Each of the nine seems to be liked by everyone except the other eight. Our agents are fluent in at least a second language, but then we all are. I don’t know why we were not all asked to be agents, but we weren’t. The only one who claims he was and who now drinks and talks a lot about it is Lane Prell, who needs to be an authority on most matters. Whenever the C.I.A. is mentioned, and Lord knows it is mentioned often, Lane becomes nostalgic, confidential, cynical. His point is that, when he was with the Agency in some exotic country, which he is not at liberty to name, the Agency was not even competent to arrange an abortion for a young, highly valued contact, whom, on that account, it lost. True or false, this anecdote evidently means a lot to Lane. He seems to find in it an immense, a universal relevance. “Guatemala,” he’ll say. “Don’t tell me about Guatemala. When I was with the Agency, do you know we couldn’t even arrange…,” or “Clandestine activities. Don’t make me laugh. When I was with the Agency, we couldn’t even manage…” Apart from Lane, though, we all regard as fraught, and even graceless, allusions to such personal concerns as race, religion, income, politics, sexual proclivities, and now: institutional affiliation.
“Are you shaky on ladders?” Jim said. It had crossed my mind just then. I had never been shaky on ladders in my life before. I looked down the three flights of ladders to the cement floor. I laughed. “Hell, no,” I said. “Not at all.” “It would be O.K.,” he said. “Fears are such a personal thing.” I would not have been scared, I think, if I had been wearing sneakers and jeans. But climbing around a construction site in high heels and all, I was beset by an extreme proposition of What if. What if I just cleave to the rungs and hover here, without looking down at the concrete. Nothing could be done. If Jim were to hold out his hand from the rungs above, it wouldn’t help; if I leaned back, the entire ladder would probably fall. The thing is to eradicate the What if, or at least postpone it, until it becomes an appropriate, theoretical speculation, on the stable ground.
The idea of hostages is very deep. Becoming pregnant is taking a hostage — as is running a pawnshop, being a bank, receiving a letter, taking a photograph, or listening to a confidence. Every love story, every commercial trade, every secret, every matter in which trust is involved, is a gentle transaction of hostages. Everything is, to a degree, in the custody of every other thing. Blackmail, kidnapping, then, are among the extreme violations of the deal. Anyway, I seem to be about to have Jim’s child; at least, I think I will, and the thing is I haven’t mentioned it to Jim.
“Far from it.” There he is again. “Don’t dwell on it.”
In any group of two or more, it seems, somebody is on trial. Sometimes more than one person is on trial. Sometimes everyone is. But not for long. Under the law, a person can be said to plan alone or to plot alone, but not to conspire alone. There are other things, of course, no one can do alone: be a mob, or a choir, or a regiment. Or elope.
We had been heading for it all afternoon. Every time we all decide to do something out of doors, we begin the day with a sense of exuberant good health, followed by a slow intoxication of danger. Often it ends mildly. Somebody barefoot steps on broken glass, or one of the beer drinkers cuts himself on the tin. One year, somebody’s guest from Palo Alto actually inhaled a cinder of his marijuana. Other times, someone missteps serving at tennis, falls, turns gray. In every case, it winds up in the emergency room. When this happens, it is always past four in the afternoon. Whoever is hurt, if he is conscious, apologizes. The form is from school days. The boy who got carsick and made the school bus stop, the girl who had a tantrum and then high fevers on the way to the museum, always spoke of spoiling it for everyone. Counting the wounded at the end of an afternoon these days, as they still apologize for spoiling it for everybody, we often find that the wounded outnumber the one or two hale whom they seem to think they have spoiled it for.
When Dan rode his bicycle over a cliff, we all behaved in characteristic ways. We were in Central Park. There was intense competition for calm, for sane instructions. Cover him, take his pulse, call a doctor, get an ambulance, stand back, raise his head, don’t move him, leave him room and air. He had been riding his bicycle at full speed, with a kind of Western-yodel whoop, over the cliff edge. It had been a dare. He was out quite cold. In the rush to help, Jeff and Lee — who are the nicest of us, really — quietly returned all the bicycles, including Dan’s, with its bent frame and mangled wheel, to the store from which we had rented them for the day. Two uniformed men appeared. They told Dan to get up. He opened his eyes. “Lie still,” we said. “Wait for the ambulance.” One of the uniformed men said, “Hey, man, we are the ambulance.” Dan blinked. He tottered up a steep hill to their car. He sat on a stretcher. They let him sit up, occasionally bumping his head lightly against the roof, all the way to the hospital. He mumbled apologies. Ralph’s girl, in a helpless daze of solicitude, held Dan’s shoe in her lap. Situps aside, it is possible that we are really a group of invalids, hypochondriacs, and misfits. I don’t know. Even our people who stay fit with yoga seem to be, more than others, subject to the flu.
“Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language. “Good morning,” says the poet’s wife, quite sunny-natured. “Do you realize,” the poet replies, “how angry you sound?” The poet’s wife, confused, pacific, says she isn’t at all angry. He repeats his question. Three more disclaimers on her part; on his, three more apparently calm and deadpan repetitions, and she is in fact beside herself. We are all, from time to time, too — well, too vehement. But there doesn’t seem to be much anger in our set. Nor much of the happy faculty of saying, This is mine, and this is mine, and this too is mine, by right. When it is not. In the idiom of our class and generation, we said, Maybe we could lie down for a minute.
On a charter flight, I once met a middle-aged black man from Georgia, who had served in World War II, put himself through school, and then through college in the South. His oldest son had won a scholarship to Yale. At the end of his junior year, the son dropped out. He was going to travel across the country, play the guitar, and find himself. In less than twenty years, in short, and by an accident of historic time, that family had lived through the whole circle of the dream, in which the sons throw away what it has been the sole hope and effort of the grandfathers to amass and to consolidate. Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in one generation, in these times, perhaps. Or the boy might become a star and send all his own sons to Yale.
Jim has in his mind, I think, one erratically ringing alarm clock, one manacled dervish, one dormouse, replete with truisms, and one jurist with a clarity of such an order that I tend to love his verdict in most things. So, there is the question of this hostage, if that’s what it is, and there is the fact of my not having mentioned it to him. These days, Jim says, very often, “Well, I had to make a decision. In my judgment, it was the right one; I’ll stand by it.” Every politician seems to like to say that. I don’t care for it. Having somebody’s children is not, of course, the sort of thing that yields much to consultation. There it is. One simply does it. On the other hand, there seems to me no time, simply no time, even years from now, when such a decision is not subject to review. Leaving aside the more gothic possibilities, what if one’s son (or, and this seems unimaginable, daughter) simply, from the first and in every way, doesn’t turn out right, or is unhappy all his life, what then? I don’t know what then. “You can’t miss it” always means you’re never going to find it. The shortest distance between two points may well be the wrong way on a one way street. All the same, all the same, I think there’s something to be said for assuring the next that the water’s fine — quite warm, actually — once you get into it. You can’t miss it. It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime.