Renata Adler: Speedboat

RENATA ADLER was born in Milan and raised in Connecticut. She received a B.A. from Bryn Mawr, an M.A. from Harvard, a D.d’E.S from the Sorbonne, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and an LL.D. (honorary) from Georgetown. Adler became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1963 and, except for a year as the chief film critic of The New York Times , remained at The New Yorker for the next four decades. Her books include A Year in the Dark (1969); Toward a Radical Middle (1970); Reckless Disregard: Westmoreland v. CBS et al., Sharon v. Time (1986); Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001); Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (1999); Irreparable Harm: The U.S. Supreme Court and The Decision That Made George W. Bush President (2004); and the novels Speedboat ( 1976; winner of the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel) and Pitch Dark (1983).

GUY TREBAY reports on culture for The New York Times . He was previously a columnist for The Village Voice and has written for The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel and Leisure, Harper’s, Esquire, Grand Street , and other major publications. His work, twice honored with the Meyer Berger Award, presented by the Columbia University School of Journalism, has received numerous other awards, been widely anthologized, and was collected in In The Place to Be: Guy Trebay’s New York .

Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written — disrupting a cliché and, presumably, creating a genre. That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I find, are the ones learned in your sleep. Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love — you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you’re over. You’ve caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.

“It is only stupid to put up the sails when the wind is against,” the wife of the Italian mineral-water tycoon said, on the deck of their beautiful schooner, which had remained all the summer in port. “Because then you lose them.”

A large rat crossed my path last night on Fifty-seventh Street. It came out from under a wooden fence at a vacant lot near Bendel’s, paused for traffic, and then streaked across to the uptown sidewalk, sat awhile in the dark, and vanished. It was my second rat this week. The first was in a Greek restaurant where there are lap-height sills under all the windows. The rat ran along the sills, straight toward, then past me.

“See that?” Will said, sipping from his beer glass.

“Large mouse,” I said. “Even nice hotels have small mice now, in the bars and lobbies.” I had last seen Will in Oakland; before that, in Louisiana. He does law. Then something, perhaps a startled sense of my own peripheral vision, registered on my left, coming toward my face fast. My fork clattered.

“You were all right, there,” Will said, grinning, “until you lost your cool.”

The second rat, of course, may have been the first rat farther uptown, in which case I am either being followed or the rat keeps the same rounds and hours I do. I think sanity, however, is the most profound moral option of our time. Two rats, then. Cabdrivers can’t even hear directions through those new partitions, which don’t seem to me really bulletproof, although, of course, I’ve never checked it. Soundproof. One’s fingers jam, certainly, in the new receptacles for money. Well, somebody sold the partitions. Someone bought them. Crooked, clearly. There doesn’t seem to be a spirit of the times. When I started to get out of bed at an unlikely early morning hour, Will, who pitches into sleep as violently as his waking life is gentle, said, “Just stay here. Angst is common.” I did find a cab home, in the rain, outside an armory.

“To the Dow-Jones averages,” the father said, raising his glass. It was his sixty-eighth birthday. His hair and mustache were silvery.

“Each in his own way,” the son said with a little smile. He was not a radical. He had been selling short. They laughed. The entire family — even the grandchildren, at their separate table — drank. The moment passed.

Alone in the sports car, speeding through the countryside, I sang along with the radio station, tuned way up. Not the happiest of songs, Janis Joplin, not in any terms; but one of the nicest lines. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” In a way, I guess.

“There are no tears here,” the young construction worker said at the funeral, when the ancient union leader, with two strokes, three heart attacks, and a lung condition, died at last.

“True,” the priest said, surveying the mourners in the cathedral. “No tears. Either the wake went on too long or he was a hard, hard man.”

“The rest are never going to die,” a young black politician said with great bitterness. “You see them staggering out of their limousines. All Irish, all senile, all strokes. The union men. Even their wives have cardiac conditions. But I know it now. They are never going to die.”

“They’ll die, all right,” the priest said, judiciously. “There’s not one of them under seventy-six. You’ll see. Your time will come.”

“To the future, then,” the black politician said.

“Shall we go to your place or to Elaine’s?” the young man asked. It was 3 a.m. He was recently divorced. The same question must have been being put just then in cabs throughout New York. “To Elaine’s,” I said. That was where we went. To Elaine’s, to the Dow-Jones averages, to the future, then, to preserve the domestic tranquility. Freedom means nothing left; cab change receptacles are hearing aids in which one’s fingers jam — when the clips are coming in quite fast, it’s like waking up and trying to orient the bed. Which side can the wall be on, which side is uptown, downtown, which town is it, anyway? In some of the best motels, near airports, along highways, they have Magic Fingers, a device which, for one quarter put into a metal box, shakes the bed for sixty seconds and sends you quietly to sleep. There are no fingers about it. It is more like sleeping on a train when the tracks are good. A sticker on the metal box says that you can have Magic Fingers in your own home. I don’t know anyone who has.

I work for a tabloid, the Standard Evening Sun. Since I got this job, I have gone out with four sons of famous fathers, two businessmen with unfinished novels, three writers with a habit of saying “May I use that” when I said something that seemed to them in character, and a revolutionary editor who patted my hair and said “You’re very sweet” whenever I asked him anything. I have sat, shivering on cold steps, with a band of fifteen radicals of whom ten were in analysis and six wore contact lenses. Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.