The Rule of Four

'Ode on a Grecian Urn'?

I nod. Taft wrote an article on what he perceived to be the declining quality of scholarship at major universities, using Macintyre's book as a primary example. In three paragraphs Taft identified more factual errors, misattributions, and oversights than two dozen other scholars had found in their own book reviews. Taft's implicit criticism seemed to be aimed at the reviewers, but it was Macintyre who became such a laughingstock that the university pruned him from the departmental ranks at the next tenure review. Taft later admitted that he was just getting even with Macintyre's father, a Renaissance historian who'd given one of Taft's own books a mixed review.

Vincent told me a story once, Paul continues, voice growing quieter. About a kid he knew growing up, named Rodge Lang. Kids at school called him Epp. One day a stray dog followed Epp home from school. Epp ran, but the dog kept following him. Epp threw part of his lunch to the dog, but the dog wouldn't leave him alone. Finally he tried to scare the animal off with a stick, but the dog just kept following.

After a few miles, Epp started to wonder. He led the dog through a briar patch. The dog followed. He threw a rock at the dog, but the dog wouldn't back away. Finally Epp kicked the dog. The dog didn't run off. Epp kicked it again, and again. The dog wouldn't move. Epp kicked the dog until it was dead. Then he picked it up and brought it to his favorite tree, and buried it there.

I'm almost too stunned to answer. What the hell's the moral of that?

According to Vincent, that's when Epp knew he'd found a loyal dog.

A silence unfolds.

Was that Taft's idea of a joke?

Paul shakes his head. Vincent told me a lot of stories about Epp. They're all like that.

Jesus. Why?

I think they're supposed to be some kind of parable.

Parables he made up?

I don't know. Paul hesitates. But Rodge Epp Lang also happens to be an anagram. A rearrangement of the letters in 'doppelganger.'

I feel sick. Do you think Taft did those things?

To the dog? Who knows. He might've. But his point was that he and I have the same relationship. I'm the dog.

So why the hell are you still working with him?

Paul begins fidgeting with the bread again. I made a decision. Staying with Vincent was the only way I could finish my thesis. I'm telling you, Tom, I'm convinced this is even bigger than we thought. Francesco's crypt is this close. No one has made a find like this in years. And after your father, no one had done more work on the Hypnerotomachia than Vincent. I needed him. Paul throws the crust onto his plate. And he knew it.

Gil arrives in the doorway. I'm done upstairs, he says, as if we've been waiting for him to finish. We can go now.

Paul seems glad to end the conversation. Taft's behavior is a reproach to him. I rise and begin to bus my plates.

Don't worry about those, Gil says, waving me off. They'll send someone down.

Paul wipes his hands together briskly. Strings of the bread roll up on his palms, and he sloughs them like old skin. We both follow Gil out of the club.

The snow is coming down much harder than before, so thick that I feel I'm watching the world through patches of static. As Gil navigates the Saab westward, approaching the auditorium, I look in the side mirror at Paul, wondering how long he's been keeping all this to himself. We pass between streetlights in the dark, and for short pulses of time I can't see him at all. His face is just a shadow.

The fact is, Paul has always kept secrets from us. For years he hid the truth about his childhood, the details of his parochial school nightmare. Now he's been hiding the truth about his relationship with Taft. Close as he and I are, there's a certain distance now, a feeling that while we have a lot in common, good fences still make good neighbors. Leonardo wrote that a painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light. Most painters do the opposite, starting with a whitewash and adding the shadows last. But Paul, who knows Leonardo so well you'd think the old man slept in our bottom bunk, understands the value of starting with the shadows. The only things people can ever know about you are the ones you let them see.

I might not have grasped this very well, except that an interesting thing happened on campus just a few years before we arrived, which caught both Paul's attention and mine. A twenty-nine-year-old bicycle thief named James Hogue got into Princeton by claiming to be someone he wasn't: an eighteen-year-old ranch hand from Utah. Hogue said he'd taught himself Plato under the stars, and trained himself to run a mile in just over four minutes. When the track team flew him out to campus for a recruiting trip, he said it was the first time he'd slept indoors in a decade. The admissions office was so captivated that it accepted him on the spot. When he deferred for a year, no one gave it a second thought. Hogue said he was tending to his sick mother in Switzerland; in fact, he was serving a term in prison.

What made the hoax so intriguing was that, while roughly half of it was an outrageous lie, the other half was more or less true. Hogue was as good a runner as he let on, and for two years at Princeton he was a star on the track team. He was also a star in the classroom, shouldering a course load you couldn't pay me to take, and getting straight A's to boot. He was even so charming that Ivy tapped him for membership in the spring of his sophomore year. It almost seems a shame that his career ended the way it did.

By sheer accident a spectator at a track meet recognized him from a previous life. When word spread, Princeton conducted an investigation and had him arrested in the middle of a science lab. Charges were pressed, and Hogue pled guilty to fraud. Within a matter of months he was in prison again, where he slowly faded back into obscurity.

To me the Hogue story was the news event of that summer; the only thing to rival it was my discovery that Playboy had run a Women of the Ivy League issue the previous spring. To Paul, though, it was much more. As someone who always insisted on a varnish of fiction in his own life, pretending he'd eaten well when he hadn't, or pretending not to own a computer because he didn't like using one, Paul could identify with a mail who felt bullied by the truth. One of the only advantages of coming from nothing, as James Hogue and Paul both did, is having the freedom to reinvent yourself. In fact, the better I got to know Paul, the more I understood it was less a freedom than a kind of obligation.

Still, seeing what became of Hogue, Paul had to rethink the line between reinventing himself and fooling everyone else. Beginning the day he arrived at Princeton, he walked that line very carefully, keeping secrets rather than telling lies. An old fear returns to me when I consider that. My father, who understood the way the Hypnerotomachia had seduced him, once compared the book to an affair with a woman. It makes you lie, he said, even to yourself. Paul's thesis may be exactly that lie: after four years with Taft, Paul has danced and danced for the book, left his bed and lost sleep for the book, and for all his sweat, the book has given up very little.

Looking back in the mirror again, I can see him watching the snow. There is a blank look in his eyes and his face seems pale. In the distance a traffic light is flashing yellow. My father taught me something else without ever saying a word: never invest yourself in anything so deeply that its failure could cost you your happiness. Paul would sell his last cow for a handful of magical beans. Only now is he beginning to wonder if the beanstalk will grow.

Chapter 9

I think it was my mother who told me that a good friend stands in harm's way for you the second you ask- but a great friend does it without being asked at all. There are so few times in a person's life when a single great friend comes around that it almost seems unnatural when three come around all at once.

The four of us met on a cool night during the fall of our freshman year. Paul and I were already spending much of our time together, and Charlie-who'd introduced himself on the first day of school by barging into Paul's