Love, in Theory Read online

  Lie awake in bed at night and listen to the unfamiliar creaks and cars, the helicopters that patrol your neighborhood, flashing search lights in your window like a peeping Tom.

  Wait for the days to pass, to drop away like the acorns that fall from the trees as you walk to campus, nuts that sometimes hit you as you pass beneath the oaks, making you wonder if squirrels have it in for you.

  Miss her.

  The professor of Greek ends the term with a sex joke. He says, on the last day of class, “It was good for me, was it good for you?”

  Everyone else laughs.

  You don’t. You are failing Greek. Ever since Erin’s visit your mind has gone on the blink.

  After class, your professor asks if you’d like to have that drink. “You seem to be having trouble,” he says. “I’d like to help if I can.”

  You tell him you’ll stop by for office hours.

  He says he’d be happy to be of service.

  You know how this will end. This, your screenwriting instructor has told you, makes for bad drama, bad art, knowing the end before it’s over. You want to tell her it makes for a lousy love affair as well, which—like art—should be an exploration of your material. If you know how it will turn out from the beginning, you’re probably not going to be honest as you proceed, she says. You know she is right about this.

  As you prepare for your final in screenwriting, come across the numbers you took down from the board. Try, for a moment, to discern a pattern. As a child, you loved math, raced ahead in class, tore through each book of equations, delighted by their beautiful symmetry, their neat and predictable solutions. Your sister had run away from home. Your brother, in a fit of suburban Buddhism, was bowing to bushes, ruining any hope you ever had of popularity. Your parents, when they spoke at all, fought. Numbers possessed a lovely order.

  In college, you studied economics, but you loathed the graphs of supply and demand, the theory of marginal utility with its disturbingly accurate claim that availability diminishes desire and the pleasure one takes in its satisfaction. So you dropped econ and took up film, graduating with a degree in cinema studies, which you realized too late qualifies you for just three things: graduate school, work in video stores, and to feel an unsociable contempt for movies your friends all like.

  Now, looking at the quilt of numbers on the page before you, feel nostalgic for the order they present. The hope of order. The rumor of it. Numbers are such a lie. They always promise more than they can deliver, a world in which things add up, in which one plus one equals two, in which there is a predictable sequence, the way infatuation is supposed to lead to romance to vows, maybe kids. But it does not happen this way, you find. In the world, in love. Awkward threes are everywhere: a couple and their best friend; a professor, his wife, and a student.

  Looking at these numbers, you think of all the things in your life that do not add up; your life is a set of random variables, figures out of sequence, waiting for an equation to give them shape and purpose, a point, a meaningful relationship to one another, a connection. The plus sign, the minus, the equal, multiplication, division (always long and always painful) are really marks of connection and relationship, and it occurs to you that without these symbols to link 6 to 17 to 10 to 8 to 4, there is no meaning here, nothing worth jotting down: the relationship is all. All or nothing.

  ACT III

  In the climax, which should come in Act III, Good and Evil meet. Ultimate right and ultimate wrong. You will think of these as Mrs. Right and Mr. Wrong.

  In your life, these never meet. Right and Wrong. The categories do not even apply. Instead, you have hard and soft. Tender and un-tender are the operative terms. Your life, you realize, is undramatic. Painful, without coming to a point. There is no climax except on futons. And, just maybe, with the professor of Greek, on a desk after hours on a Thursday night. You agreed to come for office hours, but he requested you come at the end of the day instead, for a tutorial, a one-on-one.

  On the way out the door to meet him, you get a call from Erin, whom you have not spoken to in weeks. When you hear her voice on your machine, pick up. She says she was just calling to say hi, see how you are. She tells you more about the bookstore where she works. “It has a section on polyamory,” she says. “Couples come in in threes.” Like some haywire Noah’s ark. She laughs and then she cries, and when you ask her why she tells you that she’s just come in from walking in the park where she felt lonely. Listening to her you feel lonely too, the blue fuzz in your brain giving way to some other feeling, the shape of longing.

  She tells you how she walks each afternoon in Prospect Park and feels lonely, wanting so much to have someone to love.

  “I never knew you wanted that,” you say. “I thought you just wanted to fuck.”

  “No,” she says, her voice sad. “I wanted you.”

  “I have to go,” you say, though you don’t want to. “I have an appointment, with a prof.”

  “At this hour?”

  “He’s unorthodox,” you say. “Greek Unorthodox.”

  She doesn’t laugh. She says, “Call me sometime. I mean, if you want to. I mean, I don’t know what I mean.” Then she hangs up.

  As you walk to campus, acorns pelting you like hail, realize that you are less afraid of desire’s attendant domesticity, than of losing what you love, which is your friend. Wonder if perhaps you can arrange something together, some love affair that does not involve a U-Haul, Hers and Hers towels. Think that perhaps the inherited forms of love need not apply to the two of you, as the structure of dramatic action fails to fit your life, that perhaps together you can invent some other form of love, something tender and spacious at one time, a love large as that Colorado sky you left behind, with its fulsome blue, its poignant promising emptiness that hangs like a wedding veil, stretches even now like a chuppah, over your ex’s bared and lovely head.

  The prof is waiting for you in his office, reclining in his wooden swivel chair. Handsome and at ease, he smiles when you arrive and waves you gently in. Before him on the desk, a book is open. He offers you a chair, and then a drink. He pulls open a drawer of his file cabinet which contains a tiny well-stocked bar: bourbon, scotch, port, Armagnac, vodka. He seems amused by your shock. Accept a glass of port. Cough as it goes down, hot and smoky as a cigar.

  Begin by translating from the Greek. The first words of a poem. You’re at a loss, so he helps you with the terms you’ve not yet mastered, which is all of them. His hand gently falls over yours as you follow the words on the page. When his palm moves to your shoulder, then your cheek, you’re not surprised. His touch is practiced. You are clearly not the first. He lifts you gently from your chair into an embrace, and as you slip your ass onto the desk, you knock over a framed photo of his wife. You like the bourbon-inflected taste of his mouth. You like his ease, his unembarrassed desire. You like him. But you do not want to fuck. You are not interested in drama anymore. You don’t want to cheat on his wife; you’ve cheated enough already, cheated yourself, your friend, your ex by thinking that love was ordinary, that domesticity equals death. You realize suddenly that the bonds of love—restrictive as they seem—are like celluloid and silver, a medium necessary to give shape to light, making possible the beautiful image on that big screen in the dark.

  It is a bad time to realize this. It is socially awkward, this little epiphany that people, according to your screenwriting instructor, are not supposed to have anymore. Try to bow gracefully out. Knowing there is no hope of that. Knowing that you have come too far for grace. Opt for jokes instead. Say, Sleeping with your professor you worry your performance will be graded; say, You hope that this material will not show up on the final exam; say, I am not joking, when you tell him to take his hands off you or you’ll scream. He tells you to grow up. You think you have. Perhaps a tiny bit, a mere increment, just now.

  Walk home alone under street lamps, the sidewalk spattered with the shadows of leaves, the sky above you black but full of promise. Take comfort in t
he knowledge that once upon a time people charted their course by nothing more than this, by these faint but still discernible stars.

  On an impulse that night, fly to Erin. First, by commuter jet to Chicago, then by proper plane. There will be stopovers. No delays. You will make all the necessary connections. There will be people to direct you to your gate. You will not need to read the signs. You will be full of hope, will take it on faith that she will be there, waiting for you, with open arms, believing briefly, fervently, though you know it only happens in the movies, that yours will be a Happy Ending.

  THE FLANNERY O’CONNOR AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION

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  Leigh Allison Wilson, From the Bottom Up

  Sandra Thompson, Close-Ups

  Susan Neville, The Invention of Flight

  Mary Hood, How Far She Went

  François Camoin, Why Men Are Afraid of Women

  Molly Giles, Rough Translations

  Daniel Curley, Living with Snakes

  Peter Meinke, The Piano Tuner

  Tony Ardizzone, The Evening News

  Salvatore La Puma, The Boys of Bensonhurst

  Melissa Pritchard, Spirit Seizures

  Philip F. Deaver, Silent Retreats

  Gail Galloway Adams, The Purchase of Order

  Carole L. Glickfeld, Useful Gifts

  Antonya Nelson, The Expendables

  Nancy Zafris, The People I Know

  Debra Monroe, The Source of Trouble

  Robert H. Abel, Ghost Traps

  T. M. McNally, Low Flying Aircraft

  Alfred DePew, The Melancholy of Departure

  Dennis Hathaway, The Consequences of Desire

  Rita Ciresi, Mother Rocket

  Dianne Nelson, A Brief History of Male Nudes in America

  Christopher McIlroy, All My Relations

  Alyce Miller, The Nature of Longing

  Carol Lee Lorenzo, Nervous Dancer

  C. M. Mayo, Sky over El Nido

  Wendy Brenner, Large Animals in Everyday Life

  Paul Rawlins, No Lie Like Love

  Harvey Grossinger, The Quarry

  Ha Jin, Under the Red Flag

  Andy Plattner, Winter Money

  Frank Soos, Unified Field Theory

  Mary Clyde, Survival Rates

  Hester Kaplan, The Edge of Marriage

  Darrell Spencer, CAUTION Men in Trees

  Robert Anderson, Ice Age

  Bill Roorbach, Big Bend

  Dana Johnson, Break Any Woman Down

  Gina Ochsner, The Necessary Grace to Fall

  Kellie Wells, Compression Scars

  Eric Shade, Eyesores

  Catherine Brady, Curled in the Bed of Love

  Ed Allen, Ate It Anyway

  Gary Fincke, Sorry I Worried You

  Barbara Sutton, The Send-Away Girl

  David Crouse, Copy Cats

  Randy F. Nelson, The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men

  Greg Downs, Spit Baths

  Peter LaSalle, Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism

  Anne Panning, Super America

  Margot Singer, The Pale of Settlement

  Andrew Porter, The Theory of Light and Matter

  Peter Selgin, Drowning Lessons

  Geoffrey Becker, Black Elvis

  Lori Ostlund, The Bigness of the World

  Linda LeGarde Grover, The Dance Boots

  Jessica Treadway, Please Come Back to Me

  Amina Gautier, At-Risk

  Melinda Moustakis, Bear Down, Bear North

  E. J. Levy, Love, in Theory

  Hugh Sheehy, The Invisibles