A Working Theory of Love

by Scott Hutchins

  “Cute,” Jenn says.

  The seals are the color of rotten meat. Their noses hang long and lumpy, like an exposed intestine. I’m not sure what’s cute about them, but Jenn quivers in their presence. Maybe she’s into sexual dimorphism? I detect the anxious, long-legged excitement of a girl around horses.

  She’s a good idea, this one. Pretty, enthusiastic, employed, age-appropriate.

  The ranger says they don’t know whether the cows mate with the same bull in consecutive years. They’d like to put a collar on select cows and bulls, but there’s no money for the project. The dough is drying up for such research. Besides, it’s no piece of cake getting a collar on a horny six-thousand-pound seal. Everyone laughs.

  A juvenile bull approaches the mesa. Stretching out his lumpy nose to bare jagged, fish-stained teeth, the full-grown bull slides after him, emitting a roar like an air horn.

  “See what I mean?” the ranger asks. Our group applauds.

  “That’s what I call an alpha male,” a thin man in a Le Coq Sportif jogging suit says to his companion.

  “He’s even better-looking than Eric,” she says, and they share a chuckle over this Eric.

  “What’s a harem?” a young girl asks her mother.

  The ranger is waving a flyer over his head, but doesn’t explain what the flyer is for. “The milk fat content of a female elephant seal’s milk is ninety-two percent. That’s how they get such shapely bodies.”

  “The little ones are more my style,” Jenn says, smiling at me.

  “The beta males?”

  “Yeah,” she says, nodding as if to a revelation. “I guess the beta males are my favorites.”

  I watch the mist explode off the rocks, scattering a whirl of gulls. Surely she’s not calling me a beta male. To my face. Is this some sort of sex code?

  “Do you mean beta male like in an S-and-M sense?” I ask.

  “S-and-M? Like S-and-M?”

  “I’m just trying to figure out if you’re talking about me.”

  “You?” Surprise pours down her face. “You, no.” She covers her mouth with her hand. “He thinks I’m talking about him,” she reports to an unseen audience. “I’m not talking about you. Oh, Lord. Not at all. I was talking about the seals. I like the little ones, the cute ones. Ha!”

  “Ha,” I say.

  “Oh, Lord,” she says. “You thought”—she shakes her head—“I’m blowing it? I’m blowing our first thing?”

  Jenn’s posture is hunched forward, protective. This is a serious question, a serious fear.

  “Forget about it,” I say. “I thought you were communicating something . . .”

  “Sure, I see that. I see why you think that. I’m saying beta male, you’re thinking—whoa.”

  It’s hard to resist laughing. “Yeah. Something like that.”

  We look back at the seals, screaming and humping.

  • • •

  “IT’S THE COAST that keeps me here,” she says, as we cruise back up Highway 1. “I mean, in college, on the East Coast, it was like no rocks, no PCH, no Pacific, you know. So as soon as I can, I’m back here.”

  I pull off at Montara Beach. In the trunk is a picnic I packed. Champagne, crusty bread from Acme bakery, saucisson sec, a wedge of mimolette, some cherry tomatoes, and cucumbers cut into octagonal slices. It’s kind of a beta male picnic. A sign that my passionate days in the sack are behind me.

  “This looks like a great spot,” she says.

  “I like this beach,” I say. I pop the trunk and lug the basket carelessly, awkwardly, as if I’m carrying my mother’s purse. I let Jenn spread the blanket. In a last-ditch attempt to assert myself, I toss the basket roughly in the middle, hear a champagne glass crack. I feel stupid.

  “We can share,” she says. She holds her chin up, looking like a mischievous, triumphant girl.

  “Good idea.”

  The champagne foams after its rough handling. I lick my hand, hold it out for her. She holds my wrist, touching her tongue to the small bubbles on my fingers.

  “You hungry?” I ask.

  “I am.” She rolls onto her stomach, kicks her calves up.

  “I’ll cut you a slice of cheese.”

  “I’m going to start on these tomatoes.”

  She puts one in her mouth, then one in mine. I puncture the skin, feel the acid shock filling my mouth. She rounds her lips, shows the uneaten tomato, then begins smacking on it like a piece of gum, rolling on her back and laughing ha ha ha.

  “Excuse me,” I say, lying next to her. She eyes me, but doesn’t turn her head. I lick my lips and kiss her, tasting for the tomato but finding only cool girl mouth, my favorite flavor of all.

  She lies completely open, inviting. I don’t touch her body, just watch her chest rise and fall.

  “I think you’re an alpha male who pretends to be a beta male,” she says, giving me a wonderful look. It starts with a swollen bottom lip and travels to upturned eyes. The chin is tucked. It’s a mixture of hunger and appeal, possession and shyness.

  “Better than a beta male pretending to be an alpha male.”

  She moves my hands from her side and places them back on the blanket. “Let’s cool down for a second.” She looks out at the ocean. “You pack any water?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t like having sex on the first thing.”

  “That’s a reasonable policy. I hope you’ll consider an exception.”

  “Those exceptions don’t usually turn out too well.”

  “Yeah? What happens?”

  “You don’t know? You must be very innocent.”

  “Pure as the driven snow.”

  “One,” she says, enumerating on her fingers, “we’ll never talk again, or two, you’ll never leave me alone again. Or it’ll be normal but we won’t have that tension—that nice buildup.”

  “Buildup.” My heart stumbles here. A part of me has been running a self-congratulatory tab, Rachel versus Jenn. Age, education, career, etc. But who’s to say what transpired between Rachel and me wasn’t all my fault? What if we’d had buildup? What if we hadn’t had sex right off, but had smooched a bit and exchanged numbers?

  “Yeah, there has to be the sign.” Jenn smiles. She’s still watching the waves. “The right moment, you know.”

  I refill her—the—glass. I sit back on the blanket, eat a cherry tomato. If I’d called off sex with Rachel we would never have spoken again. Our problem wasn’t buildup; it was follow-through. And so we fell off track—it’s a universal tendency. It doesn’t mean anyone did anything wrong. A relationship that doesn’t last isn’t a failure; it’s just a time in your life that’s come to an end.

  “Oh my God,” Jenn says, pointing. In the ocean, a fountain of water explodes up, widening into a mist, raining down. “Whale.”

  Another spray erupts a few hundred yards out, and then another. It seems to be three whales, though the animals themselves remain submerged. The spray fires off again, farther south.

  “Does that count as a sign?” I ask.

  • • •

  AT HER APARTMENT, we make an afternoon of it. In the dusky light of her kitchen, I stand naked and eat leftover salami. My body is tingling and warm, and I need the salt. Her place is as neat and impersonal as an IKEA showroom, and I admire it. There’s no family bed to polish or telescope to dust. You can put every stick of this out on the sidewalk tomorrow and start fresh. Liberty!

  She has an impressive array of running equipment—heart monitors, various shoes, a weightless wristwatch. We have a lot of similarities, the two of us. Working in Silicon Valley. Working for bosses who know each other. We’re similar in age. In education background. (Actually, I’m undereducated. She has a PhD.) This profil
e stuff—the bread and butter of Toler’s marriage site—shouldn’t be underestimated. I could move into this apartment tomorrow. She could move into my apartment tomorrow. The salad spinner, the iPhone adapters, the pods for the espresso machines—we could find it all. In important ways we’re living the same life, though hers is probably more interesting. She’s mentioned a weekful of plans. Drinks with friends, barbecues.

  I flip through the magazines on the kitchen table—Wired, Time, US Weekly—and also a blue, glossy brochure from Pure Encounters. It’s a professional-looking production. Across the inside it reads, The Way to Feel. Part of me thinks, maybe so. Another thinks, Jesus Christ.

  “A friend gave me that,” she says. She’s cinched a paisley robe around her waist, getting back in touch with modesty. “I think it’s a kind of a crazy sex cult thing.”

  “I know a few regulars.”

  “Computer people, I bet. We’ll pay good money to be reminded we have a body, right?”

  “I guess so.” Though I don’t forget about my body so much as myself.

  “I’m not judging it. It’s about connections. I think a lot of people are looking for that.” Her face flushes with embarrassment.

  What an odd world. I think she needs a hug—I recognize the way she’s standing—but do we know each other well enough? We’ll see. I take her by the shoulders and pull her to me, gripping her harder with one arm than the other—a little ambiguity in case I’ve misread the situation. Then I settle in for a good hug. Maybe I need it. With Rachel kaput—yes, still thinking about her—and Dr. Bassett enraged to silence (enraged at me), and my doddering genius boss giving me the furlough I don’t need. Maybe I’m the one who needs to be held. And it does feel good, though maybe only sixty percent good. Jenn and I have drunk deeply of the cup of each other’s bodies today, but—I have to say—hugging feels a little strange.

  15

  WALKING OUT OF LOMBARDI SPORTS with fresh strings in my racket, I come across a commotion. In front of the other branch of Play Date, the branch that wasn’t burned down, a young woman is lying on her back on the dirty sidewalk while a person of indeterminate gender in a robot costume pretends to joylessly penetrate her. It looks like pretty good street theater. The robot costume is homemade, a cardboard box with memory reels and colored buttons drawn on it. A group of young people stand behind the couple, blocking the entrance to the store. They hold up signs: SEX TOOLS ARE FOR FOOLS and DON’T FUCK PLASTIC.

  The audience is a good cross section of Polk Street at this historical juncture: a few Mexicans in paint-stained work pants; a white man in a suit, sleek as a greyhound; mustachioed hipsters in their skinny pants and bowler hats; a few biz-casual drones like myself; an ancient leather daddy; an Indian woman in a sari; and a mixed-race group of the homeless and crazed, one of whom is jumping up and down, chittering like a lemur.

  “Is this a promotional event?” one of the biz-casuals asks me.

  The young people behind the copulating robot chant, “No investments in my vagina.”

  The staff at Play Date peek out of the frosted glass door, looking baffled.

  “This is awesome is what it is,” a hipster says. He’s filming the event on his phone.

  “I guess it’s a protest?” I say. Protesting a sex store would be a new one here in SF, the city that never sleeps without blogging about it. But anything’s possible. The other Play Date, the one closer to my apartment, does seem to have been the victim of arson. Investigators suspect the fire began with a “Molotov incident.”

  The robot stops humping and pushes up to its knees. It raises its hands and the young people stop chanting.

  “Can you feel anything?” it asks. I think it’s a boy, if only by the size and shape of the legs. But the voice is affectless and spoken through some distorting device, like the voice of someone who has had a tracheostomy. “Can you feel anything?”

  “No,” the young woman says. She’s wearing a white Phantom of the Opera mask. “I can’t feel anything.”

  She rolls her head toward us. “I can’t feel anything,” she repeats.

  I’m struck woozy. The voice sounds like Rachel. We haven’t really spoken since the camping trip. Or, maybe more to the point, since I took up with Jenn. Anyway, it’s been weeks.

  The robot unscrews its large phallus, puts it in a kind of quiver, and removes an even larger phallus, which it screws back into the anchor hole it has in its genital area. “I’ll make it bigger so you can feel something.”

  He begins to hump her again. The young people chant against investments in their vaginas. Is it her? I can’t tell for sure. The skin is bright and white; the hair is curly, but darker than I remember. I feel the pinch of memory. Not our camping trip this time, but the dim light of my bedroom, her head heavy on the pillow, the tiny hairs of her neck riffling from the morning breeze. The smell of coffee from my automatic pot mixed with the musk of our sleep.

  I can’t let this giggling hipster post her open legs on YouTube. Especially considering that her open legs are already online, without the mask. I put my hand gently on his shoulder and shove him toward a group of newspaper boxes.

  “What?” he says, windmilling his arms. “What?”

  “You ruined it,” his little buddy says, coming in close to me. I ball my hand into a fist. I haven’t been in a fight since junior high, but I’m looking forward to it.

  “Cops!” the protesters shout.

  Two police officers, both women, amble in our direction. They hold their arms out like gunslingers, but their hands are empty. They’re not coming for me. They’re heading straight for the demonstrators, probably just to talk. But the protestors do something not in keeping with modern methods of civil disobedience: they drop whatever they’re holding and run like hell.

  “Hey,” the cops call after the protesters, who don’t look back. They dash across the street into the Tenderloin. A taxi brakes, nose dipping down, to avoid them.

  “What’s gotten into those rascals?” one of the cops says.

  I step out of the crowd and jog across the street too. I’m carrying my computer bag, and now my tennis bag, but the protesters are still pretty easy to follow. One of them is a robot with a two-foot penis. They take a left up Pine. They’re fleet of foot, these protesters. They have the sprinting ability of young people, but the man following them, oldish youth that I am, is steady.

  They turn right on Hyde. They’re heading south, toward the BART, but at the corner of Hyde and Turk a brown Econoline screeches to a halt, side door open. They throw themselves inside. The robot jumps in backwards, airborne for a split second, gripping the tip of his penis so that it doesn’t hit anyone. Very wise. He lands with a thump, and one of his memory reels pops off, rolling onto the street.

  “Rachel,” I shout, but no one is looking my way.

  The door slides shut. The Econoline gasses it through the yellow light, heading—I assume—for the Golden Gate Bridge.

  I pick up the tape reel. It’s an old home movie. Super 8, the kind that captured hours of my youth, running in circles, dancing, silently vying with my brother for the limelight. Or very rarely my father, eyebrow raised, looking as if he’d been caught in a private activity, the secret of his daily life.

  “Where they’d go?” The cops have caught up with me, both winded from the jog. I slip the movie inside my coat.

  “Who?” I say.

  If that girl was Rachel, then there’s no doubt the robot was Trevor. Kind of beautiful, their little performance. And surprisingly painful, too. I miss her.

  • • •

  AT HOME I EXAMINE the film. It’s just a home movie, and as I look at its yellowed images I come to realize its no one’s. The people in this movie are scattered to the winds. Or—the more likely explanation—they’ve just uploaded all those analog memories onto DVD
.

  I can barely admit what I feared I’d find: one of Rachel’s sex tapes. Of course, her sex tapes wouldn’t be on Super 8. They’d be digital. That’s how they would be online.

  I open up my computer, type in her name. I’ve done this already, and it’s the same haul of sites. None—not even the Facebook page—relate to her. How would I find the video? How do you search for your lover’s body—your ex-lover’s body? Teen? Amateur? Girl next door? Long Island bush? Nasty spiritual seeker? I don’t know what acts she and the guy performed. She just said “regular stuff.” Every search brings up girls—they’re in every imaginable position, in every imaginable fantasy. They’re sucking off older guys, sucking off each other, sucking off vegetables. They’re wearing pigtails. They’re carrying whips. They’re carrying briefcases. I’ve looked at these sites before, for a little fantasy, a little sexual relief. But I’ve never examined the faces. Hundreds of faces. Thousands. Tens of thousands. All a little lost. A little surprised.

  I close the laptop and call Rachel. She doesn’t pick up. And she doesn’t pick up thirty minutes later or after an hour or after two or after three. I finally leave a benign message.

  Then I call Livorno and beg him to let me come in tomorrow. He says that until dear old da is back online, I might as well relax. He doesn’t himself sound relaxed.

  “When do you think this will be?”

  “The disintegrative effect took us completely by surprise.”

  “You should buy the rights to Pride again. It’s the seven deadly sins, not the six. Seven is a magic number.”