A Working Theory of Love

by Scott Hutchins

  But Livorno’s face lacks the sharp focus of inspiration. He’s smiling into his Coke, carefree and vague.

  “Henry,” I say. “If you log in again as me, I’ll take a sledgehammer to the stack.”

  • • •

  I CALL RACHEL FOR help.

  “Quick, Friend,” she says. “What’s something fun you did with your dad?”

  I think. There had to be one thing.

  “We went through a strange phase of camping,” I say. I often forget about it, because it’s just not in keeping. “My father would pack up a huge canvas tent, a propane stove, an iron skillet, ten gallons of fresh water, a pistol, fishing gear—you name it—and put it on a mule he borrowed. I remember the mule’s name was Mule. My father had bought some getup straight out of a safari catalog—olive drab pants, a hat with mosquito netting. We slouched behind in our jeans and T-shirts. We joked that we had been kidnapped by a time-traveling scoutmaster.”

  “Fun,” Rachel says. “I said ‘something fun.’”

  “It was fun. We fished. Fried them on the camp stove. We saw all sorts of bogs and sloughs all over South Arkansas. We were eaten alive by ticks. We got into birding. A lot of people were claiming to have seen an ivory-billed woodpecker, and so we took turns carrying the camera to snap a shot.”

  “It’ll have to do,” she says. “Let’s go camping.”

  “That sounds great.” My heart drops a little. I need help, not plans. “This weekend?”

  “How about right now?”

  “It’s already six-thirty.”

  “There’s a full moon tonight.”

  “I don’t have a tent.”

  “Who needs a tent?”

  I drive into Marin to pick her up at the Coffee Barn. Then we swing by her house (where Stevie and Rick greet me with detached bemusement) and drive another hour to the foot of the Tennessee Valley Trail, which leads gently down to the Pacific. The valley isn’t named after the Volunteer State, but a steamship that hit the rocks in the gold rush. At low tide you can still see the anchor—which, come to think of it, puts me in mind of Rachel right now. We’re at low tide, but here’s an anchor. She’s gathered the needed sleeping bags and pads, but refused Stevie and Rick’s self-assembling tent. She said I needed the healing rays of the moon.

  She might be right. It’s nearly ten o’clock, but the air is still and warm. The bushes and trails, the distant trees—everything is lit as in a dream. We can already hear the ocean. We walk down the wide dirt path, lunar blue. A small lake appears down the hill, the moon a bright line across its surface. Beyond that the shimmering, churning Pacific. It’s the kind of sight that makes you question every modern human endeavor—especially the modern human endeavors I’m engaged in. Why don’t we just live in a grass hut and spend all day eating oysters on the beach? Why in God’s name am I worrying about a talking computer that refuses to talk?

  We turn up the Coastal Trail, careful not to touch the plants on either side of us—the place is covered in poison oak. At the top of the hill, though, it’s just brown grass and a rocky clearing close to an old World War II bunker. We brush the ground for rocks, spread out the pads.

  “We can zip these together,” Rachel says, holding her bag out. I think, that’s not a very good idea. Then I think, where is this light coming from? She nearly glows.

  We settle into our large uni-bag, lying on our backs. She grabs my hand, her skin dry and chafed from work. Right above us, the moon doesn’t seem to cast light so much as summon the light hidden all around us. The ocean shushes the beach; the air smells of hot dirt. This is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

  “I have a dumb question,” she says.

  “I love dumb questions.”

  “What is it like to be married?”

  “Well,” I say, listening to the waves, drawing on their equanimity. “It was like the life was being slowly squeezed out of me. But I don’t think it has to be that way.”

  “Something went wrong with you guys.”

  My antennae prick up. Just what relationship are we talking about?

  “Sometimes things go wrong.” I glance to gauge her reaction.

  “Because you changed?” As she talks her lips shape the night’s darkness.

  “I think we weren’t really able to see each other through the fog of our own self-regard.”

  “The fog of your own self-regard, huh?” She laughs, her teeth appearing, glistening. A soft wind exhales across the grass. “Do you think I’m stuck in the fog of self-regard?”

  I let the wind travel across my face. I can almost taste the cool. “No. But I do think you’re young.”

  “I am young. I know it. I feel it.”

  “Yeah? What does it feel like?”

  “It’s like, there’s me and then there’s this animal that’s like in me. And I’m just living my life, walking around, going to work, but I know this animal can take over. Just for a second. But I get that feeling a lot—that I might say or do anything.” She pauses. “Actually, it sounds like I’m crazy.” She takes a breath. “You’re supposed to say, ‘No it doesn’t, Friend.’”

  “But I’ve promised to be honest with you.”

  She removes her hand from mine, rams a hard knuckle into my ribs. “Seriously. Do I sound crazy? Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “You’re saner than anyone I know.”

  She settles in close, lays her head on my shoulder, runs her hand across my chest. “That’s nice to hear,” she says. I feel her warmth, the rise and fall of her breath, of her life. I can tell she wants to be kissed, and why not? We’ve kissed before—have been very successful at it, in fact. God knows I could use the bodily kindness. But I feel the hard California earth under my back and the sad sureness of tomorrow morning. This might make me a little better, or it might make me a lot worse. In either case it would be a false promise. I’m not any more of a fresh start than I was that night at the Coffee Barn—I’m just more desperate.

  “Good night, Friend,” I say.

  “I don’t want to be friends,” she says. “I’m just not interested.”

  “Really?”

  “Not interested,” she says.

  “This is the nicest thing anyone’s done for me in a while.”

  “Good. I didn’t do it to be your friend.”

  I put my hand on hers. “Can we sleep on it?”

  She yawns. “We can sleep,” she says. “But it’s not going to change anything.”

  • • •

  IN THE MORNING SHE’S still sleepy, and I talk a blue streak about the sunrise, the power of the moon—any diversion from friends versus more-than-friends versus less-than-friends. I hustle her back to Fairfax and go home to get ready for work. But before I leave, Livorno calls to cut me loose for the day. Actually for the week. Maybe longer. I’m not fired, he promises. Just not needed.

  “I’m sorry about the sledgehammer comment,” I say.

  “You were quite right. I shouldn’t have done that. Water under the bridge. In any case, it was very savvy of you not to learn anything about programming—now you have a paid vacation! I wish I had a paid vacation.”

  Can’t he see? You have to have something in your life in order to vacate.

  “I’ll bring lunch,” I say.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not laying you off. In fact, I was waiting to break this news, but I’ve given you and Laham ownership portions of Amiante.”

  “Henry, you don’t need to do that.”

  “Yes, well, I did. Congratulations,” he says. He sounds distracted, distant. “We will see what we can salvage.”

  “I don’t need a vacation, Henry. Why don’t I come down and help out?”

  “Very technical work. We’re going to impose a
version of the OCC affective reasoner.” I don’t know what this means, but Livorno sounds truly dispirited. “We’ll hope it gets him talking again.”

  “I can also study up on those books I’ve been meaning to read.”

  “I’m afraid those books won’t be of much use now. I’ll call you as soon as we need you. Do enjoy your break.”

  In my bachelor’s warren, I feel ungrateful, guilty, and lost. I’ve got my cat, the Internet, and too much liquor to be trusted. I thought I’d made important adjustments in my life—a focus on the creature comforts, a letting go of “goals” and “purposes”—but if I ever really achieved such a broad-legged stance, it’s gone wobbly. I’ve had my coffee, read the paper, had more coffee, read more paper. It’s 10 a.m. I walk over to the kitchen counter, pick up a recent postcard from Libby. It’s a creased picture of a resplendent quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala, where her cruise ship must have docked. The card is full of her venerable descriptiveness: Haven’t seen any of these, but plenty of ducks around. Love you, Mom. I imagine her alone down there, but that’s not exactly right. She’s with old friends or new friends. Or if not friends, people with shared interests. I sometimes cast myself in her solitary and self-sufficient mold, but that’s not her mold—it’s her condition. It ignores big stories in her life: her marriage of twenty-three years, her children.

  I need out of the apartment; I need fresh air and sunshine. So I put down the card, pack up my reusable totes, and go the Heart of the City Farmer’s Market. “Heart of the City” is code for inner city, and I step over a few wrung-out addicts to join the civic masses picking through our state’s bounty. Mostly old folks, and lots of poor folks, and some yuppies like me. Even a few hipsters are here, grubby and miserable as if after a sleepless night of dry-humping. I buy navel oranges (Valencias aren’t in season until May), bright red chard, a yellow pepper, and a flowering bok choy that I like to sauté and put on pizza. (This is better than Showbiz: I make my own dough.) I also pick up a small houseplant, not because the cat needs more plants to eat, but because I like the man who grows them. He tells me in his thick Mexican accent to repot with organic soil.

  It is a little moment of heaven. And I try to feel grateful for the small solaces of a nice bok choy, of dough rising in the kitchen. I imagine myself in ten years, and twenty years, in the cool sun, before City Hall, where a billowing rainbow tarp blocks the steps for International Women’s Day. What will I look like? Will I be here alone?

  It’s not even noon yet.

  Back at my apartment, the dough proofed, I sit. I can hear my neighbor Fred—the admirable bachelor—clomping around on his crutches. He’s been home a few weeks, and I haven’t yet visited him. I step out into the hall and climb the steps. I knock on the door and call out his name. I can smell his cigarettes, but he doesn’t answer.

  • • •

  THERE’S ONLY SO MUCH pizza I can cook, only so much food I can cram in the fridge. I leave the apartment to let my housekeeper work in peace. Otherwise, I’m in. This would be a good time to do some nesting, but can bachelors nest? For some reason my version of settling in—so far I’ve repainted the bathroom and pulled out the dishwasher to mop—is indistinguishable from my version of moving out.

  I play around on Toler’s site for the marriage-seeking, answering the questions that my mother answered for Dr. Bassett. This time I fill them in for myself, to set up a profile. But at the end of the process I’m out of luck. The site says it can’t help me, but not to feel bad. A decent percentage of people are beyond help. I take what solace this fact has to offer. There is something to be said about a shared weakness.

  The dating sites are kinder, though, and on OkCupid I find a woman who self-describes as a spirited, bored young SWF who likes going out on dates and maybe more? She’s not in the market for anything too serious. This sounds promising. A light, positive, possibly sexual friendship, a way to enjoy our dynamic metroplex. Maybe just the thing to get me back in equilibrium.

  Plus, I think I recognize her. She has the wide-spaced eyes and girlish good looks of Toler’s assistant.

  On the phone, she explains that she is not his assistant. She’s an engineer who works for him, and that’s all she can say on the matter. He’s got her sewn up in a black hole of a confidentiality agreement. (Livorno has me in something similar, but I doubt he’d have the wherewithal to enforce it.) I call her Jennifer as we’re hanging up, and she corrects me. Jenn. She says it in a hard businesslike way. It’s not a diminutive; it’s an abbreviation.

  Jenn is older than I thought she was, slightly older than I am. The advantages are immediate. There’s none of Rachel’s existential seasickness; I can guarantee Jenn doesn’t feel like an animal is about to take her over at any minute. She and I focus not on who we are, but on what we’ll do. It’s an ingenious way to avoid the First Date. All that talking and listening and listening and talking: college is wild, Europe is beautiful, childhood is traumatic. Why haven’t I thought of this before?

  We agree to go see the elephant seals mating at Año Nuevo on Saturday. She already has tickets. I’ll pick her up at Le Boulanger on Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park. The meeting place is a safety precaution, I assume. If I turn out to be a psycho, at least I won’t know where she lives.

  I know I’m not supposed to like Menlo Park. Death, despair, envy, and spiritual longing must occur here at roughly the national averages, but there’s no trace of them. The town is as clean and neutral as a model home. The downtown looks like a mall and the mall looks like a downtown. This is why I’m supposed to dislike it. It doesn’t have “edge” like San Francisco. What is edge? Homeless people disconsolate on the stoop of your restored Victorian? That’s just ugliness, the way the world works, the ugliness of prosperity and poverty. You can abhor it, but you know which side of the door you want to be on.

  In Menlo Park, everyone is on the right side of the door. Which is behind the door. They don’t have withered memento mori on the stoop. They’ve outsourced poverty. I don’t see how this makes them worse people than San Franciscans.

  So I have a warm feeling of correct expectations, of accepting-the-world-as-it-is, of looking things straight in the eye, as I roll down Santa Cruz Avenue, the Subaru nimble on the redbrick crosswalks. There’s no parking on the street, so I click on my hazards and idle in front of Le Boulanger. A Lexus SUV and a Mercedes SUV wait patiently in my rearview mirror.

  Jenn emerges from the store, carrying two coffees in a cardboard tray and a paper bag with pastries. Last night on the phone I ordered a latte and something with chocolate. She’s treating me to breakfast. Another improvement—dating a woman with an income. Jenn’s cuter than I remember. She has a sharp, upturned nose and dark, tanned skin. A ponytail—too golden brown to be natural?—bounces out the back of her baseball cap. She has runner’s legs, and is very put together in her safari clothes, a challenge unique to turn-of-the-millennium American women.

  “This car is clean,” she says, getting into the Subaru. I just had it washed, and the interior shines. The business-faced immigrants at Ducky’s Detailing even vacuumed all the sand out of my seat, the sand left over from the camping trip. The memory gives my guts a sharp twist—Rachel against me, the moon overhead, the grass whishing. I take a deep breath. The decision has been made. I won’t wallow.

  “It’s no Bentley.” I push in the spring-loaded drink holder, which unfurls with a servant’s grace. Jenn’s arms are long, olive, and dry. She smells pleasantly of some herbaceous soap. She inserts the cups as I turn the car into a parking lot, making way for the patient citizens behind me. We do the block, yield to an elderly woman in a crosswalk, and then head down El Camino Real.

  “Good joke,” she says. “But let’s make that the last mention of work.”

  “Deal,” I say. I point at the cloudless sky. “It’s going to be a good day for seal watching.”

&
nbsp; “It’s not too weird that we’re going down to watch animals mate, is it? I mean, on our first thing?”

  “It’s not too weird.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself,” she says, drumming her fingers on her coffee cup. She fidgets in her seat and then, with an air of resignation, reaches down to check her BlackBerry. “I’ve been hearing about the seals for years and I wanted to go down there. And I finally get the tickets and then you and I are talking and I think ‘okay.’ But then this morning it seems weird.”

  “That’ll be up to the seals.”

  “Ha!” The BlackBerry is not only put away, but turned off. “Up to the seals. You’re funny.”

  “Thanks,” I say, though her tone doesn’t sound too complimentary. “Are you originally from around here?”

  “Sonoma, baby.” Erin’s home county—which would explain an aversion to humor. “Santa Rosa. Go Eagles.”

  “You might have known my ex-wife—Erin Talley?”

  Jenn regards me. This is the first mention of d-i-v-o-r-c-e, but we might as well get it out of the way.

  “I don’t think so,” she says, her voice even and unrattled. “Name rings a bell.”

  She wiggles again in her seat, working the iPod, emitting waves of good odor. She smells like a bed in a charming B&B. I steer my mind toward the physical—imagining the feel of her pelvic bone, the skin of her belly. She’s lean—will she have a six-pack or a smooth expanse of flesh between pubis and sternum?

  “I like her songs,” I say in response to a question, but I don’t know what we’re talking about.

  At Año Nuevo State Park a ranger welcomes us, tears our tickets, then leads us and the rest of the animal voyeurs down a zigzagging path to the overlook point. Several rock mesas poke from the water. On each a harem of female elephant seals lie motionless as a bull serially rapes them. The bull, the ranger says, is four times larger than the cows, exhibiting unusually large sexual dimorphism. The cows are no waifs, weighing in at nine hundred-plus pounds, but the bull is the largest sea mammal before whales. The stench is strong. A mixture of fish and vomit. Several men cover their noses with the front pages of the Chronicle. Waves hit the mesas, shooting mist over the humping bulls. The droplets rain down on us, like Nature’s own money shot.