Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance by Richard Powers

Author:Richard Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Published: 2021-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

The Biographical Fallacy

There are people indeed—and this has been my case from my childhood—for whom all the things that have a fixed value, assessable by others, fortune, success, high positions, do not count; what they must have, is phantoms.

—Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Outside the Your Move Theatre, an enormous newsprint poster bore a larger-than-life reproduction of Kimberly Greene dressed as Sarah Bernhardt in her one-woman show, I Dwell in Possibility. To the right of the enlarged photo, critics from all Boston’s larger papers joined unanimously in proclaiming the stage act to be the most important thing since penicillin. Mays regarded the testimonials, trying to restore to the laudatory sentences all those words that had been surgically replaced by ellipses.

He felt like an anthropologist, piecing together an entire protohuman skull from half an inch of jawbone. “Compelling. . . . Arresting. . . . I was stunned . . . ,” Mays thought might have first appeared in print as “By compelling me to go to this so-called performance, my editor caused me to miss the simple pleasure of staying home and getting stewed. Arresting Ms. Greene would be a public service. I was stunned that such a racket could escape the Better Business Bureau.” “. . . One of the best shows of the season. . . . You must see it. . . . A piece . . . to keep you enthralled . . .” could originally have been “As a self-respecting member of the press, I can call this one of the best shows of the season, providing the appropriate persons send the usual amount to Box 35B, Boston Station. If you must see it, bring along a piece of string to keep you enthralled during the second and third acts.” Anything could be made to mean anything given enough ellipses.

If his expectations for the show were slight, if he had become openly hostile to the idea of I Dwell in Possibility, it was because of how public the object of his obsession had become. He had walked past the giant marquee perhaps two dozen times since the Veterans’ Day Parade, and he had never once associated the larger-than-life document with the three-inch antique redhead in his memory. His blindness was that of children playing the game of Find the Word on the Map: the first child might keep the second one looking an hour for the tiny C-O-M of Combrai, but she herself may never find the E-U-R of Europe, not thinking to look for something so large. The obvious, not the obscure, always gave Mays the most trouble.

Kimberly Greene, if the photograph reproduced her accurately, was even more offensively attractive than Mays had imagined. If he had gotten a good look at those high cheekbones and hazel eyes from his eighth-story window, he would never have taken on the search. An obsession, however difficult, must have some chance of success if it is to raise desire. Seeing her now, posted so publicly, made him lose almost all desire he had once felt to track her down.

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