Roger's Version (16 page)

Dale’s benediction at last launched and growing ever smaller in the stratosphere, we unlinked our sweaty hands, and there settled ineluctably into the center of my vision the turkey to be carved. Oh, those diabolically elusive, bloody, and tenacious second joints! And the golden-glazed skin that proves tougher than strapping tape! Esther, compared with Lillian, does a dry turkey, and you can slice the breast only so thin before crumbs and shredding compromise the slice. We were, at table, clockwise, Verna, I, Richie, Dale, Esther, and Paula, in Richie’s dusty old high chair, which Esther had recovered from the third floor and in which the little girl, abruptly exhausted by her bus ride, long walk, and bite of silver cigarette case, kept slumping asleep. I, too, while I did not slump, lost consciousness for intervals: at least, there are great glutinous holes in my recollection of our conversation.

Esther, between doling out orange gobs of squash and white gobs of mashed potatoes, earnestly asked Dale what exactly his research in computer graphics involved. He said, “It’s kind of hard to explain. A lot of it is looking for programming shortcuts that could bring raster-display dynamics closer to vector display in terms of image refresh time and memory cost. A vector display, you see, specifies to the screen two points and then draws a line between them, and even though there are a lot of lines and some of the instructions take a lot of crunching, it’s as fast as the eye can take in, by and large: I mean, you see motion happening. With raster, it’s like a newspaper photograph: you have a grid of dots, called pixels, maybe five hundred twelve by five hundred twelve, that’s some two hundred sixty-two thousand separate pieces of output, and so each frame takes minutes to generate instead of microseconds, which is what you’d need for convincing animation. Thirty scans a second is what you
see on television; you can get some sense of the refresh that’s going on by wiggling your fingers in front of a live screen. Also, there’s not just dimension and perspective, there’s color and light, and light bouncing in certain patterns off of different textures—all that has to be programmed in. You look at this table now in front of you, there’s a tremendous amount of visual information, I mean, a
ter
rifying amount, if you take into account, say, the sheen on that turkey skin, and the way it’s folded, and the way the water in the glass refracts that bowl, and the way the onions are a different kind of shiny from the bowl, and then there’s a little smoke, and look at that sliver of red in the stem of the wineglass from the cranberry sauce a foot away. The Japanese do an amazing job with that sort of thing—glass balls floating around in front of checkerboards and translucent cylinders and so forth. It means you have to calculate through the pixel, as if each one is a tiny window in the viewing plane, exactly how the beam of light you’re shooting through that little aperture would go, and if it strikes something transparent, where it would go then; maybe it will even divide.” His two lengthy forefingers went separate ways in illustration. His purple-and-green necktie began to look psychedelic, in the tawny low November filtered through our bare birches and our windows with their ornamental leaded lights of stained glass, a lurid gold and livid blue and the same poisonous red as Dale’s cranberry juice. “Some pixels,” he went on, “there’s maybe five or six separate inputs to be averaged out. I mean, it’s awesome, once you get into duplicating even a highly controlled set of objects, how it all blows up with complexity. It begins to scare you, in a way.”

“In what way?” Esther asked, having eaten the morsels she allowed herself and now exhaling cigarette smoke, a billowing twin plume from her nostrils and lips, blue in the wan sunlight, a ball of smoke as big as her head.

“Well, I mean, just in trying to duplicate Creation on this one simple plane of visual information. You see, it’s not quite like a photographer sitting down in front of a scene, or even a painter doing what’s in front of him dab after dab. In computer graphics, you store the mathematical representation of the object, and then you can call up the image of it from every perspective, in wire-frame diagram or with the hidden lines removed, or in cross-section, say with a mechanical part you want to analyze. And it does it, generally—we’re talking vector now—instantly, as far as our eye can tell, though even here with some of the crunching you can feel the computer begin to labor, and the delay can get up to a second, which feels like an eternity if you’re used to working with computers.”

An eternity. In a grain of sand. My eyes itched. Clouds of food particles. Receptors high in the nostrils can detect one particle in a million. Freud claims our sense of smell was freighted with poignant meanings when we walked on all fours, our noses closer to the dung-laden ground. We are base. A broad neck on a woman seems to invite a man to pounce, then lie there luxuriating like a fucked-out lion. Copulation from the rear nature’s standard way; how did we ever get turned around? Frontal nudity, rated X.
In Adam’s fall / We sinned all
. Verna was eating steadily, in silence. Could it be she was hungry? In this day and age can anyone not an African still be simply hungry?

“I like the way,” Richie contributed, “they turn things over and over like in TV station identifications or in
Superman I
, where the three bad guys are condemned to space.”

“Yeah,” Dale said, “tumbling. That’s fairly trivial to achieve, that sort of deformation and exaggerated perspective and so on, once you have the information; then it’s just a matter of shifting and stretching coördinates under some pretty straightforward transformations. Simple trigonometry.”

“Trig, ugh,” the boy said.

“Come on, Richie. Trig is beautiful, wait till you get to it.”

Wait till you get to sex
, I hallucinated that he was saying. The odd thing, Richie, is, that’s it. It’s a grand surprise nature has cooked up for us, love with its accelerated pulse rate and its drastic overestimation of the love object, its rhythmic build-up and discharge; but then that’s it, there isn’t another such treat life can offer, unless you count contract bridge and death.

“The theory of it, I mean,” Dale was saying. “And now with computers you don’t have to do all that looking up in tables and long multiplication we used to do, the computers do it all for us. Just the little hand-calculators that cost ten ninety-five; in 1950 it would have taken a big refrigerated room to hold all those circuits you can put in your vest pocket now, if you wear a vest. But, hey, how come I’m doing all the talking? Professor, tell us about heresy or something.”

“Yes, you should eat before it all gets cold,” Esther solicitously told Dale.

“Nobody ever wants to hear about my poor heretics,” I informed the table. “Tertullian, for example, whom I’ve been dipping into, to refresh my Latin. What a writer—crazy for language, when he takes off it’s like Shaw, he’ll say any mad thing to keep the ball rolling. Or like Kierkegaard, when he got the wind up. But Tertullian had a sweet, humanist side, too. He claimed, for instance, that the soul is naturally Christian:
anima naturaliter christiana
. And—you mathematicians—he did some of the basic Christian calculations. He invented the Trinity; at least he used the word
trinitas
for the first time in ecclesiastical Latin. And he put forward the formulation
una substantia, tres personae
for God, and for Christ the notion of a double essence,
duplex status
, rather nicely,
non confusus sed conjunctus in una persona—deus
et
homo
. An
AND
gate, I guess that would be, Dale?”

“Actually,” the young man said, smiling and swallowing, “I think that’s an
OR
. It’s harder to get through an
AND
than an
OR.
”

“Let the boy eat,” Esther said. “That’s very interesting, dear. You notice, Verna, that nobody asked us about
our
specialties?”

The child, bless her, ignored my wicked wife and turned to me. “What made him a heretic, Nunc? He sounds pretty straight-arrow.”

“Before I answer that very intelligent question, who would like some more of this bird, this homely half-hacked Paraclete of ours?”

Richie held his plate toward me. “Just white slices,” he said. “Thinner than you cut them before.”

“God damn it, you can’t cut them any thinner with this dull knife; they fall apart!” My profanity startled even me: I traced it back to the third glass of white wine and the fact that Richie wears braces on his teeth, to which orange and white bits of food were clinging, a repulsiveness all the worse for his being unaware of it.

Little pigtailed Paula, having slumped to sleep in her high chair, half woke, and began, not to cry, but to make that mechanical noise of childish discontent, of air jouncing up and down the trachea, which is even more irritating.

Esther said, “Poor thing, falling to sleep in that awkward position, I bet she has a cramp.”

“Do you, Poops? Or just think it’s time to give Mom a hard time?” Verna pushed her face within an inch of her child’s, merrily, mockingly, displaying to my angle of vision the delicious dimple in her round cheek, deepening.

Startled, challenged, Paula stared, hiccupped, and began in earnest to cry.

“In brief, Verna,” I answered in an overriding voice, “he
was a heretic because he was a Puritan, a purist, called a Montanist in those days; after doing battle against paganism, Marcionism, Gnosticism, and Judaism, he found the Church itself impossibly worldly and corrupt. He was too good for this world.”

“Just like you, dear,” Esther said, and urged Verna, “Give her to me.”

“There you go, Poops,” Verna said, in the strength of her youth hoisting the child, tantrum and all, through the air on extended bare arms, into Esther’s lap with an impact that visibly jarred my small-boned wife.

“You’ll be interested, Esther,” I called to her, “to know that one of Tertullian’s works,
Ad uxorem
, is addressed to his wife and tells her that after his death she must remain a widow. Then he thought about it and wrote another tract saying that if she
must
remarry, it should be to a Christian. Then he thought still some more and in
De exhortatione castitatis
exhorted her to remain chaste,
not
to remarry,
even
to a Christian. Also, he thought that women, whether married or unmarried, should remain veiled.”

“Don’t you just hate men?” Esther asked Verna.

“I’ll swap you Little Miss Nasty for a ciggyboo,” Verna was saying to her.

“Also, he thought Christians should fast more and never serve in the Roman army. See, Dale, nobody’s listening. My heretics lay an egg every time.”

“I’d love one, too,” Esther responded. “But I don’t have my pack with me, it must be in the kitchen.”

“I know where there’re some.”

“Not with me,” Dale said to me, adding to Esther, “I love these boiled baby onions. My mother used to make them, mixed with sugar peas.”

“Oh those old things, they’re so dry, they’ve been there forever,” Esther called, seeing Verna leave the table and go into the living room, through the archway with its spindlework header, toward the glass table and the silver cigarette case that Esther’s father had given us nine years ago.

“What’s the
matter
with you?” I asked Richie, exasperated by his sulk. “Eat those thin slices you’re so fussy about.”

“You didn’t have to swear,” he said, near tears, his face bowed to his plate. That touching shaggy top of a young male’s head again. A beast without eyes, butting through life.

“
Our
specialty,” Esther rather operatically called over little Paula’s wispy, frizzy head, as Verna returned with a handful of tinted cigarettes, “is cleaning up the messes men make. First they make a mess
in
us, then they make one
around
us.” The wine was getting to her, too. When a middle-aged woman becomes overanimated, her throat turns stringy, a harp she herself plays. Esther’s stringiness would lessen if she’d let up on that compulsive diet. It’s as if she’s denying me more than an ounce of woman over the marital quota.

“Maybe they can’t help it,” Verna said, slinging back into her chair with a soft and graphically unprogrammable multiple shift of volumes that, so vividly conveying the fluid heft of her body, made the inside of my mouth go dry. She lit a mint-green oval with a candle from the table.

“Christ, don’t sulk,” I muttered sideways to Richie.

“Leave the boy alone,” Esther called, again in a clarion tone, as if the toddler’s body in her lap formed a shield behind which she could launch spears at me. The tint of the cigarette pinched between her fingers was a high-toned pearl gray. “You’ve hurt his feelings.”

“It’s not me who’s hurt his feelings, it’s Thanksgiving depresses him; it depresses everybody.”

“And don’t tell us any more about that dreadful old bigot of
yours; now he really
is
depressing. It’s sheer perversity drove you, Roger, to specialize in those awful people, these antique fanatics not even skin and bones now, just dust, if that.” She added in a tone slightly more conciliatory, “If nobody wants any more, you could clear, dear.” She was pinned down by Paula, whose tint was milky brown.

“I’ll help,” Verna said, rising into her own smoke, so it swirled down her scalloped neckline into her bosom.

In the kitchen, we managed to bump bottoms, without acknowledgment, but twice.

“Scrape into the little middle sink, it has the Disposall,” I told her, as if muttering a dirty secret. Reaching past her to get the dessert plates where Esther had stacked them, I brushed with my tweed sleeve the warm bareness of her forearm, that had lifted her child with Amazonian ease. Only my half-sister’s daughter, I calculated: our shared blood had been divided and subdivided.

“I’ll take the dishes in; if you could bring one of the pies warming in the oven …”

“Ooh,” she exclaimed, “pumpkin! I love pumpkin, Nunc. Ever since I was a baby, I guess because it was so mooshy. I’ve always had this terrible weakness for things you don’t have to chew, like custard and tapioca.”