Jane Smiley - Early Warning

Paul smiled, but then he said, “I hadn’t met your brother then.”

“Joe is a farmer, not landed gentry.”

“I mean Frank.”

“Frank has plenty of money.” Claire meant that he didn’t need any more, but she saw immediately that what Paul meant was that Frank was to be simultaneously mistrusted and emulated. She sighed. She had come to think that there was a golden mean for money. Around that mean, which Claire estimated to be about five thousand a month, you worried less than if you had too little, and less than if you had too much. There was space in your inner life for other interests.

She was thinking of this because of Eliot. Eliot was older than Paul — fifty-five, he said — and balder, too — his well-shaped pate had a neatly trimmed pepper-and-salt fringe. He talked more than Paul, but he never talked about money, never talked about his children or his ex-wife, never talked about what people should or could be doing that they were not at present doing (one of Paul’s favorite topics). He did not talk about hippies or weather. He talked about books. His favorite phrase was “Did you ever read,” as in “Did you ever read Auden’s ‘Stop All the Clocks’?”; “Did you ever read ‘The Rocking Horse Winner,’ that’s by Lawrence?”; “Say, did you ever read ‘Bitter-Sweet’?” And then, “ ‘Ah, my dear angry Lord, / Since thou dost love, yet strike; / Cast down, yet help afford; / Sure I will do the like.’ ”

She’d known Eliot now for six weeks, since she’d met him at the car wash on Hickman. He’d been carrying a book then, too, reading while waiting for his car to emerge. She’d gotten his attention by saying she’d read that book —The Golden Bowl —though of course she never had. It was by her bed now, however, along with two of his favorites, The Good Soldier and The Plague. Just last night, Paul had said, “Why are you reading those books?”

“They’re supposed to be good.”

“Who says?”

She almost told him.

Now he got up and went over to the thermometer. “Ninety-seven in the shade. Gray should come in. I’m going to close down the house. We need to relax and cool off for half an hour before ingesting any food.”

She was not going to sleep with Eliot — he was much too old and reminded her of teachers she’d had at North Usherton High. Besides, Dr. Sadler had to remain solitary and pristine in his position as her great love. He would be thirty-six now, and according to Paul was married. Another thing to be grateful for — that he had vanished at the apex of his beauty. But she would keep her date for coffee with Eliot tomorrow at ten. She would have the last chapters of The Golden Bowl finished, too, and they would discuss them intelligently, just as if they were in London, or at least in New York City, and not in Des Moines.

Claire picked up her towel. Paul said, “It’s all very well to be sentimental about your family and about the farm, but you have to be realistic, too. You understand that, don’t you?” And then he stepped closer. “Don’t you?” She nodded, the way she always did.

—

TO SAVE ON heating oil, Janet and Marla had closed the door of her room and wrapped themselves in blankets. Marla was in the chair, Janet on the bed. They were reading The Madwoman of Chaillot , their third session, and they were nearing the end of the first act. Two of Marla’s plays had been put on, the best one, a one-act called Cedar Rose Park , by the Berkeley Rep. She went to the Temple with Janet every Sunday, but she complained about it and swore she was going to write a play about Reverend Jones called Loudmouth.

Though she didn’t like the Giraudoux play very much, Marla always wanted to finish. She read, “Dans les trois cent cinquante. Nous n’enverrons qu’aux chefs.” Her pronunciation had gotten better, but it wasn’t perfect, so Janet repeated the line slightly more fluently, then waited while Marla pondered it for a moment before translating it as “In the three hundred and fifty. We will not send the heads.” This was correct as far as Janet was concerned, so she nodded and Marla read the next line, “Qui va les distribuer? Surtout pas le sourd-muet! On lui rend en moyenne quatre-vingt-dix-neuf enveloppes sur cent!” Marla was now twenty-four, and seriously worried that she was getting too old to make her way in France. She was to turn twenty-five at the end of March, so she planned to leave by the first of February, to take advantage of the two months of her remaining youth when she arrived in Paris. She had gotten her passport; her savings amounted to $1,498.76. She planned to put aside another two hundred in the two months before she left, and with luck, she would find a wealthy Frenchman to take her on when she got there. This aspect of the whole thing Janet could not help her with, but she had no doubt that the willing Frenchman would present himself — Marla was as careful of her appearance as any Frenchwoman Janet had ever seen, and much more friendly. She corrected Marla’s translation, and Marla went on to the next line. One thing they had done in the summer was to translate Cedar Rose Park into French — not writing it down, but saying it aloud. Marla was proud; she did not want to be less than perfect from the moment of her arrival.

The door opened, and Lucas slipped into the room. Marla kept reading, but Janet made a smooch and waved him over to the bed. Then she did what she could never resist doing, which was to press herself into Lucas as tightly as she could. His skin tonight was chilly enough to make her shiver. When Marla finished reading, Janet said, “You are cold, baby.” He kissed her, kicked off his shoes, pulled one edge of the blanket around himself, and said, “Keep going. I like to hear it.”

Marla read, “Vous, Fabrice, vous me reconduisez. Si, si, vous allez venir. Vous êtes encore tous pâle. J’ai de la vieille chartreuse. J’en bois un verre tous les ans, et l’année dernière j’ai oublié. Vous le boirez.” Janet corrected her pronunciation of boirez. Her translation was excellent. Janet nodded. Lucas took the book out of her hand, stared at it for a moment, then shook his head. “Makes no sense to me.” He gave the book back to her.

Marla said, “Really, Lucas, you should act. You look good, you don’t give a shit about performing in front of an audience, and you’ve got style.”

Lucas shrugged.

“Start now. You’re perfect. Pisses me off, you wasting your talents while the rest of us work our asses flat.”

Lucas laughed. “Show me when that happens.”

Marla read the next line. Cat and Marla disagreed about how Janet should handle Lucas.

Marla said he had stage presence, which was rare in a drummer, too bad he had to sit at the back, because the lead singer ought to have a bag over his head, he was so ugly. Lucas was way out ahead of all of them, but he didn’t have a lick of ambition, “and that seems fine to you now, but give it ten years,” she often said.

Cat, who had given up all her acting ambitions and was going to community college in marketing, had a list as long as your arm of musicians who thought they were going to hit the jackpot, and of course never did. She thought Janet should get Lucas to go for his GED and then learn something like accounting or library science. She said, “He smiles, white people aren’t afraid of him — he should make the best of what he’s got.”

Janet turned the page. Almost the end of the first act. Lucas leaned against her while they kept reading, correcting, translating. By the time they were finished, Janet thought he was asleep, but Marla wasn’t going to allow that. She tossed down her book and jumped out of her blanket. She went over to the bookcase, stared for a moment, then chose a volume. She dropped it in Lucas’s lap, and he sat up a little bit. She said, “Let’s try it.”