Speedboat (4 page)

Vlad, who wants to specialize one day in surgery on adult hands, finds himself these days working on babies. There is a relatively new surgical procedure that, if it is performed within fourteen hours of delivery, will keep alive a baby who would otherwise have simply, surely died. After the lifesaving procedure, Vlad gets the baby. He does what he can for it with orthopedic surgery. It is perfect practice for a future with delicate, adult hands. Vlad thinks that, like so many valuable learning experiences, it cannot, cannot in the end ever be or have been worth it. I once saw, however, what might have seemed an altogether hopeless old man on crutches, making his way out of Disneyland, with a large Mickey Mouse balloon.

In Bootsy Garn’s final college year, my first, the girl across the hall from me bought a snake. The girl’s father had been a famous American fascist in the thirties. It was assumed the girl had problems. But pets were not permitted in the dorms. The college knew nothing of the snake. The girl in the room next door to mine bought an alligator. Her father was head of a chemical corporation in Cincinnati. The girl was beautiful. She held séances. She had an Austrian boyfriend, older than she by enough to have been a true Nazi in his time, who threw stones through her window and shouted “Annelise, Annelise,” in a kind of whisper-shout each night while she fed her little alligator halves of worms. Her name, in fact, was Anne. The girls in another dorm bought ducks. The girl three rooms down the hall from me had an orgone box. She believed in silence at breakfast, and used to enforce it by staring craftily at a bread knife with jam on it. An African princess, in her third year and wildly in unrequited love, tried to kill herself one evening by taking an overdose of Epsom salts. She fell in convulsions in front of the dining-room door. Rumors had begun to reach the dean’s office. Something amiss. Anne asked me to hide her alligator in my room for a night or two. I thought, This must be college, what the hell. Three nights I heard dry feet and scales dragging forlornly across my floor. The creature missed the damp. I took it to the bathtub in the early-morning hours. The third day, I left it there. Just before nine, the fascist’s daughter decided to let it be known that her snake was lost. It must have crawled out through its mesh. She thought it had entered the radiator and was now at large in the heating system. It was a very small snake, red, yellow, and black. Bootsy went straight to her room, locked the door, and screamed. For thirty-six hours, she refused to come out. The rest of us, rather dreading the emergence of the snake from our own radiators, avoided our rooms. Bootsy just stayed, and then, the following evening, came quietly out and took a bath. Neither the alligator nor the snake was seen again. Those of us who were studying the English Drama Until 1642 (Excluding Shakespeare) resumed our course. And now I’m here.

The girl in the hallway of Sam’s building, as I was rushing home, was much too fast asleep. She did not look sick. She was not unkempt. She just did not seem entirely alive. “Hey,” I said. “Excuse me. Are you all right?” She just sat there, hands clasped in her lap, large purse by her side. A man walked in from the street. “Excuse me,” I said. “Does this girl look all right to you?” He looked at her a while. She made no flicker of a move. “Do you know her?” he asked. “No,” I said. “Do you?” He shook his head, crossed the hall to the elevator, got in, and was gone. I went back upstairs and rang Sam’s bell. I said, “There’s something wrong with a girl who’s sitting in your hall.” Sam came downstairs with me.

“Hey,” he said, shaking her shoulder a bit. She just sat there, asleep. Sam took one of her clasped hands, lifted it, and let it drop. “Do you think we should call an ambulance?” I said. “Maybe we should look in her bag first, and see who she is,” he said. “Maybe she wouldn’t want an ambulance.” I said, “If you look in her bag, though, they’ll think it has something to do with you.” It was the first time I had ever used this sense of “they.” We stared at the girl. She woke up. She was all right. She went home.

I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort. Some people get a jump on the morning in other ways—speeding on the highways, making money, doing crossword puzzles, a darker tan, a whiter wash, accumulations of various kinds. The thing about doing the Sunday crossword is that halfway through you may find yourself tracking a mind you loathe. I begin, like most people, with the gap definitions, “53 Down rara—,” and continue with the words I know for sure. I find that if I can manage to fill the upper left-hand corner very early, I am never able to complete the rest. I don’t know why. Crosswords start for me in the middle, or they don’t work out. I have never been any good at bridge, chess, or Scrabble, either. Some people gain momentum on envy or rage. I tend to blast myself out of bed into situations that are drastically odd, with a moral edge, perhaps, and an element of risk. I took a plane once from an Angolan island of eccentrics to what was then Biafra, on a Joint Church Aid load of fish. In the thunder and lightning, and Valium and a sense of incongruity, it was fine.

There were only three journalists there then, in the penultimate days of Biafran misery. We had been told to bring cans of food, jerry cans of gasoline, and a lot of Scotch. One evening, we drank some of the Scotch in a bungalow, which was several miles from mine. At sunset, I thought I should go home, meaning my bungalow. One of the journalists said he knew the way, even in the dark. We could walk there later. The rain was total. We got lost. I could not quite believe it. Planes overhead somehow. We kept bumping into sentries, who could not believe it, either. Finally, we found my bungalow. I’m out. We’re still here. Biafra’s not. Before the Six-Day War, I had bought a Patek Philippe watch and a Chanel suit. I don’t know why. They had a song on the Biafran roads. “He is dead. Got to bury him. He died in a state of courage. May his soul rest in peace.”

The truth, I would like to say here, is as follows. But I can’t. In some places, it may already have begun, the war of everybody against everybody, all against all. “The Great Game,” the lady philosopher used to say, quoting from Kipling, “is finished when everyone is dead. Not before.”

I often wonder about the people who linger over trash baskets at the corners of the city’s sidewalks. One sees them day and night, young and old, well dressed, in rags—often with shopping bags—picking over the trash. They pick out newspapers, envelopes. They discard things. I often wonder who they are and what they’re after. I approach and cannot ask them. Anyway, they scurry off. Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. That “writers write” is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

I visited the University of California at Santa Cruz once. It was rich, and near the sea, and full of redwoods. The students who did not care to walk to class were conveyed by surreys with fringes. There was no real way to stage a student strike, since most things were permitted. Attendance in the classes was not taken. The only way to be on strike was to attend a class, and wear a black, identifiably striker’s armband. The students wanted to strike on behalf of the local people of Santa Cruz—who loathed them. The strike was a boycott of grapes. The students picketed the local stores that sold grapes. The locals bought up all the grapes and waved them in the students’ faces. There seemed to be no understanding among anybody. The troopers were there to protect students from club-bearing locals. The students thought the locals were oppressed by troopers. Education, perhaps, in its own way, suffered. “The only way you can get even a quorum of a class here,” a professor told me, “is with a class in Sensitivity Training or Transcendental Meditation.” I left soon.

One night, in Paris, during the last days of the Algerian crisis, I was studying in a common room at the Cité Universitaire—where I used to live and where four apparently interchangeable Americans incessantly played bridge. A bomb went off. The explosion was enormous. Windows smashed. Doors fractured. The reception desk blew up. The lights went out. The first words after the thunder and reverberations in the darkness were an imperturbable, incredulous, “Two
hearts.
“ Another night, one of the intermittent bridge players wandered, barefoot, into the common room. She was known for her casual, oddly violent Guess Whats. “Guess what,” she said. The other players, noticing that even her feet, on the dusty, littered floor, were an uncharacteristic, American high school clean, guessed she was having an affair. No one in that place, that year, except Southern girls and narcissists seemed to wash any more thoroughly than life required. But the Guess Whats always made an immediate claim; they never passed quite safely until someone guessed correctly or everyone gave up. Bathtub running over, pregnancy, expulsion from a Sorbonne class were guessed. Then wisps of smoke were drifting down the corridor. Nobody moved. More guesses. The girl’s roommate made three no trump. Then she choked, and guessed a fire from a hot plate underneath a mattress in the room they shared. Correct. The fumes were poisonous. The room had been half smoldering, half in flames. “Oh, Ruth,” the girl said, like some reproachful loser in a mindless chess game, “you always guess.”

Elaine’s was jammed, full of young women looking tired and their escorts, ignoring them in droves, talking to each other, man to man. The bachelor regulars brought a different girl each night or week or so, and then around midnight, dropped them flat. The beauty point was made. The men could talk, of royalties, pot, sex, screenplays, and politics. The girls, left to each other, girl, space, girl, space, girl, space—four girls at most tables and four empty chairs—looked quite vacant, scared. The general male reluctance seemed to be to go to bed. There was also quite a thing about the check. Some regulars appeared to believe that the check did not exist. “Reach for the check,” my father said to his sons, in one of his rare speeches of that kind to them. “Whatever happens, make sure that you pay that check.” In a family with siblings, there is a constant war of reflexes. Nothing to do with checks—the opposite. A child is sitting there, with a toy or comic book. Flash. Gone. It takes a wary eye and an instant tightening of the grip, or the thing is gone. The gentlemen at the place are flashes with that check. The others—perhaps only children?—always lose or look away.

Matthew, the man I had arrived with, was drinking brandies. I was drinking gin. Suddenly, my zabaglione vanished, cream, cup, strawberry, and all. I had a distinct, an eidetic memory of seeing it there before me. It was gone. I looked for it. Matt looked for it. It was nowhere. Somebody’s handbag was on the floor beside my chair. I felt that a whole zabaglione could not have fallen, tidily, into a stranger’s handbag. I couldn’t search in a stranger’s handbag, anyway. We stopped thinking about it. Matthew said that he had been very fat as a small boy. He read a lot. He ate. When he noticed how alarmed his parents were at how fat he was, he obediently laid his chocolate bars aside. Then, his parents were called to the school. It was a friendly, permissive, finger-painting sort of place. There was a huge papier-mâché policeman in the hall. The policeman’s knee had begun to erode. Matthew had been eating papier-mâché. He denied it at the time. He is quite slim now.

We have all, of course, had childhoods. I do find that the person with the clearest, least self-serving simply pays. I remembered another Matthew, an unpleasant child. He came from many miles away to our place, where there was a lake with fish. Matthew never caught one. We went trolling from a rowboat, casting from the shore. Sometimes, we used a bamboo pole and worms. We all caught fish but Matthew. He talked. We rowed him. Nothing happened. At first it was a triumph. Then we were embarrassed. Finally, my brothers had a thought. My older brother said that the secret of fishing in that lake was paper bags. Matthew said Oh, as though he had always known it. I rowed. My brothers put half a worm on Matthew’s hook—around that, a paper bag, with a fish concealed inside. In a few minutes, Matthew said he thought he had a bite. He reeled in. He was ecstatic with his half-dead perch. We never told him. Last year, I saw that Matthew, with his children, running for office in Chicago. He spoke of his boyhood, fishing, and of that afternoon when he caught that grand pike, casting. No harm in it. Lucky memory on his part; on my brothers’, picking up that check.

A girl at our table said she had had to steal two blouses, that afternoon, at Bloomingdale’s. She had had no time to wait. “I never used to have to hustle,” her escort kept saying bleakly, “till now. Till now.” There was a disturbance at the bar. The waiter, a frail man with hair down to his shoulders, held a huge, ill-tempered, and obstreperous writer face down on the floor in a few seconds flat. The whole restaurant grew quiet for a minute, hummed again. The writer began another scuffle. The waiter dragged him out into the street. Squad cars arrived. Most people at the tables went outside to watch, then came back in to talk. Matt took me home. There was some sort of petition, or document, or word of sponsorship lying upstairs on my desk for signing. I am not a signer. I would like to take the high road, if there is a high road. When I went upstairs, I wondered what it was I had meant to do.

T
HAT SLUM
of the air, the 747, was waiting its turn. The food had been awful, the babies had wailed, seventy-two headsets had broken down before the start of the movie. The top third of the screen was, as usual, cut off at the ceiling. Little air vents had blown into the passengers’ eyes for nine hours; there had been sneezes all over the aircraft, and cries of “
Salud.
” The washrooms had broken down halfway through the flight, also as usual. The stewardess was still walking the aisles, spraying scent. The waiting-room music, designed for calm during dangerous minutes, had played during takeoff, and now began droning for landing. We landed. As always, the passengers, having felt the squalor, the suspense, the scale of confinement, applauded when the wheels touched the ground. Some got to their feet, and were immediately admonished, in terms of great sarcasm, by the purser, that they had no right to stand until the plane had come to a complete stop. The complete stop itself, as usual, was never announced. An escalator had already reversed itself in Oakland, dumping everyone onto a concrete cellar floor. Some of us had been driving those underserviced crates of steel all the agencies now rent as cars. There were smoke inhalations from derailed subways, and fragments of airport hand grenades. There had been so much travel, we knew someone was going to die.