Speedboat by RENATA ADLER Page B

people from newspapers, the theater, movies, television to teach. In time, he mentions the importance of having students placed with people who are already E.I.F., that is, Established in the Field. He means people who are often mentioned in the press. If one can just give him a few phone numbers, he will call them at home. I should have known. I did not understand for quite a while.
    It was midnight in our paper’s office building. There was a Pinkerton man in the elevator. “Something wrong?” Jim asked. “Yeah,” he said. “A girl on the fifth floor has been molestated.”
    On the television set, El Exigente was mouthing his “ Bueno, ” the natives were diving and splashing with pleasure, and Jim and I, who were never going to drink that brand of coffee, were watching the news. “His lawyer looks bored,” I said. Jim reached for his drink. “You always try to look bored,” he said, “when your client is committing perjury.”
    A lady lifted the lid of her toilet tank and found a small yachtsman, on the deck of his boat, in the bowl. They spoke of detergents. A man with fixed dentures bit into an apple. A lady in a crisis of choice phoned her friend from a market and settled for milk of magnesia. A hideous family pledged itself to margarine.
    Testimony resumed. Apparently, no good lawyer permits a client who is lying to tell a long story—to perjure himself in detail. The longer the story, the more true it did seem. “Well, you had a little social conversation together, did you not?” Senator Montoya was asking. There was a short answer. “Well, did you socialize about the Watergate?” Senator Montoya insisted, in his idiosyncratic way.
    “ Mangia, ” said the lady in the lovely spaghetti-sauce commercial. “ Mangia, Bernstein. Mangia, O’Malley. Mangia, Garcia. Mangia , Jones.”
    “Hello, Jen?” the voice on the phone said, at two one morning. “It’s Mel. Sorry to call you at home.” Mel is the Acting Head of our department—Drama and Cinema. The Acting Head of the Acting Department, in a way. The Permanent Head, a flustered lady of pure steel, whose academic background consists of a Midwestern degree in Oral Science and a brief marriage to an actor, is on a city grant to study Media History abroad.
    “Hi, Mel,” I said to the Acting Head, as warmly as I could.
    “Jen, the Art Department wants to do a course in Space on Film,” he said. He paused. “We knew you’d want to be informed.” He paused again. “And, without trying to influence you in any way, we’d like to know what your position is.” I yawned. “Mel, I feel strongly about this,” I said. I had been teaching for some months. I was catching on. “I really do.”
    “We hoped you would,” he said. “Len has just pointed out—we’re having coffee here—that there are just two things on film. Time. And Space. If we let the Art people go ahead with Space, we’ll have lost half…”
    “Yes,” I said. “And if the History Department takes Time away…”
    “Exactly.”
    Summer. The speedboat was serious. The young tycoon was serious about it, as he was serious about his factories, his wife, his children, his parties, his work, his art collection, his resort. The little group had just had lunch, at sea, aboard the tycoon’s larger boat, a schooner. The speedboat, designed for him the year before, had just arrived that day. The tycoon asked who would like to join him for a spin to test it. The young American wife from Malibu, who had been overexcited about everything since dawn, said she would adore to go. Her husband, halfway through his coffee still, declined. The young Italian couple, having a serious speedboat of their own, went to compare. In starting off, the boat seemed much like any other, only in every way—the flat, hard seats, the austere lines—more spare. And then, at speed, the boat, at its own angle to the sea, began to hit each wave with flat, hard, jarring thuds, like the heel of a hand against a