Does Not Love

by James Tadd Adcox

  At home Robert shuts off the water supply to the bathroom sink and uses a crescent wrench to disconnect the water lines. He then disconnects the drain pipe and removes the sink from the countertop. He looks for the screws that should connect the countertop to the cabinet. Try as he might, he can’t find how it is connected. He re-reads the instructions that he printed off the internet. The instructions do not offer any insight as to where the screws that attach the countertop to the cabinet should be located. One would assume somewhere around the edges. Finally Robert just tugs at it in frustration. The whole cabinet comes away from the wall.

  “There seems to be quite a bit of water damage behind the cabinet,” Robert calls out. “Viola?” But she is not home.

  Robert looks up “what to do about water damage” on the internet. The results are not encouraging. “I’m going to have to replace this bit of drywall,” Robert calls out. He drives to the hardware store and buys a strip of drywall and a roll of fiberglass mesh and premixed joint compound and a drywall saw.

  Using the drywall saw Robert cuts out an approximately three-foot by three-foot square around the damaged section of drywall. “That’s strange,” Robert says. He goes to get a flashlight. “I can’t see the opposite wall,” Robert calls out, even though he’s pretty sure that Viola still isn’t home. He crawls through the hole, holding the flashlight beam steady in front of him, and finds that, once inside the wall, he can stand up. It’s an old house, Robert thinks, there are bound to be some surprises. Still, after living here with Viola for four years, you would think that we knew the place pretty well. Robert walks through the darkness, flashlight beam shining off into the distance, trying to figure out exactly where, in the home’s layout, he is. The air feels deathly still. There are not, as far as he can tell, any spiderwebs, there don’t seem to be any insects or animals at all. The ground is flat, featureless, and is the only thing he can see other than the hole in the drywall, receding farther and farther into the distance. Robert feels empty. The emptiness feels like a secret.

  “If I keep walking, will I find anything?” he says.

  “No,” says the emptiness. “This is the space reserved in every house for emptiness. It is a space that cannot be filled.”

  “Once I patch up the wall, this space will continue to exist,” Robert says.

  “Correct,” says the emptiness.

  “And this is the space that consumes all of our efforts to fix things, to make them right.”

  “Also correct.”

  Robert sits down on the featureless ground and turns off the flashlight. “And if I decide to stay here?”

  “You will be consumed in the emptiness. You will become part of it. This is already beginning to happen, as you have noticed. There is a yawning emptiness inside you at this very moment.”

  Robert closes his eyes, opens them, closes them again. There is no difference, of course.

  ~ ~ ~

  When Robert closes his eyes to sleep that night, the darkness that he sees is no longer darkness, it is an expanding emptiness. He tries to find the end of it, with no success. The further you go, he thinks, the more emptiness there is. It can just keep going, he thinks. There’s no reason to think it stops.

  ~ ~ ~

  “Prairie voles,” Robert’s friend Trey says. “Let’s talk about prairie voles.”

  “Okay,” Robert says.

  Robert is sitting on Trey’s slick black leather couch and Trey is sitting in the matching armchair. Between them there is a stylish black table and on top of the table is a little baggie of pills. The furniture and walls throughout Trey’s house are dark and give one the impression they were ordered, as a set, from a men’s magazine.

  “Prairie voles mate for life,” Trey says. “They do all kinds of really sweet and disgusting things for each other once they’ve mated for life, like for example grooming each other and making soft comforting prairie-vole noises to each other in their nest. This is because they have an unusual number of receptors in their brain for the chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin. Other species of voles do not have these receptors, and they have no problem leaving their mates at the first convenient opportunity. They don’t have even the slightest interest in grooming or making soft comforting noises to voles they’ve mated with. Now, if you were a biologist working with voles, and you turned down the amount of oxytocin and vasopressin inside a prairie vole brain, do you know what? Suddenly they have no interest in grooming or making soft comforting noises to each other either, and they just go wandering off to find the next available vole.”

  “I’m not even sure what a vole is,” Robert says.

  “Like a small rat,” says Trey. “They’re not especially charming.”

  On one wall there are pictures of Trey in high school in his football uniform and there is a picture of Robert and Trey’s entire high-school football team and there is a small photograph of Trey’s ex-wife and daughter. The daughter is four or five in the photograph, and has messy blond hair. The ex-wife and daughter live somewhere in California.

  Trey shows Robert the bottle of fortified pinotage that he brought back with him from his recent physicians’ conference in South Africa. He pours out two glasses. The pinotage tastes like fruit juice concentrate with undertones of paint. “A lot of people say that,” Trey says. “It can take a little while to develop an appreciation for its subtleties.”

  Trey talks to Robert about the potential adverse effects of the pills, which are currently in Phase II clinical trials. The potential adverse effects are point-one percent seizure, point oh-two percent neuroleptic malignant syndrome, three percent confusion, eleven percent dry mouth, fourteen to seventeen percent decreased appetite, four percent headache, five percent akathisia, seven percent other symptoms. “Those are all very low percents,” Robert says.

  “It’s a very safe drug.” Trey refills their glasses. He notes that the pills dissolve pretty much instantly in liquid.

  “I try to write my daughter letters sometimes,” Trey says. “Mostly this is at night when I’ve had too much to drink, but not always. I have, at last estimate, tried to write her dozens and dozens of letters, with no success. When I read what I’ve written, even the salutations seem wrong. ‘Dear Kimberly,’ ‘Dearest Kimberly,’ ‘Dear Kim,’ ‘Baby’—you can see how difficult it is. She’s just turned twelve, three weeks ago. She calls me every year on my birthday and we talk, sometimes for as long as an hour. Other than that I see her at Christmas.”

  Trey takes Robert into his office to show him his new humidor. “That looks quite elegant.”

  “Solid Spanish Cedar. A little computerized system keeps the humidity inside at precisely seventy percent. Manufactured by the German company Gerl Manufactur.”

  “I didn’t know you smoked cigars.”

  “I don’t, I just keep them because I like the smell. This is a Cohiba and this is a hand-made Ramon Allones Gigante and this is a Davidoff ‘Zino.’ ”

  “That’s quite a collection.”

  “Thank you.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Robert spends a long time staring at the plastic baggie of pills that his friend Trey gave him.

  ~ ~ ~

  I pride myself on being a good person, Robert thinks. Perhaps to my detriment. What good is my goodness doing? What good is it doing either of us?

  Robert gathers together a cutting board and a knife and some cilantro and an onion and places them all on the island in the middle of the kitchen. Viola is at work. Robert cooks some small strips of beef in a skillet. He places one of the pills on the cutting board and crushes it to a powder with the side of the knife. He wets the tip of his finger and touches it to the powder and tastes it. It doesn’t taste like anything.

  Robert gets down a wine glass from the rack that hangs above the kitchen counter and pours himself a glass of wine. He sips the wine and dices the cilantro and the onion. He checks the small strips of beef in the skillet, then gets some tortillas from the refrigerator and heats them in a pan on th
e stove. He sips the wine and waits for the tortillas and the beef.

  He thinks about the night in law school when he and several members of his cohort, all slightly drunk, drove to Kokomo, Indiana, where, they had been assured, there was a whorehouse right by the cemetery. None of them actually wanted or intended to sleep with a whore. It was like a big joke between them all, he’s pretty sure, though none of them would admit they weren’t serious. When they got to Kokomo they parked near the graveyard and got out cans of beer from the case in the trunk and wandered around, laughing and shushing each other. It’s a wonder they weren’t arrested. If they had ever found the place, if such a place existed, what would they have done? He supposes they would have gone inside, and felt uncomfortable, and each found some excuse to leave.

  The kitchen fills with the smell of beef and warm tortillas. Robert wipes the crushed-up pill from the cutting board into his hand and sprinkles it into the wineglass. He tops off the wine. The powder has dissolved completely. Once again, there’s no discernible taste.

  He puts the tortillas on a plate and tops them with the beef, diced onions, and cilantro, and carries the plate and the wineglass into the next room. On the television is more news about the shootings that have been taking place in downtown Indianapolis. All of the victims so far have been researchers connected with Obadiah Birch. Shots of empty downtown lots crisscrossed with police tape while the reporters talk. Robert changes the channel to a sports program about March Madness. A man Robert doesn’t recognize says, “Kansas doesn’t have a prayer this year.” Another man says, “Kansas does indeed have a prayer this year.” Robert finishes his plate of tortillas and stares at the swallow of wine still in his glass. He puts down the plate and takes the wine to the kitchen and pours it down the sink. He takes the baggie of pills from his pocket and puts them in the trashcan under the sink. He feels better. He rinses out his glass and pours himself some more wine and goes back to the den to watch the rest of the sports program.

  That night Robert watches his wife, asleep, and feels a great chasm opening between them. He thinks about unintended adverse effects, such-and-such percentage of decreased appetite, such-and-such percentage of dry mouth, such-and-such of confusion. He gets up from bed, quietly, so as not to disturb Viola, and goes downstairs and gets on his knees by the trashcan under the sink and fishes the baggie of pills back out. He looks at them for a long time.

  Instead, he decides they should go to Italy.

  “Italy!” he says the next evening, when Viola gets home.

  “What?” Viola says.

  “Italy! I just bought us tickets.”

  “When were you going to ask me about this?”

  “We can rent a small European car and drive around the countryside, taking in the beauty of the Italian landscape. In such surroundings our love cannot help but grow and grow.”

  “I just got back from medical leave,” Viola says.

  “É bella e piacente, l’Italia,” Robert says. “They will be understanding. They will, they will.”

  Viola thinks: Is there a fresh start for us, in Italy?

  Robert flies to Italy, alone.

  ~ ~ ~

  Robert writes to Viola from Italy:

  Today in a café on the river I saw a young woman of extraordinary beauty. She appeared to be studying mathematics — she had what looked like a textbook with her, and was shaking her head while writing out long strings of numbers on a pad of paper. The standard sheet of paper here is longer than ours, almost what we call “legal size.” It occurred to me that that extra amount of paper might make her computations that much more overwhelming, a page filled with even more numbers. Would she, mostly likely unfamiliar with our smaller American-sized paper, still somehow feel that difference? That tiny additional bit of overwhelmingness? But perhaps she enjoys mathematics, many people do — I myself feel generally comfortable with numbers, though I never liked those higher math classes where I couldn’t see any possible application for the concepts we learned.

  I have kept up my running here. Each day I manage greater and greater distances, and feel swelling within me a sense of accomplishment. Once while running in a piazza filled with birds I nearly crashed into a man selling dried corn to tourists. He ran after me for several blocks, attempting to convince me that he should be recompensed for the corn that spilled when I nearly ran into him. I argued back, as best as I could while continuing to run, and made signs of my innocence. I do not believe, to be honest, that he had spilled much corn; it was merely that he had taken me for a tourist…

  The Italian people in general, as portrayed in films and television, are of a warm and open disposition. Many of them want to discuss American politics with me, a subject about which I am I think reasonably hesitant. I have ventured far out into the Tuscan countryside. My high-school Italian, though rusty, has served me well. My rather more proficient Latin less so, ha ha.

  The world is so big. Even the tiny part of it that we see in a single lifetime is so big.

  Your Robert.

  PS. I love you and I believe you when you tell me that you care about me. What other choice do I have?

  II

  ~ ~ ~

  “I don’t want you to kiss me,” Viola says to the FBI agent. “That is a hard boundary for me, I think.”

  “No kissing,” the FBI agent says. “Anything else?”

  “Could you turn that light down a little bit? Just for right now, anyway.”

  “The light has only two settings,” the FBI agent explains. “On or off.”

  “Well could you turn it away, at least? It’s making my head hurt.”

  Viola is sitting in a straightbacked chair in a motel room in Danville, a town maybe twenty minutes outside of Indianapolis. The FBI agent has moved the motel-room desk so that it faces Viola’s chair, and he sits on the other side of it. He adjusts the light.

  Viola crosses her legs and tugs down at her skirt.

  “Do you like being humiliated?” the FBI agent asks. Viola gives it some thought.

  “In certain controlled situations.”

  “What was the time that you were most sexually aroused, that you can remember?”

  Viola tells him.

  “So not with your husband.”

  “I don’t want to talk about my husband with you.”

  “You don’t feel comfortable talking about your husband with me.”

  “I just don’t see why he has to be a subject of conversation is all.”

  The FBI agent handcuffs Viola’s hands behind the back of the chair. “Do you remember your safeword?” the FBI agent asks. Viola nods. The FBI agent slaps her. She cannot tell if he has an erection. She can barely see him, in fact, except as a shadowy figure just beyond the light.

  “Do you love your husband?” the FBI agent asks.

  Viola’s safeword is the word “safeword,” which she chose because it seemed kind of funny, or noncommittal, maybe. She works the edges of the handcuffs with her fingers.

  “I care for him very deeply,” Viola says.

  The FBI agent slaps her. “Please answer the question as it is asked. Do you love your husband?”

  “I think sometimes that I love him very much. At other times I am sure that I do not. The sureness of my not-loving him, at those times, seems to retroactively negate whatever love I once believed myself to hold, and I think to myself: I have never loved him, that was a mistake, I was only wanting to love him.”

  “Have you loved other men?”

  “I had a series of relationships before Robert, some of which felt at the time as though they constituted love. Looking back, I find it hard to believe that love was involved. Many of them, retrospectively, feel like they consisted of a certain mutual neediness.”

  The FBI agent holds Viola down on the mattress by the throat. There is some fumbling with his fly. Viola thinks: I am not supposed to help him with his fly, I am being held down, I am “at his mercy.” The FBI agent spits on Viola and Viola closes her eyes in ant
icipation of being spat on again.

  ~ ~ ~

  The FBI agent is living out of a suitcase in the motel room in Danville. The motel room has a bed with pale green sheets and a cheap-looking desk and chair. It’s all clean and a little sad. Viola tries to imagine what his actual home is like, but she can’t. Maybe he just moves from motel room to motel room, forever.

  ~ ~ ~

  There is an air of menace to the FBI agent. It is not exactly in the things that he does — or rather, if it is, it is hard to pin down exactly what those things are. Menace seems to adhere to him, as a quality.

  It is cultivated, he tells Viola. The air of menace is a part of the job.

  “That doesn’t make it any less menacing,” Viola says.

  “Is it a problem?”

  “No, I think I like it,” Viola says. “In a lover. I don’t think that I would want to live with it.”

  “I see,” the FBI agent says, then begins to sulk. He sulks greatly, while for example tying Viola to the motel room bed. He even sulks while having sex with her. At first it is funny, but then after a while it’s too much. He is temperamental, Viola thinks, not for the first time. He has a sensitive soul. The soul, perhaps, of an artist.

  “How do you cultivate it? The air of menace,” Viola asks, intending this as a sort of peace offering.

  There are ten basic methods, the FBI agent tells her, though of course individual agents are free to come up with their own variations. “Method number one: The scowl. It should not be a simple, straightforward, or otherwise thuggish scowl. It should contain elements of both disappointment and resolution. One should look as though one is scowling in spite of one’s own inclinations, that one would rather not be scowling but that one recognizes the necessity of the scowl. It should be clear, in other words, that the necessity of the scowl arises from circumstances outside of oneself.