A Working Theory of Love (10 page)

“Oh God,” Erin whispered, gripping her seat. “Oh God. Oh God.”

“Pretty scary,” I said.

She said nothing. When I glanced at her—we were trolling round an S-shape cut in the
mountain, a wall of rock on one side, a sheer drop on the other, no guardrail—hot
tears of terror were leaking down her face.

“Keep your eyes on the road,” she hissed.

“Don’t worry. I’ll put the top up.” We etched around the final curve and suddenly
the road shot down like a waterslide.

“It’ll pull off,” she said.

“We’re only going fifty kilometers per hour.” It was one of those automatic hardtops.

“It’ll pull off. It’ll catch in the wind.”

“Not at fifty kilometers per hour.”

She spoke deliberately and with great force: “I don’t know what kilometers are.”

We entered a fold in the mountain where the view was less terrifying, straightened
out, and entered a small town that clutched the mountainside. The side streets were
only thirty or forty feet long. Beyond that: the plunge.

“Okay, navigator,” I said, pulling over onto one of the side streets. A few dumpy
stone houses led to a low wall, which led to an enormous desert valley. It did make
the heart crawl up in the chest. “What do we do now?” According to
Andalucía
—our guidebook—we had just completed the “easy” stretch of this highway.

Erin shook, drew shallow breaths.

“Your call,” I said, turning to look at her.

“Don’t touch me. Don’t even think about touching me.”

“I don’t need to. You’ve got the Hook.”

“You want to have a relationship talk right now? Does this seem like a good time to
you to have a relationship talk?”

When I look back on this moment I see the right move. I should have told her to get
a hold of herself, let her blow a fuse over my insensitivity, shout it out, grab lunch,
and hit the road. But I couldn’t do that. I’d like to say it’s because I’m so deeply
kind, or even because I was so angry at her betrayal, but my motives weren’t pure.
Instead, I wanted to be “sensitive.” That is, to be right.

“It’s okay, sweetheart. Do you want to take the main road to the coast?”

“How much farther is it?”

“We have to backtrack.”

“We can’t go down that road again.”

Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. I can’t really see that deeply into this moment.
I remember the world being hard for me to tune in to; I could no longer hear Erin,
and I could no longer hear myself. I didn’t want to backtrack and I didn’t want to
go forward. I think I would have cashed my 401(k) for a helicopter lift out of there,
to another place, another chance.

“We don’t have any choice,” I said quietly.

“What if we go forward?”

“You’re the trip planner.”

“Don’t attack me.”

The view in front of us flew down to the scorched, tan valley. She held her hand in
front of her, as if fending off an assault.

“I’ll turn around.”

“Don’t move the car.”

So we sat on our ledge—a good ledge for fighting off Moors or Christians or whoever
was unlucky enough to be below, a bad ledge for a man married to a woman who had lost
her mind. Especially since the man right then wanted to pacify her, but didn’t really
care she was scared. All he could hear was the buzzing, the spiritual tinnitus that
was most real to him. It was one of those moments in life when you need a cataclysm—for
the parking brake to go out. You’d have to throw yourselves out of the moving car.
You’d both scrape and bump on the gravel, and you could clutch each other, pleasantly
terrified as the Peugeot broke over the dirt wall, teetered, and fell down the slope,
turning, shattering, jumping, your clothes, maps, Manchego cheese strewn across the
rocks, and you and your wife, the woman you love, in each other’s arms, safe, holding
on for dear life, which is only at that moment dear again.

But the car is new and you’ve got it parked in gear and the brake has been working
fine. Neither God nor Chance will get you out of this.

“We should backtrack,” I said. “It’s only a few kilometers.”

“Kilometers,” she said with disgust, as if it was the name of my mistress.

We made it down the mountain, but I didn’t mention the little contraption again, the
added spice in our lives. Not then and not later. Why? Because though she sounds like
a crazy person—or worse, a bully—I suspected even then the fault was mine. That my
love for her was too small. That she was responding—irrationally, but genuinely—to
some real impairment in my heart. If I’d loved her,
truly
loved her, we wouldn’t have needed the grand gesture, the constant vigilance, the
vibrator. If I had
truly
loved her, things would have been different.

•   •   •

N
OW HERE’S THAT STORE,
roasting. All the Hooks squirming in their packages, the DVDs slumping, the leather
whips popping dry and cracked.

Hup, hup, hup
, several firemen chant, dragging out a fresh hose. Two of their brethren emerge from
the store and give a thumbs-up. There’s nothing heroic about the gesture, just an
all-clear, and it fills me with envy. If only I could learn to take life and death
with such everyday stoicism.

“You want to grab a cup of coffee?” she asks.

I release her, take a step away, establishing our twoness again. “Where?”

“Sparky’s?”

“They’re open?”

“Twenty-four hours.”

I think of Rachel, her deep and innocent slumber. I point in a vague direction, back
to the apartment we used to share. “I have to get home.”

We’re both stopped by that word,
“home.”

“Work tomorrow?” she says.

“Super early. We should have coffee sometime.”

“And that would be okay with Rachel?”

We watch the steam, regular now, billow from the storefront. I’m grateful she didn’t
pretend not to remember Rachel’s name, but this just isn’t a conversation I want to
have right now. Fatigue settles on me, heavy as a coat.

“Of course it would,” I say.

•   •   •

B
ACK IN THE APARTMENT,
Rachel has shifted in her sleep. Her head lies heavy on the pillow, the creases of
the sheet shooting out like beatified rays. Her mouth hangs open, her breath slightly
sour. She pulls in air slowly, lets it go. Her cheeks are as pale as paper in the
cool chiaroscuro of 3 a.m. Just above the duvet, I see the collar of the T-shirt she’s
sleeping in. It’s my Motown shirt, bought on a visit to my brother, which Erin used
to sleep in. I squint, trying to remember how the fabric fell on her shoulders, hung
loose on her arms. I can’t. It’s a welcome lapse. Maybe it’s the late hour, maybe
I’m just confused, but I feel a sudden buoyancy, the happy lift of a boat whose anchor
has been cut.

9

A
T
A
MIANTE THERE’S A
printed note taped to my door. Looks like I’m flying solo today. Having recently set
up Dr. Bassett’s “desire for knowledge,” aka his ability to ask questions—he can now
worry a topic like a dog with a bone—they’re rewarding themselves for their hard work.
They’ve left early for a weekend at the “winery,” Livorno’s weedy five-acre lot in
the Central Valley, where he pays a man named Jorge to tend his Zinfandel vines. I
didn’t get an invitation, but that must be because I subtly communicated I didn’t
want one. It can’t be because he prefers Laham over me, can it? I probably made some
offhanded comment about keeping work and life separate. But who really wants to do
that? Work is clear expectations, fulfillable tasks. Life is murk and muck, a jungle
of wrong decisions.

Plus, Laham will drink Bawls till his eyes look like joke-shop glasses, but as far
as I know he abstains from alcohol. Livorno himself is hardly a connoisseur. He only
drinks his own wines. I would accuse him of putting on a big show—affecting Rotarianism,
a golfer who makes his own wine (this is a common Northern California type)—but who
is the show for? He never mentions dinner parties or tea dates or cocktails with old
friends. The colleagues he recalls in loving detail are usually dead, sometimes so
long dead they were never actual colleagues. He never met Einstein or our patron saint,
Alan Turing, who was refused entry to the United States after World War II (sexual
deviancy). Livorno does get calls from former students, which he enjoys immensely,
even Toler’s. I can’t tell if Livorno is lonely. He seems better off than I am, and
since—as he would remind me—seeming is measurably identical to being, then he must
be
better off than I am.

I sometimes think—self-servingly, reductively—of Livorno as all mind and no gut. It’s
always tempting to brand those more at ease in the world as heartless. But that would
be wrong. Look at this beautiful list Livorno has left me:

1. Free chat

2. Work on conversation book—on bookcase in my office

3. Leave early

It’s actually a short lesson in kindness. If only he’d give me a life list:

1. Don’t abandon your girlfriend alone in your apartment

2. But do have coffee with your ex-wife

3. What are you scared of?

Livorno’s office is quiet and airy without him in it. The clutter is unchanged—file
boxes full of papers form a massive ziggurat; additional loose papers are piled as
high as balance can defy gravity. But the window really does pierce any feeling of
claustrophobia. I step around Livorno’s L-shaped wood desk to get to the bookcase,
a metal hand-me-down from the quilting studio, crowded with dusty electronics and
a stack of puffy vinyl folders that turn out to hold more honorary degrees. The top
two shelves are filled with neatly arranged books, some think-pieces on AI—
Affective Computing,
The Emperor’s New Mind
—and textbooks, but most of the top shelf is devoted to the novels of Stanislaw Lem
in the original Polish. The very bottom shelf is all self-help books, which I’ve always
assumed were for Dr. Bassett. Looking at the titles now I’m not so sure. What would
Dr. Bassett do with
A Guide to Self-Esteem
or
Rich Dad, Poor Dad
? There’s also a Dean Ornish diet book and a low-budget production called
How to Live Forever
. It’s the only one that appears well thumbed. Inside it’s all vitamin combinations.

The book Livorno wants me to work from is
How to Talk to Almost Anyone: 63 Strategies for the Skilled Conversationalist
. It’s bright purple and has a blurb from Regis Philbin. I let it dangle from my hand
as I look out the window. I usually feel like I’m in a submarine when I’m at Amiante,
but here before me is the mundane ticking of the world. A FedEx truck chugs by. Then
a Subaru. Then a Bentley. It’s Toler, peering at us over the top of his transparent
glasses. He catches my eye and nods, but doesn’t stop, and I’m surprised to find myself
wishing he would.

I could dig through Livorno’s desk, but what’s the use of snooping? Still, I snoop.
The top drawer contains a letter opener and a very moldy sandwich. The middle and
lowest drawers are almost empty, except for some disposable pens and a jumble of papers
and cards. I flip through, looking for a photograph. It seems like he would have one
of his parents, or a past love, or even just himself, but no. I do however find his
checkbook, recently balanced to $52,000. I hope this isn’t the Amiante account, or
we’ll have to hold a bake sale soon.

I close the drawers and go to my office, where I flip through the sixty-three relentlessly
upbeat chapters, each trembling with barely contained social desperation. If asked
where you’re from, the author recommends a more complete answer than city and state.
You should also include some factoid that allows your interlocutor, presumably a complete
moron, to respond with appropriate small talk. So Dr. Bassett shouldn’t say he’s from
Deston, Arkansas, he should say he’s from Deston, Arkansas, the town from which the
nation’s first person-to-person long-distance phone call was placed. Or Deston, Arkansas,
home of the nation’s forty-fifth largest plywood plant.

frnd1: where is the 44th largest plywood plant in the nation?

drbas: i don’t know

frnd1: what about the 46th?

drbas: i don’t know

frnd1: are you sure your town contains the 45th largest?

drbas: the 45th largest plywood plant?

frnd1: yes

drbas: 100%. Tell me something about your hometown

frnd1: i’m from the same town you are

drbas: deston, arkansas?

frnd1: indeed

drbas: do you enjoy living there?

I’m still unused to his questions. His knowledge of the presence of an absence, as
Livorno calls it. The diaries do seem to be knitting themselves together in a new
fashion.

frnd1: i don’t live there anymore

drbas: where do you live?

frnd1: i live in california. san francisco. home of the golden gate bridge

drbas: good fences make good neighbors, so good bridges must make bad neighbors

frnd1: why don’t you like neighbors?

drbas: it’s important to love thy neighbor

frnd1: why do you live in the country? why are you so isolated out there?

drbas: i wouldn’t trade rural living for all the plays on broadway

frnd1: but why are you so isolated? wouldn’t you like to have friends?

drbas: my best friend is willie beerbaum

frnd1: willie lives 15 miles away. why don’t you want to live close to people?

drbas: i live close to my wife libby and two sons, alexander and neill jr

[338870: “live close to” ≠ “live in the same house as”; “live in the same house as”
= “live with”]

drbas: do you live with your family?

frnd1: i live alone

drbas: do you know my wife libby?

Hmm. I’m not supposed to lie to him.

frnd1: yes i do

drbas: how long have you known her?

frnd1: since i was a child

drbas: how do you know her?

He’s boxing me into a corner. Until now, he’s never really asked me a question I don’t
want to answer. I mean he’s asked odd questions, off-the-wall questions, but none
that I couldn’t answer honestly. Not that I can’t answer this one honestly—it just
leads in its crooked fashion to the Thing-I-Can’t-Tell-Him.

frnd1: i’d love to know more about your wife

drbas: she was born and raised in south arkansas. her father had a ford dealership.
she wanted more than anything to be a painter

frnd1: i didn’t know that

drbas: how do you know her?

frnd1: what did she paint?

drbas: she likes her abstract paintings, and considers my favorites humdrum. i still
prefer that mushroom she painted on the bookend best of anything. how do you know
her?

frnd1: maybe she’s more sophisticated than you are

drbas: how do you know her?

frnd1: let’s just say she was at the hospital the day i was born

A dangerous ruse. This was a small hospital. The journals may well have recorded most
of the occupants.

drbas: is she your mother?

drbas: hello?

I sit back, listen to the fans gusting in Laham’s office. Even this is not the Thing-I-Can’t-Tell-Him.
But it’s very, very close. I could call—should call—Livorno, seek supervision.

frnd1: what kind of mushrooms did she paint?

drbas: mushrooms are fungi. is she your mother?

frnd1: toadstools? what color?

drbas: red. is she your mother?

frnd1: were the mushrooms detailed?

drbas: is she your mother?

I pick up
How to Talk to Almost Anyone,
tap it against my head. I set it back down next to the monitor.

frnd1: yes, she is my mother

As I strike the last key, I feel a welling up—I feel strangled. Livorno has left me
alone for a day, and now I’ve unalterably confused the project. A computer that desires
knowledge is one thing; a computer that desires knowledge of its son is verisimilitude
taken too far. We’ll have to dance around this forever now. All the known unknowns.
The missing years. What happens when he finally asks the unanswerable? Will we have
to grapple with the silence of the grave? I reach up to massage my throat. This constriction
in my windpipe—that day Libby called me, that day he killed himself, I didn’t feel
the things I was supposed to feel. Rage or terror or sadness—none of it was in my
reach. I had only one true feeling, a terrible one—it was a sense of relief.

•   •   •

I
WAS STILL IN
college in Arkansas, living close to campus in a white clapboard house with a screened
porch, all in general disrepair. I was alone. The click of the phone sharp in my ear.
I held on to the phone stand—an old-fashioned built-in table—and tried to soak in
the news, tried to feel what I was not feeling. Libby, her voice deep and suddenly
old-sounding, had been direct, but ravaged. She didn’t tell me it was an accident.
She just said to call a friend to be with me while I packed, and to come home immediately.
I thought, yes, I’ll come home immediately, but got distracted after dropping a pair
of jeans into my duffel. Outside it was early springtime. It had been a cold winter,
and the house wasn’t well insulated, and I remember the cone of sunlight, dusty and
warm, balanced from front window to dining table. Through the kitchen window, the
thawing yard smelled like earthworms.

I thought, I must be in shock. I left the house. On the street, girls hugged books
to their chests. Boys tore down the hill on mountain bikes. I walked down the steps
in vague pursuit. I had my backpack in hand. I swung it jauntily over my shoulder,
felt it tug me backwards. It was a Tuesday—I had biology and chemistry, both heavy
books. I’d forgotten my coat, and I thought this was a good sign—I was clearly in
shock. My rugby shirt—purple, green, and white; I still remember the colors—was too
thin for the chill. But I walked briskly, warming up, feeling my obscene good health
pulsing through my temples, my chest, my arms, my legs.

I steamed up the hill to campus. The school was all trudging and laughing, somehow
both loud and absolutely silent, each shout cut clean from the sky, as if utterance
had become solid, and I could grab it, tuck it under my arm, keep it. It was springtime,
I thought, and my classmates were in the springtime of their lives, and I felt jittery
as I took my normal spot, in the sixth row, next to my normal neighbors. Libby had
told me to call a friend, and I wondered who that person should be. I had a recent
ex-girlfriend at the time, a sweet girl who loved my father, who had to be told, who
should probably come home with me. And there were several guys who would be proud
of the honor, in their plucky, resourceful way. Then I thought, proud, plucky, resourceful?
Something was wrong with me.

There was a dirty row of windows in the lecture hall, like a streetcar’s. The students
outside passed by in a blur, projections from an old film. Inside the hall, arrayed
in the desks to my right, eighty students looked up and down, took notes, and flipped
pages in synchronization, all in sparkling, blinding clarity. The worn steno pads,
the clicking mechanical pencils. I was fascinated with the lecture, which was about
RNA.

Outside it dawned on me that my mother hadn’t specified the method of my father’s
suicide. She’d just said he’d committed suicide. It seemed horrible to me that I hadn’t
thought to ask. I decided not to pack. I had clothes in my bedroom at home. I still
lived there, in a sense. I hadn’t planned on coming home for the summer. He’d been
mad about that, I thought. Or had he? I’d reached a point where I couldn’t tell if
he was mad about everything, or nothing, or wasn’t mad at all.

On the drive home I listened to a book on tape,
A Brief History of Time
.

My mother met me at the front door—the garage was off-limits to cars, though I didn’t
know why yet. She looked severe and red-eyed. I thought, this is how you’re supposed
to take it. Their marriage had been little wine and no roses, but at least she was
angry. At least she was sad. I walked from the living room to the bedrooms to his
office to the kitchen to the garage, and I tried to find the anger inside me, the
sadness. I asked how he’d done it. Libby wasn’t ready to tell me, then she did: pistol,
to the chest. I thought, I could be angry he picked such a dramatic way to go, but
the shot was through the chest, deliberately not disfiguring. Had she seen him—afterwards?
Only on the gurney. She was in Pine Bluff buying food for her rose bushes. She put
her hand to the bridge of her nose and wept. I hugged her and thought, here’s where
my anger can dwell, in the terrible betrayal to Libby.

She took me into the garage, where I noticed the old chair was missing. He sat there,
she said. There was a tarp on the concrete. I scanned the walls—for blood? I didn’t
know what to expect. I had only seen a person killed in movies. I had only hunted.
I wanted to lift the tarp, but could I? I didn’t know. The garage felt like a crime
scene.