Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

We started at the top, the Who's Whos. The boy annoyed me completely by trotting ahead, going down the spines saying, "Tried it, skipped it, tried it…." Months later, he explained he was being funny. By then, I'd discovered that Frank Todd was a competent researcher. The only thing standing between him and Ph.D., aside from sense of humor, was excessive thoroughness. He belonged to the class that can't get started writing, paralyzed by that last overlooked source. Franker perpetually budgeted another half year to mopping up; by the end of the period, the holdouts had proliferated. When I accused him of playing dumb at that first meeting, making me do the scutwork he could easily have done himself, he said, "Woman, have you ever seen yourself reach for the top shelves? Choice."

I ignored him and began the elimination sieve. As I thumbed, he stood by, irritating me further by humming. His hum sounded like the vibration of the library air conditioning, so soft and sustained were the intervals. When I looked up he was standing shoulders hunched and eyes closed, conducting himself with the closed forefinger of his right hand, wrist curled in front of his chest like a gothic icon. I just made out the tune, the slow accretion of a haunting chord. Flirting between major and minor, it brushed me with the sad suggestion that I'd heard it before, something forgotten and irretrievable. It sounded like a decision I'd made about myself long ago. But I could only work on one mystery at a time and so kept reading rather than add a descant.

We came up with nothing, which neither surprised nor disappointed him. We searched the indices and traced the biographies back a decade. The mystery man had, by all appearance, written nothing of note; we combed the combined abstracts as far back as credible and came up empty-handed. The undertaking took us both — for the solo conductor at last broke from enchanted humming to lend a hand — all afternoon. I assured him that failure still taught us a great deal, narrowed the scope considerably. "We know, at least, where the mark doesn't live." I didn't add that we'd greatly reduced the plausibility of the original hypothesis. My client stood dumbly by the card catalog, stuck his hands in his pockets, and waited for me to say what happened next.

I in turn waited for him to volunteer the reason why this search was so important. But his patience outlasted mine. In another moment, he might have gone back to humming. I gave in, ensuring another meeting. "I can run some electronic searches. But these are expensive if you don't know what you're looking for. Every vendor has a per-minute connect fee, and if you simply instruct them to grind away on an unspecified name…." He continued to smile; I wasn't sure he followed. "Then charges add up."

He spread his palms: Pay as you go? Don't I always? His voice dropped a notch. "All I have is yours."

I'm astonished to think how easily I slipped into flirtation. "Yes, but how much do you have?'

"Think Marx to Dumont on the ship's gangplank in Night at the Opera." Fifteen minutes after he left, I would produce the allusion.

I haven't had any complaints yet. I promised to tweak a few angles we hadn't explored that afternoon. He nodded and agreed to find out more at the source. Then he troubled his voice into greatness. "We won't give up so easily, will we? Not by a Lamb Chop." I refused to grin. He turned to leave, but just before quitting the reference area he swung to face me. In one of those unexpected shifts in tone I learned to predict, he asked, "Are you beautiful?" The question floored me less then than it does now. "Who wants to know?" I flipped back. The professional in me beat the provocateur, two out of three falls. Leaving that evening, I was still working on his parting shot. Was she beautiful? I said out loud, to no one, "Let's answer the hard one first."

Was She Beautiful?

I've never thought so. Perhaps he did. Dr. Ressler lent a gracious second, always chivalrous. The whole inquiry hardly seems relevant anymore. Dead issue. Why is that answer ever crucial? Those third-party testimonials— she's so trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous —are superfluous adjective catalogs without the key commodity— and so beautiful. Add that, and bored listeners beg for the chance to judge for themselves. The soberest article, mentioning good looks, sensationalizes mere journalism. She was beautiful. He was stunning. Porcelain, startling, deep, timeless, haunting: more than cosmetic. Political. Historical.

Custom downplays it, pretends that looks are a judgment call, denigrates the superficial. But the faintest suggestion of beauty and everyone's off, Todd in the lead. A glimpse, and he couldn't help myself: pretty form clamped his imagination, a credential for inner sense. Beautiful faces kept ineffable secrets he then needed to reveal. They knew something, something they might tell him if he could only get close enough, inhale, smother himself in their perfection. I've seen him stopped dead by the line of a woman coming carelessly out of a shop across the street. Perfect plumage chilled his heart. A classic face carried the imprint of another time, like those garbled message-dreams that distress the dreamer but reveal, to the skilled explicator, perpetual homesickness. For my friend, it was always the first question. Todd's every ache was desire to return. And beauty mapped the way back.

Franklin suffered from uncontrollable love for lovely women.

He nostalgically confused the lost domain with something more visceral: yellow hair, witch eyes, a pout to the lips, tight crepe black dresses stopping just south of the hip and running up the back in little ripples. Time and again he took the hook, went for the stamp, the visible spectrum, the package job, the fatal allure of surfaces. He could not resist the Vogue look. His Annie was much more the homecoming-queen shoo-in than I. I never possessed glamour or high features. Not even in the ballpark. Passable cheekbones, nose a bit too Sumerian. Body sound, but a step below aerobic. After years of living with me, Tuckwell said my face had the forbidding attractiveness that announced, "For office use only. Do not write below this line."

Hair between brown and blond is my best feature; but every schoolboy knows what hair is. Given Todd's desperation for Glossy, I don't know what he saw in me worth buzzing. If I have any surface, it is anachronistic. And yet anachronism has always had its fatal Franklin charm. "I know where I've seen you before," he said once, stroking my chin, studying it in candlelight. "The Cluny tapestries. Lady and Unicorn." He meant it as a compliment. High Medieval Flemish is his chosen field. But faint praise: he could see something in me the herd could not. I pushed my luck by asking, "Former or latter?"

I have it on authority that Franklin, confirmed Platonist from way back, seeing women who better approximated his rage for perfection, felt, above anything, distress. When led into Penn Station by a breathtaking madonna only to have her turn and reveal a mulish forehead or mousy nose, his utter relief was like a life sentence commuted to death at the last minute. A hopelessly plain face freed him of responsibility, while agonizingly perfect physiognomy attacked his cortex like an opiate, haunted his sleep for weeks, whispered to him of missed chances that might at last have lifted the confines of the mundane.

But did I have a face that compelled that connoisseur to desire? Eyes, nose, expanse of skin to alert that stranger-stalker? His repeated insistence contradicted itself. Mine is a middle-percentile dazzle, smack in the fat of the normal curve, the not-bottom-of-a-truck woman who sits next to you on the bus, attractive but unrecognized at class reunions. What Franklin saw on second take would never have sold cigarettes or survived pastel. But in the time and place he saw me — Flanders or Artois, 1500—he insisted I had the stuff that earth's waters and wild animals wept at in envy.