The Rule of Four

by Ian Caldwell

  Katie gives a sympathetic look, and Sam returns to transcribing.

  “What did you want to talk about?” I ask.

  But Katie leads me back to the darkroom.

  “It’s little hot in here,” she says, opening a door and forcing back a thick set of black curtains. “You might want to take off your coat.”

  I do, and she hangs it from a hidden hook by the door. I’ve avoided the inside of this room since I met her, terrified of ruining her film.

  Katie walks over to a clothesline strung along one wall. Photographs are clipped to it with clothespins. “It’s not supposed to get above seventy-five in here,” she says, “or the soup reticulates the negatives.”

  She might as well be speaking Greek. There’s an old rule my sisters taught me: whenever you go on a date with a girl, always meet at a place you know well. French restaurants aren’t impressive when you can’t read the menu, and highbrow movies backfire when you don’t understand the plot. Here, in the darkroom, the possibilities for failure seem spectacular.

  “Give me a second,” she says, shuttling from one side of the room to the other, quick as a hummingbird. “I’m almost done.”

  She opens the cover to a small tank, brings the film inside it to a spigot, then places it under running water. I start to feel crowded. The darkroom is small and cluttered, counters overrun with pans and trays, shelves lined with stop bath and fixer. Katie seems to have almost perfect dexterity here. It reminds me of the way she did her hair at the reception, tying it around pins as if she could see what she was doing.

  “Should I turn out the lights?” I ask, starting to feel useless.

  “Not unless you want to. The negatives have fixed.”

  So I stand like a scarecrow in the center of the room.

  “How’s Paul holding up?” she asks.

  “Okay.”

  A respectful silence ensues, and Katie seems to lose the thread of the conversation, attending to another set of photos.

  “I stopped by Dod just after 12:30,” she begins again. “Charlie said you were with Paul.”

  There’s an unexpected sympathy in her voice.

  “It was good of you to stay with him,” she says. “This must be terrible for Paul. For everyone.”

  I want to tell her about Stein’s letters, but realize how much explaining it would take. She returns to my side now with a handful of pictures.

  “What are these?”

  “I developed our film.”

  “From the movie field?”

  She nods.

  The movie field is a place Katie brought me to see, an open plot in Princeton Battlefield Park that seems to extend farther and flatter than any stretch of land east of Kansas. A single oak tree stands in the middle of it like a sentinel who won’t leave his post, echoing the last gesture of a general who died beneath the tree’s branches during the Revolutionary War. Katie first saw the spot in a Walter Matthau movie, and ever since then the tree has been an enchantment for her. It became one in a small string of places she visited over and over again, a rosary of sights that anchored her life the more she returned to them. Within a week of her first night at Dod, she took me to see it, and it was as if the old Mercer Oak were a relative of hers, all three of us making an important first impression. I brought a blanket, a flashlight, and a picnic basket; Katie brought film and a camera.

  The pictures are an artifact I don’t expect, a small part of us locked in amber. We work through them together, sharing between our hands.

  “What do you think?” she says.

  Seeing them, I remember how warm the winter was. January’s fading light is almost the color of honey, and here we are, both dressed in light sweaters, with coats and hats and gloves nowhere to be seen. The grooves of the tree behind us have the texture of age.

  “They’re wonderful,” I tell her.

  Katie smiles awkwardly, still unsure how to take a compliment. I notice stains on her fingertips, the color of newsprint, left by one of the darkroom agents bottled along the wall. Her fingers are long and thin, but with a workmanlike touch, the residue of too much film dipped in too many chemical baths. This was us, she’s saying, a thousand words at a time. Remember?

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her.

  My grip on the pictures loosens, but she reaches for my fingers with her other hand.

  “It’s not because of my birthday,” she says, worried I’ve missed the point.

  I wait.

  “Where did you and Paul go after you left Holder last night?”

  “To see Bill Stein.”

  She pauses over the name, but presses on. “About Paul’s thesis?”

  “It was urgent.”

  “What about when I stopped by your room just after midnight?”

  “The art museum.”

  “Why?”

  I’m uncomfortable with the direction she’s taking. “I’m sorry I didn’t come over. Paul thought he could find Colonna’s crypt, and he needed to look at some of the older maps.”

  Katie doesn’t seem surprised. A hush gathers behind her next words, and I know this is the conclusion she’s been building toward.

  “I thought you were done with Paul’s thesis,” she says.

  “So did I.”

  “You can’t expect me to watch you do this all over again, Tom. Last time we didn’t talk for weeks.” She hesitates, not knowing how else to put it. “I deserve better.”

  A boy’s way is to argue, to find a defensible position and hold it, even if it’s not heartfelt. I can feel the arguments crowding into my mouth, the little spurs of self-preservation, but Katie stops me.

  “Don’t,” she says. “I want you to think about this.”

  She doesn’t have to spell it out. Our hands part; she leaves the pictures in mine. The hum of the darkroom returns. Like a dog I’ve kicked, the silence always seems to take her side.

  The choice is made, I want to tell her. I don’t need to think this through. It’s simple: I love you more than I love the book.

  But to say it now would be the wrong choice. Part of this isn’t about answering the question correctly: it’s about showing that I’m correctible; that twice broken, I can still be fixed. Twelve hours ago I missed her birthday because of the Hypnerotomachia. My promises would seem empty right now, even to me.

  “Okay,” I say.

  Katie brings a hand to her mouth and bites at a nail, then catches herself and stops.

  “I should work,” she says, touching my fingers again. “Let’s talk more about this tonight.”

  I stare at the nub of her nail, wishing I could inspire more confidence.

  She pushes me toward the black curtains, handing me my coat, and we return to the main office. “I need to finish the rest of my rolls before the senior photographers take over the darkroom,” she says on the way, more for Sam’s benefit than for mine. “You’re a distraction.”

  The artifice is wasted. Sam’s earphones are still in place; focused on her typing, she doesn’t notice me leaving.

  At the door, Katie takes her hands away from the small of my back. She seems prepared to speak, but doesn’t. Instead, she leans over and gives me a kiss on the cheek, the kind I used to get in our earliest days, as a reward for jogs in the morning. Then she holds the door for me as I leave.

  Chapter 18

  Love conquers all.

  In seventh grade, at a small souvenir stand in New York, I bought a silver bracelet with that inscription for a girl named Jenny Harlow. I thought it was, in one stroke, a portrait of the young man she wanted to date: cosmopolitan, with its Manhattan pedigree; romantic, with its poetic-sounding motto; and classy, with its understated shine. I left the bracelet anonymously in Jenny’s locker on Valentine’s Day, then waited all day for a response, thinking she was sure to know who’d left it.

  Cosmopolitan, romantic, and classy, unfortunately, didn’t form a trail of breadcrumbs leading directly back to me. An eighth grader named Julius Murphy must’ve had that com
bination of virtues in much greater supply than I did, because it was Julius who got a kiss from Jenny Harlow at the end of the day, while I was left with nothing but a dark suspicion that the family vacation to New York had been for naught.

  The whole experience, like so much of childhood, was built on misunderstanding. It wouldn’t occur to me until much later that the bracelet wasn’t made in New York, any more than it was made of silver. But that very Valentine’s night, my father explained the particular misinterpretation he found most telling, which was that the poetic-sounding motto wasn’t quite as romantic as Julius, Jenny, and I thought.

  “You may have gotten the wrong impression from Chaucer,” he began, with the smile of paternal wisdom. “There’s more to ‘love conquers all’ than just the Prioress’s brooch.”

  I sensed that this was going to be a lot like the conversation we’d had about babies and storks a few years before: well intentioned, but based on a serious misunderstanding about what I’d been learning in school.

  A long explanation followed, about Virgil’s tenth eclogue and omnia vincit amor, with digressions about Sithonian snows and Ethiopian sheep, all of which mattered a lot less to me than why Jenny Harlow didn’t think I was romantic, and why I’d found such a useless way of blowing twelve dollars. If love conquered all, I decided, then love had never met Julius Murphy.

  But my father was a wise man in his way, and when he saw he wasn’t getting through to me, he opened a book and showed me a picture that made his point for him.

  “Agostino Carracci made this engraving, called Love Conquers All,” he said. “What do you see?”

  On the right side of the picture were two naked women. On the left side, a baby boy was beating up a much larger and more muscular satyr.

  “I don’t know,” I said, unsure which side of the picture I was supposed to be learning from.

  “That,” my father said, pointing to the boy, “is Love.”

  He let it sink in.

  “He’s not supposed to be on your side. You fight with him; you try to undo what he does to others. But he’s too powerful. No matter how much we suffer, Virgil says, our hardships cannot move him.”

  I’m not sure I ever completely understood the lesson my father was imparting. I got the simplest bit of it, I think: by trying to make Jenny Harlow fall head over heels for me, I was arm-wrestling Love, which my own cheap bracelet had been telling me was futile. But I sensed, even then, that my father was only using Jenny and Julius as an object lesson. What he really wanted to offer was a piece of wisdom he’d come by the hard way, which he hoped to impress upon me while the stakes of my own failures were still small. My mother had warned me about misguided love, my father’s affair with the Hypnerotomachia always in the back of her mind; and now my father was offering his counterpoint, riddled in Virgil and Chaucer. He knew exactly how she felt, he was saying; he may even have agreed. But how could he stop it, what power did he have against the force he was fighting, when Love conquered all?

  I’ve never known which of the two of them was right. The world is a Jenny Harlow, I think; we’re all just fishermen telling stories about the one that got away. But to this day, I’m not sure how Chaucer’s Prioress interpreted Virgil, or how Virgil interpreted love. All that stays with me is the picture my father showed me, the part he never said a word about, where the two naked women are watching Love bully the satyr. I’ve always wondered why Carracci put two women in that engraving, when he only needed one. Somewhere in that is the moral I took from the story: in the geometry of love, everything is triangular. For every Tom and Jenny, there is a Julius; for every Katie and Tom, there is a Francesco Colonna; and the tongue of desire is forked, kissing two but loving one. Love draws lines between us like an astronomer plotting a constellation from stars, joining points into patterns that have no basis in nature. The butt of every triangle becomes the heart of another, until the roof of reality is a tessellation of love affairs. Taken together, they have the pattern of netting; and behind them, I think, is Love. Love is the only perfect fisherman, the one who casts the broadest net, which no fish can escape. His reward is to sit alone in the tavern of life, forever a boy among men, hoping someday to tell stories about the one that got away.

  The rumor was that Katie had found someone else. I’d been replaced by a junior named Donald Morgan, a wiry tower of a man who wore a blazer when a simple dress shirt would do, and who was already priming himself to be Gil’s successor as Ivy president. I happened on the new couple one night in late February at Small World Coffee, the same place where I’d met Paul three years earlier, and a cool exchange followed. Donald managed to say only two or three chummy, innocuous things before realizing I wasn’t a potential voter in the club elections, at which point he ushered Katie out of the shop and into his old Shelby Cobra on the street.

  It was death by papercut, watching him turn the engine three times before it finally roared to life. I couldn’t tell whether it was for my benefit or his vanity, the way he idled in his space for another minute until the road was completely empty before pulling out. All I noticed was that Katie never looked at me, not even as they drove away; worse, she seemed to be ignoring me out of anger rather than embarrassment, as if it were my fault, not hers, that we’d come to this. The outrage of it festered until I decided there was nothing else I could do but surrender. Let her have Donald Morgan, I thought. Let her make her bed at Ivy.

  Of course, Katie was right. It was my fault. I’d been struggling for weeks with the fourth riddle—What do a blind beetle, a night-owl, and a twist-beaked eagle share?—and I sensed that my luck had run dry. Animals in the intellectual world of the Renaissance were tricky subjects. In the same year Carracci made his engraving, Omnia Vincit Amor, an Italian professor named Ulisse Aldrovandi published the first of his fourteen volumes on natural history. In one of the most famous examples of his approach to classification, Aldrovandi spent only two pages identifying the various breeds of chickens, then added another three hundred pages on chicken mythology, chicken-related recipes, and even chicken-based cosmetic treatments.

  Meanwhile, Pliny the Elder, the ancient world’s authority on animals, placed unicorns, basilisks, and manticores on the page directly between rhinos and wolves, and offered his own accounts of how chicken eggs could foretell the sex of a pregnant woman’s child. Within ten days of staring at the riddle, I felt like one of the dolphins Pliny described, enchanted by human music but unable to make any of my own. Surely Colonna had something clever in mind with this riddle of his; I was just dumb to its magic.

  The first thesis deadline I missed came three days later, when I realized, half-sunk in a pile of Aldrovandi photocopies, that a draft of my final chapter on Frankenstein lay unfinished on my desk. My advisor, Dr. Montrose, a sly old English professor, saw my bloodshot look and knew I must be up to something. Never suspecting it was anyone other than Mary Shelley who’d kept me up so many nights, he let the deadline slip. The next one slipped too, and so, very quietly, began the lowest period of my senior year, a stretch of weeks when no one seemed to notice my slow withdrawal from my own life.

  I slept through morning classes, and spent afternoon lectures working riddle solutions in my head. More than one night I watched Paul break from his studies early, hardly past eleven, to walk with Charlie to Hoagie Haven for a late-night sandwich. They always asked me to come along, then asked if they could bring me anything back, but I always refused, at first because I took pride in the monastic quality my life had assumed, then later because I saw something derelict in the way they seemed to be ignoring their work. The night Paul went to get ice cream with Gil instead of doing more research on the Hypnerotomachia, I imagined for the first time he wasn’t pulling his own weight in our partnership.

  “You’ve lost your focus,” I told him. My eyes were getting worse because I had to read in the dark, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

  “I’ve what?” Paul said, turning around before climbing to his bunk. He tho
ught he’d misheard.

  “How many hours are you spending on this a day?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe eight.”

  “I’ve put in ten every day this week. And you’re the one going to get ice cream?”

  “I was gone for ten minutes, Tom. And I made a lot of progress tonight. What’s the problem?”

  “It’s nearly March. Our deadline is in a month.”

  He let the pronoun pass. “I’ll get an extension.”

  “Maybe you should work harder.”

  It was probably the first time anyone had ever spoken those words in Paul’s presence. I’d seen him angry only a handful of times, but never like that.

  “I am working hard. Who do you think you’re talking to?”

  “I’m close to figuring out the riddle. Where are you?”

  “Close?” Paul shook his head. “You’re not doing this because you’re close. You’re doing it because you’re lost. That riddle shouldn’t be taking you this long. It shouldn’t be that hard. You’ve just lost patience.”

  I glared at him.

  “That’s right,” he said, as if he’d been waiting to say it for days. “I’ve almost worked out the next riddle, and you’re still working on the last one. But I’ve been trying to stay out of this. We work at our own paces, and you don’t even want my help. So fine, do it alone. Just don’t try turning this back on me.”

  We didn’t speak again that night.

  Had I listened, I might’ve learned my lesson earlier. Instead, I went out of my way to prove Paul wrong. I began working later and waking earlier, making a habit of rolling my alarm back fifteen minutes each day, hoping he would notice the steady imposition of discipline on the untended quarters of my life. Each day I found a new way to spend more time with Colonna, and each night I tallied my hours like a miser counting coins. Eight on Monday; nine on Tuesday; ten on Wednesday and Thursday; almost twelve on Friday.