Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

He walked a few steps in every direction. His eyes were intent on something farther than the other side of the silvered glass. He shook his head, racing through the permutations, discarding things he might say as pointless. He stubbed out the butt and exploded. "The man is a fool." I felt a forbidden rush: Dr. Ressler needed me. I went over to him, stopped him from stepping away, and pinned myself to him. The only demonstration either of us would ever give one another. I didn't let go; instead, I pressed against him, insisting. Slowly, against his will, he pressed back. We did not caress, but held one another hypothetically, softly letting skin guess at what desire might have felt in another place, another life, halves of a botched dissection, an old whole.

We separated without explanation. He lifted my lowered chin until I had to look squarely at him. "This is not the scenario of choice for you two. You know that."

I shrugged. "It's the scenario we're in." It occurred to me: I could say: Talk to him; shame him. And the thing would be straightened. Ressler knew as much too, and was waiting, weight on his toes, to intercede. I didn't ask. I no longer wanted to be fixed. It was a relief to escape the waiting, the nights away — to break off without it being my fault. To come away with all the benefits of the injured party.

I went home, there being no other place. Over the next several days, most of Todd's possessions politely disappeared of their own accord, vanished under bacterial rot, in stop-action film. The evacuation did leave its slight, keloid blemish. Notebooks, a record or two, a pair of socks left behind, forgotten — the crippled child in Hamelin, or props for a later, staged, happier goodbye.

The room above the antique shop once again became my private reserve. There was nothing to do on evenings off except repair the place. When I could make no more improvements to its chenille stagecraft, I began finding reasons to stay late at the branch, without compensation except the slightly more comprehensive answer.

Q: What is the largest geological feature on earth?

A: The earth's largest feature is also its youngest. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a ten-thousand-mile-long submarine mountain range rising to an average height of ten thousand feet and anywhere from three to six hundred miles wide, is split down its length by the breach of new rock welling up from the convection currents of the earth's molten mantle.

I lost several days to the QB. I thought I might be able to go on forever, working it into the perfect artifice, addressing every hidden need in the close-lipped questioner.

Warm days went on increasing. 1 began walking again, more cautiously, not so far afield as when it had been the two of us. Brooklyn is a complex biome. Two and a half million people watching the neighborhood isobars of war and truce. Streets full of Russian, Italian, German, Korean, Yiddish, Spanish, Chinese — a fair slice of the varieties of talk. But the language map is devised to keep out crossovers. I stuck to the island allotted me — branch, apartment, subway opening.

After a long afternoon at the branch rooting through Gov Pubs, I did not feel like going home. One evening, sitting in a convenient pizza parlor among surreal composite frescoes of Venetian and Florentine landmarks, I had time, for the first time since I'd left him, to see how I'd treated Tuckwell. While I'd been flush, I believed that the best thing we could do for old loves was be firm with them. I now saw the weak rationalization for what it was. I simply had had no stomach for messy responsibility. If it were too late to make good, maybe I could at least recant.

Keithy shouted a surprised hello through the intercom and buzzed me in. I walked up to the apartment, disoriented by how familiar the stairs still were. He'd left the door open but did not meet me. He was lying in the recliner, watching TV with the sound off, but in full three-piece uniform as if just back from the office. "Marian," he said, as if I too were just home from work. "What do you have to say for yourself?" I had lived here once, and all the place could say was / remember you; wait, don't tell me. … I sat next to him, ready for any sentence — hostility, abuse, sadistic wit, even affection, caresses, sex-with-the-ex, if that was the penalty he chose to extract. Any slap but casual indifference.

"You're just in time," he said, without glancing over. "Watch." He pressed a button on the remote; was it a new device, or the one we'd owned? The sound flooded on, cataclysmic Carmina Burana —the microphone everywhere in the orchestra at once. On the screen, a casserole apotheosis of meats, vegetables, noodles, and sauces flew through the air in an ultra-slow-motion parabola so charged and erotic that each of its subtle, glacially arcing parts seemed loaded with the symbolic curve of significance.

I watched arrested in horror as epic food rained down upon an ivory-colored antique tablecloth. Every transcendent splash was Bolshoi-choreographed. Succulent streamers of pasta twisted like living things against the sea bottom. Crosscut, pan, slow zoom: every visual stop pulled out to create a late-century masterpiece. The effect, pornographically immediate, more evocative than any Ingres or Master of Flemalle, scooped out my stomach more violently than the real event would have. Keithy killed the set just as the voice-over began to explain what the stain was selling. He leaned toward me in triumph. "No talking toilet bowls for me. When Keith Tuckwell dies, he's going to leave something behind him in the minds of millions."

"That was yours?"

"Essentially."

"Network TV? Prime time? My, Keith."

"Yes, woman. I've arrived." No trace of the old self-mockery, no suggestion of see what you lost? He sat back in his chair, at peace with his times. I don't know what I'd expected, what I'd hoped to say to him. In thirty seconds, I remembered how hard it was to say anything at all. I asked how he'd been. "Since when?" Had he been eating well? "Well, but not prettily." Gotten out any? Been dating? "A veritable salad bar, a smorgasbord of women. Cold women who dress in red and black. Women with overbites — very frail. Women who know all there is to know about structural engineering. Black women who drift down sidewalks humming de Falla. Leggy blondes in pastel who have never known unhappiness. Women who keep great secrets. Auburn-haired beauties whose neuroses periodically flame out like__"

I let him improvise, absorbing my due. But it was no punishment. He was too happy. An intercom call a minute later, playfully rhythmic, revealed the reason. He buzzed the caller in without asking identity, and opened the door on a heart-stoppingly glamorous girl who wore, with poised authority, incredibly expensive Italian-tailored rain-forest green and a rope of pearls. Keith introduced us without a ripple. I didn't catch her name, but the way she shook my hand and said how much he'd told her of me laid out everything.

She excused herself to take a powder, something I hadn't realized women still did. "Keithy." I said. "You can't marry this woman."

He looked at me, lips cracking. "Why not?"

"She'll stay for long periods in the bathroom with the door closed. She'll be two hours dressing, just to take the trash out. You'll be miserable. This is just a rebound."

He waited an arch second. "Too late. Your invitation's already in the mail." His date returned. "We're going out," he said, his suit now giving an entirely different account of his emotional state of affairs. "No need to wait up." They left, leaving me watching television in a stranger's apartment, knowing the exact, private locking-up routine on my way out.

Nights in my apartment I sat in the rocker, watching Todd's goods disappear of their own volition. I reviewed the old photo gallery. I remembered how he arranged his notebooks near the bed, so he could reach them rapidly in the dark. How he bought milk so he could stare at the photos of Missing Children on the cartons. How, when he lost his patience with food, he could survive for days on charges of whipped cream straight out of the can. How his body sometimes lurched in an electrostatic jerk of total fear before falling off to sleep.