The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy (The Pot Thier) Read online

  Which is why I stopped by Treasure House Books and Gifts the next morning and purchased a book about Ptolemy, the first person to successfully model the motion of the planets. His theory was that the planets were on a sort of invisible sphere that circles around the earth like a curved glass ceiling. As that ceiling revolves, the planets also go around in circles on the sphere, and those circles within circles explain why they sometimes appear to go backwards. And here’s the amazing thing about Ptolemy’s system – it still works today. You can use it to predict exactly when a planet will start to back up.

  Ptolemy’s model of the heavens started me thinking of the lyrics of a song:

  Like a circle in a spiral,

  like a wheel within a wheel

  never ending or beginning

  on an ever spinning reel

  I couldn’t remember the name of the song and made a mental note to ask Susannah about it. Occasionally I stopped reading and drew circles within spheres just to see if I had the hang of it. Occasionally I looked up when someone passed by. None of the passers-by became customers.

  About four o’clock I started checking my watch. It seemed to be doing its imitation of Mars – slowing down. It seemed like it might never reach five, so I gave up at a quarter ‘til and strolled toward the plaza, my eyes on Dos Hermanas.

  Susannah waited at our usual table. “I know how you can get in Rio Grande Lofts. Pretend to be a pizza delivery guy.”

  Her enthusiasm for my projects is a nice counterbalance to my natural caution.

  “Wouldn’t I need a uniform?”

  Susannah is two inches taller than me and has that healthy ranch-girl look of someone who gets up early to throw around bales of hay or whatever it is they get up early to do on ranches. Her hair is fine and not too long – just below the shoulders when it’s down – but there’s a lot of it, and no matter how she ties it up, it’s usually unruly.

  She’s a bit unruly herself. She’s also intelligent, funny, and frank.

  “You never order pizzas do you, Hubie? The delivery guys don’t wear uniforms. They don’t even use company delivery cars. Pizza places are too cheap to furnish transportation or uniforms.”

  “Do they get paid at least?”

  “Basically, they work for tips.”

  “Hmm. So I could buy a pizza, drive up in my own car, walk up to the doorman in my street clothes and say ‘Large pepperoni for apartment 8’?”

  “I don’t think they normally announce the ingredients, but, yeah, you just tell them you’ve got a pizza for apartment 8.”

  “Then what?”

  She thought about it for a moment while she sipped her drink. “Well, I’ve never lived in an apartment with a doorman, so I don’t know what happens next. I suppose they call apartment 8 and tell them their pizza has arrived.”

  “But since they didn’t actually order one, I’d be sunk.”

  “Yeah, but at least you’d still have the pizza.”

  I laughed and took a sip of my margarita. Proper form calls for rotating the glass after each sip so there’s salt on the rim each time you partake. A deep glass with a small circumference may hold enough, but you run out of salt before you run out of sips. Dos Hermanas glasses are slightly wider than they are deep.

  A thought finally came to me. “It wouldn’t have to be pizza.”

  “Of course not. You could pretend to be a take-out Chinese guy.”

  That brought me up short (so to speak).

  “What would I do, make myself up like Warner Oland?”

  “Who’s Warner Oland?”

  “He’s the actor who played Charlie Chan.”

  “Charlie Chan, the fat guy in the late night movies with the ‘number one son’?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Hmm. ‘Warner Oland’ doesn’t sound like a Chinese name.”

  “It’s not. He was Swedish.”

  “He played Charlie Chan and he wasn’t Chinese?”

  “Why not? He also played Al Jolson’s father, and he wasn’t Jewish either.”

  “That’s no big deal. A Swede and a Jew might look alike. But a Swede and a Chinaman?”

  “I don’t think ‘Chinaman’ is politically correct these days, Suze.”

  She looked at me and sighed. “O.K., a person of Swedish origins and a person of Chinese origins.”

  “They had very clever make-up people in Hollywood in those days.”

  “Why are we talking about this?”

  I shrugged. “Because you suggested I could pretend to be a take-out Chinese guy.”

  “Geez, Hubie, do you ever order out any kind of food?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. The guys who deliver take-out Chinese aren’t Chinese. You could do it,” she said with enthusiasm.

  “But they could still call the apartment and ask if they ordered Chinese.”

  She gave me a look of exasperation. “Well, you suggested it.”

  “No, I just said it didn’t have to be pizza. You’re the one who made it Chinese. I didn’t mean it should be another kind of food. I meant it could be another kind of delivery.”

  “Like flowers?”

  “Exactly.”

  “How would that be better than food?”

  “Because they couldn’t call the apartment and verify whether they ordered them because people don’t order flowers for themselves. They get flowers sent to them.”

  “If they’re lucky. I can’t remember the last time a man sent me flowers.”

  “Sorry, Suze.”

  “I tell you, Hubie, my love life is nonexistent. Maybe I need to change majors. What field has a lot of guys in it? And don’t say math, because there’s no way I can pass a math course. And besides, have you seen those guys in the math department? Most of them are—”

  “Suze?”

  “Yes, Hubie?”

  “Can we discuss your dating strategy after we figure out how to breach security at Rio Grande Lofts?”

  “Sure. Can we order another drink first?”

  We did, and we sat waiting for it in companionable silence on the veranda. The westerly breeze had the bite of autumn and the smell of damp creosote like it had rained on the west mesa. The sun dipped below the horizon and the sky glowed purple and orange. We get spectacular sunsets out here.

  Angie brought drinks and fresh chips and salsa. I sipped my margarita to make sure it was as good as the last one, and it was.

  Susannah asked what I was reading, and after I told her about my new book on Ptolemy, she gave me the razzing she usually does.

  “Boring, Hubert. What do you have against books with characters in them?”

  “This book has characters – Ptolemy is a character.”

  “Was he married?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “How about friends? Any crises in his life? What did he look like? Did he ever—”

  “O.K., O.K., I take your point. But his system of explaining why the moon, the sun, the planets and the stars move like they do was really neat with lots of circles around circles, and it reminded me of a song, but I can’t remember the title.”

  I sang the lines I remembered.

  “I love that song. It’s called The Windmills of Your Mind. It was the theme song for a great movie, The Thomas Crown Affair.”

  “Now I remember. I liked that one, too. Steve McQueen played a millionaire who was a thief on the side.”

  “No wonder you liked it. But it was Pierce Brosnan, not Steve McQueen.”

  “Then there must have been a remake because the one I saw definitely had Steve McQueen and was probably made before Brosnan was born.”

  “And before McQueen died,” she added.

  I looked at her and she just smiled.

  “In the new one, Brosnan steals a...” She hesitated trying to remember. Finally she said, “Monet, I think.”

  “They made the thief a Frenchman in the new version?”

  She gave me a quizzical look. “No, he was
American.”

  “But you said he stole ‘monay’—the way a Frenchman might pronounce ‘money’.”

  “No, he didn’t steal money. He stole a Monet, a painting.”

  “The water lily guy?”

  “Right.”

  “No wonder you liked it.”

  “Yeah, and Pierce Brosnan is hot.”

  “Anyway, Ptolemy’s circles—”

  “This is really delicious salsa,” she interjected with a sly smile on her face.

  I took the not-too-subtle hint and changed the subject. “You think we’re harming our health by eating salsa and chips almost every day?”

  “It’s not like we’re eating chicharrones. In fact, the salsa is probably good for you since it has tomatoes and a green vegetable.”

  “But aren’t you supposed to have more variety in your diet?”

  “Actually, I think it’s better to eat the same thing every day. Your body gets used to it and makes the necessary adjustments to digest it and use it to make whatever nutrients you need.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Digestion is just chemistry, Hubert. Say your body needs a certain protein to make fingernails. That protein is in corn, so when you eat chips, the body shoots some chemicals into the stomach along with the chewed up corn and the needed protein is synthesized and put to use. Now that same protein may be in lots of foods. But if your body is getting it from corn chips and suddenly you start eating spinach instead, then even if the protein is in the spinach, you might not have the right chemicals to extract it because it’s different from the corn.”

  “That’s an interesting theory. Did you ever major in biology?”

  “No, but I was pre-vet at one time, and I actually passed organic chemistry.”

  “Pre-vet must have lots of guys in it. Why didn’t you just stay in that major?”

  “I didn’t like the idea of cutting up animals in labs.”

  “But you were raised on a ranch.”

  “Right, and I castrated calves and killed chickens, but that’s part of ranching. We didn’t kill cats and dogs so we could cut them up to study.”

  “But didn’t you realize when you chose pre-vet that you’d be—”

  “Are you going to give me a hard time about this, Hubert? Because I don’t need that. I need someone to send me flowers, not tell me I wasn’t thinking clearly when I chose pre-vet as a major.”

  “Sorry, Suze.”

  “Sometimes you get so wrapped up in logic you forget about feelings. You’re like Spock, you know that, Hubert?”

  “You’re right. But at least I don’t have those weird ears.”

  She laughed and took a big swallow of her drink. She orders her margaritas without salt. If she has any other faults, I’m unaware of them.

  4

  I’d met Professor Masoir’s wife last spring when she came to my shop looking for something her husband could buy for their anniversary. She was a charming lady and I enjoyed our brief chat.

  I met the Professor himself for the first time when he came in a few days later. I didn’t chat with him as I had with his wife, but the few words he spoke were music to my merchant’s ears – he told me he wanted to purchase a twelve-thousand-dollar pot by the famed Maria of San Ildefonso.

  His October return prompted my interest in Rio Grande Lofts. He’d walked in my shop on Friday and asked, “Would you mind closing your store while we talk?”

  I sell maybe three pots in a good month, so closing up for an hour doesn’t threaten the bottom line. I locked the door and rotated the laminated plastic sign to ‘closed’.

  I offered him a cup of my coffee, which he wisely declined. It was almost two o’clock, and the coffee had been steeping since breakfast.

  “You know who I am?” he asked.

  “Yes. You’re the gentleman who wrote me a twelve-thousand-dollar check last spring.”

  He lifted his chin and gave out a hearty laugh. Masoir is probably in his eighties. He wears a trim mustache on a sunken face. He’s slightly stooped and his hands show evidence of a mild palsy. He doesn’t look like someone who laughs often, but it was obviously heartfelt and made me feel like laughing with him.

  “A good merchant remembers his customers by the size of their purchases,” he said.

  “The UNM Business School should be proud of me.”

  He was momentarily confused. “I thought you majored in anthropology.”

  “I did the second time, but my first time through I studied business.”

  “What made you decide to go back?”

  “I’m not certain. At the time, I thought it was because the work I was doing as an accountant was so boring. Then I got into pottery and thought it was because I needed to exercise my creative side. But now I think it was because my first time through didn’t expose me to ideas, at least to important ones.”

  “And what important ideas did you find in anthropology?”

  “Is this a quiz?”

  He laughed again. “Old habits are hard to break. I hope you’ll forgive the impertinence of a broken-down old professor.”

  “You are old, but you are definitely not broken down.”

  He nodded. “My wife says you are a young man of good character.”

  “I’m happy she thinks so, but she met me only once and then only for perhaps fifteen minutes.”

  “She fancies herself an astute judge of character, says she has a sixth sense about people.”

  “Perhaps she does.”

  “I doubt it. But regardless of how she comes to her judgments about people, she is almost always on the mark.”

  “So you depend on her for accurate character appraisals?”

  “After sixty years of marriage, Mr. Schuze, I depend on her for everything.” He hesitated for a moment. “Do you have a place where we can sit down?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling like a dolt for keeping a shaky eighty-year-old man on his feet.

  I took him back to my living quarters and sat him in my reading chair. I turned a kitchen chair to face him and asked him if he wanted anything to drink.

  “Is it five o’clock?” he asked with a wry smile on his face.

  “No sir. It’s only a little after two.”

  “Then water if you don’t mind.”

  He took a sip and kept the glass in his hand. “I see we passed through your studio to get here. I gather you’ve addressed the creative side you spoke of.”

  “I’m afraid you gather incorrectly. I call it my workshop, not my studio. I make replicas of pots. I don’t think of myself as an artist.”

  “You’re too modest. Most people who think of themselves as artists these days are decidedly not. Someone dumps a crucifix in a jar of urine and calls it art. At least your copies display craftsmanship.”

  “I agree they do. I’m not modest about that. Maybe it’s because I respect the originals I copy.”

  He sipped his water and nodded his head as if he shared that respect with me. “You know how they ran me off?”

  “The story circulating in the department was you opposed the department’s plan to divest itself of its Native American artifacts.”

  “You state it very diplomatically, but I suspect that wasn’t how you heard it.”

  “I think the official characterization was you ‘demonstrated insensitivity to the strong link in tribal culture between people and the products of their hands and the unique cosmology of such peoples that rejects the western linear concept of time and posits a timeless link with their ancestors’.”

  “You remember that?”

  “Not verbatim. But I think it’s close.”

  “Probably. It sounds like the twaddle in use back then. If they had said I failed to appreciate that Indians like their pots better than we like ours, their position would have sounded not only false, but – worse from their perspective – trivial. Academics fear nothing more than being thought trivial.”

  “Ironic,” I commented, “since triviality is t
he essence of academe.”

  “No wonder they kicked you out!”

  “So do you think Indians value their artifacts more than people of European descent?”

  “The question has no answer. There are millions of Indians. Any statement about what they value is a mere generalization. Only individuals value things. They say Indians value their dignity. Who doesn’t? I understand their concern may be more acute because the fate they have suffered in the last five hundred years is demoralizing in the extreme. But I also value dignity, and when a university tribunal ordered me to attend sensitivity training offered by a charlatan Indian activist from Colorado, I resigned.”

  His shoulders slumped down slightly. “It was not an act of great courage to do so. The fact was I no longer wanted to work among the new faculty schooled in the radical graduate programs of the sixties.” He took another sip of water. “Empathy is not my strong suit. I was taught that the best thing an anthropologist can do is study cultures and report on them as a scientist. The worst thing you can do is give them sympathy. They don’t want it, and it clouds your objectivity. The new faculty didn’t see Native American culture as something to be studied. They saw it as a cause. Maybe their view had some merit I failed to grasp…”