“Vindicated at last.”
They thoughtfully ate their pie.
Finally she said, “One thing I have to ask. Have you given up snooping through other people’s things?”
“Not at all.”
“I thought you were having a moral rebirth.”
“Jesus! No. Besides, snooping isn’t immoral, it’s just impolite. It’s like looking at people’s cards if they don’t hold them up. You’re supposed to do it.”
“Say,” said Margaret, “you know, I was thinking of Cecelia just the other day. She is Costa Rican, isn’t she?”
“By way of L.A., yeah.”
“I bet she would be interested in something. Where did I put that?”
And that was how Margaret supplied Tim with an excuse to call Cecelia. It was not that she hadn’t complied with Dr. Lionel Gift’s memo/request that she return her copy of his report to him, it was just that she had happened to Xerox it first.
46
So Soon
NORMALLY WHEN Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek bore good news, she bore it coolly, over the telephone, or in a memo. As a rule, the manner in which she delivered the news depended on the size of the grant. Only once before had she delivered it personally, and that was early in her career, when a proposal she had guided and helped write had won the university her first $250,000 grant. To mark that turning point in her fund-raising career (during the late, lamented days when SHE went to Washington, when Jack Parker was just a name attached to the University of Michigan) she had marched straight into the office of the president (who was gone now, to the University of Minnesota, fat lot of good that did her) and carolled, “A quarter million from NIH!” Later that very afternoon she had called the grant recipient and informed him.
Since then many six-figure sums had rolled through her office, and the receiving of grants had come to feel very much like buying new clothes—briefly invigorating, and certainly necessary, but never as thrilling as that very first Donna Karan with the Ferragamo pumps that matched perfectly, uncannily, as if they had been made for each other.
Nevertheless, Elaine was making her way across the snowy campus to Storrs Hall, where Dr. Bo Jones had his office, or, as Elaine preferred to think of it, his pen. Elaine was glad she had worn her SPF 15 moisturizer that morning, because a sudden blue sky, dry and brilliant, domed the campus and the thick, sugary covering of new snow on every building and branch, every cornice and curb and telephone wire and bicycle rack reflected and elaborated the sunlight until Elaine was almost blinded. After four or five steps, she took out her sunglasses with the UV protection coating and put them on. That was better. Now she could really appreciate how scintillating and lovely the world had become since she’d picked up her telephone twenty minutes before and heard the always exciting voice of Arlen Martin’s personal assistant say, “Miz Daubs-Jallanak? Mr. Martin on the line for you, honey.”
It was the last day of classes. Although Elaine was on a twelvemonth appointment, she was not quite immune to the combined fatigue and excitement of that fact. Indeed, the high point of Elaine’s life had been her four years of college at the University of Iowa, where she had divided her time between the Pi Kappa Phi house and the music building (her major had been voice). Her college career had come just on the heels of two years of student unrest, but the only thought Elaine had given that recent history was regret that the windows of the college bookstore, which had been repeatedly broken the year before, were so small that they couldn’t mount attractive displays. Elaine’s college world had been a smaller version of the world of the fifties Big Ten—parties, classes, Greeks, football games, and nice clothes. There were many people on the campus who wore rags, went barefoot, played the recorder in front of Old Capitol, handed out leaflets, and drove VW buses with slogans about sex painted on the sides, but Elaine had done them the favor of ignoring them, and now they were gone, and she had a perfectly intact and entirely positive college experience to look back upon: pajamas, popcorn, and dancemarathoning for charity in the sorority house, a yearly round of tutoring, classes, choir concerts and recitals over at the music building, the choir tour to Belgium and Norway, and, of course, her courtship by Dean, which had been better by far than the ensuing marriage. As Elaine crossed the campus, she bestowed her UV-protected gaze most frequently on undergraduate girls who reminded her of herself—careful of their appearance, feminine, hopeful, attentive to details like the cut of a collar, the size of an earring. These girls, she knew, had unexpected futures before them, but they were well equipped to handle the unexpected. A girl who made no mistakes about the right shade of lipstick would always land on her feet.
Dr. Bo’s pen was on the second floor of Storrs Hall, and the doctor was in, his back to the open door, pounding away at his computer, seemingly with his fists. Elaine raised her voice, as always with Dr. Bo, and shouted, “Dr. Jones! Dr. Jones!”
WHAT SHE looked like was a cardinal, the way a cardinal stood out red against the snow as it flitted from branch to branch. Dr. Bo was fond of snow, preferred cold weather to hot, preferred ice skating and skiing and snowshoeing in a nose-biting wind to any summertime sport. In fact, he had already begun the winter conditioning program that would prepare him for his trip to Tadzhikistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan. That was a sentence he’d lately included in his letters of application (still unanswered): “I am in excellent physical condition and have embarked upon a training program guaranteed to fit me for any potential hardships.” Just last night he had skied six miles to and from the campus after his wife had gone to bed.
Elaine took off her sunglasses and pulled off her leather gloves finger by finger. Dr. Bo pushed himself away from his computer, and she opened her red coat. Her suit was electric blue. The two together, the red against the blue, vibrated. When Dr. Bo looked away, at the white wall behind his desk, he saw an afterimage of her in green and purple.
She was grinning. She sat down on some books in a chair, grinning, and said, “Listen to this. Old Meats is saved! I found a donor who loved your idea about the museum, and is willing to fund the entire project, and all we have to do is name the museum after him!”
Without warning, rough tears came into Dr. Bo Jones’ eyes. He hadn’t been thinking much about Old Meats lately, having travelled far beyond that place already, but really, he was one of the few people on the campus who remembered Old Meats when it was bustling with activity, with white-coated, bloody-aproned meat science instructors who formed a tangible link between the animal on the hoof and the meat on the table. They were men of great strength and specific physical skills, who could fell an animal and bleed it and gut it and skin it, then show you the layers of fat and meat, the marbling that distinguished Grade A from prime. All the time the blood was flowing, they’d be talking. What to look for in a slaughter animal, signs of disease, the effects of various feeding regimens, breeds and varieties, even cooking techniques for different cuts of meat. They had no illusions, those men, about the cost of human life—it was high, and the fate of domesticated animals and plants was to pay it.
She said, “I knew you’d be excited!”
And he was! The displays leapt full-blown into his imagination—razorbacks hidden in the undergrowth, their tiny intelligent eyes glittering, the dark stinking hold of a Spanish galleon, crated sows squealing (there could easily be sound effects), the display of his own trophies, carried back from Tadzhikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan—
“… chickens,” she said.
Dr. Bo said, “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘I don’t suppose there is another museum in the country devoted to the history of chickens.’ ”
“The history of chickens?”
“Why, yes. That’s what the funding’s for. Old Meats is going to be turned into a chicken museum. I suppose that the plan is to celebrate the natural history of the chicken as well as the glory of modern chicken processing technology. The nation’s foremost chicken historian is coming this week to look over the proposed site.”<
br />
“That wasn’t our idea. Ag technology, with some hog dioramas—”
“Oh, Dr. Jones, I remember that! That was a very good first thought! And I surely did emphasize that when I wrote the proposal, but things have evolved since then.”
“You call a chicken museum ‘evolving’?”
“I do.” She tapped him on his tweed vest. “I do because that’s what we got the funding for. It happens to a lot of proposals. There are good ideas, lots of them, and then there are fundable ideas, fewer of those. Fundable ideas are better ideas. In this case, chickens are fundable, so chickens are a better idea, you see?”
No, Dr. Bo thought, he did not see.
DR. LIONEL GIFT WAS all set. His summer-weight suits were packed, as were his Egyptian cotton dress shirts, undershorts, and socks. He had a spare pair of glasses, a swimming costume, a silk robe, a hat with a wide brim. He had his laptop, his modem, his internal communications program. He had his tickets and his money.
As usual, his exams would be given out by his graduate assistants and graded by the university computer. These grades would then be added to those already on the computer from the midterm, tallied according to a statistical curve, and reported to the students. By then, Dr. Lionel Gift would have been in Costa Rica for over a week. Let it snow let it snow let it snow: He would not be here to see it, and that suited him perfectly.
He looked at his watch. The limo to the airport would arrive in ten minutes. He decided to make one more last-minute check of the premises. All electrical cords were unplugged. All faucets were turned off. The furnace was set at fifty-five degrees. Two lamps and a radio in the living room were set to turn on around dusk, and one in the bedroom was set to go on at 9:30, his customary bedtime. All the lamps and the radio were set to go off at 11:00 (what was more revealing than lights that stayed on all night?). The burglar alarm, with its digital recording of a pair of furiously barking rottweilers, was armed. In other words, all was well and good in the Gift manse, all the goods well protected against the insatiable desires of those who had not prospered in the legitimate economy and had cast their lot with the illegitimate one.
Everything considered, this was a semester that Dr. Lionel Gift was glad to see pass. While he himself had performed with his usual excellence and probity, the same could not be said of his colleagues. The entirely unauthorized dissemination of his confidential report, while it had not damaged his prospects for success (nothing ever did that) had hurt him, had perhaps hurt him deeply, for it had revealed on the part of his colleagues what Dr. Gift could only interpret as abiding envy of his success and importance. As indifferent as he meant to be to the opinions of others, he found that he was not. Of course he would never show such a thing, but—
Even Cates! Even a chemist so successful in receiving grants as Cates had read the report with unseemly interest rather than just handing it back without being asked! And Helen! Many years ago, he had served on the committee that granted Helen tenure, and he had judged her an intelligent and personable young woman, pretty but not too pretty, French but not too French, Italian but not too Italian. Why had she turned on him? he wondered. And she was rumored to be involved with Ivar Harstad himself, so perhaps her behavior reflected some sort of opinion Ivar shared? Ah, Dr. Gift could hardly bear to think about it, it shot so full of holes his long-standing estimation of how he was generally beloved on the campus.
Even though it had no effect on the larger picture (his meetings were already set up, and the TransNational and the Seven Stones people would be there to follow up on everything he said and did), the shock was still with him, the shock that so few of his colleagues, all men and women of the finest educations, lived in so unprincipled a manner. He, who himself upheld the most scrupulous indifference toward others’ fates, had not been able to quite overcome it, and so he felt doubly fortunate that the end of the semester afforded him the opportunity to get away. Down in Costa Rica, in his house there, he would certainly feel once more the pleasant knowledge that he was appreciated, and after all, that was enough for him.
As for his project, he had not allowed himself to underestimate the benighted forces who would, under the cover of “environmentalism,” advocate a retrograde localism, express a knee-jerk conservationist ethic, and resist the inevitable embrace of the market and the future. There were a few radicals who could not be moved. That was always a given. Most of the others felt real fear. While this was more a psychological problem than anything else, practical considerations made it imperative that such fears be soothed, and he had worked up a sympathetic manner for dealing with the fearful. Fear was contagious, though, and there was another, more pivotal group that had to be protected from it. This group was inclined to move forward, and simply harbored a few doubts. He had an argument for them that they could understand: All transitions are difficult, and progress sometimes does look very much like deterioration, but that is an illusion caused by not fully embracing progressive ideas and methods. The solution is to redouble efforts and commitment. A fourth group he didn’t have to worry about, though regrettably smaller in Costa Rica than in other places, they were entirely on his side already. This group fully understood the bottomest of the bottom lines—with revenues from forestry, fisheries, cattle, and tourism inexplicably gone, declining, or levelling off (Dr. Gift’s own projections were proving rather optimistic, though he attributed that to the mistakes of geologists and forest and fisheries experts), growth could not be sustained without the exploitation of something new. This gold seam was an unlooked-for bonus that would keep that line on Gift’s graph shooting upward for some undefined period of time, and really, that was what mattered most to those with the firmest grasp on reality.
He saw the limo round the corner up the street. Though the pavement had been plowed, it was still icy, and the vehicle fishtailed a bit as it entered Dr. Gift’s street. Actually, it was not a limo, it was merely a minivan. Somehow these two things coming together—the sight of the van fishtailing on the ice and the recognition of the disparity between what the van was called and what it was—infused Dr. Lionel Gift with the sense that really he need not return to this place, that, if he chose, he could be walking out of his house for the last time. It was a remarkable thought, most importantly, a principled thought—he had spent considerable time and money on his house, and yet he was more or less indifferent toward it. He turned before picking up his bag and surveyed the front hall and the living room. Comfortable, masculine, decorated to resemble an exclusive men’s club, but what attached him here? He smiled. He picked up his bag and his computer and stepped out onto the porch, careful to stay within the exit parameters allowed by the burglar alarm.
WHEN KERI OPENED the door, she saw Bob’s neck crane to look around her. She knew then that he saw the empty room behind her, the made beds, the picked-up floors. But he said, anyway, “Diane here?”
“Hey! No, sorry.” After a pause, Keri felt herself whine, “I know she’ll be sorry she missed you.”
“Well, I just brought by some stuff. You know. She left it. I figured she’d want it sometime.”
He dropped the bag of stuff by the threshold, and Keri picked it up and set it inside the door. She couldn’t help noticing that the stuff wasn’t all that important—no clothing or underwear or anything personal. A toothbrush. A notebook without much in it. A novel. A package of blank computer disks. Bob sighed. Considering that he was the one who called it quits, Keri thought he looked awfully depressed. He said, “I guess you don’t have any classes right now?”
“No, I’m done for the semester. I mean, except for exams.” She continued to smile. They both knew that there had been plenty of those gab sessions that girls get into, and that therefore she knew plenty more about him than she was letting on. He interpreted her smile, which she meant to be encouraging and sympathetic, as amused.
“Well,” he said.
“I’ll be sure she gets this stuff,” she said.
“Okay.”
??
?Thanks.”
“Yeah. Thank you.” He turned.
“You want to come in and wait for her?”
“Sort of.”
She stepped back from the door.
He said, “What do you think?”
“About what?”
“About what I should do next.”
“Go home for Christmas and ask some girls out.”
“Oh. I’m not going home for Christmas.”
“You’re not? Why not?” Now she felt genuinely sorry for him.
“Oh, my job, you know.”
“Then get somebody to do your job for a day or two and go home. That’s what I think.”
The funny thing was, he’d always noticed how pretty she was, but only after a while. He said, “Okay, well, there’s the stuff. Bye.”
“Bye.”
He turned.
After four steps, he turned back. She was just shutting the door. He said, “Say, don’t tell her how weird I’m acting, all right? I mean, I broke up with her, and I still think it’s the best thing to do.”
“I won’t tell.”
And she wouldn’t. But she knew that he wished that she would.
DR. CATES DID NOT, as a rule, develop personal relationships with his undergraduate students, which was why he was surprised to see one of them, or someone who said that he was one of them, standing outside his office when he came in about noon to pick up his mail. Dr. Cates was taking a rare day off. His son, Daniel, wanted to go sledding. Finding himself on the horns of a familiar dilemma—sledding was dangerous but Dr. Cates did not want Daniel to learn fear from him—Dr. Cates resolved it in his usual way. The sled was in the back of the car and Daniel was waiting for him in the front seat. Dr. Cates estimated that his way of safeguarding Daniel by going along with him whenever there might be a risk would last at most another year—Daniel was eight, and already beginning to chafe under Dr. Cates’ restrictions.