The Law of Miracles

Moral Problem #5: Honi Soit Qui Malypense

74 Moral Problem #5: honi soit qui mal y pense 0 You’ve just had the Big Argument and now she’s gone. There have been many other arguments (you remember particularly the one about whether millionaire NBA players had the right to strike, a subject neither of you cared about in the least but somehow roused her outraged Jewish–IWW–Ellis Island sensibility against your snide Elitist–Mayflower–Wonder Bread privileged self), but this is the one that’s going to do it. This is the one—about George-freaking-W.-Bush and the invasion of Iraq—this is the one that’s going to sink the marriage before it even starts. She was arguing for Shock and you—of course— were arguing for Awe. Or maybe it was the other way around. So you’re sitting in the cafeteria of the Derby Technology Museum in Derby, England, from which she has just made her angry exit, trying to pretend nothing has happened so the others having their afternoon tea—the English from whom you are so snidely descended—will quit looking at you. You’ve got your she-just-had-to-go-to-the-loo look on, got your legs crossed in that feminine, elegant, handmade-Italian-shoes way you’ve practiced over the years, in and out of your two previous marriages, sitting there with your jaw set, calculating the likelihood of her being gone—really gone—when you get back to the hotel room. The rental car is in her name, you remember . You’ll have to walk. But to give her time to pack and clear out—if that is, in fact, what she’s doing—you stroll back into the museum. You read again the placards that detail the building’s history. An eighteenth -century silk mill whose founder was murdered for smugglingtheplansforsilk -throwingmachinesoutofItaly.Nevertheless , you are pleased to be reminded, the Industrial Revolution marched undaunted on. Right up until today, when it began dropping millions of tons of explosives on Iraqi civilians. You move on to a half-beam steam engine called the Grasshopper . Cylinder, side rod, flywheel. In situations of this sort, the virtue of being the leaved instead of the leaver is that logistics are in your favor. It is the leaver who will have to change her plans. She can’t expect to have the hotel room when you return to London—it’s in your name anyway—and unless she wants to sit next to you for the seven-hour flight back to D.C., she’ll have to change her plane ticket. You think of this with some satisfaction as you run your eyes over a steam-powered organ—der Specht, the Woodpecker —and then reach into your pocket and turn your phone off. If she tries to reach you, that’ll only piss her off more. When you step into the next room a strange sight awaits you. There’s a Muslim woman there. A Muslim woman standing and looking at the bright, machined surfaces of a RollsRoyce jet engine. She’s dressed in full purdah—is that the right word?—black headscarf and robe: the whole deal although her face is not covered. You don’t know what’s weirder, her and the jet engine, or the fact that you and your fiancée had seen her the day before, at Chatsworth. There had been an older woman with her then. You are all, evidently, reading from the same guide book. So you begin to follow her. Discreetly, of course. You mosey from exhibit to exhibit, employ strategies of coincidence and misdirection. The swaying garment, the suggestion of hips, of breasts, the wimpled face, the dark eyes—these are supposed to not arouse the baser passions, have you got that right? She Problem #5: honi soit qui mal y pense 75 76 THE LAW OF MIRACLES stops in front of a glass case in which various scientific instruments are displayed. You sidle over to the cabinet and pretend to read one of the placards. She is, herself, dutifully studying each instrument. She moves toward the center of the display from the left—chronometer, altimeter—you move from the right—sextant, anemometer. In the center, there is an astrolabe , mysterious with its gold and silver, its delicate chasing. An hour earlier you and your fiancée had remarked on it, the pseudo-science of it...