“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.