Authors: Jane Smiley
Martha props herself up on one of their big fluffy pillows. “You never told me about HIM.”
“He hasn’t changed. Little guy with big ears. He spoke of me to Ivar as ‘your girl.’ ”
Martha smiles.
“He’s up to something. I guarantee you, he’s in bed with Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek, Associate Vice-President for Development, 113 Lafayette Hall, right now, and he’s getting ready to fuck the whole university this time.” As Martha reaches around for the comforter, her legs spread a bit. Loraine gazes at the exposed pubis affectionately. She says, “I can’t wait to touch you there.”
“Here?” Martha touches herself.
“There.” They smile at each other.
“Are you hungry at all?”
“Mmm, maybe,” says Loraine, then, “Turn over.”
Martha does so, slightly elevating her buttocks. They stare at each other for a long moment, until Loraine reaches across and begins massaging Martha’s buttocks in big, firm, circular motions. Every so often, she lets her hand wander between Martha’s legs. When she does so, Martha closes her eyes and sighs. She says, “I’m starving.”
They sit up and head for the kitchen, but after she opens the refrigerator door, she is moved to turn and drop to her knees, to explore Loraine’s labia and vaginal opening (they try never to use euphemisms about women’s sexual parts) with her tongue. Loraine leans against the sink, her legs apart, her feet on a chair, her arms braced, her head back, her eyes closed. She can’t see Martha’s breasts, but she can remember and imagine them, silky and pendulous, waiting to be sucked.
Martha murmurs, “I’d like to put something in you.”
“There’s that dildo in my bedside table.”
“Shall we go to it, or shall I bring it to us?”
“Don’t stop.” Martha doesn’t stop. She grasps Loraine around both her substantial thighs and thinks how she loves this, finding Loraine’s clitoris with her tongue and sensing it swell and throb. Loraine’s odor rises around her head, making her own vagina feel open and hot. It is she who likes the dildo, both using it and receiving it. Loraine is partial to stroking and licking. Loraine groans and Martha can feel the clitoris contract and then the artery in Loraine’s thigh, next to her ear, seems to pulse. Martha lifts her head. She says, “Don’t fall!” At their age, they have to be careful.
“Don’t stop!”
Martha doesn’t stop.
Loraine doesn’t fall.
A bit later, Martha stands up. Loraine helps her, and gives each of
her nipples a warm kiss. Together, they turn toward the refrigerator. It is still open.
“Just a fingerful of guacamole for me,” says Martha.
“Ready for bed?”
“Mmmmm.”
C
HAIRMAN
X
LIES
on his back, his chin upthrust, snoring. Beth, next to him, has one foot on the floor, and she is listening intently. He lets out, or rather pulls in, because he has a habit of snoring on the uptake, a long, ruffling, intermittent bleat. She reaches over without looking and smacks him on the shoulder. He turns away from her at once and curls into himself. The snoring stops.
But does the coughing? After three nights, she’d thought Amy’s croup was over with, but just as she was drifting off, she’d sensed the long cawing that portended another sleepless night. A fearful dream? The real thing? She wills the house into silence so that she can hear.
Nothing.
She brings her foot back into bed.
She is wide awake.
She thought they were going to make love tonight, but they didn’t. It seems like a bad sign. Or rather, what seems like a bad sign is that their sex life has receded over the last two or three years, and now looks like a house a few doors away that they once lived in but no more. And the real bad sign is her equanimity about this. She does not actually seem to need to have sex. In the past she thought that she needed it; she even, in the early seventies, took defiant pride in a need that her parents, for example, didn’t share. And now she doesn’t need it and neither does he, and a good sex life looks like any other virtue that you half will and half enjoy—eating enough fiber, cooking only vegetarian meals. Her parents probably felt relief crossing sex off their list, but Beth feels a kind of cool guilt.
Now it comes, the cawing and the hacking, clear as a bell. She sits up. It’s plenty loud enough to hear and she knows from that that her earlier suspicions were motherly foresight, a visceral knowledge, maybe from the way Amy’s body felt when she put her to bed, that the child was still sick, though she seemed well and hadn’t coughed all day. Don’t go to sleep, her own body said, It’s coming.
Amy is hot and mostly asleep, tangled in her knitted blanket. Her head has an acrid, feverish fragrance that Beth feels guilty relishing. They all smell that way only when they’re sick, but it’s such a delicious smell. The coughing subsides slightly as Beth sets the toddler upright against her shoulder, but it still sounds as if it is coming from a loudspeaker rather than a child. She cuddles Amy and carries her into the bathroom, where she turns on the shower, hot. The small room begins to fill with steam. Beth sinks down on the mattress they’ve carried into the bathroom, with her back and head against the wall. Amy’s arms encircle her neck and her darling head shifts over to one side. The breaths she draws begin to quiet. Beth closes her eyes. Sometime later, she wakes up. Amy, too, is awake, and pulling at her nightgown. At fourteen months, she is still nursing once or twice a day. Beth unties the bow at her throat, and exposes her breast. Amy smiles. Her breathing seems normal. She finds the nipple and begins to suck. Beth settles herself into this profound relaxation and closes her eyes again.
D
R
. L
IONEL
G
IFT IS
in bed with Arlen Martin, billionaire, but only in the Washington, D.C., sense. Martin himself is back in Dallas, working late and pleased, when he happens to think about it, with the success of his brief trip to the university. Dr. Gift’s dark, richly furnished chamber contains only his dream, but the dream is thrilling, and actually passes no more quickly than the sensual self-abandonments of the others.
His dream concerns just that word, “billion.” In a normal waking state, Lionel Gift isn’t much impressed by a single billion. In terms of things like the national debt, the budget deficit, the gross national product, the number of stars in the Milky Way, the net worth of corporate America, the debt load and interest payments of corporations that participated in leveraged buyouts in the eighties, and, his own special field, Third World development through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, one billion isn’t much, and he would disdain it. But $1 billion attached to the personhood of Arlen Martin has unexpectedly moved him—the small, poignant mortality, the “poor, bare, forked animal” with the jug ears, the eager smile (Dr. Gift can tell that Martin has heard of his own work, and has been anxious to meet him), the deceased wife (though he has never married, Dr. Gift finds deeply romantic the idea of all deceased wives,
women he pictures in their lost youth, reddened roughened hands deep in suds, wearing some rag of a housedress, staring down the long, say, Oklahoma vista toward the oil fields just for a glimpse of the ambitious young man with jug ears to whom they joined their fates until some early, sudden cancer or accident of childbirth took them away smiling and rewarded only by their own virtue, never to be corrupted by idleness), the shoes more comfortable than stylish, the belt high rather than low. How does a simple economist solve this mystery—the relationship between the hard, glittering sum of money and the soft, particular man? Dr. Gift feels that this spiritual conundrum, more than other allurements, is what secures his attachment to Martin’s project, which after all is just a project like most others, where one thing in one place, currently without value, will be transferred to another place and endowed with value. Ho hum. But Arlen Martin himself as an object of contemplation! Well—
Dr. Lionel Gift’s dream contains no actual human figures, only what, in Hollywood, is known as a voice-over, his own voice, it seems, counting. How many houses in Orange County, average price $10 million? (A hundred.) How many Maseratis, average price $150,000? (Six thousand.) Rollses? (Five thousand.) Apartments in Paris? (A thousand.) Apartments in Tokyo? (Two hundred.) In his dream, houses and cars and apartments and paintings parade by, all the ones he’s seen over the years and coveted, a kaleidoscope of goods, goods to touch once, to contemplate for a few moments before something else comes up and takes its place, goods to know you own, whether or not you have time to actually use them. In his professional life, Dr. Gift has met many many people who know and control numbers, but somehow, until Arlen Martin (who clearly reciprocates his respect, on intellectual grounds) he has never met so Godlike a figure, either consumer-wise or production-wise. And his glad duty, thanks to Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek, will be to serve. How many times might Arlen Martin buy and sell Dr. Lionel Gift himself? Well, apart from the enigma of the worth of knowledge, exactly two thousand times. In his dream, the thought of being personally bought and sold by Arlen Martin two thousand times brings him to such a pitch of excitement that he wakes up and can’t go back to sleep.
I
N THE TWO WEEKS
since his extension dean, Dr. Nils Harstad, had agreed to do his duty and look over his invention and his plans, Loren Stroop had lost and gained his courage five or ten times every day. His self-confidence and exhilaration, for example, had drained away almost the very moment he had expected it to burgeon—the moment he returned from the university, went into the barn, turned on the light, and viewed his machine. He had not noticed before how patched-together it looked, how unshiny and low-tech it seemed. No longer was one of the machine’s virtues that it climaxed Loren’s life of making the best of things by making the best of every one of its parts. Now Loren looked at it and saw the harrows, windmills, tractors, bicycles, planters, corn pickers, pumps, automobiles, refrigerators, and disks that had supplied those very parts; the machine looked like a jumble, never mind that it worked. It DID work—Loren had used it himself on all sorts of fields.
And the plans, so carefully put together, were drawn wrong. Nils Harstad not only wouldn’t understand them, he would be repelled by them, since they were stained here and there, soiled here and there, continued here and there on the back of the sheet. You could see, if your gaze were cold enough, and Nils Harstad’s gaze WOULD be cold enough, that the enthusiasm that had motivated and thrilled Loren Stroop through every step had also made for carelessness.
What had impressed its inventor for what it had grown from now depressed him for what it had not turned out to be—something sleek and handsome, revolutionary impact evident in every line.
Which is not to say that Loren was disheartened or deflected from his goal. No no no. He merely did what he had done all his life—after every hailstorm, every gully washer that washed away the new, vulnerable seedlings, every drought that burnt them up, every breakage of machinery, every fall in the markets that erased his profits—he redoubled his efforts. This was his virtue and his flaw, a quality that may have been merely a habit, a quality that may have been
imposed from outside, by farmer-peer-pressure, a quality that may have been something he brought to farming, that had enabled him to succeed (or at least survive) as a farmer where so many had failed (but Loren would never judge them—he would be the first to say that impossible circumstances got the best of them, or bad luck, or, most likely, the collusion of the USDA, Cargill, Iowa Beef Processors, Pioneer, Ciba-Geigy, Deere, IH, the Big Banks, the CIA, the FBI, and the Trilateral Commission).
The first thing he did was get a couple of friends to harvest the rest of his crop—he’d gotten enough in and sold it so his costs were covered, and he could always eat out of the garden and do a little hunting later in the fall. After that, he spent his nights and days in the barn, straightening this, fixing that, tightening the other thing, putting on a coat of enamel—off-white, because people seemed to like that. Most computers you saw at the computer store were off-white. Must be for a reason. He got out, but only when he was called out. It was harvest season, after all, and now that the nearest implement dealer was eighty miles away, lots of his neighbors had come to depend on him to repair their combines, so that’s when he ate, when they offered him a meal. It was dependable enough. Anyway, he didn’t notice when he didn’t eat.
He wore his bulletproof vest night and day. He wasn’t going to be gulled into thinking that the pressure was off. Quite the contrary, the pressure was more on than ever. They had ways of knowing when you were about to make your move. You could see that every night on TV—the closer you got to your goal, the harder it was to get there, and the more likely some big explosion, say, or a car wreck would intervene. Getting lost in your work tended to make you careless right at the time you could least afford carelessness.
He got the plans drawn on special paper he bought, the right paper, and he took them down to the copy center, where they said they had to keep them overnight. He didn’t like to leave them there, but they insisted.
He weighed the likelihood of the copy center being broken into by the big ag companies, but he was almost certain no one had followed him and seen which copy center he had chosen.
He had purposely not titled the plans or indicated top and bottom. That was some protection. He gave his name as “Joe Miller.”
He left the plans nonchalantly, just as if they were insignificant, as if no one would ever care about them. He told the boy behind the
desk that he would be there first thing in the morning, when the doors opened. He saw the boy write that on the paper—“Joe Miller, 8 a.m., ASAP overnight.”
He felt dizzy as he drove away, leaving them there.
Then he felt dizzy again, as if his vest were a little too tight, as he drove into the real Joe Miller’s yard, where he’d promised to stop and look at the differential on the combine. He noticed that Joe was about three-fourths done with his corn. Then he noticed that after he turned off the truck with his right hand, he couldn’t make his left hand take hold of the door handle. Then, it was the funniest thing, when he opened the door with his right hand, he couldn’t put his left leg out, and when he pushed it out with his right arm, it didn’t hold him, and he fell. And then when Sally Miller came running over with all those kids behind her, he wanted to laugh at how silly it was, but he didn’t seem to be able to get a word out, and she ran off and here came Joe. And the little girl, whose name seemed suddenly far away and impossible to get a hold of, kept patting his hand and saying something in a language he couldn’t understand.