Moo (44 page)

It was like riding a bicycle. Once you had dittoed a flyer, you could always ditto a flyer.

He printed out the two-sided piece of “literature” on his Mac, using the secondhand laser printer he had purchased the previous spring. A large headline, to which he had given a moist, jungly feel with his graphics program, read, “Do You Know Where the Last Virgin Cloud Forest in the Western Hemisphere Is?” Then, in smaller letters, he wrote, “Do You Know That Our University Is Working to Destroy That Very Same Cloud Forest?”

In some ways, it was a relief to be living in an apartment on his own and not having to answer to the Lady X, because she would
surely have made him alter that one, since it was only the fact that the university was paying a salary to Gift the pompous craven toad that implicated the university as a whole. She would have said that the fact that the university was also paying him de-implicated them, as it were. But the line had to serve its inflammatory purpose, and so he left it.

One of his Mac utilities, which he had heretofore used only for writing marginal notes on rough drafts of scientific papers, came in handy for repeating “Stop the Destruction!” three or four times in the margins around the text.

It was a pretty good leaflet. On the front side, he had made himself stick to the point—the threatened gold mine under the cloud forest, the link between Seven Stones Mining and Arlen Martin’s other companies, the crawling, greedy, execrable role of Gift. His Mac had formatted the front in the traditional two columns, and it looked good. On the back, he had allowed himself to expound a little on the historical role of agricultural universities in damaging Third World ecosystems by imposing an inappropriate model of industrial agriculture on tropical areas. Front side—call to action; flip side—education. That, too, was a time-honored arrangement. He did not plan to depart from it in future leaflets, either.

They were all printed, waiting for the first day of the second semester. Chairman X and his inner circle of horticulture students (who had needed no encouragement to shift the focus of their fervor from the ag school to the cloud forest) had agreed that the steps in front of Lafayette Hall, the front door of the economics department building, and the cafeteria entrance of the student commons were the best spots for leafletting. Hopes were high. It was possible that many of the students on campus had never been leafletted before in their entire lives, and had developed no immunities at all against leafletting.

Chairman X got up from his rented couch in his rented apartment under the rather stark overhead light fixture (the only light in the room), and went over to the shelves by the door, where he stood with a small smile on his face and admired the stack of leaflets for the fifth or sixth time. Tomorrow was the day. Some students had suggested that the leafleteers each take a stack home with them, but Chairman X had been unable to part with them. Normally, he did not find beauty in human artifacts, but he found beauty in these—the columns on the front side were not too long, not too short. The
headlines were just the right size. The marginal exhortations to stop the destruction were readable even in purple ink. He liked the prose style, too. He liked the way they had been hand-cranked, counted in that old way by the cranker mumbling to herself because the counter was broken.

They were young, and he was young, too. Instead of the guerrilla war of attrition they had been fighting against the College of Agriculture for all these years, they had a frontal assault to win. Tomorrow the attack would begin. Chairman X planned to hand-deliver to Gift himself this, the first work of the Coalition to Stop the Destruction.

Chairman X reached out and straightened a corner of the stack and went back to sitting on the couch. It was just after eight. He had nothing to do except be ready. He had, in fact, forgotten that there would be this time to fill between the departure of the students and the dawn of the new tomorrow. He had no TV, not even any books. He had moved out of the Lady X’s house with only the wallet in his pocket and a change of clothes in a brown paper bag. She had told him he was posturing. He had told her that nothing suited him better that shucking all of that bullshit. “Including your toothbrush?” she had challenged.

“Including every single thing that reminds me of this life,” he had shot back.

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.”