He knew the city like a cabbie. The stress of midtown at 5:00 p.m. rolled off his downy obliviousness. Keith would have sickened and died if he’d had to live anywhere else but this epitome. For years he protected me, underwrote my survival in this toxic place. Keith had dabbled in academics but soon strayed into advertising, “Needs Manufacturing,” as he liked to describe it. Tuckwell was outstanding at what he did. He made pots of money without shame. But he pumped a wellspring of sardonic commentary, the progressive’s estrangement from his own pursuits. “Ads,” he once defended himself at a dinner full of less forthright friends, “are our supreme art, polar exploration, and depth psychology rolled into one. And the shit that keeps the GNP blooming, to boot.”
We liked each other well enough. But the spit holding us together was the power of mutual facetiae to legitimize affection. Against my reference-desk reserve, he cultivated crude anarchy. He was far more comfortable in the flash of Lower Manhattan haute Kultur, but he had to come to me for help in navigating the boroughs, even our own neighborhood. I kept him out of debt and he kept me from starving myself. We divided the household chores contractually. I did mine in the evenings and days off; he hired outside help. Tuckwell was convinced he would die by electric shock. I milked the opposite fear of wasting away for decades in a nursing home. Our phobias and philias canceled out one another. We arrived at an equilibrium that could go on, like those fleas on backs of fleas, forever ad infinitum.
We conversed well, when we saw one another. Keith overheated at times, but he knew the language. People who still love words have to be forgiven everything. In what the last century referred to as mechanical transport, we were scarily compatible, even after four years. He taught me abandon. The rule was: recklessness could always be repented at leisure. With ad designer’s ingenuity, he steadily introduced wrinkles into our sex life, always managing to suggest that R and D had future, new-and-improved packages around the corner.
His total shamelessness even made the awful minute afterwards almost comic. As I postcoitally recoiled, Keith, still savoring the instinctual release just served up, would lie alongside me and wail, in a perfectly timed, plaintive voice directed at the ceiling, “What is the Law?” He’d answer himself in animal sadness, “Not to eat meat; not to go on all fours …”. I always laughed—the dovetail joint between need and embarrassment.
Our attraction, unplanned and mismatched, was the physics of charged particles, ions pulled toward their neutralizing not. He was one of the few who prance through the world with self-esteem. His absolute views on everything were manna after a day in the perpetually uncertain, qualified reference wilderness. Keith liked himself, a fire worth hovering near, trying to steal.
On the day I accepted dinner, I was not dissatisfied. I’d never been a big fan of unnecessary drama. Mr. Todd’s invitation was flattering, but not enough to account for my accepting it, even under guise of business. Tuckwell and I were, in the rules of coming and going, hopelessly liberal. His work was continuous and mine too variable for us to set up the schedule that ordinarily substitutes for home life. I tried to call him that July evening to tell him I’d be late. But already half sabotaging, I didn’t try his office. I rang up the apartment and listened to Tuckwell’s latest tape: “Your mission, should you decide …”. I then announced to the machine that I was eating with a stranger.
I remember little of the clam shack Franker took me to. I do remember what he wore—creased, formal, button-down bemusement. I remember the soulful look when he implored me to order the linguini with calamari, and the scolding brows leveled at me when I left it untouched. I remember seeing the chef hack off a living lobster’s tail while the creature’s front end bourréed blithely across the counter to plunk back into the tank, mix it up one last time with the ladies. “You should see him do beef,” Todd said.
And I remember him quickly relieving me of my discoveries. My disclosure—the young man in the journals, teetering on the verge of significant contribution—confirming his pain. He demanded to hear, in as much detail as I could muster, about Ressler’s early work and the predictions about him. Todd seemed to have suspected the worst, all that had been at stake. When I finished relating what little story I’d uncovered, I sat silent, gingerly prodding my unfinished plate like a bomb squad nudging a black satchel. When he finally spoke, it was only to repeat, incredulously, “Twenty-five! My age to the day, as it turns out.” I mumbled a birthday toast, unsure how literal he was being.
I naively proceeded to hand over my entire list of primary sources without securing any return hostages. My dinner date then fell rudely indifferent. His interest in me had been entirely functional after all; despite the expertly mimicked courtship dance, he wanted no more than a research assistant. I felt abused, doubly stupid for not recognizing the trick. But watching him toy with a Parmesan shaker, I was astonished to see Frank Todd clearly grieving for a person who, given what he’d said about their working relationship, was as great a stranger to him as to me.
Sitting across from me at the hired table, morose with concern: at last, someone who I might matter to. I felt a twinge of guilt toward Keith, just then listening to my taped won’t-be-home-till-late. In that one instant, Todd seemed about to fold up into himself, to drop out of sight for good. I wouldn’t have prevented him. In that minute gone bad, we were an accent away from splitting the tab and quitting. We were both geared to be rid of one another when the only real coincidence of those days intervened. A fluke, outside chance yanked Frank Todd out of a reverie he would never have come back from on his own. The sawdust dive’s piped music, until then an eclectic collection of Balkan reed choir, Tyrolean zither, and Memphis twang, turned abruptly and became solo piano. The boy bolted upright, listening, alarmed. He shook his head, amazement moving his lips: the inappropriate smile at hurt too diffuse to absorb. “Name that tune,” he said bitterly, slamming the table. “Name it, and I’ll introduce you to the bastard.”
I recognized the music, having learned the first, trivial thirty-two measures as a young girl before giving up the piano in favor of pragmatics. I had even made first forays into the variations Bach had extracted from the thirty-two-note ditty. The distillation of the first few notes held all the chest-tightening surprise of unlikely visits. “I happen to know the piece,” I said giddily. “But I’m off duty just now.”
“Name it,” he shouted. Conversation at other tables stopped. I mumbled the name of the work. By the effect on Todd, I’d just guessed the one-in-five-billion secret word. We listened. A few minutes in silence with a stranger lasts a lifetime. Only after two variations did he tell me that this piece—“this particular recording, in fact”—was the only music our mutual friend had listened to for the last year. Todd, reanimated, described how his lone shift partner sat every night in a sterile chamber of humming processing units, high-speed printers, floor-mount disk drives, and glowing consoles, doing routine work that any modestly endowed twenty-one-year-old could do, changing tapes, running the unvarying deck of punched cards through the hopper, while all the while this set of baroque irrelevances spun around on a cheap grinder perched on top of the digital check-sorter.
“All the way through, both sides, three times a night for the last few months.” Todd, the insult of care cracking his voice, fell silent as the restaurant sound track reached the third permutation, a well-behaved melody beginning all over again against itself. Two pitch-for-pitch identical but staggered parts crossed each other, independently harmonized and harmonizing, no longer one identical source of notes but two. The study in imitative forward motion, the staggered, duplicate pair of voices stood motionless at the axis of the turning world. The unison canon, contradiction in terms, left Todd morose, ready to replay the older man’s disappearance of years before. He came out of his trance long enough to say, “You won’t have heard the thing properly until you see my friend in the flesh.” The invitation I so badly wanted.
Later, after a stop at the futuristic supermarket that, li
ke me, had recently gate-crashed this neighborhood, I found Keith alone in our apartment, still engrossed in a lucrative day’s work, sprawled on the floor surrounded by tape splices, single-stepping through a video of his latest collaborative effort: the fifteen-second story of how a young woman and her breath spray find happiness together. “Dinner OK?” he asked, intent on the frame-by-frame.
“Yeah, dinner OK. Four-B’s car alarm is howling again. Buzzing like a shorted bumblebee. Nobody paying any attention. Not even the beat police flinch anymore.”
“Speaking of High Security, how’s my Princess Grace?”
I’d lived with him long enough to follow every free association. I was glad for glibness just then and retaliated in like currency. “American film actress. Born in Philadelphia, 1927? No,’28. Killed in Monaco car crash in September 1982. Almost a year already. God.” I went to the window and held back the curtain. In the street below, late-evening pedestrians worked out the details of Brownian motion.
Tuckwell gave his representative laugh: a high-pitched, uncontrolled cackle. “Very good. Been earning your keep, I see. The Human Reference Shelf wouldn’t care to say what day Mrs. Grimaldi died, would she?” I sat down next to him, looking for warmth that wouldn’t aggravate the heat. He gave me a kiss on my exposed collarbone. I made no rejoinder, and he returned to work, adding, “See To Catch a Thief for a demonstration of life imitating art.”
The television was on, sound just loud enough to give voice to incestuous bad girls from Texas and tough but basically good inner-city cops. We witnessed the last five minutes of Five Minutes to Meltdown, where political extremists, natural disaster, and old-fashioned carelessness conspired to threaten the nuclear reactor on the community outskirts nearest you. Four young, lusty civil engineers narrowly thwarted the disaster. After, we caught the late news, fulfilling our social duty. Keith got his chance to make his favorite joke: “Twenty million face famine in Ethiopia. First, this.” He made running commentary on all the spots, from headlines down to the perverse, trailing human interest. As usual, during commercials he cut the sound and ad-libbed. “Terrorism: the mini-series. Thursday, right here on …”. Had he thrived in another decade, his manic energy might have made him an activist.
When one network in its allotted half hour said all there was to say about Tuesday, July 5, 1983, we switched to another. The coverage was identical, a half hour later. Keith carried on his inspired annotations, even after I stopped listening and disappeared into the bedroom. There I worked on loose ends, preparing for work the next day. I glanced at the librarian’s trade journal, caught up on old correspondence, and, while I had the typewriter fired up, finished tomorrow’s Today in History and the unanswered Question Board questions. I rolled a clean index card under the platen and typed “A:”. I remember pausing long enough to feel proud that what I was about to answer would have taken the median librarian, relying on Brewer’s, Bartlett’s, or the OED, considerable effort. Experience, private knowledge, could still stand one in better stead than mastery of the disjointed stockpile. I typed:
A:A “catch” is a form of musical round where identical voices enter at different times. The catch to a catch is that it is printed on one solo line. In the past, as a party game, singers would sight-read from catch collections, each group responsible for figuring out when to “make the catch,” when to come in at the proper moment. Making the catch reached its peak of popularity under England’s Charles II. The phrase may have originated earlier. Rounds in general are at least as old as the thirteenth-century tune “Summer Is Icumen In”.
I stopped, realizing I was straying from the point, that summer was already two weeks gone. As the submitter had not deigned to sign the question, I left my answer similarly anonymous. The pair are both still on file that way. As I held the cards next to one another, checking my work, I knew I would not, contrary to all I’d ever assumed, remain a librarian forever.
CANON AT UNISON
My old associates threw me a going-away party today. It was, as going-away parties go, a bad mix of parting embarrassment and exhilaration. For want of a more plausible story, I spread the word around the branch that I am going back to school. Loosely interpreted, never a lie. The celebration was a sorry affair. Several colleagues brought homemade cookies, which nobody’s diet permitted. We broke the rules and served Chablis in paper cups; everyone partook dutifully, in professional moderation. Separation— life’s major emotion—is being slowly written out of our repertoire. A few friends will genuinely miss me, and I them. My buddy Mr. Scott, he of the eternal retirement threat, came up to me late in the afternoon, making no effort to disguise his eyes. “You beat me to it,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe you beat me.”
“I’m afraid I’m abandoning you, friend. Fight the good fight.” Before I could get all the way through the sentence, he swept me up in an embrace, which we held for a long time by contemporary standards. Close to his ear, before pulling away from it for good, I whispered, “Work forever.”
We all made the standard plans to stay in touch, plans we knew, even as we made them, would atrophy for no reason. As a gag gift, the collected staff presented me with a wrapped Facts on File binder stuffed with miscellaneous soap-opera synopses, gov pubs, library memos, and those You-Are-Next fliers collected from the prophets of apocalypse who hang around Grand Central. Then they presented me with my own copy of the Times Atlas. The combination of my long-expressed girlish delight in the book, the misplaced earnestness of the staff, and the hopeless ambition of the atlas itself—the simple description of how to get anywhere in the world—caught inside me. Seeing the effect the atlas had on me, my friends broke up the party.
As ironic token of affection, the staff let me have a last go at the Quote Board and Event Calendar. “Made me” might be more accurate. The work was more than I wanted to take on today, but I appreciated the gesture. For tomorrow’s Today, I chose the Home-stead Strike: the fifth day’s clash between five thousand steel-workers and Frick’s three hundred Pinkertons. I avoided my habit of extending the fact into exposition or mouthing my usual guarded meliorism. I wish I hadn’t chosen that particular event; I’d hate to suggest that I’ve left on a labor dispute. But done is done. For my last ever selection for quote of the day, I posted vintage W.C. Fields:
It’s a funny little world. A man’s lucky if he gets out of it alive.
My final official act at the branch was to sort the unbound issues of Congressional Quarterly, which some malicious cit had mixed up beyond recognition. Alexandria arranged its scrolls by size—an order useless except to the initiated. The race’s chief discovery may well be the idea that even a perfect stranger could retrieve things from parchments, given the sequence. Filing was a bit below my skills, but it was basically what I did for a living, until today. And in truth, returning the CQs to useful order gave me the thrill of send-off. I was packing my bags, feeling my freedom. I took a last look around my stacks. The collection suddenly seemed wonderful beyond naming. I had for a time lived here. Then I snapped the binders shut and was gone.
IV
TODAY IN HISTORY
A postcard arrived today. A fifty-cent picture and message, and for a moment this morning it seemed I would not be cut off from all word from Franklin. Nothing for almost a year, then four lines of friend’s postmortem. A few weeks later, a postcard making no attempt to explain the gap or give any idea of how he is. A fair sample of the man’s communication. Still, I was glad for even this scrap. I remain one of those unreformable suckers who want to hear, just hear from time to time, even if the point of hearing has long since disappeared. The card carried a pastel foreign-denomination stamp complete with obligatory royal sovereign. Frank writes:
One cannot, I suppose, traffic in Flemish masterpieces without a passing knowledge of Vlaams. And as a beautiful woman not unlike yourself once taught me, the only way to learn a foreign language, natuurlijk, is total immersion. Flanders seems the likely place. I could live for years on
new vocabulary alone. Eenvoudig = one + folded = simple. Uiteraard = out of the earth = obvious. And those just the adjectives! Invigorating, learning a second tongue. (Invigorating to have twigged a first one.) The doors that new words are opening right now! This man has spent sorrows, lacks no delight, has hoard and horses and hall joys and all a lord is allowed had he his woman with him. FTODD
On the card, a late-gothic village, purportedly in the rolling geest of Northern Europe but more likely, given the crags looming in the background, situated just south of the painter’s frontal lobes. Tempera and oil on panel, it has that gessoed, patient, long-suffering look that only painters in that part of the world, in that century, knew how to make. Ephemeral transfusion of light through foliage, discontinuous brushstrokes, the countryside’s green shading into azure and aquamarine color-freeze the village in escapist fantasy. The town is more familiar to me than my own childhood. Ground mineral, egg yolk, oil, chalk, varnish: an organic cupboard exudes a lost landscape that would be heart-balm to look at, were he not in it.
I hardly needed to check the attribution: Herri met de Bles, an itinerant early-sixteenth-century painter so obscure as to be almost apocryphal. Franklin has been trying to write a dissertation on the artist for years, searching for sufficient motivation to produce a treatise of interest only to a dozen specialists in the world. He nibbled at the project, two years stretching into four. Procrastination at last exhausted his assistantship money at Columbia. With the project still hanging over him, finance forced him into night-shift data operations.
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