BOUNDED RATIONALITY

EXCERPTS FROM A NEW NOVEL

BY

PAMELA McCORDUCK

"Bounded rationality is the notion that in decision making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make decisions."

---Wikipedia

Molloy's companion, a woman of his own middle age, puts her head back and stretches out, feeling a little bit stupid. When the captain closes the cabin door behind him, she murmurs: "You must've thought I was an idiot, offering you my frequent flier miles. I didn't realize…" She lets it go.

 "I thought it was very practical of you. Very dear." He squeezes her hand gently.

She senses he isn't entirely at ease. He's begun on the Wall Street Journal. She opens the New York Times. Over the op-ed page, she watches him furtively as he reads, that taut face that's always seemed to her like a helmet, so self-protective. But in the last few weeks, the helmet has softened; the pouty bust-of-Apollo mouth has opened to smile with warmth. With heat. With joy. And then some.

***

For his newest building, Torres was not only uneasy about the materials being manufactured in China, but also chose to suppress any concerns he had about his clients' human rights record. What really dismayed him as an architect, however, was the Chinese indifference to a sense of place—they wanted a building that would say Now, but not Here. Didn't they understand that Now changed continuously, whereas Here had a history? Not that this made the Chinese unique. To be successful as an architect, to climb into the architectural stratosphere, the biggest point he'd yielded was a sense of terroir about his structures—Abu Dhabi, Beijing, New York. However elegant those structures were, they could be anywhere. It violated something deep inside him. Well, a man must eat.

To inhabit his new success, he'd been forced to give up gutter brawling and invent a new persona. Not the fussy gnomic professor in the circular eyeglasses (somebody else—a multitude of somebody elses—had already claimed that role, those props); not the foul-mouthed imitator of a hard-hat site boss, Timberland boots, flannel shirt under a shabby down vest (again, already staked and claimed, and anyway, too close to the gutter brawler he'd once been). No. His new persona was Old World: the courtly Spanish caballero who worked to a soundtrack of the cantes and staccato palmas of flamenco, his designs driven by the souls of Gypsy ancestors, the tragic view of life. It was distant enough from the real thing to give him some diverting moments. But in his new role of courtly Spanish caballero, he must now forego losing his temper and threatening to shit himself on somebody's god, somebody's mother, or insulting their marriage, their forebears, or their sexual heritage. 

***

Lucie paused. "Let me ask you two questions. You can answer tomorrow. How come when this country was at its poorest, in the Depression, public architecture was so fine? Post offices, like the one near St. Francis Cathedral—it was handsome enough to be turned into a museum when it had to be replaced with something bigger. By then the country was flush, yet look at the post office we got to replace it."

He knew exactly what she meant. The city had also recently built a new convention center downtown, an unexceptional building clad in the usual brown stucco, the usual vigas. If not brilliant, okay. He understood that conventioneers wanted a shorthand version of the Santa Fe experience; he understood that city fathers didn't routinely commission unusual civic structures. But at the back of the building, not discreetly hidden, but on a major street, facing that same ugly sixties-era main post office that Lucie meant—on that backside, somebody had unthinkingly slapped on a factory-built parking control: a free-standing metal guard's booth, the barrier arms, ticket dispensers. It was as if, once the building was completed, it came as a complete surprise to designers that something must control the traffic coming into and out of the underground parking—itself an aperture, an orifice, that reminded Torres of nothing so much as an asshole. He'd said to his son: "It's like the convention center has pulled down its pants and, boil on its ass and all, is mooning the post office. Well-deserved, but does that kind of discourse have any place in civic architecture?"

Lucie cleared her throat. "My second question is: how come you architects all love the buildings the rest of us hate?" She smiled winningly.

***

Mikey was in front of his screen, sorting pensively through data for patterns. Every few days he found it useful to stop and think about the big questions he was trying to answer before he dived back into the details. The facts: A majority of people on Planet Earth now lived in cities. Cities: always the great engines of innovation, of wealth creation—and also the main source of crime, pollution, and disease. So this planetary crossover from mainly rural to mainly urban had profound implications—for social organization, for land use, for patterns of human behavior. But what were they exactly?

In nature, elephants and mice did not have the same metabolic rate. As biological entities got larger, their metabolisms slowed, in a well-defined relationship to their size. The bigger the organism, the slower the metabolism, by predictable rates. But successful cities seemed to live by other rules. Unlike animals, the metabolisms of cities actually sped up as they got bigger. Elephant cities had faster metabolisms than mouse villages. It was a fact with no biological counterpart.

Was there such a thing as a city's metabolic rate? If you could nail it down, could you then predict resource demands, environmental impacts, growth trajectories?

He sighed. His father was saving the world one building at a time. He always admired, sometimes loved what his father did, but it was handwork, one-offs. Mikey had larger ambitions. He intended to find a grand unified theory of stability, with cities and urbanization at its core.

***

A few months after their marriage, Judith said to Molloy: "You must visit between five and seven. That's the hour when a lady is changing from afternoon to evening clothes, and admits only her most intimate friends. Then you can go home to that hideous old hag of a scientist you married."

"Ah," said Molloy. He closed his eyes, smiled. "It was an arranged marriage."

"Mon pauvre," she said. "By the two families?"

Eyes still closed. "No. By the three fates."

She shrugged. "Between five and seven, chilled champagne will always be ready. Your favorite music."

"But I have so many favorites."

"I'll know. Debussy or the Dead; Phish or fado. It's my job to know." He shook his head, laughing softly, and never worked late.

***

"What you call chasing the almighty buck was a man making a living, Stephen, which most of us have to do. He happened to be unusually—okay, extremely, good at it. Should he have stayed home, Mr. Mom, and gone on welfare?"

"He could've made other arrangements."

"Maybe. But he didn't. Too bad." She studied her husband's son in silence, at last began to muse aloud. "For a long time, a general myth prevailed that women must invariably immolate themselves on behalf of some man—you know the fairy tales, the operas. But then it changed—at least in this part of the world—to the idea that parents should immolate themselves on behalf of their children instead. Just as the dictum for women's sacrifice on behalf of men is losing its potency, its ability to persuade women, just about the time that the whole idea of the patriarchy looks so plainly ridiculous and self-serving, the idea—no, the myth—of parental sacrifice takes hold instead. Hundreds of thousands of years where children are to be seen and not heard, and then suddenly all you hear about is children first? Weird."

"That's not what I meant." But in the silence she offered him, he didn't say what he did mean. "All I can tell you about my father is that he's the stiffest, most pompous, most unyielding man in the known world. You, however, have found the other side. I never heard my father laugh until he was with you. Don't think I'm making this up: I checked with Nikki, did she remember the same as me? She did. The anal Jackster could smile, chuckle in a pinch, but laugh out loud? Never."

She nodded slowly. "The anal Jackster was singing an old Pointer Sisters song in the shower this morning. Jump, jump, for my love. Followed by Slow Hand."

"The fucking Pointer Sisters? My father knows about the Pointer Sisters?"

"You should hear him when he's channeling Hank Williams. Totally trippy to hear him sing he's nobody's sugardaddy now. Does anyone say trippy any more?"

"My father can yodel?"

 "Better than Hank. Of course he learned how in Switzerland."

"Oh, Judith. You're the trophy wife, all right, but the Jackster's kind of trophy." To her perplexed look, he went on. "Internationally known scientist. Right up the Jackster's alley. Suits him perfectly."

"You got it, bucko. One another's trophies. He got a sub-Nobel laureate and I snagged a rich, handsome young stud. The girls in the locker room are dying to know how I did it. What's that, a blush? Surely a man who poaches on his father's girlfriend can't be entirely unaware that his father has a carnal life. Stephen, for God's sake!"

***

For all his wine, Torres is still clear-headed. "I love that building, I really do. I poured my heart into it. It has a great strong center, beautifully organized so that people know just where they are. The whole shape of the building takes its sense from that center. There's positive space all around it. People say that the strength of my designs comes from classical uses of classical shapes. They'd be freaked out to hear the classical shapes are from the people of the Kongo. Spelled with a K not a C. The original civilization of Zaïre, or what's it called now? The Democratic Republic of the Congo? Anyway, before it was the Belgian Congo. The slaves on my island originated there. They hung on to that deeply potent home religion, though most of it was in secret. I learned the cosmogram of the Kongo people through Santería—you know what that is—at a very young age."

Santería. His three listeners can only think of the shabby little storefront botánicas in Upper Manhattan; maybe headless roosters left on the front steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the odd chicken claw turning up in public parks. They don't know about a childhood spent in the company of country-girl nannies who brought the secret country ways with them into the presidential palace.

Torres goes on. "People always love what I do with light and dark. Not something you learn in architecture school: it's in my bones, in my heart and soul. I've always known how. Light is energizing; dark is restful, not scary, if it's handled right. I handle it right. When I first got to Spain, I hated the light there. It was bright and cold, like a Canaletto painting of Venice, you know?" Molloy nods, knowing exactly what he means. "And see, both these sets of people, Central American and Asian, the people who'll use this structure, understand these ideas—call it Santería, feng shui, the mesoamerican equivalent, whatever it is—fundamentally the same. We all speak to each other without needing words. What does some maldito yanqui know about such things?"

***

Above all, his father doted on him. He understood even from the earliest times that his father—always in immaculate white, a guayabera and fresh linen trousers—his father was in charge, the head of things, was deferred to by all; that from his father emanated such power that everyone acknowledged it in a thousand different ways. He was not loved, but he was admired. Deeply feared. Behind his back the very brave (or the blasphemous) called him Elegba, which sounded Spanish to naïve ears, but in fact was the name of one of the greatest of the Santería orisha, gods. Elegba the trickster, the mischief-maker, the wonder worker, who darkened the good and lightened the evil; who combined within him male and female aspects in his great creativity. Elegba devoured all things, himself included; and Elegba caused all things to multiply. Elegba was also Eshu, Satan. Yet his father was the personification of coolness, of gentle generosity of character. In short, a leader. He'd risen from nowhere and led his country to become one of the most prosperous in Latin America by nearly any measure. This was why he was not called Ogún, the hard god, the god of iron.

It may be that his father knew of this epithet, Elegba. He wouldn't have objected. He was physically beautiful—in an ambiguous way, it was later said, though the old ones thought this only natural, since Elegba embodied both the masculine and the feminine. Thus the way he was rumored to enjoy the pleasures of both sexes was only natural too. He was strong: in fact, ruthless. He dealt with some of the greatest criminals in the hemisphere, and got what he wanted out of them. He had accomplished things for his country, but his means were not cool, gentle or generous.

***

He sips his glass empty. "As one of my teachers, my mentors, I had one of the greats in this century's architecture, a name you'd all know—" he names the man. "But the reason I've exceeded even my teacher is strange. It's not because I'm more brilliant." He makes a self-deprecating little gesture that suggests he might indeed be more brilliant, but that's beside the point. "It's because—it's because I love the human body. My teacher was superb at design, and not bad as an engineer, but it was totally cerebral. He was afraid of human bodies. No, it's true. He despised the physical facts of humans, that they sweat and shit and piss and bleed. They get inconveniently horny. They get fearful or jealous, or even that they can expand their souls with happiness. So he failed to understand what it was really like to be a human being inside a structure, inside a built space; that some spaces are congenial to the human animal, and some are just okay, and some are downright threatening. I feel myself so very much as a physical human inside a physical space, and I know how to translate that feeling. I love the physicality of being human." He stops, lets his mind drift to Lucie, whose body he thinks he might love, and wonders if she will ever let him know, and love, her soul.

***

"Leandro, this is tiresome. I can't unlive my life. I can't tell you what you ask about me, and worry unduly how you'll receive it. For once this isn't all about you." She lay back on the bed pillows, to his eyes provocatively, even though she'd modestly pulled up the bedcovers over her chest.

"No, it's not. It's not all about me."

He was stupefied, that he had somehow fallen in love with—well, was utterly infatuated by, whatever it was—this beautiful distant woman who regarded him as only one of several, and ho hum. It was a novel sensation, neither pleasant nor welcome, to be merely one of the crowd. Even when the world had ignored him, he'd been driven by an overwhelming, a deeply nourishing sense of his own uniqueness, his singular gifts. But to Lucie, he was just a pleasant diversion, equivalent to, interchangeable with, Rick the Hydrologist, or whoever else crawled between these sheets. Ultimately forgettable.

***

A half dozen steps from the pavement up to the front door. She rang the bell—a real bell, strident and electrical, not the church-like chimes she was used to in Connecticut houses—and prayed that the happiness shimmering inside her wouldn't make her faint before the door was opened. Would her mother embrace her with a great hug, a kiss, would they send each other lovingly into a fit of weeping? Would they laugh until they cried?

Her mother opened the door. "Lucie dear. So nice to see you after all this time. Nice and punctual you are, too, aren't you?" She leaned forward to give Lucie a brief dry kiss on the cheek. "I'm just watching Coronation Street; won't be a moment. Come on, then, come into the sitting room."

"Mummy—"

"Shhh!" her mother said sharply, straining to catch dialogue from the other room.

As it happened, the moment her mother wished her to wait was in fact twenty minutes until the program ended. In these twenty minutes, what began as a fine needle of doubt and disappointment broadened to a great hammer of disillusion, battering inside her chest without mercy.

After ten minutes of silence, save the voices from the television, shock and hurt transformed themselves into scorn. Yes, she recognized this woman as her mother, but time had not been kind. The mother she remembered, the mother she'd dreamed of for a decade, Borneo Mummy, was slender and chic, taking her late afternoon cocktails with a soigné cigarette in her hand. But this woman, London Mother, was sloppily stout—needed a better foundation garment, Aunt Evelyn would've said. She wore a dress of some unpleasantly shiny artificial fabric, patterned all over with tiny flowers, what Lucie recognized, with a year of art history behind her now, as derivative William Morris. Not a pattern any grown woman should ever wear. The dress buttoned up the front, and was too small, so that the spaces between the buttons gaped unflatteringly, exposing glossy underthings. Her mother's hose were heavy, not the sheer stockings American women wore, and her white summer shoes, vaguely orthopedic-looking, needed reheeling. Her gray-brown hair would benefit from tinting (in her head Lucie heard one of Aunt Evelyn's friends say "we're all for natural when it's pretty"). Her mother's hair had not been washed for days.

***

After dinner, Judith drove Stephen to his house. "Thanks," he said. "Thanks for tonight. I'd just have sat there watching the tube like a fool."

"I needed you too," she said honestly.

"Really?" Impulsively, he leaned across and hugged her. "Ah, Judith. It's gonna be all right." She was suddenly touched by how he'd unknowingly echoed his father.

"Do you want to—would you be willing to spend the night at our house?"

She knew he hadn't slept under that roof since his father had thrown him out—him and the girlfriend they'd once shared. She supposed he was thinking about that. But at last he answered: "If you need me. If you'd like the company."

"That house is a hard place for you. Maybe I shouldn't have asked."

He took a deep breath. "It's a place of great shame for me, Judith. Enormous shame."

"Oh, Stephen. Far as your father is concerned, that's past, done. He forgave you a long time ago. Hasn't he said that in plain English? God, you Molloy boys." She shook her head. "Come and be family for me tonight, Stevie; this terrible, terrible night. Your old room is all made up. No one ever uses it. We put guests—well, somewhere else."

"I'm very glad to be family for you tonight," he said softly. She backed her car out of his driveway, and took him to the family compound.

***

"I need to tell you something." She's fidgeting beside him, and it comes out in a rush. "Papa, I was scared for myself, but also—scared for my baby."

He hits the remote and gives her his full attention.

She looks away from him. "I'm pregnant, papa. I'm pregnant."

He gasps, closes his eyes, wills himself to be gentle. That little-girl voice, telling him she's going to have a little one herself. "Oh, radish." Her childhood name.

"You aren't furious?"

"Why would I be furious?" he asks softly.

"Well, papa—you're—you like things done a certain way. A—a—bastard isn't exactly the way you like things done." Now she begins to weep. He pulls her to him yet again this catastrophic afternoon, caresses her heaving shoulders, thinks bleakly and with shame of the portrait of him she's offering: martinet, despot, Victorian tyrant, so far from the human being he thinks he is. Or has finally allowed himself to become.

"Is there a dad?" he murmurs. "No, your old man knows the facts of life. I mean, will we have a wedding?"

She shakes her head. "I don't want that guy in my life."

"Oh, pumpkin. Oh, princess mine. Oh, dear radish." He's called her radish since she was a newborn, very red, and she'd adopted it as her own. He takes another deep breath, strokes her hair. "Even if he seems like a shit now, sometime in the future he'll want to see his own little one. He'll have that right. Probably legally. Maybe morally. If you have the baby, that guy is in your life for better or for worse." He's kissing her temple, and it comes to him how much being with Judith has relaxed him, put him in the habit of kissing, stroking.

She turns to look at him directly, eyes brimming with tears. "Can't you fix that?"

He's taken aback, shakes his head gently. "As a man who loves babies, especially his own, I wouldn't. Even if I could."

***

Benito stands at the threshold, removing his perfectly creased Montecristi hat. Judith sees at once that he's taken from an old work sombrero the beaded Apache hatband she once gave him, and put it on this splendid thing instead. He's faultlessly tailored: casual camel hair jacket, light wool trousers, tooled boots. Perhaps his expression is slightly more skeptical than it used to be.

 He'd attract attention in any crowd with that arrogant conquistador carriage, those amused violet eyes not at all hidden behind his rimless glasses—these days, as his hair has silvered, the vividness of his eyes seems preternatural. With the very public history of him and Judith as a couple, he's a cynosure: people are compelled to watch. He nods gravely to Ernie, embraces Nola, then stops in front of Judith. His arms folded against his chest, he gazes at her; seems to study her with scholarly, almost judicial detachment. His eyes linger on the uncommonly modest pearls at her throat—uncommon for her—and the well-tailored somber gray dress. Perhaps he's remembering that dress with more striking jewelry ("Women my age can't wear dinky jewelry"); perhaps he's remembering other times when she wore that dress. At last he unfolds his arms, cradles the hat under his left arm, takes her hand, and leans to whisper in her ear. "Felicidades, querida. All my best wishes to you both." His scent—a combination of who he is naturally, and a subtle lime aftershave—makes her gasp. He shakes Molloy's hand silently and moves away. Judith follows him with her eyes, and Molloy watches her watching. "It's never easy, is it?" she says to her husband softly. "No," he agrees, "it never is."

***

Jerry McCarthy looks around the office, as if taking inventory, as if scrutinizing the room will tell him what he needs to know and hasn't been able to find out otherwise. Looks at the dog and clicks his tongue. Comes back to Molloy. "It's been a long time."

"A lifetime."

"Your mother and I—" A tenderness about that phrase goes straight to Molloy's gut. He's never heard that phrase spoken by anyone. "Your mother and I had a shotgun marriage, did you know that?" The news rakes him painfully. For his past. For his future. He has a pregnant daughter at home without a husband in sight.

Jerry McCarthy is going on. "I loved your mother, I really did, the way we love a woman in our youth, our young manhood, but—you grew up in the Mon Valley, Jack; you know how suffocating it was. You got yourself out." He pauses. "Even worse then, when I was young." Don't compare us, Molloy thinks, feeling the first signs that his shock, the turbulence this man has set off inside him, is coalescing into a mighty rage. Don't you dare compare us. But he's well practiced at keeping his face unreadable. "I tried to get her to come with me, even to Pittsburgh, but she wouldn't do it, just wouldn't. So I upped and left. Simple as that."

"Simple as that. You knew you left a son?"

"Not a son, then, Jackie, just a—"

Molloy cuts him off with a gesture.

"Jesus. What are you here for?" After all these years, he doesn't add. The dog hears the rage in his voice and stands up, tail down, ears back.

"I'm hoping for your mercy, Jackie." Silence. A long silence. "I've had a modestly successful life, Jackie, with a good wife, and kids—you have a half-brother and two sisters, Jackie. Nice people, good people, honorable people. You'd be proud to know them. I'm given to understand they'd be proud to know you."

"Tell my assistant where you're staying, and how long you'll be there."

"Jackie—"

In an even, perfectly controlled voice, Molloy says, "You get your ass out of here, Jerry McCarthy, before I kill you."

***

Jerry McCarthy looks deflated. "Let's try and reason this out, my friend."

"I was thirteen when President Kennedy was shot. That's when I knew you were dead. A sign, I thought, from God. It's really my dad who's dead. Everyone grieved the president, oh, me too; but me, I also walked around for a week numb with the secret knowledge that the president's death was a sign that my own dad was really, really dead. You reason that one out, Jerry."

Molloy steps back, sees the older man take a breath of relief. Realizes he's been bullying the man. He folds his arms across his chest, tries to make his voice reasonable. "Let me ask you something, Jerry McCarthy. Jerry Molloy. Would you have come looking for me if I was the steelworker I was meant to be, you left me to be—though by now I'd have been out of work, collecting unemployment for the last, what? Fifteen years since the Braddock Works closed? Counting the days until social security? Would you? Would you have come looking if I had some crap disease, lungs, nerves, ruined bones, the usual legacy of the mills? Would you? No, Jerry, I don't think so. You've come looking because I made something of myself, just wouldn't let your neglect, your indifference, stop me. As an old bookie used to say to me, everybody wants to back a winner. Okay, here I am."

"You're very harsh, Jack. Maybe with good cause. But looking for you has nothing to do with that. I'm proud of what you've accomplished. I think I'll be proud of everything you're going to accomplish." He smiles slightly, ingratiatingly. "Maybe, in some way, the hard times you had as a kid helped form that iron will of yours, but—"

Molloy throws up his arms, spins away from him. "Oh you fucking do not get any credit in any way whatsoever for what or who I am. In no way whatsoever."

Jerry McCarthy smiles somewhat more broadly. "Well, I hear something of myself, my young self, in that."

Molloy turns, looks at him over his shoulder. "Your young self? I'm fifty, Jerry. No youngster. A guy who's seen the world and knows which way the wind blows. Especially when it blows from a shitpile." Molloy is breathing hard, puts a hand on the Greek krater, runs his fingertips around its rim, fingertips that radiate rage.

The older man watches this uneasily.

Molloy's chest is heaving, but his voice is soft again, as he gazes at the krater. "Leave it to me in your will, Jerry. A token of, what did you call it? A family quarrel. Seduction. Betrayal. You really don't know me if you think this—beautiful thing is in any danger from me. Yeah, there might've been such a time. Lucky for you, my destructive days are over." He drops his hand from the pot, but imprisons his father in a glare of such intensity that the older man trembles slightly. 

His father closes his eyes for a moment, perhaps hoping this will break the withering condemnation he's trapped in. "But—listen to me, Jack. Nothing to do with taking credit, or wanting—anything from you. It's me. It's me. My own need to know you, to have you as part of my life. To be forgiven. Above all, I hope for that. That you can find it in your heart to forgive me. It would take a very great weight—not the entire weight; I'll always be ashamed and sorry for what I did, I'll always regret—sharply, deeply—what we've missed over the years—but it would take a very great weight off my heart if my son could forgive me."

"No."

"You won't forgive me?"

"Never. Simple as that."

"I understand your anger—"

"You don't understand a fucking thing."

"I think I understand your anger, and no one can blame you for it. I'm asking—I'm hoping—you'll go past that anger and let us know each other. Maybe forgiveness will come."

"Let us know each other," Molloy says mockingly. "I'm an old trader, Jerry. What have you got to show me?"

***

"Tell me how you work," she said.

"Very slowly, Nola. You think all these structures of mine have popped like rabbits out of hats, but I've been working on them, generating designs, since I was a kid. I always drew and sculpted. In my teens, my twenties, things got serious. Only now do I have the chance to see them come to life. That's why this accident is such a catastrophe for me. This is my moment. It will pass so quickly."

"You don't come to each site, each commission, afresh?"

"Yes, of course I do. So many things to excite the imagination. But part of my work is to recollect the issues I worked out long ago, sometimes altogether hypothetically, before I was able to build a thing. Bring them to new opportunities if they're appropriate. But it's my life's work—my whole life's work, this process. A seed is planted in my twenties, and I have no idea what to do with it. Not until it germinates maybe thirty years later, looking very different from how it once looked. Do you understand that I don't do one building at a time; that I'm always designing, always developing? Sometimes I have the opportunity to bring them to life."

***

"That moment a few months ago, where I couldn't even follow the proofs that I did in my thirties—it really scared the hell out of me. I don't mean I'm teetering on the edge of Alzheimer's or anything. At least not for a while yet. If ever. But that—" she hesitates, searching for a word "—creativity that I relied on all my life. I used to surf it; it seemed inexhaustible. When I gave a talk, I'd always end with the open questions I was hoping someone in the audience would solve. Guys would say quietly afterwards, I save the best open questions for my students. I'd say—with an arrogance that now takes my breath away—there's always more where that came from. But now? There isn't more. If it's not altogether gone, it's sure as hell drying up." She stops. He says nothing. "I know I can fake it for a few more years—guide the post-docs, do committee work, maybe even mine some of the old stuff. But the originality, that great impulse of creativity that never let me down. It's all but gone."

***

Molloy shrugs. He strokes a happy Wotan, sitting beside him, the dog too excited to lie down and sleep. "What about free will? You can't come away from Paradise Lost without figuring that it's the big question of the poem."

She nods lazily.

"The Greeks wouldn't have bought that," he says. "A hero had his foreordained fate, his destiny. He couldn't evade it. Oedipus. But so do Adam and Eve. If I get it right, Milton's God can foresee how it's all going to turn out, but claims they could've done otherwise, which is why he says they have free will."

"Free will is a crock," she says softly.

***

The months pass and the jabbing lessens, though sometimes he'll be attacked again, feel himself bleeding when he thought scar had begun to form. Right along with the pain, he feels something else: he's being engulfed by, sinking into, something inexorable: a sea of cold, infinitely heavy mud, rising slowly, promising eventually to suffocate him. There is, there will be, no help. "Horridas nostrae mentis purga tenebras," he mutters, Cleanse the horrible darknesses of our mind, not realizing he's said it aloud until Judith asks him if he's praying. "Just quoting. Saint Augustine." Her face seems to say thank God for that; that's all I'd need.

Judith continues to recede from him. He once imagined her as a golden girl, sailing smoothly over the seas that hid the rusted old hulks like him. Does she ever think how much better off she was then? She sometimes mentions the book she's doing, which requires research at her own casita, where her library is. She's scrupulous about coming home each night for dinner, dreary as dinnertimes now must be for her. He wishes she'd stay at her casita. What once seemed the liveliness of her mind, the universality of her interests, seems to him now a torment of chatter. He can barely endure it.

***

"Por el contrario, it is so very much like me, querida. I'm not a fool." Pulled off his sunglasses, which could only intensify the intimacy between them. His deep violet eyes seemed to her hypnotic. "Someone's going to insist on sitting down, sharing this table with us, so I'll make this quick. I did not used to love you, querida. I love you to this moment. I always will. When it gets to be too much, when you absolutely must leave this—man—to save your soul, save your life, you come back to me. I'll be waiting." The violet eyes were filling, which embarrassed her. Again he looked around, and now only whispered. "I thought you broke my heart when you married him, but I can tell you, seeing you like this is worse, much worse."

***

Did he regret this marriage? He must say so in plain English, because painful though it would be to hear, it couldn't be more painful than what was going on now. They could part in a civilized fashion. She'd make no trouble, financial or otherwise. But even imagining such a conversation made her heart race, her stomach want to heave. She took hold of herself: she wouldn't be the first woman some big swinging dick had decided was disposable. And what would the reality be then? To see him at gallery openings, as once she'd seen him, with attractive young strangers? To see him professionally from time to time, and struggle to keep it all professional? It was unthinkable. Could she leave Santa Fe? She'd been on her way to a job in Germany when he stopped her, wooed her, made with her a life she loved. She might—ah, but she was older now. Could she really take up a new job, life in a new country, at this stage of the game? He had neatly trapped her—in love, in stupid, irreversible circumstances. The kind of trap she'd evaded all her life. Damn you to hell, Jack Molloy.

***

For he can see it coming. He can see the woman he loves—and oh how he loves her; as mute as he's been; how he fears her absence more than anything—withdrawing from his life, first gradually, and then forever. The earworm that grabs hold of him most often is Jacques Brel, usually in English, If you go away; sometimes in French, Ne me quitte pas. Life reduced to sentimental pop songs. His son too will be lost to him. He'll have nothing, nobody. At least he talks less to Nikki in his head; the arguments haven't changed, but repeating them no longer gives him comfort.

***

This eruption terrifies Nola. Mesmerizes her. Thrills her. A warrior, hand-to-hand, an animal, tooth and claw, up against a foe that will kill—or be killed. She watches with fear, but also knows she's aroused, provoked, beginning to be seduced by a force in this room so primitive, so wild, it's been buried under civilization for millennia, Molloy its conduit. Its keeper. A Molloy no one has ever seen is releasing it, loosing its power into the world. She stops breathing. He thrashes, grappling with invisible enemies that give him no quarter. He will win. He will win. There's a madness about him now, a black energy that sends the teacups flying, a painting awry.

An elegant Rick Dillingham ceramic hits against a Nampeyo pot, and both of these priceless ceramics shatter on the tile floor.

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Copyright © 2005 - 2010 by Pamela McCorduck. All rights reserved.
Modified: May 19, 2011