Love, in Theory

by E. J. Levy

  Lesbians are often accused of narcissism—our love of women blamed on a hatred of men or a hatred of our mothers or on a thwarted maturation that has locked one in pursuit of an adolescent mirror image of oneself—as if a woman simply loving another woman were inexplicable without reference to aversion or impediment. But this, in my experience, could not be more wrong. I have loved women because they are beautiful, because they are tender or brilliant, because I am moved by them.

  When I fall for a man, as I fell for Jake, it is because he reminds me of myself.

  The next morning, while Jake was in the bathroom, I called Kate on her cell phone, just to hear her voice. I told her that I missed her. She told me that I sounded funny. Was I okay? “I’m fine,” I said. I remembered how she used to say, whenever I was away at a conference, “You can come home now, all is forgiven.” I said it to her now. She laughed. “I didn’t know there was anything to forgive.” I wanted to tell her everything, but I couldn’t. And the thought of that made me terribly lonely. I told her that I had to go, that I had a lot of papers to grade. But I didn’t work that day. After Jake left, I sat at my desk watching the wind push the leaves around outside.

  When Kate returned, I didn’t tell her about the drink. But she must have sensed something. She seemed sad, and I felt a great desire to reassure her, because despite what I had done and was about to do, I loved her. My feelings for him, I wanted to tell her, had nothing at all to do with her. I was trying to find out about love, about what it is to be human, I was after evidence, the facts of the heart. Desiring him did not detract from my love for her, anymore than reading one book detracts from enjoying another. But I could tell her none of this.

  She said she was having trouble at work. Her assignments were less and less relevant. In the last year she had covered a vampire convention of True Blood fans at the Hyatt. The theft of the butter bust of the Dairy Queen from the State Fairgrounds. The House Rabbit Society’s Easter pageant. What she called “the cultural trivia of a trivial culture.”

  “We are the Romans,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Look what happened to them.”

  Perhaps I only imagined it, with a lover’s narcissism, but it seemed to me that the culture egged me on toward an affair with Jake. Everywhere I turned were exhortations to excess, refutations of restraint. Adultery began to seem like the social equivalent of secondhand smoke, a byproduct of a culture loathe to accept limits. Ford Motors, that quintessentially American company, whose slogan had once been We’re Number One, now boasted, No Boundaries. Bus billboards pledged No Limit credit cards. Hewlett-Packard insisted Everything Is Possible. As if we needn’t choose. As if choices had no consequences.

  For a few weeks Jake and I met at his apartment in the afternoon and made love. I told Kate that I had student conferences, classes to prepare. Our meetings were largely wordless, a matter of gestures—mouths and hands, taste and touch. For hours after leaving him, I was conscious of my skin, dazed with arousal. Familiar streets took on a new brilliancy, the sky a new radiance; as I walked home along Garfield, each house, each sign seemed to possess significance.

  But the more I desired Jake, the less we had to say to each other. Grasping at desire, it seemed to disappear. After sex, I dressed quickly, eager to get home to Kate. I began to feel closer to her, more tender, protective. I began to notice little things she’d like—a Freud action figure, a biscotti recipe, books on South African history. I recalled how Kate’s stories had amazed me when we first met—stories of her work with the anti-apartheid group the Black Sash, of her visits to remote villages and appearances before pink-faced judges to protest pass laws, of her uncle’s strangulation by wire, the taste of blood oranges and olives eaten on a mountain hike. How she had wanted to be an Anglican priest because she liked the phrase “Peace be with you,” passed around like a collection plate at the end of every service. I admired how she’d taken part in what Adorno termed “resistance,” a refusal “to be part of the prevailing evil, a refusal that always implies resisting something stronger and hence always contains an element of despair.” She seemed to carry in her the parched landscape of southern Africa, its desolation and its harsh beauty. I realized that the passion I felt for Jake was passing: Our sex was a little like getting drunk, liberating at first but tedious if done too often. I was embarrassed by the boredom I felt.

  A month passed and another, before I admitted to Jake that I didn’t know if I could do this anymore; he appeared neither disappointed nor surprised. He simply asked if I wanted him to change my mind. I said it would be easy, but that I’d rather he didn’t.

  And sitting there beside him, I missed him. More than missing him, I missed desiring him.

  Kierkegaard—the failed lover—spoke of “the enthusiasm of a love that ever seeks solitude,” and I wonder now if this wasn’t the source of my disappointment in that affair; what I was seeking with Jake, I suspect, wasn’t him—lovely as he was—but a more perfect solitude, a more complete sense of the world. I wanted the feeling that comes when you release yourself toward things—reading can do this and looking at a painting and listening to music or walking through half empty streets almost anywhere alone at night will do this. I wanted to stand in the radiant presence of desire, when all things, the black branches of trees, light falling on brick, the strains of a violin concerto, one’s own hand, seem illuminated by a loveliness musical in its intensity.

  When Jake called my office a few days after we ended our affair, I was surprised. He asked to meet at a pub in St. Paul. He sounded nervous; I noted that he didn’t suggest we meet at his apartment.

  When I arrived he was waiting in a booth. We ordered beers, chatted awkwardly.

  “Have you run across my sweater,” he asked. “The peach one?”

  “I thought you’d thrown it over for a tweed,” I said. I had not seen the sweater in weeks.

  He didn’t laugh.

  “I’ve checked my car,” he said. “I can’t find it. I thought maybe.”

  “I’ll check.”

  We drank pints of ale, and he flirted with the waitress, and it was clear that whatever had been between us was over now.

  Kate was the one who found the peach sweater, the hideous thing had fallen behind the radiator in our bedroom, cast off, evidently, without attention. When she told me, I blushed, stammered. Confused by the implication, which—until she saw my reaction—she had not seen. When she asked me directly what was going on, if I’d slept with him, I couldn’t bring myself to lie.

  Kate sat on the couch and covered her face and cried as if someone she’d loved had died. And I started to cry, too. And it occurred to me that in all my careful reasoning I had left out one key thing: empathy. My formulation of the problem had been wrong, the premise flawed. I had been so concerned with the true and the untrue, the ethical versus the moral, action and inaction, that I had failed to consider the obvious, the simple fact that I might hurt the woman I loved.

  I told her that it had nothing to do with us. That it was over.

  “You’re right,” she said, standing. “It is.” And she walked out.

  For awhile Kate and I tried to patch things up. We got back together. Made love. Fought. Cried. Called it off and on again for a couple of months. Until finally we no longer remembered what it was we were trying to save, a time before things were over. I heard that Jake left the paper a few months later to return to school. I did not see him again.

  Even now I prefer to think of ours as a temporary separation, not an ending. I take comfort in the thought that things haven’t really changed, that Kate’s absence is a momentary break, which time will heal—that change, as Zeno would have it, is illusory.

  But every so often I remember the story in PMS of the follower of Zeno, who was lecturing before a crowd in Athens, gesticulating wildly as he made his points. The Zenoist was arguing that an object cannot move, because it cannot be in more than one place at a time. “If it moves where it is, it is standing still. I
f it is where it is not, it cannot be there,” he said, when suddenly he dislocated his shoulder. A doctor was called from the crowd. Asked to fix the shoulder, the physician explained that it could not be dislocated: either the shoulder was where it had been and was not dislocated, or it had moved to where it was not, which was impossible. At which point the patient saw what should have been obvious all along: logic can mislead us. If we rely on reason alone, the answers we seek may elude us.

  I remembered the story this morning as I watched my students write their midterm exams. It was one of those extraordinarily windy days in autumn and all manner of things were blowing past the classroom window, the flotsam of other lives—pages of newsprint, plastic bags like round white kites, twigs and cups and colored flyers—and in the midst of the maelstrom, I saw something go by, out of the corner of my eye, which must have been a twig, but which looked like a child’s arrow, and I thought briefly that it could be one of Cupid’s, or Zeno’s—aiming for something it will never, ever, reach.

  RAT CHOICE

  LATELY LISA’S MOTHER HAS BEEN TELLING HER THINGS she does not want to know. Lisa’s mother, who has told her little, now will not shut up. She follows Lisa out to the car, under starlight, to tell her that Lisa’s father has been impotent for years. She tells her, at the kitchen table, about the pornographic film he has rented on his doctor’s orders, about the penile pump.

  This afternoon, she is telling Lisa about the drawings she has made. They are walking in Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden less than a mile from the house where Lisa grew up; it is October and the trees are a conflagration. Ocher. Russet. Orange.

  The drawings her mother has made are crude, scrawled on typing paper in red and black magic marker. The first one is of Clara—the woman Lisa’s father had an affair with ten years back, an affair he revealed for the first time two weeks ago. Lisa’s mother slashed the drawing with lines and words. Slut. Cunt. Whore. Bitch. Then she hung it up in their bedroom.

  “I told your father about it before I hung it up, so it wouldn’t be a surprise,” she says, as if consideration were the point here.

  The second drawing, of Lisa’s father, is stick figure with a huge erection and slavering mouth. Her mother titled it The Unrepentant Rat (Lisa laughs at this); she put that one up in the bedroom, too. “I realized,” Lisa’s mother tells her as they walk a familiar path through the woods, “that Clara wasn’t the one who betrayed me. She didn’t know me. She was a slut and a whore for sleeping with a married man, but she didn’t know me.”

  What makes her mother angry, she tells Lisa, is not the fact of the affair but that Lisa’s father will not apologize. He has told Lisa’s mother that he is sorry that the news has caused her pain, but he will not apologize for fucking another woman. He claims not to remember the details. When it happened or for how long. So Lisa’s mother, her brilliant mother, her 190-iq-mother-who-gave-up-a-career-in-medicine-to-marry-The-Unrepentant-Rat spends her afternoons scouring checkbook registers from 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 in order to piece together the story Lisa’s father will not tell. Her mother has deduced from these that the affair took place while Lisa’s parents were in marriage counseling and her father was a consultant for a local electric company where Clara worked. He will neither confirm nor deny the allegations, her father, the lawyer, the dick.

  Lisa wants to comfort her, her beautiful brilliant mother. But she does not know what to say. She wants to tell her not to take this personally. That extramarital affairs are like an extracurricular sport in this country. Everyone is doing it. She wants to tell her that sex on the side is fashionable these days—that it is to the twenty-first century what Buddhism was to the fifth. It’s a sign of the times, not a personal failure. These days, everyone is cheating on something or someone: income taxes, stock holders, husbands, lovers, wives. We are cheating ourselves. But what can she say on the subject of adultery that her mother has not already heard? The headlines are full of it. There is no comfort for the suspicion that it raises, Lisa knows this well herself: the suspicion that it is her fault that he wandered, that somehow she was not enough, that maybe nothing ever will be.

  “The last erection your father had was with her,” Lisa’s mother tells her bitterly.

  They are walking under pine boughs. A forest out of fairytales. The ground littered with brown needles. The sweet smell of pine and earth. Wood smoke rises from the chimney of the stone house that serves as a visitor center inside the wildflower garden. Lisa has walked these woods with her mother since adolescence. They are not out of them yet.

  It is a month now since Lisa’s partner, Richard, left her for another woman, taking with him the boom box on which they’d played Gluck’s Orfeo and R.E.M., Smashing Pumpkins and Piaf; two boxes of books; his files; and their golden retriever, Jeff.

  “This is why people get married,” Gretchen, Lisa’s best friend, says.

  “Why? So they can cheat?”

  “No, so they stay together when they cheat.”

  “Would that be better?”

  “It would be different. It would be another choice.”

  Gretchen is getting her PhD in political science at the university where Lisa teaches composition and sometimes, like this term, creative writing. Gretchen studies Rational Choice Theory, why people do what they do and how to predict it. Gretchen calls it “Rat Choice” for short; the model, she says, is flawed, but it is popular. The New Republic ran a cover story on it just the other week. In Gretchen’s field they talk a lot about “rational states”—a concept that pleases Lisa secretly. Whenever her friend talks about theorizing rational states, Lisa pictures a continent of tiny owlish people, scholarly and dour, a whole country governed by reasonableness. Like Swedes.

  The crunch of leaves, the smell of wood smoke. Richard once called autumn an operatic season, and Lisa understands now that he meant the almost painful fullness of it, the bombast and the overblown beauty of the trees, the smell of fruit and rot, the leaves, the watery weight of the chill air. Thinking of him, she feels a lurch of desire in her belly, acute as a menstrual cramp. She tries to think of other things, of getting home, of getting food, of the class she has to teach tomorrow night for which she has yet to prepare. The cold walk has made her hungry. Her mother has fallen silent now. Lisa takes her mother’s arm, hooks it in her own, and leans her head against the older woman’s shoulder. Her mother smells of Anaïs Anaïs, a faintly floral French perfume.

  “We’ll be fine, Mom. You and I,” Lisa says. “We are.”

  What Lisa is, in fact, is thirty-two and crying too often in the afternoons. When she is feeling Byronic and self-pitying, she tells herself that she is crying because she is childless, loveless, and middle-aged. When she is feeling more robust, she makes excuses: says she has lost the love of her life after a devastating six-year love affair; says graduate school is demoralizing; says it is performance anxiety. But she suspects it is both more and less than these, both more complicated and simpler. She wants to get beyond these woods and is afraid to.

  The following evening Lisa stands before her class in a fluorescent third-floor room on the campus of a midwestern university, instructing thirty students in the basics of fiction. Tonight she is giving them an exercise. Lisa has asked her students to write down on index cards three things—a fear, a regret, a secret. Later, she will randomly redistribute these cards, each with one item, to the students as they write a character sketch of a person they consider virtuous or good. “They may or may not be good by conventional standards,” she says. “But it must be someone you consider to be virtuous or good.”

  As they write their sketches, she sorts the index cards into piles—secrets, regrets, fears. After sorting them, she sits on her desk and reads through a few.

  I am afraid of a world in which art does not matter.

  I am afraid of suffocation. Of being suffocated.

  Squirrels.

  She laughs out loud, then apologizes to the few students who look up, their brows fretted with w
orry. The truth is, she is moved by these anonymous fears. Detached from specific people, they do not seem neurotic but become philosophical. Existential. Voices out of the void. Everyfear. They are such poignant and courageous proclamations. Despite a world in which art is disregarded, suffocation possible, in which there are squirrels, we go on.

  She sorts through the fears, then the secrets. She does not have time for the regrets.

  After they have written for five minutes, Lisa hands each of them a random secret to incorporate into the sketch. As she walks around the room handing out the cards, a few students begin to moan. “Can I have another one?” a guy in a baseball cap asks from across the room. “Okay,” Lisa says, “anyone willing to trade with Nick? Anyone want to swap their fears, their regrets?” Hands go up around the room. “Can we trade with each other?” two women beside Lisa ask. “Okay,” Lisa says. She allows the students one trade, either with each other or with her. “Oh, man,” Nick says as Lisa hands him a new card, “I don’t like this one either. This is worse.” “Trade you,” someone says from behind Lisa. “Would it were so easy in life,” Lisa says. A few of the older students laugh.

  “Don’t just plop it in,” Lisa tells them. “Work toward incorporating the secret into your sketch.” This, she tells them, is how fact gets turned into fiction. This is how autobiography gets turned into myth—through the introduction and incorporation of random external elements (those casual pranks of the gods, she thinks). She tells them that it is an important discipline to accept random elements, not to try to control your material. When a thought comes up, it is important not to dismiss information about a character because you think, “That’s not how I want it to go.”

  At the end of class, a student asks her what he should do with his cards; should he throw them out? “No,” Lisa says, “I’ll take them.” She does not understand why she should want to hold on to other people’s sorrows, but she cannot bring herself to toss them. She throws the lot of them into her briefcase. Shuts out the lights as she goes.