Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Sometimes he was all formalism, tracing a lazy zigzag in the air in front of a Claude Lorrain, the rigid design of seemingly languid figures in landscape, a pattern glaringly obvious once pointed out. Sometimes he was all association and shameless indulgence. "Look at her gaze," he whispered, nodding at Vermeer's Head of a Girl. "A solitary locked gate, with no adjoining wall, in the middle of nowhere."

Sometimes he told unrelated anecdotes. "When Renoir became too crippled to hold a brush, he painted with one strapped to his forearm." His praise was all in his eyes, and his criticism was so gentle I sometimes didn't realize what it was. "A skilled painting; blameless to a fault." He was too funny to be pedantic. We stopped in front of a cryptic contemporary piece in the American wing. "Don't look at me," Todd mugged. "I got a B in Zen Buddhism." Gazing at one of those baroque hyperrealist spreads where you can count the cherubs' lashes, he smirked, "You know what this painting says to me? It says, 'Press on.'

"Ain't nothin' here I haven't been drilled on," he drawled. "Would still be drilling today, if the alma mater hadn't pitched me out on my severed ear. Seems they have a business to run; actually expected me to turn out some finished product." He tsked at the academicians' psychological naivete.

We arrived, as if by chance, at an enormous gold resonance, a wheatfield being harvested. In the foreground, among the stacked sheaves, by a tree, people sat eating. One exhausted figure lay sprawled asleep under the tree, breeches loose and abandoned. Todd would tell me nothing about this work, but the length of time he spent looking at it made me realize he'd been steering us to it all along. Brueghel's Harvesters. One of a series of Months, depicting the run of the year. At last, Todd spoke, bitter with fullness, out of the corner of his mouth. "If by some accident we get separated," he said, "meet me back here."

Under the persuasion of my private guide, I realized that my own modest understanding of painting had gathered nothing of the unlimited vocabulary of sight. I had never seen paint before; I had never seen. Not that I saw any better then, but I began to feel that I might. Shape and form began to seem dialects of desire. The desire I started to see between Prussian blue and cyan owed much to the way he kept his voice low, came behind me, placed his head on my shoulder, moved just enough air to register in my ear: "See the line of that mountain, how he mirrors it in that tree limb?"

Slowly, deliberately, I let my focus slip from the paintings to his descriptions. I gave in to heat; I hurt, slack across the slope of my chest. I arched involuntarily from the small of my back. I could discriminate every hue, every brushstroke he mentioned. I had dressed up, made myself a visual lure, come down here expressly to let this stranger pick me up, undress me with art lecture. I knew then that I would leave Tuckwell, that I would tell him that evening.

I tilted my face toward my private guide, pulled his ear to me. "Could we see?" I said, ashamed at the femininity of the request. "Could we see the costume collection?" We went downstairs together. There, amid a fabulous fetishistic compendium of Belle Epoque embroidered underclothes, he at last smelled the rearrangement going on in me. Having done nothing but brush hands since the day he first accosted me, he leaned down toward me, announced, "I think it's time," and kissed me. I knew it was coming, I had solicited it, but for some awful reason, my mouth ossified. We kissed like two planks being nailed together. Todd straightened up with a blameless smile and said, "I think it's not time." But it had been. Only, in the moment before our mouths grazed, I saw myself there, near where the wheatfield lay cut down, waiting for someone I'd become inexplicably separated from.

I Sit Still and Wait for Cloudburst

Q: And after the private gallery tour?

I went home and told Tuckwell. It was eerily easy. After months convincing myself I could never go through with it, molting, when the time came, was far less traumatic than the preparation. Avoidance is always a dry run. Keith, too, had prepped for the inevitable. He met my declaration as if he'd engineered it. When I entered our apartment fresh from the museum, Keith sensed something. He said in emcee's voice, "If it isn't the Jan o' the Day." He rushed at me, hunched over in playful wrestler's crouch. I gave in to the squeeze. Then I calmly dropped my clinch-breaking clincher. A tiny, pro-tern stem of brain took over, and with a quiet final whack of the gavel, I announced I was withdrawing from the Five-Year Plan as soon as I could find a place.

Keith and I had met years ago on a downtown E that had stalled. For the dubious entertainment of the whole hostile car, this lunatic in three-piece suit began telling a story about a Beechcraft Bonanza amassing a lethal charge while passing through an electrical storm. The passengers and pilot had no idea of the potential they carried. When the plane touched down on a wet runway, they were all electrocuted. The train lumbered back to life and coughed us out at West 4th. Chance put me behind the stand-up act, and as he touched foot to the concrete platform, I goosed him in the ribs and shouted, "Fatal discharge!" He practically shot up through the sidewalk.

We had dinner together, discovering we'd been virtual neighbors before transplanting. I asked him how a good Midwestern boy triumphed over regional reticence to tap-dance for whole trains full of angry urbanites. He stuck by the story. "That's how I'll go. I know it. You're looking at a man who has a standing date with electrocution." Foreknowledge of what waited if he ever came to a full stop kept him on the continuous insulated ride. We left the restaurant, and he kept at it: everyone we passed was either a massive anode or cathode; one couldn't tell, just by looking, which. "A pasty-faced World Trade exec and a punk, spike-haired bohunk might carry the same charge. The two of them can shake without fear of instant annihilation. But you and I might be dosed with opposite capacitance. Brush shoulders, and we're a spent commodity. Null and void." No more fitting an exit than to go up in a spurt of acrid smoke in the middle of pedestrian traffic on Avenue of the Americas. But that end, however much it might have appealed to him, didn't arrive that first evening. Not until we stopped touching, grounded.

As he raced to embrace me, wanting forgiveness for the tiff that morning, I limply let him pin my limbs to my body in comic wrestling. Then I discharged. He dropped me, burned, and sat down with a look I'll never forget. It crossed our minds at the same instant — that ancient silliness neither of us had thought about for years. I'd confirmed him at last. He put a hand to his head, shook it, smiling: I always knew it would be electrocution.

It was easy. I said, "Keithy, I have to look for a new place. You know I do."

"Sure you haven't found one already?" He looked away and said, "I'm sorry." He fiddled with a piece of visual camp he'd found somewhere — a stiff cardboard print of the Virgin making a curtain call at Lourdes. He fanned himself with it. "Go on."

"I don't know how to, quite." I felt alert, autumn soaking my receptors. "We haven't been…. We haven't really liked each other very much lately."

"No."

"What do you mean, no?" I shouted. When he laughed, I felt everything I'd ever loved about him return in one instant. It had been forever since I'd dared joke. Imperceptibly over time, we'd paralyzed one another. But he was willing to laugh when I most needed. That hurt. TuckwelPs aggressive punchlines — his every affectation of mean spirit — sprang from love of human absurdity. I owed it to him to pack my bag and leave quickly.