The Theory of Attraction (5 page)

“This is stuff my mother used to tell me all the time.”

This was
so
not a date.

“Well, she’s a smart lady. Maybe you should have listened.”

“But she would never tell me
why.
You’re better at telling me why. She always said ‘just because.’ It was frustrating.”

Privately, I wondered if his mother even knew why, herself. Or if she had learned the hard way, and was doing her best to pass those lessons along to her son. Or possibly if growing up in a small town, and staying there most of her adult life too, had created a better environment for learning these particular life lessons.

I had a certain amount of sympathy for Ivan. Part of the reason social anthropology appealed to me in college was that I often felt puzzled by human interaction. Knowing the reasons behind the rules was comforting.

The food was fantastic, the conversation waxed and waned over the course of the meal. We did better when we veered off topic and started talking about movies and books and video games, worse when we tried to re-engage on the topic of humans and their strange social practices.

But then, on the way out the door, Ivan put his hand on the back of my waist, leaving it there for a moment as we stepped toward the valet stand and waited for the car. And he didn’t merely brush against me, either, he actually pressed his hand into the curve at the small of my back like it belonged there.

And then,
then,
he grazed his fingers back and forth across the fabric, sending fireworks down my legs and up my spine, so that I nearly swooned into him. It was the first time in my life I had truly grasped the concept of swooning, but no other term seemed to fit what I was feeling.

I could have sworn I felt reluctance from him when he finally, slowly, dragged his hand away. He let the valet hand me into the car, and he got in and didn’t say another word until we were parking the car at home.

“I’ll walk you to your…wait. No.” He held up a hand and made a little backing-up motion with his finger. “Rewind. Okay,
so I was thinking…
” He looked at me for approval, grinning like a kid, and I couldn’t help but grin back. I gave him a thumbs-up, and he continued. “I’ll walk you to your door.”

“You’re a quick study.” I started to open my door, but he stopped me.

“No, I’m supposed to get that for you. My mother would kill me. I do know that much.”

Chuckling, I waited while he rounded the back of his little hybrid car and opened the door for me. He offered his hand and I took it, then had to stifle a gasp at the renewal of that swooning sensation. It outlasted the touch, which was fleeting.

The night was sultry, typical for Houston in July. But the swampy heat was sweetened with an undercurrent of lush flowers in bloom, my roses and the neighbor’s jasmine. Cicadas creaked and trilled, masking some of the traffic noise, and the short walk to our back doors was soft and quiet and so much like a date that I had to bite down on my disappointment when Ivan made no move to follow me in after I’d unlocked my door and flicked on the kitchen light.

He waved and then disappeared into his own half of the duplex, and when I closed the door it felt like there was a world between us instead of a thin wall.

* * *

The next day at work I remembered the other point I’d meant to make with the movie, about context and expectations. I was getting ready to fire off an email to Ivan to that effect when I saw that he’d beaten me to the punch. His email jumped right in, as it always did, with no small talk or even a salutation.

You said you had ideas for a way around my difficulty talking to
idiot
s strangers. Perhaps that should be lesson four?

To recap what we’ve covered so far:

• ?  It isn’t a lie of omission if the listener has no need to know.
  

1. Different expectations for different contexts (I gather I’m to focus on learning the relevant expectations for this sort of occasion as opposed to, say, how to behave with drunken same-sex peers at a sporting event); determine and meet the minimum expectations for the setting.
   
2. Provide segue when breaking a long silence. Use stock phrases if necessary.
   
3. If I interrupt people, they will not want to give me their money.
   

At least he’d gotten the gist of what we’d covered so far. Although I was a little worried about stock phrases. I’d need to make sure he didn’t wander around the party, approaching random people and saying “I’ve been thinking…” all night. I might have to start keeping some sort of list of these ideas, actually, beyond the Post-it I’d originally assigned to the task. It was turning into a lot of lessons.

I was trying to bang out a reply when I saw another message pop up in my inbox. This one, too, was from Ivan.

If you arrive at my house between six-fifteen and six-thirty, using the back door rather than the front, the odds of your being seen are considerably reduced. Most of the occupants in the other three buildings park on the curb rather than in the carport if they are planning to leave again for the evening, meaning they will use their front doors to enter and exit. If they park in the carport, they may leave but will most likely do so on foot, again using their front doors. Nobody is likely to begin cooking outdoors until at least six forty-five or seven, which should give you ample opportunity to arrive unseen.

I will provide dinner. You will provide the instruction.

If I weren’t used to this sort of thing, I would be baffled and quite possibly offended. As it was…it was just Ivan.

I wasn’t too surprised that he was trying to control things. He hated things being out of control, out of the boundaries of his own expectations. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t widen those expectations a little. I firmly believed that a good deal of it was practice and willingness. And if I needed any motivation to continue believing that, I need think back no further than the previous evening, the quick smile and piercing gaze, the almost-caress on my back that made my knees wobbly.

So tonight, I decided, I would provide a lesson that gave him plenty of control.

* * *

“I
do
know what your project is. The point is to pretend I don’t. To pretend I’m from Mars or something—”

“There’s no evidence of intelligent life on Mars. And how would you have learned to speak the language?”

“Focus, Ivan. Focus.” I picked up a slice of pizza, gesturing with it as I spoke. “It’s an exercise. A hypothetical situation. You like hypotheticals, right?”

He shrugged. “They can be useful. I assume you don’t mean hypothetical in the scientific sense.”

“No, I do not. But that’s not important. The point is, you’re going to practice on me, as if I didn’t know anything about it. Bear with me, okay?”

“Okay.”

I munched on my pizza as he settled into teaching mode, describing the stationary laser beam that would one day be aimed at a spacecraft to heat a solid fuel, allowing the craft to move much more quickly and efficiently. It could be much smaller too, without having to carry its own power source. A pocket rocket, he joked. At least compared to the current size of spacecraft. It was the wave of the future, except for the complicating issue of the international space treaty that made use of lasers in space like that a bit of a problem. And it was actually pretty cool stuff.

He started to lose me, though, when he got into the “laser broom” and how laser ablation would one day be used to clear particles from the path of…blah…something…blah…

“Camilla, can you repeat back my last point?”

I jerked my head up, eyes wide, hoping I hadn’t really nodded off. “No. Man, do you really do that to kids who fall asleep in your lecture? That’s so cruel.”

On the other hand, he was standing right in front of my chair, arms folded, looking very stern and professorial. And a wee bit like an evil genius, a look I’m the first to admit I have a weakness for.

“I don’t do that in my classes, no. But I know you already know all this, so there’s no excuse.”

“Maybe I zoned out
because
I already know this,” I pointed out.

“No.” He seemed quite firm on this point. “In class, the kids who fall asleep are rarely the ones who already know the material. The kids who already know it bring other things to look at. They’re the ones who are surfing the internet instead of taking notes on their laptops, or who have a crossword stuck in their textbook where they think I can’t see it. The ones who fall asleep are typically the ones who can’t make sense of what they’re hearing. Nobody gets bored faster than the ignorant.”

Wow. I was amazed that he’d picked all that up. He seemed so oblivious to people most of the time.

“That’s pretty astute. So let’s work with that,” I suggested. “Can you figure out why I wanted you to try teaching me something? What was my point there?”

He was still standing there in front of me. He was in his work clothes, hole-free jeans and a buttoned shirt, sleeves once again rolled up. Today’s shirt was a very nice blue chambray with a white pinstripe. He’d untucked it, so it was rumpled at the waist. My fingers itched to smooth out those wrinkles, toy with the last few buttons and the more interesting stuff hiding beneath. Other parts of me itched, too, as I played the mini-fantasy out in my mind. And now he was staring, silent and impassive, as he considered my question. By the time he finally spoke, I was practically squirming in the cheap wicker armchair.

“When I’m teaching, I’m
usually
more patient. And because I’ve made a study of it in that particular setting, I’m more aware of people’s physical cues that can tell me how they’re responding to the information. So I can adjust accordingly.”

“You don’t have to worry about charming them,” I added. “You just have to educate them. Is there a reason you’ve never made a study of people’s reactions in general conversations? I’m only asking.” It seemed to me it would have saved him a lot of trouble and earned him a lot more goodwill with friends.

He shrugged and moved away, finally, taking a seat on the closest end of the couch to my chair and putting his feet up on the coffee table. “It doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s work. I don’t want to work that hard all the time. I do that in certain specific settings, and I even enjoy the challenge of it in those settings. But I want my friends to be smart enough to understand what I’m getting at. If people are dumb, it’s not my job to educate them all the time.”

“That’s another one of those things you really shouldn’t say out loud, you know. About people being dumb. Something to keep in mind. I think you maybe need to treat this fundraiser as a series of mini-workshops. Hear me out.” This, because he was already opening his mouth to interrupt. “That’s a strength of yours, that teaching mode. And in that context, you already know what to do. So bring that context to the party. Just decide what your lesson is going to be. Keep it short. Narrow it down. It’s an introductory lesson, they don’t need all the details. You’re much…softer, typically, when you’re teaching, than when you’re in other situations where you’re dealing with a lot of people. More relaxed, more accessible. When you were explaining Minecraft to me for the first time, for instance, you were very patient and handled my questions very well.”

“But you’re not dumb,” he countered. Which was big of him, since I was pretty dumb when it came to Minecraft, a computer game I’d never really gotten the point of.

“Thank you. But I think you need to get over this idea that there are all these dumb people. They may not be smart in the same way you are, but on the other hand, they’re all able to do things like go to parties without having panic attacks or boring people to tears. That’s a different kind of smart.”

“I have never bored anybody to tears. Not literally, anyway,” he added, before I could pounce on his response.

“Your assignment for tomorrow is to come up with your mini-lesson, so you can practice that on me. And if that goes well, later in the week we can try a field trip.”

Ivan swallowed his bite of pizza and raised an eyebrow at me. “For somebody who doesn’t teach on a regular basis, you’re doing very well, Camilla.”

Nobody else used my full name. Ivan had never used it much before, but seemed to be doing it all the time lately. I decided to like it when he said it. “Thank you.”

“Tomorrow is Wednesday, so we may want to skip it and meet Thursday. On Wednesday evenings I have a class, so I’m usually not home until—”

“Seven-thirty. Or seven forty-five if you have to stop for gas.”

He blinked, then scowled in what was clearly mock anger. “An interruption, Camilla? Some might perceive that as hostile.”

“Well played, Professor. Well played.”

“My schedule is really that predictable?”

For about a millisecond, I considered lying. But then I realized that with him, there would really be no point in it. He’d probably know I was lying, and it would only serve to bother him. “Yes.”

“Am
I
that predictable?”

And I nearly said yes again, until I caught some hint of an expression in his eyes, a tiny flicker of amusement and heat. Quickly suppressed, but for a moment it had thrown me off balance as much as his casual touch seemed to do these days. Could he possibly be…flirting? Did he even know how? “I used to think so, but now I’m not so sure.”

“It’s quite possible there are parts of my schedule with which you’re not familiar at all,” he said cryptically.

“Deep, dark secrets, Professor? That does sound intriguing.” It was hard to do sultry and pouty when I was wiping pizza grease off my chin, but I gave it the old college try and was rewarded with another of those spring-rose smiles. They seemed to be getting more frequent lately.

“If the secrets are deep and dark enough, they stop being intriguing and become unnerving. Take my word for it. And on that note, I think we probably need to finish up. My predictable schedule demands I iron a shirt for tomorrow and then brush my teeth.”