Speedboat (18 page)

Somebody was nudging my tray along the rail at the museum cafeteria. I was trying to keep my tray from bumping the tray ahead. I held my fingers firmly on the tray top, hooked my thumbs underneath the steel bar. The pressure of the nudging tray increased. I gave in to the superior determination. Doubtless, the tray pusher had had an awful day. I let go. My tray slid into the next tray, which slid into the next, which crashed into another. At the cashier’s corner, there was a pileup. Tea bags, jello, trays all over everything.

Our defense correspondent used to be so well informed that his pieces made only ordinary sense to readers of the paper; to members of what is called the intelligence community they made such perfect sense that agencies and weapons analysts did not simply wonder what he might be up to; they were scared. It was not at all clear what they were going to do about it. They themselves did not expect to be done away with at the end of their working days or even to enter anonymous retirement; they expected to write thrillers during their careers and memoirs after. But they could not believe, on the basis of his columns, that the over-informed correspondent, far from being any sort of clandestine professional, was that rarity, a truly industrious reporter, doing a thorough job. Our editors didn’t understand it, either. He was, finally, transferred away from defense matters. The correspondent, a modest man and a steady drinker, thought his transfer had to do with some deficiency in his writing style. He already admired what were widely thought to be the great reporters. His early, happiest days in journalism had been as a reporter for his father’s failing rural paper. He had written a regular column called “Wanderings in Rural Penn.” His first report had concerned an oak tree, which appeared to have the largest girth of any in Penn County. Immediately, he had received letters from county readers who claimed to have seen wider local oaks. He had gone to measure; he had been fair. He had written columns about the largest egg yolk in the county, and the smallest, and the egg that contained the largest number of yolks. He had traveled around the county, solemnly breaking eggs to make certain just how many yolks they did contain. His column had inspired, always, a brisk and concerned correspondence. The paper’s circulation improved. His father raised his salary. Those were his best years. When, so many years later, he was transferred to the culture desk, he knew that he was through.

It certainly does not do to have too low a threshold for being insulted. Even the affectionate insult, or the compliment with any sort of spin on it, can reverberate in memory in awful ways. “I love your little fat legs,” Paul said to Joanne. He had watched her walking toward him on the beach. He was so in love with her that, although he meant it, he may not even have heard what he said, exactly. She never forgave him. She slept with him for another year and then married his enemy and rival, the only man Paul had ever hated in the world. “You have beautiful eyes and lovely hands,” Leroy said to Jane, “and when you smile, to me you’re beautiful.” She never forgave him, either. She married him. Their life together was hell for fifty years. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re lovely?” is, of necessity, a minefield. There is no conceivable proper answer. It all ends in disaster anyway.

The lady was not just a vegetarian; she had many theories, about food, and the elements around one, about smells. The smell of x-rays, the smell of diets of one sort and another. She spoke a lot of the
va et viens
of the elements, and the foods one ate. She pointed out she had heard that we smell badly to the Japanese. She interrupted her discourse for a moment, paused, and then turned to the sculptor beside her. “Do we smell badly to you, Mr. Omura?” she said.

Contrary to the lore of restaurants and hotel schools, I find the women I know do tip reasonably and drink a lot. They are all educated women, though—in that age group which learned its courtesies from its own mothers; its loves from Paolo and Francesca, Bronte, Joyce, and even O’Hara; and all the solid enthusiasms in its cast of mind from what we used to emphasize were not anthologies, textbooks, or other secondary works, but from originals, the works themselves. Our ambitions were, nonetheless, what those of any sensible group of women at that time, perhaps at any modern time, ought to have been: to become safe and successful; to marry someone safe and successful; to have for our children some sort of worldly safety and success. From time to time, however, there is something, I don’t know, wistful, about how it has turned out. Not just Brecht’s great ship of the eight sails and the fifty cannon. The other ships. Perhaps the tall ships, the fleet, the craft, the other ships that don’t come in.

It is not at all self-evident what boredom is. It implies, for example, an idea of duration. It would be crazy to say, For three seconds there, I was bored. It implies indifference but, at the same time, requires a degree of attention. One cannot properly be said to be bored by anything one has not noticed, or in a coma, or asleep. But this I know, or think I know, that idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is no accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time. They flourish in a single region of the mind. Embarrassment, though, on the scale of things to feel, is trivial. It does not even constitute—as do humiliation, envy, guilt—an actual emotion, a condition of the soul. Its command of the attention is absolute. Someone who needs and does not have a handkerchief is likely to be as preoccupied as someone scared to death. Most of the safest form in this is established by form, by sameness, rote. For others, the stereotyped is most embarrassing. It is by no means clear on which side of this question humor is. A surprise can be comic, as can a certainty. Leaving humor out of it, there exists embarrassment pure. Alas.

We had ordered martinis, straight up, with a twist of lemon. The waitress had brought martinis with olives. This had the force of an
éclaircissement
. “Not exactly a twist of lemon,” I said when she had left. “No,” Jim said, “it isn’t.” That was it. I have known Jim, after all, a long time. I still make these inane attempts to have a conversation. Once, in a call from Natchez, Jim uncharacteristically interrupted a memo he was reading to me, to say, “Hello, are you there?” I could understand what had happened. “Just because I haven’t interrupted you,” I said, “you think I died.”

I have lived alone now, I think, as long as anybody who is not a hermit or a kook or a spinster who keeps cats. Not entirely alone, but mostly—very far from intermittently. Jim, for instance, when he stays here, makes his telephone calls on his credit card. Rarely, somebody has called him here, collect. The last time was months ago. We were asleep. He was on the phone a long time. Jim didn’t say much. He hardly ever says much. I wonder what we would ever talk about if there were no news. A lot of people depend on him, really. And Joe, the candidate’s deputy, seems to count on us both, separately, without any idea that we even see each other, except through him, Joe. There have been some odd results. Jim, having come in from New Orleans or Chicago, uses his credit card to call his office, where there is always somebody late at night. Message from Joe. Please call. I, having gone to meet Jim at the airport, call my answering service. Message from Joe. Please call. “You first, or me first?” Jim says. “You, I think,” I say. Jim fixes drinks and brings them to the bedroom. “Maybe we ought to wait till morning,” he says. We consider it. He looks at his watch. He takes out his credit card, sits on the bed, and dials.

The maternity ward was separated from the intensive-care ward by a small corridor in which there was a single pay phone. There were also two waiting rooms, one with a painted shingle reading DADS, the other with a bronze plaque, MEDITATION ROOM. “Dads” had a television set. “Meditation Room” had two burners and a coffee pot. The families of the patients wandered freely between them, for coffee or conversation or, at crowded hours, space. A senile friend of an intensive-care patient kept calling in, at all hours, on the pay phone. He wasn’t, it turned out, even a close friend. His persistence and his desperation were such that if we did not pick up the phone and talk to him sometimes, he would call the patient’s family or even the nurses in the ward, direct. Since everyone was always bringing chocolates to the nurses in intensive care, the doctors coming out of there were always chewing something.

“Of course I haven’t confused you with somebody else. Either it was you, or I made it up.”

The operative thing about the parties was that everyone who was asked did actually go to them and that the food and drink were of an awfulness, and also scarcity, that would embarrass New York dropouts in a loft. The food was always served so late that the hard liquor, such as it was, had run out. The dishes that were meant to be hot were never quite as warm as those that were meant to be chilled. There were not only, for the intrepid, no seconds of anything, there was not enough to go around. This meant that everyone—ambassadors, actresses, bishops, fashionable congressmen, writers, professors and civic-minded nuns—pushed, quite violently pushed, in the direction of the food. When the worst was over, the hostesses were, for some reason, always overwhelmed with compliments. They accepted these graciously. Then, they would begin to marvel about how inexpensively it had all been put together, how little bother or money it had cost. They expected the guests to marvel over this with them, and the guests did marvel. All of us.

What we were doing in Washington was working for a House select committee on private and institutional corruption. It changes its name every twelve years or so, but that’s what it is. At the staff offices, we had jobs as consultants, on a temporary basis, at a hundred dollars a day. We were paid thirty-five dollars more, for living expenses, on days we were actually down there, plus fares to and from LaGuardia, O’Hare, or wherever we were from. A pretty town, Washington, not too large. None of us had ever spent much time there before. At dawn, the joggers in sweat suits would be out, whatever the weather, as would the senator and his procurer, in their sports car with the top down; joggers, senator, procurer, all pale and hungover, would wave. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, our people worked straight through the night. Thirteen secretaries, all night, on high stools in a warehouse, assembling notebooks. “Page 32, Statement 28, Tab 28.2,” the head secretary would call out, like a croupier. Each secretary, with three notebooks on a high table before her, would put a Xeroxed loose-leaf page from the stacks on the floor beside her in all three. What they worked on then, these secretaries, calmly, cheerfully, with their smoker’s laugh and their smoker’s cough, were consoles. They sat like E. Power Biggs at their keyboards, typing words that lit up in neon, at each separate console, on a sort of TV screen. People would rush in and dictate changes in the neon paragraphs. When the page on the screen was edited and complete, the secretary would push a button. While she drank coffee, and we all stood there, drinking coffee, too, and watching, the screen would activate the typewriter and the keys would type, one line from left to right, the next from right to left, in alternation to the bottom of the page. For six months, the fact that the machines could type every other line from right to left, thereby saving the time that would be occupied by returning to the left-hand margin, fascinated everybody. When the neon had finished dictating its last line, the secretary would blank it out, erase the machine’s memory of it, and begin another page. By shortly after ten a.m., most of the town’s pallor is gone. Most committees are in session. The tired, driven bureaucrats of the night have ceded the place anyway to the men who are, at least nominally, in power; and these, communing with their hometowns or with the night officers at the remotest embassies, are busy exercising their prerogatives.

A much more gentle town, Washington, certainly, than New York, pretty in its flowers and the scale of its houses, although every street in the last years is being torn up. At the fine hotels, the Hay-Adams, the Sheraton, the Madison, people often sleep to the sound of iron scraping stone and jackhammers on macadam, whenever, for some reason, the work goes on in three shifts, overnight. At the cheaper hotels, like the Quality Inn near the station, the hotel doors, the outside doors, after midnight, are actually locked; people have to pound on the glass from the sidewalks to wake the night porters, who let them back into their hotels. Greg’s aunt was for years in love with an exiled African leader, who, being Catholic and already married, could not marry her. This tragic aunt had an equally tragic but more enterprising mother, very old, who had been in love with Russia—all of it. At the time of the Revolution, this lady’s thought had been for the English governesses of White Russian children. She had actually commandeered a train. With a confidence, for which she could subsequently find no rational grounds, that every English governess would go to her local railroad station and wait there, the lady took that train all across Russia, picking up English governesses, who were in fact waiting, along the way. Greg himself was on a story in Baghdad, at a time of public hangings and of violent, berserk crowds. At the most expensive hotel, rioters had surged through the lobbies and down corridors, screaming for vengeance, or, at least, for death. Rioters pounded on all the bedroom doors. Anyone who answered to the knock was murdered. Anyone who didn’t answer, whether out of fear, or sleepiness, or a habit of not answering when no bellboy had been summoned, was left alone. The aspect of a closed door seemed to check the crowd’s momentum; it passed on.

“Tie tac toe, two out of three?” the four-year-old said, sitting down beside us. Then he drew five bars across and four bars down. Jim redrew it for him. The boy considered. He said, “I see.”

The judge had quite a number of generous impulses. He gave himself full credit for each of them. He did not carry any of them out. As a result, he was often puzzled and aggrieved by the demands the people closest to him seemed to make upon him. Though he would be the last man in the world to ask for thanks, he could not understand why they were, on the whole, so damned ungrateful. His daughter, who was overweight, but for whom he felt considerable affection, seemed actually to fear him. When he found her reading the latest diet book, or doing calorie computations, he would point out to her that she was deluding herself: the problem was that she simply ate too much and exercised too little. When she avoided his eyes and, muttering denials, left the room, he would tell himself that she was at a difficult age. His moral vanity was great. When it was touched, he became dangerous. It is not at all uncommon for someone to arrive at a scene of brutality or injustice and, with a sympathetic murmur or heroic flourish, attack the victim. It happens all the time. It underlies the columns, for example, of Dr. Franzblau. But the particular consequence of his moral vanity was that when he did people an injury, he never forgave them. Never again.