Moo (40 page)

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 striding 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.

H
ER 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?

Anyway, she couldn’t get it out of her mind. The bland, innocent look on his face, the distinct, rounded tone of his voice as it separated itself from the background noise, her own response—how she had heard it the first time, but not heard it, and so asked him to repeat, so that now she had two enunciations of the same remark to keep in her mind. And they did stay in her mind, never dissolving and then dissipating, but as it were encysted, self-contained, unchanging, hard, permanently possessing a niche, like some types of parasite. She knew that were she to tell Carol about it, she would be in a prime position for another of Carol’s favorite responses, the What-Did-You-Expect? response, complete with Look of Astonishment and Snort of Disbelief. All the same—

So she was standing in Carol’s little kitchen. Her mother was at choir rehearsal at the church. Cyrus was watching a movie on Cinemax in the other room and Malcolm was reading in the bathtub. Every so often, they could hear him turn on the hot water for a minute or so. Carol was putting dishes away from dinner. The kettle was boiling for tea, and Mary said, “I’m sure my grades are going to be here tomorrow.”

“They’d better be good.”

“They’ll be okay.”

Carol shot her a sharp look. Instantly exasperated, she said, “Now, I’ve explained the train to you before. You are the engine, Malcolm is the boxcar, and Cyrus is the caboose, and that train is going to pull me right out of this apartment and this city, so you’d better tell me right now why those grades are going to be okay and not good.”

“Well, they might be good.”

“If those white teachers do you some favors?”

“No! I did work hard! There was just something that happened.”

“There is always something that happens.”

“I know that.”

“Well, then, you get the numbers on your side and less happens.”

“Don’t you want to know what happened?”

Carol turned to look at her and put her hands on her hips. She said, “No, I don’t, because I don’t want you making a story out of it, because as soon as you make a story out of it, then it keeps happening every time you tell it, and if you make a good story out of it, then you’re gonna want to tell it, so don’t bother.”

“I thought you’d be sympathetic.” Actually, she hadn’t, but it was worth trying.

“Me? You thought I’d be sympathetic?”

“Well, I guess not. I hoped.”

“Hope again, girl. Hope that I’m gonna kick your butt, because that’s what I am gonna do.” She turned back to the stove. Mary watched as she turned off the burner, then bent down to sniff it. After that, she lifted the range top and checked the pilot lights. These precautions were so much second nature that Mary bet she did not even realize she was doing it. After that, she went to the bathroom door and shouted, “Malcolm, that’s enough hot water. You been in there for two hours now!”

Malcolm’s thin yodel came through the door. “I just got one more chapter, Mama.”

Mary knew that Carol’s fantasy was a small but particular one, nothing as grandiose as their mother’s vision of heaven, just a nice big kitchen like the ones in the kitchen-and-bath magazines she collected, with an inset marble slab for baking and a six-burner stove and a restaurant-type dishwasher adjoining a bathroom with a whirlpool, two sinks, and a separate shower with two heads. Exactly where this kitchen-and-bath combo would be Carol left up to Mary, Malcolm, and Cyrus. Trees? Lawn? Countryside? Okay for looking out at, but not necessary if you had some nice track lights. Mary sighed and sat down at Carol’s tiny Formica table. Carol went back to the stove and poured two cups of tea. A moment later, she plunked one of them down in front of Mary. She said, “Here. Don’t look back. Just fortify yourself and keep going.” She smiled, a rare event that Mary fully appreciated. She said, “Okay, girl, just to show how sympathetic I can be, I’ll kick your butt later, after those grades arrive.”

B
EFORE
C
HRISTMAS
, Tim had wangled invitations to a
Paris Review
party for Michael Ondaatje, Norman Mailer’s publication party at Random House, and a Poets and Writers party in celebration of Vaclav Havel and the changes in Czechoslovakia. On Christmas Eve (always a touchy time), there was, fortunately, a huge party at ICM’s New York offices that his agent took him to, and from there he went to Smith & Wollensky’s with Richard Bausch, Phil Caputo, and T. C. Boyle. That meant he didn’t get back to the apartment he was borrowing (no tree, no decorations, no Christmas carols, no women, no children) until nearly dawn. At six on Christmas Day, he called his mother on the Cape and asked if she got the basket he’d sent from Williams-Sonoma. She had—she was just going out the door, she would call him tomorrow. He lay back in the bed and pulled the covers up to his chin. That night he was on for drinks and dinner at a restaurant in the Village, and then there was MLA, which started the next day, and really got rolling on the twenty-seventh.