Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

He was overreacting. The first sign of reasoned objection and he wanted to circle the wagons. He’d enjoyed public respect for so long — twelve years — that he assumed it; he no longer knew how to expect anything else. The book could stand on its own, in the face of any charges. Still: he did the math. For every twenty people who read the review, one, with luck, might read the book, while the others would describe it to friends in dismissive terms, without the inconvenience of having to look at it.

He slipped the phone into its pocket and doubled back up the path toward the bike rack. He would tell Sylvie, when he got home. She would be impervious, mildly amused. Smile and ask him: What would Famous Gerald do?

The bike ride back to Strong’s Neck was all downhill. The tide was out and July tasted brackish in his lungs. He’d wanted to get back to pure science, away from the fuzzy, mass-marketed world of science popularization. Here was a further motive. The hard left whip of Dyke Road brought him along the reedy estuary. Gravity slung him along the rill where George Washington’s Setauket spy ring had hung their lanterns at night, signaling over the sound to Connecticut, back when the terrorists were the heroes. The bike sped dangerously down the tidal embankment. In what world could the book he’d written be as evil as the book he’d just read about?

He looked back across his right shoulder. Setauket Harbor gleamed, brilliant in the midday sun. Across the blue-jade inlet, the spread wings of small sailboats skimmed. On such a day as this, anything might happen. The Bridgeport — Port Jefferson ferry lowed in the distance, a great migratory thing calling its way back to harbor. He loved his life here. A happy little birthday. He could still do that much.

Tour Director got them as far as Italy. Weber stood on the Ponte Vecchio, scanning the boutiques that had lined the bridge for centuries. A brief history of capitalism: butcher shops giving way to blacksmiths and tanners, giving way to silversmiths and goldsmiths, giving way to coral jewelry and neckties that would set you back weeks of salary. In the middle of a plume of people chattering scores of languages, he watched Sylvie, giddy with new euros and Florentine sun, nose around a window full of Nardin watches, just for play. Just pretending, happy to be away, someplace fully imaginary.

They had been all over the Duomo the day before. Already, Weber failed to form a detailed picture of the church’s interior in his mind. That morning, she had picked out the night’s entertainment, a performance of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria .

“Serious?” he’d asked her.

“You kidding? I love Renaissance opera. You know that.”

He didn’t ask how long she’d loved it. He couldn’t afford the answer. He studied her now, in the flowing crowd. When the light was right, at a distance, she could pass for a Japanese tourist. A holiday in this country, her favorite spot on earth, took decades off her. She looked as she had before they married, the girl for whom, a million years ago, he’d once performed a campy Schubert chorale, words by that rhymester Willie the Shake, sung to her with his friends over the phone as a Valentine, as if it were a collegiate glee number from 1928:

Who is Sylvia? What is she,

That all our swains commend her?

Holy, fair, and wise is she,

The heaven such grace did lend her,

That she might admired be.

Young Sylvie, when she stopped laughing at the rendition, scolded them all for singing without her. “Hey! Start again. Give me a part.”

Still her, still his traveling companion, despite the years. But how they’d gotten from that year to this, Weber couldn’t say. He could still name most of the cities they’d vacationed in, if not when, or what they’d seen. Now Florence in high summer: madness, he knew, even when they’d planned the trip. But July was the only time they both could get away, and the hot, dry press of crowds just made Sylvie happier. She turned and smiled at him, a little embarrassed at her window shopping. He smiled back as best he could, unable to take a step toward her through the stream of sightseers on the old bridge. Love doth to her eyes repair, to help him of his blindness.

The Times review had appeared just before they left the States. He’d read it at the breakfast table, as Sylvie tried to pull him out of the house to the airport. “Take it with,” she said. “It doesn’t weigh anything.”

He didn’t want to bring it. They were going to Italy. Reviews not welcome. By the time they got to LaGuardia, he’d rewritten it in his head. He could no longer tell what he actually remembered from the evaluation and what he was fabricating. He did know that whole phrases in the Times were lifted from the Harper’s piece. Surely any reader who read both would see the duplication.

He called Cavanaugh from the airport. “I wouldn’t let it worry you, Ger,” his editor said. “Strange days in America. We’re looking for something to lash out at. The book is selling fine. And you know we’re there for you with the new contract, whatever happens to this one.”

By arrival in Rome, Weber was ready to expatriate. Resentment had given way to doubt: perhaps the Times review wasn’t cribbed, but was merely independent corroboration. The idea ruined him for sightseeing. Their second night, in Siena, he and Sylvie argued. Not argued; struggled. Sylvie was being way too supportive. She refused to credit any of his qualms. “They might have one point,” Weber had suggested. “Looked at the wrong way, these books could indeed be seen as milking others’ disabilities for personal gain.”

“Piffle. You’ve been telling the story of people whose stories don’t get told. Letting the normals know that the tent is much bigger than they thought.”

Just what he’d told her he was doing, all these years.

“You’re tired. Jet-lagged. Bouncing around in a foreign country. Of course this whole thing makes you feel a little shaky. Hey! It could be worse. You could have some Medici hit man knifing you in the back for your art. C’mon. Abbastanza . What do you want to do tomorrow?”

Exactly the question that worried him. What to do tomorrow, and the day after. Another popular book was out of the question. Even lab work felt shaky. His research team already treated him differently — a new impatience with his low-tech, folksy anecdotal style, a hunger for more penetrating research — the sexy stuff with Big Imaging that was cracking the brain wide open. He was just a popularizer. An exploitative popularizer, at that.

After a week of anhedonia, he discovered a surprise weakness for Italian liqueurs with exotic nineteenth-century labels, as if he were some second-generation nostalgic lush returning to the fatherland. He couldn’t concentrate on the old buildings, even his beloved Romanesque. Sylvie felt him soldiering through the ancient towns, but she never scolded him. Siena, Florence, San Gimignano: he took more than five hundred pictures, mostly of Sylvie in front of world-famous landmarks, dozens of them from the same angle, as if both woman and monuments were in danger of disappearing. He was cramping her holiday, and he worked to lighten up. But finally his militant gaiety made her sit him down in a dusty trattoria across from the Palazzo Pretorio in Prato and lecture him.

“I know you’re gearing up for an ordeal when we get back. But there’s no ordeal. No one to fight. Nothing’s changed. This book is as good as anything you’ve ever written.” Exactly his worst fear. “People will read it and do what they can with it, and you’ll write something else. My God! Most writers would kill for the kind of attention you’re getting.”