by Smiley, Jane
They seemed to play themselves out on the screen of darkness that enveloped him whether his eyes were open or shut. That green, that blue, that brightness. The impact of one of his siblings barrelling into him, rolling him against the cool earth. His own trotters sinking into softness as he jumped about. Most important, all the scents and odors that mingled everywhere, all of them distinct, but none of them strong—much unlike the confinement building, where the odor of himself and his companions was overpowering.
He gave himself up to his memories, and lay in a half-stupor on his bed of straw, unsleeping but remote from his trough and his ventilation system and his toys and his duties, and also from the pains in his legs and his back.
When the guy came in with his usual slam the next morning (well, it was almost afternoon, but how would Bob ever find that out?), his conscience smote him at the sight of the still hog, and he panicked—dead, for sure, and this was some kind of unique experiment—and he ran out and called Bob, who was having Christmas breakfast with his family after opening presents. Bob thought first of Dr. Bo and second of Earl and jumped in his car without finishing his waffle, just putting a peanut butter sandwich and two pieces of sausage in his pocket, and by the time Bob got back, Earl was on his feet at the trough going at it as if nothing had ever happened and that guy was talking fast about how often he had come over and when he had last checked him the night before and first checked him that morning, and Earl pretended not to notice the quarrel. Bob felt him all over while the guy was standing there, and said, “Well, he seems okay. You’re lucky. I’ll pay you for two visits, is all.” And after the guy left, Bob picked up the scratching stick and sat on the bars of the pen and scratched Earl on the back WHILE he was eating, a highly unusual and indulgent procedure to which Earl didn’t object at all.
51
Merry Christmas
CHAIRMAN X COULD NOT help getting Cecelia mixed up with the last remaining virgin cloud forest, which that pompous, bombastic, cretinous imbecile from the economics department was doing his best to destroy, and so every thought of Cecelia, which would normally be at least a little soothing, a little refreshing to his spirit, was now infused with anxiety and rage. It ran both ways. Because he had not as yet happened to mention to the Lady X that he had been having an affair with Cecelia, he could not quite bring himself to mention the cloud forest and seek her advice about what to do about it. If he brought up the cloud forest, then that would lead straight to Cecelia, and that would lead straight to confession of the affair, which would lead straight to discussion of their sex life, which would lead straight to self-doubt and self-blame on the part of the Lady X, which would lead to a discussion of their relationship, which would bring on a crisis, which would force them to make a decision about the future, which, as he was in no condition to be making decisions, would fall to her, and God knew where that would lead, but Chairman X did not want to risk it, so he sat through all the Christmas festivities in an agony of silence, because, as the Lady X had always said, he didn’t know the first thing about discretion.
Every year, to open the season of celebration, they went through their belongings and chose the best of what they had ceased to play with or wear and boxed it up for Toys for Tots. This year, he didn’t bother to cajole them. If they wanted to hang on to outgrown items for no good reason except habit, he let them. They began giving him funny looks and making their arguments anyway. He shrugged. When they went to the grocery store to buy food for the can drive, the eldest tentatively chose two cans of roast beef hash. He didn’t say a word, didn’t steer her toward bags of dried beans and masa harina and un-sulphured dried apricots. She grew uneasy and on her own chose a box of raisins. He himself was too glum to be selective. He chose four jars of Skippy peanut butter. At the Christmas tree farm (on marginal land, rows of live Christmas trees planted in turf did an excellent job of holding the soil) he settled on the first Scotch pine he saw, instead of whipping and goading them all the way to the back of the acreage in search of the fullest, most symmetrical and fragrant balsam. He showed no interest in making cookies or molding the bean loaf into Christmassy shapes. When they asked for what they wanted, he didn’t harangue them with his usual good cheer about the Siamese twinship of Christianity and capitalism as perfectly represented by the so-called Christmas spirit, which was really just a sensation of culturally permitted greed. In fact, Chairman X didn’t interfere at all in the Christmas joy of his family, and while they were all obscurely grateful, it did make everyone secretly uneasy, but nobody said anything because to bring it up was to risk reminding him, and then he might start in again.
The eldest went so far as to mention it to her best friend over the phone. “My dad is so weird,” she said with her habitual disloyalty, but then she did not feel the usual relief, and she let it drop. As weird as he was, it occurred to her, she did not actually want him to change!
Meanwhile, Beth was distracted enough with Christmas preparations to merely be grateful. When she did think about it, she thought that it was the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe that was affecting him, and even that he had arrived on his own at an interpretation of that event much like hers (communism was a nice idea but it didn’t work and you couldn’t actually live in such an extreme way. Even Christmas wasn’t so bad if you exercised moderation and care for others). As for his unwonted silence, well, however you INTERPRETED an event, there were still feelings to deal with, and let him deal with them on his own for once. She herself was going to bake lots of cookies and buy a few manufactured ornaments for the tree and maybe have a party, which they had never done before. When she told him that, he just said, “Oh. If you want to, okay by me.”
Beth, who had grown up in a normal American family (which Chairman X had characterized frequently over the years as a purely commercial enterprise fatally corrupted by the capitalist need for a cheap workforce and an ever-expanding market), had envisioned some kind of consumerist profligacy on the part of the children, but they couldn’t do it. Great conservatives, they opted for the homemade ornaments, the whole-grain cookies, the traditional donation of food and time to the homeless shelter, the stringing of the tree in the front yard with popcorn and cranberries for the birds. When Beth pulled out the MasterCard to charge a present for Amy, the eldest stopped her with reminders of mailing lists she would then get on, business and probably government files their names would subsequently appear in. The usual Christmas. And they didn’t have the party, either. Too much work.
It was not until the afternoon of Christmas Day, the first ebb of the season, that Beth realized that something else was going on. The older children were out sledding and Amy was taking a nap. X was sitting on the couch, admiring the Christmas tree, or so Beth thought. She flopped down beside him with a happy sigh, and said, nestling under his (unresponsive, but she wasn’t going to notice that) arm, “Well! This is nice. The tree looks good this year.”
He said, “Does it?”
“Well, look at it!”
“Mmm.”
She sat up and turned to look at him. He looked glum and his skin, usually flushed as an effect of pumping adrenaline, looked gray and chill. She said, “Are you all right?” She felt his forehead with the back of her hand.
“Oh, sure.”
“You look blue.” Actually, he did. Blue. She kissed him lightly, affectionately, on the nose, the way a wife does who’s wary of attributing neediness before the husband has indicated that such an attribution is allowable. She said, “The kids were great this year. I think your policy of leaving a lot of decisions up to them was just right. They’re old enough now—”
He put his face in his hands.
She pretended not to notice. “—to make up their own minds about the consequences of their actions. Did I tell you that when I pulled out that old MasterCard—”
He said, “Oh, God,” but it was muffled by his hands. She pretended that he said, “Oh, good.” She said, “Did you like the vest? I think those Seventh Generation
sweaters and vests are terrif—”
He seemed to sniffle.
“—ic. And not expensive, considering. You can wear it with anything. If you add up all the times you wear something like that, it turns out to be a bargain—”
She tried another tack. “I did like the flower-embroidered blouse. I was just surprised because it’s not the sort of thing I usually wear, but I’m sure it’ll look better when I’ve lost a few pounds, you know I’m amazed at how much longer it takes to lose it all after the baby’s born when you’re in your forties compared to before—”
“Shh,” he said. “Shhhh.” Well, that’s what she should have done, she thought afterward. She should have shrugged her shoulders and stood up and gone into the kitchen and done the dishes, and then gotten Amy up from her nap and served Christmas pasta (broccoli and sun-dried tomatoes) for dinner and kept her mouth shut and her mind closed. But her mind opened up at the sight of his unusual distress, became first a great vacuum that sucked the story right out of him, and later—well, that was later.
Of course SHE was a great beauty. Of course SHE was very young (just born for the assassination of JFK, hardly out of diapers when Sergeant Pepper came out, in fifth grade when Beth and X sneaked out in the middle of the night and spray-painted “4-23-73: U.S. OUT OF VIETNAM, WE WON!” on a long brick wall in Lawrence, the most dangerous thing they ever did). Of course SHE was intimately involved somehow (this was not clear) with some lost cause in Central America (Costa Rica? Belize? Beth wasn’t sure).
Unfortunately, Beth did not remain as cool as she would have liked, nor as cool as she had in the past (SHE would have been a mere seven-year-old when X cheated on Beth the first time). She thought she was going to stay cool at first, when she said, “For God’s sake, just tell me what the problem is, we can handle it,” in a light tone of voice, and even a few minutes later, when she said, “Well, I’m not surprised, though I did think you had stopped that sort of thing. It’s very dangerous. You know that.” It was the way he kept repeating, “She’s so unusual, Beth. You’d have to meet her and get to know her and see that. She’s just very unusual and different,” as if she, Beth, and all their children were not. As if he were saying, Now on the one hand we have you, Beth, and the children, and you are very ordinary, and on the other we have HER and she is remarkably unusual and different, so she said, in a voice dripping with sarcasm, “Oh, I suppose on the one hand you have US, your family, and we are so ordinary, and on the other you have HER and she is so very different and exotic and unUsual …” and she knew this would be insulting and it was, so that he said, “Goddamnit—”
And Beth said, “GodDAMNit? GodDAMNit? You tell me you are sleeping with some bit—someone else, and then YOU get mad?”
Then he said, “You didn’t used to be like this,” and she said, “You mean I used to just lie down and take it whenever you came home and told me that you were balling someone else and that it was just so great you wanted to share it with me, but that didn’t mean I actually liked it—”
“You slept with other people. You slept with Simon Harris and Ben Holiday and that Olivia woman—”
“Okay, three. That compares to, what—”
“Now we are counting? Counting old betrayals? We always said we wouldn’t do that, that that was the last thing we would do—”
He had her there. But really, he had her everywhere, in a way that she’d thought she would never be had. They shared too much, they had been together so long, through everything, their lives completed each other’s in a way that seemed mythic, that was what she had told herself, but now it occurred to her that really she had been relying on her looks, just like everyone else, and as long as she had had them they had done the trick, but now she was forty-one and her once waist-length hair was short and graying and she hadn’t had the energy or the time to whittle her waist (and besides she had relied on his difference from other men, on the fact that he loved her for her inner beauty, ha!).
And then there was a cry from upstairs, and while she was getting Amy, the others came in from sledding all cold and flushed and carrying the fragrance of the outdoors on their skin, and when she came down with the baby in her arms, she realized that she did actually love them more than she loved X, if love was an ever-renewed desire to see someone and a constantly flowing pleasure in their presence, even when they were crabby and unpleasant, and if love was an index of the number of times you looked at their faces and smiled in spite of yourself at how charming they were.
That night, the children took forever to go to bed. X said that they were just agitated from Christmas, but Beth knew that they sensed a crisis in the house, and they felt instinctively that they could stave it off if they stayed up and kept watch, kept, in fact, their parents from talking to one another. But finally even the eldest had keeled over, and Beth and X sat on the couch by the tree, and they spoke calmly, and what he said over and over was “I know I didn’t have to. I know I could have resisted. I did make some attempts to resist. But I just wanted to. I just wanted to. Okay, you probably won’t believe this, but I just wanted a little. I wanted it a lot, but I only wanted a little bit, just SOMETHING, not everything. That’s why I didn’t tell you.”
Well, he had her there, too, because it was just like Christmas and the fall of European Communism for her. All the arguments in the world were on the side of mere subsistence, of altruism, of giving till it hurts, of to each according to her needs. But after twenty years, she very much desired a little more than that, a little more than what he defined as her needs, and all fall, while he was distracted (by HER, of course), Beth had taken a little leeway here and there, to buy this or that, full price, with no regard for where it came from, who was paid five cents a day to make it, what chemicals were used in its production, what corporate thieves and villains profited from it. She wanted to. It was that simple.
After he went to bed exhausted, she sat in front of the tree, staring at it. The dishes from dinner were still to be washed, and it was nearly two (Amy would be up by six), but Beth sat, anyway, without moving, and she thought long and hard about what else she wanted, and how she was going to get it.
Meanwhile, Chairman X had come wide awake as soon as he got under the covers, and he lay in bed looking at the framed nineteenth-century botanical prints between the two windows across the room. In the darkness they were too dim to see, but he knew them by heart (Linaria linaria and Myosotis scorpioides and Echium vulgare). He knew that downstairs Beth was thinking furiously about him, and that wherever she was (no doubt L.A.), Cecelia was thinking furiously about him, too, but even tonight, even with his future in the balance, even knowing that this room, where he had slept for seventeen years, could disappear in the (possible? probable?) slow explosion of his life with the Lady X, he couldn’t seem to fix his attention on either of those women. It was as if he didn’t know them at all, had no memory of Cecelia’s fine, heavy breasts, unruly dark hair, and sudden smile, or of the way the Lady X’s shoulders and muscular back tapered to her waist and her lowered, thickly lashed eyelids looked dark and dramatic over her large, deep-set eyes. He couldn’t envision what he did know, but he could see perfectly what he had never known, the mountainous terrain of Costa Rica, the thin, moist soils, the living cloud forest floating there, ever so tenuously gripping the earth, but really making its home in the air—leaves and flowers and ferns and inflorescences, of all the trees and vines and epiphytes and shrubs, drinking in the humidity and taking nourishment therefrom. He could see the twisted threads of paths that the tapirs, jaguars, and anteaters made through the brush, hear the cries of the scarlet macaws, see the king vultures and white hawks riding thermals high above. If he closed his eyes, he saw the flashing disappearances of the howler monkeys and the white-faced capuchins through the great leafy Peltogyne purpurea and Brosimum terrabanum trees. He could even smell the myriad perfumes that rose all about. And he could see that slinking fat-faced low-life bloodsucking lickpenny from the economics department stridi
ng here, striding there, ever smiling, ever calculating, ever buying low, ever selling high, everlastingly trampling rare glass frogs underfoot, and he wondered if he was too old to take up radical violence after all, and he felt his fists open and close with the desire of it.
52
Happy Holidays
HER SISTER Carol had more opinions about Mary’s activities than Mary had herself. So far, she had made it clear that Mary should not have come home for Christmas break (Mary had let it out that Dubuque House was open through the vacation and a few students stayed, studied, cooked, and cleaned), that Mary should not have bought expensive gifts for Carol’s sons, Malcolm and Cyrus, that Mary should not help their mother bake ten varieties of cookies for the church, because those women shouldn’t be snacking on pure butter and sugar like that, even at Christmas, that Mary should major in engineering or computer science or become an actuary, too bad if she liked art and English, that Mary ought to change the orientation of her bed so that it ran north and south rather than east and west. Nor was Carol shy with opinions about her own life—on every front it could be a lot better, and her only reason for expressing what might have been left unsaid was to prevent Mary from Making the Same Mistakes, most of which, in Carol’s opinion, had to do with men.
Mary had, therefore, not mentioned Hassan. Nor, until now, had she mentioned what had since come to be present in her mind as THAT TIME.
The fact was that Mary dreaded receiving her grades, because her grades would show exactly how THAT TIME had affected her. Before it, she had taken one exam, calculus. She had been pulling a B+ for the semester, and she had gotten a B+ on the exam. In Western Civ, though, her A, laboriously gained with a fifteen-page investigation into the Dreyfus affair, had certainly dropped to a B+. Her B in first-year French was lost, and her A– in History of Art survey, too. Fortunately, she had already finished her last English paper and turned it in—her A– there was safe. When she added up the grades she would have gotten if THAT TIME had not happened, she came out with a better than 3.5 cume. If she added up her probable grades as a result of the incident, she came up with just over three points. And the loss was not just an ego loss—certain sections wouldn’t be open to her, now, not to mention certain honors. Wasn’t it Carol herself who always said, “Now, girl, you got to have the numbers on your side. Affirmative Action and all that other stuff can go for you or against you, so you always want to have the numbers right in your corner”? THAT TIME had cost her 14 percent outright, and who knew what else in terms of lost opportunities and additional effort to be made in the future?