Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

He finds it impossible to concentrate on the empirical work. His desire to perfect the cell-free system stalls against Jeanette's opacity, more cryptic than when she was a stranger to him. Curiosity has gone, leaving in its place a fatalistic homesickness opposed to investigation of any sort. He does not love her now. And yet, a keener coveting: she is more intensely beautiful for having so far declined to confirm him. Beauty, as Botkin once read to him during their joint listening sessions, Schubert's Winter's Journey, is just the beginning of a terror he might not be able to endure.

He is taken by absurd urges to plead with her, to demand explanations. Of course, he cannot, even if the explanations were his to demand. He will lose her the moment his feigned self-possession admits to need. No begging. Self-preservation now depends on a deadly competition: can he escape faster than she? He slips into the lab late one afternoon, safe for the thirty seconds he needs. But immediately, tailed to this one injudicious half-minute, he is cornered by a lab-coated, dissimulating apparition.

"May I come over and play?" She walks slowly toward him, then stops, hovering near where he stands, not daring to come flush to him. She wears her lab coat, a soft, brushed olive skirt, an organdy blouse sweetly fatigued. Dark stockings hold her legs heartstop-pingly limber. She is less clinical than reckless, frightened, precariously still. She pushes back a loose forelock, then holds the nervous forearm in her other hand, to keep it from straying. She just looks, beseechingly, too uncertain to say anything. At last, she shakes her head, giving in: "You really are a beautiful boy."

Her simple, head-down, sole-scuffing benign capitulation betrays her. Passion now would be powerless against him, but soft, dependent admission of hurt calms him before he can run. She holds his gaze, opaline, opalescent. When she finally smiles, it is with relief, as if he has favored her already with his inevitable return. "Stuart. Friend. We have to talk."

He chills without missing a beat. Pith me mercifully, then. "Don't worry," he says, suppressing the trace betrayal. "We stay on the project together. In vitro is as much your province as mine. We'll just have to find a way of working in close quarters without pulling the pin."

She stares at him, slapped down, laughing through choked throat at the frailty just revealed. She looks at him, shaking her head: Boy-o, how could you think it? Don't you realize: we can't get out now, except together. "You said you loved me," she says quietly, courage enough for both. "I've been thinking of nothing else since you admitted it."

"Nothing else?" One lie and we drown in atmosphere.

She gives him a bashful overbite that would disarm the coolest Geneva negotiator. "I won't tell you what else has gone through my head since then. Not yet, anyway." She steps toward him, a supplicant. Only believe. He does not step back. He fixes on her teeth: how can even her incisors incite him? They ought to seem more like tetanus hooks than pretty advertisements. She does not stop until they touch thighs, here in the open. She does not care who sees them.

"How could you…? You're so natural with him. You're…"

Her sweet undertones flatten into a quick cat's hiss. "What were you doing tracking him down? Spying? Big buck showdown? Imagine how / felt, seeing you talking with him behind my back."

Her anger releases him. She might fake everything else, but not this surpassing flash of hatred. "Jeanette," he says, loving her so acutely his chest feels the phantom pain of amputation. Names he never wished to be saddled with — the photo of a luminous child who died just after the lens opened. "Jeannie. Your husband is great. Kind, bright, funny." He, in comparison: ambitious, hungry, vain. Even were he in the man's league, any trade would invalidate everything.

"Yes," she admits harshly, the tear of the barbed gaff.

He takes her at the waist, knowing even as he does it that it is the worst possible gesture. "You two love each other. I've seen it."

"He's a good man. We get along. We know one another."

"But you're not…?" He stops short of the ridiculous semantic distinction. Her nervous lock falls again, obscuring her lowered face. He reaches, brushes it back. "Something in your marriage is not working?" Temporarily reprieved by that indifference he could not rouse earlier, when he needed it.

But his detachment lasts only until her next words. Her cheeks crumple horribly. Blood rushes into her soft tissue, and she chokes for air. "We can't have children." A day later, Ressler will not remember the precise next sequence. Jeannie falls into his shirt, dry-heaving, hyperventilating sobs. Water everywhere — eyes, nose, throat. Her vulnerability, her flood is at last her, one that he recognizes, recalls from internal phylogeny — cave life or earlier, arboreal, forest floor, or gilled, underwater. It pitches Ressler into the passion of animals. He begins to kiss her everywhere across the unrecognizable bruise her face has become. She kisses back. She bites, trying to break the skin. "Help me," she says, as if he were the only one who could. "What's wrong with me?"

Canon at the Seventh

They rut. No other name for the humping that takes them. He kisses her blood-filled face, scattering the hits, surrendering to dizzy inertia. She sinks her teeth into his shoulder, sick desire clamping her to him. Her frightened, little-lamb's-backsliding capitulation passes into his tissue and he can only clamp back. Sobbing, startled, she looks at him, realizing the place where they've arrived. They fall into the fabled clearing, forbidden and inevitable, the place they knew from the first caught glance they would one day inhabit. She loosens from him long enough to lead him to the back lab corner, beyond equipment shipment boxes: for form's sake, out of the public thoroughfare.

Den, hive, nest, nidus, eyrie, newlywed starter home: they build themselves a pallet on the floor. They pull each other down hungrily. He unfastens her organdy, exposing the final freshness of her breasts to the air. She stretches along the length of her flank, moans an admixture of pleasure and regret. Her exertion ripples like the paroxysms of a barometer giving up in the eye of the storm. We can't. Don't do this. Wrong, childish, wicked, degenerate. Please. Faster. Here. Home. They are to go through with it, in full cognizance, commit the self-seeking, indulgent act. It stops his breath.

He lifts the crumpled olive skirt up around her waist. Jeannie gasps once, an angry aspirant. Her stockings and panties give way. She utters sharp, soft forest noises. The sound, the pungency of her vaginal quiff undo him. He rolls into her. Her legs lift, ready to receive. The space is his only. They fit. Her small-mammal Whimpers condense in violence. He clasps his hand over her mouth.

but even now does not really care if every living thing just down the hall hears. He is drawn up her by capillary action, deeper than anticipated, into an encircling center. Never did he imagine a woman could have so much room. The fluid folds of that infinite passage press up against the intruder, welcome it with all the ingenuity of design. She is crying now, from the lungs, where he feels her from the other side. "Stop. I don't want," and then, throatier, garbled: "I love you," or "I love this."

Each races the other to unilateral surrender. Something more than sex: an excavation, mohole, metric and insufficient, each time farther down, nearer a remembered core. By turns, his whole body is a coition-charged conductance and something else — the effortless, mate-free budding of plants. There is no Herbert; whatever pain they cause the man is erased by his wife's abandon. Ressler's forward motion into her becomes a rocking apology: clandestine. Never again. He has her, as he needed from word go.