One True Theory of Love

by Laura Fitzgerald

  Not to mention, because it went without saying, she lived to make Henry happy.

  Men aren’t idiots. They just like us to think they are because it gets them out of doing so many things they don’t want to do. Like grocery shopping. Or cleaning out the garage. Or telling us how they really feel.

  The problem is, when a man acts like a simpleton over an extended period of time, he sort of . . . becomes one. Until one day he remembers: hey, there’s a real and complex person inside this shallow shell I show the world—and she’s not honoring that!

  This is what we often refer to as a midlife crisis, although it can happen at any age, and to any man.

  The Golden Arms apartment complex on Country Club Road and East Fifth Street had two qualities that made it nearly impossible for Meg to consider moving.

  First, it was one of the few places in central Tucson where she could afford a decent two-bedroom. Second, it was a twenty-minute drive from Meg’s parents’ house in the foot-hills. Since Meg’s mother largely kept her world to a five-minute radius, this extra fifteen-minute distance meant one thing to Meg: freedom from Clarabelle.

  Which was why she was taken aback when Clarabelle suddenly appeared at her kitchen window with a cheery ha-loooo as Meg was washing up that night’s macaroni-and-cheese dishes. Not only was she taken aback—she was concerned. Clarabelle had just retired from her administrative-support position at the University of Arizona after thirty-five years and suddenly had lots of extra time on her hands. Meg worried regularly just exactly what that might mean to her, personally.

  “Mom! Hi! What are you doing here?” Her mother’s appearance threatened the very essence, the very unchanging routine, of Friday-night movie night. Unbidden, Meg’s mind flashed on an image of Clarabelle crawling into bed with her and Henry.

  Nope, that wasn’t going to happen. Movie night was precious and Meg firmly believed in protecting that which was precious.

  “I was just passing by!” Her mother’s smile was breezily carefree, but Meg knew better. Clarabelle was a full-on hurricane. “I thought I’d pop in and say hello. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the two of you.”

  “We saw you five days ago, Mom.” Meg turned off the water spigot and reached for a towel to dry her hands. She met Clarabelle at the door. “At Amy’s. Like we do every Sunday, remember?”

  Amy was Meg’s younger sister and the organizer of the family. A bit controlling, she hosted a family brunch every Sunday and all the major holidays, and if you wanted to bring a dish, you had to clear it through her first.

  “I’ve got something for you.” Clarabelle came right in, set her big purse on the dining room table, and rummaged through it. Meg loved bright colors thrown together, reminiscent of Mexico or what she imagined Mexico would be like if she could ever afford to travel there, and decorated her apartment accordingly in reds, yellows, oranges, and turquoise. Clarabelle, in black, was like death in a field of flowers.

  “I knew I’d forget if I waited.” She pulled a newspaper clipping out of her purse and handed it to Meg. “Here. It’s called ‘Dogs: A Lonely Boy’s Best Friend.’ I thought you might find it interesting.”

  One. Meg took a deep breath.

  “Well, gee. Thanks,” she said. “That’ll come in handy, seeing how there’s a no-pets-allowed policy here.”

  Which her mother perfectly well knew.

  “You might buy a house one day,” Clarabelle said. “Lord knows you should be able to afford it, seeing as you didn’t pay rent when you lived with us.”

  Two, Meg thought. She’d moved in with them after the Jonathan thing happened and stayed until Henry started kindergarten at Foundation, at which time they moved into the Golden Arms apartment complex. (The Jonathan thing being: My lovely wife of three years, you’re pregnant? Well, congratulations, and I guess I should mention that all those times I told you I was studying? Well, I’ve actually been screwing my study partner. Yeah, and, um, I’m moving with her to New York City after law school . . . but congratulations on the pregnancy! I know you’ve always wanted to be a mom. . . . Jerk! Asshole! Complete asshole jerk!)

  “I offered to pay rent,” Meg said. “You said, Don’t be ridiculous. I remember the exact conversation.”

  “You were in the middle of having a nervous breakdown,” Clarabelle said. “We thought asking you to pay rent might put you over the edge, but we hoped you were saving your money to buy a house.”

  “That wasn’t part of the deal,” Meg said. “Besides, I love my apartment. My entire social life revolves around it. Not to mention, Violet’s here. Henry wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. With Violet for a best friend, Henry doesn’t need a dog.”

  Without even deigning to glance at it, Meg slipped the article into her kitchen junk drawer on top of the last obnoxious one her mother had given her: “Mothering the Fatherless Boy.”

  Clarabelle put her hands on her judgmental hips. “Where is my grandson, anyway?”

  “He’s down at the pool,” Meg said.

  “Alone? You let your nine-year-old son go swimming alone?”

  Three. Gloves off.

  “Yes, Mom,” Meg said. “And I gave him matches and lighter fluid to play with, too. What do you think? You think I don’t know how to take care of my son?” She allowed herself to use a back off, lady tone, knowing from past experience that her mother would not, in fact, back off, but it was either start giving as good as she got or start turning to over-the-counter pharmaceuticals anytime she spoke with her mother. Talking back was cheaper.

  “The whole Loop Group’s down there,” Meg said, adding, “And he’s not swimming, anyway. Last I heard, he’s building a spaceship.”

  “Loop Group,” Clarabelle muttered.

  Yes, Mom. The Loop Group. Meg and Henry called the trio of tenants who gathered each night down by the pool the Loop Group, because they were . . . well, loopy. Harley, Crazy Kat and Opera Bob—all three were certifiably quirky, but they were also decent and funny and reliably there. Meg considered them family, only refreshingly minus the baggage.

  “How are you ever going to get a date if you hang out with those . . . those people all the time?” Clarabelle said.

  Four, five, six, seven, and eight.

  “Come on,” Meg said. “How many times do we have to discuss this? I don’t want to date. I’ve made a Conscious Decision not to. I’m happy with my life exactly like it is. Plus, there’s Henry to consider.”

  “You can’t let a child determine how you live your life,” Clarabelle said.

  “I certainly can,” Meg said. “To me, that’s what being a good mom’s all about.”

  “You would think that.” Clarabelle made a show of licking her lips. “I’m a bit thirsty. What do you have to drink?”

  Meg felt her blood boil. I’m a bit thirsty. What the hell kind of comment was that? It was a sticking-around kind of comment—that was what it was.

  “Would you like a glass of water before you go?” Meg said.

  “Do you have anything else?”

  “I have wine,” Meg said. “But I don’t think you’d like it.”

  “Wine would be lovely.” Clarabelle followed Meg into the narrow galley kitchen, which was entirely too small for them both. When Meg pulled a half-full bottle of wine from the refrigerator, Clarabelle grabbed it and examined its label. “What’s this?”

  Meg took it back. “It’s Two Buck Chuck. From Trader Joe’s.”

  “Two Buck Chuck.” Clarabelle’s tone was doubtful.

  “It’s either water or a juice box or Two Buck Chuck or the boxed wine I got from Target, and I know you’d drop dead before you’d drink that.”

  Clarabelle shuddered. “Boxed wine. Ewww!”

  Meg laughed. Her mother was nothing if not predictable. She, herself, a Target Girl through and through, loved boxed wine, the petite syrah in particular. Life’s easier without the cork was another fitting life motto for her.

  She poured a glass for each of them and handed Clarabelle
hers. “What’s Dad up to tonight?”

  “Oh, who knows?” Her mother’s tone was harried, which in itself was not unusual. Nor was the fact that her sip of wine was more like a swig. But her hands were shaking. That wasn’t normal.

  Meg stared at her for a long moment, waiting for her to continue. “What’s going on?” she said finally. “Where’s Dad?”

  Clarabelle waved off her questions. “Oh, he’s at The Loft seeing some French film. He’s on a foreign-film kick lately.”

  She turned from Meg and took a spot in the armchair by the window, Meg’s special chair, relegating Meg to the couch. “You’re not, I take it?” Meg asked.

  “You know how I hate subtitles.”

  “I know how you hate everything Dad likes.” Meg put her feet on the coffee table and thought how she needed to paint her toenails soon, and then she pondered whether now was the time to say something to her mother about it. She decided yes, it was. It was Friday night, date night for other single women, and it wasn’t as if she wanted to be on a date, but drinking cheap wine with her grumpy mother? Things couldn’t get all that much more unpleasant. This was as good a time as any.

  “Mom, I have a question for you.”

  “Well?” Clarabelle said. “Are you planning to ask it anytime soon?”

  Aaargh! Meg felt her left eye twitch.

  Her mother noticed, too. “Oh, for God’s sake. What?” she snapped. “What are you upset about now?”

  “You’re being snippy.”

  “If you’ve got a question, just ask it,” Clarabelle said. “You don’t need to announce that you’ve got one.”

  But Meg had practiced. Mom, I have a question for you. That was how she was going to start. But why bother? A good mother-daughter chat required the benevolent involvement of both mother and daughter, and Meg felt rather alone in the effort.

  “You know what?” she said. “Never mind.”

  “You want to know if I’m going to leave your father.”

  “No! God, no!” Meg had planned to ask her mother how happy she was on a scale of one to ten, but she realized Clarabelle’s question had the potential to get them from point A to point B all that much sooner, which could only be a good thing. “It’s just . . . you’ve got a lot of life ahead of you, especially now that you’re retired. You’re only fifty-eight. I think you should spend some time figuring out what you want the next twenty years of your life to look like.”

  Clarabelle harrumphed. “What’s wrong with my life now?”

  Gee . . . how to say it gently?

  “I just know that for me, if I was your age and had the house paid off and had a nice pension like you do, I’d do something,” Meg said. “Indulge myself, somehow.”

  The first thing Meg would do if she had time and money was take piano lessons. She’d always wanted to, even as a kid. She had an admittedly absurd fantasy of playing blues piano at a bar in New Orleans’ French Quarter. She’d have long red fingernails that clicked when she played and her hair would be superlong and sexy, as opposed to shoulder-length and lazy. Sometimes she even imagined herself singing. She knew she’d never take things that far—she had an abominably bad voice—but she would take piano lessons once this mother-of-a-young-son phase ended.

  “Indulge myself,” Clarabelle repeated. “You sound just like your father and all his talk about do-overs and second chances.”

  “Well, he’s a smart man,” Meg said, although she knew Clarabelle hadn’t meant it as a compliment.

  Sure enough, she harrumphed again. “He’s yakking about wanting to see the art museums of Paris. Of living on the Left Bank and taking up painting. Does that sound very smart to you?”

  Fun, yes.

  Like her father? No.

  “Can’t you just see Dad with one of those little black artist berets!” Meg laughed at the image.

  “No,” Clarabelle said. “I can’t.”

  Meg’s laughter faded. Her mother could be such a killjoy. “Why can’t you just encourage him for a change?”

  “Encourage him,” Clarabelle scoffed. “For thirty-five years, I asked him to take me dancing and did he ever? No. Not even once.”

  “But what did he ever do that was so awful?” Meg said.

  Clarabelle looked at her pointedly. “He stopped thinking I was someone special.”

  There were times when I thought I’d rather die than live one day of my life without Jonathan Clark in it. This was before he left me, ostensibly for another woman.

  I was fifteen when I met him. He was my first love. My first lover, too, although we didn’t call it that back then. We called it going all the way. I sometimes used to bite his lower lip during our coupling, determined to draw blood. I’d clutch his hair in fistfuls. Jut my hipbone hard against his - anything to cause him physical pain. That’s how much I loved him.

  I was twenty-three when we got married. He was accepted to New York University law school but came back to Tucson to attend law school at the University of Arizona because that’s where I was. That became part of our truth - that he’d given up his beloved New York City for me.

  I was twenty-six when he left me. Twenty-seven when I gave birth to Henry. So much of my life, even now, is defined by how old I was when X, Y, or Z happened with, to, or because of Jonathan Clark.

  Henry was Meg’s coffee shop guy. Most Saturday mornings, they went to LuLu’s Café because LuLu served the best coffee in town from the best local roasters, Adventure Coffee Roasting, and she made the world’s best scones. Meg always got a cheddar-and-green-chile scone, while Henry always got chocolate chip.

  For whatever odd Tucson reason, LuLu’s was almost always empty, even though it was a quaint little shop right on Broadway. They usually had their pick of tables, and they almost always chose the same one by the window. But that day, someone was at it, so Henry claimed the table across the aisle and noisily began to set up their chess game.

  “Hey,” Meg said. “Let’s sit somewhere else so we don’t bother this guy.”

  The man at the other table was working on his laptop, wrinkling his forehead in cute concentration. At Meg’s words, he looked up. She could tell he didn’t really see her at first as her—as Meg Clark—but rather just as some random person to whom he needed to respond. But then his eyes sparked and he came alive, momentarily back from the dreaded land of laptops in coffee shops.

  “Please.” He gestured for her to take the table. “You won’t bother me at all. I’m just catching up on my e-mail.”

  Goodness, he had lovely eyes. They were George Clooney eyes, and Meg loved George Clooney, especially his eyes.

  “Are you sure?” Meg said. “You looked engrossed.”

  “I’m sure,” he said. “I’m just dealing with administrative stuff—one of my least favorite ways to spend a Saturday morning. Don’t give me another thought.”

  Yeah, right. With those eyes?

  “My son can be excitable sometimes,” she warned, “especially when he gets his you-know-what kicked in chess, which is what’s about to happen.”

  The man with the George Clooney eyes had a lovely laugh. “I always enjoy a good you-know-what kicking.”

  Hoo-rah.

  Meg loved good repartee and so she smiled at the man broadly. “If you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.” His eyes lingered on hers for a moment before he turned back to his computer. It was at most a half-second linger. Surely, it was involuntary and without thought on his part, and surely, it meant nothing. Still, Meg felt a little jolt the likes of which she hadn’t felt in quite some time. Was there a connection, maybe? Attraction? Even, perhaps, that long-dormant sensation of l-u-s-t lust lust lust?

  She and Henry were in a happy place. Meg wasn’t looking to date. But that didn’t mean she didn’t find men attractive. Plus, she’d been celibate for a couple years, ever since her few nights with Ben-the-artist-passing-through, in whom she’d indulged while her parents took Henry to Disneyland. Meg knew a gaze was just a gaze and that sh
e shouldn’t read anything into it, but she could tell the man was forcing himself not to look back up at her. And she liked that she had that effect on him. She liked it very much.

  She plopped into the chair across from Henry. “Okay, sport,” she said, “you’re going down.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the man smile.

  In short order, Henry trounced her and made his typical big show of victory. When Meg saw the man watching with amusement, she shrugged at him. She hadn’t let Henry win but she didn’t mind losing. How could she, when it made him so happy? “He’s got some big ol’ strategy,” she said. “I just play.”

  “Nothing wrong with just playing,” the man said.

  “Uh, duh,” Henry said. “There is when you lose.”

  “He’s a wee bit competitive,” Meg said.

  “I can tell,” the man said.

  His eyes. The . . . something in them—the delight, the sparkle, the . . . something . . . made Meg’s heart beat fast. This time when his eyes lingered on hers, it was deliberate. And so was her return gaze.

  “Yo, Mama,” Henry said, breaking in. “Another game?”

  “Sure,” Meg said. “Let me get a refill on my coffee first, though. Want your scone now?”

  Henry nodded. Meg glanced over her shoulder to see if the man was watching her as she walked away. He was, rendering Meg quite conscious of her size-six ass until she turned the corner and her posterior was out of his line of vision. Whew. She breathed easy again.

  Meg handed her empty coffee mug back to LuLu. “Henry’s ready for his scone.”

  “Ay,” LuLu said. “Fresh from the oven, mamacita. ¿Y tu? Are you ready for yours?”

  “I’m going to skip it today.” Not only did Meg not want to eat in front of the handsome stranger in her midst, she didn’t want any leftover scone particles in her teeth because of the turnoff implications.

  Oh, man, Meg. Get a grip. This was the problem with celibacy. One little look from an attractive man threw your pheromones out of whack.

  This was not good.

  In fact, it was the opposite of good.