Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

Our first dinner invitation to the Taylors' scared C. witless. She'd heard me gush about Taylor so often that when it came to meeting. him, she wanted to flee. "What does he look like?" she asked. As if that would prepare her.

"I don't know. Slight. Arresting. Immaculate. A face ravaged by intelligence."

"You're hopeless, Beau. What color is the man's hair?"

"I'm not sure."

I told her about that rainy September afternoon when I'd first seen him. He arrived at the attic dormer in the English Building where the class met. A dozen of us had assembled in nervous anonymity. In walked this close-cropped, fiftyish man in impeccable summer suit. He placed his grade book and our first text on the desk, sat down in one of those reduced, yellow-wood chairs, removed a pack of cigarettes from an inside suit coat pocket, and asked if anyone objected. He lit up, tilted his head infinitesimally backward, then said, "It defies statistics that I'm the only one in a group this size with an oral fixation."

At eighteen, we kept our fixations to ourselves. At least until the reading began.

"What did you read?" C. wanted to know.

"He started us out on Freud's Introductory Lectures. Then we applied the dream work to fairy tales and lyric poetry. After a while, we went on to the longer stuff — short stories, plays, novels."

"Titles, Beauie. I want titles."

"Let's see. Ten years ago! Gawain and the Green Knight. 'Adam Lay Bound.' 'Patrick Spens.' The Miller's Tale.' The Sonnets."

"You remember them all?"

"Like yesterday. Better. You had to be there. I remember the shape his mouth made when he recited lines. Of course, he could recite the bulk of those pieces verbatim. In the dark."

"Which sonnets?"

"Is this for extra credit? We were each supposed to pick one to present to the group. For some reason, maybe because I'd just broken up with—"

"I don't want to hear that woman's name!"

"I must have been looking for a rebound, because I picked Sonnet 31."

"Which goes?"

"Which goes:

"Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,

Which I by lacking have supposed dead,

And there reigns Love, and all Love's loving parts,

And all those friends which I thought buried."

"I thought there are supposed to be fourteen lines."

"I think there were. Before memory got to them."

"Okay. What else?"

" 'The Sick Rose.' 'The Second Coming.' 'The Windhover.' All sorts of Dickinson. 'Prufrock.' Frost, Stevens. Arms and the Man. The Tempest. Hold on. We also spent a lot of time on the Bible, right at the beginning of term."

"Repressed that one?"

"Guess so. The Grave. 'Petrified Man.' 'The Dead.' That was the one that put me over the top. That made me realize I wasn't going to lead the life I thought I was going to lead. Heart of Darkness. Light in August. Lucky Jim. ."

"So what didn't you read?"

"Yeah. It was a real lineup."

"I don't get it, Beau. It sounds like your basic Freshman Survey."

"It wasn't. First of all, this magnificently self-possessed oral fixation sat up in front of the room, telling anecdotes in syntax so decorously Byzantine we didn't even realize that half of them were off-color. The man spoke in complete, perfect paragraphs. It took me almost a whole week between sessions to decode Taylor's suggestion that the speaker in 'Stopping by Woods' was out there in the middle of nowhere relieving himself."

"I'm not going to this dinner," C. decided.

"Sweetheart, you don't understand. The man is grace personified. And his wife is a National Treasure. Together, they're hilarious."

'They'll think I'm an idiot. They'll wonder what you're doing with me."

"Just the opposite. They'll wonder what a sexpot like yourself sees in a ninety-eight-pound aesthetic weakling. C.! Everybody feels like an idiot compared to Taylor."

"I don't need that, thanks. I have enough of that as it is."

"But Taylor also has this way of making you feel smarter than you are. We teenagers used to fumble around with one poem or the other. Precocious and brilliant, but juvenile. I felt like a kid with the training wheels taken off. I'd soar for a hundred meters, then crash to the ground. But whenever I said something particularly stupid, Taylor would credit my misses with so much ingenuity I couldn't even recognize them. 'Your account of the narrator's circumvention of the repressed's return is persuasive in the extreme. But your hints about his real and unconscious motives needn't be so circumspect.' Oh, I wish I could imitate the man!"

"He's bigger than life for you, isn't he?"

"No," I answered her. "No. He's exactly life-sized."

"I'm not going."

She went, and had a good time. "He's just like you said. The suit. The complete paragraphs. Only you forgot the war bond songs."

"I had no idea about those." The evening had, in fact, been a continuous astonishment.

"Tell me again the connection between that long Matthew Arnold quote. ."

". . from a poem no one has read in half a century. ."

". . and the glimpse of Norma Shearer's cleavage that he got in a Colorado valley movie theater at the age of ten?"

"I can't remember. I think the connection was that second bottle of Slovakian wine."

We went with increasing frequency. C. grew as devoted as I. Every visit revealed new amplitude to Taylor. Taylor the inconsolable fan of hopelessly bad sports teams. The shuffler to bluegrass tunes. The consummate organic gardener who'd planted half the fruit trees in U. The collector of questionable jokes no one else would dare tell even in private. The wartime aircraft spotter. The fisherman and naturalist. The mimic of a thousand voices, from Blanche DuBois to a Mexican bush league baseball announcer. The boy who taught himself to read on Tarzan and John Carter, who went on to devour every volume in the rural library long before he made his escape.

This abundance held together on the slightest of sutures. Taylor's deepness was bleak. He had read all the books. He was fluent in the mind's native idiom. He knew that the psychopathology of daily life was a redundancy. He might have been the supreme misanthrope, were it not for his humor and humility. And the source of those two saving graces, the thing stitching that heartbreaking capaciousness into a whole, was memory.

Taylor's wit made me feel like the most sparkling conversationalist. We'd return from their place well past midnight, kept up by adults thirty years older than us who outlasted us easily. We'd proceed to lie in bed hours longer, eyes pasted open, thoughts racing, replaying the evening's exchanges. Thought seemed to me that thing that could relive, in island isolation, its own esprit d'escalier. Memory was the attempt to capitalize on missed cleverness, or recover an overlooked word that, for a moment, might have made someone else feel more alive.

C. agreed. "When we're over there, I remember stories from my own childhood that I haven't thought about for lifetimes." We cracked jokes we'd never thought to try on each other. We sang for the Taylors the songs we'd written to keep ourselves going in B., neglected since our return to U. Whatever the quality of our performance, the Taylors liked us enough to keep asking us back.

We went for the Fourth of July. The Taylors played The Mormon Tabernacle Choir Sings John Philip Sousa and made hand-cranked ice cream. We went to a Christmas party, the living refutation of Joyce's "Dead." Good cheer from on high, and in a shape even humans could understand. Late that wonderful night, Taylor came and sat down next to C. in a corner, put his arm around her. Of course, even that spontaneous affection had to be framed in an incomparable Taylorism: "I trust you realize that this arm is sufficiently anesthetized by alcohol that I'm not getting any illicit pleasure out of this."