by Smiley, Jane
Then he had, dramatically, he thought, mounted the steps of a city bus and disappeared from their life forever.
The worth of these gestures, he had made clear when he saw her the next day, was spiritual and symbolic. He in fact could not broadly modify his material existence, mostly because of the children but also because his computer and all his books and tools were at the house. Spiritually, though, he was definitely removed to a new plane.
He realized that Cecelia must have returned, since classes were to start the next day. Cecelia had been so constantly in his mind since he had begun putting together this action that he had forgotten she was out of town. Well, okay, he had forgotten everything, including eating, sleeping, changing his clothes, calling the Lady X before he came over to the house (some new rule she had made that he simply couldn’t keep track of), taking the eldest to her orthodontist’s appointment, a lot of things. But he hadn’t forgotten that he HAD children, as the Lady X accused. He had tried to get them to agree to skip school the next day and help with the leafletting, but they had refused.
Well, but Cecelia! He found his coat.
The lights of her duplex were blazing. As soon as he got off the bus he saw them, and they pulled him into a jog, though the sidewalks were plenty icy. He clambered up the steps, which had not been cleared, and rang the bell. He did not notice the large, booted footprints that had paced the snow on the porch before his.
She was wearing the red sweater, the black leggings, the bulky socks, all the things he loved. Her hair was twisted up in a large barrette. When she opened the door, he stepped into the aura of her fragrance, and though the desire to grab her and embrace her tightly only came to him right then, it felt like a longing he had been harboring the whole month, so he said, “Oh, God, Cecelia! I’ve missed you like crazy.” Over her shoulder and through wisps of her hair, he saw a tall, good-looking guy appear in the doorway of the kitchen. Even though he was surprised at this, Chairman X had the presence of mind to hang on to Cecelia, to hug her more tightly. That was the way, in such circumstances, that you staked your claim.
So THIS WAS the guy, thought Tim. He could tell, because though this guy was little and wiry, not more than an inch or two taller than Cecelia, who was five-five maybe, Cecelia seemed to disappear into the guy’s coat, like a doll he was putting into his pocket.
The guy wasn’t someone Tim knew, even by sight, and he didn’t really look like a university type, unless maybe someone from the physical plant, but when Cecelia introduced him, Tim recognized the name—a famous eccentric, the author of countless letters to the student newspaper, a former faculty senator who could still be relied upon for colorful quotes about the university in the State Journal. So this was that guy, thought Tim, who stepped forward with a grin. He was not grinning AT the guy, he was grinning WITH him, since in fact he had agreed with many of the guy’s polemicals over the years—starting the school year on September 10, for example, would open up Labor Day weekend for a last fling on the East Coast and still give him time to get back for a leisurely beginning of fall classes. “I’m Tim,” he said, “Tim Monahan. I’m familiar with your work.”
Chairman X pulled his knitted hat off his head by the tassel and jammed it in his pocket. “You’ve read the leaflet?” he said.
“The leaflet?”
“The Coalition leaflet? We aren’t leafletting until tomorrow.”
“Oh. No, I meant, you know, letters to the editor, quotes in the Journal.”
“Oh, yeah?” The guy seemed pleased. Everyone did. Tim had found “I’m familiar with your work” to be a surefire opening line.
Cecelia didn’t seem to notice that the word “work” had the magical effect of shifting the Chairman’s attention from her to Tim, but Tim did. Another thing he noticed was that Cecelia couldn’t take her eyes off this guy. When he slipped out of his coat, she patted it as she hung it up. She even took a surreptitious whiff of the collar and smiled. He knew he was watching her indulge in a secret and passionate weakness. Her feelings were so naked that anyone else besides him would have looked away. Partly to escape his gaze, he thought, she ducked into the kitchen, carolling, “Go ahead and sit down, I’ll make some tea!”
The Chairman strode into the living room as if it were his, without even glancing around, as Tim had done, to check out new decorative gestures (and there were some—Cecelia had brought lots of things back from L.A., and the place, in Tim’s opinion, was beginning to take shape). He threw himself down in the first seat he came to and picked up the New York Times Magazine Tim had brought over that evening. He didn’t look at it, however. Instead, he said, “So, do you work here, too?”
“At the university?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Sure. I teach creative writing. I’m a novelist.”
“Huh.”
“I guess you’re not familiar with my work.”
“I don’t read novels, sorry.”
In that case, Tim thought, he would be perfectly safe in appropriating every detail about this guy, from his grizzly thin hair, which stood up in every direction, to his sharp, edgy blue gaze to his inside-out sweater to his baggy, multi-pocketed pants, to his much-scuffed Red Wing boots, which were so old and well oiled that they looked like they conformed to every little slope and plane of each of his feet. Tim admired the hands, too, which were enormous, with long, muscular fingers and big curved thumbs. The Chairman seemed oblivious to observation. Tim said, “So, you’re putting out some sort of leaflet?”
“This is an action. A real action. We aren’t stopping with a leaflet.”
“What’s the objective?”
“Do you know where the last virgin cloud forest in the western hemisphere is?”
“Yes, actually—”
“Do you know that this university is working to destroy it?”
“I didn’t realize anyone here was involved besides—”
“I personally intend to wreck the career and, with luck, the life of that piece of shit Gift if it’s the last thing I do.”
“Oh, really?” said Tim.
Chairman X didn’t like tea, as Tim did, so Cecelia ended up making coffee, and then there wasn’t any instant, so she had to drip some, and wash a couple of cups, since she hadn’t done the dishes yet that weekend. Even so, she estimated she had only been in the kitchen five or ten minutes. That was how long it took Chairman X and Tim to, as it were, find each other, get together on the couch, bend over the coffee table, come up with a piece of paper and a pen, and start working on strategy and tactics. When she set the coffee down at Chairman X’s elbow, the very man who had clutched her to himself not fifteen minutes before in an ecstasy of reunion, he said, “Thanks, honey.”
She said, “What?”
He looked up with a happy smile. “Thanks. Thanks for the coffee.”
Cecelia turned to Tim. “Tim, weren’t you just leaving?”
Tim, who in Cecelia’s opinion was often insensitive but never unobservant, said, “Actually, I was.”
“Where to?” challenged the Chairman.
“Well, I was going to the gym.”
“For what?” The Chairman seemed astounded.
“To work out.”
“To work out?” It was as if he didn’t understand the words. Cecelia said, “Tim likes to stay in shape. You know, swim, lift weights?”
The Chairman’s focus was so completely on Tim that she seemed not to be there. He said, to Tim, “You take time out for that?”
“I make regular aerobic and weight-resistance exercise a part of my routine, yes.”
“Well, now, you see,” said the Chairman, “here’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. You drive over there alone in your car, then you attach yourself to some machine that runs on electricity, and you do that by yourself, then you take a shower, which uses heated water as well as depleting the aquifer, then you drive yourself home. Why don’t you just take a walk or dig in the garden?”
Cecelia said, “It’
s three degrees out there and there’s seventeen inches of snow cover.”
“Yes, but in the spring?”
“Well,” said Tim, “I don’t want to.”
The thing was, thought Cecelia, that it was the very fire of the Chairman’s innocence that attracted her. In the month since she’d last seen him, Cecelia thought she’d made steady progress toward a rational understanding of their relationship: going nowhere, offering her no social, emotional, or spiritual benefits. Even so (this was the rational part), it was compelling, the way he attached himself to things as easily and as wholeheartedly as a child—sometimes you needed a change from the cautious norm adhered to by every other man you knew. Watching him with Tim gave her a (perfectly reasonable) occasion to thrill at the energy he gave off, full of plans and charged with both hope and resolve, as well as time to incubate her (thoroughly considered) response. For now, she was content to play a role that normally she couldn’t stand, the sweet-helpful-coffee-toting-girl role. It was a shell that would burst to powder with the first passionate touch of his hand.
Tim said, “I could go later, I guess.”
“Good,” said the Chairman, picking up the pen again. “You wouldn’t believe how fired up some of my students are about this. They’ve been waiting twenty years for it.”
“Your students have been waiting twenty years?” said Cecelia. “How old are they?”
“Did I say twenty?”
“Yes, but, you know,” said Tim, “some people do wait their whole lives for something, and it’s only when that thing arrives that they find out that they’ve been waiting rather than living.”
Mmmmmmmm, thought Cecelia, shuddering and moistening her lips. Then she said, “You know, when I told my mother, she got right on the phone with her second cousin’s son’s wife, who’s a representative in the senate there, and it turned out that she went to school with the daughter of the minister of the environment.”
Both men lifted their heads and looked right at her.
57
Mass Media
IT WAS amazing, thought Dr. Lionel Gift, how they had orchestrated the whole thing during his winter recess. He would not have given them credit for the foresight or the connections if he hadn’t seen it himself. Nevertheless, it happened just the way they probably had planned it—at the very moment when he took the flyer from an unknown student, thinking it must be about a bargain airfare package for spring vacation or something, just then that little nobody from the horticulture department stepped up to him, and handed him another copy, and his grimy finger pointed to Gift’s own name in the first line, and Gift saw that the flyer was about himself and his report for Arlen Martin. As if the humiliation of having his name bandied about the campus like that weren’t enough, when he had at last escaped to his office, set his cup of coffee on his desk, and opened the paper, there he was again, on the front page of The New York Times. Admittedly, he was below the fold, and his name was mentioned only once on that page, in connection with “New Pressures on Central American Countries to Exploit Resources in Protected Regions.” But the fact that his name appeared at all would tip Martin off about the source of the leak. Gift set his coffee cup down with trembling hand. And then the phone rang. It was HER voice. She was saying, “Professor Gee-eft? Mr. Martin on the line for you, honey.”
“Thank you,” he whispered.
“Ly-nle?” brayed the little Texas billionaire. “Let me read you something.”
“I’ve read it,” whispered Dr. Gift.
“ ‘According to a recent report for Horizontal Technologies and Seven Stones Mining, prepared by economist Dr. Lionel Gift of Moo University, gold mining in the Tierra del Madre cloud forest would be not only feasible but desirable. Dr. Gift’s report indicated that negotiations between Horizontal and the Costa Rican government were proceeding, and that “certain highly placed members of the government have a distinctly favorable view of the operation. Discreet and precisely targeted payments to these and other officials could well have the desired effect.” The report also indicated that the allegations of environmental groups, that a single American corporation had been buying up land around the forest for cattle ranches, were well founded. Under various names, Horizontal Technologies and the TransNationalAmerica Corporation appear to have been buying and deforesting the land, then running cattle over the resulting pasturage. While the information in Dr. Gift’s report has not been confirmed or denied by the Costa Rican government, sources in San José did say that Dr. Gift, a well-known figure in Costa Rica, and others from Horizontal had visited the country recently, “as far as I know, just to vacation,” said the unnamed official.’
“I hadn’t gotten that far,” whispered Dr. Gift.
“What DO you have to say about this, Professor?” said Martin.
“I was meaning to call you before Christmas—” whispered Gift.
“Goddamnit, I can’t hear you,” shouted Martin.
Dr. Lionel Gift set the receiver down in its cradle and left his office, removing his beeper from his belt and setting it on his desk as he did so.
DR. CATES, who read the Wall Street Journal, did not see the piece.
DR. JELLINEK, who flipped the “Auto Return” button on his television remote between “Good Morning America” and the “Today” show, hadn’t seen a daily Times in two years or more.
DR. LEVY, who read the State Journal, clipped out and posted on her refrigerator a long article entitled “Easy Cleaning Solutions Substitute for Potential Hazards.”
DR. BELL, who got her mail first thing in the morning, was reading a review of Writing a Woman’s Life by Carolyn Heilbrun in The Hungry Mind Review.
PROVOST IVAR HARSTAD WAS halfway through a 7:30 a.m. root canal appointment with his oral surgeon.
• • •
Ms. ELAINE DOBBS-JELLINEK HAD ASKED her new secretary, Bill Bartle, to find her a copy of the Times, which she tried to read at least twice a week (though preferably on Tuesdays for the Science section and on Wednesdays for the Living section), but he seemed inexplicably unwilling to do so.
DR. BO JONES HAD DECIDED years before that nothing was so repetitive as news. When his wife, who was sitting across from him at the breakfast table, said, “Hey, Moo U. made it into the Times,” and then read an excerpt of the article, he tuned her out, as he did every morning, in favor of an article in Successful Farming called “Hog Personality: Will Tailoring Your Operation to Known Breed Characteristics Prove Economical in the Long Run?”
DR. CECELIA SANCHEZ WAS ASLEEP.
PROFESSOR TIMOTHY MONAHAN WAS STANDING in front of the honors freshman English class he had been coerced into teaching by his chairman in accordance with new university guidelines on putting higher-ranking faculty into the undergraduate classroom. He was telling the students that they would be required to purchase a subscription to the daily New York Times at campus rates (twelve dollars per semester), and that they would discuss articles in the newspaper at least once a week. A tall student seated toward the back of the room raised his hand.
“Yes?” said Tim. “Let’s see, you’re Frank Carson, right?”
“Yes. Sir.”
Tim pricked up his ears at the measured, serious tone of voice. Always a sign of trouble. Tim nodded for the kid to go on.
“Mr. Monahan, some of us consider The New York Times to be purveyors of militantly anti-Christian bias, and would prefer not to support it with our patronage.”
Tim smiled congenially. “Look at it as just another required text, okay? We can talk about those issues as they come up.”
“I’m not saying this because it is run by Jews, sir. I am not an anti-Semite. The problem is that most reporters and editors are well-known atheists and agnostics. Believing Jews are just a step away from Christians, really, like believing Moslems on the other side. But these atheists and agnostics are in another category, and some of us can’t support them. It’s repugnant to us.”
“How many?” said Tim, whose original plan had been
to discuss the Gift article as an example of “objective” rhetoric, only slipping in incidentally his own role in its conception. Four students raised their hands—Carson, another boy, and two girls, one of them the prettiest in the class, who looked around as she did so in an agony of embarrassment. Tim picked on her. “Let’s see, your name is Joellen, right?”
She nodded.
“Joellen, why don’t you want to subscribe to an entirely mainstream and universally respected newspaper like The New York Times?”
She turned red. When she opened her mouth to speak, nothing came out.
“Go ahead. Take your time.”
She stared at her desk. Finally, she mumbled, “It’s the mouthpiece of Satan.”
“Pardon me?” said Tim.
She spoke up, just a degree. She said, “When people read The New York Times, they are led to doubt the goodness of the Lord and are drawn away from their faith.”
Tim said, “This is an honors class, right?”
Frank Carson smoothly interjected, “How about this idea, sir? We can subscribe to a Christian paper, too. Then, every time we talk about an article from the Times, we can also talk about an article from that paper.”
Most of the other students smiled, relieved that a compromise they considered fair had been tentatively reached. Tim made a point of unclenching his fists under his desk, not without reflecting that one of them could have made satisfying contact with Frank Carson’s jaw. He looked at his watch. Twenty minutes gone to the most ridiculous discussion Tim had ever been a party to. Another hand went up. Tim nodded, looked briefly at the attendance sheet. “You’re Samir?” he said.
The young man nodded. Then he said, “I will be reading no Christian newspapers. Only if we read Islamic newspapers as well. In your country, people are sadly misinformed about the true nature of Islam. It is the responsibility of your institutions of higher learning to correct this flaw.”
In the back of the room, Tim could see two or three of the more sophisticated-looking students begin to grin. He knew that they were grinning at his expense.
