“It’s got to be hard on her,” Erin said. “To see the family all together like this.” Erin always went for the obvious explanation. It was a trait that made me suffer. But when I tried to bring up my theory of Mindy, we exploded into one of our stupid fights. With the epiphanic air of bad TV detective, Erin realized where this was all coming from: I was secretly attracted to Mindy.
I went looking for Libby. The sun outside was like a hot brick being held to my cheek. Thanks to Libby’s Gallic ancestry I’m a good tanner, but I have many suspect moles and shouldn’t have been without a hat in that direct, midday radiation. I walked out past our two rental cars to the shimmering blacktop and shielded my eyes, trying to catch sight of Mom’s fast-bobbing outline steaming from or into the distance.
At the edge of the island there was a convenience store that doubled as an outdoor saloon. That’s where I found my mother, sitting on a barstool under the ceiling fan. She was drinking a longneck, shelling peanuts with one hand, and watching a baseball game, none of which I’d ever seen her do before. She supports gay rights and MoveOn.org, but there’s always been the sweet, correct air of Kappa Kappa Gamma ’67 around her.
“I’ve been looking all over for you,” I said, taking the adjacent stool.
She leaned back to admire me, looking more like my mother than at any time in the previous forty-eight hours. “You found me,” she said. She took a pull off her beer.
“We’ve got plenty of that at the house,” I said.
“I come here for the ambience.” She waved a hand at the little coconut monkeys standing sentry next to the liquor bottles.
“How authentic,” I said. “Genuine North Carolina coconuts, I’m sure.”
“You sound a little edgy, sweetheart.”
“I’ve come to ask you if something is the matter.”
“I’ve just been missing your father.”
Galling, galling that Erin was right.
“Mindy’s driving me absolutely insane,” I said. What? Mindy wasn’t bothering me at all, but I felt uncontrollable invective bubbling out. “She’s a Nazi. No one can have the slightest odd opinion around her without her making big judgmental cow eyes.”
Libby looked at me with concern, but she didn’t seem as shocked as I was. “Hmph,” she said. “I didn’t know you felt that way about Mindy. She’s perfectly nice.”
“Perfectly.”
“Well, she loves your brother. She’s not exactly my style, but I’m happy to have her in our lives.”
“But doesn’t she make your skin crawl?”
“I’m surprised she can make anyone’s skin crawl. She’s as mild as soap.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t really mind her at all. In fact, I like her. I don’t know why I said any of that.”
On the television a batter swung and missed.
“Is everything okay with you and Erin?”
I’d managed with hand signals to get my own longneck. I drank from it. “We may be going through a rough spot.”
“It’s important to communicate, I think. I think it’s important to give each other space, too.”
I think. I think. This was the lingering note of my father’s suicide. She was no longer sure she had anything definite to say about love.
“But I’m not here to talk about me. I want to talk about you.”
There was fizzy cheering from the old TV set.
“Well,” she said. “Being around the four of you, all grown up and living life—I feel a little out of place.”
I interrupted. “You’re the whole reason we’re here.”
“I guess that’s true.” She smiled, clearly not believing me.
I drank from my beer. I was thirty years old and living with a woman who hated me at least as much as she loved me. I had little bandwidth and less wisdom to offer. “Have you thought about dating?”
“Who says I’m not dating?”
“Who is it? Someone I know?”
My mother finished her beer and stood, gathering her frosted-green dumbbells from the counter. “I’m not seeing anyone.”
“Don’t go,” I said. “Sit. Ask me a question.”
She didn’t sit. “How was that strange airline you took?”
“Hooters. It was just a normal plane.”
“Even a normal plane,” she said, “is a pretty special thing.”
“Is that an instructive analogy?” I asked.
She laughed. “Maybe. Neill, lately, when I look at my life and look at my friends’ lives—there’s so much going wrong—I think to myself, ‘What do I know?’ What do I know? The answer is ‘Not much.’”
“I didn’t mean it as criticism. I like instructive analogies.”
“I know. But I’m afraid you’ll start listening to them.” Her feet moved up and down on the sandy boards; the walking machine was started but idling. “Well, I’m going to get a little exercise before I start on dinner.”
“Let me make dinner.”
“You need to relax. You just called your sister-in-law a Nazi.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just relax. Okay.” She looked down at her kneading sneakers.
“Wait,” I say. “What about Dad? What about missing Dad? Is it all the time? Can you survive it?”
She’s not an indulgent mother. She looked at me sharply, annoyed. “It’s been ten years,” she said. “Yes, I miss him all the time, and, yes, I can survive it.”
• • •
SHE EMERGES FROM MY office at lunchtime. I’ve spent the morning getting rid of some of Livorno’s old computer drives, an insurmountable task (he has decades’ worth of drives) but one I enjoy. I take them into the back parking lot, unscrew the casings, take a hammer to the chips, and then to the plates if they’re glass. If they’re aluminum, I run an extension cord from Laham’s workstation, and hold them down with my shoe while I run the electric grinder over the surface. Very satisfying, especially the glass, which puffs into a powder.
Libby’s eyes are red and tired, but there’s also a sparkle. She smiles beatifically, which nowadays—unfortunately—makes her look like a crazy person. Who but a crazy person smiles beatifically?
“I had no idea,” she says. “I really had no idea. It’s like talking to him. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like he’s almost there. He remembers everything. I mean everything. More than I do. And he’s so cheerful.” She places her hand on the reception desk. She looks directly through me. “What we were doing before you were born. Our trips to Gulf Shores. It’s all there.”
I’m taking my time here, evaluating whether she’s spinning down memory lane or in some deeper trouble. I offer her tea, an idea she dismisses with a wave.
“He still talks too much about his father, and about his upbringing and all the traditional values stuff. But he’ll go over the good times, too. We had a lot of good times.”
Livorno stands in his office door. I shake my head, signaling him not to come out.
“It’s easy to forget that,” she says.
“I know, Mom,” I say. “I forget it, too.”
Her eyes come into focus. “Stop looking at me like I’m about to pull a gun on you.”
• • •
THAT NIGHT WE GO to see a play and have a quiet dinner. The play is a one-man show about a Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria, and I’m happy it doesn’t have any obvious reflection on our day or our lives. It’s just a pretty good play, a pretty good diversion. Libby seems solid, unchanged from yesterday, and yet I want to reach over and grab her hand, comfort her. I’ve never grabbed her hand before—in the Bassett family, we don’t coddle. If I touched her right now, she might leap from her seat with a shout.
&nbs
p; The fog blew in while we were in the theater. I pull my coat tight around my neck. Libby zips up her parka. I consider suggesting a stroll over to Mission Street, but the streets are deserted, and we look muggable. As we head up Valencia, my phone rings. The name—Rachel. She’s finally returning my call from her solo camping trip.
“You can get that,” Libby says.
I replace the phone in my pocket. Maybe she’s calling out of a sense of duty. Maybe she’s calling because she wants to stay clicked. I don’t know what answering would mean—pathetic hypocrisy? Weakness? An uncomplicated desire to hear her voice?
• • •
LATTES IN HAND, we’re back at Amiante at 9 a.m. My mother is cheerful, but didn’t sleep well last night. “It wasn’t your couch,” she assures me.
I escort her to my office. “You are not to work too hard. We can go have a late breakfast pastry in an hour.”
She smiles and then closes the door on me, as if she and my father need their privacy. I don’t like this. I’d much prefer to be able to see her typing on the computer, to ask her questions, to bring her tea.
I consider going into Laham’s office to watch the conversation, but instead I tell Livorno I’m going for a walk. In the parking lot, I call Rachel back. She’s in school, and doesn’t pick up. She didn’t leave me a message last night, but I leave her one, hoping she’s doing well, telling her my mother’s in town, asking her to call me back. I hope nothing’s wrong, I say. Maybe she just pocket dialed me?
Back inside, I feel sad. Lonely? Yes. A soggy, heavy feeling between my lungs. There are many boxes to open and break down, and I focus on that task. It’s bracing to see such obvious physical progress, but the contents of the boxes inspire no confidence. We have very high-tech computer equipment—cables, processors—that has been sitting here for six months. We also have more bobbleheads, more burlap bags of trail mix, and fifty pounds of microwave popcorn. Fifty! I want to ask Livorno about it, but I’m embarrassed for him. Is this what our captain thinks a business needs?
He’s putting in his office. I can hear the crisp clink of the metal on the ball, and then the plastic pop of the cup lobbing the ball back his way. As long as he doesn’t miss, he won’t have to budge.
I knock on his door jamb. “How’s she doing in there?”
He indicates the screen of his computer, which is filling in blips and bursts with their conversation. “I can barely watch.”
I see they’ve been talking about bridge, which my mother reluctantly plays weekly, and the river cabin, which she hasn’t seen in over a decade. She sold it a few years after his death, because she couldn’t stand to go down there alone. He doesn’t know that. He’s talking about the cabin as if he’s there. His sense of time is merely factual. He knows what comes before and after, but he doesn’t have a feel for the past. For him twenty years is the same as yesterday.
“It looks like a pretty good conversation,” I say. “A few missteps.”
“I’m starting to hear your father in my dreams.”
“Really?” I feel envious. Why doesn’t he visit my dreams?
He leans on his putter. “I keep thinking about one of his adages. ‘My heart is in my lady’s bower.’ Did he start saying that before or after we clicked him?”
“I don’t recognize it. Seems like something he would have read. It’s too old-fashioned even for him.”
“His reintegration confirms an interesting portion of our hypothesis—that we’re such social animals that even our inner workings need to be social. The brain and the gut need to play well together in order for higher characteristics to emerge.”
“I thought our hypothesis was ‘rather than no—yes.’”
He ignores me. “I suppose this is why your group is worried about isolation. They’re saying it makes us less human.”
By “your group” he means Pure Encounters. “Plenty of people pass through life without love, and they’re still human.”
“Romantic love, perhaps. But everyone loves someone. The bond of parent and child, for instance.”
“They’re hardly the same. I can imagine feeling the second, for instance, but I can’t imagine the first.”
“I thought you were married once.”
“By the time we tied the knot the good stuff was over. Maybe we should have had kids.”
“I doubt that would have helped.” He returns to his putting. He’s explained his process to me before—he visualizes a line between the ball and the hole, and then tries to hit the ball along that line. Seeming becomes being. “Though you would love the children.”
“But you don’t always love the children. You don’t always love your parents. You don’t always love your wife.” I point to the computer. “You’re still human.”
“Less so,” he says. Clink-tock. “When you spend significant amounts of time with someone they offer constant feedback, becoming part of the patterning of your brain. In other words, part of you. But I take your point—constant feedback is not always deep feedback. A good measure of how much of you they’ve become is your level of distress when they’re gone. If they form a large part of your patterning, then you’ll experience a major culling of the self. That’s what’s known as grief.”
“That’s a coldhearted definition,” I say, looking at the screen and thinking about my mother, who’s been grieving for fifteen years, and myself, who barely grieved at all.
He finally misses his putt. “You’ve disturbed my mind. What’s so coldhearted about it?”
“It just sounds like Toler’s definition of love.”
Livorno purses his lips, displeased. “Which is?”
“A mixture of need fulfillment and projection.”
“Adam’s problem is not that he’s coldhearted. It’s that he’s a businessman masquerading as a scientist. Projection is not a fundamental activity. Mate selection is a fundamental activity. Lately he gets tripped up on very basic concepts. He’s quite ill.”
“He looks it.”
“Pancreatic cancer.”
“Jesus.”
Livorno nods sympathetically, but it looks like a gesture he’s been practicing in the mirror. “I for one doubt there is anything like love,” he says.
“This whole iteration is based on a theory of love.”
He shrugs and hits another ball. “A working theory.”
• • •
LIBBY LOOKS SHAKEN WHEN she comes out for lunch. “Let’s get that pastry,” I say.
“He’s got your father’s good sides and bad sides,” she says, but won’t elaborate.
“Well,” I say. “Are you still having fun?”
“I think I’ll take the afternoon off.”
She insists on taking public transportation from Menlo Park to Berkeley, a thankless trek. Her friend Susan will pick her up at the downtown BART and they’ll probably do something terribly bracing—take in a documentary and then an early dinner at some brightly lit ethnic restaurant.
This leaves me with Dr. Bassett and a lot of time on my hands.
drbas: your mother was here
frnd1: yes, i know. she’s staying with me
drbas: she’s argumentative
frnd1: maybe you provoked her. did you call her a paddleball?
drbas: ????
frnd1: what did you say to her?
drbas: why can’t people just answer a simple question? that’s what i want to know
Is this a canned response? I don’t remember writing it.
frnd1: ask me. maybe i can answer it
drbas: it’s none of your business, pipsqueak
19
LIBBY SURPRISES ME AT my apartment at nine. She was supposed to call so I could meet her at the BART. I know she thinks she’s b
een in dicier situations—traipsing through Cairo, for instance—but retrograde cultures usually respect elders. Our local hoodlums are very progressive. I read on the news recently about a mugging by three teenage girls. They threw a woman to the ground, stole her iPod and purse, and for good measure drove their boots into her face.
But Libby hasn’t been at the BART station. She’s been having a drink—by the looks of her a few drinks—with Erin.
“The bartender was such a good-looking young man,” she says, sitting at the kitchen counter. “Beautiful eyes, beautiful skin. And he’d put a tattoo right across the front of his neck. He was ashamed of his own beauty.”
“Whoa,” I say. “What were y’all drinking?”
“Yes, I’ll have a glass of wine, thank you.”
In all my days, I’ve never seen my mother drunk. I pour her the glass.
“When did you decide to see Erin?”
“She’s deeply unhappy with this new man. I asked her to tell me about him, and she said, ‘He’s a lawyer.’”
“He is a lawyer.”
“That’s not the point. When you first told me about Erin you didn’t say she was a schoolteacher. You didn’t identify her by her job. You told me things about who she was. You told me about her likes and dislikes, her passions.”
Really? I can’t remember those days. I vaguely recall a sense of unbridled optimism. “She’s probably being careful with you, as my mother.”
“That damn thing you’ve got down there. That damn computer.” Shocking tears well in her eyes. “It’s the most horrible, terrible thing.” She hiccups and looks down, shaking her hands as if trying to dry them. “He’s just—I don’t like to remember your father’s bad sides. He could be a petty man.”
“I know, Mom,” I say, coming around the corner to place a hand on her shoulder or arm, but I don’t know exactly what to do.
“I can’t go back there, Neill. Neill. I wish we hadn’t given you his name. You would think that once we gave you his name . . .”
Her thought rolls a little further and clatters to a stop. I place my hand on her arm, thin through the layers of wicking fabric and parka. She’s getting frail, drying up.
A Working Theory of Love Page 23
