One from Without

by Jack Fuller

  On the train ride it had been raining, and though the rain had stopped, the Cotswold stone and old brick of Oxford were still shadowed with moisture. Fisherman in his Homburg led across greens, along the narrow Thames, under the arches to the sound of the rehearsal of madrigals.

  “I wish I had met William Empson,” said Fisherman, “but he was banished to China by the Cambridge dons for having the temerity to like sex with women. The lecture we’ll be hearing today is on his view of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94. You remember it, don’t you? ‘They that have power to hurt . . .’”

  Rosten could not summon up so much as a single line.

  “I assume you have actually read Seven Types of Ambiguity,” said Fisherman.

  “Your friend Hawthorne challenged me to come up with seven more,” said Rosten.

  “The lecturer we will be hearing today is from Princeton,” said Fisherman. “She’s Hawthorne’s younger competition for the American crown.”

  “You keep up with all that?”

  “This is the great Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theater,” said Fisherman. “They say he was a Freemason, but it is still a matter of debate.”

  “They knew how to keep secrets back then,” said Rosten.

  Fisherman seemed pleased. Or perhaps the cuttlefish was flashing a pretty color in order to get Rosten to come close. They had never spoken of art or friendship or the irrelevant past. They were not natural men. Neither of them.

  A surprising number of people had already gathered at the lecture hall by the time they arrived. Fisherman led the way to two wooden folding chairs in front of a row of women about Fisherman’s age, all in dowdy dresses. Up front stood a lectern without a microphone and behind it a fireplace clad in wood darkened at the edges by centuries of smoke. Gray light came in through tall, leaded windows.

  As they sat down, Rosten picked up a sheet of paper that lay centered on the seat.

  “At least they didn’t expect us to have it memorized,” he said.

  Fisherman glanced at the paper, folded it lengthwise, and put it into his inside breast pocket.

  But if that flower with base infection meet,

  The basest weed outbraves his dignity:

  For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

  Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

  When Rosten looked up, a courtly man and a tiny woman had moved to the lectern. The reading lamp illuminated the man from below, making him into a wizard. She stood off to the side, looking at the audience without a hint of self-consciousness as he introduced her.

  “As you know,” she began, “William Empson read mathematics before turning to literature. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that he began his explication of Sonnet 94 the way he did. There were, he wrote, four thousand ninety-six possible ‘movements of thought’ as to the meaning of the poem. That may be good mathematics, but it is very poor hermeneutics.”

  She went on to explicate the poem with great precision and even greater confidence, drawing particular attention to Shakespeare’s comparison of the cold, self-controlled aristocrat of the beginning of the poem with the sweet flower at the end.

  “Only when it suffers base infection,” she said, “does it begin to reek. One has to strain mightily not to read this as a clear warning to the aristocrat: ‘Behave yourself, or you’ll end up stinking worse than I do.’”

  “Leave it to the Americans,” whispered one of the women in the row behind.

  Had Rosten been in class, he would have enjoyed offering other plausible interpretations. It had been too long since he’d had the opportunity to exercise his mind on something of so little consequence. He looked over at Fisherman. Chin on the knot of his tie, he was asleep.

  As she drew the lecture to a close, the professor said, “Empson believed stability of meaning could be found even in utterly contradictory readings. He wanted to prove that, with such a great poem, all four thousand ninety-six possibilities could be embraced, that perhaps this was the very thing that made a poem great. But, sadly, the math does not work. It turns out that the possibilities are in the thousands only if we insist on being obtuse. I conclude with a plea: Let us not dwell on statistics but rather on the beauty of the expressive, intelligible human voice.”

  With the generous applause Fisherman awakened. The man who had introduced the lecturer stepped to the podium and called for questions. Fisherman stood and, half bent over, slid down the row of seats into the aisle. Rosten followed

  They went directly toward the train station. The street was empty.

  “I saw you meeting Nederlander yesterday,” Rosten said.

  Fisherman did not lose a step. “He told me you had followed him,” he said.

  “This outing of ours today is somehow connected to my having seen you?”

  “He thought it was hilarious that you took the hook so deeply.”

  “You planned this together?” said Rosten. “The scene he made at the Embassy? To make sure I followed him.”

  “He did not consult me in advance,” said Fisherman. “When he told me, I told him he was a fool. He had something to prove to you; such people always prove too much.”

  “What is it that I’m supposed to think?”

  “He thought you were trouble, and he wanted to show you that you were actually in trouble,” said Fisherman.

  “Somebody is.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Fisherman. “You see, I had business with him.”

  “At a tourist pub,” said Rosten.

  “I had hoped that you might have recognized by now that I have adequate reasons,” said Fisherman. “I don’t entirely disagree with your reservations about Peter.”

  So now it wasn’t the Dutchman. It was Peter. Peter and Ernest.

  “Do you agree that he could be working for Kerzhentseff?” said Rosten.

  “I am certain that he is not,” said Fisherman.

  They had reached the outskirts of the university. Midway across a bridge over one of the city’s many streams, Fisherman stopped.

  “Do you remember Empson’s seventh type of ambiguity?” he said.

  “Can we talk about reality?”

  “It is when a word or a phrase has two directly opposite meanings,” said Fisherman. “Interesting that a mathematician focused on cases in which p equals not p. No excluded middle.”

  Fisherman leaned on the rail, looking out at where the stream disappeared into the trees that lined it.

  “A person is always the seventh ambiguity,” he said. “Nederlander. Kerzhentseff. You cannot sum a man any more than you can count on him. There aren’t only four thousand ninety-six possibilities. When p equals not p, the possibilities never end.”

  He let go the railing. Rosten had been trying to look where Fisherman looked. He had seen nothing in the trees, not even a rustle of branches. Then he looked down at the water moving beneath him. It drew him so strongly that he felt dizzy. He stepped back.

  Their pace picked up as they neared the station, and they reached the platform only a couple of minutes before the train arrived. The car was quiet, some riders reading the Evening Standard and not looking up, others dozing. The station began to move backward. Benches and pillars accelerated and then were gone.

  “I hope you found something of interest this afternoon,” Fisherman said, rubbing his fingers on the glass. “Fogged windows that show the streaks. That’s what draws us to poetry, isn’t it.”

  “Is it?” said Rosten.

  “Some like to understand life by the numbers,” said Fisherman. “But that’s not the life we live.” He spoke so softly that what he was saying might have been classified. “P equaling not p is what makes people so useful.”

  9

  Gunderman was a burglar in his own house, where he had stripped and stained the woodwork, discovered old gaslight pipes behind the cracked plaster wall, trapped the mice, and bombed the roaches. Everywhere he looked, he recalled broken glass he had cleaned up, an earring he had found, a lost
toy recovered to stanch a child’s tears, yet it was no longer his home; he was casing it.

  Maggie had left Friday afternoon on what she called a girls’ escape. Girls without names.

  “You wouldn’t know them,” she had said. “They’re from before.”

  “And the resort?”

  “If you have to call me, use my cell.”

  “So it’s another mobile mystery spa.”

  “Don’t even start with me.”

  But start anywhere, and Gunderman ended up in the same place. The cell phone, for example. They both used to be on the same account, which he paid each month. At some point, he noticed that all the minutes were his, and he asked her about it. “Oh,” she said, “I fell in love with a flashy new number and signed up. Different company. You can cancel me from yours.” He did and never once saw bill for her new service.

  “I need to be sure.”

  “I think you are.”

  “It isn’t only that I don’t know her anymore. I don’t know me.”

  “You don’t like the reflection you see in her eyes. Do you think she likes the reflection she sees in yours? She blames the mirror. This is normal.”

  “I’m not interested in normal. It’s not about medians and means.”

  “Of course not. When the pain is yours, it is unique.”

  “I’ve tried to be a good provider. A faithful husband. But apparently it’s not enough anymore.”

  “At some point nothing is.”

  “I’ve never once strayed. Not a millimeter.”

  “Do you ever think about how? Did you make yourself unattractive? Invite mockery? Did you use your algorithms as shields? Perhaps you are just now realizing that in doing these things, you may have withheld something from your wife that she needed. Could it be complicity that haunts you, makes you so desperate to know?”

  A single branch of the maple scraping the roof made the empty house into a drum. He opened drawer after drawer in the bedroom, lifting up her sweaters, slips, bras, panties, doing it carefully so that they would go right back into place. No cell-phone or credit-card bills were hidden beneath, no incriminating letters. But they wouldn’t have communicated that way. She had taken an interest in the computer, which she had always before treated as a rival. All of a sudden she wanted him to show her how to boot it up, how to get onto AOL, how to use the password to keep your e-mail safe.

  There was no password on the mailbox outside their front door. There had to have been bills, and yet not once had he found one there, even when she was on one of her trips to a spa on wheels with girls who had no names. A bill would have pointed to the man. She must have taken a postal box.

  He stepped very quietly into the little office he had set up for Megan and her. State of the art. They could have started an Internet company in here. He had put in a secure local area network based in his office downstairs, which hooked into as high-speed a connection as he could get. He sat down on the Aeron chair, the casters making an incriminating clatter on the wooden floor as he pulled it close to the desk. When he booted up the machine, he saw that someone had changed the wallpaper on the front screen. It was now a scene of snow and pines. This probably reminded Megan of Canada, where all her ice idols seemed to come from. He clicked on the AOL icon. He had wanted them to switch to Gmail’s beta site. Megan was game, but Maggie wasn’t having it. She said she wasn’t anybody’s lab rat. Google really knew what it was doing, he said. “What kind of name is Google?” she said. “From googolplex,” he said, but it hadn’t been a question.

  When the log-in appeared, he pulled down the list of screen names and selected Maggie27. He had them set up with strong passwords based on simple phrases so that they could remember them. Hers was tMo1$fMI: the Matriarch of 1 $trong family aM I. He typed in the first three characters and then stopped. This was worse than rifling her drawers. His fingers slumped on the keys, and “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” appeared on the screen. He deleted it and started over. When he hit enter, “Invalid password” appeared. He tried again. Same thing. Somehow she’d figured out how to change passwords. Or Bill Cadwalader had.

  “Don’t visualize,” the Wise Man had told him. He never said how not to.

  Gunderman picked up the phone and dialed the Cadwaladers’ number. Maybe the oaf was there. Maybe this weekend Maggie was escaping from him, too. That was a picture he could live with. The phone rang four times then went to the recording. Gunderman hung up.

  The night before, Megan had sat with him as he ate the frozen ziti he had nuked. He had gotten home late, and she had already grazed her dinner, but she’d joined him at the table, placing herself in the chair where Maggie usually sat. She had the smile that her mother used to have, but lovelier. How did such beauty come from Maggie and him? Especially him. Her ash-blonde hair came from Maggie’s side. Her sister had it. Megan’s large eyes reminded him of the photos of his aunt as a girl. It was as if family traits had assembled themselves into a puzzle picture finer than any of its pieces.

  “So what did you do today?” she said.

  “Day like all days,” he said.

  “That bad?”

  Smart girl. He had to be careful.

  “You have your name back?” he said. He had changed her screen name and given her a new, very strong password: nBmwmB1M0t,hp$, nobody Better mess with me Because I aM 0ne tough, hockey playing $ister.

  “Megan Gunderman,” she said.

  “Everyone will get hacked eventually,” he said.

  And now, if he wanted to look at Maggie’s mail, he would have to become a hacker himself. There was a heavy shade on the window of the office. Maggie had put it there. She said it was to keep the sun off the screen, but he was sure that she had done it so the neighbors would not see how much time she was spending. As he sat in the dark, the house dead around him, he began to weep. He looked for a tissue box but found none. She had obviously not felt the need. He slid out the printer’s tray and took a sheet. The paper was hard against the skin around his eyes and absorbed nothing. He blew his nose, crumpled the paper, and threw the wad into the empty Blackhawks trash basket. The white seemed phosphorescent in the depths. He reached down and took it out again. Leave no evidence. She doesn’t.

  When the phone rang, he jumped. For a moment he really was a burglar, discovered in the act. He let it sound twice while he centered himself. It was his house. His phone. His life. He picked it up. Hello caught in his throat.

  “Sorry,” he said, clearing it.

  “Sam?” said a woman’s voice.

  “Maggie’s not at home,” he said.

  “There was no message, but I saw your number on Caller ID,” she said. “I thought maybe . . .”

  “Betty?” he said.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” she said. “I mean, I hope I didn’t.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Could you just ask her to give me a jingle after 4?”

  “She’s away for the weekend.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  “Bill and Anna get back from the game yet?” he said. “Megan still hasn’t.”

  “Bill’s away, too,” Betty said. “College friends.”

  “Good weekend for it.”

  “He does this,” she said.

  “Well, enjoy the peace and quiet.”

  “You as well.”

  “I’ll leave a note that you called.”

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “I mean, maybe I’ll call her next week.”

  He kept the phone to his ear after she hung up, picturing her at the rink in a sweatshirt, a little too large for her jeans but with a round face that returned warmth. You could tell that she had been pretty once. The oaf had managed to keep the weight off and always had a different sweater and a fresh crease in his slacks. Don’t visualize.

  He shut down the computer and left the room, the paper in his hand smeared with snot and saltwater. When he reached the kitchen, he rinsed his face to get the red out of his eyes. Megan might burst in at any time, scrapi
ng her hockey bag against the wall, which always drew a comment from Maggie about the cost of painters. Megan would tell him the score and whether she had gotten any points. She would pound upstairs and shower, then come back down and turn on some music he couldn’t fathom. Maybe it was still possible to make a proper life out of these little, daily things, a cocoon, at least until she was ready to break free of whatever it was that had become of her parents.

  “I still need you, Maggie.”

  His voice startled him. It had come without his willing it, as if he had Tourette’s. Needed her for the everyday things to hold. Needed her so that he might be at home in his house. So that their daughter would have a family.

  The doorbell rang. Megan was always forgetting her key. It rang again, then again before he turned into the hallway and saw through the door window the bulk of Dick Chase blocking the light. When Gunderman opened the door, Chase stepped in and took off his leather gloves.

  “We have to talk,” he said, removing his topcoat, which he threw on the back of the couch. He sat down in the chair where Gunderman liked to read the Sunday paper. Gunderman sat where Maggie used to when she still read the paper with him. Megan would sit on the floor back then with the comics and sports section. Sometimes she would read aloud to them.

  “This is official,” said Chase. “In your internal-audit capacity.”

  “We all know what we are,” said Gunderman. “Would you like some coffee?”

  He stood to get it.

  “Don’t fuck with me,” said Chase. “You need to listen to what I came to say.”

  Gunderman sat down again. “I have to ask whether you are speaking to me in confidence,” he said. “We can do it that way if you’d like, but whatever you tell me would have a lot more weight with others if they knew it came from someone of your stature.”

  A moment of uncertainty flattened Chase’s expression. He shifted in the chair and tugged down his shirt, which was bowing open between the buttons. Gunderman hadn’t meant to make a fat joke. Chase was finely tuned to such things, but fortunately, he seemed to have accepted stature as a euphemism for power.