Renata Adler - Speedboat

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience. “I remember you. In first grade, you told Miss Hennebery that Dan Frayne, the class albino, and I had been whispering during Silent Meditation. The next winter, you showed me a wino exhibitionist in our local railroad station. You said he had VD, which was the day we won the war in Europe, and that my Uncle Jean, who had fought in France, would be just like him. I went away to school for some years. In 1954, you ran over my dog. We did not meet again until after college, when we were both in love for a time with the same man at the law office where I worked. Since then, you have told any number of false and vicious stories at my expense. Now we meet again,” is not to say, “Know each other? Gosh, we’ve been close for thirty years.”

So, when you find yourself sitting in a bomb shelter beside someone who refuses to share either of two blankets with a small child who is shivering; or you find yourself standing in a living room beside someone who, seeing a sad, powerful, distinguished man, recently widowed, in animated conversation with a shy, young, not quite homely woman whose husband has left her, when you find yourself standing beside someone who then swoops toward the gentleman, embraces him as though he were a lover swum out to save her from a cruel drowning, and saying “Darling, I’ve been so longing to talk to you,” protracts her embrace until she has removed him from the not quite homely woman, as effectively as a sheepdog might single out a sheep or a tackle might crowd a runner out of bounds at the sidelines — when, time and again, such a person happens to be, in fact, the same one, it is best not to think, nostalgically, “Hell, we’ve been through a lot together,” unless you are prepared to add, “You have caused, over the years, varieties of unhappiness for which I have not, perhaps, been sufficiently grateful.”

When we were still in graduate school in England, Aldo used to read his Aristotle, for a time, before he went to sleep. When he turned the bedside lamp off, he used to drop this Aristotle on the floor. A few months later, we became friends with the downstairs tenants, also students. They spoke of the eccentricities of the previous tenant of our place. He gave enormous drunken parties. He threw watermelon rinds into the garden. Once, he had himself climbed naked into the garden, and sung a song there, until the neighbors complained; two of his guests had climbed down and lifted him back through the window. It had seemed to them that this tenant never slept. “Could you just tell us, though,” Kate said, one evening after dinner, “what is that final nightly thud?”

The eight-year-old Greek boy had been sitting on the toilet since dawn. He left the door open, so that he could watch the events in the awakening house. Each morning at five, there was a tremendous braying, squawking, mewing, barking in the street. The mules were climbing the hill and annoying the cats and the chickens. The mongrel dogs all over the hillside became hysterical. The roosters, which had crowed intermittently all through the night, gained confidence that day had, in fact, arrived, and began to crow incessantly. The noise of the mosquitoes had, at least, subsided, by the time the boy assumed his watch from the toilet seat. At eight-thirty, his grandmother called him to the kitchen. What she did in the kitchen was never clear. In theory, she was the maid. She could not cook. The point of cleaning seemed in some way to escape her. The principle that you take a clean thing to wipe a dirty thing, that the formerly clean thing becomes thereby a thing to be washed in its turn — this principle was, every morning, seriously confused. In any case, when his grandmother called him, the boy went to the kitchen. I went to the lavatory and flushed. I flushed again. All over the house, people sat up, startled, in their beds. Between sixteen and twenty-two Americans had been staying there all month. Five were sleeping in the dining room, four on each of the two terraces, no less than three in any bedroom, and a few others scattered elsewhere about the house. There were only two bathrooms; water was expensive. It had been agreed that no one would ever overfastidiously flush. Few people in the house woke up much before noon. Most stayed up on the terraces until four every morning, drinking and looking at the sky. I brushed my teeth. I went to the kitchen, put on water for coffee, and got a cup of yoghurt from the refrigerator. The grandmother and the boy stood there and smiled. I wiped off the breakfast table with a sponge. I sat reading a thriller in the sun.

By nine o’clock, Lyda awoke. Lyda likes houses; she is good with them. She went directly to the kitchen, where, every morning, in a monologue, accompanied by many gestures, she gave the maid what were meant to be the household’s instructions for the day. The grandmother did not understand a word, or care to. Her daughter, whom Lyda considered less intelligent, was by this time standing in the kitchen, too. It was hard to understand on what basis Lyda made any evaluation of mother and daughter in terms of intelligence; neither had ever given a sign of comprehending even the other. But the daughter responded to any request or instruction with an expression that suggested that, while she did not understand a single word, she had never heard such degrading, stupid, insane words in her life. She conveyed this impression by causing her head to loll forward, her mouth, with the corners down, to hang open, while she exhaled in indignation and contempt. Then, she would utter her single, all-purpose syllable, “Buh.” After the daughter had done several tones of “buh,” ranging from incredulity to outrage, the mother would begin winking, with little conspiratorial smiles, while she pronounced a range of monosyllables of her own. This may have been meant to imply that the mother was, in fact, obliging. Mother, daughter, and eight-year-old were, however, consistent in never obliging Lyda, or anyone, in anything. The household lived that month on drink, the local yoghurt, sometimes eggs, and an impromptu parody of wartime rations: Spam omelet, breaded cucumbers, sprat casserole.

In almost every thriller, a point is reached when someone, usually calling from a phone booth, telephones with a vital piece of information, which he cannot divulge by phone. By the time the hero arrives at the place where they had arranged to meet, the caller is dead, or too near death to tell. There is never an explanation for the reluctance of the caller to impart his message in the first place. Certainly, the convention existed well before the age of the tape recorder and the wiretap. Not on the phone, in a spy or mystery story, has always been, in and of itself, sufficient to hold up the resolution of a case for a long, long time. This is particularly remarkable in the sense that when, at last, the hero is able to imagine, project, or piece together the message of the original caller, that message invariably consists of a very few words. Joe did it. Or, Not I. Or, The League. The trouble with islands is that such cases, of necessity, go unsolved there. When there is no phone.

The dyes from the paper factory were seeping downhill to the gelatin factory, creating blue, brown and even dappled jello, and serious litigation over water rights. That was two miles inland. On the hill directly above the port, the young shipowner, who loved the view over his flowers to the ocean, set sprinklers in the garden every morning. His neighbor downhill and to the right made various claims about this water: that it seeped down in such a way as to undermine the foundations of his house; that it cascaded down in such torrents that his dog had nearly drowned; that his children were threatened; that dog and children had already suffered colds and incurred psychological harm. These claims were set forth each day in long, elegantly composed and increasingly vituperative letters. Every evening, the young shipowner wrote his own elegant, but after a time witty and brief replies. Although the houses were not many yards apart, the correspondence was carried on by the regular post. When the postal employees joined in the island’s wave of general strikes, the letters were interrupted, as was everything.