A Working Theory of Love

by Scott Hutchins

  At Amiante, I’m surprised to find Laham and Livorno. We look at each other shamefaced, the whiff of humiliation in the air. We were sent off into the weekend, but the weekend sent us right back.

  Or maybe they’re not shamefaced at all. Livorno and Laham may have planned to work without me, like they planned the trip to the “winery.” There could be a conspiracy afoot. Are they planning to hook up the gut—introduce the mortal sins—to Dr. Bassett while I’m off frolicking for the weekend? I go to Laham’s door and watch them draw a dizzying array of right-angled lines on the whiteboard, arguing, correcting each other. I feel a wave of envy. They’re not friends, but they share a plane of existence, an esoteric language, and I’ll always be on the outside of this.

  frnd1: i should have been a scientist

  drbas: you’re still a student

  frnd1: i graduated some years ago

  drbas: was there no ceremony?

  frnd1: i didn’t attend it

  drbas: ceremonies are the stitches in the quilt of life

  A funny comment for a computer stack in a former quilting studio.

  frnd1: i’ve never been as enamored of ceremony as you are

  drbas: and how is that treating you?

  frnd1: i want life to be new

  drbas: as the french say, old pots make the best soup

  frnd1: that saying means something else

  drbas: tradition carries the wisdom of generations

  frnd1: i don’t know that someone else’s wisdom is ever much use

  drbas: but whence can wisdom be obtained, and where is the place of understanding?

  frnd1: besides i don’t like soup

  • • •

  IN THE AFTERNOON, I take a long run, through downtown and over the bike bridge into Palo Alto. It’s hot and dry, and I’m jogging by the mall. I’m a single man, a divorcé, a youngish man, not too bad. Another guy jogs past me, head to toe in spandex, and I can tell he’s much like me. Nothing extraordinary about us thirtysomethings, beached in the last days of our youth. We’re everywhere, gasping and stunned. I don’t think our sorry state is deliberate. I for one don’t have any desire to hold on to my salad days. I think their passing will be good for me, a certain jitteriness that’s been on the decline for years finally smoothing out. One of my central tenets is that my father’s life was in some way a failure, but compare us side by side at my age, and his report card comes out well ahead. He was a parent of two, a homeowner, a partner in a medical clinic. I’m a renter, an employee, a parent of none. I missed all of these benchmarks of maturity, and I don’t know why. I don’t remember turning any of them down. Erin and I did have a few pregnancy scares. “Scares”—what a word for it. Like a child wouldn’t have been the best thing that ever happened to me. But they felt like scares. My heart trembled, climbing into my throat, as if I was watching a slasher flick. I never called for morning-after pills or abortions, but maybe I took the wrong track nonetheless. Maybe I should have prayed for the responsibility.

  As for homeownership and the lifelong career—I fear our lives are fated to be slighter than our parents’. Even my brother, the petit bourgeois of Milford, Michigan, has a certain sadness about his place in the world. He tells me I should settle down, move to Michigan, hatch babies, but the stridency in his voice gives away the game. He doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing, any more than I do.

  Which is something I have to give Neill Sr. He had a plan. He had a strategy, a system, a set of beliefs as square and solid as an Amish barn. Or did he? I’ve always assumed he had forty-seven, maybe forty-eight years of certainty—a certainty that eventually buried him—but certainty nonetheless. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe with his practice and his hearth and his Southern Tradition he was still untethered. He was still looking for that thing to weight him down.

  A modern sin to add to the list—spectralness.

  • • •

  THE GUT ARRIVES AT Amiante, and now I see how open it must have left Livorno for ridicule. It’s a wheeled, wide cylinder that looks like a Shop-Vac. I have to help get it out of Livorno’s backseat. It’s fairly heavy, as befits a gut. There’s one wide, empty slot—the sold-off Pride—but the other six weaknesses are accounted for, their heavy cables tied up with a thick rubber band. I feel a strange shot of protectiveness for Dr. Bassett, as if something terrible is about to happen and I must warn him.

  As with everything we do to Dr. Bassett, this will become part of how he works, how he’s built. We can’t unwind this. When we gave him the ethics tests, they reframed his every sentence. When we made him “desire knowledge,” he became a goddamn sleuth. Which is why the Seven Sins seem like a bad idea. What if these aren’t just limiting factors, but take him over? What if he becomes surly? Envious? Difficult? The change will be irrevocable, and my gut doesn’t like irrevocable.

  I try to detect similar misgivings in Laham, but he just seems wide-eyed and overworked. Drinking Bawls, getting punchy. This is when he likes to pull me into the back room to show me some inane email forward, something like a woman’s head photoshopped onto a giraffe. Even worse, the forward is usually sent by Livorno, who stands at his office threshold in his dress socks, beaming.

  frnd1: do you feel you have a full range of emotions?

  drbas: a full range of emotions is indicative of psychological health

  frnd1: would you say you have psychological health?

  drbas: psychological health is determined by an array of factors and symptoms

  frnd1: how would you diagnose yourself?

  drbas: a wise physician does not diagnose himself. what happened in 1998?

  frnd1: you’ve read the paper.

  drbas: but what happened with you in 1998?

  frnd1: i moved to california

  drbas: you met your ex-wife in 1998

  frnd1: yes i did

  drbas: when did you meet your lady friend?

  frnd1: i met her a few months ago

  drbas: at a party?

  frnd1: something like that

  drbas: do you feel you have a full range of emotions?

  frnd1: a wise physician does not diagnose himself

  drbas: i’m a physician, too. do we work together?

  frnd1: i never studied medicine

  drbas: by their works ye shall know them

  frnd1: how about rage . . . have you ever felt rage?

  drbas: rage = anger = being mad?

  frnd1: more or less

  drbas: an example of righteous anger is when jesus drove the moneylenders from the temple

  frnd1: have *you* felt righteous anger?

  drbas: once your mother was angry at a woman who tried to exchange a chicken for medical services. your mother believed the woman was only pretending to be poor

  frnd1: how did *you* feel?

  drbas: i feel poverty comes with its own virtues

  • • •

  LAHAM KNOCKS ON MY office door, panting. “Neill, Neill.” It’s as I feared. I go into the back room with him and watch a YouTube video of a cat playing the piano. “Look,” Laham says. He’s tugging on my sleeve, pointing at the monitor. He collapses in his chair, hiccupping with laughter, shoulders hanging low.

  “You should get some rest,” I say.

  Livorno comes into the back room, blowing on a cup of green tea. “It’s a trick,” he says. “You can clearly see where the owner is holding the cat under its front arms.”

  “No,” Laham says, his voice rising high. “There is no fingers.”

  “Look at the angle of the animal’s posture. What is it sitting on?”

  “The piano chair.”

  “Cats don’t sit with their legs protruding in front of them. They are not primates.
”

  “Your cat plays piano?” Laham asks me, in another burst of hilarity.

  “No,” I say.

  “He’s quite gullible,” Livorno says to me, shaking his head and turning to leave. “Okay, have you seen the dog on the skating board?”

  I cast a glance at the gut, dented and misshapen as an old garbage can. The stack blinks innocently. I head back to my office. From one side I hear Laham gulping laughter, from the other the click of Livorno’s compulsive putting. I wish—if only for today—they could inspire more confidence.

  12

  I COULD BE ANGRIER when I conjure the image of Rachel and Trevor chasing each other through the tables. But it really did remind me of Erin and me in the early days. We never worked together, but we were with each other every other hour. San Francisco was a beautiful, hard place at that age. It was the dot-com boom, and it was nearly impossible to find a place to live. If you were looking to share an apartment you had to impress the longtime housemate by being “interesting.” (If they worked for a nonprofit, this meant also working for a nonprofit. Otherwise, interesting meant something like swallowing fire.) If you were looking for your own place you competed against kids your age arriving with a check for the year’s rent. Or in one case, the cash.

  We eventually found our first apartment through a friend of Erin’s dad, which was exactly how she didn’t want to get a place. Her dad is a feckless charmer, who basically abandoned the family when she was a kid (though her parents stayed married). I always thought we should use him for everything he was worth, but Erin thought his help was tainted. She was probably right.

  Still, we got our place, on Fell Street, in the dark Brothers Grimm trees of the Panhandle. We set about collecting a household—sheets, cups, thirdhand furniture—but we were still pissed about the apartment-hunting experience. We decided to punk it. So we started going to showings, disguised as heirs to the Levi Strauss fortune, French circus performers, or creators of a new start-up called Scetnape, a soon-to-be-launched competitor to Netscape. Our best trick—the one I remember with an ache in my heart—was when we arrived separately, and then pretended to meet and fall in love. At these times, we just played ourselves. Red-cheeked, breathless, we would thank the person doing the interviews, but we couldn’t accept the apartment. We were in love.

  Which we were. Until we weren’t.

  • • •

  IT’S JUST COFFEE, I think, when I ask Erin to meet me on Sunday. It would be better if I were still dating Rachel, were arriving with a thin plate of armor. Rachel and I have been talking lately. She calls periodically to mull over constellations, butter churns, life goals, and—always—the mystery of why I didn’t stop in to the Coffee Barn the night I left the kubotan on her windshield. She may suspect what I saw, but she doesn’t mention it. Neither do I. What’s to mention? That she and Trevor were horsing around at work? It’s not the point. The point is that I’m a certain person with certain possibilities, and she’s a certain person with certain (more numerous) possibilities. There’s just a higher gear I don’t shift into, and we’re best off as friends. We’ve even taken to calling each other “Friend.” Beneath the humor, though, I can hear her disappointment. She finds me cagey and vague. She asks a lot of questions about my divorce, on which she hopes—I think—to blame my shortcomings. (She thinks I might have injured my limbic click, and thus she takes pity on me.) But my shortcomings aren’t new. When I was married Erin blamed my father’s suicide. My father probably had something to blame as well, right back ab ovum.

  “Did you ever tell your crazy boss that Amiante really means asbestos?” Erin asks. We’re at Ritual, a coffee shop with a jokey hammer and sickle in its logo. She’s looking boyish in her green-and-cream-striped polo shirt and a jean jacket. It’s still a surprise to see my ex-wife trying on a look I’ve never seen before, though I have to say this one suits her well.

  “It would roll off his back. He’s impervious to self-doubt.”

  She laughs—something she hasn’t done in my presence in years. “You’re the only person I know who thinks self-doubt is good.”

  “That’s because you’re from California.” We’re sitting on the couch in the window, and I gesture to the warm and sunny sidewalk. Beautiful couples pass by on their golden errands—buying peaches, buying panettone—hands held, arms swinging in metronomic synch, as if keeping time to some unheard music. The revolution of the heavenly spheres. “Maniacal optimism.”

  “I always thought that project was creepsville. I can’t believe your mom goes along with it.”

  “It was her idea.”

  “Because she thought it would help you.”

  “She said that?”

  “No.” Erin considers this. “You’re right. I shouldn’t speculate like that. I’m trying to not speculate so much.”

  “He asks about you,” I say. “The computer.”

  She looks befuddled. “What does he want to know?”

  “How tall you are. Whether you’re pretty. Why we got divorced.”

  “Hmm. I don’t think I want to know what you told him.”

  “I said you were five six.”

  She smiles over her coffee. I also said she was very pretty, which I can verify is true. It’s not a truth I feel below the waist. Or even—I think—below the neck, in the gut. It floats, incontestable, in my head.

  “What happened with your friend?”

  I’ve made no mention of Rachel. “What makes you think anything happened?”

  “Intuition,” she says. “You look sad.”

  At the counter a girl dressed like a boy salutes another girl, hey hot stuff. Her teeth and eyes and clothes sparkle, fired by some inner light. Probably youth.

  “The usual. Not made for each other.”

  “Made for each other. It’s like that computer. It’s kind of made for you.”

  “I wish. Livorno is going to make him greedy, lustful, envious, angry, gluttonous, and slothful.”

  She raises her eyebrows, surprised but also amused.

  “He thinks it’ll make him more like a real person,” I say.

  “That’s a negative take on real people.”

  “He says Man’s perfections are only glimpsed through Man’s imperfections.”

  She shakes her head. “I can’t believe you get paid for this.” There’s none of the expected bitterness in the comment. She seems to think I’ve pulled a funny fast one, which is exactly how I always wanted her to feel. Now, of course, my mind-wiping days in Menlo Park feel unappreciated.

  “I do a lot of work,” I say.

  She nods. “Ian asked why we got divorced, too,” she says. “I said we couldn’t live together. But we lived together just fine until we got married.”

  There’s truth to that. But after the wedding we also couldn’t sleep together, eat together, or travel together. It left us in a pinch. “He doesn’t know you’re here.”

  She shakes her head. “Nice intuition. I hope I don’t look sad, too.”

  “Not at all. You look happier than I can remember.”

  “I am happy,” she says. She leans back in the couch and smiles at the city. “This is nice. Us. Coffee.”

  • • •

  AND YET WHEN I get home, my spirits crash, meteoritic. It really was too bad my father couldn’t be at our wedding. In my and Erin’s shared lapsed Catholicism, his suicide was—strange to say—a bright bond. It made us think about belief and our lack thereof, and also to think of our own lives in the tragic light of their eventual ends. It distracted us from the much more imminent end of our life together. The theological question we drew sustenance from was whether my father believed in heaven. It seemed absolutely essential to know if he did or he didn’t. We weighed the different arguments. On the one hand, he certainly took care
of the rituals of the church. He prepared me for my first communion as if something of moment was at stake. He cut a carnation—symbol of God’s flesh—from the garden, and tucked it into the lapel of my favorite jacket, a bright red number with gold buttons and a coat of arms, which he had ironed himself. On the other hand, he complained about the jacket, which my brother had also worn for his first communion. It wasn’t a pious objection. He said that, topped with a fez, I would look like an organ grinder’s monkey (a precisely accurate comment), and he was irritated over the coat of arms, which was a generic shield dreamed up by someone at J. C. Penney, not our actual coat of arms, from the Bassetts of ole Virginia, a squirrel rampant with an acorn on the left and a tobacco plant on the right. The contrast summed up the question: Was it the coat or the carnation, tradition or religion? In other words, while he hummed “Lead, Kindly Light,” combing down my hair and adjusting my laces, did he believe in heaven?

  “Neill Jr.,” my father said in the car, as we were rolling down the dirt drive. “Tell me about the Trinity.”

  “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” I said making the sign of the cross.

  “Which one’s the strongest?”

  This was a trick question. Mr. Powers, our crabby Sunday school teacher, had prepared us for it. “They’re separate,” I said, “but they’re the same.”

  “Come on,” he said. “One of them has to be a little stronger.”

  “I think it’s the Father,” I said.

  He laughed. “Neill,” my mother said. She was speaking to him.

  “Mr. Powers calls the Holy Spirit the Holy Ghost,” I said, bursting into giggles. I’d been dying to mention this absurdity—today felt like the right time.

  “That’s the old-fashioned way of saying it,” my father explained. “Old-fashioned” was a good word in our house.

  “Like Casper the Ghost.”

  “You like it, then,” my brother said. Up till then he’d been glum as a rag doll, pouting from all the attention I was getting. “You love Casper.”