August 10, 1986

NO attentive reader could fail to be aware that the present tense is in ascendancy. Jay McInerney's ''Bright Lights, Big City,'' Italo Calvino's ''Mr. Palomar,'' Margaret Atwood's ''Handmaid's Tale,'' Bret Easton Ellis's ''Less Than Zero,'' Carolyn Chute's ''Beans of Egypt, Maine'' and Richard Ford's ''Sportswriter'' - these are just some of the dozens of recent novels composed in the present. And it has become the norm for one sort of contemporary short story. To pick a single example, Marian Thurm's ''Secrets'' begins this way: ''There are four of us at the barbecue, two married couples. Eric, who is married to my younger sister, Lauren, and in charge of the chicken, accidentally tips a plateful of white meat into the grass. Eight pieces lie there, skin side down, and we stare at the patches streaked red with barbecue sauce, all of us momentarily horrified and unable to move. Then Eric takes up the garden hose and rinses each piece off delicately, with a fine spray of water.'' The present tense was pretty much a novelty item until a half-dozen or so years ago, primarily because the fiction writer's most precious tool is the illusion that what he is describing actually happened. The past tense helps sweep us away in the story; the present tense subtly reminds us that it is artifice after all. Fairy tales, to name a prototypical kind of narrative, start ''Once upon a time,'' and proceed in the past tense because their listeners insist on surrendering disbelief.

Senate conferees on the tax bill agreed tonight on a proposal limiting the amount homeowners could borrow against their personal residences in order to claim more tax deductions. The proposal, part of the new offer Senate conferees are to present to House negotiators Monday, is aimed at preventing homeowners from circumventing tight new restrictions on deductions for interest other than home mortgages. The original Senate proposal would have allowed homeowners to avoid these limitations by taking out second mortgages or home equity loans up to the market value of each residence to finance consumer purchases like cars, with the interest entirely deductible.

DURING the days or weeks a Supreme Court nominee spends under the Congressional microscope, the three branches of Government intersect as they rarely do at any other time. Sometimes the fit is smooth, as it was five years ago, when the Senate confirmed President Reagan's first nominee, Sandra Day O'Connor. The hearing served essentially as the Senate Judiciary Committee's ''welcome to Washington'' for the little-known Arizona judge. But events of the last two weeks demonstrate that there can also be ragged edges when the three branches come together.

In a neat white farmhouse by the side of a country road, just after 6 P.M. on an evening in early fall, a woman is preparing to kill herself. Of all the unlikely subjects for a Hollywood movie, '' 'night, Mother'' seems among the most improbable. Hollywood is clever at animating nightmares, at turning into rubber and plastic the tangled, slithery hordes of alien things that crawl through our unconscious. Audiences feast on disguised fears. However, they have usually recoiled from straight jolts of bad dreams that don't go away in daylight. In '' 'night, Mother'' a 36-year-old woman decides to take control of her life by ending it. The mother who has never understood her is the only barrier on her road to the grave. That Marsha Norman's Pulitzer Prize-winning play has been turned into a movie is due to the willingness of everyone involved to take much less money than they usually command. Miss Norman wrote the screenplay on speculation. Sissy Spacek allowed her name to be used by the producers of the play during the year and a half that they were trying to sell Miss Norman's script. Instead of the $1 million-plus salary that she got for her last movie, ''Marie,''

AS clouds of dust filled the rooms and hallways, a group of teen-agers from Zelienople, Pa., were sweeping, shoveling and carting piles of debris out of an abandoned apartment building in Yonkers one day last week. The teen-agers, who belong to a Presbyterian youth group, arrived last Sunday to spend a week helping a community organization that is seeking to turn back the tide of urban decay that swept along Elliott Avenue in the southwest section of the city. There are six abandoned buildings on the block, which is made up of three-story brick row houses. In exchange for their volunteer work, the students received some first-hand insight into the problems of urban life. It was a life, they said, that contrasts sharply with life in Zelienople, a rural town about 25 miles north of Pittsburgh with a population of 3,500.

When ''Me and My Girl'' opens at the Marquis Theater tonight, it will mean something pretty special to Richard Armitage, the driving force behind its revival first in London, now in New York. That's not just because he's a theatrical agent, 57 years old, with no previous experience of production. It's not just because the idea of restaging a bouncy 30's British musical was thought absurdly risky by most of the leading British impresarios. It's not even just because there wasn't so much as a proper script of the show in existence when the work of revival began. No, the reason it's special is more personal, more private than that. The composer of ''Me and My Girl'' was Noel Gay. Noel Gay's offstage name was Reginald Armitage. Reginald Armitage, who died in 1954, was Richard Armitage's father. And rarely can a son have struggled harder, more single-mindedly and against tougher odds to reestablish a father's reputation than has Richard Armitage these past few years. It's a combination of filial faith and professional judgment that has paid off handsomely in London, where his production of ''Me and My Girl'' has so far run more than 600 performances; but, as Mr. Armitage well knows, Broadway is the world's capital of musical theater and provides the show with its severest test to date.

THE weekly testing of water quality at coastal beaches has brought good news and bad. The good news is that last year's problem - overflowing at aging and inadequate sewage-treatment plants - has not recurred; the bad news is that there are many other causes of pollution at beaches. And when one problem is solved, another inevitably crops up. In the first three months of the new, more careful testing program, almost two dozen beaches have been closed, usually for no more than a day or two, because the water had high concentrations of fecal coliform bacteria. Most of the problems have occurred in bays and inlets, rather than at ocean beaches. (Fecal coliform, found in human and animal waste, does not pose a danger to bathers, but may indicate the presence of untreated sewage or other contaminants.) Despite the closings, state Department of Environmental Protection officials have found the testing program reassuring.

Fear of Inflation Last week, reports of an OPEC pact to curtail output raised oil prices on world markets - and the specter of renewed inflation. But even without the oil factor, economists have been worrying about inflationary pressures. Most responding to a recent survey by Blue Chip Economic Indicators, of Sedona, Ariz., said it was their top economic concern. On average, they see the Consumer Price Index rising at higher annual rates - up to 3.9 percent in second-quarter 1987, compared with 1.5 percent in this year's second quarter. Victor Zarnowitz, a University of Chicago economist, is less worried, but agrees that inflation is likely to rise. A rise in food prices and in the cost of services - especially health services - he says, may put the C.P.I.'s annual growth rate at 2.6 percent this quarter and at 3.4 percent by the fourth quarter.

IN the waning morning hours, a few breakfasters were finishing their meals at the homey Jockey Club in the Ritz-Carlton on New York's Central Park South. The setting was faultless - the English-pine bar, the pink tablecloths, the wooden walls adorned with hunting scenes. At one of the center tables, a slight 50-year-old man with ginger-colored hair sipped his tea, stony-faced. When a maintenance man had the bad timing to start vacuuming, the stony-faced man scolded him to do that later. Luxurious trappings matter greatly to John B. Coleman. He owns the snazzy New York Ritz-Carlton and the Washington Ritz-Carlton, as well as the Jockey Clubs housed in them, and manages Chicago's fashionable Whitehall and Tremont Hotels. His decorous renovations of those hotels into something akin to charming English country homes have stamped him as one of the prominent developers of small, high-priced lodging.

My neighbor has a lovely garden, and as the weather turns fine, he sits in it - grass underfoot, flowers around him, blue sky through the branches up above. To double his pleasure, he adds his portable radio - the glories of summer and ''La Traviata'' too. Indeed, my neighbor's love for concert music is so great that it plays into his ears seemingly from the moment he wakes till his ears sink to the pillow. An entire cultural history laps at his consciousness. How can he not grow in wisdom?

In the process of converting two slender warehouses into apartment buildings, a partnership led by Anthony M. Kissling and Donald P. Parson plans to carve out a large atrium, ''skin'' and replace the facade and realign the windows. Essentially, the developers will be creating a new building, using only the existing buildings's framework and addresses, 369 and 371 Broadway in TriBeCa.

This was a match that Wimbledon was deprived of twice, one that would be called a classic if it were played again a month from now in the United States Open. Instead, Boris Becker and John McEnroe met on a scenic mountaintop in Vermont today, the boy wonder of professional tennis against the player described by his peers as an uncompromising genius, back on the tour after a six-month sabbatical. For two and a half hours in a match interrupted twice by rain, Becker and McEnroe offered a contrast in styles and temperaments. This was Becker's power against McEnroe's finesse, the West German teen-ager's clenched-fist resolve against a simmering cauldron of emotion apt to bubble over at any time.