The Behavior of Love

by Virginia Reeves

“It’s enough to get started. I can come up with the rest.”

  He takes me to the dining room, introducing me to patients and staff along the way, smiling broadly, his hand on my back.

  Ruby is serving from the first two troughs of food; Stanley is at the next tray. “Pri. Tee. Lay. Dee,” he says.

  I thank him for the compliment.

  The food looks wilted and old, but I accept everything they offer: corn, green beans, mashed potatoes, meat in a gray gravy, a small bowl of cherry cobbler. Ed does the same, and we carry our plates to a table by the windows.

  “Is it strange that you haven’t brought me here before?”

  I can see Ed puzzling over the question, interrogating his options. “I didn’t take you to Howell.”

  “You weren’t the superintendent of Howell.”

  “No one else brings their wives to work.”

  I should know not to expect straight answers: Yes, it’s strange. No, it isn’t. He doesn’t offer them because he doesn’t know which one I want, but the problem is that he assumes there is one I want at all. Most times I have nothing specific in mind, so we both just stumble along blind and confused, making inconsequential remarks until we run up against something hard.

  When I asked Danny the firefighter questions, he answered without thought. I think of his uncomplicated honesty, which makes me think of Tim with the dead mother, no longer able to answer rhetorical questions.

  A yell breaks the chatter of the room, and I look toward the sound. A man and a woman appear to be fighting. The man has a shiny bald head and ears like trumpets, great curls of twisted horn. He is exceptionally tall. His face blushes crimson, and his voice is heady and vicious. The woman’s lips are off-centered by some kind of paralysis that’s claimed half her features, but her frown is evident.

  “That’s Frank and Gillie,” Ed whispers. “They’re one of our few romances.” He scoots closer to me. “They always have the same argument—she thinks he’s flirting with someone else. We used to intervene, but now we’re letting it run its course, trying to get them to new outcomes.”

  The woman is a full foot shorter than the man, wide in the hips and breasts. She moves close to him, her breasts level with his lower ribs, her face tilted toward his glowing head with its fantastic ears. I watch her raise her arm, and I’m afraid she’s going to strike this giant boyfriend of hers, but instead, she rests her hand flat on his chest. Even though noise still floats through the room, her voice is loud enough for me to hear.

  “You have broken my heart again,” she says. Then she drags her hand away and limps from the room.

  Ed is staring at Frank, who appears frozen in Gillie’s absence.

  “Was that a new outcome?” I whisper.

  “It was.” Ed looks fascinated. “She must have heard the line on television, but she applied it perfectly. It’s the most astute verbal communication I’ve heard from her.” His voice is gaining in volume and speed. “Just think about it—if Gillie can cross-apply words from fictional television characters to the reality of her relationship with Frank, then what else can she do? So many doors!” He is standing suddenly. “I’m sorry, love—are you all right here for a minute? I just have to grab Gillie and see if we can get some of this down. It’s exactly the kind of example I need.”

  “Go do your work,” I tell him, though it feels cruel for Ed to chase the woman down for an interview to fuel his theories. Her lover has disappointed her, and her heart is broken. What more does he hope to find?

  — —

  Back on the third floor, I raid a janitor’s closet that’s equipped with cleansers and rags, a mop and bucket. Though I usually hate to clean, I don’t mind scrubbing this old classroom. I wipe down the tables and chairs and countertops, the shelves in the cupboards and along the walls. I clean the inside of the windows, still sooty from the fire a decade ago. The day comes in, and the room brightens. I dust the windowsills.

  Ed did not come back to the dining room. He hasn’t come upstairs.

  At five-thirty, I go down and knock on his office door.

  “Come in!”

  Ed is at his desk with a girl who must be Penelope across from him. He doesn’t have time to get his thoughts under control, and I have the rare opportunity to see him raw. He looks caught. It’s clear he forgot I was here, and I wonder whether I disappeared the moment he left the dining room in pursuit of the brokenhearted woman, or whether I slipped away more gradually, fading completely only when Penelope walked into his office.

  I asked him once if she was pretty, this girl he always talks about, and he said not that he’d noticed.

  Penelope is impossibly pretty.

  “Laura!” He shouts my name too loud and too late.

  “Oh,” the girl says, “Dr. Ed’s wife.”

  Dr. Ed. Shared pet names.

  I’ve never been in a fight, but images arrive in my mind—my fist busting her nose, my ring lacerating her cheek, a clump of her hair in my fingers. Disgusting. And satisfying. The girl is standing and making her way toward me, and I’m worried I’m going to slap her instead of greet her. Maybe I’ll run. This must be what’s meant by the notion of fight or flight. This exact moment. I’ve never felt it so pronounced before, and now I am angry, too. How dare this girl elicit such a response from me?

  “This is Penelope.” Ed is shouting. The room is small. It can’t be taking her this long to cross to me.

  I am shaking her hand.

  I have not hit her.

  “Hello,” I say. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  She looks at Ed. “I hate the thought of you talking about me. What have you said?”

  “Only good things,” I assure her, because I am an adult, and I do not need to be jealous of a sixteen-year-old patient of my husband’s. Also because it is true—I hear only good things. All the time.

  “I’m ready when you are,” I tell Ed. Now I’m the one who’s shouting. “Lovely to meet you, Penelope. Dr. Ed, I’ll be waiting out front.”

  When I go, I accidentally slam the door, too jittery, but I don’t want to reopen it to apologize. I walk away quickly, the fight overcome by flight. I want to be outside. Patients line the hall, and I dodge them to get to the front doors and out into the thick summer evening. I breathe in the air from the river, fresh and muddy over the hot-grass smell. I see my mother’s sunken cheekbones, hear my father’s shortened breaths. They always visit when I’m upset, these wasted ghost-parents of mine.

  I sit on the top step and light a cigarette. I want Ed to come. I want him to apologize for abandoning me in this institution of his. I want to hear him say the girl is nothing, just a patient, one of many.

  I keep my eyes on my watch.

  Every minute that passes before he comes is time removed from the other side of us. I don’t know in what increments—months, years—or when, but I feel it going.

  Chapter 6

  There’s a half-ring of chairs in the common room, each holding a patient Ed barely recognizes—crossed legs, pensive expressions. Their heads are turned toward Penelope, who holds a book open for them to see. Others in the room stare, too, their hands quiet, the television low. Ed lingers in the doorway, spying from afar.

  “Can anyone tell me what form of writing this is? The type? Yes, Chip?”

  “Poetry.” Chip slurs the word, his huge lips and tongue pummeling the sound.

  “Good, Chip. Yes. Poetry. How do we know?”

  “Lines,” Delilah says. “Shorter. Big white.” Delilah is a pretty woman with the mental acuity of a five-year-old. When Ed sees her, he can’t help thinking of that other Delilah in her room over the saloon.

  “That’s right,” Penelope says. “There is more white space on the page, isn’t there? That’s a good sign that it’s poetry. I’ll read it now.” The room falls even quieter. Ed imagines the ghosts he semi-believes in, pausing in their haphazard flights, hovering near the ceiling, fixated as well. “The title is the same as the first line: ‘Like the Trai
n’s Beat.’ ” Ed listens to the rhythm of the language, not dimpled and squashed like Chip’s but fully bloomed, luminous as the first shoots of green in spring. The girl on the train is Polish, the swinging and narrowing sun lighting her eyelashes. She uses the ancient words of Ed’s babcia, his mother’s mother, tinged with ash and gray skies. His babcia often spoke in proverb: Jak sobie poscielesz, tak sie wyspisz. “You listen to that one, Eddy!” an uncle or aunt would shout. “ ‘How you make your bed, that is the way you will rest.’ ” Kropla do kropli i bedzie morze. “That’s right! You hear that, Edmund? ‘Drop after drop, there will be an ocean.’ You have to keep at things.” His babcia’s gnarled voice runs under Penelope’s poem, an orchestra of blended consonants, burly and deep, then suddenly sharp as a snapped twig.

  Penelope’s voice stops, and the ghosts continue their movement, tripping along the corridors to hide away someone’s file or take Pete’s phone off the hook. A few of the nonparticipants initiate conversations in their corners, move pieces on game boards, set dominoes in serpentine lines. The faces Ed can see in the circle look scared and confused.

  “I don’t know what you said,” Chip ventures.

  Penelope laughs. “Poetry can be difficult. Let’s start at the beginning.” Ed listens to her explain each word, each line. She asks simple leading questions and celebrates each answer. “Yes, Nancy! That’s exactly it. The speaker doesn’t understand the language, just like he doesn’t understand what birds are saying when they sing.” Those bird notes, a voice / Watering a stony place.

  “Let’s look at that,” Penelope says. “Describe a stony place for me.” She’s leaning forward in her chair, her whole body inviting feedback from her students.

  They all start speaking at once.

  “Hard.”

  “Dark.”

  “Not nice.”

  “Cold.”

  Gravelly, stern, frost-filled, dead. Penelope offers a few words, and the patients give others, all of them vivid and alive in the mouths of these people so often silent.

  And then she asks the most important question Ed thinks they’ve ever been given, something he’s never delivered so succinctly, eloquently, purely: “What are your stony places?”

  “My dad,” says Chip quickly. He seems scared to have admitted it.

  “The bathroom in cottage fifteen.”

  “Venison. It’s really deer meat.”

  “The shower.”

  “Re. Gres. Sion. Ug-ly. Word.”

  “When David takes my pillow.”

  Their answers are equally benign and poignant, and Ed has heard none of them before. Some he can solve; others he can at least introduce in one-on-one sessions. He can make sure Bill’s counselor never says the word regression. He can talk to Chip about his father, follow up about the bathroom, identify the problems.

  “Now,” Penelope is saying, “if the bird’s notes—and this woman’s words—can’t be understood, then what good are they?”

  Chip bounces up and down in his chair, hand waving over his head. “Oh, Pen! Pen! Me!”

  She smiles at him. “I see you, Chip, and I’ll let you answer, but does anyone else have an idea? Maybe someone who’s been quiet. Megan—maybe you want to tell us what you think?”

  A sweet, slow thing in her mid-twenties, Megan chews the inside of her cheek. Ed has never heard her speak. Hers was not a name on the list of potential reading group members.

  Penelope is nodding at her and smiling.

  “Nice!” Megan blurts, bringing her hands into her lap, clasping them tightly. “They are nice to water the stony places. Nice to make the stony places soft.”

  “That’s lovely, Megan. Yes. Chip, do you want to share your thoughts, too?”

  Penelope successfully paused Chip—a near impossibility when dealing with most of the population at Boulder. To pause and then resume is an advanced skill, a difficult one to master. But Chip sat quietly, his bouncing nearly contained, while Megan found her words. Penelope is a natural.

  Chip rattles on for a bit, and then Penelope closes the book and slaps her hands on her legs. Her charges copy her as though it’s part of the program. We talk about a poem, share our feelings, and then slap our legs. And why not? It seems a fitting way to close things down.

  “Should we do this again next week?” she asks.

  “Yes!” A chorus, along with more leg-slapping. The regular din of the common room returns, and it comes so quickly Ed questions whether he actually witnessed what came before.

  The group disbands, and Ed approaches.

  “I saw you spying,” Penelope says. He helps her move the chairs back to their respective tables. “You’re not very good at it. I’ve been meaning to tell you for a while now.”

  “You’ve noticed me spying before?”

  “You’re spying all the time.”

  “I’m making observations,” he says. It’s what he tells himself, too. I am simply observing my patient’s behavior so I can document her routines and help find a pattern. He hides because he doesn’t want to alter her actions by introducing the oddity of his presence. He doesn’t want to skew his data. Never mind that he often intervenes, unable to stop himself from rushing to her when she shows signs of an impending seizure. Sometimes he can get to her before she drops, and yes, there are times when he catches her in his arms before gently lowering her to the ground, where he turns her on her side and holds her jaw open to save her tongue, pressing his hand into her shoulder to keep her arm from sustaining new bruises. The girl is covered in purple swatches, blue and green-yellow.

  “Professional spying,” she says. “I see.”

  “That was incredible, Pen.”

  She looks ready to disagree but instead nods and smiles down at her feet.

  “Will you keep doing it?” he asks.

  She nods again, and they put away the last of the chairs.

  “Will you make some copies for me before next time?” she asks. “I think it’d be good for them to be able to look at it themselves.”

  “Of course.” He’ll do anything to replicate what he just saw. He’s building programs, and the reading group is a brilliant step forward for the institution. Proof of the work he’s doing.

  He wishes Laura could see that.

  He can still hear her angry voice on the drive home that first day he brought her to Boulder. “Oh, so your meetings with Pen are for the greater population? You forgot about your wife on the burned-out third floor of this haunted building because you were busy talking about programs? And the conversation was so critical that it took you twenty minutes to wrap it up? I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you, Doctor, but you’re not spending time with Pen for the sake of the institution.”

  “She’s part of the institution.”

  “Too big a part.”

  They rode the rest of the way in silence, and she closed herself in her studio as soon as they got home.

  “You ready for our session?” Penelope asks now.

  He looks at his watch. He wasted time watching the reading group when he should’ve been doing paperwork, and now Penelope is right—it’s time for their individual session.

  — —

  Ed and Penelope have recently started playing poker as part of her therapy. For bets, they use pistachios, a treat they both love. They respect the work it takes to eat one, the cracking and splitting, and agree that the scale is better than that of the sunflower seed. “Too small,” Ed says.

  “Right? All that work for such a tiny reward. Pistachios have heft.”

  They’d been walking the grounds during that exchange, Penelope joining him on one of his tours. Ed remembers her weighing out coconut-sized pistachios in her open hands.

  “The work you do actually matters.”

  “Exactly.”

  They’d laughed, and Penelope had nudged him playfully.

  Now she sits across from him in his office. “I see your four pistachios and raise you ten.” Penelope drops the nuts slowly f
rom her clasped hand one at a time, their shells rattling against Ed’s desk. He resents the impulse he has to reach out and catch a pistachio as it falls from her fingers.

  “Ten! That’s nearly all I have left.” Ed cracks a shell between his teeth, chews the green kernel inside. They always eat through their pots while they play, bankrupt by the end. He scoops a handful and drops them all on a pile in the center. “I’ll hold. You’re bluffing.”

  He’s homed in on Penelope’s bluffing face, and though the bluff itself won’t help with her treatment, the extra time studying her behavior will. She loses all conscious control of her expression with the onset of a seizure, and by comparing her lucid face to those moments, Ed has been able to identify the specific tics that predict activity: asymmetrical blinking dominated by the left eye; tightening and thinning of the lips, often accompanied by a clicking of the tongue; low eyebrows; smooth forehead.

  She shows none of that now and lays down a straight flush.

  “Damn it!” Ed has two pairs, aces and queens.

  “I’m watching you, too, Dr. Ed.” She pulls her haul of pistachios to her side of the desk. “You sit much taller when you have a really good hand, and you always twist the right side of your mustache when you’re bluffing.” She starts to separate the pistachios, arranging them in lines. Her voice gets quieter. “Everyone has their patterns.”

  He watches her fingers move from shell to shell. “What’s wrong, Pen?”

  She remains silent, and he knows to let the silence grow. To let it swallow her so that she’ll fight against its dark belly and emerge loud and clear. He passes her the handkerchief from his pocket—clean that morning—and watches her wipe her eyes, dab her nose. It’s the first he’s seen her cry, and he wants to lift the desk that separates them and throw it through the windows. He wants to kneel at her feet and tell her she’s broken and perfect all at once.

  She holds his handkerchief balled in her fist, her other hand on a pistachio—leader of a line, commander. “I’m not going to get better.”

  He lets himself rise and go to her side, turn the other chair to face her, and lower himself into it. He knocks the nut from her fingers as he takes her hand. “You’re going to get better.” He feels the dampness of his handkerchief. Their knees touch, and her nails bite into the backs of his fingers. “I really think the behavioral model is going to work—the reading group especially. And we’ll try another drug if we have to. I promise we’ll figure it out. I promise.”