by Smiley, Jane
Anyway, she couldn’t get it out of her mind. The bland, innocent look on his face, the distinct, rounded tone of his voice as it separated itself from the background noise, her own response—how she had heard it the first time, but not heard it, and so asked him to repeat, so that now she had two enunciations of the same remark to keep in her mind. And they did stay in her mind, never dissolving and then dissipating, but as it were encysted, self-contained, unchanging, hard, permanently possessing a niche, like some types of parasite. She knew that were she to tell Carol about it, she would be in a prime position for another of Carol’s favorite responses, the What-Did-You-Expect? response, complete with Look of Astonishment and Snort of Disbelief. All the same—
So she was standing in Carol’s little kitchen. Her mother was at choir rehearsal at the church. Cyrus was watching a movie on Cinemax in the other room and Malcolm was reading in the bathtub. Every so often, they could hear him turn on the hot water for a minute or so. Carol was putting dishes away from dinner. The kettle was boiling for tea, and Mary said, “I’m sure my grades are going to be here tomorrow.”
“They’d better be good.”
“They’ll be okay.”
Carol shot her a sharp look. Instantly exasperated, she said, “Now, I’ve explained the train to you before. You are the engine, Malcolm is the boxcar, and Cyrus is the caboose, and that train is going to pull me right out of this apartment and this city, so you’d better tell me right now why those grades are going to be okay and not good.”
“Well, they might be good.”
“If those white teachers do you some favors?”
“No! I did work hard! There was just something that happened.”
“There is always something that happens.”
“I know that.”
“Well, then, you get the numbers on your side and less happens.”
“Don’t you want to know what happened?”
Carol turned to look at her and put her hands on her hips. She said, “No, I don’t, because I don’t want you making a story out of it, because as soon as you make a story out of it, then it keeps happening every time you tell it, and if you make a good story out of it, then you’re gonna want to tell it, so don’t bother.”
“I thought you’d be sympathetic.” Actually, she hadn’t, but it was worth trying.
“Me? You thought I’d be sympathetic?”
“Well, I guess not. I hoped.”
“Hope again, girl. Hope that I’m gonna kick your butt, because that’s what I am gonna do.” She turned back to the stove. Mary watched as she turned off the burner, then bent down to sniff it. After that, she lifted the range top and checked the pilot lights. These precautions were so much second nature that Mary bet she did not even realize she was doing it. After that, she went to the bathroom door and shouted, “Malcolm, that’s enough hot water. You been in there for two hours now!”
Malcolm’s thin yodel came through the door. “I just got one more chapter, Mama.”
Mary knew that Carol’s fantasy was a small but particular one, nothing as grandiose as their mother’s vision of heaven, just a nice big kitchen like the ones in the kitchen-and-bath magazines she collected, with an inset marble slab for baking and a six-burner stove and a restaurant-type dishwasher adjoining a bathroom with a whirlpool, two sinks, and a separate shower with two heads. Exactly where this kitchen-and-bath combo would be Carol left up to Mary, Malcolm, and Cyrus. Trees? Lawn? Countryside? Okay for looking out at, but not necessary if you had some nice track lights. Mary sighed and sat down at Carol’s tiny Formica table. Carol went back to the stove and poured two cups of tea. A moment later, she plunked one of them down in front of Mary. She said, “Here. Don’t look back. Just fortify yourself and keep going.” She smiled, a rare event that Mary fully appreciated. She said, “Okay, girl, just to show how sympathetic I can be, I’ll kick your butt later, after those grades arrive.”
53
Season’s Greetings
BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Tim had wangled invitations to a Paris Review party for Michael Ondaatje, Norman Mailer’s publication party at Random House, and a Poets and Writers party in celebration of Vaclav Havel and the changes in Czechoslovakia. On Christmas Eve (always a touchy time), there was, fortunately, a huge party at ICM’s New York offices that his agent took him to, and from there he went to Smith & Wollensky’s with Richard Bausch, Phil Caputo, and T. C. Boyle. That meant he didn’t get back to the apartment he was borrowing (no tree, no decorations, no Christmas carols, no women, no children) until nearly dawn. At six on Christmas Day, he called his mother on the Cape and asked if she got the basket he’d sent from Williams-Sonoma. She had—she was just going out the door, she would call him tomorrow. He lay back in the bed and pulled the covers up to his chin. That night he was on for drinks and dinner at a restaurant in the Village, and then there was MLA, which started the next day, and really got rolling on the twenty-seventh.
There was nothing actually wrong with his schedule of events. Most of the people at the parties recognized his name, and when they asked how he was, he was able to say that he had a book coming out from Little, Brown, a sign of good health if ever there was one. Tom, Phil, and Dick had been lots of fun. They didn’t mind that he was younger and less famous than they—in fact, that was exactly the right combination for them, and they had offered bits of advice here and there. Phil’s, not to give in to the temptation to buy a big house with his advance, would have, if he had actually been getting a big advance, been better than Tom’s, which was never to wear mismatched socks on television. He did not disclose what he might buy with his advance when they disclosed various things they had bought with theirs. Instead he got up and went to the bar for more drinks. As gentlemen, they allowed that. Later, however, when the conversation turned to golf, which all of them had recently taken up, he did disclose that his college golf handicap had been 2. “I haven’t played in ten years, though,” he said. Conversation stopped while they all contemplated the size of his handicap. Almost immediately, the subject returned to advances. At the end of the evening, Dick had muttered to him in the silken Virginia voice that Tim could only aspire to, “Just never let them know the size of your advance.”
All things considered, though, Tim had scared up very little in the way of writing assignments—nothing but an In Short for the Book Review, and when he was introduced to Robert Silvers, an event he had always imagined as a kind of greased chute directly into writing long think pieces for The New York Review of Books, Silvers had very politely, but unmistakably, looked over Tim’s shoulder at someone across the room. Then, when he asked where Tim taught and Tim told him, Silvers had looked almost puzzled. Tim had been forced to fill in—“Well, admittedly, the place is famous for hardware rather than software”—a look of even greater puzzlement on Silvers’ part—“you know, engineering rather than great literature—” Had Silvers then given him a pitying smile? Or had the look been merely the last rag of a conversation that the man had already forgotten? Tim knew that he shouldn’t lie in bed and contemplate these things, especially on Christmas, but the apartment was cold—the guy he’d borrowed it from had locked the thermostat at sixty-two.
Across the room, on the windowsill, was the robe his mother had sent him, his only (wasn’t he too old to care about that?) Christmas gift. The robe was black, a color that his mother seemed to associate with his lifestyle—she always gave him clothes, and they were always black. That was, in general, fine, but just today it seemed like she might have chosen, say, red, to give the room a more festive air. He did not feel like getting out of bed in this frigid apartment and putting on a black robe under the gaze of the framed poster the guy had by the window, of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. Across from it, there was a companion work that included the rest of the Sex Pistols. These were the only decorations in the bedroom. Tim put his head under the covers, but then had a moment of unease—he had to be at the restaurant in the Village by eight—and looked at his watch. It was nearl
y seven. On any other day of his life he would certainly have leapt out of bed in a panic—he hated this feeling of his career leaving him behind at the wrong station, only to stop down the line and pick up some guy who would then have the career that should have been his, a free ride all the way to—Ah, to where? That was the great golden question. Even Phil and Tom and Dick didn’t know the answer to that one.
He rolled over, keeping the covers up. A breezy gap opened behind his back, and he squirmed to close it. Really, there weren’t enough covers. This guy didn’t believe in big feather beds that you sank into and thick down comforters that you pulled over yourself, what they believed in in the Midwest. These were light, thin covers that kept you half awake most of the night mulling the next move in your career. Actually, the cold made him think of Cecelia, who was always cold. The thought of such female fragility usually gave him a little frisson of pleasure; now it just gave him a shiver. Was he really going to skip the drinks and the dinner?
He had slept with Cecelia twice; he recalled that both times he had felt a feeling of dissatisfaction, almost of boredom. He recalled that he had felt these feelings, but he couldn’t in fact recall the feelings. Instead, he recalled how warm her body had been. Her skin had a silky alive feel that pressed on your awareness the actuality of her circulatory system. With some women you felt mostly muscle; with others, even thin ones, that layer of subcutaneous fat they all had. With still others, there was a hard, bony quality. Cecelia was the only woman he’d ever touched where you felt, not the fluid itself, of course, but the heart’s force, the energy that drove the fluid. How could that have left him dissatisfied?
Well, she’d been lonely—that had been an undercurrent of the whole autumn. Loneliness in women always scared him. Getting close to that loneliness felt like getting close to the edge of a subway platform. Even if you didn’t lose your balance, someone could accidentally on purpose push you over, and while you recognized this fear as paranoid, or at least wildly exaggerated, you still got in the habit of casually standing back from the edge. Still, the rareness of Cecelia! And then a voice, a voice he recognized as Margaret’s (clearly the voice of his conscience), said, “What earlier rareness did you fail even to notice?” and he had to squirm again.
By his watch it was seven-thirty. He should be getting into a cab right now.
Instead he turned off the bedside light. The windows across from the bed lit up.
One of the reasons this guy’s apartment was so cold was that these very windows overlooked the Hudson, and received the full bore of winds from the west. They rattled in their frames, unshielded by the most routine storm windows, unmuffled by the simplest drapes. Irresponsible windows in the extreme, the sort you would only find in New York, where heat was included in the rent and flies and mosquitoes stayed close to life on the street. But all the same, you could lie here for hours staring at those windows, at the interpénétration of light reflected from below and darkness pouring in from above. The whole sky, a rare view for Manhattan, and the stars, when you could see them, no brighter in the glow of the city than motes of dust, but no less beautiful for all that. Something about the windows was peaceful and mesmerizing, and after a few minutes, Tim felt his anxieties quiet a bit.
In that lull, he fell to contemplating Cecelia’s reaction to the report Margaret had given him for her. Tim had, of course, read it. The envelope Margaret had put it in had been clasped, not sealed, and she had only said, “Well, this is for Cecelia,” with no explicit instructions not to take a peek. And their discussion of his snooping could easily be construed as permission as well as disapproval. Freud and all the others were entirely clear on the mixed intentions of any communication. The report had not shocked Tim. Shock would imply surprise, and this late in his career and this late in human history, nothing surprised him. His first reaction had been that he wasn’t into eco-fiction and, as potentially interesting as tunnelling a gold mine under the last remaining virgin cloud forest might be as a theme or motif, he didn’t see how you could make much of it as a main subject, unless, of course, it had already happened and you were a writer native to that country reflecting upon the destruction wrought upon your land by the impersonal forces of capitalism or, perhaps, by the age-old universal of human greed. All things considered, denouncing capitalism was rapidly becoming outdated, so it wouldn’t be wise to go with that unless you also denounced the Communists and your novel pointed the way toward a newer theory of the individual vs. the collective. Tim didn’t feel that he was quite up to that. Human greed he had done already, though admittedly under the guise of desire, and under that guise, he had treated the issue rather favorably. For all the irony that Cecelia found distancing, he had upheld the standard of freedom, passion, immoderation, appetite, etc., that all writers got from Hemingway and was more or less de rigueur for a manly fictioneer. At any rate, since he was not a native of Costa Rica and the mine had yet to be dug, he had passed the document on to Cecelia without even making a copy.
Now, though, the other half of the writer-reader exchange recurred to him, and he thought of Dr. Lionel Gift. You could not work at the university for any length of time without coming to know Dr. Gift by sight and by reputation. By sight, he was an unimposing round man with a disproportionately large head. He looked as though the first thing he had spent his money on after getting some was custom-made suits, and Tim had had occasion to admire both the flattering cut and the distinguished fabrics of Gift’s duds. In addition, the university was always promoting itself through Gift, so his face regularly appeared on brochures, flyers, university publications, alumni bulletins, in the student paper, you name it. If it was printed by the university, it was guaranteed to carry a photo and thumbnail bio of Gift once every academic year. Tim knew how they did those things—the public relations office always called you up and asked you what you wanted them to say about you. It would be the same with Gift, and Gift’s sketch of himself was always chockablock with fulsome self-praise and -congratulation. Distasteful, Tim thought.
And then he thought again.
He remembered the night Margaret had told him how the committee had voted for him. He hadn’t been much interested, and strangely, that indifference had lasted, but he had heard her—he wasn’t THAT indifferent—and he now realized that his dangerously low number (6,6,6, it stung a bit) was attributable to someone, and it wouldn’t be Helen, and it wouldn’t be Garcia (who had once complimented him on a story of Tim’s he’d read in Harper’s), so it had to be the other guy whose name Tim couldn’t remember and it had to be Gift. Gift was working against him.
He sat up in bed, baring his chest to the elements.
So, it was the pet project of this nasty man to blast a gold mine under an innocent cloud forest. Tim knew nothing about mining, but it was easy to imagine bulldozers uprooting the trees, stripping back the soil. It was easy to imagine large explosions and innocent plants and animals of all kinds shooting skyward in surprise and pain.
It all made him think of Cecelia again, her female fragility. But now that presented itself in another, more exciting light. He got up and put on his robe, then took a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches out of the pocket and stood under the gaze of Sid and Nancy looking down upon the white of Riverside Park and the black of the wide, as yet unfrozen river. Cecelia had taken the paper from him without opening the envelope, and he hadn’t been able to urge her to do so without revealing that he had read her mail. Besides, she was still angry with him. So that had been that. But she would have read it by now. He went to the phone and called her, thinking, Well, it would be nice to talk to her, and to be known to have thought of her, too, on Christmas night. But he only got her machine, and her customary message inviting him to leave his name and number after the beep. No clue whether she was at home, at a party, or even, maybe, gone somewhere.
He gave it up, along with his dinner plans, and went into the kitchen, where he got out some leftover black calamari pasta with nut sauce that he’d bought dow
n at Balducci’s the day before, as well as a bagel and some lox and cream cheese from Zabar’s. Before he had even assembled his meal, he was too impatient to eat it. He tied his robe more tightly around his waist. This rain—no, cloud—forest thing was too interesting not to talk about, and he had let a whole week and some four or five parties go by already. People in New York were always looking for things to talk about that no one else knew about, and clearly this Gift thing was a secret—Margaret had said as much—and of course it was a shame, no, a sin, no, a crime, no, a tragedy, no, a disaster, in its own right.
He could already voice what he would say about it. Of course, tomorrow was MLA, and he could talk about it there, but people at MLA were so distracted by their own greed for professional notoriety that they hardly listened to what you were saying, and who could blame them. Damn! He had spent a whole week with people like Toby Wolff and Robert Silvers and he had overlooked his real entrée. “They’ve got to have it all,” he would say. “The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Tierra del Madre cloud forest! Did you hear about that?” An article! He could have buttonholed Silvers with a real idea for a real think piece about whether capitalism, now that it had won or was winning, could, structurally, leave any resource unexploited. The possibilities there were timely—
