A Working Theory of Love (16 page)

I play around on Toler’s site for the marriage-seeking, answering the questions that
my mother answered for Dr. Bassett. This time I fill them in for myself, to set up
a profile. But at the end of the process I’m out of luck. The site says it can’t help
me, but not to feel bad. A decent percentage of people are beyond help. I take what
solace this fact has to offer. There is something to be said about a shared weakness.

The dating sites are kinder, though, and on OkCupid I find a woman who self-describes
as a spirited, bored young SWF who likes going out on dates and maybe more? She’s
not in the market for anything too serious. This sounds promising. A light, positive,
possibly sexual friendship, a way to enjoy our dynamic metroplex. Maybe just the thing
to get me back in equilibrium.

Plus, I think I recognize her. She has the wide-spaced eyes and girlish good looks
of Toler’s assistant.

On the phone, she explains that she is not his assistant. She’s an engineer who works
for him, and that’s all she can say on the matter. He’s got her sewn up in a black
hole of a confidentiality agreement. (Livorno has me in something similar, but I doubt
he’d have the wherewithal to enforce it.) I call her Jennifer as we’re hanging up,
and she corrects me. Jenn. She says it in a hard businesslike way. It’s not a diminutive;
it’s an abbreviation.

Jenn is older than I thought she was, slightly older than I am. The advantages are
immediate. There’s none of Rachel’s existential seasickness; I can guarantee Jenn
doesn’t feel like an animal is about to take her over at any minute. She and I focus
not on who we are, but on what we’ll do. It’s an ingenious way to avoid the First
Date. All that talking and listening and listening and talking: college is wild, Europe
is beautiful, childhood is traumatic. Why haven’t I thought of this before?

We agree to go see the elephant seals mating at Año Nuevo on Saturday. She already
has tickets. I’ll pick her up at Le Boulanger on Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park.
The meeting place is a safety precaution, I assume. If I turn out to be a psycho,
at least I won’t know where she lives.

I know I’m not supposed to like Menlo Park. Death, despair, envy, and spiritual longing
must occur here at roughly the national averages, but there’s no trace of them. The
town is as clean and neutral as a model home. The downtown looks like a mall and the
mall looks like a downtown. This is why I’m supposed to dislike it. It doesn’t have
“edge” like San Francisco. What is edge? Homeless people disconsolate on the stoop
of your restored Victorian? That’s just ugliness, the way the world works, the ugliness
of prosperity and poverty. You can abhor it, but you know which side of the door you
want to be on.

In Menlo Park, everyone is on the right side of the door. Which is
behind
the door. They don’t have withered memento mori on the stoop. They’ve outsourced
poverty. I don’t see how this makes them worse people than San Franciscans.

So I have a warm feeling of correct expectations, of accepting-the-world-as-it-is,
of looking things straight in the eye, as I roll down Santa Cruz Avenue, the Subaru
nimble on the redbrick crosswalks. There’s no parking on the street, so I click on
my hazards and idle in front of Le Boulanger. A Lexus SUV and a Mercedes SUV wait
patiently in my rearview mirror.

Jenn emerges from the store, carrying two coffees in a cardboard tray and a paper
bag with pastries. Last night on the phone I ordered a latte and something with chocolate.
She’s treating me to breakfast. Another improvement—dating a woman with an income.
Jenn’s cuter than I remember. She has a sharp, upturned nose and dark, tanned skin.
A ponytail—too golden brown to be natural?—bounces out the back of her baseball cap.
She has runner’s legs, and is very put together in her safari clothes, a challenge
unique to turn-of-the-millennium American women.

“This car is
clean
,” she says, getting into the Subaru. I just had it washed, and the interior shines.
The business-faced immigrants at Ducky’s Detailing even vacuumed all the sand out
of my seat, the sand left over from the camping trip. The memory gives my guts a sharp
twist—Rachel against me, the moon overhead, the grass whishing. I take a deep breath.
The decision has been made. I won’t wallow.

“It’s no Bentley.” I push in the spring-loaded drink holder, which unfurls with a
servant’s grace. Jenn’s arms are long, olive, and dry. She smells pleasantly of some
herbaceous soap. She inserts the cups as I turn the car into a parking lot, making
way for the patient citizens behind me. We do the block, yield to an elderly woman
in a crosswalk, and then head down El Camino Real.

“Good joke,” she says. “But let’s make that the last mention of work.”

“Deal,” I say. I point at the cloudless sky. “It’s going to be a good day for seal
watching.”

“It’s not too weird that we’re going down to watch animals mate, is it? I mean, on
our first thing?”

“It’s not too weird.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself,” she says, drumming her fingers on her coffee
cup. She fidgets in her seat and then, with an air of resignation, reaches down to
check her BlackBerry. “I’ve been hearing about the seals for years and I wanted to
go down there. And I finally get the tickets and then you and I are talking and I
think ‘okay.’ But then this morning it seems weird.”

“That’ll be up to the seals.”

“Ha!” The BlackBerry is not only put away, but turned off. “Up to the seals. You’re
funny.”

“Thanks,” I say, though her tone doesn’t sound too complimentary. “Are you originally
from around here?”

“Sonoma, baby.” Erin’s home county—which would explain an aversion to humor. “Santa
Rosa. Go Eagles.”

“You might have known my ex-wife—Erin Talley?”

Jenn regards me. This is the first mention of d-i-v-o-r-c-e, but we might as well
get it out of the way.

“I don’t think so,” she says, her voice even and unrattled. “Name rings a bell.”

She wiggles again in her seat, working the iPod, emitting waves of good odor. She
smells like a bed in a charming B&B. I steer my mind toward the physical—imagining
the feel of her pelvic bone, the skin of her belly. She’s lean—will she have a six-pack
or a smooth expanse of flesh between pubis and sternum?

“I like her songs,” I say in response to a question, but I don’t know what we’re talking
about.

At Año Nuevo State Park a ranger welcomes us, tears our tickets, then leads us and
the rest of the animal voyeurs down a zigzagging path to the overlook point. Several
rock mesas poke from the water. On each a harem of female elephant seals lie motionless
as a bull serially rapes them. The bull, the ranger says, is four times larger than
the cows, exhibiting unusually large sexual dimorphism. The cows are no waifs, weighing
in at nine hundred-plus pounds, but the bull is the largest sea mammal before whales.
The stench is strong. A mixture of fish and vomit. Several men cover their noses with
the front pages of the
Chronicle
. Waves hit the mesas, shooting mist over the humping bulls. The droplets rain down
on us, like Nature’s own money shot.

“Cute,” Jenn says.

The seals are the color of rotten meat. Their noses hang long and lumpy, like an exposed
intestine. I’m not sure what’s cute about them, but Jenn quivers in their presence.
Maybe she’s into sexual dimorphism? I detect the anxious, long-legged excitement of
a girl around horses.

She’s a good idea, this one. Pretty, enthusiastic, employed, age-appropriate.

The ranger says they don’t know whether the cows mate with the same bull in consecutive
years. They’d like to put a collar on select cows and bulls, but there’s no money
for the project. The dough is drying up for such research. Besides, it’s no piece
of cake getting a collar on a horny six-thousand-pound seal. Everyone laughs.

A juvenile bull approaches the mesa. Stretching out his lumpy nose to bare jagged,
fish-stained teeth, the full-grown bull slides after him, emitting a roar like an
air horn.

“See what I mean?” the ranger asks. Our group applauds.

“That’s what I call an alpha male,” a thin man in a Le Coq Sportif jogging suit says
to his companion.

“He’s even better-looking than Eric,” she says, and they share a chuckle over this
Eric.

“What’s a harem?” a young girl asks her mother.

The ranger is waving a flyer over his head, but doesn’t explain what the flyer is
for. “The milk fat content of a female elephant seal’s milk is ninety-two percent.
That’s how they get such
shapely
bodies.”

“The little ones are more my style,” Jenn says, smiling at me.

“The beta males?”

“Yeah,” she says, nodding as if to a revelation. “I guess the beta males are my favorites.”

I watch the mist explode off the rocks, scattering a whirl of gulls. Surely she’s
not calling me a beta male. To my face. Is this some sort of sex code?

“Do you mean beta male like in an S-and-M sense?” I ask.

“S-and-M? Like
S
-and-
M
?”

“I’m just trying to figure out if you’re talking about me.”

“You?” Surprise pours down her face. “You, no.” She covers her mouth with her hand.
“He thinks I’m talking about him,” she reports to an unseen audience. “I’m not talking
about you. Oh, Lord. Not at all. I was talking about the seals. I like the little
ones, the cute ones. Ha!”

“Ha,” I say.

“Oh, Lord,” she says. “You thought”—she shakes her head—“I’m blowing it? I’m blowing
our first thing?”

Jenn’s posture is hunched forward, protective. This is a serious question, a serious
fear.

“Forget about it,” I say. “I thought you were communicating something . . .”

“Sure, I see that. I see why you think that. I’m saying beta male, you’re thinking—whoa.”

It’s hard to resist laughing. “Yeah. Something like that.”

We look back at the seals, screaming and humping.

•   •   •

“
I
T’S THE COAST
that keeps me here,” she says, as we cruise back up Highway 1. “I mean, in college,
on the East Coast, it was like no rocks, no PCH, no Pacific, you know. So as soon
as I can, I’m back here.”

I pull off at Montara Beach. In the trunk is a picnic I packed. Champagne, crusty
bread from Acme bakery, saucisson sec, a wedge of mimolette, some cherry tomatoes,
and cucumbers cut into octagonal slices. It’s kind of a beta male picnic. A sign that
my passionate days in the sack are behind me.

“This looks like a great spot,” she says.

“I like this beach,” I say. I pop the trunk and lug the basket carelessly, awkwardly,
as if I’m carrying my mother’s purse. I let Jenn spread the blanket. In a last-ditch
attempt to assert myself, I toss the basket roughly in the middle, hear a champagne
glass crack. I feel stupid.

“We can share,” she says. She holds her chin up, looking like a mischievous, triumphant
girl.

“Good idea.”

The champagne foams after its rough handling. I lick my hand, hold it out for her.
She holds my wrist, touching her tongue to the small bubbles on my fingers.

“You hungry?” I ask.

“I am.” She rolls onto her stomach, kicks her calves up.

“I’ll cut you a slice of cheese.”

“I’m going to start on these tomatoes.”

She puts one in her mouth, then one in mine. I puncture the skin, feel the acid shock
filling my mouth. She rounds her lips, shows the uneaten tomato, then begins smacking
on it like a piece of gum, rolling on her back and laughing ha ha ha.

“Excuse me,” I say, lying next to her. She eyes me, but doesn’t turn her head. I lick
my lips and kiss her, tasting for the tomato but finding only cool girl mouth, my
favorite flavor of all.

She lies completely open, inviting. I don’t touch her body, just watch her chest rise
and fall.

“I think you’re an alpha male who pretends to be a beta male,” she says, giving me
a wonderful look. It starts with a swollen bottom lip and travels to upturned eyes.
The chin is tucked. It’s a mixture of hunger and appeal, possession and shyness.

“Better than a beta male pretending to be an alpha male.”

She moves my hands from her side and places them back on the blanket. “Let’s cool
down for a second.” She looks out at the ocean. “You pack any water?”

“No.”

“I don’t like having sex on the first thing.”

“That’s a reasonable policy. I hope you’ll consider an exception.”

“Those exceptions don’t usually turn out too well.”

“Yeah? What happens?”

“You don’t know? You must be very innocent.”

“Pure as the driven snow.”

“One,” she says, enumerating on her fingers, “we’ll never talk again, or two, you’ll
never leave me alone again. Or it’ll be normal but we won’t have that tension—that
nice buildup.”

“Buildup.” My heart stumbles here. A part of me has been running a self-congratulatory
tab, Rachel versus Jenn. Age, education, career, etc. But who’s to say what transpired
between Rachel and me wasn’t all my fault? What if we’d had buildup? What if we hadn’t
had sex right off, but had smooched a bit and exchanged numbers?

“Yeah, there has to be the sign.” Jenn smiles. She’s still watching the waves. “The
right moment, you know.”

I refill her—the—glass. I sit back on the blanket, eat a cherry tomato. If I’d called
off sex with Rachel we would never have spoken again. Our problem wasn’t buildup;
it was follow-through. And so we fell off track—it’s a universal tendency. It doesn’t
mean anyone did anything wrong. A relationship that doesn’t last isn’t a failure;
it’s just a time in your life that’s come to an end.

“Oh my God,” Jenn says, pointing. In the ocean, a fountain of water explodes up, widening
into a mist, raining down. “Whale.”

Another spray erupts a few hundred yards out, and then another. It seems to be three
whales, though the animals themselves remain submerged. The spray fires off again,
farther south.