Q: What about the third party?
He didn’t even know he was one. Franklin was more self-sufficient than I would ever be. It colored his conversation—that inappropriate bravado, the ellipses of a person too long talking to himself. I saw him charm cashiers, elicit from news vendors long stories of their boyhoods, wield phone-devotion over who knows how many fellow alums, even—how could I fail to see it?—ask anonymous librarians out to seafood breakfast. Of the scores who unrequitedly counted him among their friends, he must have had a genuine confidant or two. But Todd stuck to only one other man I knew: the only man on Manhattan more alone than he.
I was the woman who had brought him, however humble, the contents of Dr. Ressler’s file. That was enough to earn me visiting privileges. And visiting, up to the moment when I had the history of art etched onto my eye with Dürer precision, sufficed to show that Franklin’s days of socializing had ended with the B.A. He’d hinted as much over our first date: the look that came over him at the piped music, the defensive posture he unconsciously assumed as we stepped into the street, even his stoic suggestions for quotes. Franklin’s favorite take on companionship came from Melville. While survival might force one into bedfellowship with a Queequeg or two, “truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.”
NORTH EAST WEST SOUTH
Q: How did he respond to the news?
The same way Franklin responded to all news. He clipped my announcement and added it to his collage. After the day in Brueghel’s wheatfields and night lying alongside Tuckwell’s death grin, I stayed away from MOL for two weeks. After making the declaration, my conscience didn’t even allow me to call. Predictably, Todd did not call me either during that period, not even to see what was up. Nor did he come to the branch, although we were just blocks away. His signal was always the rich, ambiguous, low wavelengths of silence.
I wanted to move out without profit, to get by happily alone, assuming the worst case. In fact, the prospect of solitary evening meals, putting anything I wanted on the radio, warming the linen with my own legs was all I hoped for. But after two weeks, I had to deliver my news. The more I tried to ignore my need to notify the MOL-men of my decision, the crazier I became to see them. I was consumed by outlandish fear; their suite, in which nothing had happened for years, might have gone up overnight in smoke. Or perhaps the antique bivalve elevator had snapped. Perhaps Todd, fired with dissertation at last, had given notice. Perhaps Ressler, so long in the process, had dissolved.
On the first day in November, after two weeks of determinedly not thinking about the two of them—fifteen days, to paraphrase Todd’s favorite joke, but who’s counting?—I could hold out no longer. I had done nothing at all that day. My contribution to the molecule’s three-billion-year attempt to name itself was exactly nil. I’d had one request all afternoon, for an indifferent statistic, and had directed the questioner to the PAIS. “The what?” Pointing out the table where we kept the service was not enough. My patron looked aghast at the thought of combing the binders herself. I bit my lip and did the lookup for her. And as I flipped through the cutaway grand canyon of back issues, I remembered how arbitrarily Franklin had first descended upon me with his plea for information, a difference that might make things different. Pathetic, pitiable, wonderfully smorgasbord, his insisting that an unknown man had once done something worthy of print, on no stronger evidence than the man’s face creases and his command of diction.
Remembering how furious Todd’s italic name had made me, I needed so badly to see him, talk to him, tell him my irreversible step, that I did what I’d never done in all my years at the branch: I left early. I left Mr. Scott to field any residual Oscars, walked down to the warehouse, and buzzed my private signal. The door barked without a word, and I rode up in the accordioned freight hauler, blessing the winch-and-chicken-cage for still going through its paces. Jimmy Steadman greeted me at the top of the shaft, having just punched out. He shook his head sadly and said, “I sort of hoped you’d outgrown this place.”
“Why, Uncle Jim?” I asked, touching him on the arm as we swapped spots. Everything made me happy—the elevator, the cartons of three-part paper, this prematurely old man.
“Because one of these days, these electronic brains are gonna launch Operation Rude Awakening.” He pushed his glasses up the slope of his varicose nose. “You don’t want to be around then. You won’t want to admit knowing any of us.” Jimmy waved good night and swung the iron lever around its semicircle. The grate swung shut, the car descended, and I was alone in a silence so great I could hear it coursing in my ears.
Franklin was in the cafeteria, taking his time before commencing his share of the GNP. Dropping to my knees like a recruit in basic training, I crawled unnoticed to where my consolation sat. Only when I lowed did Frank rock upright, surprised but not frightened by another sentience in the room. Seeing it was me and not a dazed seven-point elk wandering down from Canada, he laughed explosively, grabbed my head in his arms, drew it to him, and nuzzled my neck. This time, no crossed choreography. “I’ll teach you to stay away so long,” he growled, shaking me by the rib cage and sinking his teeth into my shoulder. The man was unreformable. But from that moment, visa granted, our way of being with one another changed. From then on, we could not be in the same room without resorting to the etymology of touch.
I rabbit-punched my way out of his rib-grip and straightened. Fighting to keep the guilty triumph out of my voice, I said, “It’s been an eventful two weeks. I’m making a move. Looking for my own apartment.”
Todd brightened vicariously. “That’s great!” he shouted, cuffing me again by the waist. Then, realizing, he whispered gingerly, “Isn’t it?”
I looked at him and decided. “Yes,” I said. “I think it will be.”
Todd turned back to his notebook, and for a minute I thought he hadn’t understood. When he spoke, I saw that he knew everything, even the part he played in my decision. “We must make sure both of you get through this all right.” As if he were my agent, manager, chargé d’affaires. He asked me a hundred of his patented questions that evening. Was I ready? What did I hope to get from it? Would I go on seeing Tuckwell? Did I have a bad conscience? Did it help to talk? This last, at least, I answered unequivocally. Despite the attention he lavished on me, our new intimacy, he looked at me the way he had stared at that Vermeer Head of a Girl: urgent, quizzical, separated by centuries. He listened to every detail of my last five years. And it all went into his new pet journal.
Q: What was he so intent on?
As we talked, Todd labored with colored pens, scissors, glue, and bits of postcard. The pages he made were so full of hue and texture I thought they must be visual studies. When I caught sight of reproductions of two paintings we had seen at the Met, I thought he’d at last begun the postponed apprentice piece he’d once described as the bane of a decent computer operator’s existence. I imagined our private art tour had at last brought him to it. “I see I’m not the only one setting off,” I said. Even as I clamped down, I couldn’t hide my happiness. But Franklin looked up, confused.
“Oh, you mean this.” He gestured defensively at his handiwork. “Scrap, actually. Stupid.” He flipped a few pages, skeptically. “Here we are. Four weeks ago. Old enough for aesthetic distance, hmm? Well then. You explain this to me.” He held the page open for examination. At the top, he’d emblazoned the date in parodic gothic. Below was no dissertation, no visual study. It was a base of news copy run into a Rauschenberg combine, one of those bric-a-brac assemblages that accumulate outside the grottos of Spanish saints. Prominent, en face, he had pasted two front-page columns, set in the same typeface: “Missile Issue: 2 Perceptions,” and “America’s Cup to Australia II as 132-Year U.S. Reign Ends.” The two headlines were indistinguishable in emphasis, except that one had a secondary head claiming “Each Feels Other Holds the Advantage.”
“Exactly ho
w they appeared in the paper. All I’ve added is the paint job. We’re to read them both as news, although only the boat race passes the novelty test. And look! This one was wedged in the middle, begging to be overlooked: ‘Beirut Premier Offers to Resign in Truce Accord.’” He spoke in the same voice that had whispered the secrets of canvas in my ear. But the accents of incomprehension, which in front of the wheatfield had ached to take in, applied to Beirut—in light of subsequent events— registered only bitterness at being held forever in the dark. Event was clearly there only to carry the ads. He had worked other message-threads into the collage: “Slow Start for Weinberger in Peking,” “Nicaraguan Rebels Fail in Effort to Seize Large Town in the North.” But the text trim, now smoke screen, debased to diversion, was just the thin excuse for a profusion of visual quotes—Rembrandt, Caravaggio, his own inked labyrinth.
We sat, Todd cradling my upper arm, rubbing it gently to revive feeling. At length, he relaxed into my arms and kissed me where the collarbone turns to sternum. He came up without apology and asked, “What would it feel like to wake up to an evening edition finally announcing that something definitive had at last happened? Something real?”
No matter what my failings as a mate, woman, daughter, or friend, I’ve always held up my end of a conversation. I answered, “November first. Pompeii buried by Vesuvius. Lisbon destroyed by quake; sixty thousand die. First H-bomb explodes at Eniwetok. Jan O’Deigh walks out on lover, unprovoked.”
“You’ve landed fortuitously in my lap. A woman who already knows what’s happened today.” He looked at the cafeteria clock. “And here we are, with two hours left.” He took both my hands between his. “I’ve been very rude. I’m sorry. I know where you must be, just now.”
He was obligated to complete something before the day shift returned. But before he set to work and I returned to what was no longer my apartment, Todd showed me one more page of that new journal, the destruction of his careful clippings under rococo stuccowork. He explained why he had given up on the text, buried it under a wedding cake of filigree. “Most people who pull apart the Times aren’t looking for the millennium; they just want to explain the roundup in their corner of the panel. Everyone has his own port of entry: Business Day, Style, Science Times, the classifieds. Mine used to be page one. Quidnunc, ambulance chaser. But that was last month. You get tired of that. Look here.”
He retrieved a story, buried alive under anatomical drawings so expert I was shocked to realize he had drawn them himself. This page of his belles heures carried as background “Youth Advises House on Computer Crime.” Teen tells Committee on Science and Technology how he tapped into secret records stored on mainframes at Sloan-Kettering and Los Alamos. These ultrasensitive systems still used the passwords they were shipped with, unashamed log-ins like “system” and “test.” I could not read the story, as it was lost in vineyard rows creeping up a craggy Rhineland castlescape. Todd paraphrased, barely concealing his delight in the child’s ingenuity, the celebration of American frontier. He recited half from memory, “When asked at what point he questioned the ethics of his actions, he answered, ‘Once the FBI knocked on the door.’”
Todd smiled crookedly in the direction of his own mainframe. “The problem with living in the land of self-reliance is that a fellow has to do everything himself.” I look at the artwork again tonight, yellowed by two years. Reportage transcribed to raw color, Franklin’s latest attempt to bring newslight into the abandoned lunch-room. Shortly afterwards, this variant too broke off in favor of a new one. Operation Rude Awakening.
Todd grabbed his workbook from my hands, flipped violently through the pages. “Lots of fertile stuff here. Two hundred marines killed by truck bomb. Invasion of Caribbean nation. Big-time visual potential.” Under his thumb, the illuminated calendar shot past like those children’s animation tricks. “After a little time for aesthetic distance,” he breathed. “Do you think,” he turned casually, “there is something in the air?”
Q: Is there something in the air?
I asked him what he meant, but he took me to him again, half-tickling, half-measuring the flesh of my back. We had been on hugging terms forever; I’d never touched anyone before. He walked me to the elevator, waited, deposited me into the box, planted the softest, most fertile kiss cleanly on my lips, and pulled the grate shut as if tucking me into bed. But before I threw the lever to descend, he called out, “What day is today?”
Q: What day is today?
My answer was immediate. The day I at last left home. November first. Perpetual madness. I called out, halfway down the shaft, “All Saints’.”
IN THE ARCHIVES
My father died when I was twelve. I remember nothing about him except my suspicion that he would have preferred that I’d been a boy. But I do remember how in every situation, he’d say that one needed “the right tools for the job.” At the risk of having my old instructor in Research Methods revoke my degree ex post facto, I admit I haven’t had the right tool for the job until today. I am looking for a town where he might be, a painting that might lead me to the hiding place. Until today, I’ve done this absurdly, museum by museum, from a handbook for art hunters making the Grand Tour. Trying to determine who lives at a certain address by using the phone book. I’ve willfully ignored the capstone of civilization—pointed arch, vault, flying buttress launching man’s assault of the vertical—the cross-index. The higher the indexing level, the higher the civilization. From the recesses of my dusty reserve, I remember the cross-index for what I’m after. A two-volume, compact ordinance survey of the painted world.
With the right tool, the job is trivial. I look up met de Bles in the Painters volume. On demand, a complete list of everything the compilers know him to have painted: David and Bathsheba, Copper Mine, Adoration of Magi, Mountain Landscape, Village Landscape, Landscape with Iron Foundry, with Flight into Egypt, with Good Samaritan, with Banishing of Hagar … One of these landscapes must contain my conflagration. The titles give entry into the Names volume. There, amid the collections of Florence, Dresden, Belgium, I find a landscape matching my description. Even before my eyes confirm it, I know where the panel hangs. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. As in Mass. USA. Idiot! I was there when he picked the postcard out. I stood looking at the scene with him for almost half an hour.
Todd sent me the scene to elicit a very specific association. In the depths of winter, in early 1984, he badgered Dr. Ressler and me to make a trip to New England. Pivotal visit. Franklin and I, in that woods cottage, reached a pitch of intimacy that could survive every climatic catastrophe. Dr. Ressler, coerced into the adventure, trapped with the two of us, at last told us the details of how he had fallen through the biographical safety net. Two timeless days together, isolated in the solitude only snow can bring on, tracking, talking, singing, solving mysteries late into the night. A community of three. For a moment it seemed we would never return to the city to need.
On the route up, we’d stopped in Boston, the Fine Arts, expressly so that Franker could see the panel. A research stop, he called it. He must have thought I would recognize it at once, a telegram of nostalgia held at arm’s distance. Cursed with my visual illiteracy, I never connected the two images. He must have carried the artifact with him across the Atlantic and posted this emigrant Herri back from its native Flanders. It certainly came from the Low Countries; not even a draftsman of his skill could have forged that stamp and cancellation.
Now no cross-reference in the world will give me his coordinates or tell me what he’s up to. I’m thrown back on that synthetic task of building the index. But how? In one of his few unguarded moments, Dr. Ressler confirmed my father on this one: one simply needs the right tool for the job.
“In the case of science,” he told me, “the brief euphoria of slipping confusion’s straitjacket reconciles you to a life spent washing beakers and sweeping up rat feces. Read the accounts,” he urged, trying unsuccessfully to look grim. “Twelve milligrams of estradiol from one point five tons of ma
shed hog ovaries. Neuro-chemicals extracted from ten years’ work on five hundred thousand cows’ brains, at six cents per. Imagine. Someone carries each one of those lumps up three flights to the lab, enters them into the tedious ledger.” In the end, that’s why I loved him. Ressler knew how incalculably unlikely it was that a molecular duplication trick could hit upon a structure complex enough to probe its own improbability, willing to spend a life of profound tedium toward that end. To live the dull thrill of indexing.
I stayed in today, no leads on Todd’s whereabouts, no tools for attacking the mound of scientific treatises that get harder and take me nowhere. I would give it up, were it not for the pain inside, remembering Ressler’s dazed acceptance of long odds. “I have nothing now to give up, of course. But I would give everything for the chance to work a little longer.”
THE POLLING PROBLEM
She is a natural history, a sovereign kingdom, a theory about her environment, a virtuoso pedal-point performance. She follows a curve, a cadence, an animal locomotion he cannot help but lose himself to. Jeanette Koss is her own phylum. He admits it at last. No sense saving dignity in the face of onslaught. The moment the woman slips into the lab, everything Ressler is after—all careful simulation—is enveloped. He can attend to nothing, nor concentrate. She displaces with her texture, the frank affront of her skin, the arpeggiated toss of her hair. Dr. Koss walks across the lab to the dissection table, her legs inscribing a counterrhythm, the high arc of her collarbone floating in contrary motion. He is hypnotized by her approach, his pinch of chromatic pain enhanced to ecstasy at just being able to see her, look at her, taste without touching.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 28
