Love, in Theory Read online

It wasn’t until the night shift came on that one of the nurses glimpsed a bottle of Manischewitz in Mrs. Weimar’s locker and phoned the director at home. Turned out Weimar had a big bet on the gaunt Christ being the real McCoy. They searched her locker, quietly let her go.

  I wasn’t around for the confrontation, when Dr. Davidson brought the three Christs face to face to face. But I understand that it was quite a sight to see. They got the whole thing on video, but I can’t bring myself to watch; still, I’ve heard all about it from Jackson, who likes to tell the story. From what I hear there were intensive sessions for five days straight that week; our boys didn’t come out for hours at a stretch; at first they ignored each other, wandered around the room like the others weren’t there; when Dr. Davidson finally made them sit down and introduce themselves, things got ugly; evidently there was a lot of shouting—the Viking Christ insisted that the other two were frauds, that he was the one and only real son of God; he tried to punch out the others to prove his point; the gaunt Christ quoted scripture about how people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and something about a bean in the eye. The Angry Christ was unusually quiet—maybe someone overdid his meds—but he didn’t take much interest in the proceedings, from what I hear; he played solitaire, made little low under-the-breath comments about pearls and swine; evidently he tried to bum a cigarette from Dr. Davidson, which just goes to show the guy’s completely delusional since this is Minnesota and you haven’t been able to smoke inside a public building here in thirty years.

  Karen says it was like watching people move through the stages of grief when facing death—denial, anger, bargaining, grief, acceptance. I imagine how hard it must have been for them; how each of those guys must have clung to the hope that he really was the one; waiting to be recognized for who he is, waiting to be seen in his true colors, waiting for the moment of truth when the other guys are shown to be fakes; but eventually you just face facts; realize that you are not the man you thought, the man you’d hoped you’d be.

  I don’t know exactly what went on in those sessions, but I think I understand how those guys must have felt, giving up their delusions. I imagine they felt real bad losing the hope that they might be special after all, like I did when Karen introduced me to her fiancé—a skinny guy with wire-rimmed glasses, tall and lanky with a bowl haircut like the Beatles had and an Irish accent I swear to God was faked (love is a mystery)—and I realized how crazy I’d been to think someone like her would ever choose someone like me.

  When it all was over, a reporter asked me what I’d learned, and I told him the truth, though he didn’t print it. I told him that what I’d learned from the three Christs of Moose Lake was that no one is really that special. Not any one of us is. And the sooner you get over thinking you are, the better off you’ll be. I told him the trick to life, the key to staying sane, to not going clean out of your stinking mind, is not to expect too much of yourself or others. You’ll only be disappointed. “Ours is a technological, not a miraculous age,” I said. I didn’t say I was quoting Karen. Miracles just don’t happen.

  So I suppose you could say that reason triumphed in the end. Though Karen said maybe it was narcissism that won out. It is evidently better to be an ordinary schnook than to have to share an identity as one of three sons of God.

  Now things are a lot quieter. Karen went back to the Cities with Dr. Davidson. I hear that the gentle Christ was contacted by MTV producers looking for the newest face to play lead for a “crossover” group trying to appeal to both “the Goths and Christian rockers,” that’s what Karen wrote in a letter she sent from St. Paul; they have a Mary Magdalene on guitar whose a dead ringer for JLo, she says. Rock of Sages is their name.

  The Viking Christ is in a half-way house in Minneapolis; I hear he’s a clerk at a food coop, part-time. I hope he’s doing well. I really hope he makes it.

  The Angry Christ is ours. Of the three of them, he’s the only one who failed therapy, though the medicals don’t like to call it a failure. He was “unresponsive,” Karen would say. They had to intervene. Which is to say they shocked him. I was off that day, so I don’t know what exactly went wrong. Some sort of feedback, reverb they could not explain. Evidently, they sort of short-circuited his brain. That’s the story I got anyway. He had no family so they didn’t need to worry about a lawsuit, and the publicity had pretty much died down by then, so no one was paying much attention and no one has called to complain or protest. Still they cured two out of three, which isn’t bad, so you might say our story has a happy ending.

  But lately I’ve been feeling kind of gloomy. I don’t know if it’s the return to the everyday routines of strapping down and restraints, the mops and spills and Dixie cups and rounds. Or if it’s the fact that Karen’s gone. It’s been almost a year now so you’d think I’d be used to it. But some things are hard to get used to. Time doesn’t heal all.

  Since the shock treatment, the Angry Christ has been pretty quiet. Mostly he watches TV. He sits in the rec room on the yellow couch. The TV stays to one channel now, unless one of the staff changes it. The clocks keep time. Sometimes I find him in the rec room, just sitting there, with tears streaming down his face for no apparent reason. And I admit that when I’m feeling sort of bad myself, because the dog is sick or the streets are lousy with snow or like that day a few months ago when I got the wedding invitation from Karen, it’s almost comforting to find him weeping silently like a stoical fountain. Sometimes, I think I almost understand where he’s coming from.

  And maybe that’s the reason that I don’t want to tell the others what happened last night, maybe it’s because I feel kind of sorry for him and don’t want them to shock him again. Or maybe I’m afraid of the publicity the news might bring, because that might bring Karen back and I couldn’t take seeing her right now, not yet. Or maybe it’s that I want to keep this for myself for a little while, to hold on to the possibility that I’ve been wrong about him, and us, and everything.

  Whatever the reason, I didn’t note it in his chart.

  But the day Karen was married—yesterday, that is—when I was doing my evening rounds, coming round with extra water for the patients after the nurses had distributed the meds, I brought the angry Christ his little Dixie cup of water. He looked almost regal, radiant on those pillows, and for the first time in weeks he looked right into my eyes with an expression of sane sorrow, as if he understood my pain, as if he almost felt bad for me. And when I held the cup to his lips, he took it in his own hands, unassisted, and drank it down. I watched him swallow, watched him stick out his tongue and raise it to show me he hadn’t hidden anything. He did all this with an expression of such dignified sadness that for a minute it crossed my mind to wonder which of us was nuts—the man who believed he was the child of God or the one who was bent on convincing him he wasn’t, that no one of us is special after all—and maybe it was all the stress with Karen getting married, but I’ll be damned if when he handed back that cup, I didn’t see in its bottom, plain as day and unmistakable—palpable as longing, hallucinatory as love, or like a sign that we are, after all, maybe more than we might seem—the faintest trace of wine.

  GRAVITY

  THROUGH THE DOORWAY OF THE SYNAGOGUE LIBRARY that opens onto the main hall, Richard can see his sister Rachel clacking up the temple corridor from the dressing room. She is frantic, looking for things that have not arrived: her bouquet, her mother’s pearls, the groom. She moves in a rustle of taffeta and silk, beneath a pearl-beaded cap and a tent of cream lace, like a perambulating cake on a mission from God. That, at least, is how Richard will put it to Brian when he speaks to him later tonight, long distance. It is not a good simile, Richard is aware of that. It is rather overdone and straining for effect, but that, he thinks, is apposite to the occasion.

  This marriage—Rachel’s second—has come after a long and arduous courtship and there is more than a little triumph and enmity in the proceedings, which Richard imagines must resemble the emotions in a calf-roping ring. R
ichard likes to think of things being like other things. He does not like to think of things being what they are, in themselves. That, at least, is what Brian told him recently. He had not put it quite that way, of course, being Brian, but that is what he meant, Richard thinks, when he said, “You’re always loving what you left.”

  What Richard Has Left is a category, Richard reflects, which now could be said to include Brian, the man he loves and lives with and left two days and some two thousand miles ago to come to this wedding alone. Richard had not expected to attend. As a rule he avoids weddings, but when his father announced a few weeks ago that his mistress would be coming, Richard agreed to take part.

  He told Brian that he was going for his mother’s sake, to hold her hand. He told himself he needed a vacation from life with Brian. But now that he is back in Minneapolis, back in this town he vowed never to return to, Richard struggles to remember why he has returned, he who has spent a lifetime leaving this place and these people he loves behind.

  When he left the Midwest fifteen years ago, first for college then medical school, Richard vowed never to return. With the naive conviction one can nurse only in one’s youth, he believed that he was making a clean break. He imagined his family would fade for him as a lighthouse beam fades when a ship pulls out to sea, diminishing to a weak trail across the air, then vanishing. Their lives seemed small to him then, their choices inspired by fear, not the sharp desire he had discovered and traced over the skin of men, desire like a cord deep in his gut that had strengthened, grown taut, pulled him with a jolt into his body, his life. Now that he’s back in this the city of his earliest sorrows, he finds it difficult to account for his time since he left; it seems to him that no time at all has elapsed since he was home for his sister’s last wedding, since he last saw his family, that he has always been—may always be—in waiting.

  From the library where he stands looking out onto the foyer, watching the preparations his sister and mother make, Richard can see that Rachel is more nervous this time than the last. She is anxious to get the details right: She double checks the corsages in their box, she counts them twice; she scrutinizes the commas on the programs, harangues the caterers by cell phone. She makes a show of her guttural “h” when she pronounces chuppah, as if it would prove her an observant Jew, which she is not. He cannot help but notice how careful they are of ritual this time around, superstitious maybe or simply aware now of how fragile such vows are.

  When Rachel turns toward Richard with a pleading look, he gives a little flutter of his fingers and smiles at the Divine Pastry and, with a relief he would rather not consider too closely, starts toward her.

  Halfway across the foyer, Richard’s mother intercepts him like a bad pass.

  “I need to speak with you,” she says, voice low.

  Across the foyer, Richard’s father has entered with Uncle Leonard and a relative he does not recognize, a large woman in beige. “Rachel …” Richard begins to say.

  “Can wait.” His mother bends her mouth into a smile and turns a radiant look on Rachel and the all-but-empty foyer, as if they were her audience. Then she grips Richard’s arm above the elbow and starts toward the chapel. But she is too late.

  “Hey, kids,” Richard’s father shouts, as he crosses the room to them.

  His mother stiffens. For as long as Richard can remember, his father has called them kids—his mother, his sister, him—and despite his mother’s protestations, the term has stuck. “Kid,” he can hear her say, as she said throughout his childhood, “is an inappropriate address for a woman, even a beautifully preserved woman, of—.” It’s an old argument, Richard thinks, an old wound. But then they all are. Scar tissue, he often tells Brian, is the materia prima of family.

  Richard knows this must be hard for her: Though his parents pretend that nothing has changed; though they have not yet mentioned divorce and Richard’s mother disdains even to speak of the mistress scheduled to appear later today, Richard knows the subject cannot be far from her mind.

  When Richard’s father reaches them, he embraces Richard with that excess of enthusiasm he has taken to employing since his son left home, an enthusiasm Richard conceives is meant to compensate for his absence in Richard’s youth and to suggest an intimacy they have notably failed to achieve, a public demonstration of a mannish understanding they plainly lack.

  “How are you, son?” he asks. Then, turning to Richard’s mother, “Lydia,” he says, almost shyly. “You look terrific.” He kisses her on the cheek.

  Richard’s mother runs her tongue over her coral pink lipstick. Impatiently.

  “Excuse us for a moment, won’t you?” She holds Richard’s arm in a vice grip, as if clutching a banister on a precipitous descent.

  “Of course,” his father says. “I’m sorry. I’ll catch up with you later, Rich.”

  Inside, the chapel is hushed and mahogany. Richard notices the narrow band of indigo blue carpeting with absentminded approbation. His mother sags into the first pew.

  “Wouldn’t you know,” she says, “the one time your father is early it’s with her.”

  “That’s her?” Richard should have known, of course, but he cannot link the word mistress to the bland, beige woman in the hall.

  For a moment they share the sepulchral quiet, then Richard takes a seat beside her.

  “My god,” Richard says.

  He is appalled less by the fact of a mistress than by the woman herself. Though he’d never tell his mother this, Richard was relieved when he learned of his father’s affair. When his mother phoned to break the news, speaking with the remarkable equanimity she maintains in the face of crises—Your father has a mistress. He’s asked her to the wedding. Please come home—Richard had been torn between outrage at his father, grief for his mother, and relief. Here, at last, was desire he recognized and shared. Growing up he had despaired that his parents asked no more of life than the bland false emotion of respectability and dull suburban comfort, which looked to him like loneliness, a joyless match. Their marriage had made him wonder if the passionate life he hoped for was mistaken, more than we could ask. All they appeared to require was the semblance of happiness, which seemed to him no life at all. But here was proof—painful proof—they’d wanted more. The news confirmed for him a long-held suspicion that things are never what they seem. That none of us is.

  But he knows that for his mother the revelation has been a shock, and his heart breaks for her. His mother has believed in the image of things—the right fork, the right wine, Julia Child; she’s believed that abiding rules will redeem us, that being right is—if not the same as being happy—at least compensation for unhappiness, imagining perhaps (as Richard so often had as a child before he fell in love with men) that happiness is beyond them. But seeing his father in the lobby with the woman who absurdly must have been his lover all these years, Richard thinks perhaps it’s not. Perhaps happiness is out there still, waiting for them, in the foyer or the world, like the plump woman in beige.

  “How’s Rachel taking it?” Richard asks, trying to shift the subject from mistress to bride.

  “She doesn’t know,” his mother says. She picks a bit of fluff off her dress.

  “She doesn’t know?”

  “I didn’t want to upset her,” she says. “She’s been so tense, so sure that something will go wrong.”

  “She’ll be furious, you know,” Richard says, “when she finds out.”

  “She won’t find out. Why should she? Your father’s very good at keeping secrets.”

  “She’ll have to find out sometime, Mom.”

  “Sometime,” she says, “not now.”

  The way she says it makes Richard think that his mother is the one who’d rather not have known this, known sometime, but not now. He takes her hand in his and holds it. It is cool and dry and seems impossibly fragile, and he wonders when her skin grew thin, her veins blue and protruding, vulnerable beneath the surface, a few brown spots here and there.

  “I’m
not sure I’m going to be able to make it through this,” she says softly.

  Richard strokes her knuckles gently. “Of course you will,” he says.

  “Nothing is a matter of course anymore,” she says.

  Someone opens the chapel door behind them and there is a sudden burst of sound from the foyer—the sound of guests arriving—and then a quiet “Sorry, I didn’t know anyone was in here” and the soft sound of the door closing.

  “How long have you known?” Richard asks.

  She shrugs. “I’ve known for awhile that your father had ‘friends.’ I didn’t know about her until Rachel announced the engagement. He said he wanted her at the wedding. It’s been six months. I would’ve told you, but your father made me promise not to. He said he wanted to tell you kids himself.” She smiles up at him, as if she might cry. “Now you know.”

  She draws a sharp breath as if she might sob, and Richard pats his pockets for a Kleenex, but she doesn’t cry. Instead she tells him what she knows about the mistress, the woman named Betsy with whom his father has been involved for years. She is divorced, a former executive secretary at General Mills, a woman his mother remembers meeting once years ago at a fiftieth birthday party for Richard’s father, which Betsy helped coordinate; Richard’s mother remembers thinking her sweet, if rather bland.

  “I just wish I had a little more time,” she says wistfully, and Richard understands that she means more time with her husband, time to make it work between them. He feels suddenly how difficult this must be for her and his throat aches.

  “Just an hour,” she says, “that’s all.”

  “With Dad?” Richard asks, his voice soft with sympathy.

  His mother looks at him with irritation, as if this were an unkind joke. “Without him,” she says. “I want your father out of here. That woman can do what she wants. But I want him out. The liquor store at Byerly’s called to say the champagne order is ready. Do me a favor, will you? Get him to drive you over and load up the coolers? For me? Please.”