The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] (2 page)

I use the pronoun ‘she’ because anthropologists such as Margaret Ehrenberg have argued convincingly that women invented agriculture and created the first pots to carry the seeds and store the grains. My sense of connection is one potter to another, two fellow humans who walked the same earth and put our hands in the same clay.

Because of the reverence I feel for ancient potters, it pains me somewhat to sell their works. I always make sure the buyer appreciates the piece. The best thing I can do for the ancient potter is find a good home for her work. Of course, if a few thousand dollars find a good home in my pocket, then the pain of parting is sweet sorrow indeed.

Although passage of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act made it illegal to dig up old pots, doing so still carries little risk. After all, the places one digs for ancient pots are deserted. The same cannot be said of buildings, especially residential ones.

So I should have been worrying. But the margarita was frosty and the sun warm, and my worries evaporated in the desert air.

2

I recalled watching from the windows of my social studies class at Albuquerque High School as the steel framework for Rio Grande Lofts rose towards the sky. Miss Hinkle’s lectures couldn’t compete with cranes and girders.

The structure started life as an office building with retail space on the street level. It was the third or fourth tall building in town. In my high school naïveté, I assumed we were headed towards a skyline like Manhattan, which – like the Rock of Gibraltar – I’ve seen only in pictures. Opened during a recession, the place never achieved full occupancy. Downtown shopping lost its battle with suburban malls. The property changed hands several times and hosted a variety of ventures whose only common denominator was failure. Eventually, rent from the few occupants failed to cover expenses, and the place was boarded up.

Albuquerque’s latest revitalization plan encourages people to live downtown, and – surprisingly – it seems to be working. Even my old high school has been converted to lofts. The boarded-up office building also got a facelift. The ground floor was converted to a lobby with an entrance vestibule, mailboxes, lockers for the doormen, and storage space. Floors two through eleven were carved up for residences. I suppose calling them lofts was meant to conjure images of exposed brick, high ceilings, and industrial elevators. I was interested to discover if they really had that look.

But you already know that curiosity about architecture wasn’t the reason I wanted to break in.

Apartment – excuse me –
Loft
1101 was occupied by Ognan Gerstner, the recently retired chairman of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of New Mexico. He was the person who expelled me from the University. I disliked Gerstner, but that was true before he expelled me. I hold no grudge about it. So revenge was not my motive for wanting inside the building.

Gerstner forced out Professor Walter Masoir shortly before I returned to school and ended up in Anthropology and Archaeology. Gerstner had convinced the department to divest itself of its Native American artifacts. Masoir was the only holdout to this politically correct plan, arguing quite reasonably that it makes no more sense to operate an anthropology and archaeology department without artifacts than it would to operate a chemistry department without test tubes.

The artifacts were eventually returned to the tribes. At least most of them were. It was alleged that one collection of rare and beautiful pots never found its way back to its pueblo. The evidence for this was weak – a statement by a now deceased resident of that pueblo claiming they never received the pots. And the probative value of that statement was devalued further by the fact that the person it was told to, none other than Walter Masoir, was hardly a disinterested party.

As I mentioned, Masoir was gone before I started my studies, but I read his work, talked to students who knew him, and always admired him. Proving the plan he opposed was at least partially a failure would have been satisfying. But you can probably guess that vindicating an admired professor was also not the reason I wanted to break in to Rio Grand Lofts.

Neither curiosity, revenge, nor vindication incited my illicit intentions. I wanted those pots.

3

After leaving
Dos Hermanas
, I decided to get the pots off my mind by doing a little amateur astronomy. I often select a planet and chart its location every night for a month or so when I know it’s going to slow down, come to a halt, and head back from whence it came.

Astronomers call this ‘retrograde motion’. It’s an optical illusion of course. Planets don’t actually turn around. But it sure looks odd. Mars, for example, will stay on the straight and narrow for almost two years. Then – for no apparent reason – appear to go the opposite direction. I don’t know who first observed this strange behavior, but the Greeks knew about it thousands of years ago. That’s why they called them planets, which means ‘wanderers’ in Greek. Most people couldn’t care less, but the planets fascinate me.

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:

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 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.

“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
.”

“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.

“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.”