“Why is it glib?” I said hotly. “The point is, the real point is, forget strangers. When I told you that story about your piano teacher, I was talking not about some total stranger developing that ability to stop time by playing a certain chord, I was talking about you and you alone developing it.”
Rhody had finished getting dressed by now. “I think what you were really trying to do was to get me interested in your little dream of taking off women’s clothes in public places and doing various things to them and not getting criminally prosecuted for it. And I’m sorry — I don’t think it’s a good dream.” Saying this seemed to force her to some sort of decision. A week or two later we had another argument and she issued a fiat; soon we were no longer an item, which was too bad, since I did love her and really still do miss her, even now that (as I will go on to tell) I have gone out on a date with Joyce.
12
“I NEED TO BE SEDUCED.” THE IRONY IN RHODY’S SAYING that, as an argument against fermation used for sexual kicks, is that I never would have gone out with her if I hadn’t been able to rely heavily on the Fold for help. Before I spoke one word to her I had already taken off her shirt and looked over her small dear breasts, which had faint triangles around them from the edges of the bra. Her skin was very pale. This happened in a Thai restaurant off Boylston. I sat down and looked around and noticed a woman with very short black hair and glasses with round black rims, studying the menu. Her lower lip was somewhat fuller than her upper lip, like a Hapsburg, which is a feature that attracts me — though I also like when the upper lip is fuller than the lower, too, come to think of it. She ordered dinner and asked the waiter to bring her a cup of hot water and unwrapped a yellow teabag.
While her tea was steeping, she pulled out a book. She seemed not to have a bookmark, and yet I noticed that she didn’t have to flip around to find her place. (I learned later that Rhody always automatically remembered her place in a book. She was not good with phone numbers, and even her Social Security number gave her trouble occasionally, but the page number of her current book would just come to her without effort as soon as she held it and saw the cover. Sometimes, she told me, the number would even occur to her at odd times during the day, and she would think, Two hundred fifty-four, what a mysterious and suggestive number! It would take her a second to realize that the number seemed unusually fine simply because it was where she was going to resume her reading. Nineteenth-century novels were all-important to her. It wasn’t a question of her liking them; they were a neurological necessity, like sleep. One Mrs. Humphry Ward, or a Reade, or a Trollope per week supplied her with some kind of critical co-enzyme, she said, that allowed her to organize social sense experience. It was nice if the novel was good, but even a very mediocre one would do; without a daily shot of Victorian fiction she couldn’t quite remember how to talk to people and to understand what they said. I miss her.)
She lifted the teabag out of her cup with a spoon and bound its string tightly around the bag-and-spoon duo, squeezing most of the water that was left in the leaves out into the cup. I had never been exposed to this method of managing a used teabag before, and I was thrilled by it; and I don’t need much more than this to fall in love, after my fashion. I wanted very much to know what book she was reading. I pulled out my mechanical pencil, which, though it had lost its efficacy as a stand-alone Fold-probe some months earlier, still worked in concert with the special equation that I had adapted from a journal of mathematics. I wrote it on the placemat: the Strine Inequality. I had come across the germ of it in the Birkhoff Library at Harvard on a Sunday afternoon in a state of Tourette’s syndromish meditativeness that I knew by now often presaged a Fermata discovery. I opened an issue of The Canadian Journal of Geometry at random and was surprised by how many symbolic systems mathematicians had pressed into service: Greek and Russian letters, of course, but the British pound sterling sign? Capital letters in a florid script that looked as if it came from a wedding invitation? From a short paper entitled “Minimally Gilded Hodge Star Operators and Quasi-Ordinary Handlebodies Within a Localizable 4-Manifold Whitney Invariance,” I copied out an equation, as follows—
Several hours later, at the Ritz Carlton bar, guided by a will greater than my own, I substituted several of the international textile care-labeling symbols for key variables in the original, and changed the equal sign to a less-than-or-equal- to sign. I felt as if I were speaking in tongues as I watched my possessed hand draw a crossed-out iron and a crossed-out triangle (“no bleach”) and a stylized half-filled washtub with a large hand in it (“hand-wash”). When I had finished with the substitutions and the Strine Inequality stood complete on the page, there came a sound, a sound of distant chronic liposuction, of fine cosmetic work being done on the cosmos, nips and tucks tactfully taken, infinitesimal hairplugs of time removed from distant star-systems, where they wouldn’t be missed, and arranged in quantity serially for me to live through. I was free once again to roam the Fold. To return to time I only had to erase the inequality sign, disabling its potency.
That was the formula I wrote down on the placemat at the Thai restaurant. When it had taken effect, I went over to Rhody and lifted her book from her hand. It was a green Virago paperback called Lady Audley’s Secret, by Mary E. Braddon. The back cover said that Lady Audley’s Secret had “shocked the Victorian public with its revelations of horrors at the very heart of respectable society and its most respectable women.” Encouraged, I thumbed through it, reading things like “bonnet” and “gaudily-japanned iron tea-trays” and the sentence fragment “he amused himself by watching her jewelled white hands gliding softly over the keys, with the lace sleeves dropping away from her graceful arched wrists.” I came to the inside of the back cover; on it, Rhody (or Rhoda E. Levering, according to the name inscribed in the book) had made several notes. Her handwriting had a self-assured intelligence. The only note that I could make any sense of, though, was:
Sexiness of men who take off their watches in public
She used, as I did, the back of her book to jot down passing observations. I put the book back in her grip, and I unbuttoned her shirt and found out what I could about her breasts. A slight asymmetry inspired instant fondness. (Women who read Virago Modern Classics almost always have fascinating breasts.)
I had planned to study a review of the new Mazda 929 in Road & Track during dinner, but obviously that was not possible now. I was tempted to walk to a bookstore in the Fold and pick up some other Virago to show off to her, but I thought better of it: too aggressive a manufactured coincidence. Instead I erased the Inequality to end the time-transplantation and, once back in the swing, pulled out a turn-of-the-century biography of Edward FitzGerald by A. C. Benson that I had been halfheartedly reading; I held it open with the edge of my plate. The waiter came. I ordered dinner in a fairly loud, friendly voice in order to draw Rhody’s attention. When I had handed over the menu, I dropped my eyes immediately to my book as if I were impatient to get back to it, and then absent-mindedly began moving my watch up and down on my wrist. I knew “Rhoda E. Levering” was watching me. I turned a page, lifting the plate so that it would clear, and went back to playing with my watch. Suddenly I looked up, caught Rhody’s eye, and gave her a friendly hello-look. I felt bad about doing this, because I know how hard it is to go back to a book, no matter how engrossed you were in it, when you are alone at a table in a restaurant and you become aware of someone else who may or may not be lonely, and may or may not be curious about you — suddenly, whether you welcome it or not, there is a fiery transversity connecting the two of you, where before there had only been a narrow rectilinear green-carpeted Thai restaurant that tolerated solo readers.