Moo (41 page)

There was nothing actually wrong with his schedule of events. Most of the people at the parties recognized his name, and when they asked how he was, he was able to say that he had a book coming out from Little, Brown, a sign of good health if ever there was one. Tom, Phil, and Dick had been lots of fun. They didn’t mind that he was younger and less famous than they—in fact, that was exactly the right combination for them, and they had offered bits of advice here and there. Phil’s, not to give in to the temptation to buy a big house with his advance, would have, if he had actually been getting a big advance, been better than Tom’s, which was never to wear mismatched socks on television. He did not disclose what he might buy with his advance when they disclosed various things they had bought with theirs. Instead he got up and went to the bar for more drinks. As gentlemen, they allowed that. Later, however, when the conversation turned to golf, which all of them had recently taken up, he did disclose that his
college golf handicap had been 2. “I haven’t played in ten years, though,” he said. Conversation stopped while they all contemplated the size of his handicap. Almost immediately, the subject returned to advances. At the end of the evening, Dick had muttered to him in the silken Virginia voice that Tim could only aspire to, “Just never let them know the size of your advance.”

All things considered, though, Tim had scared up very little in the way of writing assignments—nothing but an In Short for the
Book Review
, and when he was introduced to Robert Silvers, an event he had always imagined as a kind of greased chute directly into writing long think pieces for
The New York Review of Books
, Silvers had very politely, but unmistakably, looked over Tim’s shoulder at someone across the room. Then, when he asked where Tim taught and Tim told him, Silvers had looked almost puzzled. Tim had been forced to fill in—“Well, admittedly, the place is famous for hardware rather than software”—a look of even greater puzzlement on Silvers’ part—“you know, engineering rather than great literature—” Had Silvers then given him a pitying smile? Or had the look been merely the last rag of a conversation that the man had already forgotten? Tim knew that he shouldn’t lie in bed and contemplate these things, especially on Christmas, but the apartment was cold—the guy he’d borrowed it from had locked the thermostat at sixty-two.

Across the room, on the windowsill, was the robe his mother had sent him, his only (wasn’t he too old to care about that?) Christmas gift. The robe was black, a color that his mother seemed to associate with his lifestyle—she always gave him clothes, and they were always black. That was, in general, fine, but just today it seemed like she might have chosen, say, red, to give the room a more festive air. He did not feel like getting out of bed in this frigid apartment and putting on a black robe under the gaze of the framed poster the guy had by the window, of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. Across from it, there was a companion work that included the rest of the Sex Pistols. These were the only decorations in the bedroom. Tim put his head under the covers, but then had a moment of unease—he had to be at the restaurant in the Village by eight—and looked at his watch. It was nearly seven. On any other day of his life he would certainly have leapt out of bed in a panic—he hated this feeling of his career leaving him behind at the wrong station, only to stop down the line and pick up some guy who would then have the career that should
have been his, a free ride all the way to—Ah, to where? That was the great golden question. Even Phil and Tom and Dick didn’t know the answer to that one.

He rolled over, keeping the covers up. A breezy gap opened behind his back, and he squirmed to close it. Really, there weren’t enough covers. This guy didn’t believe in big feather beds that you sank into and thick down comforters that you pulled over yourself, what they believed in in the Midwest. These were light, thin covers that kept you half awake most of the night mulling the next move in your career. Actually, the cold made him think of Cecelia, who was always cold. The thought of such female fragility usually gave him a little frisson of pleasure; now it just gave him a shiver. Was he really going to skip the drinks and the dinner?

He had slept with Cecelia twice; he recalled that both times he had felt a feeling of dissatisfaction, almost of boredom. He recalled that he had felt these feelings, but he couldn’t in fact recall the feelings. Instead, he recalled how warm her body had been. Her skin had a silky alive feel that pressed on your awareness the actuality of her circulatory system. With some women you felt mostly muscle; with others, even thin ones, that layer of subcutaneous fat they all had. With still others, there was a hard, bony quality. Cecelia was the only woman he’d ever touched where you felt, not the fluid itself, of course, but the heart’s force, the energy that drove the fluid. How could that have left him dissatisfied?

Well, she’d been lonely—that had been an undercurrent of the whole autumn. Loneliness in women always scared him. Getting close to that loneliness felt like getting close to the edge of a subway platform. Even if you didn’t lose your balance, someone could accidentally on purpose push you over, and while you recognized this fear as paranoid, or at least wildly exaggerated, you still got in the habit of casually standing back from the edge. Still, the rareness of Cecelia! And then a voice, a voice he recognized as Margaret’s (clearly the voice of his conscience), said, “What earlier rareness did you fail even to notice?” and he had to squirm again.

By his watch it was seven-thirty. He should be getting into a cab right now.

Instead he turned off the bedside light. The windows across from the bed lit up.

One of the reasons this guy’s apartment was so cold was that these
very windows overlooked the Hudson, and received the full bore of winds from the west. They rattled in their frames, unshielded by the most routine storm windows, unmuffled by the simplest drapes. Irresponsible windows in the extreme, the sort you would only find in New York, where heat was included in the rent and flies and mosquitoes stayed close to life on the street. But all the same, you could lie here for hours staring at those windows, at the interpénétration of light reflected from below and darkness pouring in from above. The whole sky, a rare view for Manhattan, and the stars, when you could see them, no brighter in the glow of the city than motes of dust, but no less beautiful for all that. Something about the windows was peaceful and mesmerizing, and after a few minutes, Tim felt his anxieties quiet a bit.

In that lull, he fell to contemplating Cecelia’s reaction to the report Margaret had given him for her. Tim had, of course, read it. The envelope Margaret had put it in had been clasped, not sealed, and she had only said, “Well, this is for Cecelia,” with no explicit instructions not to take a peek. And their discussion of his snooping could easily be construed as permission as well as disapproval. Freud and all the others were entirely clear on the mixed intentions of any communication. The report had not shocked Tim. Shock would imply surprise, and this late in his career and this late in human history, nothing surprised him. His first reaction had been that he wasn’t into eco-fiction and, as potentially interesting as tunnelling a gold mine under the last remaining virgin cloud forest might be as a theme or motif, he didn’t see how you could make much of it as a main subject, unless, of course, it had already happened and you were a writer native to that country reflecting upon the destruction wrought upon your land by the impersonal forces of capitalism or, perhaps, by the age-old universal of human greed. All things considered, denouncing capitalism was rapidly becoming outdated, so it wouldn’t be wise to go with that unless you also denounced the Communists and your novel pointed the way toward a newer theory of the individual vs. the collective. Tim didn’t feel that he was quite up to that. Human greed he had done already, though admittedly under the guise of desire, and under that guise, he had treated the issue rather favorably. For all the irony that Cecelia found distancing, he had upheld the standard of freedom, passion, immoderation, appetite, etc., that all writers got from Hemingway and was more or less de rigueur for a manly fictioneer.
At any rate, since he was not a native of Costa Rica and the mine had yet to be dug, he had passed the document on to Cecelia without even making a copy.

Now, though, the other half of the writer-reader exchange recurred to him, and he thought of Dr. Lionel Gift. You could not work at the university for any length of time without coming to know Dr. Gift by sight and by reputation. By sight, he was an unimposing round man with a disproportionately large head. He looked as though the first thing he had spent his money on after getting some was custom-made suits, and Tim had had occasion to admire both the flattering cut and the distinguished fabrics of Gift’s duds. In addition, the university was always promoting itself through Gift, so his face regularly appeared on brochures, flyers, university publications, alumni bulletins, in the student paper, you name it. If it was printed by the university, it was guaranteed to carry a photo and thumbnail bio of Gift once every academic year. Tim knew how they did those things—the public relations office always called you up and asked you what you wanted them to say about you. It would be the same with Gift, and Gift’s sketch of himself was always chockablock with fulsome self-praise and -congratulation. Distasteful, Tim thought.

And then he thought again.

He remembered the night Margaret had told him how the committee had voted for him. He hadn’t been much interested, and strangely, that indifference had lasted, but he had heard her—he wasn’t THAT indifferent—and he now realized that his dangerously low number (6,6,6, it stung a bit) was attributable to someone, and it wouldn’t be Helen, and it wouldn’t be Garcia (who had once complimented him on a story of Tim’s he’d read in
Harper’s
), so it had to be the other guy whose name Tim couldn’t remember and it had to be Gift. Gift was working against him.

He sat up in bed, baring his chest to the elements.

So, it was the pet project of this nasty man to blast a gold mine under an innocent cloud forest. Tim knew nothing about mining, but it was easy to imagine bulldozers uprooting the trees, stripping back the soil. It was easy to imagine large explosions and innocent plants and animals of all kinds shooting skyward in surprise and pain.

It all made him think of Cecelia again, her female fragility. But now that presented itself in another, more exciting light. He got up and put on his robe, then took a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches out of the pocket and stood under the gaze of Sid and Nancy
looking down upon the white of Riverside Park and the black of the wide, as yet unfrozen river. Cecelia had taken the paper from him without opening the envelope, and he hadn’t been able to urge her to do so without revealing that he had read her mail. Besides, she was still angry with him. So that had been that. But she would have read it by now. He went to the phone and called her, thinking, Well, it would be nice to talk to her, and to be known to have thought of her, too, on Christmas night. But he only got her machine, and her customary message inviting him to leave his name and number after the beep. No clue whether she was at home, at a party, or even, maybe, gone somewhere.

He gave it up, along with his dinner plans, and went into the kitchen, where he got out some leftover black calamari pasta with nut sauce that he’d bought down at Balducci’s the day before, as well as a bagel and some lox and cream cheese from Zabar’s. Before he had even assembled his meal, he was too impatient to eat it. He tied his robe more tightly around his waist. This rain—no, cloud—forest thing was too interesting not to talk about, and he had let a whole week and some four or five parties go by already. People in New York were always looking for things to talk about that no one else knew about, and clearly this Gift thing was a secret—Margaret had said as much—and of course it was a shame, no, a sin, no, a crime, no, a tragedy, no, a disaster, in its own right.

He could already voice what he would say about it. Of course, tomorrow was MLA, and he could talk about it there, but people at MLA were so distracted by their own greed for professional notoriety that they hardly listened to what you were saying, and who could blame them. Damn! He had spent a whole week with people like Toby Wolff and Robert Silvers and he had overlooked his real entrée. “They’ve got to have it all,” he would say. “The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Tierra del Madre cloud forest! Did you hear about that?” An article! He could have buttonholed Silvers with a real idea for a real think piece about whether capitalism, now that it had won or was winning, could, structurally, leave any resource unexploited. The possibilities there were timely—

But he hadn’t. All he had was some little In Short about a first novel of growing up in Indiana somewhere.

But he did have that editor’s name.

He took a chance, since the editor’s name was Pearlman, of calling the
Times Book Review
. The editor answered on the first ring. Forty-five
minutes and two intermediate
Times
reporters later, he was talking to an environmental reporter who was filing a New Year’s story about lobbying efforts by oil companies against required use of double-hulled tankers in the Arctic even in the wake of the Valdez oil spill, and there he was, promising to deliver, in two or three days, Gift’s report for whatever that company had been, though he didn’t know where Cecelia could possibly be and who would have another copy of the report, since Margaret had sent the original back to Gift.

Finally, it was a nice way to spend Christmas, on the phone, cooking up the downfall of Dr. Lionel Gift and all his allies and minions.

As
A WAY
of greeting the New Year, all the authorities (Medicare, the insurance company, the state health care authority, and the board of regents of the rehab facility) in charge of Loren Stroop’s recovery had let it be known to him that they weren’t going to wait forever for Loren to rise in the percentile rankings and walk out of the facility. Finally, his bad luck in being genetically predisposed to high blood pressure, and his bad judgment in failing to faithfully safeguard his health belonged to him alone. If, as of January 1, he did not begin making timely payments for his care, well, he was out. Each agency noted in its letter that he was possessed of considerable assets in real property. Sale of these assets and placement of the proceeds in a trust would take care of his financial and health needs for the foreseeable future. The insurance company informed him that they were prepared to oversee every aspect of this process, from the real estate transaction (“Our brokers are uniquely equipped to find you the best buyer. We specialize in bringing together enterprising investment groups with valuable real assets like yours!”) to the setting up of the trust (“Whether your needs are income, growth, or high-yield, our brokers are uniquely equipped to manage your precious nest egg!”) to the distribution of payments (“Save yourself from the complex and time-consuming chores that rob you of the time you would prefer to devote to your passions. Our brokers are uniquely qualified to act as your agents in all fiscal matters!”).