A Working Theory of Love

by Scott Hutchins

  A woman—Stevie, I assume—slams out of the back door with a Pyrex full of giant mushroom caps. She’s wearing loose pants and some world fabric draped around her shoulders. I’m relieved to see she looks comfortably middle-aged.

  “Rick,” she says, a hint of the brass band of New Jersey still in her voice. “We need to get these portobellos cooked.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Rick says, nodding at the swordfish. I suspect I’ve just seen the basic aikido of their marriage. She strikes, he diverts.

  “Ah!” Stevie says. She’s noticed us. “There you are.”

  Rick turns around, and the meeting is set in motion. He raises his arms, as if a long-lost friend has arrived. Stevie sets down the Pyrex to kiss Rachel on both cheeks, then me on both cheeks. Rick is shaking my hand—so glad to meet you . . . welcome—and I have the sudden conviction that Rachel was telling the truth: these two are excited to meet me.

  “You a wine lover?” Rick says. He has wide-spaced eyes and a boyish, open face. “You’re probably a wine lover.”

  “For God’s sake, Rick, he’s a wine drinker. Pour him a glass. Does a person have to be a wine lover to have a glass of wine?” Stevie shoots me a look that apologizes for her exasperating husband.

  “I’m making a guess on what he likes. This is getting-to-know-you time.”

  “He’s definitely going to need a glass of wine to endure that.”

  “Endure? Is it really that bad? Maybe I should just go stand by the grill.”

  “I’m just saying there’s no need for us to come on like a ton of bricks.”

  “Was I coming on like a ton of bricks?” he asks me.

  “Asking him that question is coming on like a ton of bricks.”

  “I asked him if he liked wine.”

  “Ask him if he wants some wine.”

  “I like wine,” I say. “I want some wine. Thank you.”

  They stop talking and peer at me strangely, as if a cat just spoke English. This is when I know they haven’t really been arguing. This is a comedy routine—probably a daily one—that’s as much for their benefit as for ours. One of them is probably a difficult person—short odds on Stevie—and this bickering is their way in the world. I sometimes think that if Erin and I could have bickered we’d still be married, but the little squabble wasn’t in us. We were either in mind-meld agreement or homicidal opposition.

  “He’s got a ton of wine at home,” Rachel says. She tucks herself in tightly against me.

  Stevie breaks into a guileless, approving smile. I see a family resemblance—Rachel bites her lower lip in the same way, like a chipmunk.

  “I don’t know about a ton,” I say. Am I trying to bicker?

  “I bet it’s the good stuff,” Stevie says.

  “Absolutely,” Rick agrees.

  • • •

  DOORS-OPEN approval is not what I’m expecting. I keep waiting for the barbed comment, the slight undercut. But we eat the mushrooms, we eat the swordfish. We talk about Lama Rinpoche and Rick’s legal work. By the tawny port and the crème brulée it’s clear that Stevie and Rick are offering no resistance. There’s really only one unsettling moment. Stevie follows me into the house and—very apologetic—asks me if I make pornography.

  “I’m a scientist,” I say. I mean it as a joke, but she nods, serious.

  It’s important to remember something: California is not a state built on moderation. We invented motion pictures. We made an electric sports car. We’re both the brain (Silicon Valley) and the heart (Hollywood, alas) of this great nation, and meanwhile we grow everyone’s strawberries. We’re open to innovation. We’re open to new ideas. We’re open to odd couples—and to strays from all parts of the world. Look at our last governor: an Austrian body builder and son of a Nazi married to John F. Kennedy’s niece.

  Anything can happen.

  I try to digest this truth. I carry the plates to the sink, where Rachel rinses them with quick efficiency and I stack them in the washer. It’s teamwork, synchrony—nearly domesticity. Of course, just because anything can happen doesn’t mean it will happen. It just means it won’t won’t happen. This is a small room in the Palace of Optimism, but maybe it’s space enough.

  8

  I’M AWAKE. RACHEL’S ASLEEP. Outside, sirens wail past the far end of the park. I smell smoke, and my first thought is to go upstairs to check on Fred, but the smell isn’t immediate, isn’t in my home, my building. It’s someone else’s tragedy.

  I climb out of bed, feeling for my slippers. In the living room, I turn on the fan. To the east, there’s a bright flickering, on Valencia or Mission. If that’s the flame, it’s a big fire.

  There’s nothing on the news or the Internet. I look in on Rachel. She’s contorted into a strange shape, mouth open, as if bludgeoned. I think of that question Stevie asked me—did I make pornos. She wasn’t asking about my predilections in the bedroom, but my line of work. Are you a pornographer?

  I throw on some warm-ups and tennis shoes, and go out. It feels good in the cool air. I join a stream of gawkers, some pretending to be alarmed, some trading guilty, hopeful looks. We plod up Dolores and over to Valencia, which is bright and ravaged, the rules suspended, fire trucks and ambulances parked every which way, cops milling about, strangers in pajamas sharing cigarettes. It’s cool but not cold, and the pleasant fatalism of end times is in the air. Thick black smoke pours from a shattered storefront; the night glitters with emergency lights—it’s how a movie would portray an alien attack.

  The fire is right across the street from the police station, in the T-Mobile store. The top of the building is made up of tall redbrick loft apartments, human habitation and thus a worry, but the EMTs are calm, loitering behind the open back doors of an ambulance. I don’t see any victims on the gurney. Cops strut self-importantly (or self-consciously—I can’t tell which) among the firefighters, who blow two fat streams of water into the storefront. The street shines like varnish, the yellow sulfur lights almost tropical in their reflection.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” one of the firemen shouts, as the street grows bright and a foot-wide tail of flame reaches ceremoniously out of the storefront. In the clear light, I can see I’ve been mistaken. It’s not the T-Mobile store, but the neighboring shop, the sex store, Play Date.

  “Neill.” Behind me, under the awning of the taqueria, stands my ex-wife, hugging herself. I shouldn’t be surprised. She only lives a block away, and she has a taste for drama. Drawn like a moth to the . . . I walk over, looking for her beau, but don’t see him. I wonder if she’s left him sleeping in bed. Thankfully, we don’t do our awkward hug. She just threads her arm through mine, trembling.

  “Are you scared?” I ask.

  “Cold.”

  “Alone?”

  She nods.

  Time seems wobbly tonight. I raise my arm, put it around her, pull her in to me. She tucks herself in close. I forget how small she is—she was such an outsized opponent in our marriage. “Let’s warm up,” I say.

  “You think it’s the porta-potty arsonist?” she says. There’s been a person—a man, I’d wager—setting fire to portable toilets around the city. So far he’s burned twenty-three.

  “It’s probably an accident,” I say. “Lots of devices in there to unplug.”

  She shakes her head, saddened. “Play Date is a sex-positive store.”

  • • •

  I’M SURPRISED TO HEAR this sentiment, if only because of our own experience with Play Date, which wasn’t positive. We’d been living together for nine years, and were about to get married, and yet we’d stopped having sex. It was a crisis with no known source and no known solution, and I found myself helpless to do anything about it. She suggested we get a little “spice in our love life.” That’s when Play Date came in. One day Erin made a thrilli
ng proposal.

  “I like spice,” I said.

  We left the apartment—our apartment, now mine—walked across the park and down here, to Play Date. This was a step for her. She had some shame issues around sex, or maybe they were just Neill issues, and she had stopped showing me her naked body, claiming she felt fat, a tiresome and powerful cliché. We pushed open the frosted glass doors, went in, looked around, were amazed at some of the things offered. We started out easy. We bought the Hook, a very small vibrator shaped like a cartoon J. It was purple and required one AA battery. We also bought some lubricant. The vibrator was water-resistant and could be used in the bathtub, though all we had was a shower. It came in a small baggie, the kind the police use to collect evidence.

  “Shall we try it?” I asked as we stepped out into the sun.

  “We have to save it for the honeymoon,” she said as if I was being ridiculous. Then we went home and planned.

  We picked Spain. I’d always wanted to see Andalucía, and Erin agreed it sounded beautiful, though as she got more involved in reading the guidebooks she became obsessed with the whole country. She put together a plan that took us from Madrid to Seville to Granada to the Alpujarras to the Costa del Sol to Valencia to Mallorca to Barcelona to Pamplona—and perhaps Bilbao—and back to Barcelona and home. We had twelve days. I talked her out of Mallorca and Bilbao and was working on Pamplona when she said, “This is my honeymoon, too.”

  A bad sign. “You’re right,” I said. “Pamplona it is. We can even go to Mallorca. I just don’t want us to be rushed.”

  We were sitting across the coffee table from each other, cups of tea steaming between us. She had a guidebook named Andalucía and a pad and pen for notes.

  “I already agreed to skip Mallorca.”

  “I’m just saying if it’s important to you we can do it.”

  “It’s already out of the plan,” she said, as if I were trying to renege on a deal.

  “Well, we can play things by ear a bit.”

  “I don’t like that idea.” She passed me a piece of paper with our exact itinerary. Pamplona, but no Mallorca.

  I scanned the daunting list of cities. We were covering way too much territory.

  “I look forward to using the Hook at each stop,” I said.

  She nodded and made a note. I wondered for a second if she was adding it to the itinerary.

  We landed in Madrid early in the day, and by the time we were on the Metro she had a wild look on her face. We were actually only in town for the afternoon, and we walked around, peeked at Guernica in the Reina Sofia, and held hands at a café, drinking cafe con leche, taking it easy. I tried not to insist on anything, but when you’re in fundamental opposition to a person—and that’s somehow where we had ended up—you find just how much of your life is an assertion, an insistence. At our first café, I ordered churros in chocolate and suggested she have a bite. Churros were a dicey choice for Erin’s sensitive stomach, but she tried them, making a sour face. She said they were terrible, which was mostly true. They had the fishy aftertaste of old cooking oil.

  “The chocolate’s good,” I said.

  But she had turned against everything. “People must be in terrible health here,” she said. “Look at them. They don’t eat vegetables.”

  “The south may be different,” I said. “Andalusian cuisine.”

  She said nothing. I was hoping to buoy spirits and maintain optimism, but when she got into these moods, she scoured my words for condescension. I made a pact with myself not to repeat the words “Andalusian cuisine,” but in the silence I couldn’t help myself. I thought we should at least try small talk. After all, we were supposed to spend the rest of our lives together.

  “I wonder if Andalusian food will be heavily influenced by Moroccan food?” I said.

  “Are you talking to yourself?”

  “No. I’m wondering something.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk to yourself. I wish you would talk to me.”

  “I am talking to you. What is your opinion? Do you think Andalusian food will be like Moroccan food?”

  “I don’t know what Andalusian is. I’ve never had Moroccan food. Clearly, you’re not talking to me.”

  “You have a guidebook in your bag—do you remember this guidebook?—it’s titled Andalucía.”

  “I don’t know what Andalusian cuisine is. I don’t know what Spanish cuisine is. I’m sorry I’ve never been here before.”

  I took another fishy bite of churro. “Would you like to go for a walk, my dear?” I asked.

  The heat of the day hadn’t passed, and the Madrid sun pressed down on my head like an iron. I wasn’t sure I could make it any longer without a drink. My nerves felt like they had been snipped and hammered down. I was contemplating the strong possibility that I’d made a terrible mistake.

  “I’d like to get a beer,” I said.

  “You should do that.”

  We stopped into a bar on a street—it didn’t matter which; we weren’t doing anything purposefully touristic anymore. I drank a beer, she had a juice, and we split some patatas bravas. That oil again, this time with mayonnaise. She would be laid up with stomach cramps if I wasn’t more vigilant. Yet there was always the potential, too grim to admit, that I wouldn’t really care.

  “Honestly, baby,” I said. “Are you having a good time?”

  Erin cocked her head and let out a breath. She sank in her barstool. I think this was a melting.

  “I feel weird,” she said. “Like I’m not myself.”

  “Foreign travel can be like that. Dislocating.”

  “I just imagined it differently. You know, the whole honeymoon thing.”

  She was right, and we had to do something about it. This was my strong point. I was the one who could shake things off, make things better. “Here’s what I want to do,” I said. “I want you to use your skills to order me another beer, then I want us to go on an evening walk, eat some dinner, and head back to the hotel to consummate our marriage.” Something we’d failed to so far do. “What do you say?”

  “We can do that.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Want to do?” she said, tapping her chin.

  “Yes. You. What do you want to do?”

  “You go to the bathroom. I’ll order your beer.”

  When I got back, there were two beers, glistening, golden, the condensation running down the sides. The bar was zinc and all the doors were open to the heat outside. A police officer on a spotted horse clopped by. I thought, I’m in Madrid with my wife.

  “I love you,” I said, kissing her on the back of the neck. Such gestures were still in my reach.

  “I love you, too.” She touched my face. I kissed each fingertip. They smelled of serrano ham.

  “I’m glad you’re joining me.” I indicated the beers.

  “Those are both for you. This way I won’t have to go through the trouble of ordering again.”

  I sat down slowly. I mean the following statement literally: I wished I was dead.

  “Gotcha,” she said, hoisting one of the glasses. “Salud.”

  “Salud,” I said.

  “Come on.” She touched my lips, trying to shape a smile. “I was just kidding.”

  “Okay. It’s funny.”

  “Don’t be so sensitive.”

  “Don’t tell me what to be.”

  “Yikes,” she said. “You’re pissed.”

  I looked out at the bright street, then at the copper espresso machine.

  “Baby, I’m sorry,” she said. “I really am.” But she didn’t sound sorry, and when I looked at her I detected a pleased smirk.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “It’s tr
ue. We can’t do this. Let’s not do this. Look at us—we’re in Spain. We’re in Europe. We need to appreciate this.”

  There was a false note in her voice, and I wish I had pointed it out. I wish I had been more of a pain in the ass—in general, in life. But I decided not to hear the falseness. I liked the sentiment too much.

  We drank our beers and pretended to be happy and pretty soon I think we really were happy. We wandered along a park that looked out across a valley to distant hills. We took pictures of a fountain dedicated to Don Quixote. We ambled through a big plaza and sat down to tapas in amicable silence. I searched for something to say, but there are times, especially on trips, when silence is what you need.

  At the hotel, she turned on the television. I wasn’t much in the mood to make love either.

  The next day we picked up the convertible and aired out the evil spirits on the way to Seville. We were staying there for three days—that’s what was written on the schedule. We poked around the ridiculously gilded cathedral, saw Christopher Columbus’s coffin carried by its four eternal pallbearers, and went to the section of town where they invented the macarena. We took mornings off from each other—I would sit at an outdoor café and read the paper, while she slept in. We met for lunch. It was hot and dusty and Erin seemed to have chosen our honeymoon as a time to stop drinking. She had flat water and juice while I drank white wine and cold beer—often more than I should have.