Does Not Love

by James Tadd Adcox

  They pass the strange blue child around the room. Everyone kisses it, gently, on the forehead.

  “I thought this one was going to make it,” Viola’s uncle tells Robert, in the hallway afterwards. “We bought all these baby toys. We were pretty sure this time. Like we had this feeling, she seemed to be doing so well. And then when we had to take all those toys and things back… ”

  Robert’s mother and father, who live in Geist, a suburb north of Indianapolis, arrive at the hospital bearing beautiful boxes of expensive Chinese takeout.

  ~ ~ ~

  they give the child a name. There is a small ceremony.

  ~ ~ ~

  robert and viola go to the new grocery store that has just opened in Indianapolis. It is a wonderful grocery store, two stories, with a rooftop parking deck. They pick up kale and nori and a pair of grassfed steaks. “It’s a little too far to come regularly,” Robert says. There are beers in the cold beer aisle that Robert has read about on craft brewing blogs: ninety-minute IPAs, one-hundred-and-twenty-minute IPAs. Next to the refrigeration unit is a table set up for a beer tasting. A tall black man wearing a serious expression hands Robert a small plastic cup of beer. “It’s infused with basil,” he says. “I think it actually tastes quite remarkable.”

  Viola and Robert sit at the coffee and wine bar at the front of the new grocery store, drinking coffee and flipping through a copy of NUVO, the free weekly. There’s an arts festival at Eagle Creek Park.

  “Those are always horrible,” Viola says. “Some band playing like covers of Steppenwolf and a bunch of booths selling pictures of trees.”

  Robert gives her a look. “I don’t mean it wouldn’t be fun,” Viola says. “It might be fun. We can go, if you want.”

  They get lost, momentarily, in the vast expanses of parking lot, but soon orient themselves, and find their car.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s a sign,” Viola says.

  “What is?” says Robert.

  Viola makes a gesture in the air that means, You know. “We both know I’d be a terrible mother,” she says. “This is like God saying, Viola, honey, you and I both know you’d let the poor thing drown in a bathtub.”

  “I don’t think that’s funny,” Robert says.

  “Neither do I,” says Viola.

  That night they sit on their back porch and Robert drinks a glass of the quite remarkable basil-infused beer. “It’s kind of wheaty,” Robert says. “In addition to the basil.” The night is so clear through the trees.

  “Do you remember how things were when we first moved here together?” Viola asks. “When we were first married?”

  “In what sense?”

  “In a general sense.”

  “I think so.”

  Viola stands and walks off towards the little wood on the edge of their property. She stands between the trees, and turns to face Robert. Moonlight illuminates her face. “The laws of physics work equally well in both directions; what we interpret as entropy is, perhaps, only our preference for one state of matter over another. When you and I were first married, there was a great sense of possibility in the world. We were in love with this possibility, as much as we were in love with each other. Which is to say: we did not know what was to come. Perhaps we still would have married each other, if we knew what was to come. Perhaps we would have married each other in any case. Contemporary science teaches us that all moments in time exist simultaneously. It is imaginable that some other beings, beings greater than us, could look across points in time the way we look across points in space. For such a being, the idea of loss would be unimaginable. For us, however… ” Viola gestures, as if trying to capture something with her hand that she could not quite fit into words. After a moment she walks back, and resumes her seat on the porch.

  That night Viola sleeps fitfully. Robert keeps having to wake her up to get her to stop flinging her limbs all over the place.

  ~ ~ ~

  Viola’s aunt and uncle wave goodbye from the security gates of the newly remodeled Indianapolis airport, while Viola clutches a wad of tissues in her fist.

  At home that night, Robert makes linguine with peanut sauce, using three tablespoons minced fresh garlic, a half tablespoon ground ginger, one half cup honey, a quarter cup soy sauce, three tablespoons rice vinegar, a quarter cup peanut butter, and a good helping of chili powder to make the sauce.

  On television a man is saying, “That’s what I really like about this city, if you have an idea, you can just go out and do it. This is a city that is always looking for the next new thing.”

  Later, in bed, Viola pushes Robert away. “I don’t want to be touched right now. It’s okay for you to be nearby. But I don’t want to have someone else actually touch me right now.” What she cannot explain is the way it is overwhelming, how his touch is connected to the thing she is feeling right now. Robert of course cannot help feeling hurt.

  “It will be better later Robert.”

  Robert is quiet. Viola can feel the hurt radiating off of him like heat.

  ~ ~ ~

  viola returns to the ancient neighborhood public library where she works. Now a young FBI agent is there. No one seems to talk about him. He is a sudden, accepted fact, as indisputable as the shelves or the wheezing computers. Every once in a while he catches Viola or one of the other librarians on their breaks, and tries to talk to them about the secret law.

  “I feel like we haven’t done a particularly good job of clarifying our position, with regard to libraries and the secret law,” he says, “and if there’s anything that the Bureau hates, it’s needless animosity based on simple misunderstandings.” He is very charming. Yearning, Viola thinks. There’s something about him that yearns.

  Of course there have been news stories about FBI agents in libraries around the country. But it seems weird, she thinks, for there to be one specifically in my library, which after all is not even the main library branch in Indianapolis.

  Viola tells Robert about the FBI agent that evening. “He’s a slick fucking fascist,” she says. “Very personable. A fascist for the new millennium.”

  “Fight the power,” Robert says.

  “Robert I’m serious.”

  Robert looks up from his work. Robert is a “fiscal conservative.”

  Viola feels as if she has been handed a mission, now that the FBI agent is there. There are once more things in the world to do. She prints up a set of quarter-page fliers that say, “Do you know what your child is reading? The FBI might.” She begins distributing these to patrons. Because she’s a children’s librarian, and nearly anything in the vicinity of her desk immediately becomes covered in crayon, before long every one of the fliers she had printed up is decorated with a smiley face, flower, or shaky but recognizable dog, all of which, Viola feels, somewhat dampens her message.

  The branch manager asks if he can speak with Viola in his office. “Are you okay?” he says.

  “Yes. I’m fine. Thank you for your concern.”

  “You can take more time off if you need to.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You can’t just be fine,” Viola’s friend Elizabeth says, later, in the break room. They are waiting for the coffee machine to finish brewing. Like the library that surrounds it, it is an ancient coffee machine, without automatic shutoff, and takes forever to brew.

  “Yes, I can. I’m over it,” Viola says. “I decided.”

  “Aren’t there stages?”

  “Stages have been discredited by the most recent theoretical models,” Viola says. “The most recent theoretical models tend to view over-it-ness as a negotiation, by and large.”

  Viola pictures herself saying the meanest thing she can think of to Elizabeth, for no reason. She pictures Elizabeth crying and asking her, Viola, why she would say such a thing. Viola would shrug and say, No reason.

  You are completely unloved, Viola would say. Even your father who lives with you and your two dogs view you primarily as a convenience.

  The FBI agent f
inds Viola while she’s smoking a cigarette by the dumpsters behind the library. Viola quickly stubs out the cigarette.

  “I don’t really smoke,” she says, feeling suddenly guilty, for no good reason she can think of.

  “You know, I actually really admire what you’re doing,” the FBI agent says, taking a packet of cigarettes from his inside jacket pocket. He’s olive-skinned and black-haired, with lips that pout like an Italian model’s. He’s a couple of years younger than her, at least. “Though we are approaching it from opposite directions, both of us, I feel, are acting out of love for the principles of freedom.”

  “What are you doing here?” Viola asks. “This isn’t even the main branch in Indianapolis.”

  “I am a messenger of the secret law,” the FBI agent says. “The secret law operates on the periphery every bit as much as the center. The secret law, in fact, recognizes no such center. The secret law is infinite, stretching in all directions.” He squeezes off the glowing tip of his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, puts the ash out with the sole of his gleaming black shoe before heading back inside.

  Across the street from the ancient neighborhood library, a gang of African-American bikers hang out in the parking lot of a liquor store, attempting to stare down a group of young hoodlums who have begun to hang out in the empty lot next to the liquor store. Occasionally one of the bikers revs his motorcycle, as if in warning. The bikers sometimes come into the library to use the bathroom, because there’s no bathroom in the liquor store. They are always faultlessly polite when they do.

  “Is Dude your new boyfriend?” one of the bikers asks Viola.

  “Who?”

  “That dude who was just out here. Keeps giving you those looks.”

  “No, I’m married,” Viola says.

  “Well anyway I’d watch out for him. That dude has some bad mojo.”

  “Ricky’s always concerned about the mojo of things,” says one of the other bikers.

  “You can tell a lot about a person by their mojo,” says Ricky, sounding defensive.

  “The fascist told me that he admired me,” Viola says to Robert, that night. “Can you fucking believe that? Like maybe I’d swoon because some fascist tool told me that he admired my principles?”

  “Are you doing okay?” Robert asks.

  “I’m sad, of course,” Viola says. “I’m allowed to be sad.”

  “Well sure. Of course. I’m sad too.”

  Viola has an image of the two of them, her and Robert, clinging together, moving from room to room like that, making sandwiches, washing dishes, etcetera. “But I feel like the thing to be done’s get back to life as normal,” she says.

  ~ ~ ~

  viola pushes robert down onto their bed and straddles him. She is dressed in a blue t-shirt. Robert is still wearing his boxers, tugged down now to just below his cock. He can feel Viola push him inside of her, she is rocking back and forth. There is a moment where neither of them is thinking. Viola slaps Robert, grabs at his arms, slaps him again. Robert pushes her off and stares at her.

  “That wasn’t working for you?”

  “No,” Robert says. “You slapped me. I mean — you fucking slapped me.”

  “It just occurred to me. Like maybe you’d like it.”

  “No, I don’t like it. It fucking hurt.”

  “I thought maybe you’d slap me back,” says Viola, in a small hurt voice that grates more than a little on Robert’s nerves.

  “We’ve tried that. You said you wanted me to hit you, and I tried it, and you said you didn’t like it after all.”

  “You just seemed so…uncomfortable, that time. I thought maybe it would come more naturally if I hit you first.”

  “Well it didn’t,” says Robert, folding his penis back into his underwear and stalking off to the bathroom. When he returns, Viola has disappeared. He sits on the couch breathing steadily for a while, and then goes to look for her. She’s in the upstairs bathroom, with the door locked.

  “Viola,” says Robert.

  “What.”

  “Viola.”

  “I’m embarrassed,” Viola says, from the other side of the locked bathroom door.

  “Look, I’m more than willing to try things,” Robert says. “You know that. We’ve talked about it. But I like to be given a heads-up, that’s all. That seems fair, doesn’t it?”

  “I think I’m going to stay in here for a little while,” Viola says. “I’m not mad at you.”

  She doesn’t sound embarrassed, Robert thinks. She sounds upset. Robert can feel himself getting angry again, a rising motion, angrier and angrier.

  Robert, as a rule, is not used to being angry. He’s used to being level-headed. This thing that has been happening, where he feels like he’s put in a situation where he gets angrier and angrier and has nothing whatsoever that he can do about it, is a new situation, one that he is unfamiliar with.

  Robert considers the possibilities: He could break down the damn door. Breaking down the damn door could, to a certain manner of thinking, be seen as acting out of concern for his wife.

  “I’m considering breaking down the door,” Robert says. “I feel like that could be seen as acting out of concern for you. Would you see that as acting out of concern for you?”

  “No.”

  Robert goes to bed, alone. Robert buys new two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar running shoes.

  There’s a pattern to it, Robert thinks. He is running along 38th street. He passes the Indianapolis Museum of Art and then he is running on the sidewalk that follows the edge of Crown Hill Cemetery, final resting place of Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president of the United States; “Indiana poet” James Whitcomb Riley; Howard Garns, the inventor of Sudoku; seven vice presidents; and Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun. Also of course infamous criminal John Dillinger, whose grave is nearly impossible to find without a map.

  She gets upset, Robert thinks. And it’s like I can tell she’s about to get upset before she even realizes it’s happening, maybe even before I realize it’s happening. Muscle-memory, Robert thinks. My organism recognizes the particular signs of her organism getting upset. So much of what we know is purely physical, Robert thinks: we know so much in our bodies before we know it consciously. Well, it makes sense. We’ve lived together for what, four years now. And then before that knowing each other in Ann Arbor, another year or so. It is an almost Pavlovian response, Robert thinks. She gets upset and it puts me in this defensive crouch, where I am doing everything I can to calm her down, to make her less upset. And then when the situation is over, I get angrier and angrier.

  I don’t remember her getting upset like this in Ann Arbor, Robert thinks. Not in the same way. Or maybe just not towards me?

  Once I was famous for being level-headed among my friends. Conversations about me often mentioned my level-headedness in celebratory terms. But perhaps there is only so much upsetness that the organism can take, aimed at it, like it has a maximum amount that it can absorb before it is full. Full of upsetness.

  At the North United Methodist Church he encounters his friend Luis, also outfitted in running gear.

  “Didn’t know you ran,” says Luis.

  “Just started back up,” says Robert, jogging in place.

  “Those are some fancy-looking shoes, Guay.”

  “Brand new,” Robert says. “How is Cynthia?”

  “That place on her head is getting bigger. They’re still not sure what it is.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “She’s a champ. She keeps her spirits up. How’s Viola?”

  “Good,” Robert says. “Real good.”

  “I heard you two were expecting?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  They part ways and Robert heads north on Meridian. Robert repeats the word “expecting” over and over in his head, until it loses all meaning and becomes a sort of melody, keeping time with his footfalls: ex-pec-t
ing, ex-pec-ting, ex-pec-ting. The blighted storefronts near 38th give way to tree-lined streets and large, beautiful houses set far back from the road.

  ~ ~ ~

  “Have you thought about getting something?” Robert asks Viola. He’s still sweating from his run. He thinks about toxins, sweating them out. Do you sweat toxins out? Is that a real thing?

  “Getting something?” Viola asks. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, reading. There’s a light breeze from the open kitchen window.

  “Like to help you through this.”

  “I feel really resistant to the idea of drugs, Robert. I’ve talked about it with my talk therapist.”

  “What does she say?”

  “She says that drugs can occasionally be helpful in situations like mine, but that the choice is ultimately up to me.”

  “Well sure. Obviously.”

  “This is grief, Robert. It’s a process.”

  Robert takes a shower in the master bathroom upstairs, and looks for fresh clothes. They need to do laundry. There is no underwear left in his best underwear drawer, so he gets out a pair from his second-best underwear drawer. He sits on the bed in the master bedroom, thinking. Later, he returns to the kitchen, where Viola is emptying the dishwasher.

  “That was probably not the best way to respond, the other night,” he says. “Getting angry the way I did. I’m sorry about that. It’s just that we hadn’t, I mean… ”