Speedboat (22 page)

“Harry,” the blonde said, waving her drink and putting out her cigarette, “do you realize you have made yourself into a person that one has to lie to?”

“Janine,” he said, “you know I’m very tired of your
aperçus?
”

What was mortifying was the limbo dancing. What was mortifying was the fat, hot, drunk, sunburned and flattered man at whom the calypso lyrics were directed. What was mortifying was the way his wife danced with the famous, tense, witless insult comedian. What was mortifying was the insinuating child who recited “Horatio at the Bridge” in its entirety. “Sweetie,” the blonde screamed from the dance floor to her adolescent grandson, “isn’t this fun?”

I never liked him, and now he is dead. Perhaps I should wish that I had liked him better. But I do not wish it. And I did not like him. I was not asked, which is just as well. What he was, was asleep. So they should not have buried him. Hindsight is easy. Mistakes will happen. It was one of a series of errors that marked his whole life. Not the last error, it now seems. His will is under litigation. The penultimate error, perhaps.

It was his misfortune to die during the strike of the Cemetery Workers and Greens Attendants Union—oddly enough, in this city, Local 365. I covered the meeting at which the strike ended. The men had not tended a grave or buried a body in months. The head of the local, in describing his problems, with the diocese, the bereaved, the bureaus of public health and sanitation, spoke eloquently of “this tragic backlog” and “this extra grief.” At Mount Carmel, Calvary, Cyprus Hills, there had been vandalism. The unburied coolly bided their time. The trouble is he was our candidate, Jim’s candidate really. It can’t be helped. That is all.

Our anachronism. The young uptown doctor found his standard of living drastically threatened by the change in the law. He had worked hard through his schooling, internship, and residency. He had married a girl he had met at a mixer, at Goucher. They had settled in Rye. Every Thursday night, beginning at midnight and ending at eight in the morning, he had been performing abortions, for years. The rates he had charged had not been steep, when compared with the cost of a trip to some other country. Occasionally, for a young actress out of work or some other demonstrably poor patient, he had done the operation for free. On some Thursday nights, there were only two patients. Sometimes, in the fall, there were seven. His preferred number for any Thursday night was four. He called all his patients—the Thursday night ones and those in his regular practice—by their first names. He insisted that they call him Ned. When abortion in New York became legal, Ned, never having thought of the problem in these terms, faced the prospect of having his income reduced by two thousand dollars a week, cash.

He had never been a man without scruples. The legal risk he had taken, through the years, for his patients, a sense that sane, prosperous men did not pay taxes on cash income, and a vague liberal perception that it was not altogether right to support an already too powerful government—these had combined in Ned’s thoughts into a moral certainty that his Thursday-night income was not subject to the income tax. He had, anyway, of late been taking losses in the market. Sheila, his wife, was in analysis. His two daughters were in therapy. His son—he did not know what to think about his son. At five, the boy already lacked stamina, lacked ambition. He seemed a happy little boy, but there was no question that he was far behind Doug and Netta Forster’s five-year-old in intellectual development and motor control. He was also far less tall. Doug was Ned’s best friend, and Ned had hated him since their earliest childhood. Doug had been something of an athlete. Doug had won full scholarships for college and medical school. It was true that Ned had not required scholarships, but the fact was that he had not had them. In the Army, Doug had met somebody with whom he had invested in real estate in Arizona. Ever since, it seemed clear that he was marginally richer than Ned had ever been. To conceal this fact, this disparity, had so far been the most expensive proposition of Ned and Sheila’s lives.

When the law changed, Ned had to consider these and other enormous pressures. He decided to make no concession whatever to that change. He needed the money. He had ten years of Thursday-night patients as evidence that, when they needed him, he was a good and kindly man. Patients trusted him, just as they always had, just as they should have. When a girl or a woman now came to him, not wanting to be pregnant and believing that she was, he told her to come to his office Thursday night. In a very short time, he found himself instructing patients to do this, whether the tests showed they were actually pregnant or not. He justified this to himself in a number of ways. He was busy. They were anxious. For patients beyond their early twenties, the operation might be advisable anyway. Or he could use the occasion to install an intrauterine device.

The result of this rationalization was that, on Thursday nights, Ned’s waiting room was a perfect anachronism. The women, girls usually, who arrived there were nervous, embarrassed. They did not want to be seen by the others. At the same time, each thought that the others looked legitimate. Perhaps they really
were
there for that intrauterine device. The receptionist had a bright and unwavering poster smile. She sat there, with country-and-western music blaring from her transistor, checking people in. By eleven-fifteen, when the last patient had usually come in, the receptionist left.

On any given Thursday, there might be a fifteen-year-old, shy, not pretty, accompanied by an overbearing, overcheerful mother; another young woman, perhaps a grade-school teacher, evidently religious, miserable, praying, removing her rosary from a purse and then replacing it, uncertain whether she could use a rosary on such a day or not. One young, engaged couple. One apparently adulterous young wife, alone. But whereas what had brought people to Ned’s office before the law changed was usually something savvy, something knowledgeable in having gotten such an address at all, what the people in Ned’s office now had in common was ignorance, and perhaps shame. Just as he put each one of them to sleep, with his own special intravenous formula, he said, “Just you wait. You’ll find this a kind of high.” Then he worked on his patients, one by one, through the night. None of them had complications. None of them died. The jet, the Xerox, the abortion law, and of course, of course, the tape recorder—these advances in terms of the reversible and the irreversible are one line, one still fuzzy line, between our set and the last set and the next.

There are only so many plots. There are insights, prose flights, rhythms, felicities. But only so many plots. At a slower pace, in a statelier world, the equations are statelier. The mayor has run off with the alderman’s wife, and it was to be expected if one looks back. The mayor and the alderman won’t confide in each other or be doubles partners any more. The other consequences, it will turn out, might have been foreseen. In three households and two generations, and the treehouse instantly, the track, to a degree, can still be kept. But here, the inevitable is being interrupted by strangers all the time. Seven people go off into the sunset, and the eighth is the custodian of the plot. There were so few variations. I had begun to believe that a story line was a conceit like any other. One has only to take to bed, though, with a Seconal and a thriller, racing toward their confrontation, for it to become clear that this is not quite the case. The plot of things converging, as in
Appointment in Samarra,
as in love stories, as in any story where a rendezvous must be kept. The plot of things separating, not so common, disintegration, breaking up. The plot of one thing following in the track of another, as in thrillers, chases. The plot of things parallel. Suspense, which has time as an obstacle to a resolution in the future. Nostalgia, which has time as an obstacle to a resolution in the past. Maybe there are stories, even, like solitaire or canasta; they are shuffled and dealt, then they do or they do not come out. Or the deck falls on the floor. Or a piece of country music, a quartet, a parade, the flag—all the things one ought by now to be too old for—touch, whatever it is.

A few years ago, the wire services reported that, on account of a defective latch, the cargo door on a DC-10 opened, in flight. A coffin fell out. A lady at work in her flower garden saw what she took to be a coffin fall from the sky into a neighboring field. Having been recently widowed, the lady made the obvious inference. She put down her trowel, drove to the nearest state asylum, and committed herself. When reporters reached her, to tell her the thing had really happened, and to ask her reaction to it, the lady said she preferred to stay right where she was. There has been no further news of her, or of the lady in the supermarket. Twenty years later, however, the kid accuser in the supermarket may be gaining seniority as a congressman.

The Begum played Scrabble. Morning, afternoon, and night, on the beach, aboard the boat, in the harbor night club, with ordinary sets, or Scrabble dice, or cleated letters for use on jolting surfaces, the Begum played. The Russians had smuggled in a cheese, of which they were proud. Nobody else cared much for it. Apparently, as in the matter of wines, there exists an international body of experts, which rates cheese. Last year, for the first time, the Soviet Union invited this committee to come and test its cheeses. The committee had pronounced itself unable to distinguish between any single Russian cheese and any other—except one, which, on the basis of its smell and general appearance, the committee members unanimously declined even to taste. The Russians on our island always passed around this cheese.

We sat on the beach. The Queen was an inexhaustible swimmer. Somebody had to be with her at all times to see that she did not feel lonely or drown. She talked while she swam. Ralph, who could make conversation while swimming, was with her. He was subject to chills; when he came out of the water after one of these long swims, he would stammer with cold. His girl and her brother were sitting beside us. Being naturally fair, they were now very sunburned. They stayed wrapped in their towels, and did crosswords, or tuned in to their program of news from the mainland, or did whatever else seemed amiable, or kind, or polite.

When Jim’s friends from the days when he was in the O.S.S. first settled there, they tried to raise cattle, for milk. There were already small herds of wild cattle, from past generations, at large in the hills. Within a few weeks, the wild cows, having entered the pastures by night, had lured the tame cattle into the hills with them. Now wild cows and tame cows, side by side, would come thundering through the palms of an evening, churning up the few flower beds and grazing on the few lawns there were. People began to surround their lawns with enormous rolls of barbed wire. Every carefully watered green thing was now fortified against the cows.

At City Hall, as on the campus, negotiations are in progress. It is not at all clear to me what a negotiation is. Union and management, say, terrorist and foreign minister, buyer and seller, kidnapper and F.B.I. agent, husband and wife, at least two parties anyway, disagree. They exchange views. A strike, perhaps, a war, a bankruptcy, a murder, a divorce impends. One side begins, and claims it can accept no less. The other responds, saying it can afford no more. It is clear to both sides, from the start, that both positions are false.

They proceed to bargain then, in what is called good faith. Bad faith exists when a side takes both positions to be absolutely true, then deals with something other than negotiation in its heart—stalling for time, for instance, so that friends can arrive and bomb the house. Good faith negotiation requires a liar’s margin of some sort. “I can’t stand it,” somebody says. “I can’t help it,” someone else replies. Justice is called upon, as well. At City Hall, when they negotiate, the parties get a little sleep on the floors of rooms across a hall. Night after night. In Teheran, in the oil negotiations of 1971, a representative of the companies absent-mindedly left a memo on the bargaining table during the lunch break of the first day. The memo outlined the companies’ fallback position on any compromise that they could consider tolerable. A reporter bought the memo from a janitor. It was published in the paper the next morning. The fallback position became the position at which the talks began; the remainder of the negotiation entailed the companies’ retreat from their original last stand. The absent-mindedness, almost everyone agreed, was real.

In the matter of jobs, I think I know nine spies. Eight are American. One is foreign. One has dual citizenship. It is hard to know what they do, exactly, except that they are inexhaustibly gregarious. It is not thinkable that any of the nine could learn, or for that matter keep, a secret. I am certain that they do not hover over microfilms or denounce friends. Two date starlets. One lives from time to time with debutantes, now divorced, whom he has known since boarding school. I guess what these spies—if they are spies, and I’m sure they are—are paid to do is observe trends. Why any government should pay them to observe trends is not clear to me. It may be that there are times when any information about anything whatever seems to have a reassuring, valid quality. More likely, spying is one more featherbedding, overpaid bureaucracy. Certainly all nine are snobs, with manifold, even catholic, snobberies: class, money, power, fame, fad, culture, byline, notoriety. They are all best men at controversial second weddings; escorts of abandoned wives; godfathers of very late litters of children; fixtures at black-tie dinners for convicted forgers who have published memoirs and for rehabilitated dope pushers and stranglers who hold visiting professorships of Urban Planning and Reform.

Each of the nine seems to be liked by everyone except the other eight. Our agents are fluent in at least a second language, but then we all are. I don’t know why we were not all asked to be agents, but we weren’t. The only one who claims he was and who now drinks and talks a lot about it is Lane Prell, who needs to be an authority on most matters. Whenever the C.I.A. is mentioned, and Lord knows it is mentioned often, Lane becomes nostalgic, confidential, cynical. His point is that, when he was with the Agency in some exotic country, which he is not at liberty to name, the Agency was not even competent to arrange an abortion for a young, highly valued contact, whom, on that account, it lost. True or false, this anecdote evidently means a lot to Lane. He seems to find in it an immense, a universal relevance. “Guatemala,” he’ll say. “Don’t tell me about Guatemala. When I was with the Agency, do you know we couldn’t even arrange…,” or “Clandestine activities. Don’t make me laugh. When I was with the Agency, we couldn’t even manage…” Apart from Lane, though, we all regard as fraught, and even graceless, allusions to such personal concerns as race, religion, income, politics, sexual proclivities, and now: institutional affiliation.