Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

How to put this? If rutting truly drives each organism — and doubtless it does — not even vilest desire, aroused in violence, abuse, or smudgy photos, is free of that linked factor. How did awful tenderness take hold? What possible survival value has it? Lovering's enlightened smuttiness is faked. Heat is by far the easier half of the linkage to admit. Lust does not exploit tenderness; tenderness manipulates lust.

Lovering reaches the heights of confidential repulsiveness. "See, Stu, I have this…." He beams, a boy bringing home a gold star. "I guess you'd have to call her a mistress." The disclosure promotes him to King of France. "Her name… I shouldn't be telling you this."

"You shouldn't be telling me this, Joe."

"Her name is Sandy. A remarkable woman. You know Marie Curie?" Ressler doesn't bite. "Well, she's nothing like Marie Curie. But that's Pierre's loss. Not to say Sandy's a dumb bunny. She knows Diffy Q. But let's face it: if you could bed down the most brilliant female yet produced by evolution, or have your fly zipped for three seconds by Kim Novak, I mean, tell me…?" Ressler rustles his report, but Lovering perseveres. "That's where Sandy comes in. One month ago, after much open and healthy athletic debate, I finally managed to persuade her to bestow upon me all the corporeal benefits of holy matrimony without the contractual obligations. A mere Miss Demeanor. I'd feel like a heel if it weren't for one thing. She loves it. I can't come through the door without her… she's an altered personality. Crazed. She shivers, for God's sake. She gets, like, surgically grafted___Let me tell you, the word 'stamina' has taken on entirely new threads to me. On top of that, she can turn stale shrimp into Lobster Newburg."

Almost to himself, Ressler asks, "If she's got all that, Joey, why not marry her?'"

"Where's the crime in that?" This self-declared fling, the prescribed male bravura, renders Lovering so heartbreakingly pathetic that Ressler cannot abide the office another minute, even if leaving means abandoning Ulrich's progress report. Lovering holds forth:

"Come on! You've read Frazer! That's science, too. Soft, maybe, but hey? Tilling the ol' fields?"

Ressler mumbles apology and retreats to the hall.

He arrives without plan at Botkin's office, knocks and enters. Toveh stops her patient exam grading to greet him. "Well! Here is a face absent for too long. Have we clarified some further coding mechanism?" Ressler glances at her, startled. But she's simply making conversation. Alarm unnoticed, he takes his traditional place on the leather couch, psychoanalytic-style. Botkin smiles at the familiarity. "Well then. Today's lesson?"

Ressler raises only a weak, pained grimace. He folds his hands. "Tell me everything you know about music."

"So I'm in charge of the lecture, today. Student teaches teacher, is that it? Such a topic!" Concern crosses her Alpine face. She presses her eyes with the heels of her palms. Her accent spontaneously thickens. "One must learn a language at a very early age in order for it to stick." Ressler, prone, does not move. No point in her asking the source of this sudden cultural interest. Without further objection, Botkin rises to the challenge of condensing the complete procession of Western music into an hour. Assisted by her archive of 78s, she conducts the tour in the hushed monotone of a cathedral guide who tries not to disturb the sanctuary: thorough, succinct, amazing herself by what she says, embarrassed by the desperate variety of ways of singing.

She begins as far back as she can touch, in the incense-dosed anonymity of the Middle Ages. The world as deceptive epiphe-nomenon. She sings a few bars of plainchant in a rich contralto, unaware of the prohibition against public singing. The mournful intervals of Pope Gregory turn her Edwardian cubicle into a Romanesque-capitaled, monk-infested crypt. She adds two parallel parts to the plainsong and arrives at Organum. From the Notre Dame school, she glides across open terrain, resting momentarily at Conductus, Ars Nova, an excerpt from Machaut's eerie, unrelenting mass. She flowers forth into the Renaissance, demonstrating the startling development of imitative polyphony with the assistance of her disks. She speaks of a new expressiveness, an emotional molding of discord. Music divides into cold North and sunbathed South, remote England and dazzling Italy, although the Venetian school is overrun by defecting Dutch contrapuntalists. Proper names begin to serve as post markers: Palestrina, Monteverdi, Gibbons, Byrd. Serious music strays out of the church. She plays him that party craze, the madrigal. April is in my mistress's face. And July in her eyes hath place. Within her bosom is September. But in her heart: a cold December.

The monodic revolution saddens Ressler, as does the advent of opera. Both, he feels intuitively, are wrong turns, apostasy. The sensuous music of France and the striving for new complexity in the Netherlands and Germany console him a little. Botkin maps the rise of the fugue through the Northern Baroque masters, all of whom were required to have names beginning with "Sch." The late Mediterranean Baroque is lost on him, tinkled away in ornament. She talks about the emergence of a cryptic system called tonality — a set of rules, mathematical equivalences and prescriptions. Her language becomes laced with arithmetic relations. Reaching Bach and Handel, Botkin forgoes any hope of wrapping up the outline in an hour. Rather, lecturer and audience lose track of time. She stumbles, unable to sum up this first great watershed. She mumbles a few words about the High Baroque rage for unity.

Mention of the Leipzig cantor throws him into nervous agitation. 'More on Bach," Ressler shouts from the sofa. "What do you know about this man?"

"Bach?" Botkin remarks in surprise. Not the usual starting point for novices. "Of all the composers in the tradition, Bach is by far the most…" She looks for the appropriate hyperbole. Nothing transcendent enough. "Bach is the most likely to offer to help wash the dishes."

"More Bach," Ressler insists. She plays him the most awful moment in auditory art: the Barabbas chord from the Matthew Passion. "More Bach." She plays him the last movement of Berg's Violin Concerto where out of the abject, serial mass of twentieth-century dissonance arises first the agonized tritone, then the whole Bach sotting of a resigned chorale. Es ist genug; Herr, wenn es dir gefällt, so spanne mich doch aus. It is enough; Lord, if it pleases you, simply unharness me.

She pursues doggedly — the rococo, the classical homophonic reaction against the Spent baroque. The issue is not progress or even advancement of technique, however tenuously that might be defined. Motion is not forward, but concentric: restless rearrangement of styles oozing into every open cranny. She draws him the floor plan of sonata form, its tug between tonic and dominant, symmetry and surprise. Resslef wonders if composers are made to study algebra and architecture before being allowed to play with tunes. The joking grace of Haydn prepares the way for the aerial escape artist Mozart.

She plays him the Jupiter. "Listen to him combine the old fugal with the new sonata form; as close to sublime as human engineering gets." Ressler hears, but dimly: faraway sounds from the next town over. He feels the essential oddity of this moment — a young man, hungry for a vocabulary that can contain him, reaching in progressive restlessness back into time to revive an archaism, pouring a tour deforce effortlessly out of the orchestra like water over stones in a brook, proving that no ear had ever really heard the idiom before, even when it was given up as exhausted. He needs to locate more notes. To detect with more precision the relations of time and pitch that evade him. His clay ear calls out for schooling. But can one learn to hear?