Jane Smiley - Early Warning

—

CLAIRE WHISPERED, “I don’t think my mother knows that such a thing exists.”

“They’re very open about it.”

“Henry always acted like he’s never found the right girl.”

“Your mother told me that no one is boring enough.”

“How wrong she is,” said Claire.

It was only about nine o’clock; the ceiling of the bedroom was still flowing with light, like the surface of a pond. Paul shifted her head on his shoulder, and she said, “I feel like my whole life is being readjusted.”

“He’s thirty-eight years old. I can’t believe no one thought of this possibility before now.”

“Remember when he brought Jacob to our house for Christmas?”

“Jacob has kids. Whatever he was thinking about Jacob, Jacob wasn’t thinking that about him.”

“But he was gorgeous, I must say.”

“Now we know,” said Paul.

Claire hoisted herself onto her elbow and stared at her husband. She would have expected him to be more outraged and to say something about how maybe Henry shouldn’t spend time with their boys anymore. She would have expected him not even to shake Philip’s hand, or to put on a rubber glove before doing so. But he had been in a good mood all the way over from Des Moines, enjoying the drive and not complaining. She wondered if she was going to have to change her perception of Paul as well as to continue her marriage to him. She said, “You don’t want to go to a hotel?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Paul.

But he made no move toward her. They both lay quietly, and then he said, in his doctory voice, “You know what they’re doing, right?”

She hated to admit, “Not exactly.”

Paul shifted against her, and said, “Well, I do, and being near it doesn’t turn me on.”

Claire said, “Okay.” The room was now almost dark, which had a way of magnifying the significance of the silence from the other end of the hall.

Paul’s voice rose a bit. He said, “I mean, you really didn’t know about this?”

“I really didn’t. Did you?”

He moved away from her slightly, not as if he did so knowingly, more as if he suddenly felt uncomfortable. She said, “It’s only ten after nine. Let’s go to a hotel. We can afford it.”

But at the hotel they had a fight — not about Henry, or the boys, or what Paul called “her behavior”; it was about where they had eaten dinner with Henry and Philip. Why would you come to Chicago and not eat Italian? Or at least go for a steak? Why had she just smiled and agreed when Philip suggested Greek food? Paul hated Greek food — too many olives and strange-tasting cheeses, and what was the meat in a gyro? It tasted repellent, and smelled worse.

Claire said, mildly, “You could have said something.”

“Why do I always have to sound like the spoilsport? You just leave it to me, and you agree with me — you picked at yours and only ate bread.”

Claire tried to keep her voice down. “Can’t we try something new every so often?” Since the departure of Dr. Martin Sadler, almost a year ago now, she had cultivated a soothing manner.

“I’m over forty years old. I’m from Philadelphia. I’ve tried everything I intend to try. If you come to Chicago, you do so for a reason. You know that. You said you were looking forward to a steak. You betray me. I’m always the bad guy.”

Claire apologized.

Paul said, “Don’t apologize. That makes it worse.”

Claire put her pillow over her face and lay silently on her back while Paul prepared again for bed, as he had done earlier at Henry’s — brushing his teeth, washing and drying his feet, lubricating his eyes, adjusting the covers so that they wouldn’t weigh too heavily on him, setting his pillows carefully against his body. Since the end of her affair with Dr. Sadler, she had thought over and over of telling Paul, who still didn’t seem to have found out about it, even though he mentioned Dr. Sadler and his brother every so often (“They’re doing well enough; I guess pediatric foot problems are commoner than I realized”). Times like these, she thought it would be a kindness to tell him, so that he could understand who was the real bad guy. Or gal.

—

IT WAS COLD — first of May and hardly above freezing — in fact, there had been a frost the day before yesterday, and Joe expected another one. He was walking along the grass verge he had planted above the creek. It was thick and tough in spite of the bad weather, and the creek was high, too, up to thirty feet across and five to seven feet deep, muddy and a little foamy. He had sprayed this field with atrazine on March 30, and expected the whole thing to be planted in corn by now, but it had been too wet. He had fourteen days left to get his planting done, and he was fretful.

If you farmed nine hundred acres, leaving about two hundred fallow every year (and there weren’t all that many farmers Joe knew who still did that), you had to love atrazine. It was cheap, it was safe, it did a wonderful job. You sprayed the field before you planted, and the foxtail and the plantain and the dockweed just didn’t come up. No one had to walk down the rows with a hoe, whacking at the stems of the weeds, using the corner of the hoe to drag out as much of the root as possible. When they’d had Jake and Elsa (admittedly, long, long ago) cultivating had been fun, at least for the youthful him, sitting on Jake’s back, his fingers twined in the harness as the two horses pulled the cultivator. But riding a tractor was not fun, and it did disturb the soil much more than the horse-drawn cultivator had done. And then along came atrazine, and the manufacturer sent out a rep, and everyone from all around gathered at the feed store and watched the fellow drink a glass of the stuff, burp, laugh, and say, “Mmmm.” Of course Joe knew he was drinking water, but the demonstration was somehow effective. And then there were the magic words “no till,” words he’d never expected to hear in farm country. Lois was careful about the well — for weeks after he applied the stuff, she brought water home from the market. He didn’t object, just as he didn’t object when she started saying grace before every meal (the first time, he and Minnie had exchanged a glance, but soon they got used to the “dear Lord” and the “amen”).

He had given in on the sheep idea and found Jesse four Suffolks— black faces, black legs, curious and frisky. Jesse cared for them responsibly, though without much interest, but Joe himself went out to see them ten times a day and laughed at their antics. He’d bought them from an ambitious 4-H’er down in Burlington whose brother was dedicated to Berkshire hogs. Walter had preferred Berkshires; Joe didn’t remember them as being so graceful, ears pricked, belly tucked up, feet dainty white in spite of their massive size. Thinking of them and frustrated about planting, Joe was almost ready to build a confinement barn and go into the hog business — breed them, far-row them, feed them for six weeks, and sell them to someone else to finish. Forty-two days equaled fifty pounds each, and off they went, still rather cute. Ten sows might produce three or four litters each in the course of a year and a half. It made him smile to think of it.

The habit of worrying was a hard one to break. His corn yield had been as high as he’d ever seen it — a hundred bushels an acre, with the soybeans almost forty-five — that was almost thirty thousand bushels of corn and about eighteen thousand bushels of beans he had carted to the grain elevator. And somehow, against all probability and history, there had been a market. Minnie had said to him, “Well, if land is up to fifteen hundred an acre”—and it seemed to be, according to all the farmers sitting around the café in Denby—“there must be a reason.” Walter would have shaken his head and said, “No, no reason. Never made sense and never will,” but Joe was beginning to believe that there was a reason and there was a market. Maybe it was true, as many farmers said, that the middlemen — the grain companies and the traders on the exchanges — were getting the longer end of the stick, but the stick was getting fatter, too. What was the world population now? More than three and a half billion, and no sign of slowing down — some book Lois had seen called The Population Bomb or The Population Explosion predicted widespread famine. Or, Joe thought, the arrival of an era when farmers might get paid for what they produced.