"Well, my mother and father loved each other very much," he said, clandestinely stroking my thigh.
"Ass. Who are you? Where did you come from?"
"Dunno. 'Sconsin." I refused even to grimace. Franklin sighed. "I was wedged in the middle of a heap of kids. Must have been a half-dozen of us. Doubtless where all the trouble started. Family wanted me to be an oceanographer. Went on to college, did a couple years in physics. The universe as we knew it was too small. Ended up art history, ABD." He shot me his most opaque grin. "All but Dissertation."
He would answer my questions but only to the letter. "Come — on, Franker. That's not a curriculum vitae."
"What are you after? Chambers Bio? American Art Directory? I don't qualify."
"How did you get so damn alienated?" The closest we'd come to friction since our first meal. I felt a sickening urge to push until something broke.
"I'm not alienated. I am a United States citizen."
I couldn't help but laugh. We had such divergent senses of humor that he sometimes reduced me to giggles just by losing me in translation. He loved inadvertent slippage. I once found him chuckling alone in the coffee room at a flier announcing: "Power Saws Cut 10 Dollars." In time, I recognized a Todd ambiguity at first glance. For several weeks he enshrined on the side of system A's central processor the headline I'd brought him proclaiming, "Incest More Common Than Thought."
I kept after him. I wanted something that had nothing to do with personal data. "Where did you learn to sketch?"
"You presume I've learned. You haven't seen my work."
"Is that an offer?"
"In lectures," he said, choosing the lesser of two cooperations. "'New French Naturalism to the Present.' Irresistible: huge, scooped halls; faces from every aspect. I spent genre after genre just sketching. Problem was, the professors kept turning the lights out to show slides. Even now, I draw better in the dark."
He was telling the truth. I'd seen his hand skid across a tablet at high speed. He drew while talking, a nervous muscle-jitter while his mind was elsewhere. Hatches, shades, and crevasses sprung up from a hidden plane beneath the paper. He did not draw, he dusted: the flour spread over the smooth stones in a church floor that magically raises the pattern of gothic letters lying invisible across a worn-away tomb.
"I'd start each term in the first row on the far right aisle. Then I'd discover a perfect Pisanello in the upper middle, and I'd change seats. But there were only so many interesting faces in any given neighborhood. Had to go track me down that Memling. Seek out new blood."
He fell quiet; I'd accidentally sent him back. His hand played nervously over the function keys. All at once I received a tremendous jolt of who-cares courage. "I want my portrait done."
He looked around agitatedly, bluntly examined me up and down. Just as bluntly, I let him. He squinted, and after an awful hesitation, clapped his hands. "Why, you're the same woman who was here last night!" He took a soft pencil, the same pencil he used to mark off the Processing to Do List. He flipped over the nearest green-striped printout and unceremoniously began that oldest form of programming. When he came to do them, the hairs on the back of my neck moved at his pencil touch. I felt him locking in to the layout of my bone. The way he drew me, what he saw there, redefined my facial lexicon. Terror made me a good deal more striking then than I am. But he wasn't after symmetrical features. Not the pretty composite, but mystery. And the only way to keep that quantity intact was to transpose it to a distant, more mutable key.
Several minutes passed. We talked, as always, as he worked. As always, he didn't care if his subject moved. When he finished, he set the pencil down and said, "Missed it again."
"Don't I get to see it?" Faithful to the strict phoneme, he seemed genuinely surprised at that clause hanging on the end of the bargain. He handed the document over, a contractual captive. I took it, but couldn't assemble what I looked at. Both a recapitulation of the Vermeer Head of a Girl we'd stood in front of at the Met, and a dazed, physiognomically unmistakable thirty-year-old, 1983, who showed in her penciled eyes that she did not quite know what had happened, today in history.
"We do all styles," Franklin explained. "Giotto to Gleizes, inclusive." I could only stare at the image. "I told you. I picked it up in a lecture hall. Subliminal seduction. 'Learn Mandarin Chinese in Your Sleep.'"
"This is astonishing."
"Ha! Leonardo, Rafael, Agnolo, and me."
I demanded the portrait. It was already mine. Despite a stylistic anachronism that made it unacceptable to anyone except an historically indifferent critic, the sketch betrayed such incredible draftsmanship that I was furious at him for never cultivating it.
"I need it back. I have to submit the printout."
"You can't. You aren't going to turn over this report to some, some accountant in city government with my face all over the back of it?"
He took the page and shrugged. "Don't worry. Nobody ever listens to side B."
"Give me something from your tablet then. Compensation. Something of Dr. Ressler. Of both of us."
"I dispatch those suckers, soon as I make them. Can't stand to look at them after a day or two."
"You what?" Destroyed sketches of incredible draftsmanship: it was like news of burnt Alexandria, or jerky footage of the last marsupial wolf. I shouted, "Systematically trashing art!"
Franklin shook his head rapidly. "Don't ever confuse art with Draw the Pirate." Precise, vehement. "I have a steady hand, am a competent enough imitator. But no compositional sense. Incapable of making anything original."
"And you're a feeble liar to boot." I'd watched his hand. "Your sketches make themselves."
He twisted his lips. "My point exactly."
"Well, if you aren't ashamed of seducing public librarians, you should be ashamed of squandering a genuine talent."
He froze, turned to face me, and said the crudest thing I ever heard him say to anyone: "I thought you were supposed to be well-informed." He apologized by grabbing my knees and pressing them for forgiveness. I gave it to him, took his hands and pressed back, as I would now if they were in reach.
"You see the problem," he said. "You've followed the cult of originality since autographed toilets? The strait jacketing Neo-ist canvases full of original black paint? The original razor blade and follow-up hot bath?" I didn't catch his references, but he seemed to mean that we'd reached a moment in our visual lives when innovation was itself derivative. All that was left of the painted portal sat in galleries in Soho, intelligible only with the aid of program notes. "A fellow is left with few stylistic alternatives aside from 'Divest now.'"
I said nothing in defense — I hardly felt qualified. Had I words, I would never have stopped arguing that whatever a person did well, if it promoted possibility, was worth doing. Anything that added to the heft, texture, and density of the card catalog. I had no technical basis for debate except conviction, and so I only said, "But you are good."
I meant to say something else—"adept," or "gifted." Even those would have been less than I meant. Todd knew what I was after. But a look came across his eyes, and he refused to forgo the chance to savor another slippage. "I don't see what my moral conduct has to do with anything."
To find a person both fine and infuriating, and inside of minutes: I'll never feel that again. Such a spread, in one evening. It throws me even now, long after he has — hardly originally, but with excellent draftsmanship — divested.