Moo (58 page)

Another thing you could say in her favor, observed Dr. Gift, was that she paid her own way. What was wrong with traditional marriage,
in Dr. Gift’s view, and according to his principles, was that the return on one’s investment was so uncertain. Look at the men he knew, almost every one of them, if you wanted the unvarnished truth, whose expectations of comfort, companionship, sexual release, and worthy inheritors had been blighted by spousal irritability, independence, coldness, or infertility. On the whole, Dr. Gift did not share the traditional faith in domesticity that had marked even the most rigorous economic thinkers.

Nor had he ever been inclined by nature or philosophy to make romantic distinctions among females, other than enjoying rather abstractly the niceties of packaging. Elaine, though, did eat her food with every indication of a full measure of insatiability, the way you should eat everything: more hungrily at the last bite than the first. At bottom, Dr. Gift admired that in anyone. He found that his own salmon sated him all too easily, and wondered if he should have ordered something else.

This, Elaine thought, this food, this life, this onslaught of power and money and decor, was what she deserved. The endless and thankless task of prying money out of state, local, nonprofit, and corporate institutions was a labor most people underestimated in every way. Her job wasn’t like, say, Jack Parker’s job, which was mostly a matter of holding your hat under the open spigot and saying thank you. You had to be a very special person, as she was, to do her job successfully year after year, and for her inherent specialness no one, from her father through Dean right down to the guy she was seeing currently in the plant pathology department (she had found him a grant for $100,000 the spring before), had ever TRULY appreciated her. She had to do do do when other women only had to be be be. It was unfair, but a life of one lobster lunch after another might make it more fair.

And so, as he took a piece of baguette out of the breadbasket, Dr. Lionel Gift entertained a thought, well, a notion, really, of bringing Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek, who he knew made eighty-three thousand dollars a year, under his personal umbrella. He even entertained another notion—she was not too old to produce one carefully raised son (the highest returns were always to be made on only male children), and neither, on balance, was he. He had won two university teaching awards, hadn’t he?

And Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek, smiling as if amused and adjusting the rather tight waist of her jacket, entertained a notion, too. A consulting
partnership might be just the ticket. She had no objections to doing the legwork, if Dr. Gift had no objections to introducing her to his connections, and if such a partnership led to more personal intercourse, well, how bad could it be?

And so, as Elaine lifted her last bite and set it on her tongue and as Dr. Gift folded the last leaf of chicory from his salad into his mouth, they thought the same thought (surely a sign that the hidden hand of the marketplace was working in their favor), Why not?

Excited, Dr. Gift poured Elaine another glass of wine. Excited, Elaine wrapped her manicure around the stem of the glass. Excited, they smiled and clinked their glasses, and then—

And then—

And then Elaine thought about how much she hated housework, and how every man she had ever known really did think that that was the woman’s responsibility, and you always ended up fighting about things like socks and dust bunnies and hair in the drains, for God’s sake, no matter how well-intentioned you started out.

And then Dr. Gift recalled that Elaine was said to have a son already, a cuckoo in the nest, and anyway, it was better to live by principle than by desire, and the most important principle he tried to teach his students was never to jeopardize your own return by indulging in an unproven, never to be proven, faith in the common good. The wisest course for homo economicus was the cultivation of indifference.

“Dessert?” said Dr. Gift.

“It’s tempting,” said Elaine, “but I suppose not. And I do have to make some calls before my next meeting.” She laid her napkin on the table, and stood up. The waiter stepped forward with the check. “Thank you so much for this lovely lunch!”

“Oh, my dear,” rejoined Dr. Gift, warmly, “don’t thank me. Thank the citizens of our fair state.”

As they made their way out, stopping, of course, to retrieve Elaine’s Burberry coat from the hatcheck girl, Dr. Gift found himself being attentive, and even tender, as if something had gone another way rather than the way it, of course, had to go. On the street in front of the restaurant, he squeezed her elbow a little too lingeringly, as if he couldn’t quite release her, and then, when she did depart, he felt an unaccustomed pang of loneliness.

She disappeared into the noontime crowd. Startled was how he felt, startled and disoriented. Instead of striding off, Dr. Lionel Gift looked around at the—the—yes, the indifferent Georgetown row
houses, the indifferent shops and the shining indifferent cars, the indifferent sidewalks and the indifferent intersections, all seething under the indifferent sky with homines economici, who were all themselves indifferent, at least toward Dr. Lionel Gift.

As she hurried away, her high heels clapping the pavement like a smattering of applause, Elaine, too, felt disappointed, lowered somehow, as if she would never find entrance, not only to the great white buildings in the distance, or to the Hay-Adams, but to something else that she couldn’t even identify. Perhaps it was the realm of self-assurance, she thought. Whatever it was, wherever it was, there, she was sure, she would not look at herself as she did now, passing the ripply glass windows of the Georgetown shops, awkward and broken into strangely vivid parts—a fat white calf, a long shoe, glaring big hands clinging to her Fendi bag, a face appalled and naked. She paused and summoned the remnants of her dignity from the farthest reaches of her inner geography, then smiled at no one in particular, and took her sunglasses from her bag.

A
FTER ALL
, the children were excited about it. Even the eldest, who had given up Benetton in favor of thrift shop items and had also dyed her hair black in the girls’ bathroom at the middle school, decided that her parents’ long-standing failure to marry enhanced her own personal mystique. In the end it was Beth who was not so sure.

The separation (which you could hardly call a separation when he was around every day, making excuses why he couldn’t take his computer to his new apartment) had lasted, if you counted up all the actual time apart, 135 nights, 8 weekends, and 12 days scattered here and there) and had confirmed what Beth knew from watching her friends divorce—you ended up with too little money, too much space, and all your free time in the middle of the night, when as a married person you would have been sleeping. Her principled intention to make up her mind about what she wanted to do with her life had come to seem more and more abstract in the face of the chaos her life was made up of. Then one night, she had found herself making plans for her sixties, when Amy would be out of the house. But the only plan she was attracted to was being one of those wiry, wizened old women, whose backyard is a colorful riot of perennials and vegetables, who put on their gardening kneepads with their jeans in the morning, and who walk to the post office at the same time every day, who volunteer and watch the polls at election time. With Him around, she already was one of those women. Her backyard boasted barely an uncultivated square inch, and her after-breakfast walk to the post office was full of the leisurely delights of chatting with neighbors, giving and receiving cuttings, bulbs, and seeds, and spying on what was sprouting, blooming, or fruiting all along the way. With Him around, she could leave the children and take the dog, have a Coke, leaf through the mail, read a magazine article or two, sit on the boards of the co-op market and the co-op bookstore, run the HIV and STD information hotline, and spend one morning a week at the women’s center.

Without Him around, she could only go to the post office on her way to other tasks, there was no time even to pull the mulch off the perennial beds, much less start seedlings, and she kept saying to the neighbors and her fellow volunteers, “I’ll call you.”

Without Him around, it was pretty clear that she was going to have to get a regular job, probably in some department at the university, and then she would have to put Amy in day care, buy some high heels, and actually wear them.

And without her around, He was a mess, and the children could see it, clear as day, and even though her friends advised her not to fall for the temptation of taking care of him, or at least worrying about him—it was only marriage-momentum, they said—she hated to see the furtively shocked and concerned looks on the children’s faces when they returned from his place, or from their outings to McDonald’s. She hated to see them compose masks for her, so that they could feel they weren’t worrying her. THAT job, she had always felt, was a job for mothers and fathers, not for children.

Of course, there was the unfaithfulness, the lying, the betrayal.

But once her feelings stopped being quite so hurt, she had to admit that the lying was a technical matter, the betrayal was to her self-esteem, and the unfaithfulness boiled down to a health issue more than anything else.

The question that perplexed her was the question of love. One night when she actually did get to sleep, she dreamed she was standing on white sand, to her waist in clear blue water, trying to catch darting, sparkling, platinum fish in her hands. When she woke up, she knew that the water was her inner life and the fish were love, and the difficulty was knowing whether after all these years, she loved him, even knowing, after all these years, what love was.

On the one hand, she thought he had aged well, she preferred him to the husbands of her friends, she thought their children were lucky, especially in ways they were too young to understand, to have him as their father, she knew he was a truly kind man, his passion for improving the world still sometimes turned her on, and she always felt a shock of pleasure when she nestled against the warmth of his body. Was that enough to count as love?

On the other hand, given the choice of laying down her life to save his life or the children’s lives, she would without hesitation choose the children, from time to time she felt a sharp sexual desire for some
movie actor or another that she no longer felt for him, and she preferred anticipating a really delicious meal to anticipating a night of sex. Was that enough to count as indifference?

It was much harder to get married after twenty years, three children, five cars, and two houses than it would have been after four dates and a weekend in Montauk.

At any rate, she had lost seventeen pounds. That was what a separation was good for.

As for Chairman (until the end of the fiscal year) X, he was willing to concede that Marriage predated the rise of Capitalism, and while the whole institution was tainted with exploitation and consumerism, perhaps it was not FATALLY tainted. The women’s movement, about which he had some reservations when female aspirations were based on individual gain, had, on the whole, shown that an alternative model of companionate marriage was at least possible if not inevitable, and that such a model could coexist with capitalism and afford the participants some measure of emotional and moral security. This model of nonhierarchical coexistence, he had come to think, formed an alternative to older models wherein the triumphant force, be it man or woman, humankind or nature, individual or community, succeeded in overwhelming and incorporating the defeated force. And it was a good thing he had come to think so, because he was the defeated force, and he preferred not to face obliteration.

He had proposed the wedding through the children. How about a cake? he had suggested. How about new clothes? How about a party that you can each invite three friends to? How about throwing rice and everybody getting to walk down the aisle? How about, exclaimed the children, getting immediately into the spirit, the boys giving away Mommy and the girls giving away Dad? How about champagne? How about as many strawberries as anybody wants to eat, and how about dipping them in chocolate sauce? How about, said the third, mixing the wedding up in his mind with a birthday party, keeping the whole thing a secret from Mommy, and then jumping out and yelling, “Surprise, surprise!”

“No,” he had said, “but why don’t you be the one to ask her?”

Later, when she took him to task for that, he said, “I realized right away that that wasn’t a good idea, but I didn’t have the heart to say no. He was so excited.” She scowled, but she knew she wouldn’t have either.

And so here they were. May 20, his favorite day of the year, the average last frost date. For a week, he and the children had been raking and mulching the flower beds, tying old daffodil stems out of sight, heading the tulips so that only the last perfect ones were on display. They had uncovered the roses and pruned them, fertilized the fruit trees, planted broccoli, cauliflower, peas, lettuce, chard, onions, and leeks, thinned the daylily bed, pruned the privet hedge, tied together the peonies, planted marigolds and nasturtiums and gladioli and baby’s breath. For the wedding, the wedding, the wedding, the children had done more work with more enthusiasm than during any spring he could remember. Even the eldest capered from bed to bed, dressed entirely in black but wreathed entirely in smiles.

Now, while the Lady X was inside getting dressed, he was ambling here and there, choosing blooms for her bouquet. Emperor tulips, white and red, Dutch irises, yellow with purple stamens. Branches of lilacs, white and lavender, apple blossoms, plum blossoms, cherry blossoms. The mingling fragrances lifted from the basket he was carrying and made him dizzy with delight. A wedding! How was it that he had never done this before? He set down the basket in the green grass and knelt beside it, then took the flowers in his two hands and pressed them against his face. He could feel their soft petals and rough stems, smell their sweetness. He closed his eyes.