Cryptonomicon

And Randy has been thinking about that ever since. And when he got over his surprise that Charlene was a bodice-ripper addict, he decided it wasn't necessarily a bad thing, though in her circle, reading books like that would be tantamount to wearing a tall pointy hat in the streets of Salem Village, Mass. circa 1692. She and Randy had tried, awfully hard, to have an egalitarian relationship. They had spent money on relationship counseling trying to keep the egalitarian relationship alive. But she had become more and more angry, without ever giving him a reason, and he had become more and more confused. Eventually he stopped being confused and just got irritated, and tired of her. After Amy discovered those books in the basement, Randy slowly put a whole new and different story together in his head: that Charlene's limbic system was simply hooked up in such a way that she liked dominant men. Again, not in a whips and chains sense, just in the sense that in most relationships someone's got to be active and someone's got to be passive, and there's no particular logic to that, but there's nothing bad about it either. In the end, the passive partner can have just as much power, and just as much freedom.

Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous days of labor were unable to reveal.

Randy has this very strong feeling that Amy doesn't read bodice-ripper novels. She goes the other way. She can't tolerate surrendering to any one. Which makes it hard for her to function in polite society; she could not have been happy sitting at home during her senior year of high school, waiting for a boy to invite her to the prom. This feature of her personality is extremely prone to misinterpretation, so she bailed out. She would rather be lonely, and true to herself, and in control, in an out-of-the-way part of the world, with her music-by-intelligent-female-singer-songwriters to keep her company, than misinterpreted and hassled in America.

"I love you," he says. Amy looks away and heaves a big sigh like, At last we're getting somewhere.Randy continues, "I've been infatuated with you ever since we met."

Now she's back to looking at him expectantly.

"And the reason I've been slow to, uh, to actually show it, or do anything about it, is first of all because I wasn't sure whether or not you were a lesbian."

Amy scoffs and rolls her eyes.

". . . and later just because of my own reticence. Which is unfortunately part of me too, just like this part." He glances down just for amicrosecond.

She's shaking her head at him in amazement.

"The fact that the scientific investigator works fifty percent of his time by nonrational means is quite insufficiently recognized," Randy says.

Amy sits down on his side of the table, jacknifes, spins around neatly on her ass, and comes to light on the other side. "I'll think about what you said," she says. "Hang in there, sport."

"Smooth sailing, Amy."

Amy gives him a little smile over her shoulder, then walks straight to the exit, turning around once in the doorway to make sure he's still looking at her.

He is. Which, he feels quite confident, is the right answer.

Chapter 85 GLAMOR