The Rule of Four

by Ian Caldwell

  Make no friends, and kick the old.

  All I want is silver and gold.

  Those lines alone were hardly grounds for expulsion, but Willy Carlson, in a brilliant stroke of retribution, gave the oldest camp counselor a kick as he bent over to light a campfire, then blamed the act on my influence, the new lyrics having conjured his foot into the old man’s ass. Within hours, the full machinery of Boy Scout justice was in motion, and both of us were packing our bags.

  Only two things came out of that experience, other than my permanent retirement from scouting. First, I became good friends with Willy Carlson, whose excitable bladder, it turned out, was nothing but another lie he’d told the scoutmasters to get me kicked out the first time around. You had to like the guy. And second, I got a stern lecture from my mother, the motivation for which I never understood until my Princeton years were almost over. It wasn’t the first line of the revised lyrics she objected to, despite the fact that, technically, the kicking of old people was what got me bagged. It was the strange mania of the second line that she read into.

  “Why silver and gold?” she said, sitting me down in the small back room of the bookstore, where she kept the overstocks and old filing cabinets.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. There was an outdated calendar on the wall from the Columbus Museum of Art, turned to the month of May, showing an Edward Hopper painting of a woman sitting alone in her bed. I couldn’t help staring at it.

  “Why not bottle rockets?” she asked. “Or campfires?”

  “Because those don’t work.” I remember feeling annoyed; the answers seemed so obvious. “The last word has to rhyme with old.”

  “Listen to me, Tom.” My mother placed a hand on my chin and turned my head until I was facing her. Her hair seemed gold in the right light, the same way the woman’s did in the Hopper painting. “It’s unnatural. A boy your age shouldn’t care about silver and gold.”

  “I don’t. What does it matter?”

  “Because every desire has its proper object.”

  It sounded like something I’d been told once at Sunday school. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means people spend their lives wanting things they shouldn’t. The world confuses them into taking their love and aiming it where it doesn’t belong.” She adjusted the neck on her sundress, then sat beside me. “All it takes to be happy is to love the right things, in the right amounts. Not money. Not books. People. Adults who don’t understand that never feel fulfilled. I don’t want you to turn out like that.”

  Why it meant so much to her, this correct aiming of my passions, I never understood. I just nodded in a solemn way, promised that I would never sing about precious metals again, and sensed that my mother was pacified.

  But precious metals were never the problem. What I realize now is that my mother was waging a bigger war, trying to save me from something worse: becoming my father. My father’s fixation on the Hypnerotomachia was the essence of misguided passion to her, and she struggled with it until the day he died. She believed, I think, that his love for the book was nothing but a perversion, a crooked deflection, of his love for his wife and family. No amount of force or persuasion could correct it, and I suppose it was when she knew she’d lost the battle to realign my father’s life that she brought the fight to me.

  How well I kept my promise, I’m afraid to say. The stubbornness of boys in their childish ways must be a prodigy to women, who learn faster than angels how not to misbehave. Throughout my childhood there was a monopoly on mistakes in my house, and I was its Rockefeller. I never imagined the magnitude of the error my mother was warning me against, until I had the misfortune of falling into it. By that time, though, it was Katie, and not my family, who had to suffer for it.

  January came, and Colonna’s first riddle gave way to another, then a third. Paul knew where to look for them, having detected a pattern in the Hypnerotomachia : following a regular cycle, the chapters grew in length from five or ten pages, to twenty, thirty, or even forty. The shorter chapters came in a row, three or four at a time, while the long ones were more solitary. When graphed, the long periods of low intensity were interrupted by sharp upticks in chapter length, creating a visual profile we both came to conceive of as the Hypnerotomachia’s pulse. The pattern continued until the first half of the book ended, at which point a strange, muddled sequence began, no chapter exceeding eleven pages.

  Paul quickly made sense of it, using our success with Moses and his horns: each spike of long, solitary chapters provided a riddle; the riddle’s solution, its cipher, was then applied to the run of short chapters following it, yielding the next part of Colonna’s message. The second half of the book, Paul guessed, must be filler, just as the opening chapters of the first half appeared to be: a distraction to maintain the impression of narrative in an otherwise fragmented story.

  We divided the labor between us. Paul hunted for riddles in the longer chapters, leaving each one behind for me to solve. The first I tackled was this: What is the smallest harmony of a great victory?

  “It makes me think of Pythagoras,” Katie said when I told her over pound cake and hot chocolate at Small World Coffee. “Everything with Pythagoras was harmonies. Astronomy, virtue, math . . .”

  “I think it has to do with warfare,” I countered, having spent some time at Firestone looking at Renaissance texts on engineering. Leonardo, in a letter to the Duke of Milan, claimed he could build impenetrable chariots, like Renaissance tanks, along with portable mortars and great catapults for use in sieges. Philosophy and technology were merging: there was a mathematics to victory, a set of proportions to the perfect war machine. It was only a small step from math into music.

  The next morning, Katie woke me at 7:30 to go jogging before her 9:00 class.

  “Warfare doesn’t make sense,” she said, beginning to parse the riddle as only a philosophy major could. “There are two parts to the question: smallest harmony and great victory. Great victory could mean anything. You should focus on the clearer part. Smallest harmony has fewer concrete meanings.”

  I grumbled as we passed the Dinky train station on our way to the west of campus, envying the stray passengers waiting for the 7:43. Running and thinking were unnatural things to be doing while the sun was still rising, and she knew the fog wouldn’t burn off my thoughts until noon. This was just taking advantage, punishing me for not taking Pythagoras seriously.

  “So what are you suggesting?” I asked.

  She didn’t even seem to be breathing hard. “We’ll stop at Firestone on our way back around. I’ll show you where I think you should look.”

  It continued like that for two weeks, waking at dawn for calisthenics and brainteasers, telling Katie my half-baked ideas about Colonna so that she would have to slow down to listen, then forcing myself to run faster so that she would have less time to tell me how I was wrong. We were spending the last part of so many evenings with each other, and the earliest part of so many mornings, that I thought it would eventually occur to her, rational as she was, that spending the night at Dod would be more efficient than trekking back and forth to Holder. Every morning, seeing her in spandex and a sweatshirt, I tried to think of a new way to extend the invitation, but Katie always made a point of not understanding. Gil told me that her old boyfriend, the lacrosse player from one of my seminars, had made a game of her from the start, not pushing her for affection on the few occasions when she was drunk, so that she would melt with gratitude when she was sober. The pattern of his manipulation took so long for her to realize that she brought the aftertaste of it to her first month with me.

  “What should I do?” I asked one night after Katie left, when the frustration was almost too much. I was getting a tiny kiss on the cheek after each morning run, which, all things considered, hardly covered my expenses; and now that I was spending more and more time on the Hypnerotomachia, and getting by on five or six hours of sleep a night, an entirely new sort of debt was accruing. Tantalus and his grap
es had nothing on me: when I wanted Katie, all I got was Colonna; when I tried to focus on Colonna, all I could think of was sleep; and when, at last, I tried to sleep, the knock would come at our door, and it would be time for another jog with Katie. The comedy of being chronically late for my own life was lost on me. I was due for something better.

  For once, though, Gil and Charlie spoke with one voice: “Be patient,” they said. “She’s worth it.”

  And, as usual, they were right. One night in our fifth week together, Katie eclipsed us all. Returning from a philosophy seminar, she stopped by Dod with an idea.

  “Listen to this,” she said, pulling a copy of Thomas More’s Utopia from her bag and reading from it.

  The inhabitants of Utopia have two games rather like chess. The first is a sort of arithmetical contest, in which certain numbers “take” others. The second is a pitched battle between virtues and vices, which illustrates most ingeniously how vices tend to conflict with one another, but to combine against virtues. It shows what ultimately determines the victory of one side or the other.

  She took my hand and placed the book in it, waiting for me to read it again.

  I glanced at the back cover. “Written in 1516,” I said. “Less than twenty years after the Hypnerotomachia.” The timing wasn’t far off.

  “A pitched battle between virtues and vices,” she repeated, “showing what determines the victory of one side or the other.”

  And it began to dawn on me that she might be right.

  Lana McKnight used to have a rule, back in our dating days. Never mix books and bed. In the spectrum of excitement, sex and thought were on opposite ends, both to be enjoyed, but never at the same time. It amazed me how such a smart girl could suddenly become so ravenously stupid in the dark, flailing around in her leopard-print negligee like some cavewoman I’d thumped with a club, barking things that would’ve horrified even the pack of wolves that raised her. I never dared to tell Lana that if she moaned less it might mean more, but from the very first night I sensed what a wonderful thing it might be if my mind and my body could be aroused at the same time. I probably should’ve seen that possibility in Katie from the beginning, after all the mornings we spent exercising both muscles at once. But it was only that night that it happened: as we worked out the implications of her discovery, the last residue of her old lacrosse player finally slipped off the page, erased, leaving us to start again.

  What I remember most clearly about that night is that Paul had the grace to sleep at Ivy, and that the lights were on the whole time Katie stayed. We kept them burning while we read Sir Thomas More, trying to understand what game he was referring to, in which great victories were possible when virtues were in harmony. We kept them burning when we found that one of the games More mentioned, called the Philosophers’ Game, or Rithmomachia, was precisely the kind Colonna would’ve favored, the most challenging of any played by medieval or Renaissance men. We kept them burning when she kissed me for saying I thought she was right after all, because Rithmomachia, it turned out, could be won only by creating a harmony of numbers, the most perfect of which produced the rare outcome called a great victory. And we kept them burning when she kissed me again for admitting my other ideas must have been wrong, and that I should’ve listened to her from the beginning. I realized, finally, the misunderstanding that had persisted since the morning of our first jog: while I’d been struggling to stay even with her, she’d been pushing to stay one step ahead. She’d been trying to prove that she wasn’t intimidated by seniors, that she deserved to be taken seriously—and it never occurred to her, until tonight, that she’d succeeded.

  My mattress was craggy with books by the time we got around to lying down together, hardly even pretending to read anymore. It’s probably true that the room was too hot for the sweater she was wearing. And it’s probably true that the room would’ve been too hot for the sweater she was wearing even if the air-conditioning had been on and the snow had been falling the way it did Easter weekend. She was wearing a T-shirt beneath it, and a black bra under that, but it was watching Katie take off that sweater, and seeing the way it left her hair mussed, strands floating in a halo of static electricity, that gave me the feeling Tantalus never quite got to, that a sensational future had finally pressed itself up against a heavy, hopeful present, throwing the switch that completes the circuit of time.

  When my turn came around to take clothes off, to share with Katie the wreckage of my left leg, scars and all, I never hesitated; and when she saw them, neither did she. Had we spent those hours in the dark, I would never have made anything of it. But we were never in the dark that night. We rolled, one over another, across Saint Thomas More and the pages of his Utopia, into the new positions of our relationship, and the lights were always burning.

  The first sign that I’d misunderstood the forces at work in my life came the following week. Paul and I spent much of the next Monday and Tuesday debating the meaning of the newest riddle: How many arms from your feet to the horizon?

  “I think it has to do with geometry,” Paul said.

  “Euclid?”

  But he shook his head. “Earth measurement. Eratosthenes approximated the earth’s circumference by figuring out the different angles of the shadows cast in Syene and Alexandria at noon on the summer solstice. Then he used the angles . . .”

  I realized only midway through his explanation that he was using an etymological sense of the word geometry—literally, as he’d said, “earth measurement.”

  “So that, knowing the distance between the two cities, he could triangulate back to the curvature of the earth.”

  “What does that have to do with the riddle?” I said.

  “Francesco’s asking for the distance between you and the horizon. Calculate how far it is from any given point in the world to the line where the earth curves over, and you’ve got an answer. Or just look it up in your physics textbook. It’s probably a constant.”

  He said it as if the answer were a foregone conclusion, but I suspected otherwise.

  “Why would Colonna ask for that distance in arms?” I asked.

  Paul leaned over and crossed out arms on my copy, replacing it with something in Italian. “That should probably be braccia,” he said. “It’s the same word, but braccia were Florentine units of measurement. One braccio is about the length of an arm.”

  For the first time, I was sleeping less than he was, the sudden high in my life needling me to keep pressing my luck, to keep mixing my drinks, because this cocktail of Katie and Francesco Colonna seemed to be just what the doctor ordered. I took it as a sign, the fact that my return to the Hypnerotomachia had brought a new structure to the world I lived in. Quickly I began to fall into my father’s trap, the one my mother tried to warn me about.

  Wednesday morning, when I mentioned to Katie that I’d dreamt of my father, she did something that in all our days of jogging she’d never done before: she stopped.

  “Tom, I don’t want to keep talking about this,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “Paul’s thesis. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “I was telling you about my dad.”

  But I’d grown too used to conversations with Paul, invoking my father’s name in any situation and expecting it to deflate all criticism.

  “Your dad worked on the book Paul’s studying,” she said. “It’s the same thing.”

  I mistook the sentiment behind her words for fear: fear that she would be unable to solve another riddle the way she solved the last one, and that my interest in her might fade.

  “Fine,” I said, thinking I was saving her from that. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  And so a period of many pleasant weeks began, built on a misunderstanding as complete as the one we started with. In the first month we dated, up until the night Katie spent at Dod, she built a façade for me, trying to create something she thought I wanted; and in the second month I returned the favor, avoiding all mention of
the Hypnerotomachia in front of her, not because its significance had diminished in my life, but because I thought Colonna’s riddles made her uneasy.

  Had she known the truth, Katie would’ve been right to worry. The Hypnerotomachia was slowly beginning to bully my other thoughts and interests out of focus. The balance I thought I’d struck between Paul’s thesis and mine—the waltz between Mary Shelley and Francesco Colonna, which I imagined more vividly the more time I spent with Katie—was devolving into a tug of war, which Colonna gradually won.

  Still, before Katie and I knew it, trails had formed in every corner of our shared experience. We ran the same paths each morning; stopped at the same coffee shops before class; and snuck her into my eating club the same ways when my guest passes ran out. Thursday nights we danced with Charlie at Cloister Inn; Saturday nights we shot pool with Gil at Ivy; and Friday nights, when the clubs on Prospect fell quiet, we watched friends perform in Shakespeare comedies or orchestra concerts or a cappella shows across campus. The adventure of our first days together gradually blossomed into something else: a feeling I’d never had with Lana or any of her predecessors, which I can only compare to the sensation of returning home, of joining a balance that needs no adjusting, as if the scales of my life had been waiting for her all along.

  The first night Katie noticed I couldn’t sleep, she recited a work by her favorite author for me, and I followed Curious George to the ends of the earth, where the weight on my eyelids carried me off. After that, there were many nights I tossed and turned, and Katie found a solution for each of them. Late-night episodes of M*A*S*H ; long readings from Camus; radio programs she used to listen to at home, now caught on a faint transmission down the coast. We left the windows open sometimes, to hear the rain in late February, or the conversations of drunk freshmen. There was even a rhyming game we invented for empty nights, something Francesco Colonna might not have found as edifying as Rithmomachia, but that we enjoyed just the same.