Moo

by Smiley, Jane

  “It’s at Little, Brown, now.”

  “A sale would make a big difference. With three, you’d be in there absolutely. No amount of ignorance or perplexity on their part would matter at all.”

  Tim shrugged. “A sale would make a big difference” was his life’s watchword right now.

  “I’ll be back.” Margaret stood up and headed toward the bathroom.

  Cecelia stretched and yawned, touched her hair to see if the pins were falling out. The gesture lifted her breasts, which were large, and marvelously concentrated his attention on the loose white cotton of her blouse. He heard her say, “Actually, I walked. My duplex is only a few blocks.”

  Before Joy could say a word, he was in there. “Say, I walked, too. I’d be glad to walk you home.” Fleeting amusement crossed her features, but she said, “All right, Tim.”

  He said to Joy, “We teach in adjacent rooms.”

  Cecelia said, “Yes, and his class is always laughing and my class is always droning.”

  “Well, they read their work aloud to each other, and they find themselves very funny.”

  Joy looked at him in a serious way. He said to her, “What do you do?”

  “Right now, we’re on parasites. Next week, inoculations.”

  “Of what?”

  “Oh. Of horses. And I manage the university’s horse herd and run the riding club.” She fell silent, still looking at him. Clearly she was a person for whom conversation was not an end in itself. He returned her gaze for a while, then said, “Well, Cecelia, let me know when you’re ready to go.”

  He picked up his coffee cup and looked into it, then drank a sip. The party was winding down, and there wasn’t much left to do. He had schmoozed with the provost twice already, complimented Helen on the food, listened to the Jellinek guy go on and on about bovine cloning and the vet guy do hogs. He had contemplated how he might fit Margaret’s early childhood recollections, which were certainly picturesque, into something he might write, and he had noted, on his visit to the bathroom, which was upstairs, the drugs Helen was taking or had taken, the names of the cosmetics she bought in France, the price of a new sweater she’d left lying on her bed. He had opened her bathroom closet and noted boxes of tampons, which meant she hadn’t gone through menopause yet, and a couple of diaphragm cases, ditto, with the additional implication that she was still sexually active. The rumors were that her sexual activity had once been various and unstinting. Tim was glad to see that cooking hadn’t replaced that. Tim was glad, in fact, to see any evidence of sexual activity at all around the university. Every so often he wondered, with a touch of self-consciousness, if he were not a solitary toiler in that particular cabbage patch. There were other, much more interesting rumors about Helen, too, ones that gave you to contemplate age-old philosophical questions. Tim sat, staring at his brandy, contemplating these questions, until he had finished it.

  After that, he smiled at the provost, who smiled back in that knowing but secretive way of his, and then Cecelia said, for him to hear, “Well, I guess—” and Helen said, “Must you—” and that was that.

  Dr. Dean Jellinek, Animal Science, and his great and good friend, Joy Pfisterer, walked silently to his house next door, as befitted a couple who had been arguing for three days, and had only set aside their differences for the evening in the interests of appearance. He let them in and turned off the porch light, glancing toward the upstairs, which was dark. Joy said, “Chris must have gone to bed after all. I don’t hear the TV.” They stood in silence, listening.

  “I’ll check the computer room in a minute. Are you going home or staying?”

  “I have to get up at five.”

  “People get up at five around here. Other people sleep right through it.”

  “It’s easier—”

  “Fine, call me as soon as you get in the house.”

  “Dean—”

  “Joy. Stoshie isn’t around anymore. I don’t like you going into an empty apartment.” The apartment wasn’t yet empty, Joy thought. There were still almost two weeks before she would be moving into Dean’s large and pleasant house.

  “There’s so much to do before the new renters move in over there, I just—”

  None of these topics were the source of their disagreement, but clearly, thought Joy, anything could be sucked right in, even Stoshie, her elderly Dalmatian, whom she had put to sleep a month before (kidney failure). Joy put her hand on the doorknob. “Give Chris a good-night kiss for me.”

  “The provost thinks funding is likely. A lot of funding. A couple million for exploratory research.”

  “Great.” Now they were right in it.

  “He named four or five sources right off, a couple that I hadn’t thought of. There could be real speed.”

  “Good. Speed is good.”

  “Joy—”

  “What?”

  “I need your support on this. This is going to make up for the other.”

  “You’ve got to get over the other anyway, without anything making up for it.”

  “I can’t. You know perfectly well that now, forever, they’ll call it the Dichter Technique. It could have been called the Jellinek Technique.”

  “But he doesn’t own that technique! You don’t have to pay him to use it—”

  “People who have put their lifeblood into developing something just work their lives away in obscurity while someone else rises to the top.”

  Cloning. Cloning. Dean was obsessed with cloning, and wore his obsession for all to see. It was true that he had put his life’s blood, or, at least, ten years of work and money from lots of grants, into working out a technique for the transfer of nuclear material from one calf embryo to another by placing the two eight-cell calf embryos between two electrodes, turning on the juice, and thereby causing the embryos to become one, though Joy was not quite clear on exactly how this happened. And it was also true that Dean had been writing up his article on these successful nuclear transfers, fussing a bit over his style, thinking he had an edge, some publication leeway, when, lo and behold, Dichter et al. from UC Davis had blindsided him with an article in Nature. That was in the spring. Since then, Dean had sat around the house, bemoaning all the conferences he hadn’t managed to attend, all the minute ways in which it must be that he wasn’t quite in the loop—he hadn’t heard a word, no one had told him a thing—though he was sure everyone knew, his grad students, his colleagues, his connections at the FDA, the editors at all the journals he published in. But now he had come up with a new idea and Joy had made the mistake of showing skepticism and he had been mad at her for three days.

  It was a great idea, simple in the way of all great ideas, as cloning was a simple idea. Cloning, Dean had often told her, came to everyone slightly differently. It had come to him years before, the story went, when Chris was just a baby watching Saturday morning cartoons. They’d been sitting together on the couch, eating father-son bowls of Rice Krispies, and it had come on TV, one image of a puppy that suddenly reproduced itself into a drill team. They barked, they wagged their tails, they turned their heads, all together, and just then he, Dean Jellinek, had seen cows, beautiful black and white Holsteins in a green pasture, all marked the same, all turning their heads, all mooing, all switching their tails, all in unison, a clone herd, the perfect herd of perfect cows. Why would you do it, he thought just then, and the answer was simple, too, always the sign of a good answer: you would do it because it was beautiful and because you COULD do it.

  He had staggered to his feet with the beauty and simplicity of it, and set down his cereal bowl on the couch, where Elaine’s elderly schnauzer had taken care of the cleanup. He had staggered out of the house and gotten into his car to go to the lab, leaving Chris by himself without even realizing it. Elaine had returned from the supermarket to find the two-year-old hard at work adjusting the reception dials on the TV so that every channel received only static.

  But the picture in his mind! Green meadow, blue sky, identical black and whi
te cows all turning their heads toward him at the same time with the same gesture! Divorce, custody, solitude, new love, all had intervened between that time and this, but desire propelled him insistently, relentlessly, toward this picture. Then Dichter et al. came along, and it was very much like watching the only woman you ever loved marry another man and take his name, except that, in Dean’s personal opinion, there were many potential wives, but only one or two simple great ideas.

  Joy reached up and pulled his head down for a good-night kiss. He was stiff, and wouldn’t bend. She smiled in a teasing way, and said, “Come on. We’ll see. Don’t be mad anymore. I hate not getting along. Anyway, it’s not me you have to convince, it’s the people with the money. You’re a great grant proposal writer.”

  “Am I?” He knew she would say yes.

  “You are. I have faith in YOU. It’s just an unusual idea to me. I’ll get used to it.”

  He was mollified. He bent down and gave her a long, warm kiss. He whispered, “It could work.”

  MEANWHILE, Tim’s flirtation with Cecelia was progressing better than he suspected, and better than Cecelia considered wise. The fact was that he was very good-looking in THAT WAY (as Cecelia described it to herself), and when she got up on the mornings of their adjacent class meetings, she dressed more carefully and with more pleasure, she felt less of the tedium of routine, and the day before her seemed shorter in prospect. Her sense of the quiet around her had not diminished, had induced in her an answering sleepiness. When she mentioned this to her father on the phone, he had reminded her of her first day in first grade—the room had been so quiet in contrast to kindergarten that she had fallen asleep at her desk and then fallen out of her chair and been sent home. After that, her academic career had more or less prospered, until now. The students drilled industriously, but in a kind of murmur. One time she had instructed them to shout their answers, but after three or four they had subsided, embarrassed, into the drone they were comfortable with. Other days, she made them walk around and address one another conversationally; she made them pretend to argue or to haggle; she saw at once that they would back down in any conflict, be suckered in any market transaction, and that they considered their reticence a form of becoming modesty. Little did they know that they were putting her to sleep, that she could not remember any of their names, that she had less interest in them than in any group she had ever taught.

  Nor were her colleagues much better. They invited her for dinner or lunch, but there seemed to be a general taboo against introducing any remotely unpleasant subject in the presence of food. And everything at all real was deemed unpleasant: the fact that her father, a doctor in Mexico, was a gardener in Los Angeles, and her mother, an accountant in Mexico, was a bookkeeper; interethnic conflict in L.A. in general; her divorce; the association of one of her cousins with an L.A. street gang—the kind response of any interlocutor when she stumbled upon one of these subjects was to assume that she must be ashamed to talk about such things and to relieve her of the necessity. Departmental conflicts, which were many, it turned out, were spoken of only by allusion and only in low voices. Whenever Cecelia felt she was showing a flattering interest in the personal lives of her new acquaintances, they said, “Oh, you can’t want to hear about that, it’s so ordinary.” When, in the departmental office, she happened to eavesdrop upon others’ conversations, they were invariably talking about gardening, remodelling, or problems in the schools, three subjects she could not have been less curious about. One signal conversation, which she had lingered near for ten minutes, between two woman German professors, had concerned a support group they both belonged to for people with an overwhelming compulsion to tear up their clothes and braid them into rag rugs.

  In this dreamy sea of quietude, Timothy Monahan stood out, would have stood out even if he had not looked THAT WAY (black hair, blue eyes, thin face, large hands). He was not direct and volatile like the men she had grown up with, but everything he said, and he said a lot, was inviting. It invited laughter or disagreement or outrage, even, or sex, or thought, but it always invited some response, and promised that all responses were interesting, worth his attention. Cecelia knew (thus her caution) that this habit of his was not any more a moral virtue than the face was, or the natural physical grace. She had mistaken qualities of style for elements of character before, and clearly she was disoriented and vulnerable, and he sensed that and that was another reason to be cautious. Look at him. Right now, walking down the street, he was inviting disbelief. “You know,” he said, “she has two vaginas.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “I swear.”

  “She’s told you that?”

  “Two complete sets of female reproductive organs.”

  “I’m offended that you should tell me this.”

  “Don’t you think it’s enhancing? I do.” He smiled wickedly at her.

  “I think it’s her business, not mine or yours.”

  “It’s interesting.”

  “I’m going to put this out of my mind as soon as we stop talking about it.”

  “Why? It’s just an anatomical fact.”

  “How naive of you to say so.”

  “You were in her kitchen. You saw all those giant bowls and pots and pasta servers and flower planters and colanders and orchids and that big red amaryllis and the Georgia O’Keeffe reproduction on the wall. It’s the theme of her life, but it’s still just an anatomical fact. I think of it as a kind of test. I’m sure some people are quite uncomfortable at her parties. I happen to be extraordinarily comfortable. It just depends on how you feel about women. But everybody knows.”

  “Everybody believes. Belief is never knowledge, no matter how strongly held.”

  “Some know, then. And some of them have told.”

  “I don’t know.” Cecelia knew she sounded snappish. She glanced at Tim. He couldn’t suppress a smile. “You’re teasing me!”

  He shrugged. “Interesting idea, though, isn’t it?”

  “You’ll say anything.”

  “Maybe.”

  Her porch loomed. She stopped in the street. “Thank you for walking me home.”

  “Hey.” He grasped her wrist and drew her toward him.

  She removed his hand. “I don’t like being teased.”

  “It’s true, then.”

  “Then I don’t like that sort of gossip.”

  “It’s a game, then. Like writing a novel. A game of meditating over objects of the imagination.”

  “You can’t come onto my porch, and don’t try to kiss me. I’m annoyed with you, and I hate it if men find that arousing.”

  “Okay. But I will watch you in the door.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then I’ll walk back to Helen’s and get my car.” As always, he spoke with playful equanimity. She turned on her heel, mounted the porch steps with dignity, and jammed her key into the lock. He shouted, “Night, Cecelia. I’ll call you tomorrow!” as if he didn’t care whether he woke up the whole neighborhood. Cecelia winced at the noise bursting in the silence, maybe for the first time ever.

  11

  Born Again

  NILS HARSTAD, dean of extension, heard it all—the click of the door lock, the footsteps downstairs, the give of the steps muffled by carpeting as his brother, Ivar, mounted toward his bedroom. Nils looked at the clock, 3:43, but he neither turned on the light nor sat up in bed. Normally he wouldn’t have been awake anyway, but tonight, at fifty-five years old, he was on the verge of a new life.

  He was not exactly repudiating the old life—there was nothing to repudiate, of course. If anything, he had poured himself freely out, giving of his knowledge and his strength with little prospect of reward. The early days in the field had been the best, the days of super-seeds and crop production that seemed miraculous to the village farmers who came to stare at his demonstration plots. The sixties! The era of splendid acronyms like SEATO, UNESCO, CARE. Virile young agronomists, their hatless thatches of hair bleached by the sun,
blown by the wind, their muscular strong hands begrimed with earth, had spread out all over the world, carrying with them the knowledge of hybrids and fertilizers and mineral supplements and machinery and drip irrigation and drainage (not to mention grants and gifts and low-interest loans and investments) that their agronomical elders had carefully incubated through the war and into the prosperous fifties. It had fallen to Nils and his colleagues to bear the good news—an end to hunger! granaries filled to bursting! orderly ranks of children, all races, creeds, and colors, marching off to school with their bellies full!

  Nils shivered and drew the quilt up to his shoulders, shaking off the old, claiming the new. The plan had come to him just at bedtime, first as the recognition that Marly Hellmich, a young woman at his church, was clearly attracted to him. He was thinking how flattering that was, that she must be thirty, or even younger, and that her manner of expressing this attraction was nicely done—circumspect, almost bashful—and then he had turned on his electric toothbrush and given what he thought was his full attention to cleaning his teeth and stimulating his gums—and by the time he’d switched off that little motor and stood in silence again, the plan was formed—a marriage, many children, the life of Christian fatherhood that he had missed and thought lost to him.

  The key, of course, was one or two artificially induced multiple births that would make up for lost time and, as a side benefit, bring science into the service of the greater glory of God and the enlargement of Nils’ church. You could not overestimate Nils Harstad’s gratitude to his church, for through its doctrines and the support of both the minister and the other members, he had, after almost a lifetime, found an end to doubt of all kinds—doubt of the Lord, doubt of himself, doubt of the goodness and Tightness of Providence, doubt of the way he had made in the world. Every year on the anniversary of his entrance into the church, he woke up and marvelled at, and then gave thanks for, this ongoing reassurance. He felt, in his very being, the daily approval of the Lord.

  The effects of this end to doubt were nothing less than miraculous—an end to anger (now he dealt with every university problem with the sort of patience he had only longed for in the past), an end to resentment, especially of his late wife, whom he always felt had entered into his world and his work only with reservations, an end to the lifelong loneliness of missing his distant parents and sensing a basic disjunction between himself and Ivar, for even though they looked alike, talked alike, and had some of the same interests, only Nils knew how different they were at the core—so different that their being identical twins had always struck him as a simple impossibility or, perhaps, an illusion of appearance foisted on them by others. Since joining his church, he had been far easier with Ivar—far more able to tolerate their disagreements with good grace, far less inclined to give in just to end conflict. Of course, his differences with Ivar had widened with his growing commitment to Creation Science, a theory Ivar, as a physicist, wouldn’t even discuss, but which Nils found far more doubt-soothing in every way than the theories of relativity, evolution, and the big bang. For the last five years, Nils Harstad had been a man with a smile. But the future, populated by a pleasant wife and five or six obedient children, would make him a laughing man! The gift of faith gave him no doubts about this, either.