Moo (23 page)

“Who are hogs?”

“See, now, nobody knows that.”

“No, I meant, is that what you’re interested in, who are hogs?”

“You bet.”

“Oh.”

“You see, you’re stumped, aren’t you? Give me a hog fact.”

“What?”

“You been around here long enough to know one little thing about hogs. Just say what it is.”

Elaine turned her shoulder into Dr. Bo’s chest and gave a tactful little shove. She felt as though he were pushing her down a hole, as though she should raise her hand and wave for help.

“Just one.”

“Uh—” She took a deep breath. “Uh. Let’s see. Well, I know they go for slaughter at about nine months old, or two hundred and thirty pounds or so.” Her shoulder blades grazed the wall. She felt a little panicky.

“You need to get some money to save Old Meats.”

“Physical plant matters are out of my purview.”

“That’s a truly historical building. Fittings in there could go into a museum. You could make that place into a museum.”

“The university does have a museum—”

“All they got over there is pictures. In this museum, they ought
to get old farm implements, some educational displays about corn and beans. Something for the kids. You could have some real good exhibits, like stuffed farm animals in characteristic groupings and activities, or a diorama of typical hog behavior, if anybody knew what that was. Kids like taxidermic displays. You ever been to Cabela’s, out in Kearney, Nebraska? They got grizzlies and mountain lions, and everything you can name. No hogs, though. You could get money for that.”

To Elaine, now inwardly gasping, it seemed as though his moving lips were saying, “You
will
get money for that.” She did have a distant perception, like the vision of stars up a chimney into which you had been wedged, that Dr. Bo might actually have a good idea, but she would grasp that later. Now it only mattered that he move back, that she escape, if necessary through his legs. She said, “Fine. Yes. I have some ideas.”

“I’ll call you Monday.”

“Please. Do.”

“You know where the bathroom is? I got to piss in the worst way.”

Elaine lifted her little hand in a gesture of last resort and signalled limply toward the back of the house. At last he moved off. She came out of her corner as if out of a dark closet, and moved to the center of the room, where the light was good, the air was clear, and she could keep her eye on Jack Parker, who, all the time he was schmoozing with people, also seemed to be making mental notes on who was flirting with whom, so that he could later follow them to hotel rooms and take their pictures in flagrante delicto. It did not escape Elaine’s notice that, as often as she found herself at a social gathering with Jack Parker, he had never given her the once-over. He didn’t now. When he caught her looking at him, he turned away immediately and went over to the coffee urn, where he refilled his cup.

As usual, everyone in the room was aware of Jack Parker. As she drifted to the table and balanced a shrimp between her fingernails, Elaine heard a zoologist say to a botanist, “To look at him, you’d never know that Jack Parker made the University of Michigan what it is today.”

“Really?” said the botanist.

“Single-handedly,” said the zoologist. “Ask anyone at NIH.”

In the living room, Elaine’s former husband and coparent, Dean Jellinek, was basking in the even bolder glare of public attention. A million over five years was the rumor that Dean refrained from
confirming or denying, instead allowing to play over his features just the merest complacent smile. The well-known reluctance of midwesterners to talk about actual sums of money worked in his favor, since refusal to talk about it made it the unspoken subject of every exchange, and yet he didn’t really have to explode any fantasies, including his own, just yet. It was amazing to him in this succulent moment of rumor just how friendly they all were—the President, Ivar, Dean Harstad, the chairmen of a whole catalogue of departments, from his own, Animal Science, through Economics and Statistics all the way to Zoology. Since the subject was money, of course, all their congratulations were hushed ones, but, after all, all the more welcome for the implied reverence.

Joy had come in with Dean, but taken her headache, now permanently implanted just above the worry line between her eyebrows, into the dining room to feed it. It absolutely hollered for a drink, but there were no drinks. Joy had never before been to a university party where there were no drinks, and her immediate reaction was that she just couldn’t find it, that there was a bar somewhere in the house where a nice young man in a white jacket was pouring out Bloody Marys, but that no one would tell her where it was.

The only other relief from her permanent headache lately seemed to be tears. Every time Dean updated her on his calf-free lactation project, which was hourly, she went away and burst into tears and the pain was gone for about fifteen minutes. Now, when a reliable source (the catering woman who was replenishing the sausage rolls) told her that there was no liquor at the party, she did the only thing she could, which was to burst into tears. She turned away, quietly dabbed her eyes with some napkins, and began poking melon chunks into her mouth.

As if by radar, Helen Levy was immediately at her side, asking what was wrong.

Joy gestured that her mouth was full.

Helen enveloped Joy with her motherly arm and said, “You know, I feel like I see you less than before even though you’re right next door now.”

Joy thoroughly chewed every last atom of the melon, swallowed every droplet of its juice. She saw that people were glancing at her. She said, “No drinks. It just surprised me.” Now Helen would think she was an astounding drunk.

Helen said, “Well, I suppose that’s the first honest response we’ve
had to that situation. Everyone else pretends to be relieved. Nils’ fiancée’s father wouldn’t allow it.”

“Oh.” Joy snorted and wiped her eyes. The tears had dried up and the headache was gone. She said, “If you have a headache that’s pretty constant, but it goes away if you have a drink or, say, cry about something, could it still be a brain tumor?”

“I don’t think so. How long have you had it?”

“Seventeen days. Advil doesn’t touch it, neither does Tylenol.”

“Good Lord, Joy.”

“I know. Let’s talk about something else. Is that the fiancée?” She cocked her head toward Marly.

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen her somewhere.”

“She’s been a server in the commons for years.”

“Isn’t she awfully young?”

“Old enough to know better, I think.”

“How did they meet?”

“He picked her out of the other virgins at his church.”

Joy cast Helen a surprised glance—Helen hardly ever spoke in a catty way. As if in response, Helen softened her tone. “I like her. She’s sweet, and when Nils starts in about the Lord’s intentions, she has sense enough to look embarrassed.”

“When are they getting married?”

“Before she has a chance to come to.”

“Oh, Helen, you never approve of anybody getting married.”

“Not for love. Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific. Bad mesh. Anyway, a singleton can never understand an identical twin, and Nils, since he doesn’t understand himself, won’t be able to guide her. And all they are armed with ahead of time is some biblical precepts.” Helen shook her head gravely. “Precepts are worse as a basis for marriage than love is.”

“What does Ivar think?”

“He never judges anything Nils does. Never has. I wish I could say the effort was reciprocated.”

Joy put a hand to her head. It was coming back the way it always did, as if it had a right to be there.

Helen said, “Come upstairs. I’m going to do something to you that looks weird in a crowd, but it might help.”

Joy had never been upstairs in the big brick Harstad manse. She was not in such pain that she failed to notice the decor of the upstairs
hall—swirling green and gold flowers, avocado carpeting just a shade off. Turquoise shag in the bedroom, a white chenille spread on the bed with orange pillows. Helen took off her red suit jacket, went around behind her, and said, “Close your eyes.”

Given the decor of the room, Joy didn’t have to be asked twice.

Helen began at the base of her skull, seemingly with fingertips, but also with something sharper—the point of her elbow? Her hands seemed to go in a number of directions, and to press in particular spots, the painful ones. She said, “Rise up on your toes.” Joy rose up on her toes. Helen worked on her for what would have seemed like five minutes, if they hadn’t been five minutes of remarkable migrating pain. Only Joy’s customary reticence prevented her from crying out or asking Helen to stop.

Helen stopped.

Joy opened her eyes. She was just about to shake her head in discouragement when she felt the pain in her head drain away and her whole self, body and spirit, lighten and seem to lift off her feet, out of her spine. Helen said, “Did it work?”

“Yeah! Yeah, it did! What did you do? How long will it last?”

“About twelve hours. Shall we go back down?”

Later, Joy remembered that Helen didn’t tell her what she had done to her, or, in fact, what were actual good reasons to get married.

Tim Monahan was working the room entirely out of habit. In his experience, technocrats like these could not actually be “worked,” as, say, publishing or magazine people in New York could be, and expected to be, but his heart wasn’t in it anyway. Though he was smiling and complimenting and making connections, it was pure hackwork, not real careerist art, and he would have stopped if he had known what else to do at a party. Anyway, his promotion had been recommended by the department, 11 to 1 (he thought he knew who the one holdout was), and faculty around here were remarkably touchy about even the appearance of the beginnings of the shadows of an attempt to influence the college committee. The uncomfortable result was that he barely spoke to Helen. Gift, Cates, and Garcia were not at the party. A note from Margaret in his mail, just “Dec. 1,” had let him know the date of the committee’s consideration of his material. He believed that was all she actually knew, but it was hard to talk to her these days, too. Those words he could not avoid saying, “my promotion, my promotion, my promotion,” rolled out in a self-absorbed donkey bray and intolerably offended his own ears. But it had
been ever thus—my book my book my book, my story my story my story, my review, my article, my work. At least in the East there was a kind of uneasy fellowship of narcissistic whiny bragging that it was both necessary and semi-pleasant to be a part of, but here, he knew, the preferred mode of stoicism extended beyond failure and even success to any form of publicly expressed self-regard.

In the days when Cecelia still paid actual attention to him, they had laughed about this, but now something simultaneously so distracted her and so enlivened her that she didn’t seem to be quite the same person she had been. It wasn’t a mystery to him—she was sleeping with someone—but it did offend him that she hadn’t the courtesy to sustain her usual personality in the teeth of this secret passion—clearly a married man—but indulged in adolescent mutability that a woman her age, and once married, should have grown out of.

“So,” he said to the hostess, Marly Something, it had said on the invitation, “what are our duties and pleasures if we want to properly celebrate your engagement?”

“What?” She looked surprised and dismayed at being spoken to. Tim’s interest perked up instantly. He moved closer and smiled. He had a practiced, global perception that under these wrappings she called clothes there was a good figure to go with the thick, burnished oak hair and the deep-set, heavily lashed dark eyes. Thin lips, big hands a woman could do nothing about, and they were minor flaws, really.

He said, “What do you do at a university party if you’re tired of jostling for status and promoting your career? If you want to actually attain delight and selflessly celebrate the good fortune of others?”

“Have you had anything to eat?” She sounded nervous.

“A little of everything.”

“You aren’t having a good time?” She sounded as if this were a personal failure on her part.

“Well, it’s been a long while since I’ve had a good time, especially without any artificial stimulants. Maybe since I was eleven or so, before girls and ambition set in.”

“Is that true?”

He chuckled. “Sure. What about you?”

“Well, I don’t count on having a good time very often.”

“Are you having a good time here?”

“I’m too worried about everyone else having a good time. Anyway, I’ve never been to this kind of party before. I guess my best times are
at church suppers, you know, afterward, when all the women are cleaning up, and we start laughing and can’t stop.”

“What do you think makes you start laughing and unable to stop?”

“Well, no men around, for one thing.” She looked at him. “Though I shouldn’t say it. But it’s true. If men see you acting silly, it’s their obligation to ask you to stop. And the kids are funny, even if you know they’re being a little naughty.”

“I would like to be able, right now, to laugh without stopping.”

“It would be fun.”

“Too many men around.”

“Anyway, everyone’s too dressed up to laugh. We go to church suppers in our regular clothes. That’s important, too. On Sundays, when we wear good clothes, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone laugh once.”

Well, the conversation saddened him. When some old guy in a black suit beckoned to her and she apologized and moved away, sadness rose in him like a low-grade fever, and it wasn’t depression and it wasn’t despair and it wasn’t alienation—nothing respectable like those psychological, artistic, and sociological feelings. There was not the usual invigorating admixture of anger, either. He looked at her in her bun and her long wool dress and her flat shoes, bending respectfully toward the old guy, and he thought of her saying, “I don’t count on having a good time very often,” and he thought, She can’t take care of herself, and his sadness deepened. Time to go home, he thought. He was in the perfect mood for grading papers, because the one emotion his students could narrate without any coaching was sadness.