Hair between brown and blond is my best feature; but every schoolboy knows what hair is. Given Todd's desperation for Glossy, I don't know what he saw in me worth buzzing. If I have any surface, it is anachronistic. And yet anachronism has always had its fatal Franklin charm. "I know where I've seen you before," he said once, stroking my chin, studying it in candlelight. "The Cluny tapestries. Lady and Unicorn." He meant it as a compliment. High Medieval Flemish is his chosen field. But faint praise: he could see something in me the herd could not. I pushed my luck by asking, "Former or latter?"
I have it on authority that Franklin, confirmed Platonist from way back, seeing women who better approximated his rage for perfection, felt, above anything, distress. When led into Penn Station by a breathtaking madonna only to have her turn and reveal a mulish forehead or mousy nose, his utter relief was like a life sentence commuted to death at the last minute. A hopelessly plain face freed him of responsibility, while agonizingly perfect physiognomy attacked his cortex like an opiate, haunted his sleep for weeks, whispered to him of missed chances that might at last have lifted the confines of the mundane.
But did I have a face that compelled that connoisseur to desire? Eyes, nose, expanse of skin to alert that stranger-stalker? His repeated insistence contradicted itself. Mine is a middle-percentile dazzle, smack in the fat of the normal curve, the not-bottom-of-a-truck woman who sits next to you on the bus, attractive but unrecognized at class reunions. What Franklin saw on second take would never have sold cigarettes or survived pastel. But in the time and place he saw me — Flanders or Artois, 1500—he insisted I had the stuff that earth's waters and wild animals wept at in envy.
Did he have looks enough to justify that gangbuster, self-conducting solo-humming? Oh, he's beautiful. Undeniably, breath-takingly, in all prosaic senses, the classic regularity of features. He claimed to be a little short, a little overweight, a little caulky. He was none of these when I last saw him, and he knew it. He hid behind a face that shone like no other.
The vertical files now contain us: clippings, grainy pictures of all four faces. They show me as a woman somewhat startled. Only the initiated would call me attractive. The Wire photo of Frank shows a young man whose face is a prism. Bent from its white light is the spectrum of every autumn day that ever hurt him. For standard beauty, he had a decided head start. And yet, all of us would grow infinitely more attractive. Even I would shoot open, turn heads like the rarest hothouse flower. Events conspired to make us all, for a moment, beautiful. His parting question, insouciant and impertinent, seemed to create the very pull it asked about. Somewhere I heard rules breaking, water trickling through limestone. Here was a man possessed of boundary-free confidence, asking not if I was beautiful but if I was ready to become it.
He's right: beauty does correspond to a profound secret. But there's a catch. Not the emblem of inner power, but its by-product: the last, faint track of a slowly unfolding generative order, numb-ingly miraculous, even in end results — mouth, eyes, hair. The epi-phenomenon of desperate cells, every face forms the record of shattering, species-wide experiment. The perfect face, the one we ache inside to stand near, is just the median case. The Artist's composite criminal, one that destroys us to leave. And we always leave, once we learn its creases.
He left me that day with two unknowns for the price of one: I didn't even get his name. But he left a trace, another scrap of nub script discovered that evening before I left. When I went to update the quote of the day, making my perfunctory, usually pointless search of the submissions, I found a piece of drawing paper torn from the same notebook:
Natura nihil agit frustra (Nature makes no grotesques)
Signed Sir Thomas Browne, although he misspelled the name. I used the quote, paying the price. Few selections have produced such public bafflement. But I'd choose confusion even now, over the usual indifference of days.
The Question Board
Mother always insisted I got what I had coming. From birth, I was addicted to questions. When the delivering nurse slapped my rump, instead of howling, I blinked inquisitively. As a child I pushed the why" cycle to break point. At six, I demanded to know why people cried. Mother launched into the authorized version of the uses of sorrow. At the end of her extended explanation, it came out that I really wanted the hydromechanics of tear ducts. By her account, I worsened with each year's new vocabulary. She finally took refuge in a multivolume children's encyclopedia, parking me by it whenever I began to get asky. I can still see the color plates: Archers at Agincourt; Instruments of the Orchestra; two-page rainbow Evolutionary Tree. But her scheme backfired. I could now ask about things that hadn't even existed before. Whys multiplied, poking into the places color plates opened but failed to enter.
So it righted a cosmic imbalance in her eyes that I ended up answering others' questions for a living. She hoped to see me sit behind the Reference Desk until I'd answered as many unanswerables as I had plagued her with all those years. To hasten that payoff, I invented a way to address interrogatives around the clock. The Question Board, with Quotes and Events, completes the trinity I used to break up the routine of human contact. Librarian is a service occupation, gas station attendant of the mind. In an earlier age, I might have made things. Now I only make things available. Another blit in the bulge of the late-capitalist job curve. Service accounts for two thirds of the GNP, with the figure expected to rise well into next century. By the millennium, half of all service professionals will specialize in processing data. My Question Board, then, is both living fossil and meta-mammal.
A portion of board duty is always custodiaclass="underline" disposing of "Why can't Jigs talk English?" and "How 'bout the phone number of the girl who does that shower commercial?" Eight of ten remaining requests are fish in barrels, solutions floating off the pages of major almanacs or last week's periodicals. One in ten demand tougher track-downs, sometimes lasting days before breaking. The final 10 percent, not always demanding, aren't technically answerable. Formally undecidable, to bastardize math jargon: heartbreaking, ludicrous insights into the inquiring spirit, requiring special delicacy. "Q: Is there any meaning to it all?" "A: According to Facts on File…"
Over years I've squirreled away a mass of three-by-five Q-and-A's, perpetually preparing for nebulous further reference. Backtracing, I dig up the cards displayed on the day I met Franklin. If, as all facts at my fingertips insist, I truly live at the crucial moment of this experiment, if creation itself is now at stake, it's tough to tweeze from the whole cloth the significant, saving thread.
Q: I need (desperately) to know the source of the line: "How do you get moonlight into a chamber?" Please find this. My life's at stake.
A.H., 6/20/83
A: Quince: Well, it shall be so. But there is two hard things: that is, to bring the moonlight into a chamber; for you know, Pyramus and Thisby meet by moonlight.
Snout: Doth the moon shine that night we play our play?
Bottom: A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac. Find out moonshine, find out moonshine.
Quince: Yes, it doth shine that night.
Bottom: Why, then may you leave a casement of the great chamber window, where we play, open, and the moon may shine in at the casement.
Quince: Ay. Or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine.