Renata Adler - Speedboat

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.