Love, in Theory

by E. J. Levy

  “For Christ’s sake,” he said, shaking his head slowly, like this was for the record books. He stood up and looked at the stuff he’d hauled out, the stuff scattered now by the side of the trail. She was afraid he’d abandon it there, all that she had planned for them to share.

  “I gotta take a leak,” he said and walked into the woods, breaking twigs as he went. A cloud of gnats encircled her; she waved them off, feeling water rise in her eyes. If she could, she’d have walked away and left him there, but she knew it was too late, they’d come too far. When he got back he crouched by the trail and began to jam the containers back into the pack any which way.

  “I don’t believe this,” he said, holding up the wine. “How could you be so—?” and then maybe because he turned and saw her face and saw that it was red and scrunched like an old Kleenex, he said, gently, “It’s just not practical, Buddy. Stuff like this is too heavy. It won’t last out here.”

  She nodded, but she couldn’t say a thing without the risk of tears.

  They didn’t talk much after that. She had a lot of time to think about what he’d said as they walked through the mosquito-infested woods, as each glistening green branch thwacked her face and made her think of ticks. The radiant red leaves at her ankles, which she’d thought were early turning sumac, she realized were probably poison ivy. It’s just not practical, Buddy. Love was impractical, she thought. It was a heavy thing to carry, like the army pack on her back, which would flip her like a turtle and leave her flailing were she to fall.

  The only sounds were the scratch of aluminum on rocks as they eased the Grumman into the shallow water; the splash of water against the gunnels as they loaded in the packs and then stepped into the boat; the slap of her paddle as it entered the water; the draw of it; the rain of drops onto the boat as she lifted the paddle free of the water and brought it forward, to begin again.

  The camping site on the far side of the big blue lake was beautiful, on a smooth granite shelf overlooking the water. He docked from the stern and got out first to secure the boat; then he took her hand and helped her up onto the rock. It was marvelously quiet. Even if she strained she couldn’t hear the stutter of an outboard motor or a prop plane, the rush of traffic that seemed to be a part of the breeze everywhere but here.

  “I want to show you something,” he said, and folded her hand into the crook of his arm. He took her to the edge of the woods that surrounded the campsite and pointed to a ring of bushes studded with raspberries and blueberries tight and small as buds.

  “Are they edible?” she asked.

  “Better than Lunds’,” he said, naming her favorite grocery store, known for gourmet food.

  While he set up the tent, she walked the woods gathering dry twigs and snapping them into bundles for kindling, separating these from the larger branches they’d burn. When they finished, they ate lunch—cheese sandwiches she’d packed for each of them, cheddar with arugula and English chutney. (“This is great,” he said, “what’s in here?” But she was ashamed to tell him, afraid that he’d laugh at her expensive tastes, the imported and impractical foods she loved.) Then he proposed they take a swim.

  They had the lake to themselves, so they left their clothes on the rocks and dived right in. The water was cold but clear, and she could hear loons calling and see cormorants gathered on a little stone island two hundred yards out into the lake. They swam farther and farther out. And then she noticed something dark swimming toward her, popping up out of the water, then going down, then coming up again. She started to swim toward shore.

  “Hold still,” he called, in stage whisper.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “A loon.”

  “That’s a loon?”

  “Stay still,” he said. “See how close it will come.”

  “I don’t want to see how close it will come,” she said.

  “I do.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I think it thinks your head’s a potential mate. It thinks your head’s a loon.”

  The bird approached her, swimming on the surface now, bobbing in the slight waves, tacking back and forth on its approach. It had a haunting cry, that quaver. How could it be so dumb, so ignorant of its own kind, so easily tricked into thinking it had found a mate when they weren’t even the same species? Cormorants. Coots. Loons. Her. Him.

  “Those birds are stupid,” she said, when they were back on land.

  “They’re friendly,” he said.

  “No wonder there’s a duck season,” she said.

  “People don’t hunt loons.”

  “They should.”

  They gathered raspberries and blueberries, then together they built a fire, and then he started dinner. He was quiet as he pulled foods from the army pack. There hadn’t been much to say since their fight on the trail, though they both were trying, she knew. He put a pan of water on to boil for pasta and sat on a log facing the fire. The first faint stars were just beginning to come out, and she felt sorry for them both, lonely in all this beauty. She walked up behind him and began to massage his neck. The cords of muscle were thick and tense.

  “You okay?” she asked. She didn’t expect an answer, but it seemed like the right question.

  “This is where we spent our honeymoon,” he said.

  Her hands froze. She felt a weird tingling on her palms, the sudden sickening sense of vertigo she’d felt on the cliff that day months ago and hoped never to feel again.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she said. She let her hands fall from his neck, palms tingling.

  He shrugged. “Didn’t seem important.”

  “Which part?” she said. “Telling me or your honeymoon?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This was probably a bad idea. I didn’t think it would get to me. All that.”

  When the water boiled, making a plunking sound of bubbles against the thin tin pot, he tore open a cellophane bag of corkscrew noodles (they were noodles, he insisted, not pasta; before the 1980s no one had heard of pasta, let alone eaten it; they ate noodles, he said, and they liked them) and poured them in and covered the pot.

  She took a seat across the fire from him on a thick log set there for that purpose. At night they would have to haul the food pack into midair, suspend it by a rope from a tree limb to avoid attracting bears, but right now it was beside her, behind the log, and she dug among the contents and pulled out the bottle of Jim Beam.

  “We ought to drink this,” she said, “if we don’t want to carry it.”

  “Probably,” he said.

  He patted the pocket of his shirt and drew out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and offered her one. She took it and then took a swig from the bottle and then passed the bottle to him. She had two glass tumblers stowed somewhere in the pack, but she didn’t bother get them; they’d been meant to be a happy surprise, part of a celebration she’d imagined they’d be having out here together and now knew they would not. Instead they drank straight from the bottle, handing it back and forth.

  They watched the fire and ate the pasta when it was done. And drank some more. The sky emptied of light. The loons called and quieted. The moon rose. They tossed resinous twigs on the flames to watch them crackle; she watched him across the flames, his face orange lit, distorted by shadow, until the wind changed, and he coughed from the smoke and batted his arms as if to clear the ashy plumes and then gave up and came over to her side and put his hand on her thigh.

  The front of her jeans was scalding hot where she faced the fire, and her shins hurt, but she left them there, did not draw back, and when he asked her if she knew any songs, she said she wasn’t sure, maybe, and after a moment, she began to sing, her voice wavering and reedy. “Amazing grace, How sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me.” On the second verse he joined her with an off-key harmony and they sang like that for awhile, their shoulders leaned into one another, close enough that she smelled beneath the wood smoke the flinty scent of moth balls from his coat and the cologne she’d g
iven him for his birthday last month and whiskey and the pond smell off the lake. They sang there together, starting new songs as they remembered them, joining in where they could, harmonizing until the moon was risen high overhead and the fire died down and he buried it in sand and took her hand and led her to the tent, where he undressed her snap by snap, Velcro strip by Velcro strip.

  In the morning, she woke alone and looked up at leaf shadows shifting on the blue nylon roof of the tent; the tent smelled of sweat and pine needles, and the door flap was unzipped and peeled back, revealing through the mosquito netting a white blur of sky. A cardinal cried out, and a white-throated sparrow called tee-doe-tee-tee-tee-tee-tee-tee. When she sat up, she saw Ben through the netting.

  “Hey,” she called.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She let the sleeping bag fall from her breasts; the day was warm and delicious. It would be a scorcher. Rare here, he’d said. He was crouched by the fire grate, but he stood up and brought over a cup of coffee in a blue, white-speckled tin cup.

  “Breakfast is ready,” he said, handing her the cup. “You want to eat in bed?”

  She nodded.

  “Be right back,” he said.

  He’d made pancakes with fresh blueberries and raspberries in the batter, and he kissed her gently on the mouth before he handed her her plate. He brushed the hair back from her forehead with his huge freckled hand. He sat outside the tent, cross-legged on the sun-warmed dirt. He was cheerful and gentle and talked about places they could go today, day trips they might take, and as she listened to him and chewed, she thought it possible that she loved him more than she’d loved anyone before, but she knew too it would be over between them when they got home. Though her body still turned heliotropically toward him, she knew that what they had was done; it had ended here.

  This had been a test of sorts, a proving ground, to see if new love could assuage old pain, and they had failed it, that test. She felt as she imagined her students must, those who each term protested their Bs as if an A weren’t earned but an entitlement, as if she’d gypped them somehow, gypped them as she felt he had her, though there was no logic to it, she knew. He owed her nothing. No one did. You found love or you didn’t. There were no guarantees. Not ever. Not with anyone.

  He tapped his fork against his plate and cleared his throat like he was preparing to make an announcement, and when she looked over, he looked down at her plate. She looked too. He’d served their breakfast on the china she had brought, the real china, blue willow pattern, inherited from the grandmother who was not really kin to her by blood. Seeing the pattern beneath the glossy syrup, she remembered how her mother had kept a giant serving platter from this same set atop the mantle when she was growing up. “It’s the pride of the collection and worth a lot,” her mother said. They’d used the thing for holidays, for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner, when they used the set. And then one afternoon, when her mother was dusting, the platter had fallen from the wooden rack where her mother kept it on display. They’d gathered the pieces and chips from the floor and kept them, and later they sat at the table and glued them back together with ceramic glue, as their words this morning were trying to do. But she felt now as she did then the futility of the effort, that once something had been shattered, it could never be restored. They’d put the platter back up, but the cracks still showed, and it couldn’t be used. It became another pretty, useless thing, as perhaps he would think of her now, after this.

  She was wrong, but only partly. They stayed together for another four months after that, before his ex-wife called him up at Halloween to tell him that she missed his pumpkin soup and ask if he missed her and for a second chance, and he gave it to her. He hadn’t moved in, so he didn’t need to move out, but over the months he had left a lot of his things at her place, and so he’d called last week to say that he’d be coming by on Saturday, if that was okay, to get his things, and so, because it was Saturday today, she was gathering them into the bag at her side for him.

  She had not been a pack rat before she met him, but now she was amazed by all the junk of his she had, all that had accumulated between them. There were stubs from movies they had seen and photographs of them she did not want to see again and a Xeroxed article on distinguishing morels from false morels, which were poisonous. She wondered about giving back the Swiss Army knife, but she knew that if she did, she would regret it. She wanted the knife, with all its weird appendages, as she still wanted him. She found the cards he’d given her and the notes he’d left on her office door, and she found the flyer she’d picked up the day that they first met, folded and faded but legible still. She was amazed that such things last, how such things stuck to a life when little else did; when she died, she knew, they’d find among her books and socks and earrings a host of such scraps—ATM receipts and credit card carbons, flyers she’d picked up somewhere and departmental memos announcing gatherings long past—the residue of living that accumulated in her rooms as love had not, that clung more surely than people ever did.

  She read again the four steps for how not to freeze. After Warning Signs and Danger Signs, she read the Steps to Take. Keep the victim awake. Keep the person warm. Administer hot liquids. She knew the last and final step by heart; it had been a joke between them months ago, when she’d kept the flyer on her fridge, before she took it down and put it here. The best hope for saving a person from freezing was to do the opposite of what logic taught. The best way not to freeze was to strip—to get naked with another naked body, lie there skin to skin inside a sleeping bag or under blankets. Body to body contact could save your life, they used to joke. It was the only hope for survival, the best way not to freeze.

  When she heard him knock at the door, it occurred to her to pretend she was not home. But she realized that was impractical. He’d only come back later, call again, or come on in (he still had a key). So she ran into the bathroom, stopped up the tub, and turned the hot water tap on full, leaving him to find his own way in. She heard him open the door and call her name.

  “I’m in the tub,” she yelled. “Come on in. Your stuff’s in the hall. Feel free to look around, make sure you haven’t left anything behind.” She heard him opening closet doors, checking drawers for things he wouldn’t want to leave. She heard him in the hall outside. She heard him knocking quietly on the bathroom door. She heard him call her name.

  “I wanted to say good-bye,” he said. “Can I come in?”

  She heard him try the doorknob, was glad she’d thought to lock it.

  “I can’t hear you,” she yelled above the water. “Did you find your stuff?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, to the door. “I’m going.”

  “Call me, sometime,” she yelled. “Let me know how you are.”

  When she heard the front door close, she shut off the water. She heard him turn the lock and shove the key under the door, and then she stripped and stepped into the scalding tub, amazed that she could feel so much pain. Her skin was red beneath the water and felt like it might peel off, the way a green chili’s shiny skin will when you roast it over an open fire as he had shown her how to do. But she was shivering, too, there in the tub; her legs and arms were shaking and would not stop. She tried to hold her hands over her face, but she couldn’t get them to rise from the water to her cheeks, and she remembered having felt this once before, this quaking fear, her limbs heavy and rubbery, as if exhausted from a long exertion, and then she realized when it was she’d felt this: it was when she’d climbed the cliff at Taylors Falls.

  She had been among the first to climb the cliff face above the river. They had spent the day clambering over boulders and learning knots, and she’d felt a confidence she hadn’t felt since she was a kid, a faith that her body would back her up, do her bidding. She had felt agile and young. She had started up the cliff, taking the harder route to the left, and then, half way up, out of nowhere, she’d frozen with fear. The fear was less a feeling that a physical force, a weight, like a sandbag sud
denly dropped into her arms. It pressed her chest, made her breath shallow. Her legs shivered. She stopped dead and hung on, clinging by her fingertips to the cliff, not far from the top, too far from the bottom, unable to move. “Are you all right?” someone yelled up to her. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I can’t seem to locate my arms and legs.” There was friendly laughter from below. “It happens,” someone said. They told her where her body was—“You’re about twenty feet from the top, to the left of the big crack”—but she could not feel her limbs. Or rather, she could not seem to connect her thoughts to her muscles. Somewhere a connection had been severed. Her mind said, Move. Her muscles would have none of it. Her arms ached. Her left leg—the leg she was balanced on—began to quiver and shake. They tried to cheer her up with jokes: “Hey Elvis, what’s with the leg?” A few of them sang, “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog.” Someone yelled, “Breathe.” Someone yelled, “Relax.” She yelled, “Help me,” pleading now. “I’m scared.” “What did she say?” “She’s scared.” She knew she was humiliating herself, but what choice did she have? She was not equipped for this. She was unprepared. This was not where she’d expected to be at thirty-three, alone, clinging to a sheer rock face where nothing grew, with nothing to hold on to, just shallow handholds, cold and dark, just narrow ledges. “Make a move,” the instructor yelled. “Just make a move.” “I can’t,” she said into the rock. “You can.” She didn’t know what to reach for. They told her: “There’s an outcropping of rock just to your right, about a foot over from your right foot. Slide your leg over to it.” But she couldn’t. Information could not help her now. She lacked more than knowledge. Her mind and body were not on speaking terms. “I can’t feel my hands,” she yelled. “I don’t think I can hold on much longer.” “Hold on,” they said. “We’ll help you.” “What’s going on?” she heard someone ask. “She needs help,” someone said. “She freaked.” “She’s frozen.” “Can we lower her down on belay?” “She could flip, hit her head.” “Look where she is.” “Besides, the rope could snap if we ran it on the rocks.” She listened to them deliberate on whether to climb up or rappel down. She had come too far to go back now. Her eyes were blurry with tears when someone overhead yelled, “I’m coming, hold on,” and so she did. She flashed on the waiver she had signed, the one acknowledging that her injury, her death would be on her own hands. Her fingertips prickled with numbness, stinging as if from cold; her legs shook uncontrollably, but she held on to the rock face and to the idea that someone was coming, keeping her mind occupied, free of the fear that could make you fall, concentrating on the knowledge that someone was coming, would arrive soon, any minute now, confident then, as she could not be now, that help was on its way, that someone would show up any minute to show her—if she could hold on just a little while longer—how to move again.