Jane Smiley - Early Warning

The evening of the tenth day, Janet talked them into going over to the Rive Gauche and trying her favorite Vietnamese restaurant, a cheap place where she and some of her fellow students went every couple of weeks. Richie and Michael hated the food, Andy hated the toilette , which was a hole in the ground in a room with the lightbulb burned out. Frank thought that Janet used her chopsticks in a superior way after showing off about the menu. Then she wanted to take the Métro rather than a taxi, and Richie and Michael thought they would use the map and walk — either down the Quai d’Orsay and across the Pont de l’Alma, or over the Pont Neuf and then down the street where the tumbrels had rolled, taking the condemned to the guillotine. Janet said, “That would be the only thing you two know about Paris,” and Andy said, “Isn’t it a little dangerous?” as if the two of them could not take on any muggers in the city of Paris. Look at them — they even looked threatening. So they ended up walking, freezing to death. Back at the hotel, Frank went to bed, and got up a couple of hours later, and there was Janet in the living room of the suite, wrapped in a blanket and hunched over a book. When he came in, she glanced up and then turned her whole body away.

“That’s nice,” he said.

“Don’t take it personally, all right?” But she sounded irritated that he had even walked into a room he was paying three hundred a night for.

“I think I will,” he said.

“Fine, be my guest.” She lifted her book slightly. It was a Proust, in French, Sodome et Gomorrhe , which he thought was both shocking and pretentious. He must have harrumphed, because she looked up and scowled, and he reflected that she had always preferred Lillian and Arthur. In their family, she was a boarder who deigned to be supported in luxury, but she gave back nothing except a sort of I-told-you-so perfection of academic performance that was showing off rather than pleasing. He said, “What’s eating you?”

“Well, since you ask, I can’t stand how you elbow Mom out of the way every time you are walking along. It’s very rude. Men here actually have manners.”

“Oh, do they?” said Frank. “I didn’t notice.”

“No,” said Janet, “you didn’t.” She slammed her book shut. “But they notice you. I watch their heads turn.”

“Your mother has been talking a lot.”

“So what? She’s interested. Not all disdainful, like you, or just completely heedless, like Michael and Richie, though I admit Richie looks around every so often.”

Frank said, “When did you turn into such a little bitch?”

Janet’s face registered shock, and it was true that Frank had never called her a name before — he mostly left the discipline to Nedra and maintained his distance. But she was not intimidated. She said, “About the time I realized that you spend every single minute of your working day stoking the war machine and trying to figure out how to slaughter Vietnamese peasants more quickly and efficiently.” Her mouth snapped shut, but then she had another thought, and said, “And profitably.”

“Thank you, Joan Baez, for your input.”

“I take that as a compliment.”

Frank said, “We don’t call it the defense industry for no reason, you know. You get to sit around day after day, whining about how you don’t like this and you don’t like that, and you’re safe to do it. Do you think that the Vietnamese don’t want to defend themselves? You think they want to be communists and a client state of the Red Chinese? You think Ho Chi Minh is a nice, liberal person who is going to say to those who fought him, ‘Oh, honey, so sorry we didn’t agree, just go home and plant some rice’? This is what happens when one group of people wants to conquer the other — they move in, they slaughter the chieftains of the village, or whatever they’re called, and they put the young boys into the army. I won’t say what they do to the girls. Then they go on to the next village to do it again. That’s how human beings operate. Right here in France, they’ve done it more than once, in spite of the crème Chantilly”—he pronounced this quite nicely—“and the haute couture. Maybe because of it.”

“That’s not our business,” said Janet. “Anyway, they were chased out of Vietnam, and it wasn’t our business to take over from them.”

“So, I take it, you would drive past a family being lined up and shot, and just step on the gas because it isn’t your business?” He thought he had her.

But she said, “When did you ever stop to help anyone? Remember that couple by the side of the Turnpike outside of Newark ten years ago? She looked eight months pregnant, and he was struggling with the tire. Remember that?”

Frank must have looked blank. She said, “I don’t think you even noticed. I did. Mom did, but you just stepped on the gas.”

“Your mother noticed?”

“She put her hand on your arm, and she pointed, and you just shook her off.”

Frank stared at her. She was not a pretty girl, but she was worth looking at — what the French called jolie laide , in fact. How much credit could he take that she had developed character? But he said, “I don’t believe you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I am more observant than both of you.”

“I’m not saying that you didn’t see them.”

Frank walked over to the bar, opened it, and took out a beer. The door to the corridor was to the left, and he had his robe and slippers on. He could walk out and put this argument to an end right now. But he snapped the lid off the beer and turned around. He said, “Who got me started in my career? Who set me up reading documents seized from the Germans after the war? Who taught me how things work? Do you know?” She opened her mouth, but he interrupted her. “Your divine uncle Arthur, that’s who. What do you think Mr. Perfect Love thinks of imperialism? Of breaking a few eggs for the omelette? Of putting a few peasants through the meat grinder if the sausage belongs to us?”

Her scowl was deep and furious, and about twenty years old — the same scowl she had produced as a baby. He stepped up to her and grabbed her hands. When she tried to pull them away, he opened them out flat and said, “You look, Miss Priss. You take a look at his hands when you visit next, and you take a whiff, because there’s plenty of blood on them.”

She jerked away from his grasp and said, “Why would I believe you? I’ve known you were an asshole my whole life.”

But her face was white. And what that meant was that she would never trust her instincts again, and if she encountered love, she wouldn’t know it. And then he thought, Well, why should she be any different from anyone else?

—

WHEN THEY HAD TORN DOWN Rolf’s house years ago — seven, to be exact — Rosanna had not objected or said a word about her brother besides “Well, he took after the Vogels, but the rest of us were Augsbergers to the core” (Austrian rather than Prussian). Joe put off telling her that he and John had sold the property until she began to press him about what he was going to plant in that field — and why would she care? He always planted either soybeans or corn these days. But one Saturday in March, he took Jesse over to her place for lunch, and she said, “Jesse, you know how your grandpa and I knew that your father was going to be a great farmer?”

Jesse shook his head.

“When he was sixteen years old, he grew his own hybrid seed, and the next year he planted it, and he got, oh, I think ten bushels per acre more than your grandfather. Well, your grandfather was fit to be tied.” She turned to Joe. “You don’t experiment much anymore.”

“They do that at the ag stations, Ma.”