Love, in Theory Read online

  THEORY OF ENLIGHTENMENT

  Sadhana Tattwa. The Science of Seven Cultures for Quick

  Evolution of the Human Soul. These thirty-two instructions

  give the essence of the Eternal Religion in its purest

  form. Suitable for modern busy householders …

  11…. Adapt yourself to men and events.

  H.H. SRI SWAMI SIVANANDA

  EVER SINCE HER LOVER LEFT HER FOR AN ASHRAM IN THE Catskills, Renee Kirschbaum has been picking fights with strangers. Yesterday, in a Brooklyn Laundromat, she came to fisticuffs with a twenty-year-old boy who tried to take the laundry cart she’d parked in front of her dryer. The kid was tall and lanky, with a cowlick that wobbled like a lewd tongue from the crown of his head. He strode up to the Renee’s dryer, yanked away the cart she’d parked in front of it, and was heading off across the linoleum, when she collared him. No doubt it was reflex that made him swing at her, just as it was reflex that made her duck, leaving him to drive his delicate knuckles into the yellow enameled machine.

  This morning, as she was crossing Park Avenue on her way to work, a car skidded to a halt in the crosswalk, missing her by inches.

  “Where did you get your license? A raffle?” she shrieked, banging her attaché case on the hood of the car. The man behind the wheel wore the bland cheap suit of a Jersey commuter and stared at her in disbelief, his mouth slightly ajar.

  “Sorry,” she said, recovering herself and patting the snout of the car. “I’m a little premenstrual.”

  As she rides the elevator up to the ninth floor, where her office is, Renee thinks about the day Gil left her two days ago. Renee had stood in the kitchen of the Brooklyn brownstone, looking out at the garden squashed between their building and the next, and said, “Don’t go.”

  “I need something to believe in, Ren.”

  “Believe in yourself.”

  “That’s not enough,” Gil said.

  “Then believe in us,” she said.

  “That’s not enough,” he said gently. “I’m sorry.”

  “You can’t just give up on the world.”

  “I can’t save the world.”

  “You’re afraid of trying.”

  “I know my limits.” Gil stretched out a hand to touch her shoulder but she shrugged it away. “The best I can hope for is not to do any harm,” Gil said.

  “Everyone has blood on their hands.”

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

  “Too late.”

  As the elevator approaches Renee’s floor, the guy beside her ruffles a New York Times in her face and she elbows him in the kidney. When he stares at her, she smiles. Steps off on nine.

  This is not a thing they feature in women’s magazines: How to Steal Your Boyfriend Back from God. So Renee has to turn to relatives, to friends, to strangers who lurk in adjacent cubicles. That morning, she confides in her coworker Alice, hoping against hope for good advice.

  “He’s certain. He’s at peace. And he left me on Saturday when our lease ran out,” Renee tells Alice, a fellow researcher at the midtown environmental consulting firm where Renee works in air quality. Alice is in toxic wastes. Together they stand in the narrow kitchenette having the first cup of coffee of the day.

  “It’s tough to be two-timed with God,” Alice says, clutching her mug in both hands like it might escape. Alice grew up in Alabama and is well acquainted with conversion. Her great-great-grandmother on her mother’s side, Ida Lee, ran off with a revival meeting just after the Civil War. More recently her father converted to Catholicism and enrolled in divinity school in Connecticut.

  “It wasn’t till my father left my mother for the church that she began to drink,” Alice explains. “God has put asunder more marriages than any mortal man.”

  “He’s devout?” Renee asks.

  “Oh, no, he’s not a believer,” Alice says. “He just doesn’t want to miss out in case they’re on to something.”

  Renee does not know Alice well, but adversity builds allegiances, and in the space of a day they are friends. Over lunch, they talk sex, they talk self-esteem. They share rape stories and religious denominations. By that afternoon, Renee has agreed to help Alice find an apartment in Brooklyn. Alice lives on 72nd Street, but she is looking for a cheaper place now that her roommate abruptly moved out, so Renee volunteers to show her around Park Slope. After work, they catch the subway home together.

  As they ride, Alice talks about her therapist, the drugs she takes for depression, her adolescent obsession with Salman Rushdie. In junior high, she had wanted to send him a box of homemade fudge but she was pretty sure it wouldn’t get through.

  “I just felt so sorry for him, all alone. I mean, the people he wrote the book for wanted to kill him.”

  “The man’s life was threatened,” Renee says. “I don’t think he’d have wanted to eat something from a perfect stranger.”

  “I know, I know,” Alice says. “I just wished there was something I could do.”

  Last week, when a parade of Greenpeace activists stormed up Park Avenue under their office windows, waving banners with dead whales and dolphins and chanting “Stop the Slaughter,” Alice had broken down weeping. Her therapist—Alice tells Renee—has told her to cool it.

  “Repeat after me,” the therapist has said. “I”

  “I”

  “Alice Riley”

  “Alice Riley”

  “Am not responsible”

  “Am not responsible”

  “For the entire fucking Western Hemisphere.”

  “Now,” Alice tells Renee, “I just want a place to sleep.”

  As the D train clatters over the Manhattan Bridge headed for Brooklyn, Renee thinks that maybe this is all that her lover Gil has wanted too: a place to sleep, perpetual naptime. Escape from the messy struggles of the living. Maybe it’s the rattle of the tracks, repetitive as obsession, or Alice’s example, but that is when she decides to go and visit him at the ashram, come what may. If Orpheus can go to hell for Eurydice, the least she can do is go to the Catskills for Gil.

  “I’m going to bring him back alive,” she tells Alice, as they emerge from the subway at Grand Army Plaza. “Alive or alive.” Truth is, she simply wants him back. This man she has loved as she has loved, will love, no other.

  That night Renee calls her mother in Arizona and cries. Her mother listens. Speaks calmly. Says it has to feel really bad to separate from someone you’ve spent a lot of time with over the last several years.

  “Spent a lot of time with? We were married for all intents and purposes. We bought Revere Ware. An OED.”

  “You’re young. You have your whole life ahead of you. Maybe you’ll go back to graduate school, finish that law degree, who knows?”

  “But that wouldn’t make me happy, Ma.”

  “Who’s happy?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Your father and I are comfortable. Look. Take some advice and don’t put so much emphasis on happiness. It’ll only make you miserable. It’s like Joseph Campbell says, ‘It’s important to follow your bliss, but sometimes you just have to make the best of what you’ve got.’”

  “I don’t think that’s what he said.”

  “I got the video right here,” her mother says. Renee can hear her mother shifting in a lawn chair, the squeaky sound of flesh on vinyl.

  “Your father and I are worried about you,” her mother says, when she settles. “Why don’t you come for a visit? A vacation would do you good.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s to know? It’s warm. You can bring a bathing suit. You’ll swim. Relax. Put some color back in you face. You’ll have a good time.”

  Renee pictures her mother beside the aquamarine pool ringed with potted begonias. “Every time you tell me I’ll have a good time, I don’t. Not at Aunt Sonia’s wedding. Not at my bat mitzvah.”

  “Such a good memory and this is what you use it for.”

  “Anyway, I’m busy this weeke
nd.” Static crackles on the line as her mother goes quiet with interest.

  “You seeing someone?”

  “I’m going to visit Gil, at the ashram.”

  “And why can’t he come to see you?”

  “He can’t get away.”

  “What is this place? A monastery or a concentration camp?”

  “Why do you twist everything into a shadow of the Holocaust?” There is a silence on the line and Renee knows her mother is considering whether to fight her on this one. Their relationship used to be composed of these little explosions, like gunpowder smoke signals they’d send out to one another from their distant peaks. But lately Mrs. Kirschbaum has mellowed. Ever since Renee’s mother decided not to leave Renee’s father, a thing she had been threatening to do as-soon-as-the-children-were-grown for as long as the children were growing, Mrs. Kirschbaum has softened. She has lost her edge.

  Throughout Renee’s childhood, her mother had kept a bag packed by the front door like Russians in the days of Stalin or the biblical Jews on the eve of the Exodus prepared to leave in the night, and once when Renee was eight, her mother had gotten as far as calling a cab. Renee still remembers how the headlights turned into the driveway in the middle of that clear March evening, how they shone through the bedroom window before arcing into the drive, like twin flashlights scrutinizing the home for valuables. Renee heard the sound of voices outside, the slam of the cab door, and the whining whir of the car engine backing down the drive. The headlight beams reeled like drunks back across the walls then slipped out, leaving Renee in darkness again. But the next morning when Renee got up for school her mother was there in the white-curtained kitchen, frying eggs and cursing the toaster and rushing Renee’s brother and sister out the door before they missed the bus—her eyes only slightly more bloodshot than usual, her face only a hint puffier—as if nothing had happened. Renee never asked her mother about that night, but after it she fought with her mother regularly, over school lunches, dishes, curfew, boyfriends.

  Now as she listens to the clinking of ice in a glass her mother is stirring half a country away, Renee realizes she is hoping for a fight, for someone to struggle against to know where she stands: the way it was in the old days, where you knew who you were by the side you were on. But her mother shrugs off the provocation.

  “At least they got visiting hours,” her mother says.

  On Friday afternoon, Renee catches the van up to the ranch in front of the yoga center. The van is ordinary, blue, except for the stripe of white stenciled letters around its girth: OM NAMO NARAYANAYA CHANT FOR WORLD PEACE. She arrives early and takes a seat at the back, by the window. While she waits, she slips on a pair of sunglasses and ties a scarf around her hair in case she should pass anyone she knows. Women pile in over her, grabbing seats, arranging baggage, staking territory. The women are in their forties and fifties mostly, she thinks, ex-housewives and bohemian Upper East Side ladies looking for peace, meaning, skin tone. The driver is a handsome man, deeply tanned, with a shaved head, round wire-rimmed sunglasses, brown leather bomber jacket, jeans, and a silk scarf draped around his neck. He slips behind the wheel and chants three rounds of Tryambakam Yajamahe before starting the engine.

  “I don’t know how I feel about riding with a guy who has to pray before he drives,” Renee jokes to the woman next to her. The woman glances at Renee without interest, then looks straight ahead.

  As they enter the Lincoln Tunnel headed for Jersey, Renee thinks how ironic it is that Gil, of all people, should dump her for God. When they met five years ago, Gil was an atheist and an associate professor of wildlife biology at the University of Texas. Renee was college educated and underemployed. During the day, she cleaned houses. In the evenings she drove a van for a local sanctuary group, visiting warehouses on the edge of the city to pick up immigrants fighting deportation orders, who told harrowing stories of border crossings in the Arizona desert trying to evade vigilantes who menaced the U.S. border the way drug gangs did its other side.

  After a few months, the local pastor and a few pious matrons were questioned by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the network disappeared like smoke. Renee kicked around town for a few months, waiting for the network to resume, but when no one contacted her, she gave up and applied to law school. That was where she’d met Gil, in a corridor of Townes Hall where he was trying to throw a coat over a sparrow that had mistakenly flown in and gotten trapped. He was thirty-three at the time, but his hair was already white. He made her think of a medieval gravestone rubbing from an English church, his face gaunt and elegant and sad like some long-extinct knight. He began picking her up on weekends to tour her through the hill country outside Austin and along the Gulf Coast, introducing her to the local flora as if this were his family. He drew her attention to varieties of plants and fungi, using their Latin names for the formal introduction and then, more intimately, leaning toward her to reveal their common names: rocky mountain jay, cottonwood, maidenhair, bolete.

  “Being happy is a revolutionary act,” Gil had said once, not long after they had moved in together. In those days, he often came home from class to find Renee seated by the radio listening to news broadcast from D.C., chewing her cuticles, a copy of The Nation spread open on the table.

  “Tell it to the Burmese,” Renee had said. But, in truth, she harbored a secret faith in their affection. Gil was her only consolation for all that was bitter and wrong in the world, as if happiness were a form of justice. In a world of melting glaciers, dying frogs, and extreme rendition, they developed a simple creed, a faith more modest than ideology or temple, in each other, as if the smallness of the act, their bond, would keep it safe.

  That evening as they sat on the front porch, drinking sherry and watching the sky above the cotton trees smolder with the dying light, she’d asked him where their responsibilities lay.

  “What will we tell future generations when they ask us how we let all this come to pass?” she’d asked Gil. “What will we tell them when they ask us what we knew and when?”

  Her voice, she knew, had its familiar edge. It was the voice she used to quote nuclear winter statistics or factual inaccuracies from the paper over breakfast.

  “I think there are people who can change the world,” Gil had said carefully, “but I don’t know who they are. All we can do is add to the right side of the world.”

  “How do we do that?” Renee had asked.

  “Recycle?” he suggested.

  “We are waffling in the face of history,” Renee said.

  On the interstate in New Jersey, they stop at a rest stop for gas. The driver tells them they have ten minutes, and Renee makes a beeline for the McDonald’s across the parking lot in search of coffee. There is no coffee at the ashram, or processed sugar, garlic, mushrooms, onions; they are considered unduly stimulating. Before she can order, another woman from the van—a plump berry-brown woman with Rasta hair—joins her, and soon after the driver enters; they both tell him they’re glad to see him.

  “I was beginning to think we were the lone subversives,” Renee says.

  The driver laughs. He points to a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers poster on the wall by the entrance. “That’s nice,” he says.

  For a moment, the three of them admire the irony of framed art prints—Turner, Monet, Hudson River School—in a McDonald’s. Even the Muzak is Mozart.

  “It’s New Jersey,” the Rasta woman says. “What can you expect?”

  Renee doesn’t speak to the driver again, but in the van, as they wait to pull out of the parking lot onto the highway, she watches the back of his neck where his scarf gives way to skin.

  As they drive up into the foothills the air is redolent of warm apples, wind, and leaves. It is November but unseasonably warm. Autumn lingers. The low green hills in the distance are striated with blue and purple shadows. Watching the beautiful world become a blur outside the van window, Renee feels suddenly bereft. Her throat thickens and she finds it hard to swallow. When th
e Rasta woman points out some deer by the side of the road, Renee can only nod and look away.

  It was in late December, a year ago, just a month after Gil’s first visit to the yoga center, that Renee first began to notice the rift developing between them. They had recently moved from Manhattan to a brownstone on a tree-lined block in Brooklyn when Gil began coming home late—three, four nights a week—arriving at eleven p.m., at midnight, reeking of incense, aloof as God.

  He began to dedicate fewer evenings to Renee and their ritual acrostic and more to chanting, folding his body into unusual positions without her. They used to talk about botany and Mahler; now their conversations pivoted on the Upanishads and obscure Hindu texts. He began rising at 5:30 a.m. to floss his nose, oil his gums, light incense, practice asanas, meditate.

  At first Renee tried to take an interest in his “practice,” as he called it. After a month of watching Gil spend evenings on his head in the living room of their apartment, Renee dragged out the teal sweat pants she had consigned to the back of her closet years before and went to sign up for a class. It was the day after Christmas and the city was tender with evening and snow.