Renata Adler - Pitch Dark

The truth was, there was something in the ice cube. I don’t like this mode. Tell about the scandal at the tennis courts, Smiley, the handgun. Helplessness, your professional capacity. I mean, has she no occupation, what does she do for a living? Well, she frets. Fretting is not an occupation. Yes it is; for a spy, a reporter, a scholar, many people. Dayshift. Nightshift. Watchers of soap operas. Can the Rich Write. Tell about lunch with the vedette; and Ben, and the garland, and the swami with the baby in his arms. And, in the matter of the Irish thing. But do you sometimes wish it was me?

The punchline can remain in families when the joke, such as it was, has long eroded. Where is my poison, my father used to say, every single morning, as he took the mild medication that had been prescribed for his arthritis. He believed his tablets to be very strong, however, and took them with considerable ceremony. Where is my poison? he would say, quite loudly, and my mother would hand him the small bottle of pills. One weekend, in my junior year at college, Sally came to visit. At breakfast, we spoke of the dog, Bayard, the Great Dane; never having been much of a watchdog, he had barked a bit the night before. Where is my poison? my father said, and Sally, who was in considerable awe of him already, leaped to her feet and, crying No! upset her cup of coffee.

Long years later, in fact quite recently, I had what may have been a similar misunderstanding, though without, so far as I could tell, any ingredient of horror. I was in an English country house, on a shooting weekend. Everything, the house, the trees, the countryside, the dogs, the river, was beautiful. The retrieving dogs were all enormous Labradors. The hostess’s personal pet, however, was a small, golden spaniel, which for the most part trotted by her side. Several times, the lady mentioned that this spaniel’s front teeth were missing. I felt some response or comment was expected of me. She had found these teeth embedded in the rear end of a three-legged greyhound, another of her pets. She found it remarkable that so small a spaniel should manage, or even try to bite so much taller a dog as this three-legged greyhound. When she actually bent down to show me the spaniel’s jaw, where the teeth were missing, I asked, Did you remove them? Heavens no! she said; its congenital, a calcium deficiency. And I realized that she thought I had asked whether she had removed the fourth leg of the greyhound. No, No, I meant the teeth, I said; did you remove them? And she said, Why yes, as soon as I found them. But the exchange was relatively calm.

Here’s how matters stand at the tennis court. I have played there since I was ten, when there was just one court, outdoors, clay, surrounded on three sides by a wire fence. Now there are five courts, one under a large wooden structure, two under bubble tops, and two outdoors between the old court and the long, sloping meadow, where the backboard used to be. The meadow stretches some distance, right down to the firehouse. All the town’s ambulances are still run, not out of the hospital but out of the local firehouses, and manned not by doctors but by firemen. Two years ago, I came into a little house where the court phone and office and showers are, along with the Coke machine, on top of which there is a television set that kids of the players, kids of the pro, kids waiting for lessons watch all day long, I walked in and saw on the couch a man so pale, and obviously ill, and sweating that I asked at once whether I could do something, and only realized seconds later that I knew him, that he was Morty Stone, the young internist who, when he first came to town, brought with him, along with his clear contempt for the local general practitioners, the modern notion of telling people, frankly, whether they wanted to know or not, what the prognosis was, whether they were dying, along with the old commitment to keep them alive, by whatever means, at whatever cost and in whatever pain. There was Morty, then, who had treated my grandmother, in fact, and wanted to tell her the worst and then operate and hold down on the drugs, but who was, quite simply, overriden by Dr. Mills, our family doctor, in actual charge of the case. It was Morty, then, who lay there. What he had done, actually, was just to dislocate his shoulder. The friends, all doctors, with whom he had been playing, were out on the court again, where, with the fifth of their group, they had resumed their Wednesday doubles. I thought this heartless of them, but they had done what they could for him, and I guess they could not bear to watch him now, with that look, the cold, the unmistakable pallor, of a man who, though his injury is minor in every sense but one, is badly hurt. He didn’t want company in any case. What he wanted, all he wanted, was morphine. The pro’s young son had run to the firehouse, the ambulance was on its way; in due course, Morty was on his way to the hospital and his shot of morphine. I don’t know whether or how it affected his dealing with patients, but I suspect Morty had never been in that kind of pain before. In any event, though he dropped in at the court three days later, with his arm in a sling, and though he had played every Tuesday and Thursday for years, and though the injured shoulder healed completely, he never quite brought himself to play tennis again. Never to this day, I mean. Maybe someday he will start again.

But now, here’s how matters stand at the tennis court. There is the scandal, in which all of us are, to some degree, taken up. And at the firehouse, there has been a tragedy in the course of which two men, the first in the town’s history to be killed in the line of duty, are, as it turns out, with perfect futility and for no reason, dead. The two men, friends since high school, were in their late thirties, legendary. One had been a football hero; the other, the smaller of the two, was famous, miles around, for this: he was able to eat eleven wieners in twenty-two bites. The way the two men died was this. A roof and three floors of a factory fell on them. They had gone in to rescue a man who ought to have been in there but was not. And in the matter of the Irish thing.

I said, But can we live this way.

A moment here. A moment here for a topic. Sentimentality in the work of Gertrude Stein. A real contempt and aversion for sentimentality, too, of course, an attempt to expunge the conventional and easy from her work. But, say what you will, A rose is a rose is a rose is not an unsentimental line. All right, on the other hand, Thomas Wolfe. Obviously, unremittingly, concededly sentimental, Look Homeward, Angel, You Can’t Go Home Again . But Gertrude Stein, I suspect, rather despised her life, and Thomas Wolfe was rather proud of his. Free of constraints, reserve, hesitations, he was free to go sentimentally on and on. She went on and on, too, of course, but only in a state of tension: drawn to the sentimental rhythm and the sentimental substance, but mocking and concealing it, reining it back. A rose is a rose is a rose is a joke, after all, and a truism, and a pointing out of something. But whatever else it is, it is not in spirit so remote from a stone, a leaf, an unfound door, and all the forgotten faces, which is Thomas Wolfe’s. A great hollow wind blows through both of them, and both are on the verge, undeniably, of tears.

All right. I can’t read her either.

This is my little disquisition about football: the quarterback, the center, and the towel. On the rare occasions when I went to football games in high school, they were night games. Saturday nights, of course, when it was cold and dark, with a little rain or snow perhaps, while people huddled under their blankets and drank beer. In those days, I wore my glasses only when I had to, and my sight was better than it is now; but even with my glasses on, and no matter where in the stands I sat, I could not see or understand a single play. It seemed to me there were moments when the players stood about, moments when they crouched in opposition, a moment of rising tension, then a thud or scuffle, and they all fell down. After each play, I usually knew what must have happened, either because somebody told me or from the changed position on the field. But that was it. I never saw the ball or knew who had it, even on passes or the longest runs. With television, naturally, I can see and understand the play; and even in the days when I couldn’t see it, I had always liked the game. But as often as I’ve watched football on television, and as much as I’ve come to appreciate some of the beauty of it, there is always, inevitably, repeatedly, a moment that strikes me as wonderfully bizarre. It is the moment, at the line of scrimmage, when the quarterback wipes his hands on a towel draped over the crouching center’s rear. I understand it, obviously; the quarterback, to be sure of getting a firm grip on the football, needs to dry his hands. But, as often as I’ve asked about it, nobody has gone beyond that explanation, delivered, always, as though nothing could be more ordinary. Whereas what interests me, what I simply cannot imagine, is how the particular custom came into existence, the history of it, the history that is, of the quarterback, the center, and the towel. My brothers admit that they remember no such custom in their day, others have said the same. Was there, then, a moment, on a very wet day, when the first quarterback, muddy and soaked through, saw no further avail in wiping his hands on the back of his own uniform? The ball kept slipping out of his hands, say. Then, the center having perhaps been injured, another center, in a fresh, dry uniform, ran out onto the field, crouched at the line of scrimmage. This happened, perhaps, many times. Many times, on soaking wet days, with second-string centers in fresh, dry uniforms, quarterbacks began, perhaps absently and in desperation, to wipe their hands on the back of the centers’ pants instead of their own. And the first center, or perhaps many centers, startled, said, Hey, cut that out; or perhaps, though they were not startled, they were embarrassed; or with the advent of television, somebody, the center, the quarterback, the coach perhaps or the television producer, thought it looked embarrassing, maybe that’s what happened, to have one man wiping his hands on the seat of another man’s uniform. Or maybe, since the first-string center, presumably as wet as any of his teammates, could not serve in this drying capacity, maybe someone thought long and came up with something dry, a towel. Where to put it? And the answer was what we have. Or maybe the first quarterback said to the first center, when they were both soaked through, Look, Mo, I know this sounds silly, but could you carry some Kleenex or something? And Mo said, Are you out of your mind? The fact is, I just can’t imagine it. The conversation that produced the first few instances of what subsequently became that particular custom on the field.