Love, in Theory Page 16

  “Of course,” Richard says. He stands and walks to the door, then he turns to look back at her, at her tiny fragile figure on the hard wooden pew, as it seems he has always done—turning back to look at her as he is leaving her behind.

  “I’m so sorry, Mom,” he says, door handle in his hand.

  “Don’t pity me,” she says. “Your father’s a prick.”

  Richard knows that he should be angry with his father, but what he feels is awkwardness, a slight unsociable embarrassment at all that is unsaid between them. Richard and his father don’t speak as they cross the temple parking lot under the humid blur of a Minnesota midday sun, and Richard hopes that his father won’t try to disburden himself of details, to pass on his secrets to Richard, like family jewels. Richard is curious, it’s true, about his father’s other life, but it is the faint unsatisfying curiosity that one reserves for the tragedies of strangers. He does not really want to know. It’s enough to know that they hold this thing in common: infidelity.

  “Some heat we’re having,” his father says, irrelevantly. He clenches his fingers and a faint beep issues from a car in front of them. Richard’s father is a handsome man, the sort of picturesque old gentleman that foreign tourists snap photos of. His father’s favorite story from his travels abroad is the one about the cluster of Japanese tourists who surrounded him once in a street in Paris and took his picture as if he were a national monument, thinking him the quintessential Frenchman in his red beret, his handsome face, his pouty frown. He delights, as Richard does, in being mistaken for someone else. As if a false, even a mistaken identity, might be more promising than the ones they have.

  Richard’s father is a great believer in family, in the notion of family, a thing Richard thinks may characterize those who are unfaithful—this faith in family they cannot seem to keep. As they drive up Hennepin, heading for Excelsior Boulevard, Richard remembers a night many years ago when his father drove them through a wooded area near their home. The swatch of park was part of a campaign by the city to preserve the last remaining wild lands in their bedroom community, and as they took a curve by the small swampy lake where Richard had first kissed another man (a boy really, lanky and tough, with white blond hair, who tasted of Marlboros and peppermint schnapps), a shape had bolted into their headlights and they’d felt the thick dull weight of a body clip the grill of the car before it bounced off the bumper and into the grassy ditch.

  It was a scrawny deer, legs skinny as fishing poles, a thing that seemed meant by its delicacy to be broken; its side heaved frantically, smudged with mud and blood. Richard had stroked its coarse brown fur, crying stupidly, pointlessly, over what was already lost. His father had clicked his tongue. “Damn it,” he said. “Goddamn it.” Across the road Richard saw a second deer waiting near the trees, watching for this one to clear the road and come, innocent still of loss. For a reason they never discussed, they decided not to tell Richard’s mother. As if it had been some sexual indiscretion, a shameful indulgence, this accidental death. “We don’t have to mention this,” his father had begun. “No,” Richard agreed. And they never had.

  But Richard thinks of it now, driving with his father once again. He remembers how his father had looked stern and moved and solemn as they drove home and how he had said, the only mention of it he had ever made, was to say, quietly, distractedly, “I never saw it coming.” Which is how Richard imagines he feels now, about all of this, all of them, even his own life, though he does not say it. It makes Richard feel tender toward his father and he lays a hand on his Dad’s thick shoulder and gives it a light squeeze and his father frowns at him, eyebrows raised, wonderingly, and then smiles and says, “I’m glad you could make it, son.”

  By two-thirty, the foyer of Temple Beth Elohim is clotted with guests who arrive in large shiny rented cars, feathered hats, polished shoes, accessorized with leather. Rachel has retired to the dressing room and Richard stands alone by the chapel door, armed with programs, squinting at the blaze of the ozone-depleted summer sun reflected off the asphalt parking lot.

  His mother, Mrs. Lydia Klein (née Morris), stands greeting guests as they arrive. She is a formidable woman, even from here, even in the face of adversity. Her authority is apparent and impressive, her casually correct posture, elegant and unrigid; the taut skin of her cheeks glows like polished leather. Tan and toned, she has—he thinks—the resolute bearing of the unhopeful, like a Civil War general leading troops into a losing battle. Her small figure has always seemed towering to him, even after he grew well beyond her five-foot-five height. When she looks up at him, he still feels she is looking down. Even now, especially now, seeing her in a shift of Prussian blue linen, a string of pearls at her neck, the diamond of her wedding ring catching the light so it glints.

  It has fallen to Richard to hand out programs. He stands by the chapel door, trying to soothe the gentiles. He slips the folded program with its inset sheet of Hebrew prayers into the hands of his mother’s Methodist kin, knowing there is nothing a Methodist fears more than not being able to comply with the rules. He notices several on his mother’s side freeze when they glimpse the unfamiliar Hebrew letters. The idea of having to sit through a communal prayer without being able to hold up their end clearly unnerves them. His aunt Elizabeth, his mother’s elder sister, looks positively stricken, as if she might turn back, until Richard points out the transliteration on the back. Still, once the ceremony is underway, it will be rough going for the gentiles, the Orthodox contingent spitefully upping the tempo until it is difficult for even the Reconstructionists to keep up.

  The last time Rachel married, the groom was an Anglo-Catholic and the wedding was held before the family hearth with a justice of the peace presiding; a string quartet played Bach in the kitchen, and the Methodists—on his mother’s side—were right at home. The Jews—his father’s New York kin—were grim; they came late, left early, wore yarmulkes through the service, though there wasn’t a rabbi for miles. Richard’s mother had orchestrated the whole affair. The reception was held at a good French restaurant and involved large quantities of poached salmon, pâté, endive, baby vegetables. There were ice sculptures in the shapes of fish and swans, loaded down with caviar, hard-boiled eggs, and shrimp. The wedding cake was a monument of scalded sugar, built of profiteroles stuffed with cream. It was all very comme il faut, Richard thinks now. They had joined the New York family for breakfast and dined with the Minneapolitans at night for cocktails, and the divisions, like the scotch his aunt Elizabeth drank by the quart that long weekend, were neat. But this time something has shifted and Richard is uneasy; he feels lost, relieved for little things like the card that will be on the linen tablecloth tonight, to tell him where, if anywhere, in all of this, he belongs.

  The Jews arrive like conquering heroes, loud and exuberant, wearing large hats. His Uncle Leonard, his father’s elder brother, sports an Italian silk suit, a handkerchief in his breast pocket, a skimmer; he slaps Richard on the back as he accepts a program and asks after the bride.

  Standing in this crowd of unfamiliar relations, Richard feels disoriented without his props: his desk, his white lab coat and surgical blues, his nurses and reception, his apartment overstuffed with books and tasteful costly art; he feels lost without Brian. Though they fight on trips—unflappable Brian annoying in his equanimity while Richard loses his mind—Richard misses him. Brian is a handsome, charming guy and is great at working a crowd. Richard imagines his lover in the foyer and feels a twinge of domestic pride he can rarely feel when they’re together.

  Brian and Richard were friends for years before they became involved. They met while doing their residencies at the same hospital in New Haven before ending up at the same hospital on the other coast. In the years before they got involved, they’d lunched together occasionally, been fond if distant friends. Then, two years ago, they’d drifted into their love affair like flotsam washed up on a beach after a particularly nasty storm. Each having survived a bad breakup had turned to the other f
irst for comfort, then for love.

  Their first few months as lovers, they had been careful with each other, solicitous and gentle, the way one is with the ill. They bought each other flowers, tied with ribbon and raffia. They tucked little notes under the windshield wipers of one another’s cars, into lab coat pockets, desk drawers, on clipboards among patients’ histories. At home and out with friends, they called each other absurd pet names: sugar bean and pumpkin, honey and cupcake. They made a show of their domestic bliss, as if to prove their exes wrong. Their sex was passionate and urgent. It left Richard weak-kneed, given to fits of the giggles. But at some point he cannot yet discern, it changed between them. Settled.

  These days their sex is more like flossing, a prophylactic regime, regular and suburban as lawn care; Brian never wants to fuck in the kitchen or on the edge of the tub or among the file cabinets of Medical Records as they once did. He does not like to use words like fuck when talking about sex. Richard’s handsome lanky lover wants Doris Day sex. That, in fact, is what they call it, the Doris Day. Is Doris coming today? they quip. Y’know she comes whenever she can. Richard finds he misses his last lover, a small ugly pug of a man who fucked with a kind of Genet-like brutality. When he dreams of desire, as lately he often does, it is this man—not Brian—who holds him, this man whose force, like gravity, draws him magnificently down.

  Across the foyer, in the far corner, by a potted palm, Richard’s father is looking uneasy; every so often he turns to scan the crowd, as Richard was doing before catching sight of him. Beside his father is the woman in beige, who appears to be studiously avoiding scanning anything at all. She smiles vapidly up into the rafters, with what seems to Richard to be a vegetable placidity, staring not at the high second-story ceiling, not at the crowd, but at some indeterminate place in between.

  What appalls Richard about his father’s mistress is not what he’d expect. It is the fact that she is ordinary. The word mistress hangs about her like a tacky boa, an ill-fitting dress. She is short, plump, dressed in a tan suit and skirt with a pearly synthetic cable-knit sweater underneath. Shaped like a butternut squash. Beside her, Richard’s mother is a monstrous beauty and Richard thinks that this may be the point. The mistress is no threat. She looks intelligent but not too. Attractive but not too.

  His father sees him and gives a wave and they start over.

  Richard’s father looks misty-eyed, and Richard wonders if he’s regretting having brought her.

  “Son, I’d like you to meet Betsy.”

  Betsy takes Richard’s hand in both of hers as if to demonstrate her sincerity. “It’s awfully nice to meet you, Richard. Your father has talked about you for—well, all the time. You’ve made him very proud.”

  Her hands are soft and powdered. Her hair is salon sculpted, a dull false brown. He is sure she has white couches in her house—worse, a condo—with large floral patterned curtains and glass tabletops.

  “And you have made him …” Richard begins, when he is interrupted by someone tugging on his arm. He has no idea what he might have said, how that sentence would have ended. He was in a freefall of verbiage, waiting to hit ground to see what sort of sound, or mess, he’d make. But he never lands.

  It’s Sasha, his childhood chum, at his arm. Tugging playfully, as in the old days, when they were kids, and later, in high school, sweethearts.

  “We’ll see you later, son,” Richard’s father says, obviously avoiding introductions where he can.

  Richard hands a program to a Methodist wavering in the doorway, then turns to Sasha.

  “You look wonderful, Richard,” she says. “Running away from home agrees with you. I, on the other hand, am a mess. I gained sixty pounds with Lizzie. I never lost the weight and now.” She shrugs.

  Whenever Richard meets his high school friends, people he pretended to know because friends were necessary as clothes—they made it less embarrassing to go out in public—he feels a twinge of self-consciousness, an embarrassed moment when he finds himself wondering what they know about his life now. It’s not that he’s ashamed about the fact that he is gay, quite to the contrary, he imagines rather fatuously that this preference marks him out, makes him part of a lineage of Baldwin and Wilde, Shakespeare and Socrates, confirms some long-held but vaguely and never quite articulated sense that he is different from the others, born for some remarkable end, which he is only now beginning to suspect he is not.

  In the psychology textbooks he had read during his medical training, he recognized this as a Napoleonic Complex, but nevertheless, the feeling has remained, haunting him, especially now when the first blush of youth has passed and his life is rutted with the emotional potholes that soon become one’s path in life, and he can no longer imagine himself as anything other than what he is now—a respectable gay radiologist with a handsome husband, a thirty-year mortgage, and a stable, loving, monogamous relationship from which he sometimes strays.

  It is not embarrassment then, but something more like shyness that he feels at the prospect that once again, as throughout his schooling, people might imagine that they know him, and are wrong. It’s not as if he isn’t out to his family, they have absorbed the news like leukocytes massing on a foreign body, surrounding it and making it their own. They have produced from the bourgeois surplus of their lives an excess of enthusiasm for Brian. Holiday cards come addressed to them both, as do invitations to Thanksgiving, a set of knives, his and his bath towels, flannel sheets printed with cartoon barnyard animals.

  Richard smiles at Sasha and wonders what she’s heard and from whom and in what form. He recalls that she was once very close to his mother. He had been envious of her then.

  “How’s Brian?” she asks, answering his unasked question.

  “He couldn’t come,” Richard says, though that is not what she’s asked.

  She nods. Scans the crowd. Her profile is still flawless, Mediterranean.

  “I didn’t invite David,” she says, referring to the husband he’s never met. “Not that he would’ve come.”

  Richard feels something in him unknot beneath his rib cage and a warmth take residence there. He’d forgotten how likable Sasha was. Her frankness. Of course he realizes that she may simply be one-upping him with honesty, sensing in her uncanny way his own dissembling, and to counter that impression and deny her the opportunity for superior candor, he adds, “Brian had a gastrointestinal conference to attend in San Diego.”

  “Ah,” says Sasha.

  He wants to ask her if she is disappointed in the way things have turned out, but she would ask him in what way—how what has turned out—and he would not be able to explain.

  He thinks about their childhood as green—bands of grass and dense forests of oak and elm and fronds of wild asparagus. He wants to tell Sasha about the tour he made yesterday of their old haunts, the woods where they smoked dope and the railroad tracks that held a glamour for him then that trains still hold, their old neighborhood with its greenways and bike paths and warnings to yield. As a kid, he had tried to be careful, which is what the acres of tidy green, those pristine forests stocked with bunnies and does were intended, he thinks, to convey. The harmlessness of things. They promised what life never could deliver: that if only you stayed in your yard, if only you stayed on the path, you could avoid damage.

  The ceremony is mercifully brief; the couple—to his surprise—are untraditional and have dispensed with the chuppah and most Hebrew prayers. The only remnants of religion are the tallitot and yarmulkes worn by the rabbi and groom. Judaism reduced to sartorial inflection. Watching the couple take their vows—his lace-festooned sister and her portly graying groom in a ponytail—Richard feels a dull tug of recognition, as if he were trying to recall something, when he realizes with a start that what he’s recognizing is the disturbing similarity between the groom and his father’s mistress. They are the same shape. Both members, it would seem, of the squash family, and now his.

  After the ceremony, dinner is held in the basement of the sy
nagogue—a large, dim, beige room in which have been arranged dozens of round tables with white tablecloths. Rachel’s father-in-law leans back in his chair, twirling the stem of his wine glass on the table so it makes a neat, indented ring on the cloth.

  “Be a sports writer,” he tells Richard, evidently confusing him with someone’s nephew, a reporter for the local Tribune. “All the truly great writers started out writing about sports.”

  “I’m a physician,” Richard tells him. “I’m Rachel’s brother? I don’t like sports.”

  “Boxing,” he says. “Now there’s a sport.”

  The immediate family are seated with the bride and groom, except for Richard’s father, who has defied his place card and sits now beside his mistress a table away. He chats to her, Richard notes, as if she were a distant but delightful cousin. A maiden aunt. He is cautious in the extreme. Rachel, who has begun making the rounds of tables, greeting her guests, appears not to notice this change in seating—or perhaps she is just too preoccupied, or too exhausted, to care.

  Richard can hear his aunt Elizabeth at the next table ranting about indigestible bean sprouts. The first female aeronautical engineer in the country and a one-time consultant to NASA, she had been Richard’s favorite relative. He loved her for her excesses in this moderate family: drinking too much, chain smoking, she could argue any of them under the table. But now she’s gone half mad and in her familiar righteous tone is declaiming the vice of vegetarianism.

  “People think that stuff is good for them,” she raves. “There are more toxins in raw broccoli than in a pack of cigarettes. And peanut butter? You might as well eat plastic.”

  There are raucous toasts, then dinner is served.

  Neil and Rachel tip their heads together and make a show of love throughout the meal, and Richard recalls the morning when he first met Neil fifteen years ago, just after Rachel left her first husband, just before Richard left for college. Rachel was twenty-three then, a few weeks divorced, and you could see still a band of pale skin where her wedding ring used to be. It was a weekday morning in late spring and Richard remembers a thin blue sky through cold glass windows, a chill in the air. Richard had been helping Rachel settle into her third-floor apartment. (A fact that seems significant now: Everyone he’s ever known who’s divorced and taken an apartment has chosen rooms on a high floor, as if more at home in midair.)