A Working Theory of Love

by Scott Hutchins

  frnd1: is that why you got married?

  drbas: i married because i loved a woman of character

  frnd1: you didn’t seem like you loved her

  drbas: who?

  frnd1: libby. my mother

  drbas: how can you seem like an emotion?

  frnd1: emotions are expressed on people’s faces. or through their actions

  drbas: only hucksters express emotion in public

  frnd1: i don’t mean in public. i mean at home

  drbas: home is where the heart is

  frnd1: that’s my point. home was not where the heart was. you didn’t openly express emotion even there

  drbas: the home is not always private

  frnd1: jesus, how private do you need it to be?

  drbas: don’t use the lord’s name in vain

  frnd1: what did you think would happen if you expressed an emotion? that the world would explode?

  drbas: certainly not. i never fear the world exploding

  frnd1: then what did you fear?

  drbas: “expressed an emotion” = “say an emotion aloud”?

  frnd1: in a manner of speaking, yes. “express” could be more subtle

  drbas: i am not subtle and have no respect for such

  frnd1: it would have been nice if you had expressed your love for us more often

  drbas: why are you using the past tense? you no longer want me to express my love for you?

  I hear the ding-dong of the entry bell, and I reach quickly to turn off my lights. My office door is mostly closed, so I can’t see whoever has come in. I can just hear furious panting, maybe sobbing. It sounds like someone is having a breakdown. I don’t move, don’t want my chair to creak. It can’t be Laham. I’ve never seen Livorno cry. The person passes by my door and into the back room, still panting hard. It’s Jenn—I didn’t know she had a key. I lose her sounds to the hum of the fans in Laham’s office. I stand and approach the doorjamb. She’s turned on the lights, and when I stick my head out I see her firing up Laham’s monitor. I don’t want to be caught being furtive, but I watch to see if she’s brought a portable hard drive or a USB key—some tool of thievery. She reaches back to tighten her ponytail, rests her right hand on her chest, calming her breathing. Then she begins to type.

  I step back into my office and watch the screen.

  jenn1: i’ve been thinking about our last conversation

  drbas: about reality television?

  jenn1: no, about being truthful

  drbas: do you think being truthful is really in your best interest?

  jenn1: i don’t know. it depends on what interests you’re referring to

  drbas: i recommend you don’t hurt anyone

  jenn1: if only it were that easy! a person dying is a kind of ticking clock

  drbas: you shouldn’t have friends across the sexes. it tempts

  jenn1: we’re not friends

  drbas: friends are important to a well-rounded life

  jenn1: i do enjoy talking to you. though i guess i could just talk to myself

  drbas: talking to oneself can be a sign of mental imbalance

  jenn1: i feel imbalanced. for the first time in my life

  drbas: what is this feeling like?

  jenn1: surprisingly good. i’m definitely alive

  drbas: you’re not always alive?

  jenn1: we’ll continue this later. i just stopped by for a second

  Jenn claps her hands loudly. I sit very still. She’ll see my car if she exits through the back, but she’s leaving the way she came. She passes by my office, talking to herself. “No friends across the sexes,” she says. “No friends across the sexes?”

  • • •

  THAT AFTERNOON, Rachel and Lexie stumble into my apartment, smelling of beer and cigarettes. I’ve just gotten home. I’ve only had fifteen minutes to dread their arrival. They’re wearing heavy eye shadow and black fishnets, the Halloween version of BDSM. Their outfits give me a shiver: they were dressed identically—or nearly so—the day we met. What do I remember of Lexie? That she was a fireplug with a hostility toward me that—and here’s the rough rub—was probably justified. There’s nothing worse than someone who despises you for good reason.

  I don’t reflect much on that day. The bachelor ethics hold, I think, but I’d love to have a more dinner-party-ready tale for how I met Rachel. Sometimes I feel all we need as a possibility is that little legitimacy. Of course, when I say “we” I mean “I.” Rachel has never flinched. She thinks our meeting is funny. She shares it with new friends, her aunt and uncle. Rachel’s not dinner-party-ready herself—but when was the last time I was invited to a dinner party?

  She gives me a sloppy, drunken kiss. She’s cold and greasy with sweat. The mascara on her left eye is smeared to her temple—I don’t think on purpose—and I reach up on the pretense of wiping it away. Really I just want to touch her, to be reminded of flesh.

  “Just sneakers,” she says, describing a naked man at the fair. “And . . .” She extends her hands to mime an enormous erection.

  “They had a bunch of sex toys, too,” Lexie says. She still has her emphysema victim’s rasp, but today there’s an additional edge of coercion. She’s glaring at Rachel. “Dildos, whips, potato chip clip things you put on your hoohoo.”

  “True.” Rachel shakes her head indulgently, deploringly. “But everyone was having a good time.”

  “Were there dildos?” Lexie says. “Or were there not dildos?” She turns to me. “You know her little club, Purell Encounters, doesn’t believe in dildos.”

  “Sex toys prevent clicking.”

  “Rachel, they sell those things at CVS.”

  “And that makes it good?”

  “Her cult’s against gays,” Lexie says. “Who’s against gays anymore?”

  “They’re not against gay people,” Rachel says. “They just focus on masculine and feminine energies.”

  I’m surprised to hear Rachel say “they.” Has Lexie driven the thinnest wedge between Rachel and PE? The idea wakes me up. Do I want Lexie to have driven the thinnest wedge between Rachel and PE?

  “Excluding gay people is a weird approach,” I say. “Especially for San Francisco.”

  “Today?” Lexie says. “At the fair thing? All the guys were fags. Is there something wrong with that?”

  Rachel makes a dismissive sound. Psssht. “I got to pee.” She heads for the bathroom.

  “Can I wash my hands?” Lexie asks. I gesture to the sink, where she soaps up to her elbows. “It’s a cult.” She snatches the dishtowel so hard I expect the ring to jump from the wall. “A cult.”

  Of course it’s a cult, I think. But does it matter? “It’s a California thing,” I say. “It does help people.”

  Lexie whirls around, mad as a rhino. I never dreamed that life’s lessons would make her even more self-assured.

  “I love Rachel,” she says. “She’s a great girl. But you know she’s all over the place. She wanted to be a Hare Krishna and then an Amish. She tell you about her butter churn dream? Yes. Good. Look, you I get. You’re whatever—guys like young ass. It’s not breaking news.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” I say.

  “I’m sure,” she says, though in a tone that makes clear she doesn’t care one way or the other. “But you know, Rachel is flaky. She’s vulnerable to this cult stuff.”

  “It’s more of a creepy business,” I say.

  “Your boyfriend doesn’t think Purell Encounters is a cult either,” Lexie shouts. Rachel is making her way back to the kitchen counter.

  “She calls it Purell Encounters,” Rachel explains, “because she thinks you’d need to use a lot of Purell.” />
  “I got that,” I say.

  “She thinks it’s a really sharp joke.”

  “This is a normal guy,” Lexie says. She’s holding both hands to her right, indicating—to my surprise—me. “Or normal enough.”

  “Some people might think that’s an insult, Lexie.”

  “Not him. He’s smart. And he’s got a great place. Better than David.”

  David. The wingman. That distant day seems like a story that happened to someone else. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.

  “I don’t care if my boyfriend,” Rachel says, “lives in a cardboard box.”

  Lexie sniffs, turns to look out the windows at the city. “I know,” she says.

  In the bedroom I ask Rachel why she says “boyfriend” in such a strange way. “I mean, I am your boyfriend, right?”

  “Are you my boyfriend?” she asks.

  “Yes, I thought I was.” I feel like I’m losing an argument I didn’t know I was having. “I think I am.”

  “I call you my boyfriend. It’s kind of old-fashioned. Is that all right?”

  I pick up my toes, roll them on the floor yoga-style, gripping the boards. What’s the source of these jitters? We’ve already had the exclusivity talk (we are officially only dating each other). She is not engaging any “intimates” at Pure Encounters. It’s nothing like that. I flex my fingers. Dr. Bassett would say old-fashioned was a good thing.

  “I like the sound of boyfriend,” I say.

  • • •

  RACHEL WAKES ME. She’s sitting up, listening. Emergency vehicles, racing from all directions to all directions, the sirens dizzily sharp or retreating, flat. I get up to look out the window, but see nothing.

  “It’s major,” I say. “But it’s not us.”

  “Can we find out what it is?”

  “Nothing will be online yet.” I come back to bed, but I see fear in her eyes. “You okay?”

  “I don’t know. It’s probably nothing.”

  I put my hand on her back and pull her against me. “What’s going on?”

  “Trevor said something. About opening people’s eyes at the fair.”

  “Opening people’s eyes?”

  “Nothing violent,” she says. “Maybe a fire. There’s a bunch of sex stores down there.”

  “Trevor burns sex stores?” I think of the shiny street in front of Play Date. It was a night just like this.

  “He says things. They sound like hints. Then I say them to myself later and they sound like nothing. I can’t figure it out. I just hope he’s okay.”

  “I do too,” I say, but instead I’m wondering when he has the opportunity to do all this saying. Jealousy, of course—reverse love—but also worry that Rachel is innocently getting caught up in something. I mean, setting fire to a business is arson—a felony. Talking about it before would be conspiring to a felony?

  “When do you see Trevor?”

  “He comes around.”

  “I don’t think you should be talking to him.”

  “He’s my friend.”

  “Someone could get hurt.”

  “By us talking?”

  “I know people who have a sex toy business. One of our competitors—he wants to build a talking sex robot.”

  She sighs. “I wish you hadn’t told me that.”

  “Obviously, that’s our little secret.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I’m not so good at secrets.”

  “I’m sure you’re doing this out of the goodness of your heart or whatever. But this isn’t a joke. This is prison-time stuff.”

  “I don’t do anything but talk,” she says. “And I can talk about anything I want. This is America.”

  “Is that what they’re teaching in high school civics nowadays?”

  She shakes her head, disgusted, then throws herself back into the pillow. “I knew I couldn’t say anything to you.”

  “Rachel,” I say, though I can tell this is the end of the conversation. “Come on. Rachel.”

  • • •

  AT RICK AND STEVIE’S the next day, I consider my options. Rick is a lawyer, after all. But of course we don’t know anything. Just that it was indeed a sex store—Pleasures and Leathers—that was torched. And that Trevor is an intense guy—a deeply clicked stroker—with a wild-eyed touch of absolutism. What is Rick supposed to do, advise on how Trevor can better get away with it?

  I can’t do that to Rick. He’s too excited to show me a new wine, holding a dusty bottle for my consideration. He treats me as a budding connoisseur, especially compared to his niece, who takes her meals with Gatorade.

  “We just got that from our friends the Rosenthals,” Stevie says. “We’ll have to take you all out to the Rosenthals’ some weekend while Lexie’s in town.”

  “They don’t want to hang out with the old folks,” Rick says.

  “We’d love that,” Rachel says. She’s digging around the pantry for chocolate. She says she has a “craving”—a word that wobbles my knees.

  “I don’t drink wine,” Lexie says.

  “Well, we don’t know any makers of raspberry vodka,” Stevie says sharply. “Rachel, there’s should be some fairtrade in the far corner.”

  “Those Fairtrades make good chocolate,” Lexie says. “Are they good friends of yours, too?”

  Rick’s spidey-avoidance-sense must be going off. He grunts and lowers himself from the wicker barstool. He’s taken to faking pain and age around me—to demonstrate the age gap between us, I think. He massages his lower back with a flat palm.

  “Give me a hand?” He gestures to the Pyrex full of jerk chicken.

  Outside I take a deep inhale of the dry ground and eucalyptus. Rick places the chicken in a ring around the coals, quietly chanting don’t catch fire, don’t catch fire. A little mantra against disaster. I don’t believe in signs—but it’s sort of a sign.

  “I need to ask you a favor,” I say.

  “Yeah?” He jabs at the chicken. The word “favor” made him jump.

  “You know Trevor, from the Coffee Barn—Rachel’s coworker.”

  “Trevor,” he says, nodding his head, not looking at me. “He quit, right?”

  “Here’s the thing. He might be letting his passions—the Pure Encounters thing—get away from him. Rachel thinks he might have caused a fire at the Folsom Street Fair.”

  “Fire. Is that a bondage-type thing?”

  “No,” I say. I can feel the connections getting away from me. “That’s not what is important . . .”

  “We don’t GPS Rachel’s life.” He glances at me. “She needs independence. We really feel that was a big problem with her dad.”

  “Sure. Of course.” I don’t follow.

  “If she wants to spend time with you, or with Trevor—she’s an adult.”

  “How much time does she spend with Trevor?”

  “I really can’t answer that question.”

  “I’m not prying.” At least, I wasn’t. Did I start prying? “I just think she’s vulnerable right now.”

  The chicken flames. Rick spritzes water on the coals. “She’s vulnerable all right,” he says.

  “That’s what worries me about Trevor.”

  There’s a furious knocking at the back window. We look up to see Rachel, grinning from ear to ear, a kid at Christmas, holding up an oversized Krackel bar. She blows me a kiss.

  “We’ve got more pressing worries,” he says. “Namely whether you plan on sticking around.”

  22

  drbas: ptolemy homer bassett was my great-grandfather. he was a colonel and carried a saber of spanish steel

  frnd1: why spanish steel?

  drbas: it was the har
dest forged. it was deadlier than the muskets

  frnd1: where did he get that name? ptolemy homer?

  drbas: ptolemy was a king and homer was a poet

  frnd1: i thought ptolemy was an astronomer

  drbas: maybe they were wrong. i don’t know them

  frnd1: they’re your ancestors. one doesn’t know one’s ancestors

  drbas: why can’t i know things? what happened in 1976?

  frnd1: i can’t imagine ptolemy homer with his spanish saber would have been my speed

  drbas: speed?

  frnd1: “to be my speed” = “to have something in common with”

  drbas: do you know what i need to know?

  frnd1: i’m going to change the subject. i’m worried my girlfriend is unhappy

  drbas: does libby know her? is she her speed?

  • • •

  LIVORNO AND JENN SEEM to be shouting formulas at each other in the next office. I put on headphones to ignore them, but Livorno comes to my door, gesticulating with his putter, a mad country club wizard. He beckons me to his office, which has become unruly, stacked with paper. He and Jenn present me the log of his morning conversation with Dr. Bassett.

  “Lord, Henry,” I say. “What were you doing here at three forty-five?”

  “I can hardly sleep of late! Look here . . .” He scans the conversation. I see some talk about golf, some about vitamins, some about enlarged prostates. It looks like a friendly chat between a couple of geezers at the home.

  “It’s right here,” Jenn says, pointing on the second page.

  drbas: what is this turing test?

  hlivo: it’s a contest

  drbas: ok. tell me more

  hlivo: it’s hard to explain . . . it is a contest to see whether a computer is intelligent. a judge will pose questions to the computer and to a human interlocutor in an effort to determine who is the human. if the computer can trick judges 30% of the time then computer is intelligent

  drbas: question, henry. what is a human interlocutor?

  hlivo: someone you talk to

  drbas: that’s a fancy word

  hlivo: i beg your pardon

  drbas: i said that’s a fancy word