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.
Did he have looks enough to justify that gangbuster, self-conducting solo-humming? Oh, he’s beautiful. Undeniably, breathtakingly, in all prosaic senses, the classic regularity of features. He claimed to be a little short, a little overweight, a little caulky. He was none of these when I last saw him, and he knew it. He hid behind a face that shone like no other.
The vertical files now contain us: clippings, grainy pictures of all four faces. They show me as a woman somewhat startled. Only the initiated would call me attractive. The Wire photo of Frank shows a young man whose face is a prism. Bent from its white light is the spectrum of every autumn day that ever hurt him. For standard beauty, he had a decided head start. And yet, all of us would grow infinitely more attractive. Even I would shoot open, turn heads like the rarest hothouse flower. Events conspired to make us all, for a moment, beautiful. His parting question, insouciant and impertinent, seemed to create the very pull it asked about. Somewhere I heard rules breaking, water trickling through limestone. Here was a man possessed of boundary-free confidence, asking not if I was beautiful but if I was ready to become it.
He’s right: beauty does correspond to a profound secret. But there’s a catch. Not the emblem of inner power, but its by-product: the last, faint track of a slowly unfolding generative order, numbingly miraculous, even in end results—mouth, eyes, hair. The epiphenomenon of desperate cells, every face forms the record of shattering, species-wide experiment. The perfect face, the one we ache inside to stand near, is just the median case. The Artist’s composite criminal, one that destroys us to leave. And we always leave, once we learn its creases.
He left me that day with two unknowns for the price of one: I didn’t even get his name. But he left a trace, another scrap of nub script discovered that evening before I left. When I went to update the quote of the day, making my perfunctory, usually pointless search of the submissions, I found a piece of drawing paper torn from the same notebook:
Natura nihil agit frustra
(Nature makes no grotesques)
Signed Sir Thomas Browne, although he misspelled the name. I used the quote, paying the price. Few selections have produced such public bafflement. But I’d choose confusion even now, over the usual indifference of days.
THE QUESTION BOARD
Mother always insisted I got what I had coming. From birth, I was addicted to questions. When the delivering nurse slapped my rump, instead of howling, I blinked inquisitively. As a child I pushed the “why” cycle to break point. At six, I demanded to know why people cried. Mother launched into the authorized version of the uses of sorrow. At the end of her extended explanation, it came out that I really wanted the hydromechanics of tear ducts. By her account, I worsened with each year’s new vocabulary. She finally took refuge in a multivolume children’s encyclopedia, parking me by it whenever I began to get asky. I can still see the color plates: Archers at Agincourt; Instruments of the Orchestra; two-page rainbow Evolutionary Tree. But her scheme backfired. I could now ask about things that hadn’t even existed before. Whys multiplied, poking into the places color plates opened but failed to enter.
So it righted a cosmic imbalance in her eyes that I ended up answering others’ questions for a living. She hoped to see me sit behind the Reference Desk until I’d answered as many unanswerables as I had plagued her with all those years. To hasten that payoff, I invented a way to address interrogatives around the clock. The Question Board, with Quotes and Events, completes the trinity I used to break up the routine of human contact. Librarian is a service occupation, gas station attendant of the mind. In an earlier age, I might have made things. Now I only make things available. Another BLit in the bulge of the late-capitalist job curve. Service accounts for two thirds of the GNP, with the figure expected to rise well into next century. By the millennium, half of all service professionals will specialize in processing data. My Question Board, then, is both living fossil and meta-mammal.
A portion of board duty is always custodial: disposing of “Why can’t Jigs talk English?” and “How ’bout the phone number of the girl who does that shower commercial?” Eight of ten remaining requests are fish in barrels, solutions floating off the pages of major almanacs or last week’s periodicals. One in ten demand tougher track-downs, sometimes lasting days before breaking. The final 10 percent, not always demanding, aren’t technically answerable. Formally undecidable, to bastardize math jargon: heartbreaking, ludicrous insights into the inquiring spirit, requiring special delicacy. “Q: Is there any meaning to it all?” “A: According to Facts on File …”.
Over years I’ve squirreled away a mass of three-by-five Q-and-A’s, perpetually preparing for nebulous further reference. Back-tracing, I dig up the cards displayed on the day I met Franklin. If, as all facts at my fingertips insist, I truly live at the crucial moment of this experiment, if creation itself is now at stake, it’s tough to tweeze from the whole cloth the significant, saving thread.
Q:I need (desperately) to know the source of the line: “How do you get moonlight into a chamber?” Please find this. My life’s at stake.
A.H., 6/20/83
A:Quince: Well, it shall be so. But there is two hard things: that is, to bring the moonlight into a chamber; for you know, Pyramus and Thisby meet by moonlight.
Snout: Doth the moon shine that night we play our play? Bottom: A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac. Find out moonshine, find out moonshine.
Quince: Yes, it doth shine that night.
Bottom: Why, then may you leave a casement of the great chamber window, where we play, open, and the moon ma
y shine in at the casement. Quince: Ay. Or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine.
Midsummer Night’s Dream, III, i. If we can save your life again, by all means let us know.
J. O’D., 6/23/83
Q:Got an anagram for “ranted”? “Roast mules”?
R.S., 6/04/83
A:This one took time. Unfortunately, anagrams can’t be solved by dipping into Reader’s Guide. The first is trivial:
“ardent.” The second took our concerted staff two weeks, although the answer is so simple any child can do it:
“somersault.” We hope you appreciate the tax dollars that went into these. If your efforts produce any cash prize, we trust you’ll split it with your favorite library.
J. O’D., 6/23/83
Q:Where can I go live where the people are really well off, money-wise? I don’t care what type of government, because I don’t vote anyway.
K.G., 6/22/83
A:For sheer income there’s always Nauru, a Pacific island whose eight thousand inhabitants are far wealthier per capita than the U.S. population. They make their money on one product, phosphates, which run the industries of Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The Nauruans extract the chemicals from huge deposit of seafowl guano laid down over thousands of years. Such affluence has a price. The island is itself largely a giant guano deposit, and the more than two million tons of phosphates exported each year eat it away rapidly. While everyone on Nauru drives expensive cars, there are fewer miles of road to drive on every year. You might as well stay home and vote.
J. O’D., 6/23/83
Q:Has a woman ever given birth to the child of a goat? What was this creature called?
B.R.G., 6/23/83
A:No. But such an offspring would be a satyr—Greek mythological hybrids, man above the waist, goat below.
J. O’D., 6/23/83
This last one attracted special attention. I’ve marked the card for admittance into my circumspect list of all-time classics. During my Question Board tenure, I’ve been asked everything at least once. Which is worse, cancer or heart attack? If Chicago time gives more hours than New York time, why don’t we go on it too? I’m doing a family tree of Jesus and need to know Mary’s last name; was it also Christ? Three weeks in the reference section of the local public would convince even Saint Paul that caritas is, if anything, beside the point. Love doesn’t even scratch the surface of what the species needs. Goat-people arise more frequently than anyone except reference librarians knows. I long ago stopped being astonished at the number of people unable to distinguish between whim and brick wall, who choose their newspapers on whether they are readable on the subway.
As I left that evening, I thought how the italic-penned challenge also partook of the species-wide inability to tell need from not. All the way home, walking through the enfeebling city heat, I wondered why I’d agreed to help find what could better be learned by asking the man in question. I came up with no better answer than the asker’s beauty. Reaching the relative safety of my neighborhood, I heard my father—no more tolerant than my mother in answering my endless girlhood questions—whisper his old litany, “Stranger, Danger,” in my interrogative ear.
FACE VALUE
I worked for a humiliating week and a half without turning up a shred of evidence that Stuart Ressler had ever existed, let alone done anything hard. I spent more time on the job than I should have, rigor proportionate to my anger at the thing’s idiocy. Half a dozen times a day, on a new inspiration, I’d labor a page or phone midtown. I was on the verge of running a bogus credit check to get his date, place of birth, and social security. Ethics and pride prevented me, but only just. The sponsor called once during that period, more out of obligation than hope. He’d weaseled some specifics from the source that he thought might help. The man was born in 1932, putting him just over a half-century. He had been brought up in the East but joked about time as a young man “in the interior.” He spoke little and read perpetually, everything from throwaway fiction to abstruse journals. He was by all appearances celibate. He lived at work. “You probably can’t use this,” my accomplice added, “but the only time I’ve ever seen him show emotion was last year, when that famous pianist stroked out dead.”
I brought up the matter of occupations. “I know we’re after the distant past here, but it might help to know what line of work the two of you are currently in.”
Mr. Todd chuckled hollowly at the other end. “We run the country, the two of us. Nights. Paper collating. Buck ten over the minimum.” They were the mainframe operations graveyard shift for a data-processing firm. “Info vendors. You and me are practically kissing cousins.” He stopped short of suggesting we improve relations. As worthless as the stray facts were, I learned one helpful bit before disconnecting: Todd’s name. He also gave me a number where I could reach him, “any hour of the night or night.”
I hit the payoff only by coincidence, after another week of ingenious, impotent search. Serendipitous discovery, beloved of science historians. The trick to blundering onto a gold mine lies in long preparation. I undertook no project without testing it for relevance. But the solution chose to arrive with such accidental grace that it appalls me. A wide-eyed schoolboy had come to the Reference Desk with a whitewashed first draft of a term paper on civil rights. Attempting to bring the movement back from gelded interpretation, I led him to primary sources, contemporary reports of 1957 Little Rock—the Arkansas National Guard confronting the U.S. Army. We flipped through a popular Year in Pictures, the ingénu discovering that this foregone event had in fact required a second civil war just before his own birth, and was not yet decided.
As I’d done habitually with every book I touched for the last two weeks, I scanned the index. Nothing. Then the next year’s cumulative, reduced to hunt-and-peck. This time, beyond all hope, an entry. Refusing to believe, I pulled the citation. A gallery of black-and-white portraits accompanying an article on this annus mirabilis in molecular genetics carried a minor caption that read, “Dr. Stuart Ressler: one of the new breed who will help uncover the formula for human life.”
That was just the first shock. I had seen the accompanying face before. The eruption of coincidence made me put off calling Franklin Todd. I woke that night from a sleep of secret cabals to make the connection: Ike’s coronary specialist, the man in the pilled oxford. He was a smooth twenty-six in the photo, and over fifty when I’d met him the previous fall. But despite the intervening years, his face was unmistakable. The cell paths responsible for aging had failed to erase his particulars. Lying in bed, unable to go back to sleep, I did the long division. The NYPL has over eighty branches serving more than ten million people. The odds against a man paying my insignificant branch a visit followed months later by another who wanted to identify him were incalculable. I jumped to conspiracy: the two were colluding to test my research skills for some reason I was compelled to figure out. In the dark of my room, beside a sleeping male whose breath did not change cadence as I shot awake, it felt as if Dewey had broken down: on the shelf, spine to spine beside the Biography Index where I had begun the search, came cheap intrigue.
Suspicion didn’t leave me until the day Frank Todd took me to his office, that converted warehouse he shared with the still obscure Dr. Ressler. Only then did the statistical improbability work out. I laughed at my mathematical paranoia, at how I had missed the crucial, obvious splint: their office, the night watch where they nursed the machines, was four streets down from mine. I had swapped cause with effect. The two lost men were simply both patrons of the nearest public bookshelf.
RULE OF THREE
I’ve logged tonight much the same story as the one I started a few nights ago. Identical, with changes: the dead man’s one theme. A life in the laboratory made Dr. Ressler see everything that happened on earth— everything that ever can happen—all speciation as a set of variations whose differences declare their variegated simila
rity. Yet in the end, the work he left behind, the bit he added to the runaway fossil record, proves that the occasional, infinitesimal difference, astronomically rare, is the force that drives similarity into unexpected places. Tonight I put the scratched record on the machine again, playing it out loud when my memory becomes too spotty to call up the melody. The same tune this evening, same simple scale as the one that a few days ago prompted me to end my professional life. But not a note of Dr. Ressler’s piece is in place.
Last week, the dance seemed a duet, subtle play between a right hand too close and courant to hear and a left I left so long ago I didn’t at first recognize it. But tonight: I definitely hear trio. Love triangle. Dr. Ressler’s story is nothing if not a threesome. He loved a woman; and he loved something else, inimical. Research didn’t teach me this; firsthand contamination did. I’ve been to the place, picked up the spore.
Coy cat-and-mouse, familiar Q-and-A game around since the dawn of Chordata. The man I loved was of a low opinion of love’s predictability. I can hear him—in the same voice that wandered up that stacked, homeless chord while he conducted himself—singing, “Birds do it, Bees do it; even shiftless ABDs do it …”. I loved Franklin, and it all seemed a duet once. But every late-night visit I ever had from him, every visit I ever paid, took place in the shadow of an unnamed corespondent. A third party. Every couple an isosceles.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 4