Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

We pressed against each other, each day more blatantly, feeling the short fuse evaporate, postponing, restraining the way a bud shimmies under time lapse before falling into flower. Following an evening's wrestle, he would kiss me goodbye, dipping into my dress, saying he needed to fix my surface in his memory until he could see me again. We played deeply and dangerously. I found a meridian on his shoulders, the mere press of which made his muscles collapse and his eyes roll up. He came by but never stayed over; we were two passengers in a long-haul airport, consulting the array of world capital clocks, each still on his native time zone. My night of romance was his midday.

One night during lunch break he came to my room carrying a package he'd acquired downstairs just before my landlord's antique shop closed. I unwrapped the box to find an off-white eighty-year-old linen blouse that must have set him back a month. Along its dorsal edge ran cloth-covered hemisphere buttons the size of lady-bugs, hundreds of them. The high choker owed its origins to Alexandra's tracheotomy. It rippled with multiple traceries, ruffles under ruffles that, as they could not actually be seen once the blouse was on, could only have been, like those exceptionally skilled adventures in heavy counterpoint, for the express benefit of those privileged to hold the score in front of them.

"Try it on," he commanded. I hesitated, but just for pacing. I went to the bedroom, stood in my closet, the mirrored door left conspicuously open, and stripped to my underclothes. Even these I changed for the antique slips and skirts I had collected piece by piece, on account with my landlord. In a few minutes, I was clothed in a soft, lost century. But the effect was not yet done. I sat down at my vanity (another piece rescued from downstairs), pulled my hair up in a storybook pile, and made up lightly, with an eye toward the period. It took some time and extraordinary, wavering patience on both our parts.

When I stood and walked toward him, I knew we were done for. He'd watched the entire process, standing in the doorway, waiting to undo it. The clothes I had attended to so carefully shed themselves everywhere. Some stayed on, displaced and uncaring. Everything began to move slowly, underwater. I felt him, felt myself all over, both far away. Minutely mammalian, I conformed to fill every space between myself and this shape pressing against me. I could see the peach inside of his legs and sweated to match his breath condensing against the back of my neck. Strenuously, straining, but expansively, slowly, we worked, astonished to be recovering pneumatics from a manual we were born knowing. And something else to our rocking: an attempt to recall a word on the tips of our tongue. The word was nihil. The word was nearly. I felt his skin stretching, conductant, as smooth, hazel, and aromatic as the taste of food I craved for years but could never identify. My skin.

I kept waiting for my body to pitch me over those patent falls, the one I'd discovered at thirteen but which, by thirty, I still hadn't adjusted to. Instead, something unprecedented: as I realized I was invading, being invaded by, this man, that we'd surrendered to the thing we had been circling nervously for months, I was doused by first serum-surge; rather than sharpen to a cutting point, it spread, a thick, coffeed narcotic, into parts of my body I never knew existed. It vacillated, then intensified toward white, wider than I thought possible, for bottomless seconds before it faded into capillaries. I could not tell if I'd gone over or not. Stupid semantic. I was ionized.

We made love — copulated — at my apartment repeatedly over the nights that followed. I never recaptured that total diffusion, that month Of later. I did catch brief bits and pieces before his body became more almond-familiar. That sustained current never reappeared, and I came in time to wonder if it had been somatic after all. The work we lavished on each other, hungry and needy, received reinforcement, often and diffuse and strange. More than enough to keep us coming back. Todd came frequently to my apartment, sometimes with more old clothes.

But it was some time before I ever set foot in his place. True, he lived in Lower Manhattan, while I lived in the neighborhood where we both worked. At last I invited myself. He was to cook for me, on a weekend we both had off. He agreed to the conditions, with whispered additional terms.

He lived in an attic—"loft" is the current euphemism — on a street straight out of "Bartleby." The corbled eccentricity of the place made him give up nicer rooms uptown, going from a relatively safe neighborhood into the heart of the urban experience. He greeted me at the street, walked me down the hall, parodying bachelor brazenness as soon as the apartment door closed. "Well. Here we are. Just throw that dress anywhere."

He took me on the lightning tour. His makeshift sitting room lay angled oddly against the back corner's fire escape. He had pitched a double bed in an old storage room and turned a large walk-in closet into a study. "Not much, but we call it home. All right: abode. Let's not niggle over terms." Museum-clutter suffused the place, somewhere between a Sotheby's halfway house and Turkish bazaar. A dumbwaiter, now dysfunctional, toted a Howdy Doody in pince-nez. Furnishings included a table made from a lobster pot, chairs made from conveyor belts, and a lilac-colored upright piano. Here and there were scattered convenience-store samplers of instant coffee, lip balm, shoe-odor pads: CARE packages dropped for a shipwreck who'd forgotten how to use them.

Art treasures — Brueghel's wheatfields and Vermeer's Head of a Girl prominent among them — covered every inch of his walls, and a few Tiepolo-type trompe l'oeils even encroached on the ceiling. That popular seventeenth- and eighteenth-century genre, the picture gallery: one canvas crammed recursively with as many different miniature art masterpieces as could fit in the space allotted.

Not only prints: incomplete sets of Conrad and Scott, African kalimbas, a glass harmonica assembled from kit, dancing bears and Uncle Sams that swallowed dimes. Among the larger bric-a-brac was a seamstress's costume dummy from the 1920s, adjustable along all major axes. "Meet Theda Bara. I inherited her after the breakup of a college experiment in idealistic living." She had os-motically acquired a wardrobe: flapper skirt, feather boa, worn-out sneakers, a cocky hat fashioned from a post-office mailer, a brightly painted papier-mâché toucan nose, and a breastplate of buttons reading, among other things. "Liquid Courage, Not Liquid Paper." Against a wall of raw brick lay a hundred-gallon aquarium divided between soil and water. The dry land was given over to mosses, beetles, and skinks. Below lake line, turtles and eels swam oblivious of captivity. "I tried salt water once," he explained, "but it's more difficult to balance than you think."

I watched as he prepared a skillful dinner — Indonesian chicken, so he said, although it could easily have been ad lib. He chattered the while, not even stopping to answer the phone. "They'll call back. Do you think I could pass for an eighties man? The eighties man is sensitive. He wins women's hearts by saying such things as 'I feel a deep sadness welling up in me.' Do you think I'm in any position to win women's hearts?" He was nervous, profuse. I was happy, feeling how little I knew him.

We ate epically — two hours over dinner. He made me try three cabernets blindfold. We talked about his dissertation, long delinquent, and about how I had ended up in library science. When at last nothing graced the table but scraped dishes, he reached over, felt my belly, and nodded, satisfied. "All right then," he said, withdrawing his hand after only a modest amount of further exploration. "We have to talk about music now. You start." I could think of nothing but his violent reaction, on that first business dinner of ours so many months before, when the piped tape of Bach's little keyboard exercise had hurt his face so spontaneously. I wondered if it weren't music he wanted to talk about, but that taboo neither of us had raised since he first hired me to find Dr. Ressler in the historical register.