He looked at his watch. "Ten months or so. Jersey City, actually. A shade cheaper."
"Ten months! Franklin. Oh God. Jesus. Why on earth did you wait?" Even as I asked it, I knew the question was out of line. Wait for what? To come see a person who had told him that visiting hours were over?
"I could not drop by earlier," he said, parodying Euclid, "because I didn't want to show up here empty-handed." He reached into a rucksack that had been lying innocuously by the side of the chair. He had arrived packed. He extracted a sheaf from his overnight bag and handed it to me. A stack of beautifully typed watermark bond. "I figured that you wouldn't even say 'boo' to me unless and until I wrapped up the dissertation."
My hand caught, afraid to turn over the cover sheet. "Todd. Don't start this again." I felt myself laughing, stricken, beginning to believe.
"Done. Portrait of the Artist. I'm out from under it."
I turned the cover page and began to read. I knew what it was with the first paragraph, the first sentence's description of a young post-doc's Greyhound bus arrival at a laboratory deep in the interior. He too had served his sentences. The story of one life; the math of the central nervous system. I could not read on. I began straightening the sheaf of papers, throat, hands, eyes, all in wild counterpoint.
"Who'da thought it?" Todd said, filling the silence. "Years of art history, and I wind up in biography after all."
You should talk, friend: all I ever wanted to be was a researcher, and here I am, plunged into information science. To keep myself from complete regression, I asked, "What have you been living on all this while?"
Todd shot back, speaking through the corner of his mouth, "Patrimony. The old man's life policy. What's it to ya, doll?"
I began to cry, quietly. He came and sat beside me on the floor. He began to tell me about his last visit to the professor. "The man pretended to be furious at me for leaving Europe just to come see him like that, a skeleton. We managed to sneak in a car tour, out to the woods, before he got too weak. I plied him for buried biographical details. I asked what it felt like, slowly dissolving into bad instructions. I asked him for his odds on humanity. I asked him if he was happy with the way he'd spent his time. He told me: 'It seems my answers to all the important questions are doomed to remain qualified.'
"No bursts of false hope, no journal entries celebrating I kept my meals down today. Let's hope tomorrow is still better. Nothing left behind, no bequest to first filial but the ongoing experiment. Janny, his hair had turned white. White. As white as a fresh sheet of paper. I asked him if the cancer study he'd hooked up with had reached any conclusions. 7 have, in any case. It hurts.'"
So did the punchline. So did having to laugh. The muscles around my rib cage contracted all together, against the blueprint, more like a swimmer's cramp than laughter. Todd made another feeble, black crack, for my sake: something about the absurdity of a language that made oncology and ontology differ by a single mutation. A little while later, I thought I might try breathing again.
"He told me a story: 1982. The year before you meet him. He's passed fifty, gratefully out from under the immediate jurisdiction of endocrinology. Through decades of training, he now thinks of Dr. Koss only three times a day. He's living in a world where clipped, rewritten supercoiled strands of nucleotides can be sent from anywhere to anywhere. Where everybody's got his own ILLIAC. Three golf balls on the moon.
"He's working steadily on the night shift, the month before I get myself hired. On a whim, he turns the radio on, fiddles with the dial, and freezes it on an old friend. It's the Canadian kid, beyond a doubt. The inimitable playing style, that muffled humming in the background tracks trying for a Platonic, thirty-third variation just beyond the printed score. Playing the piece that woman gave him. Ressler is amazed to find how vividly the structure of the past is still encoded in him. Stadium Terrace, Cyfer. That reverse-telescope dilation, where distant is closer than near. He discovers he still loves Jeannie as intensely as the day he first stumbled upon the evidence.
"But in an instant's listening, he's shocked to hear that it's not the same piece, not the same performance. It's a radical rethinking from beginning to end, worlds slower, more variegated, richer in execution. A lot of the variations enter attacca, without pause, the last notes of one spilling into the first notes of the next, anxious to hear how they might sound all at once, on top of one another.
"He can't believe his good luck at getting a new recording. But
the party dissipates at the end, after the return of the ossified aria, when the announcer reports that the pianist has suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage just after releasing this take two. He leaves the radio on all night, and the next, as if letting it air out. When the piece plays again two days later, he knows why. He sits and listens the piece through in its entirety, weeping like a child for the death of someone he didn't even know."
I saw then why Todd came back to pass all this on to me. I raised my head, knowing I looked hideous, thinking that if he could see me this way and not run away, it might begin to signify some chance. When he saw my face like that, Todd laughed, reached out a finger, and smeared a little saline pool around in the bogs under my eyes.
"He sent you back to me," I said.
"My suggestion. He supplied the dowry. A trunk packed with handwritten full scores. He thought we might like to try to decipher them together." Todd reached his hands around my waist from behind, closed them around mine, then moved both sets in a pantomime of that old pump-organ enterprise we had once indulged in, up in the woods. This time the keyboard was only four-hands.
I freed myself from his arms. The thought of Dr. Ressler's compositions pinned me against the stakes of being alive. The readiness that the singing bank machine had released in me vanished. Everything I had learned in my year off, every stunted enzyme for courage that I had managed in isolation to nurse alive, was about to seize up and go dysfunctional again, knowing all that now rode on it. I tried to steady myself; if I could tell Todd everything I'd done, from the beginning, I might begin to retrieve myself. "I've been toying with a little biography too, I'm afraid."
"So I see," he said, picking up the notebook I had caught him reading. "Pretty strong stuff here, Missy. Sex, love, espionage, the works. You're sitting on a gold mine, you know."
"Don't be absurd."
"No. I'm serious. I have this great idea."
All of a piece, I knew what it was. "Out of the question. Don't even think of it."
"Come on. A few edits, a little cut-and-paste___"
He made me laugh. I couldn't help myself. "I believe 'splicing' is the bioengineer's term of choice."
He made a great show of collating, a little courtship-dance of paper-shuffling to win me again, for good. "Come'on. Let's do it. Let's make a baby."
I shook my head. "No," I said, dead sober. "It wouldn't be enough. A man like you will always want the real thing someday. Or at least the chance. It would never last."
"My dear Ms. Reference." He edged over to me, taking me up against him. "Why do you think the Good Lord invented sperm bank donations?" He placed his hands over my face, exploring the burning landscape there. "And let me ask you another thing." One for the perpetual Question Board. His eyes were full beyond measure. His whole throat shook like a beginner's in wonder at the words he was about to discover. "Who said anything about lasting?"
ARIA
Da Capo e Fine