by Smiley, Jane
“I heard they had four kegs.”
“They had everything. It was like the sixties.”
“Lot of people passed out?”
“And major puking.”
They fell silent for a moment, appreciating the good time had by all in Berkeley Hall.
“So what’s Lyle doing these days?”
“Nothing. Work, school, you know.”
“I saw him at that party.” She tried to make it sound casual.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He got up and went to the bar, then returned with a pitcher of PBR. She said, “The thing is, I need a Diet Coke. My roommates and I agreed we were going to stop drinking for a week, from that party.”
“Major puking?”
“Too major.”
He got up and fetched her a Diet Coke. They took thoughtful swigs from their drinks. Gary had the strangest feeling, one he did not recognize. After a moment, though, he remembered it from the earliest days of junior high school. He felt uncomfortable, and with a girl! Amazing! He didn’t know what to say, how to flirt! Astonishing! Gary Olson, the boy with five sisters, ill at ease! He said, “Well, it’s too bad you don’t come around anymore.”
“Why’s that?”
“I miss you.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Well, you know Lyle and Bob. They don’t have a lot to say. And that girl Bob was seeing, that’s cooled off, so he’s moping a lot.”
“I didn’t know about that. Who was she?”
“Diane Somebody. Just a freshman.” “Oh.”
“Want another Diet Coke?”
“Sure.”
He went to the bar again, then trudged back to Lydia. The thing was, it was frightening to imagine how fat she was going to be, how bitter, how unhappy. Here she had this great hair, this beautiful voice, this pleasant face, and this deep ignorance. She thought she was going to be a college girl forever, buying mohair sweater sets on her parents’ charge card with the absolute assurance that she would always turn every head in the bar. If she thought of marriage and a career and children, and what girl in this university didn’t—a couple of years ago in his English class Professor Bell had asked how many of the girls expected to have high-powered careers as well as large happy families, and every girl had raised her hand; when she’d asked the boys how many expected their wives to work, only three had raised their hands (“Who do you expect to marry, then?” she had remarked)—if Lydia thought of the future, then she was seeing this self, this slender, fluid, fleeting beauty striding around in it as around a stage set. She didn’t see the future entering her, reshaping her, as Gary did. It tied his tongue because now that he’d written those stories, that was what he knew about Lydia, and instead of doing his usual thing, which was getting the girl to tell him about herself, he wanted to do something very strange, which was to tell her about herself, and really, what had Lydia done to deserve this? She had been in the wrong place at the wrong time—in his roommate’s room, talking—just when he was supposed to be writing down some dialogue. Now she was doomed. Her own little boy would be terrified of her. Gary sighed at the unfairness of it.
Lydia, meanwhile, was looking around, and across the large room of bar tables she saw the redhead who had been talking to Lyle at the Berkeley Hall party. Even at this distance and in this light, she could see the girl’s dark roots. She sniffed. She was heavyset, too. Wasn’t that always the way? That’s what had happened with her father. Before her parents’ divorce, he worked all the time and never even picked his own clothes off the floor. If he wanted more food, Lydia’s mother or one of the girls got up and served him some. He had so little patience with his children that the only time he would willingly be in their presence was driving in the car with at least two of the four sleeping. In his second marriage, however, and Lydia was a witness, so she knew whereof she spoke, he changed diapers, dandled infants, washed clothes, learned to cook a repertoire of northern Italian specialties, and frequently stopped to smell the roses, which meant taking off plenty of time from work to be with his new wife and the two babies, while often remarking to Lydia or Holly or Roxanne or David during their visits that children were only young once, and he thanked God he had realized that and he hoped that they would never make the mistakes he had made. Every time she or one of her siblings mentioned the sorts of things their father now enjoyed, Lydia’s mother would go bananas. Once she said, “You know, I’ve gotten over the divorce and I like our life together, but the idea of him making BRUNCH and eating PANCAKES drives me crazy!” Lydia had never mentioned that her father took especial pleasure in serving his new wife, Mary Beth, her pancakes, which he shaped into Mickey Mouse faces, just the way Mary Beth liked them.
Lydia looked again at the redhead, and realized that she had seen her before, in her Spanish class, early in the semester. After a week or so, the girl had either dropped or stopped coming. She had a flamboyant way about her. Lydia thought she was a little trampy-looking. She sniffed. Well, that wasn’t surprising, either.
Gary was saying, “So anyway, that’s why I’m thinking of switching my major.”
Lydia smiled with all sorts of apparent interest, and trilled, “I do think you should major in something you’re really interested in.”
“So did I, but now that I’m almost a senior, I’m beginning to think that’s impractical.”
“Oh, really?” The thing was, everything about Gary was impractical. He was good-looking and nice and could be lots of fun and a lot of girls she knew had had crushes on him for a while, but in Lydia’s opinion there was some little hard thing missing inside. There wasn’t enough friction with Gary, which meant, she thought, that he didn’t have any character. He was like the second edition of her father, a nice smiley face, compared to the first, an actual person that daily life brought you right up against.
“… law school,” he said.
“You want to go to law school?”
“No, Lydia, I don’t.” He looked amused. “What I said was ‘I’d do anything but go to law school.’ ”
“Oh.”
“Well, if you aren’t paying a lick of attention to me, what are you thinking about?”
Lydia wasn’t in the habit of revealing her thoughts, but she had been impolite, she decided, so she said, “Oh, that girl over there. I saw Lyle talking to her at that party. She’s fatter than I am, and her hair is dyed, too. And my dad and mom since the divorce. My dad’s always, like, ‘I’m a new person, don’t you think, aren’t I great?’ and then he points out some little thing on one of his new children, like her belly button or something, and starts raving about the miracle of life.”
Gary laughed.
“Mark my words, Lyle’s going to turn over some new leaf.”
“Well, he stopped drinking straight out of the milk carton.”
“I told you—”
“No, Bob trained him. Every time he saw Lyle drinking out of the carton, he took the milk away from him and poured it down the sink, almost whole gallons. I think he showed him some slides of what grows in milk, too. Even Lyle got disgusted.” They laughed again, then Lydia said, “You know, I kind of miss you, too. Why don’t you kick Lyle out and find another roommate. Then I could come over and hang around.”
Gary settled in his seat. She was smiling now, relaxed. This was more like it. And he didn’t have to write down what she’d said about her parents, either, since he’d trained himself to remember. If he took her home by midnight, he thought, he could put at least a couple of hours in at his computer.
45
Privileged Information
WHEN THEY PASSED in the halls or paused by the coffee machine, Tim Monahan seemed to have forgotten about his promotion. When Margaret said, “Congratulations,” the Monday after hearing about the sale of his book, he actually said, “For what?” He meant it, too. She said, “Why, on your book, of course,” and he said, “How did you hear that?” and then, “Oh, right. Well, thanks. It’s great.”
A little smile. So she invited him to dinner.
He hadn’t been over, except for a Christmas party, since the end of their little affair years before. As he came in, he said, “Where’s everybody else?”
“I didn’t invite anyone else.”
She headed for the kitchen and he followed her. They passed the refrigerator, and he opened the door and took out a beer. She said, “Would you like a beer?”
He looked at the bottle in his hand, and said, “Got any Beck’s?”
“I might. Why don’t you check?”
They laughed, and Margaret realized that she had been just a little nervous about this evening. But after all, you could always rely on Tim to keep the conversation going at a superficial but entertaining clip. He said, “I know, you told people that I was coming, and they all turned you down.”
“Only the women.”
Instead of laughing, he sighed.
He didn’t tell her the price of the wine he brought. Nor, she realized, had he remarked upon her new carpeting—“Is it wool? Nylon? Olefin? How much was it? What else did you see? Was that more expensive? Pad and installation included?”
She shrugged. “Well, you know, it’s been so long since we talked, and I’ve been so distracted this fall, that I said, why not, I don’t have anything better to do that night.”
He smiled. “Hey, since I’m not getting any ego boost here, what’s for dinner?”
“Veal. Veal medallions with artichoke hearts and lemon, parmesan potatoes, and braised string beans.”
“Okay, then! I’m here, you’re here, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!”
“Yeah!”
“Yeah!”
She turned to the stove. Everything was ready except the veal medallions, which were a last-minute dish. She picked up a pale round of meat and began dredging it in seasoned flour. A mixture of butter and olive oil sizzled in the skillet.
Actually, Tim had been looking forward to some spicy black beans and red rice, ladled over cold orange slices, something Margaret had cooked for him three or four times because she knew he loved it. He was a little shocked at the veal, a dish he could have gotten from anyone who had a subscription to Gourmet. From Margaret, he expected principled food, nourishing, cheap, and delicious, food worthy of someone whose greatest monthly kitchen expense was olive oil rather than meat. And she had carpeted the living room, too, in the sort of closely woven and subtly colored plush that would run thirty dollars a yard from the sort of flooring place that charged extra for carpet and pad. He resisted a disapproving nod and called upon his most tactful tone of voice. “Remember that dish you used to make, black beans and rice, really spicy, and you would lay a big slice of cold orange in the bottom of the bowl before ladling up the beans?”
“Sure.”
“I loved that. You got a recipe?”
“Are you going to start cooking?”
“I might.”
“Why?”
“Well, I was teaching Kafka in my class a week or so ago, and I realized that the reason Gregor Samsa is redeemed by being turned into a bug is that he learns to live in the physical world, and take pleasure in simple actions like running over the walls of his room or hanging from the ceiling and rocking back and forth. Being turned into a bug is a step UP for him. So I think it’s time for me to start cooking. I don’t know. To start eating everything with a big spoon. Simple pleasures. I stopped showering.”
“You what?”
“I mean I started taking baths instead of showers.”
Margaret dropped six floured medallions into the fat, and the delicious fragrance of browning meat rose around them. “See,” he said. “Time to stop and smell the MEAT.” He sighed.
Margaret turned and looked at him. “As I remember, you always said that self-improvement should be a writer’s greatest fear.”
“This isn’t self-improvement. This is spiritual redemption.”
“Pardon me for getting the two mixed up.” She moved the browned pieces of meat to one side of the pan, and poured in the artichoke hearts, the lemon juice, and some white wine.
“See,” he said, in a tone Margaret found irritatingly informative. “The body, the mind, and the spirit don’t form a pyramid, they form a circle. Each of them runs into the other two. The body isn’t below the mind and the spirit; from one point of view it’s between them. If you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can’t get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction and opens the way to transcendence.”
“Did you make this up?”
“Well, of course. Though I’m sure there’s all sorts of bits and pieces of things I’ve heard and read. All unattributed, needless to say. Novelists never have to footnote.”
“Am I to infer that you have fallen into despair and you are making your way out of it with hot baths and black beans and—”
“Jogging. But not for reasons of fitness or vanity or health.”
“God forbid.” On each plate, she laid three golden rounds of veal and ladled over them some of the artichoke sauce. Beside them, she set two parmesan roasted potatoes and some beans. They carried their plates into the small dining room and Tim went back for the wine. Though he hadn’t bragged about it, she noticed that it was a white pinot, her favorite. She estimated the cost on her own—fifteen to twenty dollars.
He didn’t even turn over his saucer and check the label on the bottom.
She said, “I don’t think you’ve seen what I’ve done to this house.”
“New carpeting, new deck. What else?”
“I remodelled the bathrooms.”
“Great.”
That was all. After a moment, she prodded him. “I got a terrific deal on the carpeting.”
“Good. You know, this veal is excellent.”
“You want the recipe?”
“Well—”
“Well?”
“Well, spiritual redemption is in beans, not veal.”
Margaret felt herself taking offense.
“You know, Margaret, I’m glad you’re interested in all this, because—”
“Honey, I’m not that interested.”
“Oh.” He returned glumly to his dinner.
Now this was alarming. The old Tim would have given her six reasons, all of them invasively personal, about why she SHOULD be interested. It was then that she did what she shouldn’t have done. Probably if he had shown any more curiosity, let’s say, curiosity remotely approaching what he had shown early in the fall, Margaret would not have been tempted. His naked urging would have pushed her toward high moral ground, and that’s what she had expected, urging of the most naked sort. Probably she would not have been tempted if he had not sprung so suddenly from the veal to the moral high ground himself. “You know, we had our meeting.”
“I figured you would have by now.”
“Don’t you want to know?”
“You would never tell me.”
She looked at him. She said, “It was good.” She thought about him dismissing the veal again, veal she had felt a little pride in presenting. She added, “But not really good.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Not good enough, maybe—”
He actually shrugged.
It was Margaret who exclaimed. “Monahan! What is the matter with you? Where is the careerist lowlife, the money-grubbing, arrogant, narrow-minded, narcissistic, sexy, exuberant, happy guy I used to know?”
“So, tell me the number, then.”
“I can’t tell you the number! But, lower than seven, higher than five!”
He shrugged again.
The old Tim would have leapt out of his chair at how weak his recommendation was, how iffy its passage through the provost’s office would undoubtedly prove. She would have been treated to a tirade against hidebound so-called scholars, hacks in suits, the corruption of the intellectual life, the bankruptcy of the
American campus and all the soldier ants who scurried—
“I can’t believe this.”
“What?”
“The way you are.”
“What way am I?”
“Sadly well-meaning.” She thought of the old Tim, then said, “Unsparkly.”
“Not fun?”
“Well, no. Not fun.”
He pushed back from the table, but not without running his finger around his plate, picking up the last of the sauce and then sucking it thoughtfully. He said, “I was too much fun. I was relying on that for everything. Remember that woman at Helen’s party in September?”
“Cecelia?”
“Yes, her. She and I, we got fed up with me.”
“How so?”
“Oh, you know how I am. Things were going well with her for a while, but the more that I was the way I was, the less interested I got in her, even though I liked her more and more, and then she met some mysterious person around the campus who sort of transfixed her with passion, and I realized that I have never transfixed, nor been myself transfixed …”
His voice tapered off, and Margaret got up to get the pie, but then he said, thoughtfully, “You’ve read my work. Look how relentlessly I’ve mined every romantic feeling and sexual desire for profit or career advancement. Look how carefully I’ve studied other authors for ideas about how to rework that material over and over for more profit and career advancement. Now everything I do reminds me of something I already wrote.”
Margaret laughed, though Tim did not.
Then she brought out the lime chiffon pie and set it on the table. It was a good one, high and foamy-looking, but firm. The palest, coolest green. It was an old-fashioned sort of pie, one her mother had taught her to make, but her favorite. She cut him a wedge and set it in front of him. She said, “Well, Monahan, what can I say? You’re probably right on all counts.”