What He's Poised to Do

Boatman, one of the few men who seemed to want nothing more from her than her friendship, was also in Paris, working in medical research. The first week she was there they met for coffee and he told her a story; it seemed incredible, yet he staked his word on it. A research department in a university had shown one thousand men a series of one hundred images. The images were broadly random: some were of trees, some of cars, some of animals, and some showed the faces of attractive women. At first, each image remained on screen for one second. Then the rate of projection was accelerated: each image was shown for only a half second, then a quarter second, then a tenth of a second. Finally the set of images was shown to the men in such rapid succession that each image was onscreen for only one twentieth of a second. At that point, the sequence was altered, the new sequence shown again at the fastest rate, and the men were asked which photograph was out of place. If they were unable to furnish an answer at that rate, the sequence was shown again at a slightly slower speed, and so on, until it was back to an image per second. The vast majority of the subjects showed no ability to answer correctly for the images of trees, cars, or animals, but nearly half the men were able to tell when images of women had been rearranged within the sequence, even at the fastest speeds.

Deborah had heard some fish stories in her day, and this ranked near the top.

“I’ll bring you the magazine with the article,” Boatman said. He pushed his cup of coffee forward as punctuation.

“You do that,” she said, coming to her feet.

While she waited for the magazine, she poured herself into the books about painting she had brought from home. She spent time going slowly through museums. She talked on the phone to her mother more than she had in months. There were no men—there was no man—and that left her time. “We can have lunch every week,” she told Boatman. “I’ll even pay if you bring that magazine you lied about.”

He presented it to her rolled up and rubber-banded. “Don’t read it here at the table,” he said. “It’s rude. Wait until you get home.” They ate. She went home. The magazine, thick and printed in an oversize format, was called Topic: A Month of Things to Think About. She was mortified that she had never heard of it and at the same time thrilled, because she was now permitted the pleasure of discovery, which was considerable. The magazine was a fantastic mix of high-toned reporting, lurid celebrity news, science, culture, home design, and travel. The cover story was about Corrado Feroci, an Italian sculptor who traveled to Thailand in the early twentieth century and created works at the behest of King Rama VI. Then came a piece about the metabolic studies of stressed cells, and then one about an actor who had left his wife for a costar. The print in some of the longer articles was tiny, but Deborah read every word, and when she looked up at the clock, more than an hour had passed. She went right back in for another hour, and called Boatman when she surfaced for dinner. “This is the best magazine in human history,” she said. “I put it down, then picked it back up, and guess what story I landed on?”

“Metabolic studies of stressed cells?”

“No. A piece about Marcus Hebert.”

“Who?”

“The French critic of accidental literature. Do you know him?”

“No,” Boatman said. “The only French critic of accidental literature I know is no one.” He waited a beat. “Jean-Marie No One.”

“Hebert is a genius. He became famous writing these short essays about texts he would find in the street. Initially, he thought they were the literary equivalents of ready-mades, but then he designed this inverted critical structure that privileged a letter you might write to a girlfriend over, say, Tolstoy.”

“Well, of course,” Boatman said. “Stupid Tolstoy.”

“It got to the point where Hebert felt that the only way he could make good on his theory was to stop publishing, and instead write his essays in the form of letters to other critics and authors, who occasionally published them as correspondence. He went on to write about the way that writing has changed: the death of handwriting and the birth of typing, the death of words as possessions and the birth of words as currency. Anyway, he has a new book.”

“A book? Hypocrite.”

“That’s addressed in this piece,” she said. “Anyway, for years he’s been at American universities, but he’s spending this whole month in Paris. And because he’s perverse to the end, he’s doing all kinds of things to alienate himself: staying in a different hotel every week, staging a series of readings at rock clubs, speaking only in English while he’s here. I can’t believe I didn’t know that. I can’t believe this magazine.”

“I told you.”

“Though come to think of it, I can’t find the article you mentioned, the one about the men studying images of women.”