by Smiley, Jane
At the table, picking out some savory bits and pieces for Father, Marly was sorry she had let down like that. There, that man she had been talking to, was leaving already. He had come to celebrate, and they hadn’t celebrated yet, and he looked just like she felt. Was it too self-centered to think that she had done that to him? She hadn’t meant to say what she had said. The women at church, who had been giving her all kinds of advice about getting married, had all said, “Don’t let them know what you’re really thinking. It scares them.” One had even said, “It scares them and he’ll get back at you somehow, even if he doesn’t want to. He can’t help it.” She put the last of the shrimp on her father’s plate. She had been skeptical, but not anymore. She sighed. Marly did not choose to look forward to marriage in this sad and lonely way, but it seemed to come to her without her bidding, even against her will. Even so, she went toward the wedding day by day. The old life had, after all, ejected her, and there was nowhere else to go.
Dr. Garcia passed Tim Monahan as he was hurrying up the walk, and carefully mastered his temptation to stop and chat. What was there to chat about besides the very interesting way Tim’s hopes, aspirations, and personality structure meshed with those of the tenure committee, the very thing Garcia could not possibly chat about? And even the most idle conversation would reveal—
Tim glanced at and obviously recognized him. Garcia felt his left eyebrow, the conspiratorial one (his right eyebrow was the disapproving one) arch upward. He made his face into a mask and kept going. The exchange took a nanosecond, and after it, Garcia paused and turned to look at Tim’s receding back. He didn’t kid himself into thinking that the exchange hadn’t registered—the ability of primates to interpret even the most subtle facial expressions of other primates was so highly developed that even chimps could, with 99 percent accuracy, pick the friendly expressions from a series of slides of other chimps flashed upon a screen for a tenth of a second apiece. As Tim was a novelist, Garcia thought, his skills in such interpretation, whether learned or innate, would be all that much more acute.
He stepped up onto the Harstad porch and rang the bell. The door opened. You know, he thought as he made his greeting, you could get a bunch of novelists together and run all sorts of tests. They were not an especially well-studied group—
He went into the house and the big red door closed behind him.
31
He Tells Her He’s Not Married
IT WASN’T a very nice day—rainy and chilly, too cold for Cecelia, and only in the thirties. What in the world would she do when the temperature dropped into single digits, and the windchill factor (a frightening concept) into the double digits below zero—fifties and sixties below, she had heard.
Her thermostat sat magically on seventy, where the landlord had set it before locking it in, but the air temperature seemed to gyrate wildly anyway, at least between frigid (when she was sipping hot tea) and unbearable (when she was grading tests, homework, and compositions). She had on a heavy undershirt and three sweaters and was contemplating her third hot bath of the day when he knocked. She discarded two sweaters as she walked to the door.
Of course it was Chairman X, even though it was Sunday, and after four, and he and the Lady X had promised the children a movie at seven as a reward for the last-minute baby-sitting that had allowed them to go to that ghastly engagement party.
He looked, as he often did, as though he was just going to say one thing and then leave, but no. As soon as she had shut the door, he had his hands under the sweater and the undershirt—that she had no bra on was not a coincidence—and she had hers on his face, and he was kissing her all under her ears and down her neck as he eased her onto the living room carpet and pulled off her slippers, socks, more socks, corduroy slacks, and tights and shouldered them aside in heaps. She arched toward the tropical warmth of his need for her, and in about two seconds she was naked and sweating, a girl at the beach, her eyes closed against the glare.
The only married man Cecelia had ever slept with had been her own husband; it seemed clear that marriage produced a more volcanic effect on Chairman X than it had on Scott. He showed up every day or so. His need to go to bed was as constant as the sun, but his desire to do so was as erratic, and dramatic, as the loop of a comet through the solar system. One day he had made up his mind that he could not, would not, today or ever again. The next day he had to, no matter what. But in fact, his convictions had nothing to do with it. He would assure her, in a voice full of tragic feeling, “I have a choice, you know. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to take responsibility for my own actions.” Cecelia would nod with her eyes closed, nearly unconscious with the desire that his tone of voice aroused in her. If there was one thing she had learned it was that, right now at least, she was irresistible.
They got up off the living room carpet and moved into the bedroom. He covered her tenderly with the bedspread, then hung her clothes fondly over the back of her desk chair, pairing her socks and slippers in a row on the dresser.
He didn’t look THAT WAY, or any way that Cecelia had ever been attracted to—he was small and wiry, though years of outdoor work had hardened his hands, forearms, and shoulders. He was much older than she was—his hair was thin on top, and graying, and badly cut. Most of the time it looked like he had been pulling it, or that it had just stood up on its own out of an excess of feeling. Even though he was thin and muscular, his body looked used and uncared-for. Apparently he had solved the problem of what to wear by always wearing the same thing—jeans, a laundered shirt, a threadbare cotton sweater, crew socks, brown boots. But she took this and everything else as a true sign that he was altogether different from her standard, a true sign that she had dropped to a deeper, more genuine and powerful level of feeling, a true sign that even deeper levels than she had ever imagined existed were available to her if she had the guts.
He said, “I didn’t mean to stay. It’s almost five, and I promised my kids they could go to a movie. I’ve got this bean loaf in the oven.”
“What?”
“It’s my day to cook. I made a bean loaf and a salad.”
These clues about his domestic life were tantalizing and strange. She sighed with appreciation at his uniqueness. In this area, she had little to offer—sometimes a soup on the stove that he wouldn’t eat if it had meat in it, sometimes just a jar of Skippy peanut butter and a loaf of Roman Meal bread or a bowl of popcorn.
He lifted her hand, which he was holding tightly in both of his, to his cheek. She spread her fingers and he pressed into them. He said, “I really have to go.”
She said, “I was thinking about my uncle Carlos, well, he’s really a cousin, but lots older than my father, and at one time he was a rich man, so we all called him ‘Uncle Carlos’ out of respect. When I was little, we would go to his farm every summer. He was the only one in the family with both a house in the city and a farm in the country. The farm was mostly orchards that his father had planted—”
Chairman X put his feet on the bed and looked at his watch. He said, “Ten minutes at the outside.”
Cecelia hid her smile with the bedspread and said nothing, only went on about Uncle Carlos. “Lots of familes live on the farm to take care of the orchards. I don’t know that they were profitable, but Uncle Carlos had some other businesses. All I know is that there seemed like there was always plenty of food. And this other thing, too. I don’t know that the fruit actually did give off much fragrance, but it always SEEMED that the air was full of sweetness—not overpowering—just enough to make you want to inhale and inhale.” Cecelia felt that although this bit about the fragrance was a lie, that in fact this whole tale was a lie, it should have been true.
Chairman X said, “Just a minute.” He got up and walked over to the phone on her desk and dialed with his back to her. After a moment, she heard him say, “Honey, did you take the bean loaf out? Good. Listen, I’m tied up right now. I’ll try to be home in time to go to the movie, but I can’t guarantee it. Maybe
I’ll meet you there. Okay.” He hung up and came back to the bed. When he sat down, there was a silence between them, and Uncle Carlos seemed to have receded into the distance. Chairman X said, “You know, twenty years ago, I would have said, ‘Honey, I’m over at Cecelia’s, and we decided to get it on, I’ll be home when I can,’ and she would have said, ‘That’s cool,’ but we can’t do that anymore.”
“Your wife is unfaithful, too?”
“We’re not married, technically.”
“Excuse me?”
“We forgot, in a way.”
“You forgot to get married?”
“It was low on our list of priorities. Now my daughter’s in the eighth grade. I don’t know. It seems like if we turned around and got married now, it would lower my daughter’s opinion of her mother too much.” He sighed. After a long, pensive moment, he said, “You know, I’ve got to say that twenty years ago, I didn’t expect to be living in the world I live in now. If I had, I might have been more ready to embrace political violence.” He shook his head, the way people in L.A. did when they talked about how they wished they’d bought into the Orange County real estate market in 1965.
Then he said, “Tell me what was planted.”
“What was planted?”
“In those orchards.”
“Oh.” She returned to the story she was making up, taking her usual pleasure in seeing him turn away from his past and toward hers. “Almonds. Apricots. Avocados. Some peaches. I don’t know. Grapefruit. Lemons. Probably oranges.”
“All those together?” His eyes were closed, but he sounded skeptical. Cecelia licked her lips, caught. There had been an Uncle Carlos, and he had had a farm, but Cecelia didn’t actually know anything about it. Even her mother had only been there once or twice. “Well”—she drew the word out, as if delving carefully into her memory—“the farm was large, and on the side of a mountain. I guess there were lots of different elevations.”
“Microclimates can vary considerably, even in a rather confined geographical area.” He put his hands behind his head and made himself even more comfortable. Although he wasn’t touching her, his settling in felt like an actual embrace.
“Hmmmm,” she dared, “I think there were grapes, too.”
He nodded. The lies Cecelia kept telling felt to her like a net that she was throwing over him. She glanced at the clock. It was almost six. He wouldn’t be meeting his family at the movie, that was for sure. The quiet exultation of this knowledge was possibly the most astonishingly selfish feeling she had ever known. But she felt no remorse. As she talked about Uncle Carlos, she unbuttoned the Chairman’s jeans and opened his zipper so slowly that she could feel its teeth separate one by one.
32
It’s Always Something
LOREN STROOP WAS making a remarkable recovery from his “brain attack.” His doctor didn’t like the word “stroke,” which he said made a medical accident sound like an act of God, of which there were none. His doctor was particular about the niceties of brain attacks, and he was careful to inform Loren that his recovery was in the eighty-fourth percentile of male patients of his age group (65 plus) in speed of recovery and in the seventy-ninth percentile in scope of recovery. Loren couldn’t talk yet, so the doctor anticipated his doubts by advising him not to think of these percentiles as if they were grades (a B and a C–), but to think of them as representative examples of the law of averages. Loren had escaped, by thirty-four percentage points and twenty-nine percentage points, the law of averages. The doctor was pleased with this, and in his daily conversations with himself about Loren, which Loren listened to as much as he could, since they were taking place in his room, Loren tried to find as much satisfaction as the doctor in these numbers. If Loren looked depressed, the doctor would fill him in on the progress of Mrs. Gruber, down the hall (age group—45 to 65, percentile rankings—thirty-two and thirty-four), who wasn’t doing well at all. Loren knew this clandestine information was supposed to buck him up, possibly to make him feel lucky that he had gotten away with some of Mrs. Gruber’s rightful points (although, according to the doctor, no one had any rights in the law of averages), so he did his best. The nurses all liked his doctor very much, and approved of his manner with his patients, which was to set an example of determination and good cheer that they would feel obliged to follow.
He could use his right arm and his right leg. He could recognize objects on his right side. He could use his left leg and arm if he could manage to keep his right eye on them, which made walking with his new cane possible but not easy. He could understand what people said and read the right side of a book page, but he could not produce language of any sort, either by speaking or writing.
He woke up in the morning thinking about his main problem, which was how to get his plans to his extension dean Harstad, and get his dean out to his machine. Sometimes he thought about his other problem, which was how he was going to live with these “functional deficits,” as the doctor called them. They did not fit in very well with the solitary farming life that was the only life he knew.
The nurse came in with his breakfast and put it on his right side. He recognized everything except one thing, but when he turned his head a little, he saw that what he hadn’t recognized was cantaloupe. He kept his head cocked, and remembered, all of a sudden, an old cow he’d had, blind in one eye, who cocked her head like that. You had to milk her from her good side, but he’d liked her, liked the deliberate way she’d gone about her business, the habits she’d developed to compensate for her disability.
After breakfast, they made him walk around the halls. They wanted him to go faster than he wanted to—it was taxing to have to ignore the way everything on the left sloped away to confusion. It was like walking on the edge of the known world and he had to protect himself against the fear it seemed always to arouse. It was easier to lie in bed with his good side up, but they were bound and determined not to let him do the easy thing. The walk lasted forever, and made him forget about his future, but never about his machine or his plans. He could picture both perfectly in his mind, but no matter how receptive his pretty and sweet speech therapist looked, no matter how softly and encouragingly she said, “Go ahead, try it. Say it,” still, the sounds came out like mooing.
He did not doubt that the big ag companies, the CIA, and the FBI had introduced some sort of selective brain poison into his water supply in order to disable or, more probably, kill him. He did not doubt that he was lucky to be alive. He did not doubt that he would overcome this mooing problem and prevail in the end. But it seemed unfair, after a life of hard work and patience, that they would get him at last.
The Millers came before lunch. They brought a sack of apples, their Haralsons that he liked so much. They sat on the right side of the bed, and the nurse told them he had walked four circuits of the hospital today. They were thrilled. Sally did most of the talking. She and Mary Hutton had been over to his place, cleaning. Mary’s dad, Line, had had a little accident with his truck, but Line had beaten the dent in the hood out with a hammer and it looked as good as new. Mary wasn’t speaking to her sister in Chicago, still. Sally’s own girls were back on the basketball team at school. Practices had just started. Weren’t the apples good-looking this year? And crisp! Just wait until he tried them. Sally smiled and smiled, and stroked his right hand so that he didn’t want to pull it away even though he did want to find each of the girls a dime.
While Sally talked, he stared meaningfully at Joe, until finally Joe said, “Well, I told you about how we sold your beans? Got a good price on them, too.”
Loren shook his head. That news was weeks old.
Joe went on uncertainly, “Corn’s in the bin. It had about seventeen percent moisture. Pretty good, I thought. We dried it down to about fourteen. Just waiting for the price to go up a bit to sell it. That’s what I’m doing with my own.”
Loren shook his head. Though Joe would have been dumbstruck by the thought, Loren didn’t care at all about the corn.
/> Loren looked at Sally, who fell silent. After a bit, she said, “You want to tell us something?”
He nodded.
“Not about the corn or the beans or the dogs? The dogs went over to the Christensens. You mind about that? They like dogs.”
Loren shook his head.
“The house?”
Loren shook his head, though doing so made his worlds, the known and the unknown, swirl painfully together. Nothing quite took it out of him like shaking his head.
Joe said, “The machinery? Lyle Hutton and I put it away in the machine shed the other day.”
Loren shook his head.
Joe said, “Now, we ain’t been in the barn except to turn out the lights. I know that’s your secret place, and we don’t want to get into that, so your secret is safe. We haven’t been a bit nosy, if you’re worried about that.”
“That’s right,” said Sally. “You can count on us. We stopped the mail at the post office and had the phone turned off, but we thought it was better to leave the electric on, and some lights on in the house. But believe me, we haven’t gone into your private things.”
Loren nodded vigorously, to indicate that they COULD go into the barn, they COULD investigate his private things, because he was convinced that if Joe did that, he would be impressed enough with the machine that he would take care of it, preserve it. Preservation would be, well, might be, enough. Somewhere, a few points up in the percentile rankings, he would find language again. The mooing would turn into persuasion, and there he would be, back in the office of his dean, showing his plans; there his dean would be, out in the barn marvelling at his revolutionary machine, and that would be IT for the CIA, the FBI, and the big ag companies.
But the Millers interpreted his nods as approval, and assured him again that they wouldn’t get into his private things, and pretty soon they had told him the rest of the gossip and gone home to their dinner. His own dinner was meat loaf, which he ate because there was nothing else to do, and then he turned his good side up and tried to doze off in spite of the sense he had of the strange unknown place beneath him, over which he lay suspended. He substituted knowledge for feeling, making himself think, over and over, I’m just in bed, I’m just in bed, I’m just in bed, but the fact was, if you went with that, substituting knowledge for feeling, then you had to admit that, maybe, probably, that machine would never get out of his barn and those plans would languish at the copy place until after he was dead, and then they would throw them out. If you substituted knowledge for feeling, then you had to admit that the FBI and the CIA and the big ag companies, especially them, were likely to have their way, with him, Loren Stroop, as with everything else.