Speedboat (17 page)

We went skiing. We had not gone in years. We drove for hours through a blizzard, in the car of the natural athletes—jumpers on trampolines on Mondays, squash players and ice skaters on other week nights, and just to top the note of general health, players of string quartets on Thursday afternoons. The athletes were impatient with the snow that slowed the driving. They approached a cliff en route and climbed it, in an interim show of fitness. We barely followed. It was ice. Then the athletes whooped, dived and slid headfirst down the cliff. It was steep. The athletes seemed invigorated. They drove on. When they reached the ski hut, everybody put on snowshoes. After ten steps, I thought I might not make it. Skiing was worse. With great effort, I maintained a slow and trembling snowplow recalled from childhood, side to side, graceless, across the mountain, worried by passing schussers, cold. “It won’t hurt you, you know,” one of the athletes said, as though he were imparting useful information, “to point your skis downhill.”

Downhill. One of the President’s closest friends was interviewed, at length, on television. He repeatedly spoke of the President as a witty man. He stressed the wonderful sense of humor of this President. The interviewer asked him for an example. The President’s friend demurred. The interviewer suggested that the friend could surely think of one instance of it. The friend, beginning to smile, declined. The interviewer pressed for just a single example, just one remembered time. The President’s friend was beginning to suppress what was obviously great mirth, as he started on this anecdote:

The President, and this friend, and another friend were on an island. “And we had,” the friend said, “this pair of rubber legs, you know?” He said this as though everyone had a pair of rubber legs. “This pair of woman’s rubber legs. And a wig, you know.” His amusement and anticipation were such by now that he could hardly hold his laughter back. “And the President, the President suggested that we put them”—here a laugh—“in the bed. So we put the wig on the pillow, and a blanket, you know, with just the rubber legs sticking out”—from here on, the laughter began to escape control—“and he told me to hide behind the curtain, so when Bob came in”—by now, he was laughing so hard he had to pause—“I was hiding behind the curtain. And he showed Bob the bedroom, and the bed had the wig and those rubber legs, you know. The President didn’t say anything about it. And Bob, well, I thought Bob was going to…” That was it. It was not just his laughter that indicated the anecdote was over. It was clear that, whatever he had thought Bob was going to, the President’s friend’s account of the President’s sense of humor seemed to him complete. Well, I voted for him. Not twice, but once. I did vote for him. I don’t see any reason why a President should be a witty man, or a man responsible for the assumptions of his closest friends about his wit. He’s out, as Manuel said, “Mr. Nixon has go out.” He’s not at his desk. He’s in a meeting. We worked for that, too. And that sort of anecdote doesn’t come into it at all. It was just the exoticism I was not prepared for. The most natural thing in the world, a pair of rubber legs.

A tall man was beginning a Tiny Tim sort of grateful frenzy—covering his ears, and shaking his head and saying, shrilly, often, how wonderful to him everybody was, how wonderful. Once, at a Christmas party on Park Avenue, when somebody was reading, beautifully, aloud from Dickens, I began to giggle, uncontrollably. It was that classic Tiny Tim and his damn crutch. I have always thought of the other, singing Tiny Tim as serious. Elva Miller, Frances Foster Jenkins, but Tiny Tim especially—being somehow
bent
to play out the American freak triumphant, to sing in falsetto about tulips, when what he longs to do, knows how to do, does seriously, is sing in exact imitation of 78 r.p.m. records, complete with scratches, old forgotten songs, in exact imitation of the voices of the dead. There he was, then, Tiny Tim, on the talk shows, in no sense a comedian but a loser meant to win it for the losers. The underside, a fifties person. Or rather, contra-fifties, in his peculiar way. For years now, there have been other, sounder contra-fifties people. Against all that modesty, domestication, niceness—Joe Namath, Bobby Fischer, Mark Spitz, Jimmy Connors, Bobby Riggs, Muhammad Ali. For the ladies, well, for the ladies, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Diane Arbus, Janis Joplin, Anne Sexton, and, after all on another racetrack, Ruffian.

All those unendearing braggarts and, on the distaff side, the suicides. Books about Ali. Ten years earlier, the preoccupation with Monroe. But there was a day, or there came, as Sam Dash would say, a time, when an actual Evel Knievel metaphor appeared—in an event that was inconsequential, small. The proposition was deep. It virtually spun. People were invited to see somebody ride his motorcycle over a canyon gap. That was what it was said they had been invited to pay to see. An early truth of the matter was this: it could not be done. The performer and his sponsors knew what he was going to do. The people who paid their admission knew what they were coming to see. By the end, the morally spinning proposition was this: when, by some miscalculation, the motorcyclist was actually exposed to a danger which he had not foreseen, when his parachutes almost failed so that he nearly did get killed (not, it is true, in a manner that had anything to do with the alleged hazards of his ride, but rather by being slammed by his parachutes into the sides of cliffs), when, in short, the escape procedure became the menace, were the members of the audience entitled to feel cheated in any way. They had paid to see him die. He had arranged to escape unharmed. There was nothing of the old-style prestidigitator-understanding in this thing. In their separate ways, neither party ever seriously entertained any notion that the motorcycle could rocket successfully over that canyon gap. What did, then, occur; what was the event? A performer and an audience conspired that someone should be misled. The performer intended a motorized parachute jump. The audience paid to see a suicide. No fifties teamwork or nice-guy qualities in it anywhere. Nothing went according to plan. The question was who was misled, whom were they conspiring to mislead? Why, history. For a perfect moment it was like almost every other event in public life.

On the shuttle from Washington to New York, I started to take a seat in the first row. All passengers except the few who think that, in case of a crash, the tail section will be spared try to sit in forward rows, in order to save time in getting off. A stewardess said the first three rows on this flight were reserved. We all, resignedly, moved further back. One meek-looking man, however, balked, protested, said that this time they had gone too far. He knew, he said, they knew, everyone knew that federal law forbids reserving seats on shuttle flights. He would insist, he would notify, he would denounce. In fact, under the rule of first come first served, he would sit down. A stewardess, meanwhile, was gently herding him to the fourth row. A steward, looking young, and blond and fit, said the seats had been reserved for reasons of security. The ranting man demanded to know for whom. The steward said, for reasons of security, he could not tell their names. The rant had subsided to a grumble that passengers had at least a right, a perfect right to know the names of any celebrities they were being put through this absurd outrage for, when a group came aboard and sat down in those seats. Among them, laughing, with a black patch across his eye, was a passenger who would cause any other passenger in the world to recognize a problem of security.

An extremely old, infirm and doddering lady, carrying an enormous bag, part wicker and part canvas, had meanwhile quietly taken an aisle seat in the first row. She sat, staring straight ahead and trembling, apparently unaware that her presence was now the subject of discussion, in at least two languages, throughout the plane. A man in the new group, who was himself carrying a large canvas parcel, whispered a while with two men in the third row and then approached the lady, with the evident intention of asking her to move. He stopped, shaking his head. He couldn’t do it. He walked back, to a seat in the fourth row. Passengers of all sorts and races were still coming aboard. The whole aircraft scrutinized them, for evidences of fanaticism.

The steward, a stewardess and the co-pilot were now whispering. Just before takeoff, when the plane was full, the stewardess bent over the old lady, trying to get her to part, at least, with that enormous bag. The lady sat, at first, not hearing, trembling. Then she said, “My crackers, inside. I am going to want.” As the plane started down the runway, the lady rummaged and found her crackers. The bag was examined, discreetly, and put away. We took off. Halfway to New York, she ate her crackers. Then, surprisingly, she got up and began to wander toward the rear. After a few steps, she went back to her seat, beckoned to a stewardess, and began to mumble for a while. The stewardess elicited the information that the lady’s son was a famous journalist, that she had recognized the renowned man in the seat behind her, that her son would not believe that she had been on the same flight with such a person, that her best friend, who was in any case at times these days quite senile, would not believe it either, that in sum she would like that man’s autograph. There were consultations. Then she got it. Then she had no place to put it. She required her bag. There was another ripple of apprehension that she might be, after all, the world’s most improbable terrorist, with a weapon hidden, after all, in that enormous bag. She spent the rest of the flight, though, staring, doddering, holding on to the bag by its string.

The sign that Manley Dubois had entered a woman’s life might be her collection of Billie Holiday records. Women confided in Manley Dubois. They described him as the only man they could trust. There is a high edge of ill temper in vain women which no other women and, among men, only a self-parodying category of homosexuals permit themselves. The edge is common in women who have been beautiful since birth, or think they have; it also exists in women of power in the arts. Such women—and extremely gentle women—have confidences. Everyone has secrets. Most women have shames or sins or crimes. But confidences, apart from the lives of schoolgirls, belong to women of timidity or power. It was these that Manley encouraged to share their grief, their blues, their sense of life and earth, with him, through any singer one could love. At lunch, or of an evening
à deux,
in that tipsy intimacy which was his special note, Manley often comforted the woman who was confiding in him at the moment with the secrets of the woman who had confided in him the evening before. Dubois was a writer, who had played a great part in the creation of the particular society in which he moved. People in a confessional frame of mind rarely drew the obvious inference. Or perhaps they simply would not be deterred. When he finally came to write about it, it turned out, strangely, that he had never understood his material at all.

One night last week, a lady from public broadcasting called. I had been watching
Medical Center.
A girl who would require open heart surgery was in love with a young man who had just had his appendix removed. He was retarded. He was in love with her, too, over the objections of his sister, who was possessive about him and hurt his feelings a lot. The lady from public broadcasting asked whether I would like to take part in a symposium on Politics and the Media. I said I couldn’t. She asked where she could reach Jim. I said I thought at the office. She asked whether I thought Jim would like to participate in a symposium on Law and the Media. I said I didn’t know. Then, she said, “Hey. Are you watching
Medical Center
?” I said I was. It turned out she had been watching it too. We talked awhile longer. She asked if I ever listened to radio. I said I did. “Well,” she said, “after we finish our marathon reading of Trollope and Proust, we’re going to move right into the Federalist Papers.” She laughed. She asked whether I would like to participate in a symposium they were having on the female orgasm in fiction. I said, thanks but no. She asked if I could suggest somebody. They had five people; they needed one more. I said I couldn’t think of anybody. Could I suggest any novels, though, besides the ones they had already thought of. I said I couldn’t think of any besides the ones they must have thought of,
Ulysses
, D.H. Lawrence. She said, And Mrs. Dalloway. I said, Mrs.
Dall
oway?

For weeks, I had been stalking the prowler. He stood, late most nights, just inside the glass outer door of the house, in the hallway, fumbling with the doorknob of the secondhand dress shop, which is on our ground floor. He just stood there, fumbling and smoking many cigarettes. I could see him from the sidewalk. When he saw me, he would leave, brushing by me and muttering. At other times, when he didn’t notice me, I would watch him. Some nights, I thought of locking the glass outer door while he was in there, and holding it locked until someone came and caught him; I could not quite imagine, though, how that would end. Last month, I really did catch him. I had been out to dinner, which I left early, in order not to get drunk. It was on Fifth Avenue. I found a cab. An elderly gentleman, who had left the dinner too, got in beside me. He said it was not safe, after dark in this city, for a lady to take a cab home alone. He dropped me at my door. He said we ought to have lunch, please to call him. He went off in the cab, not having noticed the prowler inside the glass door. I hadn’t noticed him either, until then. The prowler, smoking, fumbling, didn’t notice me at all.

I walked a few steps away along the sidewalk. There was nobody else around except one young, cheerful man walking toward me. “Excuse me,” I said. “I live two houses from here. There’s a prowler inside the doorway, in the hall.” The young man walked back. He looked in through the glass door. “I see there is,” he said. “I’ll walk you in if you like. If he isn’t armed, I can take him.” I said, No, thanks. “I practically know him. This time I’d like to call the police. I’ll try that pay phone at the corner.” He said, “I’ll walk you over. Just dial 911. 411’s information. I’ll walk on this side.” We passed a few people on the way to the corner. The man walking with me suddenly shouted, “Phil. Hey, Phil. Nice to see you.” He shook the hand of a bearded man who had just crossed the street. They were delighted to have met. Another friend of Phil’s crossed the street then. There were introductions. Phil offered me a dime for the pay phone. I used it. I called the police. I gave Phil his dime back. We shook hands. They went off. My original friend had gone back to stand outside the glass door of my building. When a police car pulled up, he said, “Goodbye. Take care.” I said, “Thanks.” He went away. More squad cars arrived. Two policemen went into the building. Another squad car. I was now standing with six policemen at the curb. A slightly drunk, kind and friendly-looking man walked to us, and asked whether I was all right and whether I had a boyfriend. I said I had. He said, “Sure?” I said, “Absolutely.” I pointed to one of the policemen. “O.K., sweetheart,” the drunk man said, and walked away. It occurred to me, and I am almost certain, that he thought he was coming to the aid of someone alone, being arrested by six men in uniform, when, after all, it was I who called the police.