some reason, this induced the lady customers to buy. Within a year, convinced of many European things and yet unalterably American, we all went home.

We are thirty-five. Some of us are gray. We all do situps or something to keep fit. I myself wear bifocals. Since I am not yet used to wearing specs at all, I tend to underestimate the distance required, for instance, for kisses on the cheek. If the other person wears glasses, too, we are likely to have a brushing clack of frames. We have had some drunks, an occasional psychotic break, eleven divorces, one autistic child, six abortions, two unanticipated homosexuals, several affairs of the sort that are lifelong and quiet and sad, one drowning, two cases of serious illness, one hatred each, no crimes. No crimes is no small thing. We might have run over somebody in high school and left the scene. Before that, we might have stopped putting pennies on tracks to be bent by trains, and tried to hitch rides on freight cars just as they began to move. We were always daring each other to do that. It would not have been a crime, of course. But it would have taken us over that edge of irreversible violence where, whether in a pattern of years or in the flicker of an oversight, crime begins.

“Far from it. Far from it,” he is muttering to himself again.

Every child, naturally, who was not a sissy swam. In lakes, and seas, and heavily chlorinated pools, they earned their certificates, Beginners, Intermediate, Advanced, Junior Life Saving, Senior Life Saving—all the New England summer accreditations of the healthy child. There has been, always, the preoccupation of people of our age and class with documents: degrees, cards, certifications, records, licenses. One got them the year one became of age to get them. Of age. People who missed their proper year often remained afraid of swimming, driving, hunting, or whatever, all their lives. The accreditations all began, though, in the water: at five, the dog paddle, and at twelve, the dive to break the death grip of some giant instructor, in order to tow him, by means of the chin carry, the hair carry, the cross-chest carry, whatever other carry, home. By now, there have been many years of accepted assurances that the water’s fine—quite warm, actually—once you get into it; many years’ insane passings on of such an assurance. And here we all are. All that is, except Barney, whose sailboat overturned two years ago last November. It is probable that he had been drinking. When Jim and I took him to dinner the preceding August, he said he was bored with his job.

“Now, class. Now, seniors,” the high school principal said, interrupting the Pledge. “It’s one nation. Under Gawd. Indivisible. Some of you are saying under Gahd. In fact, most of you. What are the parents going to think? What are your teachers going to think? What are the visitors from Hartford going to think? This is very important. Many of you are college bound. Now say with me, please. Gawd. Again. Gawd.
Un
der Gawd.
In
divisible. Good. Now let’s resume. Give it the feeling you’re going to give it on graduation day.” Her name was Miss Crosby. Crawsby, not Crahsby. We let it pass.

From her earliest childhood, Jametta Anna Scozzafava had mysterious sources of information about what holiday it was. No school tomorrow, she would say—often quite late for a small child to be up on a cold evening: Scragg Day, or Teachers’ Records Day, Moss Day, State Commemoration Day, or High School Bus Repairs. Mysteriously, these holidays did exist, although few of them recurred from year to year. Jametta also knew holiday nights: Chalk Night, Garbage Night, Crab Night—and, I think, Teachers’ Records Night, although I am not sure. Chalk Night and Garbage Night were clear enough. I never knew what were the right observances for Crab Night and, one year, for Seven Moon. From third grade on, Jametta spent most of her classroom hours either whispering with Moose Natale, or absent altogether with the Passcard. In her senior year, however, Jametta sat in front of one Alvin Benso, in the first row of Miss Keane’s English class. We were doing our required Shakespeare play. The state seemed to require of its students one half year of world history, Mesopotamia to the present; one half year of American history, Jamestown to the present; one solid year of Biology, in which one earthworm and one frog must be dissected; and, somewhere in four years of English classes, a Shakespeare play. Miss Keane’s method of teaching Shakespeare was to assign parts for reading by row, characters in order of appearance: first seat, first row, first part, and so on along the rows. The class was doing
The Merchant of Venice
, Miss Keane’s favorite. Miss Keane had done her disquisition about Shylock—a villain she found comparable, and perhaps even related, to all the many traitors in our own time, our own country, brainwashing our boys abroad, flashing subliminal messages on television, stealthily approaching, if they did not already have, our minds. Miss Keane had subsided. The reading started. Jametta was Portia. It fell to Alvin to read Lorenzo. “Lorenzo Benso!” Jametta shouted. “Lorenzo Benso!” swept the classroom. It was our first political slogan, and the witticism of Jametta’s academic life.