Moo

by Smiley, Jane

  Joy couldn’t shake the picture in her mind of the cows AS money: green, falsely pregnant cows in a green field, crisp and crackling, like new dollar bills. One time she had hazarded the remark “Wouldn’t that be boring? I mean, the only thing that keeps me going some days is that at least something new and interesting is going on.”

  He’d said, “Remember that Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’? The dairy farmer’s curse is, may you have an interesting herd of cows. The thing is, you, we, have a steady income. We can afford to cherish what’s interesting.” Though he laughed when he said this, she’d known how to take it. Her approval or disapproval seemed self-evidently irrelevant. Anyway, to be frank, the people Dean was talking to were mentioning such interesting sums of money that he hadn’t even minded her remark.

  The round of work continued through the noon hour. The horses who stayed in most of the time were hayed and watered. The rest, numbering thirteen, filed out to the near field, where the water tanks had been filled during the morning. Joy placed an order for oats and feed corn on the cob, which she liked to use because if you left some cobs in the feed dishes, it took the stabled horses longer to eat and gave them something to do, looking for stray kernels, in their all too abundant spare time. She ate a sandwich and drank orange juice from her thermos. The night before, he’d said, “You know, your own routine is the problem. You’ve been doing the same thing for five or six years, now. You haven’t even taken a trip, except to buy horses or go to a show. No wonder you’re in a bad mood all the time.”

  And she’d said, “Am I in a bad mood all the time?”

  He’d shrugged a little shrug, to say, Yes, but I’m not going to mention it aloud, then he’d said, “Not bad, like irritable. Bad, like down in the dumps. It doesn’t BOTHER me, but I worry about you.”

  But it did seem like the more doubts she overcame with regard to Dean’s phantom pregnancy project, the more doubts she developed with regard to everything else. All those cows with the same pattern of black and white, all turning their heads at the same time, all mooing in unison (his first love was still cloning) and all feeling pregnant when they were not, didn’t seem to be an image she could hold in her head along with the rest of what she knew about life. On the other hand, she seemed to be the only person Dean knew with this problem.

  20

  Who’s in Bed with Whom

  MARY, much to her surprise, is in bed with an extraordinarily handsome Palestinian named Hassan who is a graduate student—graduate student! Twenty-five at least—in plant genetics. She has known him for a week now. After meeting in the lunch line at the commons, they have seen each other every day and every evening. He has many virtues, some of which she likes to admit to herself and some of which she doesn’t, but admits to herself anyway. Among the former—he is ambitious and hardworking. Five of their dates have been study dates, and he has, in a kind way, never belittling her, unraveled a good deal of the tangle she was in in her calculus class, while she has corrected the English usage on a paper he was writing. He is direct—he admits that he doesn’t understand American dating customs, and his solution for this problem is to ask her what would be comfortable for her. He is cosmopolitan. Although new to America, he has lived in Beirut, Paris, Rome, and Algiers. His family had been importers-exporters in Palestine. Now most of them work for the Israelis. He is politically aware, though he doesn’t push that on her, and she is a little afraid to investigate too deeply. She likes to think of his history and circumstances as apart from his self, just the way she likes to think of her own history and circumstances. A virtue she doesn’t like to admit to herself—he is neither black nor white. When she tells her black friends and her white friends that he is Palestinian, both sets are impressed. Both sets suspend the judgments they would otherwise make. He is also good in bed, as she has just found out, relaxed with the relaxation of experience (Beirut, Paris, Rome). He has never slept with a black woman before, and now that she has slept with him, she thinks of herself as a black woman, not a girl any longer.

  NILS HARSTAD AND Marly Hellmich are not actually in bed. They are two rooms from the bed, in fact, and will not, anytime soon, go near it. Marly wouldn’t mind, except that she has just now discovered that Nils thinks she is a twenty-five-year-old virgin who has selflessly devoted her time to taking care of her elderly father, who will, Nils says, of course be welcome to live with them following the ceremony. He is talking right now, holding her hand and running the fingers of his other hand up and down her arm. Her elderly father. Nils, himself, now fifty-five but sooner than you think seventy-five. He is talking in a low soothing voice about their six imminent children—in vitro fertilization, embryo transplant, multiple pregnancy, pergonal, multiple birth, Jesus. Marly feels drowsy. He can have her pregnant by Christmas if they get on with the ceremony. A year from now! Just think. Marly can’t think. The words, his hand ruffling the hair on her arm—it’s all like a drug. But she holds the thought that she can talk him out of it once they are married. They have to get married. She has to get out from behind that steam table. It was one thing to work there year after year, expecting no change, dumbly following her round of duties. Now that she has seen the light, been inside the house and the Lincoln and the Pinetree Supper Club, the need to leave the steam table behind is a thirst that is killing her. After the marriage, after sex, she will wake him up once and for all.

  BOB AND DIANE are in bed in the technical sense, though not yet in the larger sense, since they’ve agreed to sleep next to each other but not to “do anything,” but they will be in bed in every sense in about five minutes, because Bob has just taken off his shirt. His chest and shoulders and abs, from lifting hay bales and feed sacks all his life, form a rippling, solid, and precise picture of maleness that seems to render abstract Diane’s every doubt about him and every certainty about her goals. He turns around to hang up his shirt (he’s very considerate of her—not the virtue it should be), and his back curves and the muscles fan away from his shoulder blades and the waistband of his jeans sits on his hips. He turns back. His smile is nice, too. It is not, after all, sex that distracts you from your goals. Diane takes the pill and carries condoms, one of which she will hand Bob, to his thrilled humiliation, in about seven minutes. It is marriage that distracts you, and just because Bob thinks that you always end up marrying the first girl you sleep with (or one of the first, anyway, this is almost the nineties, after all), that doesn’t mean that everybody thinks that way, she is just a freshman and no one expects freshman relationships to last. She will think about that later.

  It’s just that when he slips off his jeans, well, the definition all the way down, quads, calves, ankles, even feet, well, it kills her. That’s what she’s going to tell the others tomorrow, that his body just killed her. But she won’t mention, except maybe to Sherri, the long solid pressure she can see inside his briefs, which seems to represent and concentrate and present for her alone all the rest of his body. She says, “Oh, Jesus. Okay,” and sits forward so that her shirt falls away from her breasts and his eyes get wide. And then he turns away just for the smallest second to make sure the door is locked.

  HELEN SAYS, “Be careful,” but Ivar always is. He always enters slowly and then slows down even more. It is a technique he learned in his thirties that transformed his sex life from urge to art. Like now. He is concentrating; he can tell that Helen is concentrating. Just slowing down expands every moment, every sensation, his very experience of her. And as his mind diminishes to a point, his body expands to a universe. His penis feels like any number of things: a man in a dark tunnel, a flood pushing through a narrow canyon, a hand sliding into a satin glove, a furry animal burrowing in the earth. The more slowly he goes, the more the images collect, all widening the simple act of sex into a cosmic sense of connectedness, which is what he likes best, which is what he feels with Helen more than he has with any other woman. Helen can concentrate as well as he can; it’s the main thing they have in common.


  In his ear, he hears a very deep groan, a creak in the foundations of her body, and he goes in deeper, imagining cracking those foundations with his power. She opens her legs and lifts them backward, inviting him, but he resists the invitation in an impossible way, like a man who has jumped off a diving board, but then, through force of will, lowers himself inch by inch into the pool. Another groan comes, a groan of such desire that it is as irresistible as gravity, but he resists it—the man creeps along the wall of the tunnel, the hand pauses, the furry animal hesitates. Then he moves forward again, forward and down. Though he wants it more than anything, the slowness makes him crazy—the tip of his penis is a hot coal. He feels her hands on his buttocks, pressing. He cups his own hands around her breasts and pinches the nipples, he is that cruel. “Ohhhh,” she says, and her hands come up to push his away but instead squeeze the fingers tighter. Down and forward he goes, making his way, blind and huge, lost.

  And then they are thrusting, slowly, more quickly, more slowly, and he is wondering, as he always does, why he put this off, it is so perfect a motion, so much what his whole body had been wanting to do all along, and just when he has relaxed into it, a surprising explosion comes and after that he is back in his head, sprawled on top of Helen, who is chuckling a deep chuckle that he can feel all along his chest.

  THINGS AREN’T going as well for Tim, whose sex life is still compounded mostly of urges and, for all he writes about it, hasn’t mutated into art yet. The trouble is that he has been consulting the wrong authorities—male novelists from Eastern European and South American countries. He has been believing their stories about fifteen-year-old girls desiring eighty-year-old men and mistresses who are uncritically insatiable year after year. He also takes as a guide his own erotic dreams, which he assumes show the royal path to his real needs—desires—what’s the difference?

  Cecelia seems to be enjoying herself well enough, but now that he has made it into her bed, he’s less excited than he planned to be. He’s only, say, 80 percent excited and, given the effort of wooing her over the last few weeks, he had planned to be 110 percent excited. Her body, which had practically made him come the first time he saw her, now seems more like a geographical task—he has to make his way from mouth to shoulders, to neck, to tits (nice tits—he hasn’t lost his esthetic sense), to waist, to pubic hair, to labia, etc.

  Those Latin American and Eastern European novelists aren’t any help here. They live inside the mansion of female desire as if it is their right. Their own desire is a nice healthy dog on a string, ready to eat, fuck, fetch, piss on the bushes. Clearly Tim’s desire is unreliable compared to that, and he hardly lives in a mansion of female desire. Cecelia, whose fault all of this must be, has made this simple act such a big deal that it’s simultaneously demeaning and frightening. If she’d just let him fuck her when he wanted to fuck her, the way women in Eastern Europe and South America did—

  But it is a mistake both moral and practical to stray into that sort of bad thinking. He likes Cecelia, he really does, as much as he likes anyone these days. She has virtues and charms where other people don’t even have qualities. The fact is, he is happy to be with Cecelia right now. He just would prefer being somewhere else with her. She opens her eyes and looks at him. He brushes her hair out of her face and smiles at her with honest affection. She says, “Tim?”

  He resumes thrusting.

  EVEN THOUGH it’s after midnight, and Mrs. Walker and her companion, Mrs. Lake (they know each other as “Loraine” and “Martha,” of course, but everyone else they see, day in day out, from Loraine’s coworkers to Martha’s fifth graders, calls them “Mrs.”), are wide awake.

  Martha says, “So the twin is getting married? Unbelievable.”

  “Mark my words it won’t happen. She’ll call it off.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Marly Hellmich. She works in the kitchen over at the Union. The father used to work in the machine shop until they fired him for drinking on the job. The mother was a nice woman. Of course she set herself to be long-suffering, just like it was a degree you could get.”

  “Dead?”

  “Liver cancer.”

  “How did you know her?”

  “How do I know anybody? I just did. She was around, I was around.”

  “What does Ivar think?”

  “He was surprised, but he’s so bound up in this other stuff that he hasn’t reacted very strongly. I say good riddance. They’ve been twins long enough.” Martha reaches over and touches Loraine’s bare breast affectionately, and Loraine’s gaze lingers over Martha’s similarly bare breasts—similarly bare and similar breasts—they have come to look a lot alike over the years. Loraine loves the thin, stretched feeling of the skin of Martha’s breasts, especially underneath. It is the most delicate tissue—living, pale, warm, as smooth as the way water looks pillowing over a rock in a stream. She smiles, thinking that the next day is Sunday and they can stay up all night if they wish.

  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.”

  CHAIRMAN 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 o
n 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.