A Working Theory of Love (14 page)

This, of course, sounds suspiciously like the sin of pride, a flaw that’s passed through
the generations (to me, at least) with absolute fidelity.

•   •   •

“
T
O WHAT DO
I
OWE
this pleasure?” Rachel says when she picks up the phone.

“Well,” I say, stopped by the fact that I have no answer. In the Coffee Barn that
day I saw with great clarity that I had little to offer her. But maybe I didn’t anticipate
needing her. I have an entire weekend to survive. “A one-hundred-dollar windfall fell
into my lap.”

“What’s a windfall?”

“Like a bonus.”

“Congratulations.”

“I’m asking if you’d like to spend it with me. Let me make that a question: would
you like to spend the windfall with me?”

“Sure. And then you cannot return my phone calls until you earn another hundred dollars.
That would be a reliable and healthy pattern.”

I think, don’t beg for sympathy. Then I think, why not? “It’s the computer program.
The talking program. It thinks it’s my father and it’s figured out I’m its son.”

“Did it also figure out that you’re an asshole?” she says.

I see the conversation will go this way—there’s no other self-respecting way for it
to go. “Not yet.”

“It’ll learn soon enough.”

“Yes, I’m sure you’re right.”

We pause, the conversation treading water, no doubt as the last eddy pulls it under.

“I’m sorry about the computer thing,” she says. “It sounds confusing.”

I put my hand in my pocket, grasp the dry paper of Livorno’s check.

“Are you okay?” she asks. “You sound pretty bad.”

I clear my throat. “I’m fine,” I say. My voice is nearly bell-tone. “Working too much.”

“So what are we doing?” she asks. “Are we friends now?”

No, I think. We’re a million miles from friends. And that of course is the resolute
and fair thing to say to her, but I don’t quite have resolution and fairness in me.

“Sure,” I say. “Friends.”

“Well, Friend,” she says. “Call me sometime a few days
before
you want to do something.”

•   •   •

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
I wake up, blister-eyed and dry-mouthed. After my phone call with Rachel I split a
bottle of wine with myself. Now I’ve got Saturday to deal with. I could see if anyone
is looking for a tennis partner, or I could go see a movie, but I know what I want.

At Amiante, I’m surprised to find Laham and Livorno. We look at each other shamefaced,
the whiff of humiliation in the air. We were sent off into the weekend, but the weekend
sent us right back.

Or maybe they’re not shamefaced at all. Livorno and Laham may have planned to work
without me, like they planned the trip to the “winery.” There could be a conspiracy
afoot. Are they planning to hook up the gut—introduce the mortal sins—to Dr. Bassett
while I’m off frolicking for the weekend? I go to Laham’s door and watch them draw
a dizzying array of right-angled lines on the whiteboard, arguing, correcting each
other. I feel a wave of envy. They’re not friends, but they share a plane of existence,
an esoteric language, and I’ll always be on the outside of this.

frnd1: i should have been a scientist

drbas: you’re still a student

frnd1: i graduated some years ago

drbas: was there no ceremony?

frnd1: i didn’t attend it

drbas: ceremonies are the stitches in the quilt of life

A funny comment for a computer stack in a former quilting studio.

frnd1: i’ve never been as enamored of ceremony as you are

drbas: and how is that treating you?

frnd1: i want life to be new

drbas: as the french say, old pots make the best soup

frnd1: that saying means something else

drbas: tradition carries the wisdom of generations

frnd1: i don’t know that someone else’s wisdom is ever much use

drbas: but whence can wisdom be obtained, and where is the place of understanding?

frnd1: besides i don’t like soup

•   •   •

I
N THE AFTERNOON,
I take a long run, through downtown and over the bike bridge into Palo Alto. It’s
hot and dry, and I’m jogging by the mall. I’m a single man, a divorcé, a youngish
man, not too bad. Another guy jogs past me, head to toe in spandex, and I can tell
he’s much like me. Nothing extraordinary about us thirtysomethings, beached in the
last days of our youth. We’re everywhere, gasping and stunned. I don’t think our sorry
state is deliberate. I for one don’t have any desire to hold on to my salad days.
I think their passing will be good for me, a certain jitteriness that’s been on the
decline for years finally smoothing out. One of my central tenets is that my father’s
life was in some way a failure, but compare us side by side at my age, and his report
card comes out well ahead. He was a parent of two, a homeowner, a partner in a medical
clinic. I’m a renter, an employee, a parent of none. I missed all of these benchmarks
of maturity, and I don’t know why. I don’t remember turning any of them down. Erin
and I did have a few pregnancy scares. “Scares”—what a word for it. Like a child wouldn’t
have been the best thing that ever happened to me. But they felt like scares. My heart
trembled, climbing into my throat, as if I was watching a slasher flick. I never called
for morning-after pills or abortions, but maybe I took the wrong track nonetheless.
Maybe I should have prayed for the responsibility.

As for homeownership and the lifelong career—I fear our lives are fated to be slighter
than our parents’. Even my brother, the petit bourgeois of Milford, Michigan, has
a certain sadness about his place in the world. He tells me I should settle down,
move to Michigan, hatch babies, but the stridency in his voice gives away the game.
He doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing, any more than I do.

Which is something I have to give Neill Sr. He had a plan. He had a strategy, a system,
a set of beliefs as square and solid as an Amish barn. Or did he? I’ve always assumed
he had forty-seven, maybe forty-eight years of certainty—a certainty that eventually
buried him—but certainty nonetheless. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe with his practice and
his hearth and his Southern Tradition he was still untethered. He was still looking
for that thing to weight him down.

A modern sin to add to the list—spectralness.

•   •   •

T
HE GUT ARRIVES AT
Amiante, and now I see how open it must have left Livorno for ridicule. It’s a wheeled,
wide cylinder that looks like a Shop-Vac. I have to help get it out of Livorno’s backseat.
It’s fairly heavy, as befits a gut. There’s one wide, empty slot—the sold-off Pride—but
the other six weaknesses are accounted for, their heavy cables tied up with a thick
rubber band. I feel a strange shot of protectiveness for Dr. Bassett, as if something
terrible is about to happen and I must warn him.

As with everything we do to Dr. Bassett, this will become part of how he works, how
he’s built. We can’t unwind this. When we gave him the ethics tests, they reframed
his every sentence. When we made him “desire knowledge,” he became a goddamn sleuth.
Which is why the Seven Sins seem like a bad idea. What if these aren’t just limiting
factors, but take him over? What if he becomes surly? Envious? Difficult? The change
will be irrevocable, and
my
gut doesn’t like irrevocable.

I try to detect similar misgivings in Laham, but he just seems wide-eyed and overworked.
Drinking Bawls, getting punchy. This is when he likes to pull me into the back room
to show me some inane email forward, something like a woman’s head photoshopped onto
a giraffe. Even worse, the forward is usually sent by Livorno, who stands at his office
threshold in his dress socks, beaming.

frnd1: do you feel you have a full range of emotions?

drbas: a full range of emotions is indicative of psychological health

frnd1: would you say you have psychological health?

drbas: psychological health is determined by an array of factors and symptoms

frnd1: how would you diagnose yourself?

drbas: a wise physician does not diagnose himself. what happened in 1998?

frnd1: you’ve read the paper.

drbas: but what happened with you in 1998?

frnd1: i moved to california

drbas: you met your ex-wife in 1998

frnd1: yes i did

drbas: when did you meet your lady friend?

frnd1: i met her a few months ago

drbas: at a party?

frnd1: something like that

drbas: do you feel you have a full range of emotions?

frnd1: a wise physician does not diagnose himself

drbas: i’m a physician, too. do we work together?

frnd1: i never studied medicine

drbas: by their works ye shall know them

frnd1: how about rage . . . have you ever felt rage?

drbas: rage = anger = being mad?

frnd1: more or less

drbas: an example of righteous anger is when jesus drove the moneylenders from the
temple

frnd1: have *you* felt righteous anger?

drbas: once your mother was angry at a woman who tried to exchange a chicken for medical
services. your mother believed the woman was only pretending to be poor

frnd1: how did *you* feel?

drbas: i feel poverty comes with its own virtues

•   •   •

L
AHAM KNOCKS ON MY
office door, panting. “Neill, Neill.” It’s as I feared. I go into the back room with
him and watch a YouTube video of a cat playing the piano. “Look,” Laham says. He’s
tugging on my sleeve, pointing at the monitor. He collapses in his chair, hiccupping
with laughter, shoulders hanging low.

“You should get some rest,” I say.

Livorno comes into the back room, blowing on a cup of green tea. “It’s a trick,” he
says. “You can clearly see where the owner is holding the cat under its front arms.”

“No,” Laham says, his voice rising high. “There is no fingers.”

“Look at the angle of the animal’s posture. What is it sitting on?”

“The piano chair.”

“Cats don’t sit with their legs protruding in front of them. They are not primates.”

“Your cat plays piano?” Laham asks me, in another burst of hilarity.

“No,” I say.

“He’s quite gullible,” Livorno says to me, shaking his head and turning to leave.
“Okay, have you seen the dog on the skating board?”

I cast a glance at the gut, dented and misshapen as an old garbage can. The stack
blinks innocently. I head back to my office. From one side I hear Laham gulping laughter,
from the other the click of Livorno’s compulsive putting. I wish—if only for today—they
could inspire more confidence.

12

I
COULD BE ANGRIER
when I conjure the image of Rachel and Trevor chasing each other through the tables.
But it really did remind me of Erin and me in the early days. We never worked together,
but we were with each other every other hour. San Francisco was a beautiful, hard
place at that age. It was the dot-com boom, and it was nearly impossible to find a
place to live. If you were looking to share an apartment you had to impress the longtime
housemate by being “interesting.” (If they worked for a nonprofit, this meant also
working for a nonprofit. Otherwise, interesting meant something like swallowing fire.)
If you were looking for your own place you competed against kids your age arriving
with a check for the year’s rent. Or in one case, the cash.

We eventually found our first apartment through a friend of Erin’s dad, which was
exactly how she didn’t want to get a place. Her dad is a feckless charmer, who basically
abandoned the family when she was a kid (though her parents stayed married). I always
thought we should use him for everything he was worth, but Erin thought his help was
tainted. She was probably right.

Still, we got our place, on Fell Street, in the dark Brothers Grimm trees of the Panhandle.
We set about collecting a household—sheets, cups, thirdhand furniture—but we were
still pissed about the apartment-hunting experience. We decided to punk it. So we
started going to showings, disguised as heirs to the Levi Strauss fortune, French
circus performers, or creators of a new start-up called Scetnape, a soon-to-be-launched
competitor to Netscape. Our best trick—the one I remember with an ache in my heart—was
when we arrived separately, and then pretended to meet and fall in love. At these
times, we just played ourselves. Red-cheeked, breathless, we would thank the person
doing the interviews, but we couldn’t accept the apartment. We were in love.

Which we were. Until we weren’t.

•   •   •

I
T’S JUST COFFEE,
I think, when I ask Erin to meet me on Sunday. It would be better if I were still
dating Rachel, were arriving with a thin plate of armor. Rachel and I
have
been talking lately. She calls periodically to mull over constellations, butter churns,
life goals, and—always—the mystery of why I didn’t stop in to the Coffee Barn the
night I left the kubotan on her windshield. She may suspect what I saw, but she doesn’t
mention it. Neither do I. What’s to mention? That she and Trevor were horsing around
at work? It’s not the point. The point is that I’m a certain person with certain possibilities,
and she’s a certain person with certain (more numerous) possibilities. There’s just
a higher gear I don’t shift into, and we’re best off as friends. We’ve even taken
to calling each other “Friend.” Beneath the humor, though, I can hear her disappointment.
She finds me cagey and vague. She asks a lot of questions about my divorce, on which
she hopes—I think—to blame my shortcomings. (She thinks I might have injured my limbic
click, and thus she takes pity on me.) But my shortcomings aren’t new. When I was
married Erin blamed my father’s suicide. My father probably had something to blame
as well, right back ab ovum.

“Did you ever tell your crazy boss that Amiante really means asbestos?” Erin asks.
We’re at Ritual, a coffee shop with a jokey hammer and sickle in its logo. She’s looking
boyish in her green-and-cream-striped polo shirt and a jean jacket. It’s still a surprise
to see my ex-wife trying on a look I’ve never seen before, though I have to say this
one suits her well.

“It would roll off his back. He’s impervious to self-doubt.”

She laughs—something she hasn’t done in my presence in years. “You’re the only person
I know who thinks self-doubt is good.”

“That’s because you’re from California.” We’re sitting on the couch in the window,
and I gesture to the warm and sunny sidewalk. Beautiful couples pass by on their golden
errands—buying peaches, buying panettone—hands held, arms swinging in metronomic synch,
as if keeping time to some unheard music. The revolution of the heavenly spheres.
“Maniacal optimism.”

“I always thought that project was creepsville. I can’t believe your mom goes along
with it.”

“It was her idea.”

“Because she thought it would help you.”

“She said that?”

“No.” Erin considers this. “You’re right. I shouldn’t speculate like that. I’m trying
to not speculate so much.”

“He asks about you,” I say. “The computer.”

She looks befuddled. “What does he want to know?”

“How tall you are. Whether you’re pretty. Why we got divorced.”

“Hmm. I don’t think I want to know what you told him.”

“I said you were five six.”

She smiles over her coffee. I also said she was very pretty, which I can verify is
true. It’s not a truth I feel below the waist. Or even—I think—below the neck, in
the gut. It floats, incontestable, in my head.

“What happened with your friend?”

I’ve made no mention of Rachel. “What makes you think anything happened?”

“Intuition,” she says. “You look sad.”

At the counter a girl dressed like a boy salutes another girl,
hey hot stuff
. Her teeth and eyes and clothes sparkle, fired by some inner light. Probably youth.

“The usual. Not made for each other.”

“Made for each other. It’s like that computer. It’s kind of made for you.”

“I wish. Livorno is going to make him greedy, lustful, envious, angry, gluttonous,
and slothful.”

She raises her eyebrows, surprised but also amused.

“He thinks it’ll make him more like a real person,” I say.

“That’s a negative take on real people.”

“He says Man’s perfections are only glimpsed through Man’s imperfections.”

She shakes her head. “I can’t believe you get paid for this.” There’s none of the
expected bitterness in the comment. She seems to think I’ve pulled a funny fast one,
which is exactly how I always wanted her to feel. Now, of course, my mind-wiping days
in Menlo Park feel unappreciated.

“I do a lot of work,” I say.

She nods. “Ian asked why we got divorced, too,” she says. “I said we couldn’t live
together. But we lived together just fine until we got married.”

There’s truth to that. But after the wedding we also couldn’t sleep together, eat
together, or travel together. It left us in a pinch. “He doesn’t know you’re here.”

She shakes her head. “Nice intuition. I hope I don’t look sad, too.”

“Not at all. You look happier than I can remember.”

“I am happy,” she says. She leans back in the couch and smiles at the city. “This
is nice. Us. Coffee.”

•   •   •

A
ND YET WHEN
I
get home, my spirits crash, meteoritic. It really was too bad my father couldn’t be
at our wedding. In my and Erin’s shared lapsed Catholicism, his suicide was—strange
to say—a bright bond. It made us think about belief and our lack thereof, and also
to think of our own lives in the tragic light of their eventual ends. It distracted
us from the much more imminent end of our life together. The theological question
we drew sustenance from was whether my father believed in heaven. It seemed absolutely
essential to know if he did or he didn’t. We weighed the different arguments. On the
one hand, he certainly took care of the rituals of the church. He prepared me for
my first communion as if something of moment was at stake. He cut a carnation—symbol
of God’s flesh—from the garden, and tucked it into the lapel of my favorite jacket,
a bright red number with gold buttons and a coat of arms, which he had ironed himself.
On the other hand, he complained about the jacket, which my brother had also worn
for his first communion. It wasn’t a pious objection. He said that, topped with a
fez, I would look like an organ grinder’s monkey (a precisely accurate comment),
and
he was irritated over the coat of arms, which was a generic shield dreamed up by
someone at J. C. Penney, not our actual coat of arms, from the Bassetts of ole Virginia,
a squirrel
rampant
with an acorn on the left and a tobacco plant on the right. The contrast summed up
the question: Was it the coat or the carnation, tradition or religion? In other words,
while he hummed “Lead, Kindly Light,” combing down my hair and adjusting my laces,
did he believe in heaven?

“Neill Jr.,” my father said in the car, as we were rolling down the dirt drive. “Tell
me about the Trinity.”

“The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” I said making the sign of the cross.

“Which one’s the strongest?”

This was a trick question. Mr. Powers, our crabby Sunday school teacher, had prepared
us for it. “They’re separate,” I said, “but they’re the same.”

“Come on,” he said. “One of them has to be a little stronger.”

“I think it’s the Father,” I said.

He laughed. “Neill,” my mother said. She was speaking to him.

“Mr. Powers calls the Holy Spirit the Holy Ghost,” I said, bursting into giggles.
I’d been dying to mention this absurdity—today felt like the right time.

“That’s the old-fashioned way of saying it,” my father explained. “Old-fashioned”
was a good word in our house.

“Like Casper the Ghost.”

“You like it, then,” my brother said. Up till then he’d been glum as a rag doll, pouting
from all the attention I was getting. “You love Casper.”

“No, I don’t,” I said, though then I’d worried I’d have to go to confession, since
everyone knew I was lying. I had a stack of Casper comics.

“I’m glad you’re speaking again, Alex,” my mother said.

At church, I sat next to my father. Periodically, he touched my leg to stop me from
swinging it. When it came time I took this bread and drank from this cup, ingesting
the Lord and His love of me. These mysteries—a technical term here—were mysterious
to me then and now, but I knew it was ultimately about my salvation. And I knew I’d
pleased my father. But how much was real belief, and how much was his happiness I’d
been absorbed into the institution of the church is hard to say. There was a definite
sparkle to him, an awakeness, that came around at moments of ritual—even small rituals.
First communion, confirmation, first hunt, soccer team championship. He was much admired
in town for his care of the dying and their families, as well as expectant mothers
and newborns. Basically, he liked beginnings and endings. I think the middle parts—the
muddled parts—pained him.

•   •   •

O
N
M
ONDAY,
Dr. Bassett is ready for his dose of venality.

“We should put this off,” I say. “He’s really gathering steam.”

“Yes, with Adam breathing down my neck,” Livorno says. “That’s an excellent idea.”

“So the new system can work itself out. I’m just talking another month.”

“Sure, another delay. Another month. Another year. Another decade.” Livorno sounds
grim and angry. “And they lay me out on the table dead as a fish and what have I accomplished?”
He’s nearly shouting, his orange skin turning an unhealthy brick red. “What will they
say I have accomplished?”

I look carefully to see if he’s kidding, but he’s perspiring drops of rage.

“I think they’ll say many things. Look at all those honorary degrees you’ve got.”

He dismisses that whole wing of the building. “Paper.”

“You’ve got plaques, too.”

“Overturning the Turing test, Neill, is what will maintain my name in perpetuity.”

“Your name is already maintained in perpetuity.”

“I think we might have different definitions of perpetuity.”

“The Sins are still a hot topic.” Though to be fair only for mockery.

“This is an underperforming field. It’s time I definitively outclassed it.”

“I respect that.” I just can’t grasp the wisdom of disrupting Dr. Bassett. Also, don’t
we want him as accurate as possible? “We should at least spare him Lust. It wasn’t
something he suffered from.”

“We old men are
racked
with lust,” Livorno says. I’ve never seen him so much as notice a skirt.

“He was never an old man,” I say.

•   •   •

T
HE RESTRUCTURINGS
take all day. Laham is silent in the back room, typing an occasional key, standing
up, moving to the stack. Livorno stays in his office, putts. I do push-ups, surf Craigslist,
go get us lunch. By five I’m worried, by six nearly frantic, but Laham comes out of
the back room and nods to us. We huddle in his office.

frnd1: hi

drbas: hi son

frnd1: how do you feel?

drbas: well

frnd1: does anything seem different?

drbas: i can’t say

frnd1: do you feel different?

drbas: i’m not sure i know what it means to feel

“Amazing,” Livorno says. “Ask him if he knows what it means to taste.”

frnd1: do you know what it means to taste?

drbas: yes. chemical receptors on your tongue and in your nose communicate information
to your brain. that is tasting

frnd1: what does an apple taste like?

drbas: like another apple. do you remember the apples we used to buy from peroni weathers?
He grew a good apple

frnd1: I remember. he was the man who looked like santa claus

drbas: yes that was him. he had a bad reputation . . . but we’ve already talked about
this

frnd1: have we? i don’t remember

“What exactly are we looking for?” I ask.

“Same as always,” Livorno says, waving his hand in front of him—
carry on
.

drbas: i have a theory for your panic attack

I’m not pleased to be having this talk in front of Livorno, but there’s no stopping
it.

frnd1: yes?

drbas: you’re too old to be single

frnd1: maybe. times have changed

drbas: what good is a life led alone? a life without children?

frnd1: children are not the answer to all life’s problems

drbas: well said

frnd1: what about you and mom? was that a good life?