A Theory of Love

by Margaret Bradham Thornton

  “Maybe Fontainebleau. Sometimes they were in the barn.”

  She walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down at the curve of the bay. The land was covered in coconut palms with canopies of lush greens, the beach was bleached bone white, and the water was a turquoise blue that turned a dark sapphire as it deepened. Bougainvillea covered the wall of the house with hot pink blossoms.

  “God, these colors, where do they come from?”

  “I remember the sea captain telling me that in World War II the cockpits of the bombers were painted green to help keep the young pilots calm. I never knew if it were true or not. I’ve always wanted to believe those pilots saw the same green I saw when I went exploring with the captain.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Lee, Captain Lee. I never knew if it was his first or last name. It was always just Captain Lee.”

  “The Imperial War Museum would have an answer.”

  He looked at her, not understanding the sequence of her comments.

  “About the color of the cockpits.”

  “Oh, right. I’ve never wanted to find out. What if it had been some drab color, more gray than green, and that was the last color some of those young pilots saw. Do you want some breakfast? We have some fresh mango and pineapple.”

  “No, thanks, maybe later. Just coffee would be great.”

  “We can sit over there,” he said when he returned with two mugs of coffee, pointing with his chin to a small pavilion with two chaises. Next to the pavilion were two rope swings hung from a primitive-looking frame.

  “Would you rather be in the sun?”

  “No, this is fine.”

  “I don’t remember those swings being there last time.”

  “I think the frame may have been broken. The supports look as if they’ve been replaced. They were here when Laure and I were little.” He checked the cushions of the chaises. They were damp. He left to find two towels.

  She was sitting on a swing when he returned.

  “Sun,” she said as a reason for moving.

  He put the coffee on the ground and came and joined her. He moved slowly through the pain in his side. They sat on the swings without saying anything. She anchored her heels to the ground and moved back and forth. They both watched her shadow lengthen and shorten across the grass. She enjoyed the sense of control.

  “Laure and I used to spend hours on these swings,” he said after a while.

  “How is Laure?”

  “Fine, you knew she is having a baby?”

  She nodded. “She must be due any day now. Does she know what she’s having?”

  “A girl.”

  Helen twisted her swing twice around and then let it unwind.

  He watched her but did not say anything.

  When she had steadied herself, she asked, “Do you think things would have been different if we had had a child?”

  He bent down and snapped a blade of grass. He creased it between his thumb and index finger and split it in two. He looked at her. “I don’t know.” He had learned a long time ago that nothing good came from asking questions that could not be answered.

  * * *

  When Christopher had called her in Havana, she had wondered if his reasons were as clear as he suggested. Did it have anything to do with the two of them? But seeing him now confirmed her answer. He had always made clean decisions, as if he were making them with a knife that was so sharp it never left frayed edges. That part of him had not changed. He had mentioned the sea captain, and she remembered his telling her about him, how he would always know where he was by the color of the sea. She had lost her bearings with him. Maybe it wasn’t possible to know where you were all the time. Maybe Pauling’s theory of parallel lines did not apply, because knowing a person had to do with interiors, and concepts of perspective had no meaning. Or maybe there were regions where access would never be granted. She had wanted and expected too much.

  She wished she had not asked him about having a child, about whether things would have been different. She knew it didn’t matter—it was too late. Children pulled you under. And maybe in being pulled under, their love would have touched and flowed together and they would have become so inextricably bound that they would have believed it would have hurt too much to pull apart. But maybe that would have obscured or covered over what didn’t, what hadn’t, existed between them. Shouldn’t they have been pulled together even if it were just the two of them? They hadn’t been able to find a way for that to happen.

  She wondered if the couple in Cuba had children. She had no idea how old they were—poverty obscured their age. Without children, she and Christopher were uncoupled. Their breakup had been slow, like the strand-by-strand fraying of a rope until it snapped, and they couldn’t find a reason to try to mend it. They would never have a reason not to speak past one another. She had hoped they could have gotten to a place where nothing was off-limits—where she could ask him anything, and he would answer willingly. Each question and each answer would be a thread pulling them closer together. Without that there would always be a gap—parallel lines that would never cross. She couldn’t pinpoint when she first noticed the gap, but she guessed it had always been there, and early on she had been so in love that she hadn’t noticed. Enamoramiento? Was this what they had had between them in the beginning? If so, it hadn’t lasted. Was that the reason there wasn’t a word for it in English?

  “At some point I need to make arrangements to fly home.”

  He braked with his feet. The abrupt movement shot daggers through his rib cage. He caught his breath, he turned to her. “Then why did you come?”

  “I don’t know. As I told you last night, I think I was looking for you. But I feel trampled by this place, by the memory of it. I would have given anything for you to have said, ‘Don’t go,’ and I guess I was still trying—even after I left—to understand why you didn’t. Maybe my leaving was my way of trying to get you to react to me. You couldn’t love me the way I wanted to be loved. It made me feel desperate.

  “I think we were probably doomed at the very start. You dissolve the boundaries of who I am. And that can be beyond wonderful, but if I feel abandoned by you, I don’t have any control over the devastation. It’s as if I’ve given up all my defenses and have nothing left to protect myself. But by coming here I realize the chance for healing can’t overcome my fear of destruction. The danger for me was hoping that it could. It was a mistake—coming back here.

  “I’m sorry. Maybe I had to see you one more time to be sure. When you called me in Havana, the thought of your going away for a long time—my not being able to see you—I guess it just panicked me. I’ve gotten through the last six months inch by inch. I’m not like you. I can’t avoid looking back.” Her words folded down hope.

  “What do you want me to say? This is when I want to tell you to grow up, but I won’t, because I don’t want you to leave. Of course I would have loved to have had a child, and yes, I do think a child might have held us together, might have held us together at times in a way that we were unable to do by ourselves. You believed in us well past where you should have. Somewhere along the way I made certain I wouldn’t be able to feel anything. Ambition was my way forward. I thought it could keep me safe, but all it did was keep me from feeling. Speed, velocity kept me from having to deal with anything, at least for a while.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “When I appeared to be ignoring or resisting you, it wasn’t you—I guess that’s all I’m trying to say. But there’s nothing I can do about any of that now. No words, no action—nothing. And do I wish I had said, ‘Don’t go’? I thought I had.”

  The cadences of his voice were full of meaning.

  “If you decide to leave—I understand. I should have been better at a lot of things. No one understands that better than I do. I know I made it difficult, too difficult, for you. I get that.” He looked up at her. “But I still love you.”

  It was no longer a ques
tion of his saying anything more.

  * * *

  In the late afternoon, the sun burned through a low band of clouds that sat heavy on the horizon. They walked down to the hotel so she could book her flight. The hotel manager did not understand how she could be leaving so soon, but she would give nothing up. The small plane was arranged to take her to Puerto Vallarta where she could take a flight to Dallas and then connect to a British Airways flight back to London. There was no reason for her to go back to Cuba. She had been looking for something she knew she would never be able to find. She had enough to write a small piece, something to justify her trip. Back home the summer holidays were starting. The day after Henry and Leonora’s summer term ended, Louis and Henrietta were leaving for a holiday in the South of France. They had taken a farmhouse for six weeks outside of Grasse and had invited her, but she had declined the invitation. She would remind David she wanted to work through the summer months. It would be her way of making up for the almost wasted trip to Cuba.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Bermeja

  He took her to dinner at the hotel. He was relieved not to see the couple who had been there the night before. They talked about her trip to Havana. She told him about the reader in the cigar factory, the beauty and the richness of the land, the bishop in Santa Clara. She told him about the gift of mangoes. She and Christopher had lived a life that was the inverse of the Cuban couple’s, but she did not tell him this. They discussed her plans, they avoided themselves. He was careful to curve and weave around the debris of their marriage, like a skater skilled at making redirections seem part of a predetermined pattern.

  “What are you going to do after?”

  “You mean . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know. You know I sold the firm—or what was left of it.”

  “I did.”

  “In order to sell I had to sign a noncompete for eighteen months. Which is fine, because I don’t know if I ever want to go back to all that. I can always return to practicing law. Besides I have—let’s see—fifty-four more years before Tortuga’s lease runs out.”

  “You’ll get bored.”

  He looked around the almost empty restaurant. He looked back at her. “You’re right. I will. But not for a while.”

  “What about the Pavesis?”

  “What about them?”

  “Isn’t it strange or awkward to be here if they are?”

  “Well, first of all, my family was here first, and second, Alfonso said Paolo went back to Milan for medical reasons. Apparently he is very ill. So I guess all the rumors about his not being able to return were false. Alfonso said Philippe has moved to Argentina. Something about polo and a ranch, but my guess is he’s laying low. Said a group from Dallas came down to look at this place.”

  “You mean the Pavesis might sell?”

  “Don’t know. But I don’t see Philippe managing it.”

  “And Marc?”

  He shrugged. “I knew when I went to the authorities we would never speak again.”

  “There was something in the press about Marc and Ghislaine getting a divorce.”

  “Not surprising, really. She’s a survivor—they both are. Ghislaine will marry or at least try to marry another rich man. I’d like to think Marc learned something from everything that has happened, but I’m not so sure. My guess is he’ll resurface somewhere with another firm and be just as aggressive, only he’ll be more careful and shrewder than before—”

  “Until he isn’t.”

  “Right, until he isn’t.”

  “Have you seen Willie?”

  “No, not since his play.”

  “Do you remember the line at the end about memory pulling you back and pushing you forward?”

  He looked down at the palm of his right hand and ran his thumb over the ridges of cuts and scrapes. “Not sure I do.”

  “Christopher, I don’t want the mews house. I’m not signing those papers.”

  “You should take it. You’ve always loved it.”

  “I loved it with you, but it’s never been mine. I like my top-floor flat on Old Church Place. It suits me. It’s small and cozy, and when I lock my door at night, I know I’m safe.”

  “No bats?”

  “No bats. Just a little pigeon that sleeps on the sill of my kitchen window at the back of the building. He’s always there, even on the coldest, wettest nights—all alone. And despite the filth he creates, I don’t have the heart to shoo him away. I wonder if he’s still there. Speaking of bats, can I stay in your room tonight?”

  He nodded and glanced around the empty restaurant. “I think they want to close.” They walked up the road to Casa Tortuga. Their silence was witness to their past.

  * * *

  In the middle of the night, she was awakened by the lights of a car going down the drive.

  “Christopher, are you awake?”

  “I am.”

  The sound of his voice told her he had never gone to sleep.

  “Did you see that?”

  “What?”

  “The lights. A car just drove by.”

  “It’s the guard service. They drive around at night at random hours.”

  “I don’t remember them.”

  “It’s just been since those drug murders occurred up the coast.”

  It was for her a night of impossible thoughts. Hours later she heard him get up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “For a walk. I can’t sleep.”

  He closed the door behind him.

  She lay in bed. She felt his absence. She felt the edges of her body. If she had been asked to draw the outline of her body when they had slept together, it would have always included his—a hand, an arm, a leg, a foot was always touching her—often his entire body if she had fallen asleep with her head on his shoulder or with his arms wrapped around her. She would never be able to take the feeling of his weight and warmth with her during the day. Edges were the ends of things, perimeters that could never be erased, where things stopped—the edge of despair, the edge of sadness, the edge of hope, of happiness, of fear. Not feeling edges was a willful act. The boundaries between them disappeared when they lay next to each other, but they always reappeared the next day. They knew who they were at night. But in the day, permission to cross was never granted.

  Christopher looked up and considered the night sky. It glittered with thousands of stars. He would live and die without any consequence to the universe that he now held in his gaze. He listened for the space where the air was completely empty of all sound. But he could find none. The sounds were different at night. They were louder and closer. He listened for the curve of the waves before they exploded against the cliff, but the sound made him feel as if the world were tearing apart. He listened for what he could not see. He turned to look behind him, perhaps to accept the consequences of speed and ambition, perhaps to recognize the world he had left behind, perhaps to acknowledge the tides and gullies of his love for her. Life had emptied a place inside of him that he had not been willing to fill. He had stood guard. But he had come to understand that nothing stays still for very long.

  What does it mean to love someone? Sex was the easy part. What took place that could not be seen was the difficult part. Theoretical physics has its own form of answer in the theory of entanglement. Two particles that have been close can be separated by vast distances, even light years, and still remain connected. What happens to one, happens to the other instantaneously. Entangled particles transcend space.

  Christopher thought about the solitary osprey he had seen searching for sustenance the day of the storm. Humans were different. They needed each other, needed to be recognized, needed to be heard, needed to be touched, needed to share the earth and the sea and the sky to know they were alive. Helen was always trying to find metaphors to understand the world around her, forever blurring lyricism with theories of physics. She had opened her heart wide, but he had been listening from too far away.
<
br />   She heard him come back when it was no longer dark.

  And in the early hours of that morning, they moved with stealth past the guardians of their hearts.

  About the Author

  MARGARET BRADHAM THORNTON is the author of Charleston and the editor of Tennessee Williams’s Notebooks, for which she received the Bronze Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award in autobiography/memoir and the C. Hugh Holman Award for the best volume of southern literary scholarship published in 2006, given by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. She is a graduate of Princeton University and lives in Florida.

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  Copyright

  Selected lyrics from the song “Volare” reprinted with permission of Curci USA Music Publishing (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved.

  A THEORY OF LOVE. Copyright © 2018 by Margaret Bradham Thornton. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Title page images by Robyn Mackenzie/Shutterstock, Inc.

  Cover design by Allison Saltzman

  Cover art © Robin Coats

  Digital Edition MAY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-274272-8

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-274270-4

  Version 04052018

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