Moo (35 page)

“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.”

“Vindicated at last.”

They thoughtfully ate their pie.

Finally she said, “One thing I have to ask. Have you given up snooping through other people’s things?”

“Not at all.”

“I thought you were having a moral rebirth.”

“Jesus! No. Besides, snooping isn’t immoral, it’s just impolite. It’s like looking at people’s cards if they don’t hold them up. You’re supposed to do it.”

“Say,” said Margaret, “you know, I was thinking of Cecelia just the other day. She is Costa Rican, isn’t she?”

“By way of L.A., yeah.”

“I bet she would be interested in something. Where did I put that?”

And that was how Margaret supplied Tim with an excuse to call Cecelia. It was not that she hadn’t complied with Dr. Lionel Gift’s memo/request that she return her copy of his report to him, it was just that she had happened to Xerox it first.

N
ORMALLY WHEN
Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek bore good news, she bore it coolly, over the telephone, or in a memo. As a rule, the manner in which she delivered the news depended on the size of the grant. Only once before had she delivered it personally, and that was early in her career, when a proposal she had guided and helped write had won the university her first $250,000 grant. To mark that turning point in her fund-raising career (during the late, lamented days when SHE went to Washington, when Jack Parker was just a name attached to the University of Michigan) she had marched straight into the office of the president (who was gone now, to the University of Minnesota, fat lot of good that did her) and carolled, “A quarter million from NIH!” Later that very afternoon she had called the grant recipient and informed him.

Since then many six-figure sums had rolled through her office, and the receiving of grants had come to feel very much like buying new clothes—briefly invigorating, and certainly necessary, but never as thrilling as that very first Donna Karan with the Ferragamo pumps that matched perfectly, uncannily, as if they had been made for each other.

Nevertheless, Elaine was making her way across the snowy campus to Storrs Hall, where Dr. Bo Jones had his office, or, as Elaine preferred to think of it, his pen. Elaine was glad she had worn her SPF 15 moisturizer that morning, because a sudden blue sky, dry and brilliant, domed the campus and the thick, sugary covering of new snow on every building and branch, every cornice and curb and telephone wire and bicycle rack reflected and elaborated the sunlight until Elaine was almost blinded. After four or five steps, she took out her sunglasses with the UV protection coating and put them on. That was better. Now she could really appreciate how scintillating and lovely the world had become since she’d picked up her telephone twenty minutes before and heard the always exciting voice of Arlen
Martin’s personal assistant say, “Miz Daubs-Jallanak? Mr. Martin on the line for you, honey.”

It was the last day of classes. Although Elaine was on a twelvemonth appointment, she was not quite immune to the combined fatigue and excitement of that fact. Indeed, the high point of Elaine’s life had been her four years of college at the University of Iowa, where she had divided her time between the Pi Kappa Phi house and the music building (her major had been voice). Her college career had come just on the heels of two years of student unrest, but the only thought Elaine had given that recent history was regret that the windows of the college bookstore, which had been repeatedly broken the year before, were so small that they couldn’t mount attractive displays. Elaine’s college world had been a smaller version of the world of the fifties Big Ten—parties, classes, Greeks, football games, and nice clothes. There were many people on the campus who wore rags, went barefoot, played the recorder in front of Old Capitol, handed out leaflets, and drove VW buses with slogans about sex painted on the sides, but Elaine had done them the favor of ignoring them, and now they were gone, and she had a perfectly intact and entirely positive college experience to look back upon: pajamas, popcorn, and dancemarathoning for charity in the sorority house, a yearly round of tutoring, classes, choir concerts and recitals over at the music building, the choir tour to Belgium and Norway, and, of course, her courtship by Dean, which had been better by far than the ensuing marriage. As Elaine crossed the campus, she bestowed her UV-protected gaze most frequently on undergraduate girls who reminded her of herself—careful of their appearance, feminine, hopeful, attentive to details like the cut of a collar, the size of an earring. These girls, she knew, had unexpected futures before them, but they were well equipped to handle the unexpected. A girl who made no mistakes about the right shade of lipstick would always land on her feet.

Dr. Bo’s pen was on the second floor of Storrs Hall, and the doctor was in, his back to the open door, pounding away at his computer, seemingly with his fists. Elaine raised her voice, as always with Dr. Bo, and shouted, “Dr. Jones! Dr. Jones!”

W
HAT SHE
looked like was a cardinal, the way a cardinal stood out red against the snow as it flitted from branch to branch. Dr. Bo was
fond of snow, preferred cold weather to hot, preferred ice skating and skiing and snowshoeing in a nose-biting wind to any summertime sport. In fact, he had already begun the winter conditioning program that would prepare him for his trip to Tadzhikistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan. That was a sentence he’d lately included in his letters of application (still unanswered): “I am in excellent physical condition and have embarked upon a training program guaranteed to fit me for any potential hardships.” Just last night he had skied six miles to and from the campus after his wife had gone to bed.

Elaine took off her sunglasses and pulled off her leather gloves finger by finger. Dr. Bo pushed himself away from his computer, and she opened her red coat. Her suit was electric blue. The two together, the red against the blue, vibrated. When Dr. Bo looked away, at the white wall behind his desk, he saw an afterimage of her in green and purple.

She was grinning. She sat down on some books in a chair, grinning, and said, “Listen to this. Old Meats is saved! I found a donor who loved your idea about the museum, and is willing to fund the entire project, and all we have to do is name the museum after him!”

Without warning, rough tears came into Dr. Bo Jones’ eyes. He hadn’t been thinking much about Old Meats lately, having travelled far beyond that place already, but really, he was one of the few people on the campus who remembered Old Meats when it was bustling with activity, with white-coated, bloody-aproned meat science instructors who formed a tangible link between the animal on the hoof and the meat on the table. They were men of great strength and specific physical skills, who could fell an animal and bleed it and gut it and skin it, then show you the layers of fat and meat, the marbling that distinguished Grade A from prime. All the time the blood was flowing, they’d be talking. What to look for in a slaughter animal, signs of disease, the effects of various feeding regimens, breeds and varieties, even cooking techniques for different cuts of meat. They had no illusions, those men, about the cost of human life—it was high, and the fate of domesticated animals and plants was to pay it.

She said, “I knew you’d be excited!”

And he was! The displays leapt full-blown into his imagination—razorbacks hidden in the undergrowth, their tiny intelligent eyes glittering, the dark stinking hold of a Spanish galleon, crated sows squealing (there could easily be sound effects), the display of his own trophies, carried back from Tadzhikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan—

“… chickens,” she said.

Dr. Bo said, “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘I don’t suppose there is another museum in the country devoted to the history of chickens.’ ”

“The history of chickens?”

“Why, yes. That’s what the funding’s for. Old Meats is going to be turned into a chicken museum. I suppose that the plan is to celebrate the natural history of the chicken as well as the glory of modern chicken processing technology. The nation’s foremost chicken historian is coming this week to look over the proposed site.”