The Candy House(3)

Luckily, Bix had marshaled other tools of identity concealment. Online, he’d purchased a headscarf with dreadlocks emerging from the back. The price was exorbitant but the dreads looked and felt real, and their weight between his shoulder blades was like the touch of a ghost. He’d known that weight for many years, and liked having it back.

When everyone had settled onto couches and chairs and introduced themselves, Bix, unable to repress his curiosity, said, “So. What was she like, Miranda Kline?”

“Surprisingly funny,” said Ted Hollander, Portia’s art historian husband. He looked to be in his late fifties, a generation older than Portia. Their toddler daughter had already charged into the living room pursued by an undergraduate babysitter. “I thought she’d be dour, but she was almost playful.”

“What makes her dour is people stealing her ideas,” said Fern, dean of the women’s studies department and rather dour herself, Bix thought.

“People have used her ideas in ways she didn’t intend,” Ted said. “But I don’t think even Kline calls it theft.”

“She calls it ‘perversion,’ doesn’t she?” Rebecca asked tentatively.

“I was surprised by her beauty,” said Tessa, a young professor of dance whose husband, Cyril (mathematics), was also in attendance. “Even at sixty.”

“Ahem,” Ted said good-naturedly. “Sixty isn’t so very ancient.”

“Is her appearance relevant?” Fern challenged Tessa.

Cyril, who took Tessa’s part in everything, bristled. “Miranda Kline would say it was relevant,” he said. “More than half the Affinity Traits in her book have to do with physical appearance.”

“Patterns of Affinity can probably explain each of our reactions to Miranda Kline,” Tessa said.

Despite assenting murmurs, Bix was pretty sure that, apart from himself (and he wasn’t telling), only Cyril and Tessa had read Kline’s masterwork, a slender monograph containing algorithms that explained trust and influence among members of a Brazilian tribe. “The Genome of Inclinations,” it was often called.

“It’s sad,” Portia said. “Kline is better known for having had her work co-opted by social media companies than for the work itself.”

“If it hadn’t been co-opted, there wouldn’t have been five hundred people in that auditorium,” said Eamon, a cultural historian visiting from the University of Edinburgh and writing a book on product reviews. Eamon’s long deadpan face seemed to shield an illicit excitement, Bix thought, like a generic house containing a meth lab.

“Maybe fighting for the original intent of her work is a way of staying connected to it—of owning it,” said Kacia, the Brazilian animal studies professor.

“Maybe she’d have some new theories by now if she wasn’t so busy fighting over the old one,” Eamon countered.

“How many seminal theories can one scholar produce in a lifetime?” Cyril asked.

“Indeed,” Bix murmured, and felt the stirring of a familiar dread.

“Especially if she started late?” Fern added.

“Or had children,” said Portia, with an anxious glance at her daughter’s toy stove in the living room corner.

“That’s why Miranda Kline started late,” Fern said. “She had two daughters back-to-back, and the husband left her while they were in diapers. Kline is his name, not hers. Some kind of record producer.”

“That is fucked up,” Bix said, forcing out the profanity as part of his disguise. He was known not to curse; his mother, a sixth-grade grammar teacher, had heaped such withering scorn on the repetitive dullness and infantile content of profanity that she’d managed to annul its transgressive power. Later, Bix had relished the distinction that not cursing gave him from other tech leaders, whose foulmouthed tantrums were infamous.

“Anyway, the husband is dead,” Fern said. “To hell with him.”

“Ooh, a retributivist among us,” Eamon said with a suggestive waggle of eyebrows. Despite the stated goal of using “plain language,” the professors were helplessly prone to academic-ese; Bix could imagine Cyril and Tessa’s pillow talk including terms like “desideratum” and “purely notional.”

Rebecca caught his eye and Bix grinned—as heady a sensation as taking off his shirt. At his fortieth-birthday party last year, he’d been presented with a glossy pamphlet entitled “Bixpressions” that codified, with photographs, a system of meanings assigned to barely perceptible shifts of his eyes, hands, and posture. Back when he was the only Black PhD student in NYU’s engineering lab, Bix had found himself laughing hard at other people’s jokes and trying to make them laugh, a dynamic that left him feeling hollow and depressed. After getting his PhD, he cut out laughing at work, then cut out smiling, and cultivated instead an air of hyperattentive absorption. He listened, he witnessed, but with almost no visible response. That discipline had intensified his focus to a pitch that he was convinced, in retrospect, had helped him outwit and outmaneuver the forces aligned in readiness to absorb him, co-opt him, shunt him aside and replace him with the white men everyone expected to see. They had come for him, of course—from above and from below, from inside and from every side. Sometimes they were friends; sometimes he’d trusted them. But never too much. Bix anticipated each campaign to undermine or unseat him long before it coalesced, and he had his answer ready when it did. They couldn’t get in front of him. He gave some of them jobs in the end, harnessing their wily energies to advance his work.