Love, in Theory Read online

  She sat on the blond parquet wood floor, her legs folded to one side, unpacking boxes and chain smoking Dunhills, while Richard put dishes away on the cabinet shelves. It was approaching noon when Neil emerged from Rachel’s bedroom wrapped in a blue velour robe, wearing moosehead slippers with brown felt antlers. He scuffed sorrowfully across the parquet, his fists dug deep into the pockets of his robe, antlers flopping.

  “I overslept,” Neil said, looking at the moose. “I have to call work and tell them I’ll be late again.”

  “Poor sweetie,” Rachel said.

  “You’re not going to send me to the home for the motivationally impaired, are you?” Neil asked.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Rachel said, embracing the man she’d later marry, “This is the home for the motivationally impaired.” They’d laughed then and for a moment clung to one another amid the litter of boxes and their image became indissolubly linked with Richard’s worst suspicions about his family. Months later, when he packed up for college and left, it was this that he believed he was escaping, leaving behind him forever: doubt and its attendant compromises that pass for love.

  That is what Brian has failed to understand these last two years; Brian has taken personally Richard’s reluctance to domesticate. He doesn’t understand that what Richard is trying to leave behind isn’t Brian but the thing his mother and sister settled for. He’s spent his whole life trying to get free of these same bonds, to resist the gravitational force of family that demands such compromises, that makes insouciant sex into infidelity, homosexuality into a family embarrassment, all the compromises and scars that come of belonging and wanting to belong. Brian takes it personally, but he’s wrong to do so. Richard simply wants a bigger life than this, than what he sees around him here in the basement ballroom of Temple Beth Elohim.

  Across the table, Rachel rises from her chair taking her new husband by the hand. Turning to the klezmer band set up behind her on a platform decorated with crêpe paper and balloons, Rachel blows a kiss to the band leader, a skinny saxophonist who winks at her and blows a deep note, and the band begins to play the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” in a slightly dissonant, minor key, klezmer-style, played as it might have been sung in a Polish synagogue a century ago—like a hopeless prayer; and turning to her new husband, Rachel begins to dance.

  Richard is not sure how long he watches them, the couples twirling around the room like the carnival rides he watched as a kid, thinking the motion beautiful—synchronized and bright like small bouquets—and wanting to be part of it. But he holds back now as he did then, knowing rides are disappointing once you’re on, the dipping and spinning as if the world has come unmoored, knowing that the dancing couples are beautiful only because he is on the outside looking on at the fine patterns they make.

  Instead, Richard gets up from the table and crosses to the bar in the corner. The bartender, in his little red vest and black bowtie, behind his little portable bar, looks bored and for a moment Richard is annoyed that he should see this affair as just another gig, another schmaltzy wedding with a lot of boozy guests, instead of Richard’s family.

  The bartender asks what Richard will have and then, before he turns to get it, he holds Richard’s gaze a beat too long, a fraction of a second, but it’s enough. Richard smiles. The guy is not unattractive. Maybe a little young, twenty-six, twenty-eight. As a rule, Richard prefers his lovers to be older; he prefers to be the younger man. The ingenue. But it will do. Besides, it’s just flirtation.

  “Always the groomsman, never the groom,” the bartender says, with half a smile.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Richard says. He stuffs a bill into the tip glass, thanks him for the drink.

  The bartender sets the bottle of Jim Beam on the bar between them. “Take it,” he says. “It’s got your name on it.”

  “Which would be Richard,” Richard says.

  “Nice to meet you, Richard. I’m Ed.”

  Richard thanks Ed again and goes to sit down at an empty table. He eases off his shoes and pours himself a drink. Then another. And another, enjoying the soft feeling that comes after several drinks when the walls bend like wax, the room slowly collapsing onto itself.

  Every so often, as he looks around the room, he glances over at the bartender, who is almost always looking back at him. Their eyes meet this way several times until Richard realizes he’s been staring, and the bartender staring back, for something approaching half a minute, each waiting for the other to turn away. He tells himself it’s not sex he’s after here, but the familiarity of the gesture, the connection made between strangers that defines his other life, which is composed largely of this bravado and self-invention—like the routine he learned as a resident for taking case histories—“playing doctor,” he still calls it.

  He’s had to learn this, over time. It is, he thinks, a trick picked up in medical school, where it was necessary not to think about the cadaver disemboweled before you as a person who once played golf, played bridge, ate tuna sandwiches, made love just like you. He’d understood then that sometimes it was necessary to turn things into other things in order to go on. And it worked in the world as well. It helped, he found, to imagine himself the hero of some great adventure, his couplings and courtships prelude to some great love affair, to imagine the future as a place in which fulfillment was imminent.

  He’s skilled at impersonation, and knows it. But it has its drawbacks: it makes him wonder what, if anything, is authentic between people. Looking around the room at all these people related to him by blood and genes, he cannot help but wonder what if anything they have in common. On the plane, he’d read in JAMA about the latest studies on twins, and had thought then, looking at the evidence, how fragile and unpredictable are the things that bind us to each other, how irrelevant often and absurd. Lawn furniture and neighborhoods, stamp collections and a preference for parting one’s hair on the side. What struck him about the studies was what was rarely noted in popular press renderings of the research: how inconsequential are the bonds between people in the end, how tenuous and insignificant, even for those more genetically alike than most of us will ever be, how—for all the genetic dicta—we share so little of significance.

  When Richard decides to go over and speak to the bartender, it’s not with any conscious intention of picking him up. It’s not premeditated, he tells himself. He’s just playing a part. It’s just one of many things he will pretend away, make into something else: an excess of joie de vivre, a drunken and fantastic absurdity, rather than infidelity. Truth is, he loves Brian, but infidelity has nothing to do with love, he thinks. It’s more like stepping out for a smoke, an invigorating break.

  As he passes the head table, Richard overhears his aunt Elizabeth telling his mother about dark matter in the universe—the powerful, unseen substance that gives galaxies their shape, that mysterious force that holds stars and planets in their orbits with its fierce gravitational pull.

  Later, as Richard stands in the dewy grass outside the temple’s classrooms where as a child he’d learned the Hebrew alphabet, unzipping the bartender’s pants, he thinks of Brian with sudden and intense longing, the thought arriving as a weight on his heart, but to his surprise it is not unpleasant but a thrilling anticipation that merges in his mind with his arousal and the soft yellow blur of streetlights in the distance, the firm satisfying rump in his hands.

  Back inside, in a corridor of the basement, Richard phones Brian, but there is no answer. Richard’s own voice asks him if he’d like to leave a message after the beep. He hangs up. Plans to call back later.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” Sasha says, when Richard returns to the ballroom. She’s standing just inside the door and tugs at his sleeve. “Dance with me.”

  “Why not?” he smiles.

  They step onto the floor. Moving among the others, awkwardly. People bump against them giddily, drunk, light as balloons. Across the room, his mother is seated at the table, nursing a bottle of
Vermouth, talking to the other mother, Neil’s. The two of them sit alone amid a clutter of dirty dishes, while the others dance. Generals holding their ground. They are always sitting there, it seems to him, the mothers. He’s been afraid all these years of getting trapped the way his mother had, the way all the mothers had, her grief a weight he carried with him everywhere, a small but ubiquitous burden, like the nutritious lunches she packed that smelled of peanut butter, over-ripe apples, jelly donuts, a sweet cloying smell that he associates with all her losses, all she’s given up for them. All she might have done and didn’t. She who would’ve been a doctor had she not been born a girl. His one clear aim as a boy was to get free and he had. But now he wonders if he really has or will or even wants to.

  Dancing with Sasha, his chin leaned against her fragrant hair, Richard feels a sudden tenderness for these people, all of them, for his family moving in circles around the room, the seated moms. It’s like seeing them from a very great distance, like terrain glimpsed from a plane, that he can map for miles in every direction. Watching Rachel nuzzle Neil’s beard as they dance, Richard can see already how her intense love for him—now that they’ve married—will mellow in a year, become worn in, smaller, leaving gaps that Rachel will fill with bridge games, a vegetable garden, the children she is already planning to have, an affair. But it doesn’t matter. They are here now, in each other’s arms, making something lovely that will not last the night.

  And, as if his thoughts were an incantation, it begins, the end.

  What Richard will remember of the evening after that is a confetti of images, like the colorful piñatas his mother made for him each birthday when he was young, which they slowly tore apart in the course of the day’s festivities, leaving Richard inconsolable beside the eviscerated figure of a papier-mâché donkey, sun, or deer—though he should not have been surprised since it happened every year, the same old loss.

  What he’ll remember of the evening after that is this:

  How his father, courtly and maybe still in love with his wife, rose from the table where his mistress sat and walked over and asked Richard’s mother to dance. He bowed a little, took Richard’s mother’s hand in his, and pulled her up from her chair. She was flushed with some sort of strong emotion, but she let him draw her into his arms and for the length of a Sinatra song they held each other. Like old times. Then Uncle Leonard cut in on the couple and Richard’s father returned to the table where his mistress sat, dreamily swaying her head to the klezmer version of “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” and drunk, incautious, she’d clasped his arm, and from there the details blur.

  There was a moment when the music, which had buoyed them, abated, and Rachel shouting into Neil’s face, said loud and clear, “Who is that woman with my dad? Is she one of yours?”

  And Richard, dancing nearby, said, in a moment of uncharacteristic candor (no longer wanting to pretend things were other than they are), “That is our father’s mistress.”

  Then a general confusion ensued.

  Rachel stood beside the table where Richard’s father sat, and screamed, “I can’t believe you’d do this to me,” before running out. Her bouquet dropped to the floor.

  At a signal from someone, the band resumed its work and valiantly played on, though only a few diehards danced. Most were getting their coats, when Richard heard her. “A toast,” Richard’s mother screamed into the roiling music, “a toast to Rachel and Neil.” The dancers didn’t seem to hear at first, until, like brushing snow from a windshield, Richard’s mother swept aside a clutter of dishes from the table and stepped onto it. The music stopped then, or rather fractured, like ice falling off a roof—a few pieces crashing, the rest following in a heap, then silence. Richard’s mother loomed above them, the way the bride and groom should have been held aloft on chairs, a kerchief between them like love. But Richard’s mother stood alone, holding her glass of Vermouth aloft; she weaved, unsupported, in stocking feet. Everyone turned to watch as she struggled to remember what it was she needed to tell them, the thing she wanted to remind them of.

  Her face folded in confusion as she looked over the crowd, as if she didn’t recognize them, could not place herself, here among strangers. For a moment, she wavered, towering, as if she couldn’t remember why they were gathered here, and maybe at that moment she did not.

  “To …” she said, sadly. Richard wanted to help her. He wanted to call out “Neil and Rachel,” he wanted to call out “Love.” But he didn’t want to unsteady her, could not stand to see her fall. So he watched in a dreamlike paralysis as she teetered on the table, saying, over and over, “To. To.”

  Till Richard’s father detached himself from his mistress and moved toward his wife, with a certitude and fluidity of motion that made it seem he was inevitably drawn.

  “Lydia,” he said gently, “Come down, hon.” His father had never sounded so gentle, except maybe that one night they’d struck the deer.

  But seeing her husband approach, Richard’s mother straightened, grew definitive and bold.

  “To,” she told them grandly, lifting her glass, “To—”

  And then she fell.

  It was miraculous that she only broke a wrist and ankle, shattering one kneecap; at her age, a broken hip could be decisive, the first step in a steady decline. But these smaller injuries would prove decisive as well, if in a different way. Or so it will seem later that night, when the mistress is dispatched in a cab with Uncle Leonard, while Richard and his parents are reunited in the ambulance. His father appears to have forgotten the mistress, refuses to leave his wife’s side. In the eerie light of the ambulance, the men crouch together beside the gurney, an EMT checking vital signs, while Richard’s father holds his mother’s hand, tears in his eyes. He leans close and says something quietly, into her ear. Richard can see his mother nod slightly and press his father’s hand, in reply.

  Richard has never known his parents to hold hands before, had not imagined what might be between them, till now—when his mother is vulnerable, his father clearly afraid of losing the woman he clearly loves. Richard can see that his father will never leave her, and had never meant to. As he holds onto the gurney rail, bracing himself against the stops and turns, Richard glimpses the simple thing that had been obscure till now—what a lifetime together might mean: someone there beside you when you fall.

  It is late even on the West Coast and Richard knows that Brian will be sleepy and grumpy, he knows the rumpled vanilla smell of him, the tone of his annoyance (Brian never likes staying up late, never enjoys the night as Richard does, preferring the clear optimism of morning, which Richard loathes). It’s two hours earlier on the coast and if he calls now, he’ll wake Brian at midnight. But he misses him, and so he calls.

  “Hell-o,” says Brian, jauntily, wide awake.

  “Brian?” Richard says. Why the hell is he wide awake?

  “Richard?”

  There is a sound of music in the background, Miles Davis, loud.

  “You were expecting someone else?” Richard asks. He means this to sound like a joke, but it doesn’t. “Is someone there with you?”

  “No. There is no one here with me,” Brian says, repeating each word carefully.

  There is a muffled sound, and Richard knows that Brian has covered the receiver. When it clears, the music’s lower.

  “What’s that music?”

  “Oh, just the TV.”

  Richard thinks he hears someone laugh.

  Richard does not hear the rest. He hangs up.

  It occurs to him that he’s just worn out from the wedding, that his own infidelity is what haunts him, not Brian’s. He reaches for the phone to call back and apologize (Richard’s always the one to apologize, Brian never does), setting his hand on the receiver, when it rings. Before he reads the number in the caller ID box, he knows it is Brian. It’s two in the fucking morning, who else would be calling but Brian? When the phone rings a second time, it has the insistent anxious ring of someone caught in deception, someone r
eady with an excuse and an apology. Someone who’s about to leave but is having a hard time saying goodbye. It rings once, rings twice, rings three times. So Richard picks up the phone and depresses the button to disconnect the call, then sets the receiver beside the phone to keep the line engaged, and he prepares to sleep.

  His skin feels clammy as he lies in bed; it prickles with the static-electrified feeling of fear. The room cradles, rocking back and forth gently, and Richard feels the lightness of knowing that nothing holds him down now, the sense of having slipped free of gravity. He imagines this is how the astronauts must feel, nostalgic for the pull of something larger than themselves, longing to be drawn into the orbit of a greater force and held there. It is the heart they have to worry about in space, his aunt Elizabeth has told him. In zero gravity, the heart will grow too large and slack. Without the pull of a greater force, it fails us.

  THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS

  I.

  CONSPICUOUS LEISURE

  The Scottish Brewer and his wife have not joined us this afternoon for our trek through the forest of Tapantí. They are protesting the mud. Boycotting the birds. Outraged by the sloppiness, the untidiness of nature. How they conceived of an ornithological tour that did not require hiking through muck, I cannot conceive, but the Scottish Brewer seems to have imagined that the birds would come to us. Regrettably, the Duck Man and his wife are undeterred; they come up the path behind us, talking loudly. Manuel, our guide, has shushed them repeatedly but to no effect. Our only hope now is to outdistance them, but every so often, through the canopy of green, from amidst the vines and leaves, I hear a distant quack and know that they are out there still, the Duck Man and his wife, somewhere in the jungle, gaining on us.