Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  Bullock smirked slightly with dramatic showmanship, enjoying the role of man with the facts. Throughout the ensuing speech, Mays wished for a copy of the criminal code, so he could see if what he wanted to do to Bullock really carried all that stiff a penalty. While Lenny gave his view of the facts, Miss Stark brought on the meal without a word. Lenny paused politely when she came by the table, but Mays waved him on impatiently; if he could stomach the facts, so could innocent bystanders.

  —Puzzles like this, Nicky, always involve some moment of insight—the instant of aha. The solution comes in a flash, all at once, so simple and obvious you wonder why you couldn’t see it before. But seeing the answer requires jumping out from under bad assumptions. Take the one about the two men who play three games of chess and each wins the same number of games without drawing. You see the puzzle in a magazine and become obsessed with it. You stop taking meals and baths. You decide the thing has no answer. Then one day a year later you wake up at midnight and realize that you’d assumed, falsely, that they were playing each other.

  Habituated as he had become to digression, Mays wondered if there were a simple way of hastening Bullock down the path toward revelation. Perhaps throttling him and yelling, “Get to the point” might do the trick.

  —Not to belittle the basic attraction of cherchez la femme. I know that finding this redhead cheesecake is more difficult than an exercise in logic. Only you—and I, when you first put it to me—had some bad assumptions about what you were going after.

  —Meaning?

  Mays was perfecting the art of the dangling interrogative.

  —Meaning you came into my office asking me to help find a red-haired clarinetist. Your givens are all wrong.

  —All right, oboist. Whatever you say. I didn’t get a good look at her.

  —It’s worse than that, my friend.

  —She’s not a redhead? She’s not a woman?

  —Funny, Nick, but that’s the skeptical spirit. I mean to say that your phantom of delight isn’t even a musician.

  —Not . . . ? Come on. I saw her, playing in the parade. That is . . .

  Mays felt only disgust and fatigue; he had just gotten mugged, and was trying halfheartedly to talk the thief into giving his credit cards and license back. He had no energy to object any more strenuously.

  —Fascinating, no? You look out through a window onto a thin frame of fact, and create all the rest out of an initial mistake.

  —But you yourself said she played the oboe.

  —I said no such thing. She was holding an oboe. A tremendous clue. I kick myself now for being so obtuse. There I was, going through my memory of every woman instrumentalist I know. When I gave up the notion that the instrument belonged to her, the whole scene came back to me in one piece. I’d seen your image, and on the same day, too.

  —Impossible. This was downtown, and you were . . .

  —Assumptions, Nicky. The exchange is closed on Veterans’ Day. I was kicking around downtown, doing errands and killing time. Caught a bit of the parade. Your redhead was fairly prominently showcased, before the floats broke up. I didn’t dwell on her, though I saw she had the goods to turn a head or two. I was preoccupied with the oboe. It wasn’t right. Pan doesn’t play oboes. He plays reed pipes.

  —Mind speaking English, bwana?

  —You see, she wasn’t carrying the oboe at the time. That belonged to the fellow on the float next to her. Nijinsky.

  Mays had had enough. He wanted to forget the whole thing, head home, catch a little prime time, shower, rack out, then look for work tomorrow under an assumed name. Fixations were supposed to be clean and simple. This one could not possibly be worth unraveling.

  —Seems some civic luminary hit on the idea of sprucing the parade up some. Rather than another year of just having the dour vet crazies get in formation and limp down Commonwealth Avenue in the memory of regimental splendor. Add some local color, a dash of exotica.

  —Clowns, brass bands, the usual stuff? Yeah, I saw all that. You mean to tell me I’ve been chasing down a majorette?

  —Not at all. Just the opposite of your usual parade filler. I’m talking something peculiarly Bostonian. Too many universities here. Smell your pits and six grad students want to write dissertations on it. No, I’m talking about a Parade of History. A Floating Documentary of this Veterans’ Cementury. Something to that effect.

  —Sorry, still don’t follow you.

  —Look, you have your parade manifest handy?

  Mays handed over the manifest and went on patently addressing himself to his meal. He had regressed from the beef to a tasteless excrescence billed as Potato Skins. Bullock examined the roster. It cross-indexed each alphabetized name by sponsor and activity. Mays had already crossed out all those not related to music. Bullock ran his finger down a dark, heavily crossed-out area.

  —Let’s see . . . here’s the ticket. Great Personalities of the First World War Era. Awkward title, but to the point.

  Mays looked up sharply from playing with his food. He’d noticed the listing and several like it a hundred times without attaching any significance to it. Extraneous filler: “A tableau of the great men and women dominating the period of the Great War.” Its sponsors included two local art museums, the New England chapter of the American Society of Concerned Scientists and Engineers, and the Triple-A. Mays followed Bullock’s thumb down the roster.

  —A perverse idea, if you think about it. Here are all these fellows sent off to another continent to fight, and why? To make the world safe for democracy. And they get maimed or gassed or killed, and then they come back and can’t get work and have to become gangsters or bootleggers. Finally, seventy years later they have to march along in a parade that treats the whole thing like a prettified photo in the Golden Book of History: an actor playing Einstein, one playing Freud. An actor dressed up as Nijinsky, the satyr in Afternoon of a Faun, but with oboe in place of panpipes, for Christ’s sake.

  Mays blushed unconsciously. He had always thought the piece had been about a baby deer.

  —But before I regress totally into bleeding hearts’ club, allow me to point out your actress, playing Sarah Bernhardt.

  And Bullock’s meal-greasy thumb came to rest under the penciled-out name “Kimberly Greene.” Mays felt overcome by anticlimax. Knowing the name depressed him tremendously.

  —I don’t see how all this follows. How do you know that’s her? Just because she’s listed on that float doesn’t mean . . . All right, I’ll grant you your basic theory, but how do you know that that is her?

  —Because, chump, the “Great Personalities” float had a ready-made local celebrity to cast as the world’s most famous actress. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? Too busy with your microchips to keep current with the arts scene. Caro is exactly the same way. I say, “Isaac Stern is in town. Let’s go see him.” And she says, “Isaac Stern, the inventor of the low-conductivity relay?” Why does everyone have to choose between one cult or the other?

  Mays did not particularly feel like admitting that despite his job he was technically illiterate, and despite his recent spate of concertgoing he still had no entrée to the cult of culture. Isaac Stern was the smart fellow in third grade who took off for Yom Kippur.

  —You mean this woman is famous?

  —Bernhardt?

  —Greene.

  —Small potatoes. A local talent who’s made a name for herself doing a revue of famous women from the past. The Divine Sarah is one of her specialties. She’s got a one-woman show that’s been running forever at the Your Move Theatre: I Dwell in Possibility. The critics raved over her Virginia Woolf, but found her Margaret Sanger somewhat sterile. Get it?

  Mays decidedly did not get it, and probably would not have even if he had been paying attention.

  —And you’ve seen this show? You’re certain it’s the same woman?

  —No. I only see shows with casts of thousands. But she’s on the parade roster, no? The papers praised her Bernhardt to the
skies. She was a natural for the “Great Personalities” float.

  The evidence strongly suggested that Sarah Bernhardt, Kimberly Greene, and Mays’s idée fixe were one and the same. Here was an explanation of the quality of antique displacement he had seen in the figure even from several stories up, the quality of fierce nostalgia that had kept him on the search for so long. Yet the idea of an actress playing herself playing another actress playing an old stage role for a Veterans’ Day Parade seemed the most recursive, unlikely thing he’d ever come across. But then, Mays had never read much history.

  —But if you doubt the explanation, put it to the test. Her show’s at the Your Move, on Boylston.

  He gave rudimentary directions, and suggested that Mays call the papers for information. Then he excused himself, saying he’d only be gone a minute. Mays watched him walk to one end of the bar, to a vacant terminal resembling the one at the brokerage. Bullock began punching up quotations. That’s why they had to eat at The Trading Floor instead of The Feed Bag. Caroline’s boyfriend had an even more violent sickness than Mays had before realized: he was addicted to information.

  Gradually, the serious evening diners began to replace the afternoon business-drinking crowd. Looking out the window for the first time since entering the bar, Mays jerked slightly on seeing the advance that evening had already made. For the first time in a long while, he had no particular need to get home, to keep to a strict timetable. He felt slack; the mere fact of evening no longer implied he had to be here or there. He no longer had the mystery to organize his time.

  From across the room, he watched Bullock punch up a few more stock quotes. Miss Stark returned, this time so perfectly preserving the illusion of Edwardian decorum that Mays had to resist the urge to ply her for information on Sarah Bernhardt.

  —Will that be all, sirs?

  Peter wondered what he had ever done to this woman to deserve the plural. At least three mouthfuls of every course remained on Bullock’s plate. Mays blanched, hearing in his memory his immigrant mother lecture on how millions of children—usually Indian but sometimes, for variety, Chinese—would kill for such scraps. Mays, not wanting to be killed by children of any nationality, had long ago perfected the technique of clearing his plate, and even at so fancy a place as The Trading Floor, he had sopped up all the beef juice with a spare roll when no one was looking.

  The refusal to finish his meal seemed to fit with the rest of Bullock’s personality, though. It was cut from the same cloth as the enormous personal debt, the consolidation loans, the forty-five-minute-fast clocks, and the midnight lawn mowing. Mays resisted the temptation to clean off Bullock’s plate, too, with one enormous wipe of the tongue, although he would like to have seen how such a move would register on the woman in black linen.

  —Yes, that will be all, ma’ams.

  He watched her face as she bent to clear away the china. Either she had not heard the joke, or they had her well trained. She didn’t even contemplate grinning. She placed the bill face down on the cleared table and said, in the same strain of ancient accent:

  —We hope you have enjoyed your meals.

  Mays decided not to report this spate of verbal activity to Bullock. Intent on transferring as much as possible of the twenty-five-dollar surplus value from the broker back to the Edwardian anachronism, he decided to say that she came by, cleaned up, slapped the bill down, and said, “Here,” a grand total of two words, good for twenty-three smackers. He was, after all, a technical editor by vocation.

  But so excited was Bullock when he returned to their table that Peter never got the chance to lie for the woman.

  —Listen, Nicky. This is absolutely your last chance. Are you buying in or not?

  Mays could not, even by violent force, fit the words into any smooth continuity with what they had been discussing. Buying into Bullock’s theory about the redhead? Buying into his share of the meal? Buying a ticket to I Dwell in Possibility? As customary when confused beyond recall, Mays said nothing.

  —You’d better decide now. I’m heading back to the office and can put a ticket in for you for tomorrow.

  Suddenly things clicked. The whole business meal, the opulent, archaic restaurant, the unraveling of the elusive woman had all been, to Bullock, just another sales pitch. Lenny had strung him along, indulged him, and had hoped that, by disabusing the client of his little fantasy, he could pick him up on the rebound and score a big sale of that issue he had hounded Mays over for so long: Trans-Air Transport. Shut up and buy bonds.

  For a moment, Mays understood that all such mysteries at last come down to a question of double-entry bookkeeping, that after dalliance with red hair, one had always to come back to questions of profit and loss. But a perversity on his part made him refuse to give in just yet. Only now the object of his perversity was no longer the antique woman he’d seen from eight stories up, hereafter called Ms. Greene, but the improbable image of a one-legged actress stumping the boards and sleeping in a golden coffin.

  —Trans-Air? I don’t know, Lenny. I’ve always found the idea of airplanes a bit, you know, tentative.

  —Jesus. I’m not asking you to ride in them. Just buy into their equity.

  —I know. Only, airplanes go up, and you’re never sure how they’re going to come down. Why just today, in your office, I was reading on the wire about this plane in Chicago . . .

  —Nick, I’ve got to get back . . .

  —Do you have anything more down-to-earth?

  —Autos? You want to buy autos? Jesus, Nicky. Haven’t you heard what the Japs have done to Detroit? They’ve leveled it.

  A day that will live in infamy, thought Mays.

  —Sorry, Leonard.

  Bullock grunted. Brusquely, he gave over the cost of the meal with twenty-five extra dollars and specific instructions to tip the waitress by the prearranged formula.

  —And with the leftover, get a ticket to this woman’s show. Then when you return to sanity and are ready to talk reality principle, come back to the brokerage. But you’ll never have another chance like now.

  When Lenny had left, Mays decided willfully to betray the bequest and leave Miss Stark the full twenty-five dollars as legacy. Having reached that decision, he stretched out his empty hands palms down, placing one on the heavily starched tablecloth and resting the other carefully in a pool of gravy accidentally spilled by the prim Edwardian as she removed the boat. Again, he felt the queasy responsibility of being without sponsor or commitments: he never brought work home from the office, there was nothing of interest on television that evening, he’d written his mother only five months ago, and Ms. Kimberly Greene, merely by existing, had removed the last possibility of enchantment in life. He had absolutely no place to be more than where he was.

  Like any other revelation, this profound feeling lasted only long enough to be displaced by another, more powerful one of bodily discomfort. He had to go to the loo, and announced the fact out loud to no one in particular.

  On seeing The Trading Floor’s bathrooms, he no longer mourned the loss of his revelation. He would have sacrificed twice the profundity to see such a place. The sinks were a smoky gray marble, the floor a rich mottled mosaic of hexagons, the mirrors polished to perfection with a floral trim that threatened to swallow up his reflection in a pastiche of petals. The fixtures were of semi-precious metals, including faucets in the guise of dolphins that spit water in upward parabolas. Mays turned them on and off several times in succession, delighting in watching the watery arcs spurt and die.

  He felt happier among all this grotesque ornament than he had at any time since the pseudo–Veterans’ Day. The overabundance left him positively oceanic, and he only regretted not being able to stand unobserved in the corner and watch the brokers from this place’s heyday unbutton their tailored flies and take their privileged pees. Hats and canes, the original executors: how did they differ from the current breed of Bullocks?

  The toilet stalls were no less opulent than the privy foyer. The do
ors and toilet rims were of an amazing dark wood that Mays suspected was no longer manufactured. The water tank sat ten feet atop a lead pipe, and Peter was in a great hurry to evacuate so he could pull the chain, a flushing method entirely novel for him. The side walls, cut from the same quarry as the basins, were pasted over with printed matter. For a fellow whose folks had always forbidden reading matter in the john, this was heaven on earth.

  The document taking by far the largest area of stall walls bore the title “Securities Exchange Commission Regulations for Registered Representatives.” Mays felt as if he were reading taboo material, not for laymen’s eyes. He imagined a broker, constipated, who nevertheless made good use of his otherwise lost time by checking to see if everything he’d done that day was aboveboard.

  He bogged down in the turgid legalese. As he finished what his mother, even well into his maturity, insisted on calling his “business,” he began wishing that the authorities had posted “Famous Actresses” or “Great Personalities of the First War Era.” Even as a child, he had adored the four-line thumbnail biography, complete with legends and wild claims beginning “Sarah Bernhardt did not change the history of acting. She was the history of acting.”

  Mays stood and began fastening himself together. As he did so, he automatically read the text that bobbed up to eye level. “The New York Stock Exchange closes in observance of the following holidays:” He jumped from Jan. 1 to Jul. 4 without thinking. But after going from Labor Day to Thanksgiving, he stopped, backed up, and made the leap again. No Veterans’ Day—either original armistice or congressional rescheduling. Bullock had lied about seeing the parade.