Renata Adler - Speedboat

“Of course, you have right,” said the Frenchman, in serene misunderstanding. “When I have eighteen, I go in Natalie.” He seemed to be speaking of a visit to Turkish relatives in Anatolia. “I have eat something. It give me a terrible pain. In my tripes.”

“Lord, yes,” said the quarterback, warmly. He was already a lay preacher. He had just made a large investment in organic dog foods. The lights dimmed. The tape and the cameras had been off for several minutes. “Exhausted?” the curator of the Sixties Art Collection was saying to a cameraman who stood there. “My dear, I was drained.”

I have been writing speeches for a politician. Jim, who is a lawyer from Atlanta, has been running the campaign. My normal job is reporting and reviewing at the paper. By mistake, these past few months, I also teach. Normally, left to myself, I am not inclined to work much. To the contrary. “To the contrary” is what the head of the mine workers’ union said when he was asked whether he had ordered the murder of a rival and his family. It is hard to know what to the contrary of ordering a murder might, exactly, mean. Jim thinks ordering a birth, perhaps, or else a resurrection. The man was convicted anyway. I have now written “fairly and expeditiously,” and “thoroughly and fairly,” and “judiciously and seriously,” and “care and thoroughness and honor,” and so on, so many times that it may have affected my mind. I eat breakfast fairly and expeditiously. Jim cuts his own hair thoroughly and fairly. It rains judiciously and seriously, with care, and honor, and dignity, in full awareness of the public trust. Our politician, anyway, is a good and careful man — who sounds always a little pained, as though someone were standing on his foot.

Edith, from Kiev, twice divorced, and in New York, in her own words, a “terrapist,” was stealing a bonbon from one of the trays on the Steinway grand. She went to the bookshelves, removed a fine old volume there, and tore the four-leaf clover pressed inside to bits. The party had not yet begun. “This Max,” Franz, her own analyst, said to her next day. “How he makes you regress.”

“Now here, where it says Name,” said Miss Fiotti, from Fringe Benefits, “you write your name. Good. Now where it says Date. Yes. That’s right. Now here, where it says Name again. Exactly. Now once more. And your signature. Wonderful. Thank you, Professor Ellis.”

Miss Fiotti is the only efficient person at our city university. She is employed by the union itself. The union helps us with our forms, our insurance and pension plans, tenure, strike threats, and salaries, of course. The fact that the university is unionized at all, from janitors to deans, means that we have in many ways the worst of the civil service and of academe: a vast paper-riffling ivory tower in a cast-iron union shop. We are, in fact, a scandal citywide. Our faculty, liberal on most issues far away, sleeps well on this. Politicians tend to say the issue “does not sing.” Our full professors, tenured faculty, teach H.B.A., or Hours By Appointment; that is, never. Young instructors, hoping for tenure here, are scheduled to teach days and nights. The idea is that as long as an instructor is required to be in a classroom every hour, he will not have the time to write or publish anything. Not having published, he will never earn his tenure. Under this system, instructors tend to get hepatitis and become demoralized, but, thanks to the union, they are highly paid. And so they stay.

I see Edith, Max, Franz, and Miss Fiotti every week or so. I’ve taught courses for two semesters here, as Ms. Associate Professor Fain. I thought I missed the academic world, the books, the hours. I took the job part-time. I noticed only gradually. One evening, in a seminar, a student spoke of the required course they had all taken with the Recording Secretary of Professor Klein. “The what?” I said. “The Recording Secretary,” the brightest student said again, “of Professor Klein.” Dalton Klein has been, for thirty years, a book reviewer and writer of unsuccessful musicals. I don’t know what recording secretaries are. I know professors earn our professorial thirty-eight thousand a year. “Has anyone,” I asked, “ever had a course with, um, with the, with Professor Klein himself?” Certainly not; even his Recording Secretary now is H.B.A. Two students within memory had, however, actually met Professor Klein; he had approved their Prior Life Experience credits — for a year they had spent raking famous people’s leaves.

Prior Life Experience credits, as substitutes for courses, are one of our educational anomalies. They are normally inseparable from a less innovative program known as E.I.F. The Dean, it turns out, has a great longing to know the private phone numbers of celebrities. He hires people from newspapers, the theater, movies, television to teach. In time, he mentions the importance of having students placed with people who are already E.I.F., that is, Established in the Field. He means people who are often mentioned in the press. If one can just give him a few phone numbers, he will call them at home. I should have known. I did not understand for quite a while.

It was midnight in our paper’s office building. There was a Pinkerton man in the elevator. “Something wrong?” Jim asked. “Yeah,” he said. “A girl on the fifth floor has been molestated.”

On the television set, El Exigente was mouthing his “ Bueno, ” the natives were diving and splashing with pleasure, and Jim and I, who were never going to drink that brand of coffee, were watching the news. “His lawyer looks bored,” I said. Jim reached for his drink. “You always try to look bored,” he said, “when your client is committing perjury.”

A lady lifted the lid of her toilet tank and found a small yachtsman, on the deck of his boat, in the bowl. They spoke of detergents. A man with fixed dentures bit into an apple. A lady in a crisis of choice phoned her friend from a market and settled for milk of magnesia. A hideous family pledged itself to margarine.

Testimony resumed. Apparently, no good lawyer permits a client who is lying to tell a long story — to perjure himself in detail. The longer the story, the more true it did seem. “Well, you had a little social conversation together, did you not?” Senator Montoya was asking. There was a short answer. “Well, did you socialize about the Watergate?” Senator Montoya insisted, in his idiosyncratic way.

“ Mangia, ” said the lady in the lovely spaghetti-sauce commercial. “ Mangia, Bernstein. Mangia, O’Malley. Mangia, Garcia. Mangia , Jones.”

“Hello, Jen?” the voice on the phone said, at two one morning. “It’s Mel. Sorry to call you at home.” Mel is the Acting Head of our department — Drama and Cinema. The Acting Head of the Acting Department, in a way. The Permanent Head, a flustered lady of pure steel, whose academic background consists of a Midwestern degree in Oral Science and a brief marriage to an actor, is on a city grant to study Media History abroad.

“Hi, Mel,” I said to the Acting Head, as warmly as I could.

“Jen, the Art Department wants to do a course in Space on Film,” he said. He paused. “We knew you’d want to be informed.” He paused again. “And, without trying to influence you in any way, we’d like to know what your position is.” I yawned. “Mel, I feel strongly about this,” I said. I had been teaching for some months. I was catching on. “I really do.”

“We hoped you would,” he said. “Len has just pointed out — we’re having coffee here — that there are just two things on film. Time. And Space. If we let the Art people go ahead with Space, we’ll have lost half…”

“Yes,” I said. “And if the History Department takes Time away…”