Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

He wanted to hear me say it, unleash my rage. "How long," I said, perfectly modulated, stewardess-clinical, "have you been packing your dick into that pretty little muff?" Hearing myself pronounce the obscenity — I still can't believe this — brought me to the first stages of arousal.

"How long have I been sleeping with Annie?" He waited brutally until I nodded at the paraphrase. He was a boy. A stupid, puerile, self-indulgent, arrested boy. His eyes looked up as if he were reading the answer there. "Since shortly after I began sleeping with you."

The moan came out of me before he finished the predicate. I covered my face in my hand, so that he would not have the pleasure of seeing the knife slice across it. Muscle convulsed under my palm, my skin burned, all over an exchange of words. Todd took a clumsy, involuntary step of compassion in my direction, but he did not dare close the gap. He could not bear to be responsible for a show of pain that compromised me. He let out a plaintive bleat, banged into a chair, and slammed the cabinet, by way of offering comfort. "You honestly didn't know?"

It helped, at least, to let my facial tics explode. "You said nothing. Total silence." Amyclaean, golden, consenting. Alien and unnatural in my mouth. "You hid. How I was supposed to know?"

He shook his head. "She's always around. Devoted. Doting." His tone was soft, pointed, regretful. "All the qualities I so patently lack."

"From that I was supposed to guess?" I went shrill, and — last symptom of losing control — didn't care. "She treated us like a couple. So did you, for that matter."

"I still would. So would she." If, he implied, you weren't so archaic, perverse with monogamy. "The night I first went home with her, she told me she wouldn't hurt you for all the tea in china shops. I obviously miscalculated in telling her you'd understand."

Having slighted everything else, he went after my understanding. I wanted to prove myself the most magnanimous, liberal creature on earth. At the same time. I wanted to snuff him out, arrogance and all, like a kitchen match. Hurt him beyond understanding. "You screwed with a creationist." Monotone outrage. Sex with a religious zealot: the most unforgivable miscegenation. Todd could not stifle a horrible laugh. The pained chuckle came out hideous; he knew the escaping sound would divorce us for good.

"We slept together regularly, yes."

"Slept together," I said. "Regularly." The act might have taken fifteen seconds against a wall, but the polite name promoted their every transaction to a mutual sedative between the politenesses of linen. "I don't understand." Bitter pleasantry. "How can she square this with the Six-Day God? Isn't fucking without benefit of clergy one of the bargain fares to damnation?"

Todd pinched his lip. "We've never discussed doctrine."

"What do you discuss?"

"Not much, frankly. You and she have always talked more than she and I."

She'd wanted to save me. God did not allow for interpretation. Thou shalt not commit. Her folk-song simplicity had fooled me into assuming she did not share creation's basic contradiction. I didn't care anything about her or her motives. The only thing I cared about, flailed at as if it alone could keep self-esteem from dissolving, was the cause of Franklin's infidelity. Irrelevant.

Unaccountably calm, I suddenly knew that belonging, for Todd, was another ugly name for aging. He was losing the courage to face routine, and monogamy left him in the path of exhaustion. Woman-jumping, deep in him long before I arrived, publicly proclaimed that in the end he wouldn't be around for anyone. He could never have survived, as half his life, a partner's crises, the death of her parents, her illness, aging, change. He barely survived the spring overhaul of my wardrobe. The constant terror of event unfolding in daily familiarity could only be beaten by jumping ship, getting promiscuously free.

He had ruined whatever chance the two of us ever had of looking to our joint moat. I would never forgive him that. But I needed to confirm a worse suspicion before breaking off. I spoke softly, not to repair but to cauterize. "Why, Franklin? You have to explain. Don't leave me guessing."

"Janny." A student pleading for a grade change. "I don't want to leave you at all." I retaliated now with all the secretly stockpiled silence I had stolen from him over the months. "Jan. You want me to make it worse?" I waited, my fingers jiggling like voltmeter needles. "You're asking me to hit you." Yes, 1 thought. Say it. It will never make any sense otherwise. I will never work it out alone. "You cannot," he started. He shifted clauses. "She… Annie. You see, with her—"

"She's still fertile," I supplied. His relief, the greatest 1 ever succeeded in giving him, broke all over his face. I felt, to answer it, only sick, self-confirming, disaster stoicism. Your house is on fire and your children have burnt. I knew what I needed to do, and would do it cleanly. "I'm sorry," I said. "I had no idea. You two are trying to make babies?"

"Janny." Frank was beyond trying. "Janny."

But I was right: the saving maybe. Every option exercised was a small murder. Open-door policy, everything had to remain possible. He couldn't write about his Flemish landscapist without first acquiring botany, geography, geology, optics, another foreign language. He could not write a life with me without a second edition being at least conceivable. He had to remain an able-semened body. My ligation robbed him of potential. His every evasion of commitment preserved the day when he might exercise his birthright, cash in and capitulate to fatherhood.

I had my explanation, and I made to leave. But stopping at the door, meaning to make a concession to closure — a last goodwill drink somewhere — I surprised myself by furiously whispering, "I told you everything early on. Why bother coming back, week after week? Why trouble to move halfway in? Why string out the thing, knowing I was useless?"

A boy, arrogantly loose on his scavenger hunt, stared at me in boyish bewilderment. "What do you mean?" He held his head, searched for the best possible word to counter my willful misrepresentation. "I love you."

I left him and walked alone to the control room, where I heard Dr. Ressler's birthday musical offering. I knocked and entered rapidly, before I could back out. The professor sat behind the bank of monitors, blissfully happy in the spray of dense counterpoint from his turntable. "Ah! A victim. Listen to this," he said, hungry for companionship to a degree I had never seen in him. He was now ready for anything that circumstance might throw him. And I had come to rub his readiness out.

"The D minor partita for solo violin. 'Solo' is a euphemism. Multipart polyphony from a single instrument. Last movement: the chaconne. Constantly repeated eight-bar theme___" He stopped.

I had my back to him, looking through the two-way mirror into the computer room, committing the place to long-term memory. "No music lesson today?" he said gently, without patronage. Unique among males in my experience.

"Your boy says he loves me," I said, trying for lightness and missing by light-years.

Dr. Ressler lifted the needle of the phonograph and bombarded us with quiet. "That much is obvious." My long silence gave him a chance to allude to that old, shared joke. "Well, yes. It is obvious."

"But you see," I said, turning to him and parodying a smile, "I am no longer functional."

He looked me full in the face, searching for the missing pieces. In less time than it would have taken a professional, he had the thing figured. Against room rules, he lit a cigarette brutally, in disgust. A flare-up I didn't know could come from him. He had taken a chance on us, tenderly maneuvered us over our own flaws, poised us for a reasonable chance at happiness; all we had had to do was pay attention and try to be relatively free of cruelty.