Speedboat by RENATA ADLER

for years, dwelled upon this problem: “For if a man should dream of heaven and, waking, find in his hand a flower as a token that he had really been there, what then? What then?”
    Well, I don’t know what then. Every autumn, presumably, the scarlet of the maples still thrills Congressman Tino Bellardinelli’s lonely spirit like a cry / Of bugles going by. When Agnes Betty Cotts’ summons comes to join / The innumerable caravan which moves / To that mysterious realm, she will receive it as a nun and president of a Catholic women’s college. I work here at the newspaper. Sooner or later, though, I guess I was bound to slip the surly bonds of earth / And dance the skies on the laughter-silvered winds of Six Two Uniform or Three Nine Tango.
    “Take off everything except your slip,” the nurse said. “Doctor will be with you in a moment.” Nobody under forty-five, in twenty years, had worn a slip, but nurses invariably gave this instruction. There they all are, however, the great dead men with their injunctions. Make it new. Only connect.
    “Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop,” the moderator of the talk show said. They had been taping a panel. The Indo-Chinese lesbian restaurant owner, who was holding her fish-sauces cookbook, resumed a dignified, offended silence. The crisp, cold, bracing writer was drunk, and raving to the savage pundit. The French film-archivist was talking, with delight, to the Bulgarian movie personality from California, who was about to sell, in stores across the country, the product of her secret formula for face creams. “That,” said the French film-archivist, squinting through his smoke, and scattering more ashes onto his vest and trousers, “is a house of another color.”
    “Horse,” the nine-year-old star of television commercials said.
    “I know exactly what you mean,” said the lady critic, who had been trying to find her way into the conversation somehow. “ Exactement what you mean, Emile,” she added, patting the Frenchman’s arm. The rock musician, however, spoke at the same moment. “ Tu parles ,” he said, amiably. It was his favorite (in fact, his only) French expression. For Italians, he had “ Ecco ” and “ S’immagine ”; for Germans, “ Sowas ” and “ Unglaublich .” He had travelled widely. In this case, he said, “ Tu parles , Monsieur Blin.”
    “Stop,” the moderator said again. The nine-year-old sulked.
    The gentleman critic was now in his cups and muttering. Seven years ago, an obscure Southern writer by the critic’s own name had been chosen for an international colloquium on modern humor, which was held in Seoul, Korea. It had not been widely covered in the press. Certainly there had been an error. Certainly the invitation had gone to the wrong—the obscure and unintended—Herbert Course. No publication, however, had called attention to the matter. In the critic’s mind, the outrage had assumed immense proportions, as a parable of the monstrous in contemporary life. His divorce, his conversion to the politics and the literature of alienation had been but one result.
    “Of course, you have right,” said the Frenchman, in serene misunderstanding. “When I have eighteen, I go in Natalie.” He seemed to be speaking of a visit to Turkish relatives in Anatolia. “I have eat something. It give me a terrible pain. In my tripes.”
    “Lord, yes,” said the quarterback, warmly. He was already a lay preacher. He had just made a large investment in organic dog foods. The lights dimmed. The tape and the cameras had been off for several minutes. “Exhausted?” the curator of the Sixties Art Collection was saying to a cameraman who stood there. “My dear, I was drained.”
    I have been writing speeches for a politician. Jim, who is a lawyer from Atlanta, has been running the campaign. My normal job is reporting and reviewing at the paper. By mistake, these past few months, I also teach. Normally, left to myself, I am not inclined to work much. To the