Moo (18 page)

Chairman X, meanwhile, looked up, and saw the beautiful Costa Rican woman he had sat beside at Gift’s lecture. Her coat was unbuttoned, revealing a long red sweater and black leggings. Her hair was pulled back in a thick ponytail, and she was absorbed in a dark, heavy-looking book in a way that seemed impossible to him, because his present state of distraction was clearly permanent, and all he could do was what he had been doing for the last week, carrying it restlessly all over campus and parking it in unlikely places.

After a moment, she slipped off her coat and pushed it through the stack, so that it hung there. He averted his gaze, not wanting to catch her eye, and only looked back when he was sure she had returned to her book.

What was not wrong? They were going to bulldoze his garden, rip the peach trees and apricots up by the roots. They were going to halve his gardening staff and cut the heat off to half his greenhouses. They
were going to hand the campus over to the corporations; the hole in the ozone was growing; a thousand species a day were falling into extinction (Chairman X knew that one of his afflictions was that he could so easily imagine the blue and sunlit globe of the world, its fragility and variety. Too many treks after specimens had exposed his sight to too many unique microenvironments. He had appreciated the adaptive mechanisms of too many plants—how such mechanisms combined utility and grace. He had appreciated too many vistas, small and large, had been struck by each as if each were an event. And each discrete appreciation that his memory contained was painfully twinned with others in his imagination that he was fated by mortality and the wideness of the world to miss. Gift and Nils Harstad were unburdened by such an affliction because, Chairman X thought, they knew so little about what was out there that they assumed whatever they might substitute for it would be good enough.)

The Lady X was fed up with him and his older children were embarrassed by his increasing eccentricity. Just this morning, the oldest little X had spoken unequivocally at the breakfast table. She had said, “Daddy, the junior high is going to call you about Career Day, about coming and giving a talk.” She caught his gaze. “No matter what they say, turn them down. I mean it. If you don’t, I will never forgive you.” She didn’t have to say that she meant that, too. Her hair and her one cherished Benetton outfit were perfect. The Lady X had tried to save his face, saying coolly, “Your father doesn’t have time for that anyway, and you should be more courteous, young lady.”

A toss of the head. “Please, then.”

“That’s fine,” he had said.

He closed his book, and thought of another place to carry his unease—the university cemetery, where he could spit on the graves of those who had hybridized corn and tea roses and double chrysanthemums.

The Costa Rican woman said, “Oh, are you leaving?” and she said it as gladly as you could say something so cool and impersonal. Then she said, “I remember you. From the lecture.” She came closer. “He was an awful man, wasn’t he? So complacent. Are you feeling better now?”

“No.”

The unexpected anguish in his tone transfixed them both. It was
the most naked expression of emotion Cecelia had heard in two months. She snapped awake just like that. She stepped forward.

It was hard for the Chairman to grasp how large she became as she moved toward him. Such largeness was unique in his experience. Her red sweater loomed, thick and reassuring. She tossed her head, and those same hammered silver earrings seemed to twirl like moons against her neck. Pheromonic radiance lifted off her in clouds, compounded of her serious look and her half-smile and her unconscious grace as well as the usual biological operations that Chairman X had occasion to explain to his classes every fall and spring.

He turned his chair suddenly toward her, with a squeak, a noisy scrape against the floor. Now he was awkwardly close to her all of a sudden, but she didn’t step back. Maybe he didn’t give her time to step back. Maybe he just grabbed her and buried his face in that red sweater, smelled her wool and Jergens fragrance and put his arms, just as if he had a right to, around her hips. At any rate, this unorthodox greeting was followed by a momentary pause the largeness of which sank deep into the Chairman’s very flesh, and then her hands found his head and neck and back, and she was kneeling and they were kissing, and Cecelia felt the fog blow out of her brain as in a stiff wind and as she lay back on the cool floor, each book on each shelf looming above her achieved perfect distinction from its every neighbor, and the acrid archival dust billowed deliciously around her.

His hands came up under her sweater as she pushed her leggings smoothly down over her hips and somehow every man she had ever known came to seem by comparison to this man, who didn’t look THAT WAY in any sense, hesitant, reserved, doubtful. She closed her eyes.

The Chairman was mostly filled with shame. Here he was, at it again, doing just what he had promised the Lady X and himself that he would stop doing, “fleeing to the woman” (her words), “driving over a cliff, dick in hand” (his). Even when you really just wanted to bury your face in a big warm red sweater, once you got inside those pheromones, you went on and on as if (but only as if, said the Lady X, and he did agree with that) you couldn’t stop.

No one happened by.

They lay quietly, their faces turned in different directions, until she could no longer stand the hard pressure of the floor against her backbone.

They sat up, their backs against the stacks. She remade her ponytail. He successfully refrained from burying his face in his hands. After a moment, he said, “I want you to know that my wife works for the STD and HIV Campus Information Hotline, and I am completely infection-free.”

“Me, too.” She paused. “I guess I should say, me, too, as far as I know.”

“Transmission is a lot less likely female to male.”

“I’ve heard that.”

Their breathing slowed.

He said, “I’m getting too old for this. I’m exhausted.”

“I always nap here anyway.” Today, however, Cecelia didn’t foresee any naps. Truly she could say that the future of days in the library and the classroom that she had possessed only minutes before had vanished without a trace. Now she had a hard time foreseeing anything. She said, “You know, your sweater is on inside out.”

He looked down. He hadn’t taken it off, so he must have put it on that way before leaving the house. He said, “I’m a little distracted lately.”

“Me, too.”

They smiled at each other.

He said, “Do I understand that you’re from Costa Rica?”

“Well, not exactly—” Watching him, as Cecelia now felt compelled to do, she saw the searchlight of his gaze dim just a few watts at this reply. In spite of herself, really without any volition on her part, she continued, “But of course, yes, I am.”

“How interesting,” he said, and leaned irresistibly toward her.

D
R
. D
EAN
J
ELLINEK’S
great grief, and one wholly shared by his son, Chris, was that the university had never fielded a winning basketball team. Dr. Jellinek and Chris had been to every home game in the last five years, and they had tickets just behind the bench, but as the season approached, he wondered if he would be able to get through it without a heart attack or a stroke. It was so frustrating to look down from his seat at Coach Rawlings making his pissant little drawings of anally retentive little plays, circling his pointer on the floor of the gym in tighter and ever more introspective spirals while the players looked on in hopeful confusion.

The cannon fodder who played for the university had come to seem to Dr. Jellinek like ranks of willing soldiers freshly recruited for a long war that they were already destined never to win—the Thirty Years’ War, the Hundred Years’ War. Coach Rawlings, with his tragic worldview and his rueful half-smile, sucked the heart out of every freshman class drop by drop. Dean Jellinek was the coach’s enemy, and put his own name in every year for the Faculty Athletic Council, just so he could lead the fight to fire the parasite, but they never put him on it.

This is not to say that he had learned nothing from his years as a basketball fan. Now, for example, that seventeen companies were vying to fund research into calf-free lactation, he called on all that grace-under-success he had witnessed in the NBA if not at the university, and, calling upon it, found it was there. He made himself, for example, as happy-to-be-here as Magic Johnson, as coolly sincere as Michael Jordan, as grittily determined as Charles Barkley. Were he actually tall, black, and electively bald rather than short, pallid, and unwillingly balding, he could not, in his humble estimation, have handled his recruiters with greater skill.

First of all, he let his research record speak for itself, the way they let their ball-handling talents do the same. He no longer felt quite the same way about the Nuclear Transfer thing—he was willing now to
see his own role as more in a making-it-to-the-finals-but-losing-in-the-last-game sort of light, with an added stolen-by-the-refs bit of color (when he inserted this idea into the conversation, he always did it with a maybe-maybe-not-some-people-seem-to-think sort of shrug). Second of all, his career scoring record, both in percentages and totals, was plenty impressive; grant money, like points, seemed to enjoy its own company and this was reassuring to those who were friends with money. Even so, he allowed it to be known, as those basketball players did, that money was one thing, the game another. He played the research game purely for the love of it, though, of course, winning was an important part and not to be undervalued. Mostly he learned from those players the myriad ways of saying “I don’t know” so that he could diddle and dandle their curiosity. Not “I don’t know” about the project—you could never make that mistake—but “I don’t know” about what was best—for the project, the university, himself, the companies in the running.

What was really best, everyone knew, was gobs and gobs of dough, simoleons raining down in torrents, choking great wads of cash that would give everyone confidence just by its presence, but that kind of cash was pretty shy and only displayed itself after everyone’s desire had been forced to bloom in the hothouse of delicately managed rivalry.

Sometimes these days Dean felt like picking up the phone and calling his buddy Michael Jordan and chortling with him over how he’d played Continental Dairy Industries off against National Milk, but of course he didn’t have Michael’s number.

He did have a sense, however, that the last exquisite days of courtship were coming to an end, that soon the phone calls and messages would cease, that he would return to being himself again, and on top of that, he’d have to develop this herd of calf-free lactating Holsteins that he’d thought about so obsessively that he was now a bit bored with them. Soon they would devolve from potential money to real money, from an image of bovine paradise to years of probably laborious and discouraging work. Soon, in fact, he would have to once again call on the resources of his character that had been put on hiatus by the very exhilaration of this courtship, and he was superstitious enough, and midwestern enough, to harbor the occasional thought that his character might have gone terminally flabby from success.

Even so, he could still sit in his office, in silence, with his feet up on the desk, and stare at the phone thinking, Ring! and have it ring.
The fact was that he was so greedy for these moments of being sought, desired, courted that no future payback seemed too large.

The phone rang. Joan in the office said, “I have a transfer call for you, Dr. Jellinek,” and Dean said, “I’m here,” and it was Samuels, the R and D man from Western Egg and Milk Commodities, who said, “Well, Dean, Richards at Purdue and Isaacs at Iowa State say this deal of yours is impossible.”

“For them, I’m sure it is.”

Samuels laughed. “They say—”

“They say false pregnancy in cows isn’t well enough understood. They say that PREGNANCY in cows isn’t well enough understood. They say vet science isn’t far enough along for that, not to mention biotechnology. They say we don’t know enough. It’s true. They don’t know enough. But you read my proposal.”

“It’s a wild proposal.”

“Out there is where you want to be, right?”

“That’s what the boss tells me.”

“Look, Hal, there’s a lot of things money can’t buy. We both know that. But there’s a lot of things it can buy, and one of them is technology and the time to develop technical know-how. You get in on the process early, and this is what you get, you get a patent not only on the product, but on every process that leads to the product. That means that the others who come later, like Isaacs and Richards, end up having to take the back roads, or having to pay the toll. You own the patents, you get the tolls.”

“True enough. I’ve got to tell you that this proposal has gone all the way to the top, not just of Egg and Milk, but to the top of the top, to Martin himself. That’s where they REALLY like it. The old man fancies himself a lifelong innovator.”

Dean didn’t know who Martin was, but Richards’ tone was reverent. Dean pretended he didn’t notice, adopted his own tone of casual but superior knowledge. “Hal, let me tell you a story. You know the story of the invention of the computer?”

“No.”

“You should ask Isaacs. I bet he knows.”

“So tell me.”

“Well, the short version is that the guy at Iowa State who invented the computer in the late thirties never patented a thing—not the memory bank or the digitizing system or the application of binary numbers
to the problem of computing. Not the drum or the switch, nothing. And the university over there didn’t take enough notice to do it for him, even in their own name, even as a crazy idea that might go somewhere. They forgot about the old machine, and threw it out, but when it came down to a court case about ten years or so ago between Sperry and Hewlett-Packard concerning who owned the patents, it turned out that nobody did. Now, that’s nice for us computer users, wouldn’t you say? But is that where Egg and Milk wants to be in twenty years?”