The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  But it was some time before I ever set foot in his place. True, he lived in Lower Manhattan, while I lived in the neighborhood where we both worked. At last I invited myself. He was to cook for me, on a weekend we both had off. He agreed to the conditions, with whispered additional terms.

  He lived in an attic—“loft” is the current euphemism—on a street straight out of “Bartleby.” The corbled eccentricity of the place made him give up nicer rooms uptown, going from a relatively safe neighborhood into the heart of the urban experience. He greeted me at the street, walked me down the hall, parodying bachelor brazenness as soon as the apartment door closed. “Well. Here we are. Just throw that dress anywhere.”

  He took me on the lightning tour. His makeshift sitting room lay angled oddly against the back corner’s fire escape. He had pitched a double bed in an old storage room and turned a large walk-in closet into a study. “Not much, but we call it home. All right: abode. Let’s not niggle over terms.” Museum-clutter suffused the place, somewhere between a Sotheby’s halfway house and Turkish bazaar. A dumbwaiter, now dysfunctional, toted a Howdy Doody in pince-nez. Furnishings included a table made from a lobster pot, chairs made from conveyor belts, and a lilac-colored upright piano. Here and there were scattered convenience-store samplers of instant coffee, lip balm, shoe-odor pads: CARE packages dropped for a shipwreck who’d forgotten how to use them.

  Art treasures—Brueghel’s wheatfields and Vermeer’s Head of a Girl prominent among them—covered every inch of his walls, and a few Tiepolo-type trompe l’oeils even encroached on the ceiling. That popular seventeenth- and eighteenth-century genre, the picture gallery: one canvas crammed recursively with as many different miniature art masterpieces as could fit in the space allotted.

  Not only prints: incomplete sets of Conrad and Scott, African kalimbas, a glass harmonica assembled from kit, dancing bears and Uncle Sams that swallowed dimes. Among the larger bric-a-brac was a seamstress’s costume dummy from the 1920s, adjustable along all major axes. “Meet Theda Bara. I inherited her after the breakup of a college experiment in idealistic living.” She had osmotically acquired a wardrobe: flapper skirt, feather boa, wornout sneakers, a cocky hat fashioned from a post-office mailer, a brightly painted papier-mâché toucan nose, and a breastplate of buttons reading, among other things. “Liquid Courage, Not Liquid Paper.” Against a wall of raw brick lay a hundred-gallon aquarium divided between soil and water. The dry land was given over to mosses, beetles, and skinks. Below lake line, turtles and eels swam oblivious of captivity. “I tried salt water once,” he explained, “but it’s more difficult to balance than you think.”

  I watched as he prepared a skillful dinner—Indonesian chicken, so he said, although it could easily have been ad lib. He chattered the while, not even stopping to answer the phone. “They’ll call back. Do you think I could pass for an eighties man? The eighties man is sensitive. He wins women’s hearts by saying such things as ‘I feel a deep sadness welling up in me.’ Do you think I’m in any position to win women’s hearts?” He was nervous, profuse. I was happy, feeling how little I knew him.

  We ate epically—two hours over dinner. He made me try three cabernets blindfold. We talked about his dissertation, long delinquent, and about how I had ended up in library science. When at last nothing graced the table but scraped dishes, he reached over, felt my belly, and nodded, satisfied. “All right then,” he said, withdrawing his hand after only a modest amount of further exploration. “We have to talk about music now. You start.” I could think of nothing but his violent reaction, on that first business dinner of ours so many months before, when the piped tape of Bach’s little keyboard exercise had hurt his face so spontaneously. I wondered if it weren’t music he wanted to talk about, but that taboo neither of us had raised since he first hired me to find Dr. Ressler in the historical register.

  I shrugged. “I played the piano once. As you know.”

  Franklin smiled. “I played the accordion. I could make ‘Five Hundred Miles’ sound as if it had been transposed into kilometers. At eighteen, I applied to music conservatory. Chopin études on the squeeze box for my audition. Went to art school.”

  He looked at me, decided to get the worst out of the way. “You know, the professor came to music late in life. He says the whole enterprise caught him by surprise. Other noises, other tunes. Said he spent years committing to memory the entire repertoire. But somewhere along the way, he’s pared Western music down to just what he can carry.” His voice fell, forced-cheery. Todd shook his head.

  But this time, we didn’t stop at Dr. Ressler’s collapse into the microcosm of those few dozen measures. He became animated, demanding to know my favorite pieces. I gave over a couple hostages. He accused me of being hopelessly stuck on mainstream war-horses. He challenged me with a dozen composers, none of whom were more than names to me. “These are the folks who are writing music right now. Your contemporaries. But who bothers listening? We’re reduced to the three-minute unison synthesizer banks while an electronic drum loop programmed to bash out every other beat mercifully drowns out the hermaphrodite wailing about how it feels good to feel bad. It’s a war zone out there. Lose-lose situation. Another concert hall rendition of Finlandia for folks with the heavy jewelry on the one hand, and three anemic teenagers called ‘The Styro Detritus’ on the other.”

  In a minute, he recovered. “The trick to listening,” he said, lifting me by the hand, “is to hear the pieces speaking to one another. To treat each one as part of an enormous anatomy still carrying the traces of everything that ever worked, seemed beautiful awhile, became too obvious, and had to be replaced. Music can only mean anything through other music. You have to be able to hear in Stockhausen that homage to the second Viennese school, in Schönberg the rearrangement of sweet Uncle Claude. And every new sleeper that Glass welds together gives new breath to that rococo clockmaker Haydn, as if only now, in 1980, can we at last hear what pleasing the Esterhazys is all about.”

  He was performing for me. By then we were in the bedroom, but for a wholly different seduction than we’d explored at my place. Franklin’s dirty clothes were stacked into prim piles, interleaved with notebooks. He cleared away a state-of-the-art turntable, expensive but not well cared for. He went to the top shelf of his closet. There, stretching from end to end where the sweaters usually went, was a wall of records, arranged by spine color in rainbow spectrum. He dug out a disk, mumbling, “Have a seat. No. Take the bed. Lie down and close your eyes.”

  I did as instructed. Eyes closed, I heard everything: Todd shuffling the record jacket, the domestic argument in the flat downstairs, the sound of breaking bottles, someone being sick in the street below, Dr. Ressler putting up a disk pack on a spindle across town, the first snow of the year falling on my mother’s Midwest grave. I heard the hollow of high-fidelity speakers, the muffled pop of needle touching, and the sandy scuttling of crabs across the worn record surface.

  A deep harp pulse, then a double reed, followed by a muted horn choir: before I realized that the piece had started, a door opened beneath me, and I fell effortlessly into another place. An orchestral work, but deployed in a chamber, slower and more melancholy than any music I’ve ever heard, a sound written after the history of the human race was only a faint memory.

  I didn’t possess the sophistication to say when it had been written. I didn’t even worry it. The notes took occupancy, a horizon of tones stretching in all directions; I was at the center of the sound. Someone was singing, a contralto, although it took me measures before I identified voice as that new, ravishing instrument that had entered. She sang in a language I didn’t know but understood perfectly. The song was so agonizingly drawn-out—sustained loss unfolding in the background of a peaceful scene—that I couldn’t make the pulse out. One measure became eight; eight crystallized into sixteen. I knew that sound: the last day of the year.

  Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

  Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben;

/>   Sie hat so lange nichts von mir vernommen,

  Sie mag wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben …

  Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel

  Und ruh’ in einem stillen Gebiet.

  Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel,

  In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied.

  I couldn’t say how long it lasted; I was stunned to learn later that it took less than ten minutes. Just as the tune seemed reconciled to ending, its texture thinned to nothing, the strings waited on the verge of resolution, that reed hung on a suspension, and the whole chord stood still in space, frozen, refusing forever to give up the moment of quick here now. Then the portal closed; I came back to this man’s room, all the noises of his apartment and the street, noises I had designed my life around not hearing.

  He waited a suitable moment before ruffling the silence. “Well? What was that all about?” Didn’t he know already? I snapped my head up, opened my eyes, saw him again in the corner of the room, sitting amid his notebooks and clothes and rummage treasures. He hadn’t moved during the piece. Had he meant to use the music to win me, heart and frozen soul, he could not have succeeded better with my assistance.

  “I don’t know,” I answered sharply. I closed my eyes and let my head drop back to the bed. “I don’t speak German.”

  He laughed at my hostility. “Not the text, goof. The music. What does that tune mean?”

  I was auditioning all over again. I was to tell him what that frozen chordal unfolding contained. Against my will, I wanted to answer correctly. Wanted badly. But anything I might say would be wrong. I kept still and waited, knowing that the least sound would give me away. I could think of nothing to add to the notes. But my interviewer waited just as patiently for the thing he wanted from me. I would have hummed that infinitely patient theme out loud by way of explaining what it meant, if I thought my voice could carry it. I said nothing for as long as nothing was possible, then came out with, “It’s about leaving.”

  Todd sat up. “I’ve been waiting forever for someone to hear that.” Unable to leave well enough alone, he added, “The most beautiful delaying gesture ever written.”

  He identified the tune as one of the Rückert Lieder by Mahler. He would play it again for me later, under different circumstances, when it would sound completely changed. But this time, over the sea in America, in 1983, in a cluttered, unzoned apartment, between two people who couldn’t, despite themselves, have the first idea of what was going on out there, in the real house of cartels, conspiracies, and national states, it sounded completely out of place and time: a round, bitter, beautifully inviting rearguard action against loss. But we didn’t understand, yet, just how much there was to lose.

  “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” he said, coming over to where I waited. “I have gotten lost in the world. Although der Welt, feminine, seems to be in the dative: maybe ‘to the world.’ Abhanden is definitely not the tantalizing choice: abandoned. False cognates. Faux amis, as the Germans would say, if they were French.”

  I hated him at that moment. His arrogance ruined for me what sound I could still just make out. Truth was, I was not a native speaker. I had studied it once, but had gotten nowhere. Had he played any other piece, I would have heard little, maybe nothing at all. I would have flunked the audition if the piece he’d chosen hadn’t been so clearly a sound track for the only thing on God’s earth I have an ear for. I wanted to be outside in the cold. I wanted to be by myself, in the apartment I had left a man to get. To die away from the world’s noises, to live alone in a quiet place. In that song.

  Todd kept chattering amiably, as if I were another of his news vendors or street drunks. I wanted him to stop talking, but he wouldn’t. He jabbered on about the composer, the exhaustion of romanticism, the absolute distrust Americans have come to feel toward European culture, toward their own past. He prompted me to join in, but I snubbed the invitation. He prodded me again, but a look from me cut the game dead. He stood, went to the window, and stared at something farther than the neighborhood. He squinted, looking for that metaphor, the outside world with its untraceable, newsprint, global urgencies closed off to us, hermetically sealed. “But I do love you,” he said. I was the only person within earshot.

  “Thank you. I mean, for …”. I gestured at the record player with a wrist. He turned to look at me. I saw in his face the evidence he’d been denying since the day he came by the library to ask about a disappearing man. I understood that all the people he spread himself out over—the cashiers, the subway vets, the three-piece-suiters, college friends held at phone’s distance, everyone who elicited that uncalculated, soliciting, contagious charm—were grapples, last-ditch efforts to reverse the departure he was well into. He had the Ressler gene, recessive, latent, but irreversible.

  He returned the record to the closet shelf. “I have become a stranger to this place,” he said, not daring to look at me. I realized later that he was trying again to translate the song text, quote of the day.

  XVIII

  CANON AT THE SIXTH

  “Does it have any side effects?” he asked one night in my room, our habitual place for love. We lay still straddled; I crouched exhausted on top of him. Although subzero outside, we were moist from exertion. Sex, slack and slow, expansive, aesthetic, like serious wine tastings where nothing gets drunk but everything sampled, sometimes turned fierce for no reason, vocal, frantic, a muscle purge. The first such escalation scared the daylights out of us. Neither had initiated any change of pace, but all of a sudden we were both running hard, testing the edge of control. The more frightening it became, the more wildly we went at each other. Afterwards, still winded, I murmured about not knowing he was a sprinter.

  “Sprinter? ‘Hurdler’ wouldn’t half say it. You get that from a book? Private reference?” I made an embarrassed pun about open circulation. After that, even our most passive encounters—wide-eyed stroking—had a whiff of danger, as if anything could trigger fierce surprise.

  Following such an outbreak, we lay motionless in my room, awkward in the impossible non sequitur, the return to nonchalance. The behavioral masterstroke, more crucial to human evolution than the opposable thumb: the ability to pretend that nothing just happened, that there is no seam. “Does it have any side effects?” he asked in the dark, after geologic pressing desperate enough to crystallize carbon. He could make himself obscure in half a dozen languages, including his mother tongue.

  “Hair on my palms, you mean?”

  “Can it do that?” he blinked.

  “Can what do that?” Even reaching the conclusion that we didn’t get each other was endlessly difficult.

  He leaned toward me confidentially. “Safeguarding.” I stared, unable to crack the euphemism. “Here we’ve been happily tilling the fields for weeks, with nary a mention of prevention. That leaves, to my knowledge, only two possible methods by which you …” His speech ground to a halt. He locked eyes and stuttered, “Uh-oh.”

  I laughed a monosyllable. “Idiot.”

  “I suppose I should have asked beforehand, huh?” He was abashed only a second. “Which is it then? I don’t want you using anything that’s going to give you …”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “What do you mean, don’t worry? I’m worrying.”

  “We don’t have to worry about pregnancy. Or any birth-control side effects.” We dressed slowly. I stood looking outside, wishing for all the world that we could go for a walk.

  After a respectable pause for a man, Todd broke into Cockney constable. “What’s all this then?”

  I faced him, as self-possessed as a health professional. “I had a ligation.”

  “You what?” Dead silence. “You’re not even thirty.”

  “Pretty soon,” I said, suddenly too girlish.

  We lay back on the bed, fully clothed. He put tentative fingers through my hair. “Mind if I ask …?” I waited placidly, relaxed, until he put it in so many words. “What prompted you … or did you need to?”
>
  “No. Tuckwell and I decided that, with our lives, our careers, we would never do well with babies.”

  “But I didn’t think … Did you expect …? Did you think you would live with him forever?”

  I snorted—a sharp exhalation that expanded my lungs as it emptied them. “Evidently I must have, on our good days.”

  “Jesus. One of you must have been pretty certain. I mean, ‘permanent’ means …”

  I discarded the argument that the operation could conceivably be reversed. The odds against that loophole made it irrelevant. Permanent meant permanent. “He had nothing to do with it, really.” I was sorry I’d mentioned Keith at all, ashamed to have tried to palm off on him an interest in the decision. “It was all me. The idea of passing on accumulated adult knowledge to a helpless infant—how to expectorate phlegm and not swallow it, how to tell the difference between ‘quarter to’ and ‘quarter after,’ how to stay off the stove, how to tell when people were trying to hurt them—was too much. I couldn’t see myself selecting all those clothes and birthday presents year after year, keeping them from inserting screwdrivers in electrical outlets, nursing them through the destruction of favorite toys.”

  “Jan. No. You’re joking.” Franklin was pale, shaking. “Motherhood is tough, so you tied your tubes!”

  I could have crushed him with one word. It would never be his pregnancy. He wasn’t even responsible enough to have thought of prevention. The male model of parenthood: everything between ejaculation and tossing the football with the twelve-year-old is trivial. The matter didn’t concern him in the least. The fight had begun, after all, with his wanting to avoid contributing to any child of mine. I had made an irreversible decision, a choice self-evident at the time, one that would have been made for me anyway in a few more years. I did not care to reproduce, and although I was still relatively young, removing that possibility meant clearing the anxiety from my remaining sexual life.