The risk in posting this had nothing to do with going out onto a predictive limb. Beyond doubt the Apollo/Soyuz linkup, symbolically at least, was the equal of half the revolutions and three quarters of the assassinations that mark the usual mileage posts of progress. My risk was not in jumping the canonical gun. It lay in my four lines of accompanying caption — shriller than public servants were supposed to let themselves become. I held out the hope that the event had not come too late to save us from the rest of history. I announced, supported by facts I felt no need to produce, that we were pitched in a final footrace, not between Manichaean political ideologies but between inventiveness and built-in insanity. July 15 tipped the calendar ever so slightly toward the euphoric, exploratory. The risk I took was editorial, insisting that event was real.
This was years before I met Dr. Ressler and his clear-faced protege. That same day, six years later, for a reason preserved in artifact, I posted, as quote of the day, Aristotle's critique of the Pythagoreans in the Metaphysics: They say that things themselves are Numbers. The risk this time was entirely mine.
The Husband's Message
For days after meeting Frank Todd for seafood — my dinner, his breakfast — I heard nothing from him. I'd turned up the facts; our business was transacted. But we weren't done with one another. The flavor that kept coming back at odd hours as I fielded calls or directed question-traffic was the look that had come over my makeshift date's face as I told him of Stuart Ressler's disappointing early collapse. Todd had looked for an instant as if he were hearing, after the fact, the obituary of a childhood hero.
Time passed with no follow-up on Todd's invitation to dig deeper. My job was to discard the content once I'd handed it over. In those few previous instances where professional assistance had aroused other interest, I'd always nipped it quickly in the stamen. Not that I felt any need to avoid temptation. Tuckwell had never demanded monogamy, at least not overtly. Keith referred to our commitment as a "Five-Year Plan" or a "Great Leap Forward," depending on the humor his adwork left him in on a given day. If I steered a course of noninvolvement through daily contacts it was for my own sake: my research skill exceeded anything else I had to offer anyone. But Todd's taciturn courtship, comical when delivered, confused me when withdrawn. I resented that professed infatuation with my face — sheer, male data — bribery. His semantic waffle over whether I was beautiful, a question more aesthetic than erotic, was simply clinical fascination for a woman who had him momentarily at her mercy.
I had wanted at dinner to preserve my informational advantage, to surrender the hard-won facts only at a favorable rate of exchange. But for some reason I still don't understand, I gave in to pity, told him everything, bared my throat like low dog in a fight. I heard myself give him abstracts of every article I'd turned up. When all shred of danger to him had passed — one of those predators capable of remaining inert for hours as prey blunders blithely over it — Mr. Todd took the proffered parcel and was gone. My resentment kept doubling back on that moment when I'd caught him disconsolate, his confidence dropped. That quick glimpse of facial bruise told me he wanted something from me that had nothing to do with biographies. He needed what he would never know to ask for. It wrecked my equanimity: he requested less and went away satisfied.
When he called the Reference Desk again, he did not bother to identify himself. "Can we try this again? Same place and time? Round two?" I couldn't imagine his motive in calling back. No hope of anything fresh, no new esoterica. I didn't know whether to cut him or accept with pleasure. I went for a frosty yes.
I found the restaurant again, and Franklin Todd was waiting. I knew instantly the reason for this follow-up. I could tell from his posture, his welcoming grin. This date meant to erase whatever impression of weakness the first might have left. We were not to mention the case. We were to be absolutely upbeat. And afterwards, as befit cheerful strangers, never see each other again, I confirmed that he was lamentably attractive, taller and sandier than I remembered, his light stubble two years ahead of fashion. He looked completely incapable of being devastated by the deterioration of an older coworker. But then, I did not then look like a woman capable of quitting her profession for nothing. He was in midsentence when I reached the table. "So what happened this morning?"
I was about to give the same, daily nonresponse I gave Tuckwell when, stopped by a sardonic crook to his face, I caught on. I returned the look, saying, "Spanish Civil War on the brink of breaking out, 1936. Goldwater wins GOP nomination, 1964. Apollo/ Soyuz, 1975."
He beamed. "You're so predictable."
I shook my hair loose and sat down. "You know, I haven't even met you properly and already I don't like you."
"The pleasure's mutual, I'm sure." His face broke out in all the muted possibilities of the opening game. "You are extraordinary." He gave the long word an extra syllable, intoning it with the same converted skepticism he had given his measurement of my beauty. "But you suffer from this terrible twentieth-century bias."
"It's not a bias. Most of what has happened happened in the last hundred years. Any newsworthy July day is probably recent."
"I see. Current events, like traffic, increasingly clogged until one day soon some old guy's going to pull out of his garage in Iowa and poof: universal gridlock." He ordered for both of us, issuing instructions throughout the meaclass="underline" "Squeeze the lemon like this. Let the taste sit on the back of your tongue while you think of Mardi Gras." The imperatives carried the inbred, dictatorial drive of males — the hand in the small of the back they always use to steer the weaker vessel. But something else in his voice too: inappropriate enthusiasm for experience that needed sharing. Franklin in no way passed for a gourmet. He sniffed the Tabasco cap and made me do likewise. "Most expedient sinus recipe known to man." He did not preach good taste so much as enjoyment. "Cut this end off. Swirl it first before dunking." Expertise acquired over long trial and error, offered up now to save me the bother of the learning curve. It amused me, his assuming I'd never eaten food before. He had the ingenuous pleasure of a novice who sees in everyone a new initiate.
We paid and left. Coming out to the street, turning into the Sidewalk tide, he took my hand and shook it enthusiastically, as if I'd been a far more entertaining guest than I had been. I was supposed to remember only this round, erase the unpleasant undertone of the first. I asked where he was headed. "My night off. Back home to the Butter and Eggs."
"You live in Manhattan? What were you doing at our branch?"
"Research."
"/ was doing the research. You were humming to yourself, as I remember."
"There's a difference?" He smiled and left.
Another week went by before Franklin turned up again. I was cleaning out the Question Submission Box. To the query "I want to buy a microwave oven. Are they safe?" I knew both the desired answer and informed opinion. I'd been asked the question often, and I easily delivered the unimpeachable stats, adding at the bottom of my response, "Most reports concerning cooked human kidneys are urban legend." Number two was "What is the formula for figuring compound interest?" or something as trivial. "Trivial," I knew, derived from trivium, any junction of three Roman roads, where your basic whores hung out. I gave the formula with no editorial comment.
But the third note had been left for no one's but my eyes. It was in the same anonymous typewriting as the one about making the catch. Todd had never had any intention of disappearing. He meant to water me with a steady stream of far-ranging, restless demands for answers for every imaginable issue, however far from hand.