Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  —So bloody what? You tell those news bosses to eat a sausage. Then you take a walk and find some honest work.

  —Absolutely, young man. Sans doute. And you, for yourself, can thumb your nose at the Huns, pack a passel of clean shirts, and set up house in some other town.

  —But where would I go? Who’d take me on? I’ve no papers; I’m no good for anything but light farming and selling pipe smoke. I’d be in a gutter in three days. Anyway, the Hun would be onto me after a while, no matter where.

  —My point exactly. I ask myself: I’m supposed to change my habits just because it’s Armageddon?

  —But it’s not so bad for you. You’d be with the press. That’s safety; a paid holiday. They can’t shoot someone with press papers.

  —Unfortunately, they don’t always check your papers before shooting. Then there’s fire, and falling masonry, and artillery shells. I’ve done a little calculating, in fact . . .

  Theo pulled out of his mantle pocket a soiled sheet of scribblings. He began to explain his mathematics to Peter, who, after the first log, was left in the woods. Theo claimed to have figured out, with an exactitude remarkable in one without firsthand facts, his chances of being hurt as a reporter at the front if the war lasted another six months, as some extremists were now saying it would. He had proved, with floating statistics, a 17 percent chance of his being wounded and a 9 percent chance of his being killed. His countenance took on an editorial gravity.

  —Clearly unacceptable risks, you see.

  Peter did not see. Compared with his own odds, which he now gauged at somewhere well past certain death, 9 percent seemed a gambler’s land of milk and honey. He refused to involve himself in other men’s quarrels. But no other course freed him from being hounded into an active role at the front.

  —I should be blessed with your problem.

  It took the men half an hour more of the moral-superiority game to realize that in that statement lay both their salvations. The only place in the involved world where Peter could hope to escape being drafted was the front. Theo could only escape the burden of firsthand observation as he had always done: by sending a proxy in his place.

  The two arrived at the idea at the same time, as if the climate and not their individual genius made for discovery. Then they went about systematically working out the details and addressing each other’s objections.

  —How will I pass for you?

  —Easy: take my credentials, press gear, and la! Theo Two. No one in France would recognize me. You have only to fool a few officials, and being fooled is their vocation. I’m more worried about what I’m to do with myself. I can’t very well go back home and abroad at the same time. The world is only beginning to accustom itself to absurdity, and my neighbors wouldn’t be ready for that.

  —Stay with the widow. She’s on the prod patrol anyway. It won’t be long. Three weeks of machine guns, everyone will be dead, and we can all go home. Stay in the shop, across the street. There’s space, and even a fellow like yourself can learn how to stand behind a counter. But how am I to learn to write dispatches?

  Peter fell back into morosity. The impossibility of the proposed switch came on him, and he saw the situation too lucidly to pretend it would work. Yet in arriving at this conclusion, he’d left out the variable of necessity. He had learned to be a Schreck, a Kinder, too, for that matter. He could do for a Langerson, under fire.

  —Reporting? Nothing to it. Just put everything you have to say in the first sentence: who, what, when, where. . . . One more: what’s that last one? Anyway, just write what you see, or what you can get people to tell you. Get as many proper names as you can: place-names, weapons, heads of staff. Count everything, and measure everything else. Write down any unusual words. When there’s no news, get the nearest foot soldier’s story. When you get a few pages, send them to me, care of your widow. I’ll doctor them and get them to the paper.

  Peter saluted, military style. This dress-up game had definite possibilities.

  —Of course, your letters will have to pass the army censors. So to give them the air of credibility, at least for the time being, you can leave out the “i” in “Germain.”

  —What? Let me make a note of that. Who are you? What’s today? Where are we?

  —Good enough. How are your languages, by the way?

  —Speak-ee the Dutch like a native, humbly report, sir.

  —I mean foreign. How’s your German?

  —Why do you think they’re drafting me?

  —French?

  Peter released a salvo of pursed-lipped “lunes” and “soleils” that reduced them both to hops-induced tears.

  Having satisfied himself on all counts that the change of identities, if not plausible, represented his only way out of responsibility, Theo left to secure the necessary documents of transfer. Besides cards and credentials, he found the boy a notebook and pen: at least give him a nudge in the right direction. He also produced a winter coat and more cash than the boy had ever seen in one place. Theo had little hope for the success of the venture, but it beat the alternative.

  The Spoon filled with the old regulars, stopping in after work. In twenty minutes, Peter trained all his friends to call him and think of him as Theo.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Biographical Fallacy

  There are people indeed—and this has been my case from my childhood—for whom all the things that have a fixed value, assessable by others, fortune, success, high positions, do not count; what they must have, is phantoms.

  —Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

  Outside the Your Move Theatre, an enormous newsprint poster bore a larger-than-life reproduction of Kimberly Greene dressed as Sarah Bernhardt in her one-woman show, I Dwell in Possibility. To the right of the enlarged photo, critics from all Boston’s larger papers joined unanimously in proclaiming the stage act to be the most important thing since penicillin. Mays regarded the testimonials, trying to restore to the laudatory sentences all those words that had been surgically replaced by ellipses.

  He felt like an anthropologist, piecing together an entire protohuman skull from half an inch of jawbone. “Compelling. . . . Arresting. . . . I was stunned . . . ,” Mays thought might have first appeared in print as “By compelling me to go to this so-called performance, my editor caused me to miss the simple pleasure of staying home and getting stewed. Arresting Ms. Greene would be a public service. I was stunned that such a racket could escape the Better Business Bureau.” “. . . One of the best shows of the season. . . . You must see it. . . . A piece . . . to keep you enthralled . . .” could originally have been “As a self-respecting member of the press, I can call this one of the best shows of the season, providing the appropriate persons send the usual amount to Box 35B, Boston Station. If you must see it, bring along a piece of string to keep you enthralled during the second and third acts.” Anything could be made to mean anything given enough ellipses.

  If his expectations for the show were slight, if he had become openly hostile to the idea of I Dwell in Possibility, it was because of how public the object of his obsession had become. He had walked past the giant marquee perhaps two dozen times since the Veterans’ Day Parade, and he had never once associated the larger-than-life document with the three-inch antique redhead in his memory. His blindness was that of children playing the game of Find the Word on the Map: the first child might keep the second one looking an hour for the tiny C-O-M of Combrai, but she herself may never find the E-U-R of Europe, not thinking to look for something so large. The obvious, not the obscure, always gave Mays the most trouble.

  Kimberly Greene, if the photograph reproduced her accurately, was even more offensively attractive than Mays had imagined. If he had gotten a good look at those high cheekbones and hazel eyes from his eighth-story window, he would never have taken on the search. An obsession, however difficult, must have some chance of success if it is to raise desire. Seeing her now, posted so publicly, made him lose almost all desire h
e had once felt to track her down. The dialogues he had practiced in private for the moment of denouement and mythical meeting now caused him acute embarrassment that he could only hope would fade in the weeks to come. Curiosity had gone from the affair. The only shred of dramatic interest left in his life lay in whether Miss Stark, whom he had actually had the temerity to invite to see the show with him, would turn up.

  Yet every time he looked down the street for a sign of Miss Stark, he looked up again at the enlarged image of Ms. Greene. More properly, he looked at Sarah Bernhardt, at the curious compromise of the two, their divvying up and occupying the same body. Seeing for a moment the two-at-once, he felt all the force of the old mystery: not red hair, but paradox; not present beauty, but the hint of some past debt.

  Panic descended like Pentecost when he saw Miss Stark approaching the theater from down the block. He had one hundred yards to recall her first name, which he’d had the foresight to get from her before leaving the lost era of The Trading Floor. He thought dimly that it began with A-L, and he suspected it played heavily on “I”s and “S”s. He ran through the permutations of A-L-I-S female names—Alice, Alicia, Annalise. Names, words, letters, and sounds were not his strong suit. He suspected his brain was dominated by its nonverbal hemisphere, except that analytical quantities terrified him equally. As A-L, and perhaps I-S, Stark bore down on him, he remembered a favorite maxim of Delaney’s: those who can’t do become reporters, those who can’t do or say become editors, and those who can’t do, say, or comprehend become technical editors.

  But in the last few paces of Miss Stark’s approach, his anxiety gave way to fascination as he noticed a quality in the woman’s walk. Looking now at Mays, now at the pavement, now randomly about herself in exploration of the theater district, Miss Stark, decidedly un-Edwardian in jeans and a loose-neck wool sweater, approached with all the easy, practical grace of an untrained dancer. She moved with a delightful self-consciousness, as if she had direct knowledge of every colony of her body.

  The transformation from lace to denim, her mock-sheepish look at having shown up for this off-the-cuff invitation, her obvious enjoyment of the situation’s novelty, and not least of all, her beat-up oxfords’ syncopated attack on the sidewalk combined to create in Mays a sensation he had not felt in months, a sensation beginning, he intuited, with A-P-P-R: apprehend, apprentice, approaching, appreciation. That was it. Appreciation.

  Gratitude joined appreciation when Miss Stark, saving Mays from a potential fix, sallied up, saluted, and said:

  —Alison Stark at your disposal. The enemy is some distance off, and it seems safe to take some brief entertainment.

  —At ease, shoulder.

  Before Mays could redden over his slip of the tongue, Alison laughed and drew in her collar in mock propriety.

  —Have you bought tickets yet?

  —No. I wasn’t sure if you’d show.

  —Good. They’re on me. I’ve come into an inheritance.

  She pulled out the twenty-five dollars from Bullock’s tip, adding:

  —Do your parents know you’re dishing out this kind of money?

  —Listen, that wasn’t mine. That fellow I was with has this tipping system . . .

  —Sure, what do you think I am, naïve? You’re trying to buy my affections, aren’t you?

  She struck a pose faintly reminiscent of Horatio at the Bridge:

  —Well, it can’t be done for a cent less than fifty.

  As she went to the ticket booth, it occurred to Mays that what had just transpired was good humor.

  They took their seats. The sound of shuffling as the audience waited for the curtain gave Mays motion sickness. The opulent dim house, the half arcs of seats reminded him of the endless concerts he had attended while the search was still on. Preconcert excitement always nauseated him. He had the distinct impression that all around him, people had smuggled in pocket scores to follow during the performance, letting out gasps of indignation if the orchestra so much as bent the definitive text. Those concerts had only been made bearable by the hope of red hair. But certainty had a way of doing in hope, and now he hadn’t even that to buffer him from audience anxiety.

  The atmosphere in the Your Move Theatre seemed even more gladiatorial than usual. This was a one-woman show—the height of virtuosity—and the fans could smell blood. Mays ticked off all the reasons he could think of why people would come to these things. Some burned off excess income. Some, giving up on the hopes of promotion up the corporate ladder, looked to the theater as another arena. Some, as Bullock would say, came out because yet another evening with the dinner dishes, television, and cards would prove positively fatal.

  Looking over the gallery, Mays concluded that most people who came to the theater did so because it met all the requirements of what bygone eras had called “hobbies”: it was expensive, it produced nothing useful, and it killed time. The problem with getting by was no longer that life was nasty, brutish, and short. Lately, the difficulty was that life had become comfy, ghoulish, and long.

  Alison sat down next to him matter-of-factly. Mays thought he had never before seen anyone so totally at ease. He suspected at first that her calm was an illusion produced in comparison to his own discomfort. But no; her body fused into her chair, filling the contours familiarly. Mays’s vertigo lessened when he looked at her. After reading over every square inch of her program, even the fine print and disclaimers, she began folding it into irregular polygons. Noticing Mays’s eyes on her, she looked up and explained:

  —I’m regressing.

  In seconds, with a few deft twists, tucks, and topological upheavals, she transformed the printed program into one of those graceful Japanese folded figures—a swan or egret or heron, some near-extinct wildfowl neither of them would ever see. She held the bird by the throat and pulled its tail. The paper wings flapped in an imitation of flight.

  Still flapping, Alison began making guttural noises—a motor revving up—and all at once tossed the bird several feet in the air. It came down three rows in front of them, on a veteran concertgoing grande dame, who singled them out for an executioner’s stare. Under her breath, Alison whispered:

  —Goddamn it, Orville. I thought you said we had it this time.

  Mays laughed. Without thinking of what he was doing, he leaned over, lifted the hair off the back of her neck, and touched his lips there. He sat up and did his best unknown-soldier disappearing act, thinking that might help him escape the consequences. Off to the side, he heard Alison saying:

  —I’ll give you a quarter if you do that again.

  It didn’t seem fair; people were supposed to have to pay for well-being like hers. Mays asked her about her job, dressing up and waiting on the movers and shakers at The Trading Floor. Alison answered as if it were the first time she’d ever been asked about the matter.

  —Well, I used to be a Catholic, but I found I could get all the suffering I needed by going in to work. It’s like this. When I first started, for three days I got a kick out of how lovely the place was, the old outfit, and all. Erotic, you know? Dreamy. After that wore off, for about three weeks I took pride in being a professional, knowing where the gravy boat went, which fork went on the outside, what not to say. When that went, for the next three years I was able to content myself with going home and counting my tips, stacking the coins in piles and figuring how far I was from the next hundred. A sexy element to that too, I suppose. But that ran out. Now I’m looking for the trick that will divert me for the next three decades.

  Mays knew of no such trick, so he kept silent. Alison sat silent too, but not yet sullen. After a few seconds’ thought, she volunteered:

  —It’s not the place, so much. The place is peculiar, but nothing that can’t be worked around. It’s the psycho customers. My job is to care for them when I can’t really care for them. At least, not beyond basic human kindness. They’re all basket cases. You can’t serve them dinner without them going to pieces on you. They all want to involve you i
n elaborate drama. Like Mr. Krakow, the old guy you rescued me from. He comes in every other day, dressed like Old Vienna, with this endless story about bomb shelters and camps and a wife who I’m supposed to reproduce perfectly. Must be the costume: anything from that era. I can wait on him. I can even listen to him. I won’t send him away, because I do care for him. But as a fellow human, not as a long-lost, dead wife. There are too many of them to serve as long-lost wife for each.

  Alison drew up short, aware that she was now asking of Peter the same involvement she denied her customers. She bunched her nose.

  —Don’t mind me. Just bring me another sherry and the check. It’s my own fault, I suppose. I insisted in majoring in Liberal Arts. History. I was told a thousand times that the degree would be worthless. You see, I had this crazy notion that being interested was reason enough to study a thing. If I were doing it over, though, I’d let interest go hang. I’d get some salable credentials. I’d get myself a technical background. Computers.

  She pronounced the word as if to distinguish it from “commuters.”

  —Say, what do you do? For a living, I mean. You’re obviously not a broker, or I’d never have agreed to meet you here.

  The sudden strains of a Protestant hymn saved Mays from the embarrassment of answering. A good part of the audience turned around in their seats, trying to see the spinet and bellows that produced the hymn. Both Alison and Peter, however, raised on such deceptions, kept face forward as the house lights dimmed, intuitively aware that the music was piped in.

  Another instant explained the choice of tune. Solo in center stage stood Kimberly Greene, in nineteenth-century dress, her hair somehow darkened and pulled back in New England severity. The program identified the first tableau as Emily Dickinson. Greene began what would be a two-hour monologue in twenty voices with the unassuming couplet:

  I dwell in possibility,

  A fairer house than prose.