Moo (50 page)

“Wife. Mistress. I’ve seen it a thousand times. I say it’ll be a lot better all around if we just let the two of them work it out between them.”

I
T WAS
late, almost two. The riot, Gary thought, had been terrific, a real experience for his literary alter ego, Larry. He didn’t want to write about it too quickly, though, because Mr. Monahan had always advised letting things settle, steep, ferment, lie dormant, lie fallow, germinate, etc. Still, he’d had his notebook out the whole time, writing down notes. He was especially proud of one section: “Some woman comes out in a red coat. The guy I’m standing next to says to this other guy, ‘Bet you a six-pack of Molson’s that I can get this through that little window in the door there,’ the other guy says, ‘You’re on,’ and then he beaned her right on the forehead, and the two guys were just standing there saying, ‘Fuck, man! Fuck, man! Did anybody see us? Fuck, you hit her, man! Shhh! Fuck, did you mean to hit her? Nah! I meant to get it in that broken window, man, and she stepped right in the fucking way! What if she’s fuckin’ dead, man? She’s not dead! Fuck! I can’t believe it! Let’s get the fuck out of here!’ ” He had taken down the dialogue just the way Mr. Monahan had had them do it the first semester, only by now he was faster, and got it down more accurately. It was good dialogue, too, dramatic, though not, he realized, especially revealing of the idiosyncratic personalities of his characters. He would have to add that on his own.

And it wasn’t long after getting down that great piece of dialogue that he ran into Bob’s old girlfriend, Diane. Mmmm. Diane. She had on a new leather jacket, dark green, and a woolly hat that matched perfectly and these terrific black boots, and she’d been veeerrrrry
friendly, possibly because of the dangerous situation they were in with the riot and all. So he kind of hung out with her, and then they went out to eat and to the movies, and then out for something else to eat, and the long and the short of it was that Gary was in love. He hadn’t gotten her back to Dubuque House until after one.

He had this terrific feeling, all jazzed up and happy. The rest of the semester to come looked entirely different now. Mmmm mmm mmmm. Of course, it wasn’t going to be all that easy with Bob around, but where there was a will there was a way. Mmmmm. Gary pulled out his chair and sat down at his computer. He pressed “Enter,” and the screensaver disappeared. Oh, he thought, ahhhhhhh. “Name of Document to Open?” read the screen. Gary poised his hands above the keys for a moment, then typed in, “DONNA.Doc.”

“Donna”

a story by Gary Olson

High above the Manhattan skyline, Donna Halvorson, chairperson of the board, Megavestments Corporation of the World, turned from her computer screen and stared out the window. It was 2:18 in the morning, and Donna could see no one else in any other office working so late. “Where did I go wrong?” said Donna to herself, her perfectly manicured hand straying over her five-thousand-dollar wool pinstripe suit jacket. “I have everything I’ve ever dreamed of, but

W
HEN PEOPLE
at the conference saw Margaret’s university affiliation on her identification badge, they all said, “Oh! I saw that on the news! Didn’t you have a—”

“Wasn’t that amazing?” purred Margaret. “Campus unrest at this time of the year?” That was all she felt like saying about it. Back home, the program-cutting scissors that had been snipping and trimming here and there had suddenly turned into a circular saw and all departments, from the grandest spruces over in the Biotechnology buildings to the narrowest willows in Speech and Theater Arts were at that very moment being fed to it like so many logs. Margaret found herself waiting for someone, maybe anyone at the conference in a higher-level administrative capacity to remark, “You must be looking for another position. As a matter of fact, at our university—” (Yale, Berkeley, Margaret fantasized, or, in another mood, the University of Hawaii, or of the Virgin Islands). Surely she could jump, maybe she could jump, couldn’t she of all people jump—Ah, but here, halfway between Sea World and the Magic Kingdom, every detail of home and job slipped farther away by the minute.

As a precaution in case her plane went down, Margaret had graded and turned back all tests and exams and brought up to date all attendance sheets and records of in-class work, as well as rereading her will. She had made a special trip to the benefits office to include her new nephew, aged nine months, on the list of beneficiaries of her university life insurance policy. That was the old her, the Margaret she had thought of as her authentic self.

Since coming here, though, she had deconstructed, and gladly. The Margaret who would have looked around the lobby, her room, the rest of the grounds, and said, “So this is what they’ve been keeping from us,” had vanished and the new Margaret looked around and said, “I want this.” No, that was wrong, too. She didn’t
say
anything at all. The desire was in her flesh. Her mind was in the backseat and the car was driving itself.

It started when she opened her eyes on the peachy pink and succulent green color scheme of her room that said to her, “Lie back, roll over, slip more deeply between the smooth sheets, your breakfast will be here soon!” Did she turn on “Morning Edition”? The radio was at her fingertips. Or even the “Today” show? The TV remote was already in her hand. No! She turned on the hotel’s very own weather channel, which featured panoramic shots of the grounds and a soothing voice predicting light breezes, “temps” between seventy-five and eighty, and plenty of sunshine, interspersed with clips of blizzards elsewhere and a gravelly, despairing male voice saying, “Another large storm is tracking through the midsection of the country, dropping freezing rain and snow over a wide area.” After watching the weather channel as if spellbound for the hour that it took her to spoon half a perfect melon into her mouth with a few bites of croissant, chased by a tall glass of orange juice, she got up and put on her swimsuit, feeling just enough ambition to go to the pool. Her room had a view of the pool. Fourteen stories below her private balcony, it drew her dreamy gaze, a hex-cut aquamarine, a jewel that you could enter. When she looked down at the other swimmers, she saw the surface of the stone close magically over them, smooth, mysterious, and inviting.

After all these years (her little bitty passenger intellect laughed nervously at this), she felt at last like the princess, a role her “authentic self” would have disdained, but here she was, possessed of the magic power, partaking of the magic food. That there were many other princes and princesses at the conference made no difference, in fact soothed her. Twenty laps in the jewel the first day, thirty laps the second, then she stopped counting. The conference didn’t start till two in the afternoon, then it lasted only two hours before they broke for cocktails and dinner. The evening presentation went on for only an hour.

She had been taken by surprise; it seemed that she couldn’t resist this inexorable and exquisitely pleasurable extraction of her “authentic self.” On the third day, she went into the hotel dress shop and bought a silk cocktail dress for five hundred dollars. It featured the same colors as her room, and it slid over her body like the water in the pool, only catching deliciously at her shoulders and clinging there. The skirt seemed to float on its own gentle breeze. She put it on her MasterCard, the one she kept only for emergencies and
almost never actually used. At the cocktail party that night, she saw Cates looking at her across the twilit patio as if he didn’t realize who she was and hadn’t seen her at hundreds of committee meetings over the years.

That evening she sat up late, no makeup and no stockings and no shoes, but unable just yet to take off her new dress, and she read the paper she was to present the next afternoon. She was sitting on the bed, and she could see herself in the mirror beside the TV, the dress glowing, her skin burnished in the single circle of golden light shed by her reading lamp. Looks-wise, she was ordinarily a girl who did her best and settled for that, but tonight she ravished herself. And the paper wasn’t bad, either.

It was therefore all the more surprising when, the next morning, she was informed by the manager that due to a sudden notification by the corporate sponsor of the conference, something called Horizontal Technologies, the rest of the conference was being cancelled and, unfortunately, the management of the resort would have to ask the guests to guarantee room and restaurant charges that they had already incurred. With a coercive and challenging smile, the young woman (ten years younger than Margaret at least) ripped her bill out of the computer printer and flourished it in her direction. At the bottom of the page, right by the words “total charges,” her glance picked out the number 3,198.24 the way a frog picks a mosquito from the air. Then Margaret saw her own hand lifting to meet the page and felt her own mouth smiling. A good, good, good girl, she said, “Oh. Thank you.”

“Will there be any problem with that, Professor?”

“Oh,” said Margaret, grinning madly. “Of course not.”

T
HE KNOCK
at the door of Dr. Dean Jellinek’s lab was almost inaudible. If he hadn’t been alone in there, working at his computer (which, because of its state-of-the-art engineering, was almost silent), he might not have answered the door, might not have been surprised at the sight of three men, one of them small and owlishly bespectacled, in the sort of outmoded brown suit and cowboy boots that executives of agricultural companies favored, the other two brawny, in slacks and big jackets. One of these was pushing a dolly. “Yes?” he said, carefully measuring into his tone his busyness, his general importance
around the university as the recipient of a large grant, and his kindly willingness to be helpful.

The little man, whose voice he instantly recognized as that of his phone buddy and teammate Samuels, of Western Egg and Milk, said to the two others, “There’s the computer. That must be a box of backup disks beside it. Take those, too. And the printer.” He stepped past Dean and looked around the lab. “The rest of it seems to be university property. Okay.” And the two larger men bore down upon the treasure-house of Dean’s intellectual life, plucked its cord out of the wall, and in two minutes were out the door with the equipment on the dolly, heading toward the elevator.

“Wait a—” said Dean. Could it be that Samuels, of all people, a guy who loved Magic Johnson as much as he himself did, would do him harm? He looked around the doorframe again, to see if two other big guys were bringing him an even better computer.

Samuels, meanwhile, had drawn forth a piece of paper and his glasses, which he put on. He read, “ ‘In seizing the aforesaid equipment, the company recognizes that some of Dr. Jellinek’s own intellectual property, that is, work not pertaining to the calf-free lactation project, may be stored in the computer’s memory bank. This work will be copied from that memory bank onto floppy disks and returned to Dr. Jellinek by our very best computer technicians, and then deleted from the computer. Dr. Jellinek will not be charged for computer disks so employed, but they will be provided, gratis, by Western Egg and Milk.’ ” Here, Samuels gave him a beneficent smile, then continued, “ ‘All work pertaining to the calf-free lactation project is the property of Western Egg and Milk, its parent companies, and its subsidiaries, and may be utilized by any or all of these companies, may be sold, patented, published, or utilized in any other way that the company sees fit, in accordance with contracts between Western Egg and Milk and Dr. Jellinek. The seizure of the above equipment hereby terminates any and all agreements made between Dr. Dean Jellinek and Western Egg and Milk and any of its representatives.’ ”

“Samuels!” said Dean.

“That’s me,” replied the little man.

“What’s going on?”

“Restructuring, is all. It might not be that bad. Getting rid of the fat, you see. Personally, I’m pretty safe. For one thing, I don’t believe all that stuff about the pension plan. You can’t be panicked by wild rumors, that’s what I told my wife. And I’ve got feelers out to some
other companies. Personally, I’m in pretty good shape. I could get sent down to the minors, but only to, say, Omaha, not to, say, Chillicothe. And my wife has a good job with—”

“You can’t take my computer!”

“I have to.”

“Why?”

“Now, Dean, you’re being a little naive.” He handed Dean the sheet of paper.

“You can’t take my computer!”

“We took it.”

“Bring it back!”

“Dean.” Samuels stepped up close to Dean and looked him right in the eye. His voice was soft and friendly. “Sue me.” He said. “I mean that.”

E
VEN THOUGH
Dr. John Cates had discovered the cancellation of the conference long after everyone else (they had gotten out to breakfast and the Magic Kingdom by eight and hadn’t returned until almost nine), he was able to reflect with some complacence that he had already delivered his paper. In addition to this, he happened to have the letter with him, the one that stated that all his conference charges (and they were itemized, as per his request) were guaranteed by conference officials (whose names were also on the letter) and corporate sponsors (ditto). When the little girl at the desk demanded his credit card, Dr. Cates had drawn himself up to his full height and shaken his head. He had, however, allowed them to Xerox his letter before giving it back to him. All this business had been conducted behind bright shielding smiles, and was now concluded, like most of his business, to Dr. Cates’ advantage.