Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

It was automatic, once I gave it the first push. We hardly needed to hash out logistics. We agreed we were both too expert at rationalization to benefit from institutional attempts at patch-up. "It does seem somewhat presumptuous to show up at a marriage counselor without a license." In truth, there was no therapy except quitting. We both knew that trial separations are rigged — self-fulfilling equation in two unknowns. All separations were final. Our mating simply had not lasted for life, per our inner instructions. I felt the residual mammal tract, the pair bond, torn from me. But it wasn't my mate who was disappearing.

We worked out the particulars, adultly arranged the furniture deeding and cash transfers. We set a timetable of target dates. The more painful the depreciation, the more effortlessly I wrote it off. I looked for signs that Keith was relieved as well. But he remained subdued, neutral, if not unhelpful. We talked through the news hour, skipped dinner, at last called the day on account of darkness. But before we climbed into the now awkward bed, Keith revealed himself. He cut through my anesthetic, scraped the nerve he could not have gotten to deliberately. "Can I ask you one thing?" he said, lying on his back, examining the road maps in the plastering. "Let me look over any place you find before you sign anything. I don't want you to get stung."

I grabbed his shoulder, forced him to face me and accept my embrace. It had been months since my cells had felt so exhilarated. Then I saw his mouth pasted with the death smile, a sickening look of failed bravery, that amused lip-pinch of confusion when receiving news too appalling to put together. Your parents both died. Broad smirk. You have inoperable cancer. Warm grin. I'm leaving.

Q: To whom could a body turn?

We'd lived so professionally that our friends came mostly from our respective offices. Socializing with already incestuous work acquaintances is so widespread that it must be a capitalist trick to increase productivity. All jobs are surrogate families, complete with oedipal urges, sibling rivalries, and the ugly rest. To occupation and family, add primary social contact and recreational outlet. In another fifty years, we'll have returned to the medieval apprentice system, with parents selling their ten-year-olds into careers appointed by benevolent aptitude test.

Sure, Keith and I saw a few people regularly simply because we liked them. But those we saw most easily were those already in tune with who we were all day long. Keith felt no need to advertise for friends when he had friends in advertising. And I could imagine no periodic contact that would require me to cross the Wilson Line. As such, we each had to go on working inside our social circle after we separated. Neither half of our partisan friends was much help in the massacre.

I had two or three major moorings, each in her way having come, once, closer than words commonly allow. Had any of them asked, I would have hopped a jet out of La Guardia on a moment's notice. But they never asked. In fact, they called only around holidays, never with a trace of desperation. That made it impossible to call them now. I also had my share of lighter long-term friends whom I might have called for steadying: college chums similar enough for some intimacy, a cast-off amour who had stayed in touch out of decorum. I'd made these friends when young enough to risk friendship casually. I lost that ability after twenty. By thirty, acquaintance-making had become a formality with diminishing return.

I called an old girlfriend in Indiana, just to tell someone I knew how I'd smashed domesticity into little bits. In the back of my mind I had the regressive idea of talking her into coming out and sharing an apartment. She upstaged my news: "How did you know to call? I just found out I was pregnant."

Had it been death, I would have had dozens of names to contact. But no one had died, Tuckwell's smile notwithstanding. I was just clearing out. Still, I needed to tell someone closer to hand. Not for emotional support; I just wanted to go public so I couldn't back out. But who to announce to? My regular social contact consisted of checkout clerks, the muffled sadism from upstairs, and a host of cheerful, limited-time phone offers.

Q: What about the third party?

He didn't even know he was one. Franklin was more self-sufficient than I would ever be. It colored his conversation — that inappropriate bravado, the ellipses of a person too long talking to himself. I saw him charm cashiers, elicit from news vendors long stories of their boyhoods, wield phone-devotion over who knows how many fellow alums, even — how could I fail to see it? — ask anonymous librarians out to seafood breakfast. Of the scores who unrequitedly counted him among their friends, he must have had a genuine confidant or two. But Todd stuck to only one other man I knew: the only man on Manhattan more alone than he.

I was the woman who had brought him, however humble, the contents of Dr. Ressler's file. That was enough to earn me visiting privileges. And visiting, up to the moment when I had the history of art etched onto my eye with Dürer precision, sufficed to show that Franklin's days of socializing had ended with the B.A. He'd hinted as much over our first date: the look that came over him at the piped music, the defensive posture he unconsciously assumed as we stepped into the street, even his stoic suggestions for quotes. Franklin's favorite take on companionship came from Melville. While survival might force one into bedfellowship with a Queequeg or two, "truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast."

North East West South

Q: How did he respond to the news?

The same way Franklin responded to all news. He clipped my announcement and added it to his collage. After the day in Brueghel's wheatfields and night lying alongside Tuckwell's death grin, I stayed away from MOL for two weeks. After making the declaration, my conscience didn't even allow me to call. Predictably, Todd did not call me either during that period, not even to see what was up. Nor did he come to the branch, although we were just blocks away. His signal was always the rich, ambiguous, low wavelengths of silence.

I wanted to move out without profit, to get by happily alone, assuming the worst case. In fact, the prospect of solitary evening meals, putting anything I wanted on the radio, warming the linen with my own legs was all I hoped for. But after two weeks, I had to deliver my news. The more I tried to ignore my need to notify the MOL-men of my decision, the crazier I became to see them. I was consumed by outlandish fear; their suite, in which nothing had happened for years, might have gone up overnight in smoke. Or perhaps the antique bivalve elevator had snapped. Perhaps Todd, fired with dissertation at last, had given notice. Perhaps Ressler, so long in the process, had dissolved.

On the first day in November, after two weeks of determinedly not thinking about the two of them— fifteen days, to paraphrase Todd's favorite joke, but who's counting? — I could hold out no longer. I had done nothing at all that day. My contribution to the molecule's three-billion-year attempt to name itself was exactly nil. I'd had one request all afternoon, for an indifferent statistic, and had directed the questioner to the PAIS. "The what?" Pointing out the table where we kept the service was not enough. My patron looked aghast at the thought of combing the binders herself. I bit my lip and did the lookup for her. And as I flipped through the cutaway grand canyon of back issues, I remembered how arbitrarily Franklin had first descended upon me with his plea for information, a difference that might make things different. Pathetic, pitiable, wonderfully smorgasbord, his insisting that an unknown man had once done something worthy of print, on no stronger evidence than the man's face creases and his command of diction.