The Philosopher's Apprentice (21 page)

 

LIKE DANTE CATCHING
his fateful glimpse of Beatrice, I first spied her from afar—or, rather, from above. I was standing on the stepladder, shelving a near-mint collection of Heinlein juveniles in the topmost loft of our science-fiction and fantasy section, when a female voice called out from the precincts of J. R. R. Tolkien below.

“Excuse me. I'm looking for a hardcover
Faerie Queene.
Is there such a thing?”

I glanced downward, and my eyes met the upturned face of a goddess with generous lips, endearing dimples, and the sort of large, intelligent eyes behind which, if I was any sort of judge, elegant thoughts were routinely entertained.

“It's not with the poetry,” she continued, “and I tried literature, too, so maybe somebody shelved it with your wizards and elves?”

As luck would have it, two days earlier a retiring professor of British literature had dropped off a complete run of those lavishly illustrated, out-of-print marvels known as the Erlanger House Classics, including a slipcased incarnation of
The Faerie Queene,
so I could assess their condition and make him an offer. “There's a rare three-volume set on the premises, but I haven't priced it yet,” I told my adorable Spenserian, then carelessly followed up with a question that a retailer must never, under any circumstances, ask a customer. “How much are you willing to pay?”

“Anything,” she said. “Three hundred dollars.”

Assuming it was in good shape, I would happily give the professor four hundred dollars for his
Faerie Queene,
which would probably fetch seven hundred on the Internet. “You can have it for two hundred and fifty,” I told her. “Meet me at the cash register.”

Leaving my heart aloft, I descended to earth and floated into the back room, where I unsheathed all three volumes and leafed through them in search of underlinings and dog-ears. The books seemed free of blemishes. I considered lowering the price to two hundred dollars, then decided that if my goddess ever found out what this edition was really worth, she would think me an idiot.

“We don't get many Spenserians in here,” I said, approaching the sales counter.

“I'm sure,” she said.

As if Isis and Horus hadn't already done enough for me, the object of my infatuation wrote the store a personal check, and thus I learned not only her alliterative name, Natalie Novak, but also her address and phone number.

I probed, I pried, I snooped, I sleuthed, and by the end of the month the salient facts were mine. An ABD in the English department, Natalie divided her time between writing her dissertation, something about the function of Providence in Emily Brontë, and teaching a panoply of courses ranging from Elizabethan Tragedy to the Twentieth-Century Novel. On agreeable spring days, she was not embarrassed to escort her Victorian Poetry class down to the Charles and recite “The Lady of Shalott” aloud while the students imagined the hapless maiden drifting past on her funeral barge. But the surest route to Natalie's heart doubtless lay in Spenser's Faerie Land, and so I undertook a journey to that extravagant realm.

For six full weeks, I immersed myself in the epic, keeping company with its valiant knights, foul witches, beautiful shepherdesses, lustful giants, virtuous adventurers, and depraved magicians. I accomplished this feat even though
The Faerie Queene
suffers from the
defect of not being very good, or such was my reaction to its stone-obvious moralizing, in-your-face allegory, and retrograde political dogma. It wasn't easy working up affection for this god-awful masterpiece, but somehow I suspended my revulsion long enough to start appreciating its positive aspects: the occasional neat plot twist, the intermittent linguistic felicity. “Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,/Ease after war, death after life does greatly please.” A fine couplet, no question. “Her angel's face/As the great eye of heaven shined bright,/And made a sunshine in the shady place.” Well done, sir. “Her birth was of the womb of morning dew.” I had no idea what that meant, but I liked it.

One golden April afternoon, I decided to bring my project to fruition. I left Dexter in charge of the store, rode my bike to the river, and hid behind a forsythia bush. Right on schedule Natalie appeared, her fifteen Shakespeare 101 students trailing behind her like imprinted ducklings. For the next forty-five minutes, she lectured on
Antony and Cleopatra,
arguing that it was at once the most cerebral and the most emotional of the tragedies. She fielded some questions, answered them astutely, then bade her ducklings scatter. Time for me to make my move.

“Hello again.” A good opening gambit, I felt. Precise but non-threatening.

“Have we met?”

“I'm the guy who runs Pieces of Mind. I'll be honest, Natalie. When you bought that pricey
Faerie Queene,
I was so dazzled I lost the power of speech, and before I'd untied my tongue, you were out the door. At long last, I told myself. At long last—a kindred spirit!”

“We're not communicating.”

“‘Her birth was of the womb of morning dew.' It doesn't get any better than that.”

“It doesn't?”

“I'll wager that of all the people down by the river today, only you and I fully appreciate that astonishing moment when Duessa
stands exposed as a filthy, scabby hag, not to mention Error showering the Red Cross Knight with her vomitus of books.”

“I really love your store.”

“Thank you.”

“I'm afraid I can't say the same for
The Faerie Queene.
”

“Come again?”

“To tell you the truth, I think Spenser is the most pompous twit ever to molest the English language. Sorry. Really. Art is so subjective.”

All my muscles contracted, a whole-body wince. “I see,” I mumbled. “So that's how it is.”

“I know the man has his partisans. He also has his virulent anti-Catholicism, his bigotry toward Saracens, his contempt for democracy, and his treacly notions of piety. Pieces of Mind is a great gift to our community. May I buy you a beer?”

“If you can't stand Spenser, why did you spend two hundred and fifty dollars on that Erlanger House edition?”

“A college graduation present for my brother. Verbal filigree and ersatz medievalism never had a bigger fan. You and Jerry should get together. I'm serious about the beer.”

“What sorts of books
do
you like?”

“Lately I've been reading a lot of nonfiction, looking into the impact of science on philosophy. I just finished a thing called
Virtue from the Dirt.
No, that's not it.
Ethics from the Earth,
by somebody named Ambrose. I think he lives around here. Breathtaking book. Do you know it?”

 

TWO DAYS LATER NATALIE MOVED
out of her cramped, cluttered, second-floor apartment on Cummington Street and into my cramped, cluttered, third-floor apartment on Sherborn Street, and we joyfully set about our objective of living happily ever after. For the better part of a year, our relationship flourished. Having previously transformed Londa into the restless and obsessive Dame Quix
ote, I had no ambition to make any woman, vatling or otherwise, into a putatively better version of herself, and I willingly endured Natalie's habits of scrawling illegible messages on the kitchen calendar and stashing unpaid bills in her handbag. Natalie, for her part, announced that she would not battle my various defects—my illiterate understanding of laundry, my tendency to deface the bathroom sink with blobs of toothpaste—until I was her eager and unresentful ally. In short, we allowed one another to be terrible roommates, a forbearance that doubtless figured crucially in our becoming great friends.

But there was a serpent in the garden, a worm in the apple of our idyll. Natalie's symptoms were not particularly disturbing in and of themselves—intermittent pelvic pains, numbness in her legs and feet—yet in this case they pointed to a serious condition: blood clots. Once the diagnosis was confirmed, we listened in dismay as a team of specialists argued not only for putting her on a regimen of Coumadin injections but also for equipping her circulatory system with plastic screens designed to trap errant embolisms before they could lodge in her lungs. This plenary approach was no cure, as clots could easily form upstream from the Greenfield filters. It was better than doing nothing, however, and so despite her chariness toward orthodox medicine, Natalie submitted to the technique. There were no complications, and within a few weeks she was back at work, reciting Tennyson in full throat as the waters of the Charles lapped against the shore. Truth be told, she handled the situation much better than I, for whom this sword of Damocles seemed especially heavy, its thread singularly thin. Many were the nights I trolled cyberspace searching out the latest sonic, surgical, and pharmaceutical approaches to blood clots—once I even visited the Web site of Londa's avant-garde Institute for Advanced Biological Investigations—but I failed to unearth any breakthroughs.

Among the consequences of Natalie's quasi-Luddite worldview
was a commitment to what she called “pagan birth control,” which boiled down to a combination of fertility charts, herbal contraceptives, and wishful thinking. I was skeptical but willing to gamble, especially since for Natalie the natural correlate of pagan birth control was pagan lovemaking. Under cover of night, we shed our garments in woods and dells. We connected in sacred spaces, calling each a Bower of Bliss—for a couple of anti-Spenserians, we were peculiarly ready to appropriate his diction—most memorably the shallows of Walden Pond, the stacks of Widener Library, and those cryptic New Hampshire megaliths known as America's Stonehenge.

Despite our prophylactic intentions, we soon learned that one likely outcome of conjoining pagan birth control to pagan lovemaking is a pagan pregnancy.

“I
knew
this was going to happen!” I wailed when Natalie told me the news. “I goddamn fucking
knew
it!”

“No birth control method is foolproof,” she said.

“We didn't practice birth control. We practiced druid superstition.”

“This is not your finest hour, Mason. You're behaving abominably.”

“I'm behaving abominably,” I agreed, and then I continued behaving abominably for the rest of the afternoon, accusing Natalie of “self-delusion masquerading as shamanism” and “flakiness posturing as subversion.” Natalie, to her credit, accepted delivery on none of these indictments. By sundown we were calm again, assuming demeanors more appropriate to our circumstances: two civilized adults facing questions for which neither civilization nor adulthood furnished palatable answers.

As any good Darwinist will tell you, ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny. In noting the transient gill slits of a developing human fetus, one must avoid the temptation to regard the creature as an adult fish. And yet, as that same good Darwinist will tell you,
there is something astonishing about a fetus's gills, an intimation of the epic through which algae became Aristotle and the cucumber turned into you, for these wispy slits resoundingly echo the corresponding features in an embryonic fish. And so it happened that as Natalie's pregnancy progressed, I found myself wondering whether the mite in her womb had yet embraced its piscean ancestry, and when it might take title to its reptilian estate. As long as the thing had not claimed its mammalian heritage, I would endorse whatever decision Natalie made.

Over the next three weeks, we consulted a quartet of health professionals, and they were unanimous in their view that Natalie's pregnancy would aggravate the propensity of her blood to form rogue clots. “The danger is serious but not grave,” said Dr. Millard, her primary-care physician, a remark that struck us as a distinction without a difference. The gynecologist was equally unhelpful. “If you elect to bring the fetus to term,” Dr. Harris told Natalie, “I'll do everything possible to keep you out of the danger zone.” Hematologist number one, Dr. Protter, offered a more upbeat verdict—“Although I can't make any promises, this impresses me as a low-level risk”—but her optimism was canceled by the unequivocal gloom of hematologist number two. “In your shoes,” Dr. Shumkas informed us, “I would terminate the pregnancy.”

The human mind, I learned that month, had not yet evolved sufficiently to wrap itself around this sort of issue. My thoughts were a stroboscopic muddle of flashes and voids, every second burst showing me a vignette from the life of my provisional son, my hypothetical daughter, a Donya Sabacthani sort of childhood, abrim with tree houses and toy planetariums, but it was the interlaced images, the glimpses of mourners and pallbearers, that stayed with me. Two days after our consultation with Dr. Shumkas, I told Natalie I thought she should get an abortion.

“I don't want an abortion.”

“You want a baby, then?”

“Not that either.”

“What
do
you want?”

“I want the pregnancy to go away.”

At the end of the week, we drove to Mass General and withdrew our contribution to posterity. It was the simplest of procedures, a routine outpatient dilation and curettage. My root canal had been more complicated. We decided not to ask about the gender of the extinguished fetus. On the way out of the hospital, we stopped by the pharmacy and obtained the prescribed antibiotics. We went home, split a bottle of Chianti, and crawled beneath the blankets, sobbing in each other's arms.

I awoke near dawn with a foul, metallic taste in my mouth, as if I'd been licking a spigot. Leaning toward my drowsy friend, I kissed the nape of her neck. I shuffled to the bathroom, appeased my bladder, and, upon returning to bed, endured a long and distressing Isla de Sangre dream. I was snorkeling in the Bahía de Flores, gliding above a clamshell the size of a hatbox, which suddenly opened to reveal, besides the expected clam, a sodden copy of
The Book of Londa.
Applying some amorphous appendage, the clam turned back the cover, whereupon I read, “My mother conceived me, my godfather gestated me, my sisters nourished me, but it was Mason who made me the monster I am.”