Free Speedboat by RENATA ADLER

year—is still around.
    The St. Bernard at the pound on Ninety-second Street was named Bonnie and would have cost five dollars. The attendant held her tightly on a leash of rope. “Hello, Bonnie,” I said. Bonnie growled. “I wouldn’t talk to her if I was you,” the attendant said. I leaned forward to pat her ear. Bonnie snarled. “I wouldn’t touch her if I was you,” the attendant said. I held out my hand under Bonnie’s jowls. She strained against the leash, and choked and coughed. “Now cut that out, Bonnie,” the attendant said. “Could I just take her for a walk around the block,” I said, “before I decide?” “Are you out of your mind?” the attendant said. Aldo patted Bonnie, and we left.
    DEAR TENANT:
    We have reason to believe that there are impostors posing as Con Ed repairmen and inspectors circulating in this area.
    Do not permit any Con Ed man to enter your premises or the building, if possible.
    THE PRECINCT
    The New York Chinese cabdriver lingered at every corner and at every traffic light, to read his paper. I wondered what the news was. I looked over his shoulder. The illustrations and the type were clear enough: newspaper print, pornographic fiction. I leaned back in my seat. A taxi-driver who happened to be Oriental with a sadomasochistic cast of mind was not my business. I lit a cigarette, looked at my bracelet. I caught the driver’s eyes a moment in the rearview mirror. He picked up his paper. “I don’t think you ought to read,” I said, “while you are driving.” Traffic was slow. I saw his mirrored eyes again. He stopped his reading. When we reached my address, I did not tip him. Racism and prudishness, I thought, and reading over people’s shoulders.
    But there are moments in this place when everything becomes a show of force. He can read what he likes at home. Tipping is still my option. Another newspaper event, in our brownstone. It was a holiday. The superintendent normally hauls the garbage down and sends the paper up, by dumbwaiter, each morning. On holidays, the garbage stays upstairs, the paper on the sidewalk. At 8 a.m., I went downstairs. A ragged man was lying across the little space that separates the inner door, which locks, from the outer door, which doesn’t. I am not a news addict. I could have stepped over the sleeping man, picked up my Times , and gone upstairs to read it. Instead, I knocked absurdly from inside the door, and said, “Wake up. You’ll have to leave now.” He got up, lifted the flattened cardboard he had been sleeping on, and walked away, mumbling and reeking. It would have been kinder, certainly, to let the driver read, the wino sleep. One simply cannot bear down so hard on all these choices.
    What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind. Sometimes the point is a momentum, a fact, a quality, a voice, an intimation, a thing said or unsaid. Sometimes it’s who’s at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life. But if you are, for any length of time, custodian of the point—in art, in court, in politics, in lives, in rooms—it turns out there are rear-guard actions everywhere. To see a thing clearly, and when your vision of it dims, or when it goes to someone else, if you have a gentle nature, keep your silence, that is lovely. Otherwise, now and then, a small foray is worthwhile. Just so that being always, complacently, thoroughly wrong does not become the safest position of them all. The point has never quite been entrusted to me.
    My cousin, who was born on February 29th, became a veterinarian. Some years ago, when he was twenty-eight (seven, by our childhood birthday count), he was drafted, and sent to Malaysia. He spent most of his military service there, assigned to the