Moo

by Smiley, Jane

“With all due respect, Helen, and I do recognize we are guests in your home, this is really not your business.” He beamed. He said, “The Lord has returned my youth to me for a reason. I have prayed over and pondered what that reason might be. The fall of Godless Communism in Europe is the answer. I have wandered in a wilderness of meaningless activity for all of my adult life. I studied to bring enlightenment to developing nations, but people who were supposedly on my side worked against me, and the people I was trying to help failed to see the light. My wife died. I fell into despair. Only then did I find the Lord, and only then did I find Marly and our future together. Only NOW do I understand what I was sent here to do. The Lord’s message can come through CNN as easily as in a glorious cloud.” He fixed his gaze momentarily on each member of the party, then said, “If you pray ardently and earnestly, you will understand that we will not be balked, and that for all of us here, embracing this vision rather than resisting it will lead us forward into the light.” He sat down, grinning.

  Helen realized that when he used the word “we,” he meant himself and his coconspirator, the Lord.

  42

  Leben und Arbeit

  EVERY DAY, Dean Jellinek had to dig a little deeper to haul up the remaining glow from his courtship by the Final Four corporations who had vied for the privilege of granting him not exactly, or even close to, the million dollars everyone on the campus thought he had gotten. It was a habit he got into—when he sat down at his computer in the morning, the first thing he did was run his hands over the keyboard (it was a new computer, one he had bought with much of the first installment of the money, a computer powerful enough to crunch all the numbers he was contracted to generate in the next year, five months, two weeks, and four days). Running his hands over the keyboard reminded him how enthusiastic all four corporations had been, and that reminder gave him enough confidence to call up the program he was modifying to receive his data. He did not have any data yet, which was okay, because he hadn’t perfected his program. He spent many hours every day perfecting his program. Had it not been for that remaining glow, Dean Jellinek would have been in despair: As a longtime computer nerd, he knew that, for him, perfecting programs was what watching television was for others—a mindless activity that promised pleasure, lasted for hours, and left him feeling like an old cigarette butt. He knew this because when he went home at night, he watched everything on the TV from the nightly news with Tom Brokaw to David Letterman almost without looking away from the screen.

  Dean Jellinek was a hard-working, hard-playing, hard-driving sort of guy, outwardly balding but possessed of an internal crewcut stiff as the bristles on a wire brush. Only once before in his life had he endured a period like this one, and that was in the early months of his marriage to Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek, when he was beset by second thoughts and he knew she was, too. The signs were all the same: Every morning, sometimes late, sometimes early, but always whenever he could no longer resist, Hal Samuels, the R and D man from Western Egg and Milk Commodities, would call him up and ask him how it was going, and he would say that it was going fine. “Give me some idea,” Hal would say, “something I can tell the board,” and Dean would give him some idea—zero to sixty in five seconds, a line drive to deepest center field, a sky hook from the center line, a double eagle over the water hazard, a seventy-yard touchdown run, a slap shot between the goalie’s legs. After trading enough sports analogies, Hal and Dean were both reassured, and both felt, in some obscure way, that information had been exchanged. But really it was just the same as it had been with Elaine—honey, I’ve been thinking about you, honey, how are you, honey, have you been thinking about me, honey, last night was great, didn’t you think so, too, to which he would answer, good, fine, yes, and yes, as warmly as he could.

  Ah, but, as with Elaine, how had he gotten himself into this? Ah, but, as with Elaine, how had he invested so much—the computer had, in fact, cost as much money as that house they’d bought—so quickly? Ah, but, as with Elaine, how was he going to, day after day, month after month, year after year, endure this commitment? Ah, but, as with Elaine, how was he going to find some breathing room, with Samuels clinging to him all the time, his expectations, like Elaine’s had been, unvoiced but ever-present? The great irony was that he had been priding himself on what he’d learned about relationships—one of the reasons he was drawn to Joy, one of the reasons he’d pressed her to move in with him, was that she didn’t give him that breathless, closed-in feeling. He’d heard somewhere that one thing about horsewomen as girlfriends was that they almost didn’t have time for you. That had suited Dean right down to the ground.

  The frightening thing was that a corporation wasn’t like a girlfriend or wife, or like the federal agencies he’d gotten earlier grants from. This time he’d signed a contract. There would be no going to Samuels and saying, “Gee, honey, it hurts to say this, but I just don’t think it’s working out.” This time he had to learn to live with that suffocating feeling of commitment. He had to renew his faith in calf-free lactation, faith that had faded another degree with every step toward realization. These days calves looked GOOD to him. How else could a farmer so cheaply replenish his herd? What farmer would go for a life of dairying without calves? But he had to embrace Samuels, Western Egg and Milk, and those Holsteins anyway, without reservation, with desire and enthusiasm and hope and joy. He soothed his doubts with the same arguments he would use to soothe Samuels’ doubts, should Samuels express them: “Hey, marketing is YOUR end. I’m just here for the technical breakthroughs.” All things considered, it was easier to perfect his program.

  “Joy,” he had said this very morning, “Joy, honey, you aren’t helping me here. We’ve got ourselves into a big project, the biggest, and there can’t be any drag. The slightest friction, the least little wind resistance, and I’m afraid this airship isn’t going to get off the ground.” He then pursued his point. “I have to admit, Joy, and I only admit this to you, that the ship is bigger and the engines smaller than ever before. Not as much thrust, not as much thrust as we’ve been able to count on before.” Remembering her doubts, he added hastily, “The idea’s good, don’t get me wrong, the idea’s great, but it’s big, Joy, it’s so BIG! I can’t help being daunted. Anyone would be, so the least little, I don’t know, failure of cooperation, of, yes, teamwork, that’s a problem. I can’t help but think of this as our project, because it’s a project that we both have to live with. I can’t do a project like this at work. The immersion has to be total. I have to eat, sleep, and dream this project, and that’s where you come in, because I feel a small but decided spiritual space between us, like a crack in the tail assembly. I don’t want to crash, Joy, I don’t want to, and I know you don’t want to either.”

  He went on and on, buttering one slice of toast after another, and listening to himself spout this unbelievable bullshit while she sat across the table from him drinking a cup of coffee, no, sipping it one milliliter at a time, wrapped in her robe as if she were freezing to death, a statue of misery, and when he should have been saying something like “Joy, what’s the problem, how can I help you, let’s take a vacation, I’m right here, and I want you to talk to me,” he felt too deeply the wedge of anxiety driven into his soul by the four-hundred-thousand-dollars-over-four-years grant from Western Egg and Milk (God forbid any more than that—a real million might have killed him) and could not say what he should have said, but could only say, “We’ve got to get rolling on this, Joy, we’ve got to buck up and buckle down, turn this team into a victory machine, and I know we can do it, it’s only a matter of getting with it and getting on with it.” Go go go, fight fight fight. And then he ate all that toast, just folding each slice in the middle and shoving it into his mouth and gulping it down until he could tear himself away from the kitchen table and make himself go to the lab.

  THERE HAD BEEN a time, Joy thought, as she opened the gate to the indoor riding ring, when nothing stood for anything else, when the world around her was literally meaningl
ess and her activities were essentially mindless.

  When the gate was all the way open, she went through, then turned and pulled gently on Frenchman’s reins. The rangy bay four-year-old gelding ambled through the opening calmly enough, but once in the ring, he pricked up his ears and cocked his head and arched his neck as if all around him invisible stallions were challenging his authority. He let out a long, imperious squeal. From far in the back of the barn, his great and good friend, Tillie, let out a muffled but distinctly needy reply. Tillie was a seven-year-old Connemara pony mare, very much on the stocky side. They were a mismatched pair, but given the choice, neither would have moved a step without the other. Joy had tried three times to separate their stalls, knowing that continuing companionship only exacerbated their dependency, but the callings out and squeals of despair and clarion challenges and pledges of undying faithfulness on both sides had reechoed for days on end, until Joy had given up her principles and put them back together.

  Frenchman was a good-looking thoroughbred with some real talent for dressage, but love had made him distinctly less useful—he was always distracted by his attention to Tillie. He was bad enough when she was out of sight and far away. He was almost impossible if she were nearby.

  Joy pulled down the stirrup and mounted with an athletic little spring. While she was settling into the saddle, the gelding brought himself to frozen attention, and then squealed again. Joy nudged him with her heels, but he wouldn’t move off, so she smacked him hard on the rump with her whip. His pattern was to move eagerly in Tillie’s direction, and sluggishly away. Usually, Joy had to smack him very hard with the whip and use spurs to get his attention. He had been gelded late and Tillie had been bred twice. Both, therefore, had known sin, through the carelessness of owners who did not take equine virginity seriously enough as the foundation of a useful and productive life. Nor did it help that when the two were out in the field together, Tillie liked to back her round and lowly hindquarters right up to his nose, flop her tail over to the side, and offer herself, to his eternal frustration. It was a bad situation, and Joy couldn’t see a solution short of selling one or the other.

  Two years ago she would have sold Tillie without a second thought, briskly diagnosing the problem and efficiently solving it. Now she saw things more or less from their point of view, with results fatal to her own usefulness.

  She asked, then demanded, that Frenchman move into a trot. Tillie called out. The gelding’s ears swivelled, but he maintained his gait. Joy squeezed him a little harder with her legs, but held him firmly in with her hands. She felt the tension in the reins increase. His neck and back rounded as he went onto the bit and his trot settled into a bright, easy, swinging two beats. She felt the pleasure of it all through her thighs and hips, into the small of her back. This is what he could have been without Tillie. She guided him through some small circles, then some figure eights. On the serpentine, he curvetted out of his line and arched over the bit, testing her. She pushed him forward with her legs and then with the whip, making him do it again until the half-circles and straight lines he cut in the tanbark of the ring were as crisp as she knew he was capable of, then she brought him down to a walk and let him stretch out his head. He immediately issued a challenge to all the invisible stallions and a reassurance to Tillie that he would protect her. She neighed supportively back. Had they been human, their single-minded devotion to each other would have aroused admiration, or envy. As horses, their obsession was just another example of how simpleminded they were.

  She herself was simpleminded about Dean. Now that their paths seemed to be inexorably diverging, she was a little surprised at the power of her attachment to him. It was not as though she didn’t know what Dean was all about. In their five years together he had come up short morally or spiritually any number of times. He was devoted to Ronald Reagan, for example. The two of them could sit side by side, watching the same speech, and Joy would find herself so irredeemably appalled by the vacancy she saw in all the actor-president’s looks and gestures that she assumed that this time, at last, even Nancy Reagan could see it, but at the end, Dean would turn to her and say, with real enthusiasm, “God, that was great! What a great man! Not since Abraham Lincoln—” Another one of Dean’s habits, so transparent that Joy winced every time, was to buy something expensive whenever he felt anxious or unconfident. When they were first together and didn’t have much money, he had even gone from reconciling the checkbook and lamenting how low their funds were directly to the mall, where he would buy a new stereo component or a Shetland sweater purely out of the fear of being broke.

  She lifted Frenchman into a sluggish canter on the wrong lead, stopped him, got his attention with her whip. The next time, he took off at a livelier pace, and she settled into the rocking motion, circling the ring four times, then turning diagonally across it and asking for a flying change of lead in the center. She could feel his doubt, but then he did it. She smiled, and let him extend himself down the long side. One of the great pleasures of her early life had been long easy canters, sometimes mile after mile, down dirt roads in Oklahoma, where she had grown up. Her pony would be so fit from a summer of exercise that in the cool of the fall he seemed like he could go without stopping. She’d ridden mostly western then, or bareback, no goals and no pretensions.

  She had never wanted to marry Dean, but now, perversely, considering how deeply she disapproved of calf-free lactation and how firmly convinced she was that their couplehood would cease sometime soon, she wished they had gotten married, so that their life together would go out with a bang, rather than passing away in the vapor that now seemed inevitable. Partly she wanted this so that the surprising pain she felt at the breakup would be publicly marked and noted. Partly she wanted it because in retrospect her whole life seemed mostly vaporous, undifferentiated by events—no children, no marriages, no advanced degrees, not even any big-time championships, many pretty good horses that she’d brought along well enough, but no great one. Okay, and no grand love for an extraordinary and unique lover, either, just many days and years with Dean, an ordinary man of ordinary tastes who was terribly afraid of seeming ordinary, itself a characteristic that Joy had noted in almost every man and most of the women she had known.

  Down the center of the ring, six black and white poles raised by crosspieces six inches off the ground lay in a grid. She turned Frenchman toward them—cavalletti—and pressed him into an extended trot. The extended trot was Joy’s favorite gait, because of the bold way the animal’s forelegs shot forward, and the proud arch of the animal’s neck. The goal was not speed itself, though a certain amount of speed was a by-product of the longer stride. The goal was the balletic ideal of a long line, full display, and an extreme degree of dynamic tension achieved and controlled. They were going away from Tillie, so the horse was reluctant and lazy. She turned him out just before they reached the cavalletti and went back to the track. She raised her whip-hand high over his rump and brought it down hard, simultaneously maintaining a tight grip on the reins. His rump tucked. She applied her spurs. He was young enough and unsure enough of himself to wake up right then, right when she asked it. They came around the end of the ring, and she turned toward the cavalletti again. This time he was looking ahead, preparing himself to spring over each pole without breaking stride. They came to the first pole. She drove him on with her legs. She felt his muscles work, and then they were through. She brought him around and did it three more times, each time as well or a little better than the first time. Then she let him walk. He let out his neck and dropped his head. When Tillie called out, he was too tired to reply. Joy smiled.

  DEAN WENT to the commons for lunch at 11:30, right when it opened. He always hated it if one of the entrées was gone when he got there, because it would have been the best entrée and he would have missed it. Today he chose the bar-b-qued beef w/ sesame bun, carrot sticks on the side, cherry pie w/ whipped cream squiggles, and lettuce wedge w/ ranch dressing, $3.72, though perhaps he should have gotte
n the hamburger stroganoff w/ dairy sour creme and egg noodle bake. On the way to his table, he spoke with pleasant authority to everyone he should have, but he made it clear that he needed to be alone by pulling out his notebook and a mechanical pencil as soon as he sat down. As the recipient of a rumored million-dollar grant, he did get to sit alone while all the tables around him filled up.

  In his notebook, he sketched a Holstein cow—he’d always had a knack for drawing—who was standing by a fence gazing into the distance. Her udder hung heavy and full almost to the ground (120 pounds a day) but she wasn’t mindful of that. She was looking at the distant hills, which he then sketched in, and sniffing the fragrance, carried by the wind, of the unseen ocean beyond them. She was wondering. That was all, just wondering. Then he flipped over the page and began a list. The first item on the list was “Talk to Joy about her concerns ten minutes a day, increasing two mins. a week.” The second item was “Chris, this wkend, McDnlds and computer store.” Then he began to do what he should have done weeks ago, which was to break down the procedures he was going to have to employ in completing his project into smaller and smaller components. As he did so, it became clear which ones he could assign to his graduate assistant, which ones he could put off, which ones he needn’t do at all if he didn’t want to (“Write up daily report”), which ones he could do easily (“Make backup copy of number-crunching program”), and which ones would take some thought (“How does embryo signal its presence to cow?”). By the time he had gone back and gotten a serving of hamburger stroganoff w/ dairy sour creme, the list covered seven pages, and his future no longer frightened him. He licked the last of the dairy sour creme from his fork and saw by the commons clock that it was 12:39. He saw that he could get that program copied by 1:00—it really was good enough for now, and he wouldn’t know what else he needed to do to it until he had some numbers to crunch—and then he could go on to the next item on the list—“Call Suzanne (grad. asst.) and set up meeting Wed.?” and so on and so forth all the way down to the bottom of page 7—“Apply for larger grant.”