Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Why waste my limited time narrowing Todd down to a specific atlas spot? He is unreliable, skittish, more changeable than the seasons. But he is the only other person who knew Ressler. The only person I know who, even now, I might speak to. If I find the museum that houses met de Bles's panel, what will it tell me? Nothing guarantees that Todd stayed in the neighborhood more than an afternoon. But a start. Something to use my training on. Odd comfort, to know the exact town he was in on 7/6. An anchor spot. A day like any other.

I start with the obvious: the Low Countries. Aided by art catalogs, I search through northern Belgium, the Dutch Rim Cities. For a minute, I think I've pinned him down in Rotterdam. There, in the Boymans — van Beuningen, a picture that might have drawn him: one of Brueghel's two great Towers of Babel. The painter and subject matter he really wanted to write about. But no Herris. I find a Bles panel— Paradise —in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, and another in a regional museum in the south of the country. I am dragging my heels, pursuing the unlikely. The stamp on his card was in francs, not guilders.

I cross the border, no douanes to trouble me over undeclared baggage. I find nothing in Antwerp but an afternoon of fabulous distraction. Ghent is a dead end; the altarpiece must have brought him there, but I have no proof. No clues when. I save my chief suspect for last. Brussels. French-speaking enclave in Flemish countryside. Musée des Beaux Arts. Voor Schone Kunsten. Brueghel's Census at Bethlehem, his Fall of Icarus. Indifferent, irrelevant, overlooked, unbearably mundane suffering, depicted dead on. And for a moment: electric connection. Three bona fide panels by Bles. But the two landscapes do not match the view I'm after, and the subject of the third is all wrong. This painted apocalypse is of flood. The world I'm looking for must end in fire.

The Date, No Longer Off

Todd was never sufficient motive for overhauling my life. I knew nothing of his private affairs, his prior commitments. No matter; I simply liked to be with him. Time was wide, broad enough for all manner of RSVPs. All his solicitous attention made me feel unique. The decorous handshakes and hugs — generations out of date — the barrage of personal questions, the liquid forest-animal eyes, the detailed monologues about his father's Saturday ritual or Northern Renaissance painters made me feel that I brought about a reciprocal cold alertness in him, the suggestion of imminent ocean crossing.

Five minutes of seeing Todd, through the one-way glass, smother pretty bank teller Annie with the same courtier's attention should have brought home that his flood could engulf anything that would hold still long enough to get wet. Sometimes in the early evening at MOL, the phone would ring with acquaintances eager for a share of his voice. Frank would greet every obscure claimant at the other end like a childhood blood brother lost for decades. A thousand people in greater New York considered him their best friend. Only he was on this island alone.

With only the slightest encouragement, I was prepared to jettison Keith, the apartment, our circle of mutual dinner friends— to slash and burn them all, rewriting the past with brutal efficiency. For a moment before consigning the old letters to the bin, I hesitated. Some nights I fell asleep swearing it would be tomorrow. But in the morning, the thought of splitting up the end tables we had bought as a set struck me not as clearing off deadwood but as torching the living tree. Tuckwell, sensing the lumpectomy might yet be avoided, played on my remorse. Fighting to keep me around, he put on a heroic show of lightness, as if that quality would awaken my fullest nostalgia for him. In October, the air took on unbearable, crisp clarity. It was waiting for me. The solid blue of the sky, the smell of dead leaves insisted that courage was a little thing. Slight. Easy, in that time of year when everything happened.

I was then on weekend rotation, two days off in midweek. Keith's willingness to market anything to anyone had landed him in court. An exporter and a manufacturer of an ultrasonic antipest device for whom Keith had done a brilliant multimedia campaign were suing one another for fraud. Each had led the other to believe that fortunes were to be made selling the killer sonic machine in Australia. Following bankruptcy, both held the other responsible for failing to determine that the top three Australian pests were deaf. On one of my free mornings, Keith suggested I join him in the civil courtroom where he was performing. "An especially interesting item in the docket today. An animal psychologist who specializes in vermin defense mechanisms. A must-see on anyone's judicial list."

"Keith, I'm not up to it just now. Besides…."

"Come on, woman. This is just what you need. Lose that long face. We're talking major Constitutional implications here. Democracy in action. The unmistakable element of human pathos." The couple that litigates together, mitigates together. Whenever the tertium quid settled down between us, he began to practice an ivy-league irony that made fun of everything he did for a living.

"I can't. I have to meet a friend at the Met."

"First I've heard about it." It would be the first Franker heard too. Todd had extended a standing invitation to look at paintings together any daytime I wanted. That afternoon, I wanted. But unable to move from one life to the next, I took to deception. To compound the ugliness, I blamed the need for deceit now on Keithy. But skulking had started all the way back with that first dinner date. I'd thought that for me to call Tuckwell and tell him "I'm meeting a man for dinner" would have been like the secretary of state announcing, in front of that bas-relief, briefing-room, world map proclaiming this country's perpetual escapade in high seriousness, that we have no immediate plans for amphibious invasion of this week's hot spot. Tuckwell and I had always danced warily around formally fixing the contract. We lived on a perpetual option to renew. My coming on with the threatened leverage of a stranger would seem to telegraph the conventional dictate "Marry or get off the pot." This I refused to do. So I withheld the facts, and withholding, week by week, grew progressively easier.

By that October morning, I was positively skilled at fabrication. Truth seemed so small a thing, against such overwhelming odds. Lying about plans for the Met had an aura of novelty, as exciting as hearing the mailman downstairs. As soon as I invented it for Keith, my faked afternoon date took on a sweepstakes feel. Bold and violent decision, the scent of spice islands.

I refused to justify my day's plans. Keith repeated, "Come on. You'll love this. The technology, the untapped continent, and the men who dared rid it of its lower forms of life. The shattered dream, the falling out of friendship, and the judicial system that reconciled them. And it's free. Can the Met offer you even a fraction of that?"

For years, his ability to stoke up inspired silliness on demand had saved me from myself. But today, that was history. "Not very attractive, Keith."

"Pest eradication prosecution seldom is, dear one."

"Stop it!" I scared myself with the volume. "It's all a big burlesque, your life, isn't it? But you keep putting on the power suit every day, don't you? You jump through the same hoops as any other little zealot. Then you parody it all for your friends, so we'll all know you're only an observer."

Breaking loose, but in exactly the way I didn't want to. Keith closed his eyes and got infuriatingly calm. "OK. Easy, sweet. Let's do a little breakfast before we get too far into this. We don't want to start a catastrophe simply because we skipped today's E, hmm?"