The Rags of Time (9 page)

 

 

Topology, that’s a crowded field,
Gina said.

You remarked upon the jangle of her bracelets, her assessment of your canvas jacket with Maisy’s spit-up on the shoulder. In the gathering gloom of the limo, you rapped your binoculars for attention:
We don’t have much time away from the children.
Protecting me, not yet a postdoc, from this woman’s superior smile and, as you noted, excessive eyeliner and smart mouth, this Gina with tasks insufficient to keep her from surveillance of Artie, the boyhood chum. So you rattled on,
abundance of species. A long-eared today. Owl, that is.
You attempted the great egret’s mournful cry, though he had been out of sorts, silently strutting on pipe-stem legs.

Bud offered door-to-door service. You said,
Just drop us, we like the walk.
That’s how I remember it, a conjecture which need not be proven, strange when you’d been counting the minutes to get home to the kids. Something desperate about Bert’s air kiss aimed at you, corner of CPW, Gina’s ringtone ordering him back to business in the limo. Tapping me with a skeletal hand, Chairman of Skylark said:
Don’t be a stranger.
Not an offhand remark, a plea. We faked one of those embarrassing male embraces. Bert, transformed to dry skin and bones. What was left of my friend’s solid state? There’s your problem for topology. And why that woman?

Many questions, though on our way home in a taxi, I simply asked,
Can you believe it?

I believe it
.
Poor Heather.

You wondered about that—poncho? About the design woven into the gray wool, a pattern circling in on itself, the fringe of dangling strings with the weaver’s knots you thought might be read, knots forming words, and the alarming sight of Bert’s manicured toes peeking out of rough sandals. You never liked Boyce. Till that day I did not know he once suggested the two of you
get it on,
the boss and my wife riding downtown in the old Boycemobile, fitted out with a screen tracking the commodities market. And yes, I was pissed or at least affronted, but you awarded the incident a girlish disbelief you can still call upon in honesty. The current floating palace less office, more lounge of a first-class hotel. Smoked glass of the windows mutes the city. Did Gina
get it on
with Bert? He seemed too frail, flesh fallen away under the floppy gray garment.

Such a find,
you said,
in the chili-bean market, unwearable when you get it home.

Bud had looked a sad clown. You carried on about that Gina, then disapproved of yourself as a prude. That woman intimate with the small problem I worked on, suggesting I’d never find my place in a crowded field. You haven’t much of a clue about topology, only that my superiors are attempting to map the world, beginning to end, without landmass or bodies of water. You remain a tourist in this geography of abstraction.

Remember the logo?
I called to mind the wingspread on the web site. Skylark, on the annual report and the simplified wings of my design woven into the corporate carpet.
Bird that never was.

Bird thou never wert,
correcting your husband, Humanities dropout, comic relief man chirping
wert, wert.

Oh, Artie,
checking your watch again. How long had we waited for the crosstown, then malingered in the stretch while Cyril and Maisy were abandoned to my student, a strange girl they’d never met?

Gone the sun from the river, from Riverside Park. Darkness falling as I sorted through bills to pay the cabby.

Now, why? Why that melancholy tune? To beg a smile.

 

 

If I relied on the memory of my laptop with its stellar capacity, I’d not have the full story—day of our birding, even less of the present. Could I have imagined Tim McBride’s educated guess as he let me into the abandoned interrogation room? The Boyce case might never go to trial. So why was I absent from my classroom duties, simmering on a back burner? Why reconstructing, as though with imaginary numbers, the events of a day on which we sighted the long-eared who, noted in our communal notebook, would not ruffle his
speckled cascade of feathers
? I had come in good faith to speak my piece to judge and jury and find I am defending myself, still telling the story of the Castle in Central Park that now harbors the Official Weather Station, Your Honor, and the timeline of that day, as in: It was well after six when my student really could not, Professor Freeman, consider the money pressed on her, and besides it was fun helping Cyril with his homework. Cyril, who is five, does not have homework. And Maisy, she was sorry to report, had been coughing, running a fever. A well-brought-up girl, sweetly rejecting my offer to walk her home in the dark.

It’s only six twenty-seven.
Cyril, flashing his digital watch, grown-up gift from Our Sylvie. The student was gone with high fives for the children. A last gift of the day.

That night I couldn’t get near the extra dimensions that may, in a very long run, anoint me a professor.
Don’t be a stranger.
Bert’s look searching me out was desperate, but we were exactly that: strangers. He knew it, yet sent that woman, whatever part she played in his life, to ferret out my small problem. That Gina who seemed to know I was sulking in a corner of string theory appropriately called
flop-transition,
as though the tilted rubber ball of space named the failure of Artie Freeman.

 

 

 

It was no go when I attempted to work on while my family slept. That is how I think of it now, my family safely tucked away. I logged off, took up the birdwatching diary, which lay by your chair along with the discarded mystery. I have now violated the green notebook with an account of my courthouse days, flipping past the pages on which you recorded Columbus Day 2007.
Great Egret
(
Casmerodius albus
)
4:30 Turtle Pond, should be on its way south;
your lovely sketch of our owl (
Asio otus
)
4:50 Reservoir Track,
lacking the observation as to sex or probable age, though you had noted:
Boyce, a molting Goshawk, predator
,
86th & 5th Avenue. Wears a gray tunic to hide his wasted body. The fringe is patterned with knots that must mean something if you can read them. Is he sick, even dying?
I left the book open, believing I was meant to answer, then carried it to my grandfather’s desk, took a pen from the secret drawer and wrote:
Dying or trashing his life. Lou, it’s numbers in those knots that dangle from Bert’s gone-native garment, not letters that tell a story. Numbers, an accounting or tracking of days tied in by a woman in the Andes, a bit of pre-Columbian string theory I might at best master, at least understand.

It occurred to me that night of our birding, not for the first time, our family life in these rooms was inauthentic, no need for our children to be stacked in a bunk bed, Maisy below nestled in her plush menagerie, Cyril above clutching his tyrannosaurus rex. No need for us to fear toppling his tower of Lincoln Logs. Just behind me the hamster tumbled incessantly in its cage. A cluster of shrinking balloons hovered on the ceiling. No need for this pretense of student life. We should look to our own migration, a refuge sustainable for more than a season of uncertainty. I’d sold Cyril O’Connor’s apartment on Fifth Avenue, glad of the take. You said we must move from the loft downtown, the contaminated air of our injured city the first of all your fears. So here we still are in cramped quarters, a little late for growing pains self-inflicted. Is that what Bud, costumed as a starving peon, was up to? He had stroked the leg of the all-knowing Gina as though under a spell.

I opened the baby book with the stork on the cover, flipped back to the day of our birding, first day you had not noted each verified death in the war. The blank page was marked with a postcard from Sylvie Neisswonger who is more than our friend. The Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla sat firmly on its hill.
Waters rising! Love to all, natürlich.
Sylvie’s hand schoolgirl perfect,
natürlich
. What’s more, you did not read a mystery that night, no body in the library, no clueless inspector from Scotland Yard. Then, as I finally attempted to set the course for the next encounter with my students, more pedagogical tricks than math, you stood beside me, Maisy in your arms. You had affixed a disfiguring nebulizer over our daughter’s face. Mucus sucked in little blips from her nose and mouth.

I said:
Now, this is the scariest thing.

You shifted Maisy, left shoulder to right:
Not really.

Her temperature would be brought down by pink sugary drops, nothing magic. I understood the pleasure of your control, your soft lullaby voice. Do you remember the only thing that mattered was to wait in silence for the even draw of her breath, for the moment when Maisy pushed the plastic tube away? Then we waited for the sleepy smile on her flushed, rosebud face. Together we put her down with the bear and the lion, the tortoise and speckled snake. I said,
All that’s missing is an owl,
an attempt to keep our vigil light.

When Maisy breathed easy, I noted that you wore the nightgown, the one I like, though it buttons to your neck with difficult pearl buttons, the blue nightgown now dimmed in the wash. And I saw, not the first time, streaks in your pale hair, dark as dull bronze.

A full week of delays. Like that Gina, I opted for the present, waiting for a judgment to be handed down; that’s the feel of those courthouse days. Skylark in ruins, unlike the midscale Buick that shares its name, more the frail body of my equations towed to the scrap heap of rusted ambition. When it finally came, the reprieve, McBride was proven right, proud of himself predicting Bertie would not be charged with cooking the books. The case was too flimsy, but the plaintiff is not off the hook. Boyce must be a good lad, suffer a slap on the wrist, a year’s public service. Skylark may never soar again, spread its wings over the dusty pits of Peruvian gold or peck at the infinitesimal grains of nano technology. In the first flush of their victory, Bertie and Heather, losing their cool, embraced me, but I had not testified that my friend discovered Freeman, the new boy at school, inscribing hieroglyphics in his algebra text, that he had a slim chance of besting me at chess, that the neighborhood was ours, every alley, shop, embassy and elegant doorway between Fifth and the Boyce apartment on Park, where we played games of my invention on a primitive DOS system free of interference from Bert’s socialite mom. Play—we had played hard and long—which kept me from diving for salvage in my mother’s watery grave. Back, back then Bert finally psyched out my trips to the Egyptian collection, but the Opening of the Mouth was never revealed. Only now comes to mind, Louise, the ritual I enacted in the back bedroom of the apartment you dread, King Tut mumbo jumbo that might bring the goddess to life so she might breathe, speak to her boy, play a song on the lute. That was private, middle-of-the-night stuff. Still, never-call-me-Bert was my buddy, and the alliance began in which I was to play office boy as he rose to corporate power.

 

 

 

On the courthouse steps, we lingered in a light drizzle, Bert, the pay-back kid, almost fully restored, as though that desiccated version of himself reflected the misdemeanors of the dated past. My walk-on lines were written out of the script, though where, may I ask, was that Gina? Refurbishing her nest? Bertie and loyal wife were escorted to a modest black livery by their lawyer, licking his chops, swallowing the canary, brittle bones and all. They turned back, suggesting a triumphal lunch.

Can’t bring to mind how I begged off.
Rain check?
Or work, I suppose, heavy duties of my professorial life.

Justice was deferred, which brings to mind my grandmother, who said something like that about our sins, most particularly sins of omission, that we would face them come Judgment Day. McBride in his various roles—prosecutor, defendant, jury, judge—went on to his next case. I was free of the interrogation room.

Tonight as I stood at the window looking through the leafless trees to the Hudson, I saw a familiar boat not yet stowed away for the season. It will sail downstream to safe harbor, the 79th Street boat basin, I guess. A ship with a single mast, and it was only then that I remembered
skylarking.
When we were in high school, we came across the term in a computer game we played too often, signing off on an early version of Myst. No knights defending a phony castle, only the crew of a pirate ship. Apparently Bert did not forget the perilous game played by these black-hearted sailors. Climb the mainmast, latch onto the rigging, swing out far over the sea. City boys making our mark in the classroom, we never had the occasion to skylark beyond the virtual, but we climbed too high, Bertram Boyce and Arthur Freeman.

 

 

That first day, post-courthouse, I returned to campus, homecoming of sorts. Our leader, Gottschalk, caught me out, called me into his office, a stage set, this proper old-fashioned realm with wooden bookshelves to the ceiling, an oak desk of modest proportions on which the sole computer looks a prop, screen saver of dizzy double helix spinning. We know in Mathematics Hall that this room with its arched windows looks on the livelier courtyard of the business school sheathed in glass, endowed with incorruptible steel. But it is here in Gott’s office, we confer under the water-stained ceiling, the dim overhead light, and take our course assignments from our Chair. Gott, attempting a youthful look that day, had gelled his white hair (cockatoo in breeding plumage), a double-breasted blazer overdosed with brass buttons, the stud of some prestigious award in the lapel. Tap-tapping a printout in hand. Tilted dumbbells of extra dimensions floated to a decorative purpose. He turned to a back page. Under
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