Moo by Jane Smiley

Author:Jane Smiley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780307805294
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

42

Leben und Arbeit

EVERY DAY, Dean Jellinek had to dig a little deeper to haul up the remaining glow from his courtship by the Final Four corporations who had vied for the privilege of granting him not exactly, or even close to, the million dollars everyone on the campus thought he had gotten. It was a habit he got into—when he sat down at his computer in the morning, the first thing he did was run his hands over the keyboard (it was a new computer, one he had bought with much of the first installment of the money, a computer powerful enough to crunch all the numbers he was contracted to generate in the next year, five months, two weeks, and four days). Running his hands over the keyboard reminded him how enthusiastic all four corporations had been, and that reminder gave him enough confidence to call up the program he was modifying to receive his data. He did not have any data yet, which was okay, because he hadn’t perfected his program. He spent many hours every day perfecting his program. Had it not been for that remaining glow, Dean Jellinek would have been in despair: As a longtime computer nerd, he knew that, for him, perfecting programs was what watching television was for others—a mindless activity that promised pleasure, lasted for hours, and left him feeling like an old cigarette butt. He knew this because when he went home at night, he watched everything on the TV from the nightly news with Tom Brokaw to David Letterman almost without looking away from the screen.

Dean Jellinek was a hard-working, hard-playing, hard-driving sort of guy, outwardly balding but possessed of an internal crewcut stiff as the bristles on a wire brush. Only once before in his life had he endured a period like this one, and that was in the early months of his marriage to Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek, when he was beset by second thoughts and he knew she was, too. The signs were all the same: Every morning, sometimes late, sometimes early, but always whenever he could no longer resist, Hal Samuels, the R and D man from Western Egg and Milk Commodities, would call him up and ask him how it was going, and he would say that it was going fine. “Give me some idea,” Hal would say, “something I can tell the board,” and Dean would give him some idea—zero to sixty in five seconds, a line drive to deepest center field, a sky hook from the center line, a double eagle over the water hazard, a seventy-yard touchdown run, a slap shot between the goalie’s legs. After trading enough sports analogies, Hal and Dean were both reassured, and both felt, in some obscure way, that information had been exchanged. But really it was just the same as it had been with Elaine—honey, I’ve been thinking about you, honey, how are you, honey, have you been thinking about me, honey, last night was great, didn’t you think so, too, to which he would answer, good, fine, yes, and yes, as warmly as he could.

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