by Smiley, Jane
38
An Unbelievable Coincidence
MRS. LORAINE WALKER DID NOT normally eat in the commons. She preferred to bring something leftover and delicious from the previous night’s meal, but there weren’t always leftovers, especially if the previous night’s meal had been especially delicious. Eating in the commons, she thought, was a good punishment for gluttony. You didn’t have to choose the taco bar (odd-tasting tortilla shells, blackened ground meat that had been steaming for hours, orange cheese, white tomatoes) in order to regret eating there. You could regret any entrée at all.
She went through the line, speaking in a friendly way to Marly Hellmich, who didn’t seem to have quit her job yet, and choosing the broccoli quiche, the scalloped potatoes, and a soft roll. There were a lot of people she knew here, another reason to avoid the place. She had found it a wise policy over the years to cultivate her personal mystery.
All of the tables were occupied, and she found that she had to join some blond woman in a corner of the nonsmoking section. The blond woman turned out to be Alison Thomas, Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek’s secretary. Mrs. Walker sat down with more enthusiasm.
“Hi, Mrs. Walker,” said Alison Thomas, in her what-did-I-do-wrong-now-I’m-sorry voice.
“Well, Alison!” said Mrs. Walker. “I haven’t talked to you in a couple of weeks.”
Alison sighed. “There’s been a lot to do.” She had a forkful of barbecued beef close to her mouth, but she allowed it to sink to her plate. Alison, Mrs. Walker knew, had an M.A. in linguistics from the University of Michigan. Her husband taught in the vet school, and she actually drove to work in a certified, though elderly, Mercedes. Rumor had it that these very claims to academic respectability were what goaded Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek, once a mere faculty wife herself, into the irritable, demeaning way that she treated Alison. Having not found a better job in spite of everything she had going for her must have convinced Alison that she deserved such treatment. But there was nothing Mrs. Walker could really do about it, except recognize the fact that some people didn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain, and Alison was one of them. She said, “Well, that’s always true this time of year. You have to be firm about what they are going to do for themselves, and, of course, realistic about what they CAN do for themselves. Sometimes they look more competent than they are. On the other hand, they like responsibility if you shift it to them gradually.”
“Oh, Mrs. Walker, you have a much more organized sense of it all than I do. All I know is, she’s always jumping out of her office, wanting this and wanting that. She likes to think she’s just a paragon of order, but she’s terribly disorganized. We’re a match made in hell, frankly. And she doesn’t listen. I can tell her something three times, and she’ll come back to me a day later and get on me for not telling her. The thing is, and the others in the office have noticed it, too, she only really listens to men. Even when she KNOWS it’s vital to listen to me or some other woman, she just can’t do it.” Alison sounded as close to anger as Mrs. Walker had ever heard her. Mrs. Walker came to the crust of her quiche, which hadn’t been too bad—apparently they’d drained the broccoli this time before introducing it into the pie—and cut it carefully into four parts. She put the first part slowly, encouragingly, into her mouth. Alison watched her, then, encouraged, went on. “And she’s obsessed with Jack Parker. Every day she comes flying out of her office asking where Jack Parker is, is he in Washington again, are they putting him up at the Hay-Adams again, why don’t they put him up at the Ramada? That’s where they put her up!” She sighed. “Now there’s this lost document. She had it last night, and she put it in her briefcase. I said to her right then, ‘Let me Xerox that before you take it home,’ because, you know, her house is worse than her office, things stacked on chairs and the floor. I’ve had to actually go over there and find things for her, and they’re always mixed in with underwear and slips and stockings and stuff. And let me tell you, that kid of hers is neat as a pin. I don’t know where he gets it.” Mrs. Walker shook her head in the soberest manner, even though inwardly she was laughing.
“So, of course when she got to the office this morning and looked in her briefcase, the document wasn’t there, she didn’t remember taking it home, and she didn’t remember me offering to Xerox it, and when I told her the exact sequence of events, her eyes sort of glazed over. I could tell she wasn’t listening to me at all, she was just waiting to find out whether Jack Parker was on the campus and then to tell me to look through all the file drawers, because that must be where it is, so I had to put aside all my other work and go through all the file drawers. Oh, she is imPOSSible!”
“I’ve been telling you for a year to apply for another office.”
“She’s not going to give me a good reference. And she filed a bad report on me last winter. AND we both know not every office gets to have someone at my salary level. With these cutbacks, it’ll be fewer still. I did call. But Personnel said there just weren’t any openings.”
Mrs. Walker tried an idle tone. “What sort of document was it?”
“Oh, something from Dr. Gift, in Econ. They’ve got their heads together.”
“Why don’t you just call Sophie over in Econ and have her print out another one?”
“It’s not on the computer. I tried that. Sophie hadn’t ever heard of it.”
“That’s odd. He’s one of the worst for dumping work on the secretaries over there. He’s got a permanent request in our office for his own personal secretary. I might authorize it the day before he retires.” Mrs. Walker smiled.
“It’s some kind of grant report or consulting thing. If it’s coming through our office, it must have to do with this grant he’s got from Horizontal Technologies.” She sniffed. “It’s not that big a grant. The university’s share was twenty-five thousand. SHE acts like it was ten times that much.”
“Horizontal Technologies?”
“Isn’t that a funny name? That’s why it stuck in my mind.”
It had stuck in Mrs. Walker’s mind, too. Horizontal Technologies, she knew from her investigation of databases, was one of TransNational’s holding companies—no business, no assets, only a board of directors. She sat calmly at the table, scraping up the last of the atomic yellow sauce from her scalloped potatoes. Finally, she said, “Did she ever find it?”
“Well, what do you think? Of course not. She’s got it at home. It’s probably under the bed, with all that old popcorn, those apple cores and candy wrappers and wadded up Kleenexes.” They looked at each other and laughed.
This, Mrs. Walker knew, was the document she was looking for. Briefly she imagined herself and Martha heisting this document from Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek’s house or, possibly, from Lionel Gift’s house—the secrecy, the excitement. Instead she looked Alison Thomas right in the eye and said, “If you send me a copy of that document, I will find you a job in another office.”
“Can you do that?”
Mrs. Walker looked at her.
“What if she can’t find it? It’s just for the file drawer. She wasn’t going to do anything with it. Usually she only exerts herself to find things if her butt is on the line in a meeting or something.”
While Mrs. Walker considered it demeaning to address these particular mealymouthed fears on Alison’s part, she did say, “If I find you a job in another office, Alison, you have to take charge right away. The worst thing you can do is allow them to develop some habitual way of thinking about you that undercuts your authority. This is your test. If you can find a way to take charge of this one situation, then you will have demonstrated that you can handle another position.”
“I can see that.”
There was a juncture in every enterprise that Mrs. Walker savored. It was that moment when the success or failure of her plan seemed to move out of her control into the much more tenuous grip of someone else, like Alison, like Ivar. For some duration of time, her plan teetered upon the commitment, the competence, or the honesty of another person. Thi
s moment, these moments, always exhilarated her, and not only because, most of the time, she had judged correctly, asserted herself tactfully, and would know success. Another sort of exhilaration—a ghostly reminiscence of her elopement with Mr. Walker when she was seventeen and he was nineteen—came from the risk itself. She would never again live her personal life according to such an unreliable breeze, but there was a little more play in her life at the office.
Across the room, she saw Just Plain Brown carrying his tray and looking for a table. He had a glass of milk, a humble brown bag, and his everlasting smile. As if by magic, three students stood up and vacated a table. Just Plain Brown set down his tray.
Alison said, “I’ll see.”
“Good,” said Mrs. Walker. She looked at her watch.
“At least she’s got a meeting until three.”
They walked companionably out of the commons.
39
Off Campus
UNFORTUNATELY FOR Chairman X, the autumn work of mulching beds, taking up bulbs, pruning, composting, harvesting, and sorting and preserving seeds, scions, grafts, rootstocks, forbs, and all the other natural and unnatural reproductive material of the plants he was in charge of was pretty much over, and teaching classes and tending to administrative work left him plenty of time to contemplate the end of Communism in Europe. To his own disadvantage, in this case, he had trained his group (department, constituency, cell) to work with such revolutionary enthusiasm that they did everything with dispatch. The enemy was across the campus, in Agronomy, the war was played out in terms of row planting vs. bed planting, monoculture vs. polyculture, mechanical cultivation vs. human cultivation, fertilizer vs. compost, feed crops vs. food crops, and a thousand other antitheses, and the horticulturalists really believed that gardening would save the world that agriculture was destroying. “How do you think everyone was employed for thousands of years?” he would rage. “In growing food and fiber! Is idleness on the streets actually BETTER?” They loved his lecture on how agriculture actually promoted starvation by first promoting overpopulation. They would surge out of the classroom, electrified by the passionate vision of agriculture as a catastrophic historical mistake—he could produce fifty new revolutionaries every semester without any classroom preparation.
For years that had been enough for him. Well, almost enough. But now, every day, after reading The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, after watching CNN on a little TV he had brought to the office, after thumbing through The Nation and The Progressive, he sat staring out his window, tapping a pencil on his desk, and mulling over the triumph of consumerism, selfishness, technology, leisure, meat eating, localism, competitiveness, and appetite. In the exhilaration on every face in every picture or videotape from Eastern Europe, he saw the self-defeat of Communism, and even though he’d disagreed with forced collectivization of the peasantry and had worried about the Cultural Revolution and had, in general, been filled with doubts about all sorts of specific policies for years, he couldn’t help sighing at the departure of certain ideals—work, rationality, cooperation, brotherhood, altruism.
Those who saw the world as inherently cruel, and didn’t mind it, who saw people as inherently materialistic, and didn’t object, who saw capitalism as natural, and shrugged off the inherent inhumanity of it, had won. And they were thrilled to have won, as if cruelty, materialism, and inhumanity were benefits. Well, maybe they were. In Chairman X’s experience, most of the self-doubt was on his side, almost none on theirs. That was true in this case as in all others. He sat back until his chair creaked, stretched his neck to one side, then the other, and went back to tapping his pencil on the desk.
IN HIS OWN HOME, though unbeknownst to him, his life’s companion and the mother of his children was herself feeling the pall of twenty years of Marxism lift, and she was feeling it with almost the same exhilaration as the people on TV. It was true that for years they hadn’t hung the four-foot-by-four-foot silk tapestry of Karl Marx that Chairman X had ordered from China; it was true that the Chairman hadn’t voted for Gus Hall since 1972; it was true that their subscription to Challenge had run out in 1971, and all issues had gone out in some cleaning frenzy around the time the eldest was born; it was true that their early habit of Left-speak—“a worker student alliance,” “a good struggle relationship”—had fallen by the wayside. Steady employment, the birth of the eldest, the purchase thereafter of their own washing machine and dryer (from Sears, on credit) had raised them almost without their own efforts into the middle class.
But over the years he had greeted every purchase she proposed—a NEW car, a food processor, an attractive winter coat, a microwave oven, a VCR, an automatic garage door opener, air conditioning in the house—with a look of deep betrayal and hurt. “Fine, if you really want it,” he would say, but she knew he was thinking something else, thinking that these desires showed how shallow she was, how weak; she knew he was wondering if it was inherently feminine to want things, to live one’s ideals in such a wishy-washy way. Couldn’t the money go to better causes? For everything that they would like, there were a hundred things that other people needed, he reminded her.
Now she could look at the people on TV, at their wild happiness, and say, “Nobody likes drabness! People like to feel some money in their pockets, and to have the power to choose! A little desire isn’t equivalent to greed! Beautiful objects grow out of the love of craft as well as the exploited slavery of the workers.” At least, she said it to herself. Chairman X was so depressed lately that she didn’t have the heart to say it to him.
HAVING READ Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel and Witold Gombrowicz and seen the films of Andrzej Wajda, Timothy Monahan could claim that he was hardly surprised at the fall of European Communism. In fact, when people shook their heads and said, “Isn’t it amazing?” he shrugged and replied “No” with a startling (he thought) and rather knowing air. Socialist realism had never been a popular or expressive art form, and really, you had to look no further for an answer than that.
What surprised him, on the night they had their final argument, was Cecelia’s attitude.
It was almost Thanksgiving vacation, and Tim was leaving in two days for the East Coast, where his agent had set up a meeting with the editor at Little, Brown. The editor, she said, might or might not. He wanted to sound Tim out on the changes he thought the book needed, which might be, probably were, certainly were pretty drastic. “I don’t know” was what Tim said to his agent, but “almost anything” was what he said to himself, albeit with a familiar feeling of shame.
He took Cecelia to Drake’s, his favorite bar, and the only nonstudent bar in town that didn’t have a theme, the only one whose decor had simply accumulated over the years instead of being designed at corporate headquarters to evoke some brand of alcoholic nostalgia.
Their conversation had moved crabbily from one topic to another. Her classes were not going well; the semester was too long here; she couldn’t get warm; the pipes in her duplex banged all night long. He wanted to know who she was seeing, but they didn’t seem to be good enough friends anymore for him to ask. They fell silent, but that got uncomfortable. She said, apparently annoyed, “Those people in eastern Europe are in for a big surprise. They should send a fact-finding mission to L.A. before they do anything drastic. That’s what I think.”
“Well,” said Tim, in his usual way, “I’m not surprised at what’s happening. If you read Kundera, it’s easy to see what sort of profound alienation—”
“Why is your tone always so cold? It’s like you’ve put all of this in a box already, and you don’t even care.”
Tim looked around, then said, “What?”
“That really annoys me about you.”
“What does?”
“Well, you’d think a writer would have uncontrollable passions, or would be seized by events or feelings or something.”
It was clear that she was comparing him to someone, probably the unknown lover. He said, “I don’t happen to be seized
by this, is all. I can’t make myself surprised if I’m not. Besides, that’s a very romantic view of writers.” He smiled, trying a little joke. “I specialize in irony, anyway.”
“Well, I think it’s very detached. No wonder you’re always so depressed. If you can’t get excited about this, one way or another, then I think you need medical help.”
Tim sensed that his jaw had dropped, and consciously closed it around the rim of his glass. His beer had warmed. He caught the eye of the bartender and signalled for another. Then he said, “You think I need medical help because I’ve read a lot of Eastern European literature and seen a lot of films and I’m not surprised that the alienation from the political system they uniformly express has finally emerged?”
“You make me sound ridiculous, but it’s all a part of one thing.”
“What thing?”
“How cold your writings are, how cold you are, the way you talk about your career and the way you contain it all with some funny remarks. You’re a nice person, but look at your life. There’s nobody in it, you’re not excited about anything.” Her voice was rising.
Tim’s first impulse was not to be offended, but to be surprised. He said, “Why in the world do you care?”
She just looked at him. Tim had a feeling that she knew what she wanted to answer, but she didn’t dare. After that, though, the feeling of offense hit him all of a sudden, as if in the back of the head. He felt his face heat up suddenly, and redden with anger. He said, “I think I’d better take you home.”
“Me, too.”
He dropped her in front of her duplex and drove off without waiting to see whether she got in okay.
The irony was that two nights later, when he saw they were running Doctor Zhivago on Cinemax, and watched it just because there was nothing else on, he did start to cry. He did feel the breathless clamping down of the Communists; he did find the ever-renewed hopes of the characters pointless and sad; he did regret the three generations and more that would be lost to a failed experiment; he was moved in a new way, as he had never been moved by the film when the system was firmly in place.
