Love, in Theory Page 19

  Our professor claims that we have outlived our glory. The disdain heaped on liberals is a stand-in—he maintains—for a general disdain of the bourgeoisie. The League of Women Voters. The PTA. The Rotarians. Members of NPR, PBS, the ACLU—the names alone sound like a punchline to a joke.

  But in our defense I say that we are the ones who are neither so poor nor so rich as to be indifferent. We have the leisure to sympathize and mourn, and the good sense to be ashamed of ourselves. My psychotherapist friend maintains that shame differs from guilt. Guilt, she says, is the consequence of a disruption of the social order, while shame results from a disruption of the natural order, the order of things. Guilt can be made right by an apology, a bread-and-butter note, but shame requires penance, the righting of a wrong; it requires sacrifice.

  The professor says we are a dying breed, the middle classes. Even in this country that gave rise to Veblen’s theory of the leisure class. Even here, we are going the way of the dodo. Our professor has documented our decline. The United States is, he says, coming more and more to resemble a Latin American country, with the mass of underpaid workers serving a small, self-perpetuating oligarchic class. You see it everywhere, in the cuts to public education, the shift to temporary workers, the lay-offs, the assaults on unions and workers’ rights. His thesis is essentially that the culture wars are a distraction from the corporate assault on the citizenry. As the middle class is squeezed out by downsizing and globalization, we have no one to hate but ourselves: Jews against blacks, blacks against Koreans, everyone against the feminists and the intellectuals and the young and the homosexuals, a free-for-all of loathing.

  Those of us who believed in the Great Society are dying out. I can hardly stand to go to the opera any more. All the heads are gray. And what will happen when we are gone?

  Après nous, le déluge. Après nous, la canard.

  It is too depressing to contemplate, so I put aside my journal and pull out Veblen, to read for class; reading before dinner has always felt like a great luxury, a private vice.

  “What are you reading?”

  It is Sanderson. I am startled by a voice outside my head, but glad to see him.

  “The Theory of the Leisure Class.”

  “Veblen. It’s been years.”

  I tell him about our class and how we’re missing three lectures to come on this tour.

  “It’s worth it,” Sanderson says.

  “Yes,” I say, “it is.”

  Sanderson is on the board of a local museum and symphony, as I recall.

  “What’s it about?” the Duck Man asks, appearing in the doorway.

  “Us,” says Sanderson, expansively, and laughs.

  I explain that Veblen was a nineteenth-century economist and sociologist who applied Darwin’s theories to the American bourgeoisie to examine which traits survived in the modern industrial age.

  “He coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption,’” I say.

  “I’ve heard of that,” the Duck Man says, then he wanders over to look at a vase.

  “Your son’s a political scientist, isn’t he?” Geneen Sanderson asks.

  “Our daughter, yes. She’s finishing her PhD at Chicago.”

  The Sandersons nod and smile. They are from Oak Park. Nice people.

  “That’s a good school,” James Sanderson says.

  “You must be very proud of her,” says Geneen.

  “We are.”

  When Milt arrives, we four go in, leaving the Duck Man to wait for his wife. Often we take a table for four to avoid the Duck Man and the Scottish Brewer, but tonight it is banquet style. There is no helping it. The Duck Man lands across the table. He leans toward me and says, “Gee, you clean up nice.”

  VI.

  PECUNIARY CANONS OF TASTE

  This is not a proper hotel restaurant or night club. We are too far out in the countryside for that. It is an old converted hacienda. I wonder if the smooth dirt floors are mixed with goat blood, the old way. They are dark brown, solid as stone. Flecked with bits of hay. Flecks of straw can be seen in the thick walls where the white wash has chipped away. Each spring they plaster the exterior with micaceous clay against the year’s rains, shoring up against the relentless process of erosion. This afternoon, it rained and the dining room smells of dust, moist earth.

  The table where we dine is covered with a heavy linen cloth, the former owner’s table perhaps. It has the length and general dimensions of the table you see in paintings of the Last Supper.

  I take the liberty of rapping discreetly on its surface to test the density of the wood and find the tops are plastic, metal fold-out tables set end to end. They wobble slightly when the large ceramic platters are placed on them, heaped with stewed beef in chili sauce, rice, chicken fried in oil and spices, cooked pumpkin, potato, carrots, onion, with a small glass bottle of oil, limes, peppers, fried plantains, a platter of limp lettuce leaves smelling of chlorine, sliced tomatoes, cilantro, hearts of palm, cold beer.

  I am pleased to know the names in Spanish; my accent, Manuel tells me, is quite good. Milton, however, insists on speaking to the waiters in Italian, which he learned in the army during the war, as if any foreign tongue would do. He likes this pretense of ignorance, likes pretending he does not know what he does. But he does, I know. As if he were an innocent abroad, a charming bungler, but I know better.

  Marion, the Duck Man’s wife, holds an ice cube in her plump fingers, which are pink and swollen as tropical slugs. There is perspiration on her upper lip, glistening above her coral lipstick. She runs the tip of her tongue over her lips, darts at the sweat, glancing around the table to see if anyone has noticed. I pretend not to. When she catches my eye, I do not smile. Earlier, she wedged three fingers into her water glass to extract the ice she holds in her hand. She’d glanced up midway through her procedure and smiled deprecatingly, as she extracted the chunk of ice and palmed it in an effort at discretion. She rubs the ice cube along the sides of her long, plump throat.

  “Failure is the family business,” the Duck Man said on our first day out, flashing a broad salesman’s smile. But he didn’t need to tell us. Milt had already heard of him from men he knows in Omaha. The Duck Man has a reputation: Like the smell of a slaughter house, it carries distances. He is known for buying scrap metal that was once the basis of a productive business. He has made a fortune in scrap, in destroying what others built.

  At dinner, his wife holds forth on the eating habits of parrots. They have not been able to have children. She keeps one as a pet in Detroit, where they live, and dotes on it.

  When Geneen points out that the exotic animal trade is ruthless and often cruel, that parrots are usually tortured during capture, illegally transported in trunks, often dying en route, the Duck Wife looks uncomfortable, then distressed. She tears her napkin, shreds it.

  “I never heard that,” she said. “Honey, d’you think it’s true?”

  The Duck Man shrugs and chews.

  They talk about the ballroom-dancing lessons they take each week, about their boat; they seem to signify some unhappy truth about the dying century. Perhaps it is unfair to judge them, but they seem to be all that is tawdry and sad and commercial. They confirm my worst fears, that we are slipping in some significant way, that we are losing ground, après nous, la canard.

  “Failure is the family business,” he says proudly, repeating what is clearly his motto.

  “Oh, you,” the Duck Wife says. “He’s always saying that. You can just ignore him if you want.”

  Would it were true.

  They remind me of our neighbors in Iowa, who are in a state of perpetual tan. The Herberts smile hugely at us from across the hedge. They stopped inviting us to dinner years ago, but they continue to wave at us from the driveway as if it were a great and remarkable pleasure to see us again. They always look as if they were about to set sail, when the fact of the matter is they are going up the street to the Olive Garden at the mall for a bite to eat. It is worst in summer. Then they
are in tennis whites, baring their aggressively good teeth. Huge, athletic, unreflective people. Even in winter they are tanned. As if they could defy the season we are in.

  VII.

  THE BELIEF IN GRACE

  After dinner, young women collect the plates and ask if we would like coffee. Milton excuses himself and retires to the room, too tired to wait for the folkloric dancers. Since his operation, he is careful not to overexert himself. Procedures that would have killed us twenty years ago now are routine. Like Darwin’s creatures on the Galapagos, we are still evolving. The phrases sound so innocuous—bypass, double bypass, triple bypass, quadruple bypass—more like highway construction, like urban planning, than a matter of the human heart.

  The young women bring out bouquets of flowers to fill the empty places at the centers of the tables. One of the dancers invites the General out onto the floor. Soon, the others, even Manuel, even the Sandersons, go watch.

  I am alone at the table, when I see the bird of paradise and remember the hospital room. The bouquet by the bed. It was after the operation. We were holding hands and I asked Milt how he was feeling and he said, “I had an affair.” For a moment I thought he meant that he was having a ball, a fair, a riot, in the hospital, that he was being ironic. “It ended ten years ago,” he said.

  That was the first I heard about the woman he had almost left me for years ago. The hospital room reminded him; she’d died in one, he said. If she hadn’t died, he would have left me. He was sixty at the time; she was forty-four. He’d been involved with her for twenty years, half our marriage. Those are the numbers, the details I cannot get out of my head. Specifics I do not want to know.

  The hospital room was private, thank God. There was no one else to hear his confession. An ugly room. Blank as the heart of God, with all the charm of a dentist’s office. White linens. White walls. The only color came from the flowers I’d brought. A vase of orange tiger lilies, a sunflower, a bird of paradise, a spray of greens, a branch of yellow elm. I don’t know why he had to mention it, after all these years, after three mortgages and seven cars and all the loneliness and compromises.

  He reached for my hand and I jerked away and knocked over the vase.

  “Damn it,” I said. “Goddamn it.” I crouched to get the pieces. The bird of paradise had snapped its stem. Water seeped across the linoleum tiles.

  “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” he said.

  “I didn’t want to know.”

  “I want things to be clean between us.”

  “How dare you,” I said. “How dare you tell me this now.”

  Later, I will say, we have done worse things to each other, we have survived much worse, but I’m not sure. Is there worse than this: to make of someone’s life a lie?

  I don’t ask for details. I don’t want to know. But Milt tells me when he feels like it. What he remembers. Which isn’t much. An amnesiac about his own indiscretions.

  Leaves. That is what I remember. Funny the things you remember and don’t. Yellow elm leaves. The shadows left on the sidewalk after the leaves had been swept away, their silhouettes like shadows of bodies after a nuclear detonation. The aura remains. Even after the body is gone.

  I cannot see what all the commotion is about. The others have formed a ragged circle at the far edge of the room, and they stand together on the dance floor, smiling and clapping to the music. I finish my coffee and stand to leave, and then I see them: the ridiculous couple, waltzing. The Duck Man and his wife. The music is all wrong for a waltz, but they are undeterred. The folkloric dancers have cleared the floor, and, like the others, they watch the Duck Man and his wife, moving around the room in one another’s arms. I stop and stare. The couple bobs and glides and turns; they bob and glide and turn. And all the while between them there is a gap—between their thighs and hips and chests. And I understand suddenly that this is how waltzing works, this is what gives it grace, what creates the tension and the poignant beauty of the dance. This empty space. What moves us is not the dancers’ proximity but the careful distance they maintain: it is amazing that two people can be so close and still not touch.

  And despite myself, I have to say it, they are lovely.

  When I get back to the room, the moon is up and bright enough to see by. I make my way to the bed, undress, and slip beneath the covers. Lying there, I am filled with what I’d felt that day in the hospital, just after the moment when I knew that Milton wouldn’t live, when they started the dead man’s heart again: the unexpected relief that I’d been wrong. And I think of the couple on the dance floor, moving around the room in one another’s arms and of that empty space between them. You’d never have guessed they had it in them, that couple, so unlike what I had imagined we’d become. And I cannot help but ask myself, Who’d have believed they had beauty in them, who would have guessed they were capable of grace?

  THEORY OF DRAMATIC ACTION

  ACT I

  In the last three months, your cat has died, your car has died, your marriage ended. In the last three months, you have lost ten pounds, a job, a city, a state. Now as you drive a U-Haul across the vast stretch-marked belly of the continent, on your way from Colorado to start film school in Ohio, you try to locate a feeling to go with these events. But your life feels like a silent movie, the strange weight of absence heavy in the air around you. What comes instead of grief is blankness, the late-night-TV fuzz of the brain, as if you had simply tuned in at an inopportune moment and must now wait out the morning when regular programming will resume. You narrate your way across the country, imagining yourself the heroine of some B-grade movie or a road-trip flick. Faster, Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill, you say as you floor it to pass a semi on your left. You think of yourself in the second person, in the present always tense.

  You want to be a screenwriter, maybe work in Hollywood. You admire the films of Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, Bergman and Godard, and you imagine that your appreciation for the work of others qualifies you for something, mistaking taste for chops. You flatter yourself that you have an eye. An eye for an eye. You can spot talent, which maybe means you have some.

  But as you drive toward the storm-strained horizon of Nebraska, you wonder if all you really want is a more dramatic life. Something other than this ordinary pain you’ve felt for months, that constant dull ache, like a pulled muscle in the heart.

  Your first quarter in graduate school, sign up for Screenwriting, Eng 625. The teacher will be a redhead, tall and gaunt, she will be fashionable, she will be glam, she will be pretty and talk fast. She will have dated many of the new directors you admire. She will have worked in what she calls “The Industry” for years. When you mention Hollywood, she will stop you. “No one calls it Hollywood,” she says. “Don’t ever call it that. And never call a secretary a secretary, they are Executive Assistants. Next month they will be Agents. They are your Best Friend. Without them, no one will ever read your script.” She is twenty-eight, an age at which one speaks in capital letters, with certitude. (You are thirty now and were never twenty-eight. You were never twenty-nine. You were never sure.) Take notes on everything she says.

  Your first day you will learn about the structure of dramatic action, or what your instructor calls the Three Acts. When you first step in the door, however, it will appear you are going to learn about New Math. On the board is written a sequence of numbers that do not appear to add up. Note them down anyway, in case you need them later.

  What makes for dramatic action, your instructor tells the class, is a powerful need meeting an equally powerful obstacle. That, she says, is drama. Dutifully copy down into your notebook the diagram of dramatic action she scrawls across the chalkboard. It will have a Hook, a Plot Twist (I), a False Resolution, a Plot Twist (II), a Climax, a Denouement. Act I, Act II, Act III.

  As you write down the heading False Resolution, you think of the life you have left behind, the life you shared with your now ex-lover. The house you built together in the mountains outside Boulder, the
vows you made, the hopes you had, your resolution to see this relationship through, to have kids, a steady salary, a life you think now you could not possibly have led. Still, you long for it sometimes. For love. Stability. For resolution in the midst of these irresolute days.

  Domesticity is something that you crave from time to time, like McDonald’s, but it does not suit you. Does not go down well. Like the McDonald’s you ate on your way to class, it makes your throat dry, you find it hard to swallow, which is why you left your ex after four years together, after building a house, left a woman you loved but could not live with. The ordinariness of your life together depressed you, the laundry bin domesticity of it, the day-in-day-out canned corn and peas kind of love you shared. You found yourself wondering if this was all there is; you found yourself looking for options like stocks.

  You are not without options. You are a lesbian, but men mistake you all the time, and lately you mistake yourself. Lately you consider dating men; partly for the shock value, partly because you are tired; partly because men are like turtles, they need less attention than a woman requires, demand less; partly because you are tired of being told that you are “just like a man, you cannot commit,” tired of hearing this from women you are committed to.

  You consider dating a man as you might consider buying another car. You consider your options: models, design, year of manufacture, dents and damage and mileage, comfort of the ride. It seems a practical matter now. Cars and marriage and love. These vehicles that move us through our lives, from the continent of youth into what seems to you now the compromised and embattled territory of middle age.