Moo (8 page)

Her face was flushed, her blond hair disordered from dancing. The skin of her neck and shoulders shone with perspiration. Two beers had put her in a laughing mood, and four guys were standing near her, staring at her and laughing with her. Others, farther away, were attuned to her, too, and kept glancing in her direction as if they couldn’t help it. She sat half on a table with her foot on a chair—the purple skirt showed lots of leg, and it was good leg, long, well defined, and smooth, but the most interesting thing about her to Mary was not that she gave off light and heat for the first time that Mary had seen, but that she also gave off safety. There wasn’t a single man looking at her. Looking at her had turned them all into boys. This was an aspect of Barbie-hood that Mary had never given any thought to, that Barbie created Ken, anatomically incorrect to the very core of his brain, where he understood as well as he understood his own name that Barbie was inviolable.

Inviolable was exactly what Mary herself wanted to be, safe here at the university, safe back in Chicago, safe in her future, safe without thinking about it or looking around her or waking up in the night wondering whether the doors and windows were locked. Though her Chicago neighborhood was not the frequent scene of gunfire, she would have liked to walk safely there without wondering about which passersby were carrying what weapons. Not being safe was very time-consuming, more so in that she felt less safe than she was, which meant she gave it more attention than she needed to, which meant
that her sense of danger was accompanied by a nagging sense of wasting time that could be used for better things. Friction, a drag on her energy, something she had to work herself up to, whether she felt like it or not.

Conditions at the university were not precisely the same, but anytime you went among whites all day long, you couldn’t help feeling exposed to looks, attitudes, even sometimes gestures, and if you went around with the other black students, there were longer, more speculative, more aggressive looks from the white students, often met by the equally aggressive looks of your companions. Keri was never taxed in this way. Probably, given statistics that Mary was well aware of, Keri was not as safe as she felt, but it was hard not to envy the natural joy of the safety that she did feel, the freedom it allowed her to throw back her head and laugh, kick up her leg, look square into the eyes of the nearest guy, to abandon herself to the good time that came to her as a beautiful white blond woman, a good time that she didn’t have to seek, like Sherri, or probe, like Diane, or resist, like Mary herself. There was reason to envy her, and standing off by herself, more unexposed than usual, Mary could admit that she did envy her.

H
ELEN
L
EVY GAVE
a dinner party every weekend. She had big copper pots with silver lids hanging above the six-burner range, and large brightly colored bowls and stacks of big platters and two soup kettles, four-gallon and eight-gallon, and a table with three leaves that could seat up to twenty, and she had windows all along the length of the tiled kitchen counters that looked out upon her herb garden and her vegetable garden and her edible-flower garden. Instead of her former husband, who had cost her a lot of money, she had a man who helped in the garden who cost much less. She had a desk in the kitchen. She had cookbooks in French and Italian, including Vietnamese and Moroccan cookbooks in French and Ethiopian cookbooks in Italian. She had written one book in the old days, when one book was enough for a full professorship and since then she had confined herself to gustatorial research into recipes, kitchen techniques, and cooking equipment. She would never publish again, but most assuredly, given her root cellar, freezer, and food dryer, neither would she perish.

Guest lists came to her in dreams, and this week she had dreamed up seven possibilities—Cecelia Sanchez, who needed to be introduced around; Timothy Monahan, who seemingly did not need to be introduced to Cecelia; Ivar Harstad, whose relationship with Helen was as discreet as it was long-standing; Dean Jellinek, who lived next door and worked in Animal Science; his girlfriend, Joy, who was about five feet tall and as big around as a baseball bat (Equine Management); Margaret Bell, whom Helen was growing more and more fond of the longer they sat on that horrible tenure committee; and Dr. Bo Jones, whose relationship with Helen had ended fourteen years earlier, but who loved the bouillabaisse Helen was serving, and whose wife, Carla, Helen’s good friend, was away visiting their daughter and her new baby. Only Dean and Joy formed an actual pair, so only they were having trouble getting along. One of Helen’s principles was never to invite more than one couple for every six singles, ever since
the birthday party she had given for her former husband where each of the four couples invited had squabbled on the road and turned back, leaving Helen and Howard to eat all of the osso buco and the chocolate fondue by themselves, an extended interaction that had led them into a fight, as well.

Helen didn’t mind if a dinner party wasn’t successful. There were so many of them, after all, and the food was always good, but this party had gone well, all the way through the frozen raspberry mousse and chocolate-dipped orange wafers she was now clearing from the table. Dr. Bo had been discoursing about hogs, which allowed the other guests to ruminate peacefully and think their own thoughts, when Margaret broke in suddenly and exclaimed, “You know, this reminds me of something I hadn’t thought of in years. Before I ever went to school, we used to go to my great-grandparents’ place in the country, and it seems like everybody there lived in terror of the hogs. I remember there was a mule and also a horse, and if we rode them into the woods, we had to be careful to never fall off, because then the hogs would get us. It seems to me that we were told they would eat us. Are hogs carnivorous?”

Dr. Bo pressed himself back in his chair until it creaked, and said, “Hungry hog’ll eat almost anything. Used to be common practice to let ’em forage in the woods, and the veneer of civilization lies very lightly on the hog, very lightly indeed. You say to that hog, ‘Adapt,’ and that hog will adapt, whether to a life of ease or a life of brutish warfare. All over the world, hog and human take each other’s measure. It is a delicate alliance, as your folks would have attested.”

Swept up in her newly discovered train of memory, Margaret said, “And back home, we never had pork. My father couldn’t stand pork!”

“Where are you from?” said Joy.

“I grew up in Kansas City, but all of my father’s family lived in Arkansas. That’s where those hogs were. I think I was only five the last time we visited there.”

Dean said, “I’m surprised you remember it. My family moved when I was five, and I can go right to the house we lived in before and not recall a thing.”

Dr. Bo, not to be turned from his favorite subject, said, “That hog, that southern hog, would have been lean and very fast. Rich in the hams, dark in the shoulder.”

Margaret said, “My grandmother did bring the ham to the table as if—you know, she always said, ‘Jesus himself ate ham at the Last
Supper,’ and my uncle always said, ‘Jews don’t eat ham, Mama,’ and then my grandmother would look at him and say, ‘Well, how do you think they knew he was a Christian and not a Jew, then?’ ”

Everybody laughed.

Dr. Bo tried for one last fact. “Spanish brought the hog, set ’em free all over the Caribbean so they could come back the next year to a ready food supply. Ecological disaster, of course.” Helen set a cup of coffee in front of him, and he drank deeply of it.

There was a long pause in the conversation, not unusual when Dr. Bo was a member of the party. Helen knew that most of the guests were trying to develop some interest in, and feeling for, the information they had just been given about hogs. She said, “Shall we take our coffee into the living room?” Twenty minutes left, a half an hour at the most, even though it was only ten-thirty. This group was predominately youthful, and that meant sobriety. She looked across at Ivar. In her first year at the university, they had met at a party given by a couple in the psychology department where the whiskey drinking, as at all parties then, started at six, dinner was brought to the table toward ten, and heads were sometimes laid upon the table between courses. The last drop of brandy was licked from the rim of the last bottle long after midnight. At that particular party, in fact, the hostess’s elderly mother, bourbon in hand, was discovered, along about nine, to have passed away in her chair. She was left to herself, just her legs covered with an afghan and the drink removed from her grasp, until the roast beef and coffee could sober everyone up. Helen had been impressed by the aplomb with which the hostess had gazed down at her mother, thoughtfully sipped her own drink, then returned to the kitchen and taken the rolls from the oven.

Timothy Monahan accepted brandy, turned the glass in his palm, and looked at Cecelia, who had seated herself beside Joy Pfisterer. The problem, he was tempted to think (but thinking this way was always a temptation), was that his fame didn’t penetrate here, and so couldn’t work in his favor, for example with Cecelia, the way it did out East. The stories in
Granta
and
The Paris Review
, the pieces in 7
Days
, even the reviews he’d done for the
Times
meant nothing here. They didn’t speak nearly as much for him as the bad review he’d gotten (with picture) in
People
magazine spoke against him. After that appearance, eleven of his students had mentioned that their mothers had wondered if that Timothy Monahan were him? With such a review,
you were tempted to say no, the short answer, or to explain the difference in America between high culture and low culture, the long answer. At any rate, just to use the scientific method, this summer, his triumphal progress from writers’ conference to writers’ conference had proved sexual as well as professional, and there they knew his name beforehand and here he had to explain to every new acquaintance that he was in the English department and what he did there, often to be greeted by polite “Hmms” as if even an explanation weren’t enough to establish his identity. Apparently Cecelia had been so immersed in her courses and dissertation that her ignorance of his work was as total as anyone’s. In this flirtation he was conducting, he had had to rely entirely on his personality, never a good idea.

Margaret sat down beside him and took a sip of his brandy. He said, “Hey, kiddo.”

She said, “I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to you tonight. Did you put together your review materials?”

“I turned them in Thursday. But you aren’t going to see them for months, right?”

“I’m not going to see them. As a member of your department, I have no input at all.”

“Well, that’s probably for the best, eh, Dr. Bell?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She smiled, possibly with some affection—Tim couldn’t tell. His affair with Margaret, three years in the past now, had been firmly grounded in his understanding that she had never read any of his work. Then, one Sunday over breakfast and the
Times
, she had made a little noise, one little noise, at a review of the third novel by a writer he knew and detested, a total fraud whose whole approach to the novel was unserious in the extreme, whose style was second-rate and had been since Tim had known him at Columbia. It was an appreciative noise, so Tim had looked up, said, “What?” and Margaret had pointed out the review, and Tim had snorted, and then Margaret had said she was including a paper about this joker in her book, and Tim had said, “Well, in that case, you really OUGHT to read my work,” and she had said, “I have, you know that,” and they had looked at one another and he had never felt an iota of desire for her afterward; try as he might, all the unspoken opinions that had changed hands in those few minutes still shrivelled him right up, it wasn’t even vengeful. He smiled and said, “Well, there is a conflict of interest.”

She nodded, and said, “Did you sell your new book yet?”

“It’s at Little, Brown, now.”

“A sale would make a big difference. With three, you’d be in there absolutely. No amount of ignorance or perplexity on their part would matter at all.”

Tim shrugged. “A sale would make a big difference” was his life’s watchword right now.

“I’ll be back.” Margaret stood up and headed toward the bathroom.

Cecelia stretched and yawned, touched her hair to see if the pins were falling out. The gesture lifted her breasts, which were large, and marvelously concentrated his attention on the loose white cotton of her blouse. He heard her say, “Actually, I walked. My duplex is only a few blocks.”

Before Joy could say a word, he was in there. “Say, I walked, too. I’d be glad to walk you home.” Fleeting amusement crossed her features, but she said, “All right, Tim.”

He said to Joy, “We teach in adjacent rooms.”

Cecelia said, “Yes, and his class is always laughing and my class is always droning.”

“Well, they read their work aloud to each other, and they find themselves very funny.”

Joy looked at him in a serious way. He said to her, “What do you do?”

“Right now, we’re on parasites. Next week, inoculations.”

“Of what?”

“Oh. Of horses. And I manage the university’s horse herd and run the riding club.” She fell silent, still looking at him. Clearly she was a person for whom conversation was not an end in itself. He returned her gaze for a while, then said, “Well, Cecelia, let me know when you’re ready to go.”

He picked up his coffee cup and looked into it, then drank a sip. The party was winding down, and there wasn’t much left to do. He had schmoozed with the provost twice already, complimented Helen on the food, listened to the Jellinek guy go on and on about bovine cloning and the vet guy do hogs. He had contemplated how he might fit Margaret’s early childhood recollections, which were certainly picturesque, into something he might write, and he had noted, on his visit to the bathroom, which was upstairs, the drugs Helen was taking or had taken, the names of the cosmetics she bought in France, the
price of a new sweater she’d left lying on her bed. He had opened her bathroom closet and noted boxes of tampons, which meant she hadn’t gone through menopause yet, and a couple of diaphragm cases, ditto, with the additional implication that she was still sexually active. The rumors were that her sexual activity had once been various and unstinting. Tim was glad to see that cooking hadn’t replaced that. Tim was glad, in fact, to see any evidence of sexual activity at all around the university. Every so often he wondered, with a touch of self-consciousness, if he were not a solitary toiler in that particular cabbage patch. There were other, much more interesting rumors about Helen, too, ones that gave you to contemplate age-old philosophical questions. Tim sat, staring at his brandy, contemplating these questions, until he had finished it.