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.
QUIET
THAT 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.
“It is the sirocco,” someone said, looking pale on the boat deck, and passing the aspirin. “No, no,” the owner of a shore boutique said. “It is the mistral.” A deckhand, politely passing Bloody Marys, said he thought it was the tramontana. “Hangovers,” the English horseracing columnist said, quite firmly. “Always blame the wind. Depressions.” A Frenchman said that, in any case, he had a grand cafard.
I found a quarter yesterday, in a puddle, in Wilmington. I have a history of finding coins — a penny on the sidewalk one spring morning on Park Avenue, a dime that afternoon; the next day, on the bus, eleven cents, exactly. It seemed a sign. I have found coins abroad. Leaving aside minor jackpots hit in pay phones (which seem only fair, considering the change one loses when those things are out of order), last month I found a quarter in the back seat of a cab. Nobody saw. I have no regard for the law in these matters, as in several others. By law, I think, it now belonged to the owner of the cab. He was not there. A passenger had clearly lost it. He was gone. In the end, having noticed that the driver of the cab was black, I gave in. I said, “Excuse me. I think you have lost this quarter.” He said, “Thanks.” An old friend, who teaches, these days, at a seminary, had the fine solution. He said I should have given a different quarter to the driver, kept the one I found. I wish I’d thought of it. I find that many city people give their most minute attention to the ethics of found objects, small.
It is not even that I much believe in magic. I did not for an instant, for example, think yesterday’s puddle quarter was the cab quarter of last month returned to me perhaps by air in Wilmington. No. Another friend, a reporter at the paper, makes lists, with numbers, of what he has to do that day and even what he wants to talk to me about. He once sent me a letter from Chicago with the P.S. “What is your zip-code number, please?” He travels often. There they sit, though, the people who are so free and easy with their disapproval, at their table in the restaurant, crunching the little bones.
Many English girls one meets abroad are called Vanessa. When a Van, or a Ness, in New York shut the cab door on her thumb, Sam called me from the emergency ward of the hospital. He had taken me home. He had dropped off Nessa next. Then she slammed the door that way, and he took her to the hospital. It was two a.m. He called me because he thought it might help to have a woman around. I put on jeans and a shirt. I took some Scotch along. The emergency ward was full of the slightly injured, mainly knife wounds at that hour, and Sam. Nessa was having her thumb set. We of the emergency ward passed around the Scotch. When Nessa came out, with the intern who had put a cast on her thumb and wrist, it was 3:15. On the way out of the hospital, I thought I was going to faint. Then, I thought how unseemly it would be to have to be carried back into the hospital. I think you are not altogether American unless you have been to Mississippi; you are not a patriot if you start to faint when somebody breaks her thumb. Anyway, I never faint.
Most of the cars that tried to run us down were off-duty cabs. Sam finally found a cab to take Nessa home. On account of her thumb, she needed help with her keys, so we walked her to the door. As Sam put the key in the lock, her mother-in-law stood there, distraught. She looked at Sam, with his rimless glasses and his beard, and at me in my shirt and jeans. She screamed. Then she started to cry. She looked at Nessa. “I knew it,” she said. “What have they done to you?”
Last night at dinner, a man said that, on principle, he never answers his telephone. Somebody asked him how he reached people. “I call them,” he said. “But suppose they don’t believe in answering, either?” I thought of phones ringing all over New York, no one answering. Like people bringing themselves off in every single adjoining co-op of a luxury building. Or the streets entirely cleared of traffic, except ambulances. We spoke of a friend of ours who had died the night before, at forty-three. “But my God! I’m forty-one,” a bearded banker said. “Don’t worry,” his wife, who is German, answered. “There is no order. It is not a line.” I often meet people who do not like me or each other. It doesn’t always matter. I keep on smiling, talking. I knock at the same door once, three times, twelve. My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind — like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing. The same smile. I knew someone who used to go to sleep counting, not sheep, but people against whom he had grievances — bullies from childhood, kindergarten teachers, back to nannies even, bosses, employees, anybody awful up to the preceding day. When they were rounded up in his mind, he would machine-gun them down. If it turned out he had left out anybody, he would have to start all over. Round them up. Gun them down again. Slept without difficulty. Judgment Day may be compiled of private arsenals like these.