Jeanette, wetting his mouth with hers, breaks only long enough to pull him impatiently back toward the barracks. But before she can cover him in the prize she will bestow on him for his discovery, while he can still remember the wrinkle with sufficient agitation, Ressler grabs the spiral notebook that came out to Illinois with him. He has reserved it until this moment for lab notes, hypotheses, models, the verifiable jottings of procedure. The pages fill with a complete, handwritten history of the in vitro attempt. Now they seem the logical place to record the afternoon's momentous insight. Jeannie clings lightly to his back, sinking her teeth into his shoulder. She looks on, reads as she murmurs, allowing him two minutes to say what he needs. Then she will take from him everything he has shown himself to be worth. But first, he arrests in print amber the skeleton that might one day release the world from its condition of standing cipherhood: "Flowers have names."
Today in History
March 21: First day of spring, vernal equinox, pedal point of Aries, the calendar's octave. My file for the day is full of forgettable sports records, local legislation, small-time politics, standard international bickering. I can find only one thing of lasting consequence that happened on this date, one recombination that will stick, lodge itself in the permanent gene. For once, I break the self-imposed rule prohibiting birthdays: today is Bach's.
Ressler was celebrating that musical provincial's 299th the night I walked into MOL to make my goodbyes. Todd, alone in the lunchroom, was cheery. "Thanks for breakfast," he said, implying by a grin that they both had needed it. "Why didn't you wake me?"
The question, self-evident to him, knocked the words out of me. I sat down at the empty lunchtable. I had nothing left to say. I didn't even want to be there. Impulse instructed me to run, get rid of him without pointless postmortems. I would have, except for the farewell I owed Dr. Ressler, the blessing I needed from him.
"Why didn't I wake you?" I could manage nothing more than a flat, journalistic survey. Todd nodded, but betrayed the pretense by fiddling with the knobs on the microwave. I was getting softer, fainter. I felt nothing. No resentment, no desperation. Zero. A cipher. I lifted my eyebrows: I release you; now will you let me out cleanly?
"You didn't want to wake our friend?" Todd's voice tacked suddenly, came about. Its preemptive volume, front first, dropping the would-be innocence, jerked me by the neck.
"I didn't want to wake your friend," I said, this time finding the exact, disdaining disengagement I was after. He tilted toward me and rubbed an eyebrow; every natural defense lay with him. I could not lie, could neither attack nor escape. Tolerance of animal stupidity, the only religion I believe in, kept me from choking him. He had broken no rules; we had never laid down any. From the first, I could have him only without promise or propriety. But he had broken something, unforgivably cheated. He had not said. From the day he first showed at the Information Desk, all facts were to be on the table, public domain.
I
"How long?" I asked him. I might have been conducting a phone poll, a product questionnaire.
Todd closed his eyes, pressed thumb to the lids, and struggled to suppress an hysterical snicker. "How long what?"
He wanted to hear me say it, unleash my rage. "How long," I said, perfectly modulated, stewardess-clinical, "have you been packing your dick into that pretty little muff?" Hearing myself pronounce the obscenity — I still can't believe this — brought me to the first stages of arousal.
"How long have I been sleeping with Annie?" He waited brutally until I nodded at the paraphrase. He was a boy. A stupid, puerile, self-indulgent, arrested boy. His eyes looked up as if he were reading the answer there. "Since shortly after I began sleeping with you."
The moan came out of me before he finished the predicate. I covered my face in my hand, so that he would not have the pleasure of seeing the knife slice across it. Muscle convulsed under my palm, my skin burned, all over an exchange of words. Todd took a clumsy, involuntary step of compassion in my direction, but he did not dare close the gap. He could not bear to be responsible for a show of pain that compromised me. He let out a plaintive bleat, banged into a chair, and slammed the cabinet, by way of offering comfort. "You honestly didn't know?"
It helped, at least, to let my facial tics explode. "You said nothing. Total silence." Amyclaean, golden, consenting. Alien and unnatural in my mouth. "You hid. How I was supposed to know?"
He shook his head. "She's always around. Devoted. Doting." His tone was soft, pointed, regretful. "All the qualities I so patently lack."
"From that I was supposed to guess?" I went shrill, and — last symptom of losing control — didn't care. "She treated us like a couple. So did you, for that matter."
"I still would. So would she." If, he implied, you weren't so archaic, perverse with monogamy. "The night I first went home with her, she told me she wouldn't hurt you for all the tea in china shops. I obviously miscalculated in telling her you'd understand."
Having slighted everything else, he went after my understanding. I wanted to prove myself the most magnanimous, liberal creature on earth. At the same time. I wanted to snuff him out, arrogance and all, like a kitchen match. Hurt him beyond understanding. "You screwed with a creationist." Monotone outrage. Sex with a religious zealot: the most unforgivable miscegenation. Todd could not stifle a horrible laugh. The pained chuckle came out hideous; he knew the escaping sound would divorce us for good.
"We slept together regularly, yes."
"Slept together," I said. "Regularly." The act might have taken fifteen seconds against a wall, but the polite name promoted their every transaction to a mutual sedative between the politenesses of linen. "I don't understand." Bitter pleasantry. "How can she square this with the Six-Day God? Isn't fucking without benefit of clergy one of the bargain fares to damnation?"
Todd pinched his lip. "We've never discussed doctrine."
"What do you discuss?"
"Not much, frankly. You and she have always talked more than she and I."
She'd wanted to save me. God did not allow for interpretation. Thou shalt not commit. Her folk-song simplicity had fooled me into assuming she did not share creation's basic contradiction. I didn't care anything about her or her motives. The only thing I cared about, flailed at as if it alone could keep self-esteem from dissolving, was the cause of Franklin's infidelity. Irrelevant.
Unaccountably calm, I suddenly knew that belonging, for Todd, was another ugly name for aging. He was losing the courage to face routine, and monogamy left him in the path of exhaustion. Woman-jumping, deep in him long before I arrived, publicly proclaimed that in the end he wouldn't be around for anyone. He could never have survived, as half his life, a partner's crises, the death of her parents, her illness, aging, change. He barely survived the spring overhaul of my wardrobe. The constant terror of event unfolding in daily familiarity could only be beaten by jumping ship, getting promiscuously free.
He had ruined whatever chance the two of us ever had of looking to our joint moat. I would never forgive him that. But I needed to confirm a worse suspicion before breaking off. I spoke softly, not to repair but to cauterize. "Why, Franklin? You have to explain. Don't leave me guessing."