Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

J. O'D., 7/5/83

My new acquaintance examined our handiwork. He giggled at the first and took undisguised pleasure in the second. Then he looked at me, scrutinized my face, trying to determine exactly who worked this advice column for the fact-lorn public. "You've found something," he declared. "That much is clear."

I wanted to contradict him, but couldn't. "Like the Canadian Mounties…" I began, but caught myself before ending up in the double entendre.

"You'll have to tell me everything. Listen: turns out I'm the sole patron of a seafood dive very much ahead of its time." His burlesque was gentle, with no sadistic edge. "I'm particularly enthusiastic about their humane handling of shellfish. Want to do lunch?"

It felt good to be asked a question that didn't require a double-check. I laughed. "It's almost five o'clock."

"Almost time for night-shift breakfast. I thought lunch might be an acceptable compromise."

"You cannot have seafood for breakfast. I forbid it."

"I've done worse. Can we take that no as a yes?" He went on, with wondrous, unassisted certainty, to set the time and place, not to mention what I would be eating. He rubbed his hands and made a curious snapping flick with thumb and middle finger. I later learned how many different things that nervous gesture stood for. "All right then. Meet you there. I assume you are dependable, Ms.

O'Deigh?" My paranoia flared as I heard my name in his mouth. "You'll be there?" Urgent but decorous library subdecibel. "Ach, she'll be thare, laddie. Stop with yare wurryin'."

All that I know of animal courtship dances comes from Van Nostrand's. But this clearly was one; too much bravado and flutter to be anything else. No man had done me so elaborate a two-step in several seasons, and I let it go on, despite myself. Pure, amateur male theatrics: nothing to take seriously. While ambivalent about meeting the man outside the jurisdiction of the shelf list, I saw little danger in it. Capitulation was easier than trying to outtalk him. My own curiosity about the collapse of the precocious empiricist would have been enough to take Todd on. I wanted everything his colleague might tell me.

But Franklin Todd's soft-shoe polish also smelled of something else: aromatic locales I hadn't yet visited, the scent of travel. The man was genuinely strange. Two people, no longer young, knowing nothing about one another, their pasts sharing no word in common, meet on a day in early summer to compare notes on a third party. The scenario had all the charm of travelers' phrases, a crash course at Berlitz. Sardonic, innocent, Todd backpedaled from the Question Board. He stopped abruptly and retraced his steps. He looked me over a last time and said, "But you are." Contradicting all advance reports, yet firm in the face of the evidence.

"Am what? What am I?"

"You are looking after your moat, aren't you?" He'd meant something else, an answer to his own question of a week before, deciding that I was, after all, possessed of surfaces. And the decision surprised us both. Still pruning the board after he left, I found an impeccable imitation of one of my own typed cards hiding amid the others, one of those marvelous walking sticks or owl-imitating moths. The impostor-card asked, "Q: What is the origin of the phrase 'Make the catch'?" It had not been there before Mr. Todd's visit.

Persistence of Vision

At the time, I was not in the market for dance steps, however novel. Already involved, as contemporary idiom puts it, tied to a man in a mutually professional windbreak stable enough to deflect this new sea breeze. Stavine toeether for four vears Droved our complementarity. Keith — slick, quick to anger, addicted to excitement, at times insane — countered my own reverse extremes. Together, we passed in our class and era, subtly matched opposites in a country full of couples as incongruous as Tuckwell-O'Deigh.

Keithy always made me laugh. The problem, by summer of '83, was that I'd begun laughing at his running routine despite myself. My mate's particular brand of joke had lost the redeeming secret: the trick of making disparate reality show a hopeless, bearable seam. Like everyone I know in New York, Tuckwell was a prairie refugee. Every damn person I get close to in this city — all transplanted Hoosiers or huskers. It would have been cheaper to stay home. Keith's dress, speech, and manner were compensatory— Coastier Than Thou. He could speak convincingly about everything on the island from P/E ratios to performance art. "Appraising, dear heart, doesn't necessarily require the inconvenience of knowing."

He knew the city like a cabbie. The stress of midtown at 5:00 p.m. rolled off his downy obliviousness. Keith would have sickened and died if he'd had to live anywhere else but this epitome. For years he protected me, underwrote my survival in this toxic place. Keith had dabbled in academics but soon strayed into advertising, "Needs Manufacturing," as he liked to describe it. Tuckwell was outstanding at what he did. He made pots of money without shame. But he pumped a wellspring of sardonic commentary, the progressive's estrangement from his own pursuits. "Ads," he once defended himself at a dinner full of less forthright friends, "are our supreme art, polar exploration, and depth psychology rolled into one. And the shit that keeps the GNP blooming, to boot."

We liked each other well enough. But the spit holding us together was the power of mutual facetiae to legitimize affection. Against my reference-desk reserve, he cultivated crude anarchy. He was far more comfortable in the flash of Lower Manhattan haute Kultur, but he had to come to me for help in navigating the boroughs, even our own neighborhood. I kept him out of debt and he kept me from starving myself. We divided the household chores contractually. I did mine in the evenings and days off; he hired outside help. Tuckwell was convinced he would die by electric shock. I milked the opposite fear of wasting away for decades in a nursing home. Our phobias and philias canceled out one another, We arrived at an equilibrium that could go on, like those fleas on backs of fleas, forever ad infinitum.

We conversed well, when we saw one another. Keith overheated at times, but he knew the language. People who still love words have to be forgiven everything. In what the last century referred to as mechanical transport, we were scarily compatible, even after four years. He taught me abandon. The rule was: recklessness could always be repented at leisure. With ad designer's ingenuity, he steadily introduced wrinkles into our sex life, always managing to suggest that R and D had future, new-and-improved packages around the corner.

His total shamelessness even made the awful minute afterwards almost comic. As I postcoitally recoiled, Keith, still savoring the instinctual release just served up, would lie alongside me and wail, in a perfectly timed, plaintive voice directed at the ceiling, "What is the Law?" He'd answer himself in animal sadness, "Not to eat meat; not to go on all fours—" I always laughed — the dovetail joint between need and embarrassment.

Our attraction, unplanned and mismatched, was the physics of charged particles, ions pulled toward their neutralizing not. He was one of the few who prance through the world with self-esteem. His absolute views on everything were manna after a day in the perpetually uncertain, qualified reference wilderness. Keith liked himself, a fire worth hovering near, trying to steal.

On the day I accepted dinner, I was not dissatisfied. I'd never been a big fan of unnecessary drama. Mr. Todd's invitation was flattering, but not enough to account for my accepting it, even under guise of business. Tuckwell and I were, in the rules of coming and going, hopelessly liberal. His work was continuous and mine too variable for us to set up the schedule that ordinarily substitutes for home life. I tried to call him that July evening to tell him I'd be late. But already half sabotaging, I didn't try his office. I rang up the apartment and listened to Tuckwell's latest tape: "Your mission, should you decide—"I then announced to the machine that I was eating with a stranger.