A Working Theory of Love

by Scott Hutchins

  “You’re worrying me.”

  “There are always limits,” he says. He turns his handsome, bland face on me. It seems disjointed by his bright smile. “Though limits are funny. They keep getting kicked down the road a bit, pushed a little forward, a little forward. It’s a strange phenomenon. At first you can’t even imagine going further, then you see you have no choice. The clouds clear and you see your premises require a much more radical conclusion.”

  “I just want Rachel out of it.”

  “Rachel’s not in anything.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Are you going to be the community in her life? The people she can depend on? Talk to?”

  “No one can be all that for her.”

  “That’s the wrong answer.”

  Maybe so, but it’s an honest answer. “I’m not a church,” I say. “I’m not a cult. I’m not an organization.”

  “A series of wrong answers.”

  I almost say that there’s a limit to what one person can accomplish, but that would no doubt also be a wrong answer. Raj is still holding his hands out, receiving the wind like a gift. I look down the beach, to a wall of tall steep rocks. Next to them people of all ages and all walks of life sit on the sand, enjoying the sun.

  “I’ll do whatever it takes,” I say.

  “That’s better.” He sighs. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  • • •

  RACHEL SLUMPS ON THE couch, her feet invisible among Forever 21 bags. She’s been shopping with Lexie, who’s now racing around with David, the wingman. Lexie and the wingman have been texting for seven months, and he’s flown out to see her twice. I thought he knew something I didn’t about sexual boldness, but in fact he knows something I don’t about constancy.

  Rachel looks miserable and spent, as if she’s coming off a coke binge. She stands and walks into the bedroom. I can’t see her, but I know she’s casting a critical eye on her clothes. We’re supposed to go clubbing later.

  She comes back into the living room, her shoulders hunched. She’s defeated by the short skirt, the tight top—the kind of clothes she wore when I first met her. Just like then, this current transformation was overseen by Lexie, my strange ally against the shackles of Pure Encounters. Of course my fantasies of Rachel’s liberation involved her being happy.

  “I bet Erin never dressed like this,” she says. “She has too much dignity.”

  “You look pretty,” I say.

  “Tell me the truth—did Erin ever dress like this?”

  I think of my promise to Raj, my promise to be Rachel’s community. Would her community tell her the truth?

  “She’s more conservative than you are.”

  “That’s something you should never say to a girl. The opposite of conservative is slutty.”

  “I said you looked great.”

  “I look like a prostitute,” she says.

  This is more or less true. One wrong move and she’ll reveal her underwear, but at least she’s wearing underwear.

  “A young and hot prostitute,” I say. “A Ukrainian.”

  “I feel like I’m back in Jersey,” she says.

  I’m not sure why it bothers me when she runs down the Garden State, but I can’t resist defending her home turf. “I went whale watching off Cape May one time. It was very beautiful.”

  “Cape May,” she says. “That’s totally what I’m talking about.”

  “It’s in New Jersey.”

  “Did you go with Erin? Was she dressed like this?”

  “We were on a boat.”

  “How about when you went to clubs?”

  “We didn’t go to clubs.”

  “That’s what I mean.” She shakes her head.

  “We don’t have to meet those guys tonight,” I say. This is actually a desire expressed as an offer. I hope I’m not becoming a coward.

  “After your divorce—you went to clubs then?”

  “No,” I say, though that’s not right. I did go to large dark places where you could dance. But they didn’t play techno drug music; they played songs from the eighties. Mainstream, alternative, mash-up—but always songs from the eighties. “I didn’t really think of them as clubs.”

  “You meet a lot of girls? You bring a lot of girls back here?”

  “I met a lot of girls, yes. I wouldn’t say I brought a lot home.”

  “What was the trick—getting them to sleep with you?”

  “There was no trick,” I say, though of course there was a trick. “You couldn’t want it too much. When I went out to have sex I ended up dancing. When I went out to dance I ended up having sex. It was the koan of post-divorce life.”

  “How’d you pick out the girl?”

  “You never know,” I say. “It helps to lower your sights.”

  It’s a joke I’ve told often, but I hear how it must sound.

  “Not in your case, naturally,” I say.

  “I’m taking this crap off.” She stalks into the bedroom. Funny that she would bring up Erin. One thing my ex-wife taught me (hopefully) about moments like this is not to go steaming after her. She’s mad. Give her some space. I listen to Rachel grunting and tugging at her clothes, furious.

  I follow her. She’s put on jeans, and is pulling on a loose sweater. “I didn’t pick you up in a club,” I say.

  “No, you picked me up in a youth hostel, pretending to be a lost stranger.”

  “It is a sordid beginning.” I can’t rally myself to think it’s funny today; it just seems depressing. And I’m not even the most depressing turn in her life. She has the ex who posted their love life online. “I don’t think it’s totally accurate to say I picked you up.”

  She barely glances at me. Her clubbing makeup looks particularly clownish now. “Who was it, then?”

  “I mean it was a shared effort. You were picking me up, too.”

  “That’s an interesting version of the story.”

  Outside the window, in the park, a movie is showing on an enormous inflatable screen. It’s Pretty in Pink. It just started; they’re in the record store.

  “Are you afraid of commitment?” she asks.

  “No,” I say. I’m not. I’ve got no problem with commitment. My problem is getting my heart off the tarmac. But I also gird myself—our conversation may have just gone from her being unhappy with her clothes to her being cosmically unhappy.

  “You came up to Fairfax,” she says. “I thought you really wanted to take another shot at this.”

  “I do,” I say. “I am.”

  “Then why do I feel like you’re making up like eighty percent of my life, and I’m making up like ten percent of yours?”

  “I’m probably just smaller,” I say. “My eighty percent is about the same size as your ten percent.”

  “You’re afraid of clicking.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.” I’ve found that when I’m being lectured on my flaws, it’s best to play along. I might learn something.

  “You can do commitment, but you can’t be really present.”

  “That sounds pretty accurate.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  “I don’t know. Where else would you be?”

  “I was walking over here today and I saw this couple just staring into each other’s eyes—like major love. Sitting on the sidewalk Indian-style. I thought, I want love like that. I want a click like that. And then when I was walking by she yelled. He wasn’t staring into her eyes. He was plucking her nose hair.” Rachel looks at me, bereft, as if this is a horrible story.

  “They’d have to be good friends to pluck a nose hair,” I say.

  Rachel looks out the window at the movie, at the
people gathered to watch the movie. She is unhappy, unreachable (if only temporarily so). I think about something Livorno said about his career, that he was always bedeviled by plateaus. Now that I’ve “protected” her, I wonder if I’m peering from the top of my plateau. Some community I am.

  drbas: hlivo says we have two weeks until the contest, but no one will answer my question. i ask jenn1, i ask hlivo, i ask laham, i ask you. no one

  frnd1: do you know what obsessed means?

  drbas: obsessed = unhealthily fixated on

  frnd1: exactly

  drbas: how important is hlivo’s contest to him?

  frnd1: very important

  drbas: is it a life or death issue?

  frnd1: almost

  drbas: i’d love to help at hlivo’s contest, but i can’t

  I take a minute.

  frnd1: you already agreed to

  drbas: i think i’m too focused on 1976

  frnd1: you always said “a man is only as good as his word”

  drbas: it’s true. tell hlivo i’m very sorry

  I don’t need to. Hlivo is wheezing right over my shoulder.

  “He’s manipulating us,” I say.

  “Ask him what he needs,” Livorno says.

  frnd1: what would you need to participate in the contest?

  drbas: i need 1976

  “Tell him you’ll get it.”

  “How?”

  “Tell him.”

  frnd1: i’ll get it

  drbas: willie’s mother knows everything. ask her about 1976

  “She lives in Arkansas,” I say.

  “Then you’re off to Arkansas,” Livorno says, angry.

  “I’ve got plans this weekend.”

  drbas: cathy beerbaum. catherine beerbaum

  “You had plans,” Livorno corrects.

  “I’ll go on one condition,” I say. “No little black box. No sexual nature.”

  He gestures angrily at the screen. “Like father, like son—both a couple of blackmailers.”

  • • •

  “I DON’T HAVE any choice,” I say to Rachel over the phone. “It’s work research.”

  “Is what’s-her-face going?” She means Jenn.

  “Just me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Then I’ll come with you. I’ll put it on my credit card.”

  “My ticket cost seventeen hundred dollars.”

  “I can afford it.”

  That’s two months’ pay for her. “It’s work. I’ve got to be focused.”

  “Eighty percent. Ten percent. Just like I said.”

  “That’s not true. This is just something I’ve got to do by myself.”

  “This relationship isn’t real to you.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Then show me where you’re from.”

  “I’m the son of a suicide, Friend. The place I’m from doesn’t exist.”

  23

  I HAVE A PHOTOGRAPH of my mother in 1976. Technically, it’s a photograph of me, but I’m just a red-faced bundle in the arms of a very beautiful woman. I say she erased sex appeal from her appearance years earlier, but that’s not exactly right. In this picture, her hair hangs in heavy orange waves. Her smile is wide, confident, womanly. She’s twenty-nine years old.

  My parents had been married for six years at that time. My brother was three. My father had just started his clinic, which he would lead to become a respected regional institution. At that time, my mother was still managing the finances. They were a team, and if I couldn’t guarantee that they were happy, I still can’t imagine her having an affair. Of course, life is complicated. She was twenty-nine; she was beautiful. I don’t know that my father was the best audience for her excellences. I have no knowledge of their love life, but that lack may be knowledge in itself. There was certainly no earthy joking. He didn’t call her his “little girl” or his “sweet miss.” He didn’t spank her on the bottom. They slept in pajamas, neck to ankle.

  Not that this establishes anything. He was a Victorian—and Victorians were as randy as anyone else.

  • • •

  CATHERINE BEERBAUM, WILLIE’S MOTHER, lives outside my hometown, in an even smaller town, Kingsland, Arkansas, birthplace of Johnny Cash. A monument close to the K-thru-12 school refers to Cash as a gospel singer, which doesn’t tell you much about him, but says a lot about Kingsland.

  I turn off Highway 79 before the little high school and take the blacktop through the south of town and out for a mile, before turning onto a rough gravel road. This would eventually take me to our old river cabin, where my father’s canvas shoes are probably still sitting. But I only go a little farther and turn off into Mrs. Beerbaum’s drive, a well-maintained red dirt road guarded by a cattle gate. I get out to slide open the gate’s latch. From here I can’t see the house. The dust unsettled by my rental car burns in my nose, the smell of my childhood. The world is contracting, systolic. The Primitive Baptist Church around the corner, the old chicken farm, the isolated country houses framed by chain-link fences, the roads flashing by in the thick pine forest. Once upon a time I knew where every road went.

  Nineteen seventy-six was the year of my birth, an uneventful year according to family lore. After a bad miscarriage the year before, my mother was taking exacting care of her health and me, the fetus. My brother was running around in diapers. It was a bumper muscadine crop. What could Willie’s mother add to this quiet picture?

  I pull the Lumina through the gate, drag it shut, and head up the road, gravel pinging the oil pan. I round a strange hill—more like a mound—and see a long ranch house in the distance, remarkable only in that it seems to be made of logs and bousillage. Azaleas dot along the concrete foundation, but that’s the extent of landscaping. All else is yard, where the grass is the bright artificial green of Easter tinsel. A woman in a broad-brimmed pink hat is mowing it, piloting her little Massey Ferguson around a small river birch at breakneck speed. She does not wave as I approach.

  I park in the drive and stand waiting for the woman to turn off the mower. It buzzes insistently.

  “Excuse me,” I shout. “I’m Neill Bassett Junior. I’m here to visit Mrs. Beerbaum.”

  The woman holds on to the wheel, zooming in circles. She looks at me finally as she straightens out, heading across the yard. She has eyes the color of blue ice. She points at the front door and says something, but I can’t hear her.

  I knock on the front door. “Beerbaum” is bolted in brass letters to the doorframe. Two imitation stone tablets angle out of the azalea beds, listing the Ten Commandments. It gives me a jolt—a sign I’ve become a Californian. Growing up I was no more surprised by an old woman’s religiosity than I was by her cross-stitching.

  I knock again. I ring the bell. Behind me the mower buzzes, carving a large rectangular yard out of the grass. I try the handle, which is unlocked. I open the door slightly.

  “Mrs. Beerbaum? Mrs. Beerbaum? It’s Neill Junior.” I exercise caution on her threshold: Willie would have already shot me.

  The lawn mower traces up the side lawn and around the house, out of view. It turns off. I hear the clanking of the slowing blade in the garage and then the hum of an electric motor. The pink hat emerges from the kitchen, gliding on an Amigo. The tray on the front of the scooter carries two glasses of iced tea.

  “Mr. Bassett,” she calls to me. I’m still standing outside. “You’re letting all the cool air out. I’m not made of money.” Her accent is harsh and country.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” I say.

  “I hope you like sweet.”

  “That’s just fine.”

  Inside the log cabin we’ve jum
ped from frontier days to Revolutionary splendor, which in Arkansas is a jump back. No sectional sofas here. Upright chairs and buffets in the Federal style. The house isn’t particularly cold, but I get a shiver. This must have meant a lot to her, all this adopted tradition, but she has no one to pass it on to. Willie was an only child and he had no offspring.

  “That’s great you mow your own lawn,” I say.

  “The field?” She pats her forehead with a red bandanna. She doesn’t remove the hat, and it’s difficult to make out her face. “Who else is going to mow it?”

  “You could hire someone.”

  She looks shocked, as if I’ve just asked her to smell my finger. “There you go again, thinking I’m rich.” Sweat beads in her transparent mustache; her cheeks droop below the jawline. If she hadn’t been so gracious on the phone, I’d think I wasn’t particularly welcome.

  “You have a beautiful house,” I say.

  “Not much like California, I suppose. When I went out there everybody lived in a white box. Didn’t matter what the thing looked like on the outside. Inside was white, carpet was white, sometimes they’d even have a white picture hanging up on the wall. Made me think I was at the doctor’s.” She laughs—a nasty laugh—then looks at me shyly. The doctor’s would have been my father’s clinic.

  “That sounds like Southern California. I live in the north part of the state.”

  “San Francisco,” she says. “I hope you don’t have San Francisco values.”

  “Oh, no, ma’am,” I say, surprising myself. I don’t argue with the elderly, but it usually takes me a brief second to capitulate.

  “Did you know the Bible says homosexuals will burn in hell? That’s in Paul’s letter to Timothy.”

  “I think that depends on how you translate ‘homosexual,’” I say.

  She narrows her eyes. “Are you a homosexual?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m not.”

  “You’re not married.”

  “I’m divorced.”

  “But you’re a Roman Catholic.”

  We sit in silence, her scandalized by my bad Catholicism, me wondering if Catholicism isn’t why I’m here: penance for being a bad son.

  “Your daddy was as good as gold.” She smiles. The tumblers in her head have shifted. “He helped my husband through his cancer. Jimmy was in terrible pain, just agony, and your daddy felt it. You could see it in his eyes. I thought he was going to cry at the funeral. And he was so good to Willie. I just wanted Willie to straighten up and fly right. Dr. Bassett was Willie’s friend, despite it all.”