The Rule of Four (20 page)

“Then in Numbers 12:1, something unusual happens. Moses’ brother and sister speak against him because he marries a Cushite woman. The details are never explained, but some scholars argue that because Cush and Midian are completely different geographical areas, Moses must’ve had two wives. The name of the Cushite wife never appears in the Bible, but a first-century historian, Flavius Josephus, writes his own account of Moses’ life, and claims that the name of the Cushite, or Ethiopian, woman he married was Tharbis.”

The details were beginning to overwhelm me. “So
she
cheated on him?”

Paul shook his head. “No. By taking a second wife, Moses cheated on
her,
or on Zipporah, whichever one he married first. The chronology is hard to figure out, but in some usages, cuckold’s horns appear on the head of the cheater, not just the cheater’s spouse. That must be what the riddle’s getting at. The answer is Zipporah or Tharbis.”

“So what do you do with that?”

His excitement seemed to dissipate. “That’s where I’ve hit a wall. I tried to use Zipporah and Tharbis as solutions every way I could think of, applying them as ciphers to help crack the rest of the book. But nothing works.”

He waited, as if expecting me to contribute something.

“What does Taft think about it?” was all I could think to ask.

“Vincent doesn’t know. He thinks I’m wasting my time. As soon as he decided Gelbman’s techniques weren’t yielding breakthroughs, he told me I should go back to following his lead. More focus on the primary Venetian sources.”

“You’re not going to tell him about this?”

Paul looked at me as if I misunderstood.

“I’m telling
you
,” he said.

“I have no idea.”

“Tom, it can’t be an accident. Not something this big. This is what your father was looking for. All we have to do is figure it out. I want your help.”

“Why?”

Now a curious certainty entered his voice, as if he understood something about the
Hypnerotomachia
that he’d overlooked before. “The book rewards different kinds of thought. Sometimes patience works, attention to detail. But other times it takes instinct and inventiveness. I’ve read some of your conclusions on
Frankenstein
. They’re good. They’re original. And you didn’t even break a sweat. Just think about it. Think about the riddle. Maybe you’ll come up with something else. That’s all I’m asking.”

There was a simple reason why I rejected Paul’s offer that night. In the landscape of my childhood, Colonna’s book was a deserted mansion on a hill, a foreboding shadow over any nearby thought. Every unpleasant mystery of my youth seemed to trace its origins to those same unreadable pages: the unaccountable absence of my father from our dinner table so many nights as he labored at his desk; the old arguments he and my mother lapsed into, like saints falling into sin; even the inhospitable oddness of Richard Curry, who fell for Colonna’s book worse than any man, and never seemed to recover. I couldn’t understand the power the
Hypnerotomachia
exerted over everyone who read it, but in my experience that power always seemed to play out for the worse. Watching Paul struggle for three years, even if it culminated in this breakthrough, had only helped me keep my distance.

If it seems surprising, then, that I changed my mind the next morning, and joined Paul in his work, chalk it up to a dream I had the night after he told me about the riddle. There is a woodcut in the
Hypnerotomachia
that will always stay in the stowage of my early childhood, a print that I bumped into many times after sneaking into my father’s office to investigate what he was studying. It’s not every day that a boy sees a naked woman reclining under a tree, looking up at him as he returns the favor. And I imagine no one, outside the circle of
Hypnerotomachia
scholars, can say he has ever seen a naked satyr standing at the feet of such a woman, with a horn of a penis extended like a compass needle in her direction. I was twelve when I saw that picture for the first time, all alone in my father’s office, and I could suddenly imagine why he sometimes came to dinner late. Whatever this was, strange and wonderful, beef potluck had nothing on it.

It returned to me that night, the woodcut of my childhood—woman lounging, satyr stalking, member rampant—and I must have done a lot of turning in my bunk, because Paul looked down from his and asked, “You okay, Tom?”

Coming to, I rose and shot through the books on his desk. That penis, that misplaced horn, reminded me of something. There was a connection to be made. Colonna knew what he was talking about. Someone
had
given Moses horns.

I found the answer in Hartt’s
History of Renaissance Art.
I’d seen the picture before, but never made anything of it.

“What are these?” I asked Paul, tossing the book up to his bunk, pointing at the page.

He squinted. “Michelangelo’s statue of Moses,” he said, staring at me as if I’d lost my mind. “What’s wrong, Tom?”

Then, before I even had to explain, he stopped short and turned on his bedside light.

“Of course . . .” he whispered. “Oh my God,
of course.
”

Sure enough, in the photo I’d shown him, two little nubs stuck out the top of the statue’s head, like goatish satyr horns.

Paul jumped down from the bunk, loudly enough that I waited for Gil and Charlie to appear. “You did it,” he said, eyes wide. “This
must
be it.”

He continued like that for a while, until I started to feel an uncomfortable sense of dislocation, wondering how Colonna could’ve put the answer to his riddle on a Michelangelo sculpture.

“So why are they there?” I asked finally.

But Paul was already far ahead. He yanked the book off his bunk and showed me the explanation in the text. “The horns have nothing to do with being a cuckold. The riddle was literal: who gave Moses horns? It’s from a mistranslation of the Bible. When Moses comes down from Mount Sinai, Exodus says, his face glows with rays of light. But the Hebrew word for ‘rays’ can also be translated as ‘horns’—
karan
versus
keren
. When Saint Jerome translated the Old Testament into Latin, he thought no one but Christ should glow with rays of light—so he advanced the secondary translation. And that’s how Michelangelo carved his Moses. With horns.”

In all the excitement, I don’t think I even sensed what was happening. The
Hypnerotomachia
had slunk back into my life, ferrying me across a river I never intended to cross. All that stood in our way was figuring out the significance of Saint Jerome, who had applied the Latin word
cornuta
to Moses, thus giving him horns. But for the following week, that was a burden Paul happily took upon himself. Beginning that night, and continuing for some time, I was only a hired gun, his last resort against the
Hypnerotomachia.
I thought it was a position I could keep, a distance I could maintain from the book, letting Paul play the middleman. And so, as he returned to Firestone, white-hot with the possibilities of what we’d found, I went off and made another discovery of my own. Still strutting after my encounter with Francesco Colonna, I can only imagine the impression I made on her.

We met where neither of us belonged, but where both of us felt at home: Ivy. For my part, I’d spent as many weekends there as I had at my own club. For hers, she was already one of Gil’s favorites, months before bicker for her sophomore class began, and it was his first thought to introduce us.

“Katie,” he said, after getting both of us to the club on the same Saturday night, “this is my roommate, Tom.”

I gave a lazy smile, thinking I didn’t have to flex much muscle to charm a sophomore.

Then she spoke. And like a fly in a pitcher plant, expecting nectar and finding death, I realized who was hunting who.

“So you’re Tom,” she said, as if I met the description of a convict from a post office wall. “Charlie told me about you.”

The best part about being described to someone by Charlie is that things can only get better from there. Apparently he’d met Katie at Ivy several nights earlier, and when he realized that Gil intended to make the match, he eagerly chipped in with details.

“What did he tell you?” I asked, trying not to look concerned.

She thought for a second, searching for his exact words.

“Something about astronomy. About stars.”

“White dwarf,” I told her. “It’s a science joke.”

Katie frowned.

“I don’t get it either,” I admitted, trying to undo my first impression. “I’m not much for that kind of stuff.”

“English major?” she asked, as if she could tell.

I nodded. Gil had told me she was into philosophy.

She eyed me suspiciously. “Who’s your favorite author?”

“Impossible question. Who’s your favorite philosopher?”

“Camus,” she said, even though I meant it rhetorically. “And my favorite author is H. A. Rey.”

The words came out like a test. I’d never heard of Rey; he sounded like a modernist, a more obscure T. S. Eliot, an uppercase e. e. cummings.

“He wrote poetry?” I ventured, because I could imagine her reading Frenchmen by firelight.

Katie blinked. Then for the first time since we’d met, she smiled.

“He wrote
Curious George
,” she said, and laughed out loud when I tried not to blush.

That was the recipe of our relationship, I think. We gave each other what we never expected to find. In my earliest days at Princeton I had learned never to talk shop with my girlfriends; even poetry will kill romance, Gil had taught me, if you mistake it for conversation. But Katie had learned the same lesson, and neither of us liked it. Freshman year she dated a lacrosse player I’d met in one of my literature seminars. He was smart, taking to Pynchon and DeLillo in a way I never did, but he refused to speak a word about them outside of class. It drove her crazy, the lines he drew through his life, the walls he put up between work and play. In twenty minutes of conversation that night at Ivy, we both saw something we liked, a willingness to have no walls, or maybe just an unwillingness to keep them standing. It pleased Gil that he’d made such a good match. Before long I found myself waiting for the weekends, hoping to run into her between classes, thinking of her before bed, in the shower, in the middle of tests. Within a month, we were dating.

As the senior in our relationship, I imagined for a while that it was my job to apply the wisdom of my experience to everything we did. I made sure we kept to familiar places and friendly crowds, having learned from past girlfriends that familiarity always arrives in the wake of infatuation: two people who think they’re in love can find out, when left alone, exactly how little they know about each other. So I insisted on public places—weekends at eating clubs, weeknights at the student center—and agreed to meet at bedrooms and library nooks only when I thought I detected something more in Katie’s voice, the come-hither registers I flattered myself I could hear.

As usual, it was Katie who had to straighten me out.

“Come on,” she told me one night. “We’re going to dinner together.”

“Whose club?” I asked.

“A restaurant. Your choice.”

We’d been together for less than two weeks; there were still too many parts of her I didn’t know. A long dinner alone sounded risky.

“Did you want to ask Karen or Trish to come along?” I asked. Her two roommates in Holder had been fail-safe company. Trish, in particular, who never seemed to eat, dependably talked through any meal.

Katie’s back was turned to me. “We could ask Gil to come too,” she said.

“Sure.” It struck me as an odd combination, but there was safety in numbers.

“What about Charlie?” she asked. “He’s always hungry.”

Finally I realized she was being sarcastic.

“What’s the problem, Tom?” she said, turning back to me. “You’re afraid other people will see us alone?”

“No.”

“I bore you?”

“Of course not.”

“Then what? You think we’ll find out we don’t know each other very well?”

I hesitated. “Yes.”

Katie seemed amazed that I meant it.

“What’s my sister’s name?” she said finally.

“I don’t know.”

“Am I religious?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Do I steal money from the tip jar at the coffee shop when I’m short on change?”

“Probably.”

Katie leaned in, smiling. “There. You survived.”

I’d never been with someone who was so confident about getting to know me. She never seemed to doubt the pieces would fit.

“Now let’s go to dinner,” she said, pulling me by the hand.

We never looked back.

Eight days after my dream about the satyr, Paul came to me with news. “I was right,” he said proudly. “Parts of the book are written in cipher.”

“How’d you figure it out?”

“
Cornuta
—the word Jerome used to give Moses horns—is the answer Francesco wanted. But most of the normal techniques for using a word as a cipher don’t work in the
Hypnerotomachia
. Look . . .”