A Working Theory of Love

by Scott Hutchins

I should get angry about this comment, but I sip my drink and consider whether she has a point.

  “What direction did I represent?”

  “Did or do?”

  I’m surprised to hear I represent anything currently.

  “Do.”

  “First love gone mysteriously wrong.”

  I raise my glass to her description. “I’d agree with every word in the statement but ‘mysteriously.’”

  “If you can explain it to me, I’m all ears.” She leans on the bar and gives me a warm smile, as if we’re old friends having a chat. As if we’re not talking about the implosion of our lives together. Does she not think our lives imploded?

  “Does Ian know you’re here?”

  “Of course he does,” she says. “He just doesn’t know you’re here.”

  Some comedian has loaded the jukebox with Journey’s greatest hits. We’re caught in a whirlpool of “City by the Bay” and “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Erin leans over to the bar to order yet another drink, and I find myself wondering if I could sleep with my ex-wife. If we might—and this has to be the third martini whipping up my post-retreat brain—get past some roadblocks that way. But I can’t make a pass at her and have it turned down. And I can’t make a pass at her and have it accepted. We would know exactly what to do, of course. We had a white-hot physical connection, before we had no physical connection at all. I look at her newly strong forearms. I like them.

  “Are you having another?” she asks.

  Sleeping with her would have pleasures, one of them the pleasure of home—home after a much-needed remodel. I imagine the exact steps we would go through. The awkward question. Would you like to come to my place—our old place—for a nightcap? Then we would walk up over to Dolores and past the park and up the hill—a good twenty-minute walk, a near eternity. The dusty staircase would be waiting on us. Maybe even an old neighbor with a surprised look. Erin would comment on the changes in the building—the new compost bin, the energy-saving bulbs. And then there’s the cat, which will probably give her a cold welcome and offend her. Or give her a warm welcome and offend me. And then the bed . . . our old bed . . .

  There’s absolutely no way. The only proposal I could make to her would be a dirty night in a hotel, which might take care of this storm cloud that’s blown up around us. But not tonight. No more drinks for me. Because I blessedly, once again, have to go to work tomorrow.

  • • •

  I MEET LIVORNO AT the hostess stand of P.F. Chang’s in the Palo Alto mall. He looks thinner than I remember. Gaunter. It’s an old-man thinness. It could be his white shorts, which show off an expanse of sinewy, pale leg.

  Is he using bottle tan on his face?

  “I was just telling Montana here about the New Orleans marathon,” he says.

  Montana is the hostess, a pretty, pleasantly blank-looking high-school-age girl. It’s not profound blankness—just the vacancy of youth. A certain position of the head, a set of the eyes, all of which can be transformed by twenty-two or twenty-five or twenty-seven, her eyes sharper, head tilted down into life, ready for impact. She just needs something terrible to happen to her, and then needs to do something terrible to someone else. After that, she’s all set.

  Montana is giving Livorno her tolerating-a-crazy-talkative-senior smile. One she probably saw on a training video. He brags a bit more about the marathon—it’s a half-marathon, I happen to know, but the man is knocking on eighty. It’s still impressive. But Montana only perks up when Livorno whips out his new iPhone. I feel a little thrill when the girl ogles it, has her thinking reset. You shouldn’t underestimate your elders, young lady.

  “Montana,” he says. “What province is Chef Chang from?”

  She looks alarmed. “Our chef’s name is Mario,” she says.

  Nor should you overestimate them.

  We’re shown to our table, where we order lettuce cups, Mongolian beef, and Hawaiian prawns. We both drink Arnold Palmers, and I’m so happy to be here, sitting across from Livorno. I’ve missed him like a best friend.

  “I’ll be brief,” he says. “Your father is still scrambled.”

  “I guess if you made me angry, despairing, greedy, envious—and the other two—all at the same time, I’d be scrambled myself.”

  “I should be crowing. The Sins weren’t this robust last time.”

  “What happened to ‘paddleball’?”

  He shrugs. “We have gotten him to speak a bit. He’ll answer basic questions, but won’t go beyond them. Sometimes, there’s a passing sense of presence, even in his refusal to speak.” Livorno is warming up, the old delight at discovery upon him, but then he stops, leaning back to sip his drink. “Though it could be my limited English.”

  “You speak English better than I do.”

  “I’m not any worse off than my colleagues,” he says. “We’ve spent the last fifty years making wild predictions and failing to even come close. We predicted sentient computers. We produced self-propelled vacuum cleaners.”

  “Which don’t work very well.” I regret saying it.

  “Exactly. And as far as natural language processing? We’ve made it to the point where a customer can shout ‘operator’ into his phone four or five times and hope to speak to a real person. This is hardly progress.” He beams, seeming to take some satisfaction in his shared defeat.

  “You always told me AI was philosophy, not engineering,” I say.

  His smile disappears. “That’s because in philosophy you can move the goalposts. In engineering, you just fail. And that’s where we are. Laham is preparing to return to Indonesia. Dr. Bassett is lost in himself. In a kind of labyrinth.”

  I take a bite of lettuce cup. It’s a funerary meal. My first thought is that he can’t take this away from me. But what is this? My father—the chance to chat with my father’s ghost. So what if it’s mostly about horses and Willie Beerbaum. He has helped me. We’ve talked about Rachel. We’ve talked about Erin.

  “But what if our problems are philosophical?” I say. “What if with the gut and the brain we’re leaving out an essential element to cobbling together a person?”

  Livorno puts his hands flat on the table, pushes himself up straighter. “We don’t have anything close to the resources to build a body.”

  “I’m talking about some governing principle that connects gut and brain. Being lost in himself, in a kind of labyrinth, separated, pulling apart on the inside—that sounds like a common affliction. So let’s attack this head-on. What if we had a system to unify him, so everything inside him starts to click?”

  Livorno narrows his eyes, as if I’ve just gone blurry, but I don’t feel blurry. I feel precise, maybe inspired.

  “What do you mean by click?” he asks.

  “Connectedness,” I say. “Connection. I was just at a retreat”—this feels like a misstep—“and it was all about encouraging a kind of inner harmony, getting over roadblocks.” Misstep again. I’ve got to convey my ideas before the lingo of Pure Encounters betrays me. “Meaning psychological blocks. It’s more about attitude. It’s about wanting”—I search for the words, but I seem to be possessed—“to click and stay clicked.”

  He leans in; he doesn’t look outraged or disbelieving. “But what is the mechanism of the clicking?”

  “Well,” I say. The answer involves chakras, meridians, auras. Where do I start? “It’s about love. It’s about inner love and outer love. It’s about love being part of every interaction with yourself and the world.”

  “I still don’t understand the mechanism of conveyance for this love. What is the thing that is doing the clicking? The gut? The brain?”

  “I think it’s the limbic system.”

  “The limbic system.” He leans back, rolls a lettuce cup, sets it down. He takes a sip
of Arnold Palmer, sets it down. He begins to crack his knuckles. “And they think human love is an extension of some sort of primum mobile.”

  “I think they also just think it’s just, you know, the feeling.”

  “A theory of love.” He sips his tea. “It makes for an eye-catching press release.”

  “Sure,” I say, disheartened. I should be grateful he’s even listening to me. I can only imagine the level of desperation necessary for him to ponder these ideas. But I want to know if he thinks we’re actually on to something. “He has a gut and a mind. Maybe he needs a heart.”

  Livorno weighs this suggestion silently. “The limbic system is a much clearer metaphor.”

  “A metaphor that might work?”

  “The whole idea is a bit Gnostic. Every interaction colored with love. A kind of universal positive inclination. Rather than no—yes.”

  “Rather than no,” I say. “Yes. That’s basically it.”

  “There’s nothing basic about it.” He touches the uneaten lettuce cup, raises it to his mouth. “Modeling even a discarded version of human nature is a complicated proposition. At the very least, we need Laham. For good measure, I should buy Pride back.” He swallows, then bares the full piano keyboard of his teeth. “This is not going to be cheap.”

  • • •

  I RIP THE PLASTIC off a laundered shirt. I adjust my hair. I’m officially back on the job, and my first task is to visit Toler. Though he’s the competition, we’re asking him for the additional funding. I’ll have to weather his disdain.

  But as I’m walking out the door, Rachel’s uncle, Rick, calls me again. “I should be sending texts,” he says. “I know how you kids are.”

  “I’m sorry I haven’t called you back,” I say.

  “I was just wondering if you could put Rachel on the phone.”

  “Rachel?” I lock my door and set down my bag. “She’s not with me.”

  “Oh.” He sounds embarrassed. “Well, sorry to call.”

  “It’s good to hear from you,” I say, holding the phone on my shoulder as I pick up my bag. I can feel the day shifting into gear again—Livorno, then Toler, then lunch—but something about Rick’s voice stops me.

  “You don’t know where she is?” I ask.

  “We just assumed she was down there with you.”

  “We haven’t actually talked in about a month.”

  “You’re not dating anymore?”

  “No,” I say. But why is this a secret? Was she proud to be dating me? Sweet God, I hope she wasn’t ashamed to have lost me.

  “I guess we’re a little worried about her then,” he says. “It’s been three days. We’re trying not to be controlling, you know?”

  “Can you call any of her friends?”

  This suggestion is met with silence.

  “She took off work,” Rick says. “I just saw those two sleeping bags gone and, you know, assumed.”

  • • •

  IT’S WITH TREPIDATION that I cancel my meeting with Toler. Can you just reschedule a meeting with the super-rich? Will he deprive us of funds out of spite? I’ll find out—tomorrow. For now I’m driving over the mountains to the Tennessee Valley trailhead. It’s a weekday and there aren’t many cars, but Rachel’s Honda is parked in the lot, her cell sitting on the driver’s seat, either off or with a dead battery. Mystery solved. I know where she is. I know she’s as safe as she wants to be. But I stand there and look down the trail, thinking about that detail Rick mentioned—two sleeping bags.

  Of course, she’s off camping with someone else, maybe in the spots she showed me. That’s what you do in life. You meet someone, date them, and when it’s over you gather the good parts and carry them into the future, shedding the bad, if possible.

  Still, couldn’t she have gone camping somewhere else?

  I think about leaving her a note. Everyone worried—please call. This way she would know that I knew. Pure passive aggression on my part. I’ve left messages, Rick has left messages. She’ll get them as soon as she returns to the car.

  So happy to have found you, and hope you’re having fun, but please do call. Want to stay clicked.

  Even worse.

  I lock the Subaru and head down the main path toward the ocean, stopping at the map to the park. There looks to be fifty miles’ worth of trails, more than I could cover in a day, and that would assume she wasn’t hiking them herself, a moving target. All I know is she must like this person. Three days here would be a boring stretch otherwise. A gust of wind whips dust off the path and into my eyes. Ahead of me several women in English riding costumes trot their horses toward the beach. The sun overhead is hot, especially to me in my starched shirt. The usual suspects are about: egrets, seagulls, titmice. California quail with their dashing pompadours. And people. There are always people who seem to have the day off.

  I stop at the foot of the Fox Trail but decide not to climb it. Same with the Coastal Trail. I’m not going to snoop on Rachel. If I stumble across her and her camp partner, so be it.

  Walking back up to the lot I see her. She swings her backpack into the Honda’s trunk, slams the lid down, sniffs. She gives the Subaru—parked several slots down—a long look, though it should be impossible to know it’s mine. I bought the most standard of standard models, and I’m morally opposed to bumper stickers. Still, I crouch on my brushy patch of trail to make sure she doesn’t spot me. She bends down to straighten her jeans, then stands again, smoothing back her hair into an unruly ponytail. She’s alone, and I get the impression she has been, the whole time. She has the slow, deliberate movements of someone who has been keeping her own counsel. I feel somewhat shamefacedly happy she’s camping solo, and then I feel terrible she’s here by herself. But why should I feel terrible? She’s simply a girl who walks the earth as I do. Walks it better than I do. Imagine liking the person you’re camping with—when that person is yourself.

  17

  I’M MEETING TOLER at the research wing of his company in Redwood City, where he apparently spends most of his time. The corporate headquarters of his matchmaking company is deeper in Silicon Valley, among a stretch of forgettable office parks that express their imperial grandeur only through sheer cost—by square foot it would be cheaper to relocate to the Champs-Elysées. But scrappy start-ups—even well-financed ones—should have humbler digs. Toler Solutions hasn’t quite lowered itself to a former quilting studio, but close enough: a pressed sandstone and glass two-story building vague enough to contain anything—a cookware outlet, a printing press, dentists. It’s eight in the morning—I had to get up at six to be ready. I think the early hour is punishment for rescheduling. If so, I’m happy to receive it. Whatever makes Toler’s money smile down upon us.

  I park the Subaru in front of a concrete trash can, right next to the Bentley, which—let’s face it—looks like a Chrysler, and step up on the low sidewalk and enter the glass door. The reception area buzzes with fluorescent lights. To the right three beanbags—bright primary red, yellow, and blue—surround a coffee table covered in what appear to be toys for children age three and under. A wooden train set, a stack of Mega Bloks. To the left a young, unsmiling Asian woman stands motionless behind a large polished-wood counter. A huge monitor behind her head plays a television commercial for Toler’s other business. I smile at her, but she merely looks at me steadily. She must not be the receptionist, but who else could she be? She’s standing behind a desk in the reception.

  “I’m here to see Adam Toler,” I say, grinning from discomfort. When she says nothing, I grin harder, stretching my face as far as it will go.

  “Name?”

  “Neill Bassett.”

  She turns to the monitor and touches it, pulling up a very full list of appointments for Toler. My name is nowhere to be seen.

  “Maybe
he’s going to try to work me in?”

  She turns back around, her eyebrows raised doubtfully. “Why don’t you have a seat?” She indicates the corner of the room with the toys and the beanbags.

  “Do you have chairs?” I ask, but she’s exited through a door into the depths of the building, leaving me alone.

  I walk over to the coffee table and pick up a plastic hammer. I don’t want to sit in a beanbag—it feels debasing in advance. Legs splayed out, arms stuck to the vinyl. But I’m tired, and besides what do I care about debasement? I’d bark like a dog—chase a stick!—to get Dr. Bassett talking again.

  “Where is he?” Toler’s voice comes from a back office. I try to scramble up from the beanbag, but it’s a difficult process. I have to first sit on the floor and get my legs under me, then hold on to the coffee table to get into a squatting position, as if the toys have somehow sent me back to my toddler days. It’s at this stage that Toler strides in, hand held in front of him. I’m ready to correct him on my name, but he says, “Welcome, Neill.” He looks like he’s been on some radical diet since I last saw him. He’s dropped another ten pounds easy. His skin is yellowed and drooping, his jowly face loose as a hound’s. But he doesn’t seem to have lost any of his evil buoyancy. “Tea? Bubbly water?” he asks. “We even have wine, and I didn’t make it in my bathtub.” He sweeps an arm in the direction of his receptionist. “Grace, get this man what he wants.”

  He leads me through the door he just came out of, down a dimly lit hall to his office, which isn’t as showy as I would have guessed for a Bentley owner. I think he’s tried to communicate minimalism, humility. Or maybe something more ineffable—communicating that he’s not trying to communicate anything. But the red leather chair I sit in has a nice Italian feel of needless luxury, and there’s a grouping of black-and-white photos on the wall—not too organized, not too disorganized—that imply a designer’s touch. His desk is arranged as if for a photo shoot—a pad of paper, two black pens side by side, and a closed brushed aluminum laptop. If it weren’t for the three Ionic Breezes in the corners and a Tiger Woods bobblehead (an homage to Livorno?), I wouldn’t be sure this room was anything more than a theater set.