He meant to slight more than his panel painter's technique. He meant the whole, colossal impertinence of studying Art History— the delicate, gessoed, tempera conflagration — in a world setting itself on fire. Franker, in the year I knew him, carried inside, wound up in his love for anachronistic art, a contempt for aesthetics that only the aesthete can feel. Every so many weeks he tried, despite his temperament, to turn himself into a moralist whose ethical code bore one criterion: use. Frontpage news — the bleakest of which he clipped obsessively for months — would not allow him to indulge the pointless pleasure he needed. Headlines confirmed his worst suspicion; current events shamed panel and oil. Like an unfaithful lover, he repeatedly swore off sin and allure. But repeated infidelity made the betrayed more beautiful.
What use could new light on a sixteenth-century landscapist be to a sick, self-afflicted present? Dr. Ressler's terminal nightmare may have decided Franker on that account. His card is cheery enough; he sounds worlds limberer than in the closing weeks of love. But has he really gone to Dinant to write? Could he sincerely believe long-postponed looking might now be of some moral use? New language, any new language — at best, homage to a lost linguist he loved. He'll never put his new adjectives to the use he wants. Acts of care are never fundamentally useful.
At least he's made the pretense of getting down to work. I, on the other hand, entering unemployment's third week, have done nothing for days but add up my liquid assets and divide them by my spending rate, determining how much time I have before I run my life savings into the ground. Depending on the weight I assign the variables, I'm left with between forty and sixty weeks. Less than nothing and more time than I know how to fill. Weirdly exhilarating prospect: I give this week a number and begin the countdown. Week zero, getting closer every seven days, ought to put an edge on my style. Make me more supple than I've been in a while. But supple for what? Having nothing better to do, finding guilty delight in the pure, useless exercise of powers, I spent two hours this afternoon placing the allusion in Franker's card. The accents and alliterations gave me a broad hint where to begin. I worked in the sunny pleasure of my own room, combing the volumes that have grown over the years, reproducing themselves into a private reference collection. I worked — the oddest of feelings — for myself alone. No one to solve the citation for but me.
The line showed up in an Anglo-Saxon poem, one of the earliest in the language that mutated into English. A fragment in the Exeter Book called the Husband's Message. He closed with it as friendly challenge, for old times' sake: from a vanished friend to one left behind. Invigorating, to learn a language. Aside from that citation hunting, nothing. Dinner, extravagantly, at a sit-down place near Prospect Park, savoring spice and irony, paying for both with two days' worth of remaining time. The passage of time with nothing specific to accomplish makes me feel a little more blessedly, acutely free. I eat, I walk fearless in the summer air back home. I sit alone in my room, among the home reference. I now have all a lady is allowed had I only an answer. Had I only him.
Imitation of the Dance
If the forties' great debate raged over which macromolecule carried hereditary material, and if the early fifties fought over nucleic acid structure, Ressler walks smack into the contention of 1957 on his first day in the lab. Conscientious hygiene resulting from a working relationship with microorganisms made him bathe this morning before leaving barracks. A regular dawn dunking also gives him time for undirected reflection. Like Luther, his best insights arrive in proximity to porcelain. But drying his hair before setting off is time lost to superfluity. The omission puts him into the scientific cross hairs.
While he unpacks his glassware and sets up a cot in a storage room, Jeanette Koss, the woman at Ulrich's party steeped in world polemics, passes his counter and puts a discreet hand on his. The contact startles Stuart; her touch, real skin rubbing the fur of his arm, cuts — so long has he been without — like an accusation. Dr. Koss whispers, "If Blake or Lovering catches sight of you in this condition, your year is ruined."
In the same soft confidence, she lays out that Joe Lovering, her soiree spar partner, and Tooney Blake, the pianist of less than gershwinning ways, are locked in an ideological conflict about the hazards of going outside with a wet head. The two scientists share compatible lab practices and commensurate views on the coding problem. But on this matter, they are bitterly bipolar. Dr. Koss relates how Blake has devoted himself to a systematic destruction of the old wives' hypothesis linking wet hair to open virus season. For the last month he has immersed his head twice daily, once before setting off to work and once before leaving the lab. "Just a hairsbreadth," Dr. Koss confides, "between empiric physiology and abnormal psych." Lovering, on the other hand, in horrified reaction, not only maintains bone-dry hair at all times but even now, in late July, keeps up a steady regimen of preventive tonics. "You see," Koss explains, releasing him from her touch, "they have no experimental control. If they catch you like this, you're It."
He's walked into all-out inimical politics. To date, he's lain low in the exchange between lab partners Niki and Ike. But his colleagues in deciphering have brought the Cold War home. Best avoid getting caught in the draft. Ressler thanks Dr. Koss for the caveat, but that's not sufficient. She produces a supply-room towel and insists on helping him. She wraps his head in the fabric and before he collects presence of mind to object begins rubbing him gently but briskly, businesslike, from crown to nape of neck. Buried memory shoots up through scalp: his mother preparing him for church, a wedding or funeral. The wince of somatic recall — thumb moistened with saliva, rubbing raw the skin behind his ears. The woman pinches his head into sweet pain. Woytowich walks in, salutes abstractedly, not even blinking.
Koss smoothes back his hair, combs it, smiles, and crosses the room to resume her work with the vernier scales. There she carefully measures the thickness of near-invisible growing media. In a minute, nothing out of the ordinary has happened; in two, Ressler's skin forgets the contact. He'll have to make allowances for the woman in the lab. Female scientists are still rare enough to seem as anomalous as Dr. Skinner's Ping-Pong-playing pigeons. Cyfer's employing two is a statistical violation. Toveh Botkin, the team's senior member after Ulrich, possesses an antique, clinical grace that sweeps her into the province of competent sexlessness. At the welcome party, he took to the older woman and refused all but a weak smile at the lone flash of humor to come from the evening: Joe Lovering describing her life as a series of near Mrs. Dr. Koss, on the other hand, a certified Mrs. in her spare time, is not to be completely trusted. Young, still breeding-age, somewhat better looking than germ culture: might upset the pheromone levels around here from now through the end of summer.
Yet this first afternoon, there seems little to worry about on that score. Blake, by his pianistic skills, is prematurely male-menopau-sal, Dan Woytowich too B-complex-deficient, and Ulrich too intent on cash-raising to raise any more disruptive fund drives. That leaves Lovering, who, by the time Stuart finishes unpacking, has taken up a post by a caged pair of white lab rats, apparently more mascots than experimental animals. Crew-cut, glasses, starched white coat with nub tie underneath, Joe shouts, "Mate, you suckers." Lover-ing's safe too.