Speedboat (14 page)

In almost every thriller, a point is reached when someone, usually calling from a phone booth, telephones with a vital piece of information, which he cannot divulge by phone. By the time the hero arrives at the place where they had arranged to meet, the caller is dead, or too near death to tell. There is never an explanation for the reluctance of the caller to impart his message in the first place. Certainly, the convention existed well before the age of the tape recorder and the wiretap. Not on the phone, in a spy or mystery story, has always been, in and of itself, sufficient to hold up the resolution of a case for a long, long time. This is particularly remarkable in the sense that when, at last, the hero is able to imagine, project, or piece together the message of the original caller, that message invariably consists of a very few words. Joe did it. Or, Not I. Or, The League. The trouble with islands is that such cases, of necessity, go unsolved there. When there is no phone.

The dyes from the paper factory were seeping downhill to the gelatin factory, creating blue, brown and even dappled jello, and serious litigation over water rights. That was two miles inland. On the hill directly above the port, the young shipowner, who loved the view over his flowers to the ocean, set sprinklers in the garden every morning. His neighbor downhill and to the right made various claims about this water: that it seeped down in such a way as to undermine the foundations of his house; that it cascaded down in such torrents that his dog had nearly drowned; that his children were threatened; that dog and children had already suffered colds and incurred psychological harm. These claims were set forth each day in long, elegantly composed and increasingly vituperative letters. Every evening, the young shipowner wrote his own elegant, but after a time witty and brief replies. Although the houses were not many yards apart, the correspondence was carried on by the regular post. When the postal employees joined in the island’s wave of general strikes, the letters were interrupted, as was everything.

Back here, the enmity began when the tenant on the third floor, an early riser, stole the
Times
of the tenant on the fifth. On weekdays, the third-floor tenant would acquire his paper honestly, along with his cigarettes, on the way to the school where he was a history teacher and guidance adviser to the senior class. He was a bachelor. On Saturday mornings, he would escort whoever had spent the night with him to her own place; or, if he had spent the night at her place, he would return alone. In either case, he would buy a paper on the way. On Sunday, however, and within a few months of the first occasion every single Sunday, he would steal his upstairs neighbor’s
Times.
The first theft had been, in a way, accidental. He had assumed, from the silence on the staircase all weekend, that the fifth-floor couple were away. He was wrong. The fifth-floor husband, having come down to the sidewalk, and found his newspaper missing, ranted all the way up the stairs to the fourth floor, where he paused for breath. I live on the fourth floor. The third-floor tenant, as he subsequently explained to me, thought this humorless of our neighbor. Some weeks, he stole the whole paper; some weeks, just the News of the Week in Review. I don’t think there is a reader of the Sunday
Times
in the world who does not, every Sunday, experience some anxiety that his News of the Week in Review section will be missing. The fifth-floor tenant was beside himself. It is possible that there will be murder, in the end.

She did not know the way. They had arrived for dinner in their separate cars, never having before, as it happened, met. They had drinks and dinner. When it was time to leave, the hostess, remarking that they both lived in the same neighboring town, and knowing Marge’s sense of direction to be poor, suggested that Joe lead the way back. So they drove through the night, he in his old Packard, she in her battered Ford. Along the curves of the back road, on the highway, on the dark back roads again, she maintained the distance between them perfectly. When a car passed her, and seemed about to stay behind him, she passed the car easily in her turn. Watching at intervals, for miles, through the rearview mirror, he saw her driving smoothly, keeping that steady distance; he had not needed to slow down. It turned him on.

Years ago, when we were not even the same people, years and a lot of separations ago, Aldo and I went to the particular bar in Venice where he and his friends had gone all one summer, when they were still boys, at boarding school. The bar was not crowded. Italian workingmen came in, had one quick drink, and left. There were only four bar stools. Aldo and I sat down. We ordered drinks. Aldo was certain the bartender recognized him, that he was holding back any sign of recognition until the regular customers were gone. Over our third drink, Aldo began to speak his Italian, of which he was proud then. After a time, the bartender, who turned out also to be the owner, did remember, or claimed to remember, the young Americans who had come to his bar so often, seven years ago. He called to a back room, to his two brothers, who came out and sat on the stools beside us. Aldo ordered Scotch all around. He was congratulated many times on his fluency in Italian. The brothers pronounced it incredible for one who had spent so short a time in Italy. He was, for a moment, hurt by the qualification. Then he took it to be a joke, and happily smiled. One more round of Scotch. Then, the bartender, with solemnity and in friendship, brought out the house brandy and treated us to a drink. The house brandy was greenish brown, with the texture of the filling in a many-year-old bonbon. It seemed, after all those drinks, not bad. It was also the particular house drink that Aldo remembered with such fondness. Seeing how happy the first glass seemed to make him, the brothers insisted that we drink several rounds of it.

Our
pensione
was extremely squalid. I have no memory of crossing Venice to return to it, although we did get there. The
pensione
was not on any canal. It is probable that we walked. We were the only transients. There were six permanent tenants, women, staying in the place. They were not young. They wore black. They sat, most of the time, in the dark parlor, which had stained, stuffed chairs on a floor of dirty linoleum. They discussed us. Sometimes they fell silent when we came in. Sometimes not. Often we heard them through the wall of our bedroom. I was certain, it only stood to reason, that they also heard us. Aldo said that was paranoid. If they heard us, that was their problem. He had to like the place. It was the one they had all stayed in that boarding-school summer. Or he thought it was. And if it wasn’t, it was certainly like it. Or near it, anyway. It wasn’t the sort of neighborhood you could forget. From the moment we first arrived, in any case, and gave the concierge, or proprietress, or whatever she was, our separate passports, and she hesitated, and then thought what she could charge and decided to admit us, it was clear that the six old Venetian women had a lot to talk about.

When we got back to the
pensione
from the bar with the house brandy, we went through the parlor to our room. We went to bed. Late that night, I woke up. Sick. Sicker than I had ever been in my life before, or have been since. There was a small sink in our room. Within a short time, I had exhausted the possibilities of this sink. The
pensione
had only one lavatory. Under somewhat better control, I managed to put on Aldo’s raincoat and go there, to be sick. Then, I went back to our room, tidied up, brushed my teeth at our sink, went to bed and passed out. When I woke up, just at dawn, I felt almost well. It seemed only right to check on the condition of that lavatory, though, before the other guests got up. Aldo was still asleep, I thought, but looked healthy. I found my own trench coat this time, and set out down the hall. Four of the women were in the doorways of their rooms; the other two sat in chairs they had put outside the lavatory door. They stared. They smiled. They clucked. It seemed somehow horrible. The lavatory was clean. I walked back to our room. The woman across the hallway nodded, cooed, made a cradling motion with her arms, and said, very slowly and distinctly in Italian, Perhaps he will marry you now. I smiled at her. I went into our room and shut the door.

Maybe it was a hangover. It was certainly the most wretched moment of my life. I got back into bed. Aldo moved, woke up, groaned. “I feel awful,” he said. I said I did too. The house brandy, I thought. He shook his head. He did look worrieder, sadder even, than I had ever seen him look. He said, “I don’t know whether I can tell you.” It was unlike him. For a minute, I thought he was leaving, then realized he wasn’t. “It’s only me,” I said. He said, “Well, you especially. I don’t know what you’ll think.” He asked me to look away. I shut my eyes. He coughed. He said, “I made love to you. While you were out cold.” Pause. I said, “No. I remember. I would have thought I was awake.” He said, “I don’t mean then. Later.” I didn’t say anything. He said, “Twice.” I waited. Silence. I said, “Well, I guess I missed it then.” He said I honestly didn’t have to be as nice as that about it. He clearly meant that. Miserable as I was for my own reasons, I could tell he did mean that, whatever it was. I said, “Well, I guess I don’t understand.” He said, “You don’t?” I said, “No.” He said, “Really?” I didn’t say anything. He coughed. He said, “Necrophilia.” So I was in despair because six fat women of Venice I would never see again thought I was pregnant by a man who did not want to marry me, and he was in despair because he thought he was a necrophiliac. Both despairs were genuine. It may be that we were retarded. We were younger. We were other people, anyway, in another world.

Some images yellow and dry out like parchment. Some casts of mind become obsolete. “And fold their tents like the Arabs, and silently steal away,” for instance, is a thoroughly dated idea. In its obituary of King Faisal, the
Times
mentioned, as an example of his modernism, the fact that in the 1930s he abolished slavery. As an example of his gift for poetry, there was the line, “See you. There be Arab.” Something lost in translation there, perhaps. Everywhere.

Three holidays. On New Year’s Eve in Zurich, it is customary to bring in a live and healthy piglet. Precisely at midnight, everyone kisses it on the snout. While this occasions what seems to be terror in the piglet, it is meant to bring people a year of luck. One year, my parents and I were, on a New Year’s Eve, in Zurich. We were having dinner in a hotel restaurant. The other guests, except for the Germans, had all been relatively restrained through dinner, although most people seemed to be drinking steadily. Shortly after eleven, there was, at all the tables, that awful and rising tension. It grew. People drank more. At one minute to twelve, a dignified old headwaiter dashed in through the doors of the kitchen. The piglet was struggling under his arm. At midnight, he began to hold it out to one guest after another. Nobody seemed to skip it. Some people shyly or desultorily pecked at it. Some people seemed actually reverent about it, as though they were praying or making a wish. Some of the young Swiss and Germans who were drunkest tried to turn the thing into an amorous joke. Distinguished-looking men tried to look as though they didn’t care one way or another about it. But everyone was kissing the snout of that struggling pig. My mother was worrying about germs, but very apparently worried. When the piglet got to her, she hesitated a moment, then kissed the tip of her finger and touched the piglet’s nose. That seemed to lighten other people’s quandaries. I just patted the piglet. A couple at the only table that came after ours just gave it a hug.

In a public school in a run-down section of Brooklyn, Mrs. Cavell, under a grant for special projects, was conducting her kindergarten civics class. “What are you?” she would say to her little people, right after the bell each weekday morning. “I’m free,” they had learned to say, as one. On a particularly cold, bleak morning of midwinter, Mrs. Cavell tried a variation. “Today, we are going to say it in our individual voices,” she said. “When I call on you, I want you to stand and say it proudly. All right. Jefferson Adams, what are you?” Jefferson Adams got it. “I’m free,” he replied. “Right. What are you, Franklin Atell?” “I’m free,” Franklin Atell said. Mary Lou Jones had to be asked to speak up, but then she said it firmly, “I’m free.” Up and down the rows of carved and gum-stuck desks in the pre-school classroom, the words rang out, but Mrs. Cavell, a good soul, who had taught for thirty years in Brooklyn, saw a look of somehow disquieting resolution on Billy Martin’s face. “What are you, Billy Martin?” Mrs. Cavell asked. “I am four,” he said.

The Piano. The rich grandmother was always giving her grandchildren presents which had to be put away until the children were old enough to care for them properly. On one birthday, the five-year-old was given his great-grandfather’s pocket watch; his twin sister was given an extremely fragile eighteenth-century doll. As a reward for giving up chewing gum, the seven-year-old—who had reached such an intensely tomboy phase that, although she was constantly on playing fields or in the trees, she refused to change out of a single set of clothes, or to permit them to be washed—was given a strand of pearls. For his graduation from grammar school, the twelve-year-old received shares in a utility. On other occasions, this grandmother bought expensive clothes or gold wristwatches, invariably in her own size, which she gave to the children with the suggestion that they grow into them. The other grandmother, who was poor, took the children to the five-and-ten and gave them things that could be put to immediate use. She was, perhaps unfairly, far the more popular grandparent of their early years. Twenty years passed.

At Christmas, in this country, as before in Germany, the family did not have a tree. Not being at all devout, however, and having grown over the years to a considerable number, including one great-grandmother and seven small children, the family had to make some accommodation to the season. This accommodation became increasingly festive and odd. Christmas was called Christmas, but it was celebrated on any day in December when the entire family could make it, could return conveniently from their separate places to the country house where the grandparents lived. This day seldom, any longer, fell on December 25th. Decorations were eclectic. Presents were placed, in fact, on and under the piano—an old Steinway grand that no one any longer played. Out of a vague conviction that the youngest children ought to be reminded that they were not really quite Christians, their grandmother yearly lighted candles on the eight-branched silver holders, which she had inherited from her own grandparents, and which were polished for whatever day was the designated Christmas of the year. The maid, however, a strong-minded Catholic, felt the occasion was too bleak with just those frail and flickering candles. Yearly, she placed more ribbons, tinsel, twigs, pine cones, and finally colored light bulbs on the piano and around its base. The year she put a painted wooden angel on top of the largest present on the piano, it was thought that she had gone too far. The angel was removed.