Does Not Love

by James Tadd Adcox

  “What?” says Viola, placing a newly clean serving bowl on the counter.

  “Like there was a while where you didn’t even want me to touch you. That felt horrible. And then, a couple of nights ago, I guess it came as a surprise.”

  “Oh Robert,” Viola says.

  Viola pushes back Robert’s still damp hair from his forehead. She thinks: This is my husband, for whom I care very much. She thinks at the same time: I could live without him.

  The ways emotions are layered, Viola thinks, and how you often can’t tell which one is the real one and which one is the one you are playing at.

  ~ ~ ~

  Robert and Viola go to a park near their house and wander around underneath the trees. The weather is suddenly beautiful. In the park Viola and Robert spend a long time watching a squirrel attempt to carry a plastic bag up a tree. “Maybe it’s stuck to him somehow?” Viola says. “Like, maybe he was eating something inside the bag and it got caught?” The squirrel keeps getting its legs tangled in the plastic bag. Viola feels a rising sense of panic. “Maybe we should help?” she says.

  “How would we help?” asks Robert.

  “I’m just afraid he’s going to fall,” says Viola, her voice suddenly too high.

  That night she looks through websites about potential surrogate mothers. There’s no reason to assume that the problem is on my end, she thinks. But I do. Why do I just assume that? If after all they don’t know why the miscarriages are occurring…

  For each of the surrogate mothers there’s information about her ethnic background, her education, her interests, whether she speaks any languages in addition to English, etcetera. In some cases, there is a short personal statement.

  “I believe that the gift of life is the most important thing one human being can give to another. I am a graduate student studying Mathematics with a particular interest in Riemannian geometry. My other interests include hiking and the struggle of the people of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.”

  Viola goes into the next room, where Robert is working at his desk. “My interest in them feels prurient,” she says.

  “In who?”

  “The women on these websites. All of their eyes are blacked out, did you know that? With those little black bars. It’s for privacy, but it still comes across as dirty, you know?”

  Robert follows Viola to the next room and looks at pictures of women on the surrogate mother website, with their eyes blacked out.

  “I thought we weren’t going to worry about this right now,” Robert says.

  “I’m not worried about it,” Viola says. “I was just looking.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Robert and Viola watch a DVD of Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. The room around them begins to thicken with ghosts. From the crowd of ghosts, Viola’s mother steps forward, her face a mask of white powder, dark lines drawn in kohl around her eyes and mouth.

  “What are you looking for?” Viola’s ghost-mother asks, impatiently. Viola realizes, abruptly, that she had been scanning the crowd of ghosts.

  “I guess,” Viola starts, then says, “Nothing. Never mind. It’s stupid.” Then: “There’s that one Gwendolyn Brooks poem? About how she feels the presence of the children she might have had? Not ghosts, exactly, but potential ghosts?”

  “A Gwen what poem?”

  “Never mind. I already said it was stupid.”

  “Little baby potential ghosts,” Viola’s ghost-mother says, taking in the room, which is a much nicer room than any room she’d lived in. She passes her hand through this object and that. “Aren’t you precious.”

  Viola’s ghost-mother passes her hand through a side lamp and ends her tour of the room facing Robert. Robert frowns at the screen, seemingly deep in thought. She gives him a long arch look before shaking her head. “This guy?”

  “What, Robert? My husband, who you weren’t around to meet? He’s good,” Viola says. “He’s stable. Dependable. I know that sounds like faint praise, but it’s actually kind of rare, as it turns out.”

  “Robert,” Viola’s ghost-mother says, drawling the name out. She makes a face. “Bob. Bobby.”

  “It’s just Robert.”

  “He’s boring,” Viola’s ghost mother says.

  “He’s stable. Though I’m not one-hundred percent surprised you don’t know the difference. He’s been there for me. That’s something I figured out that I need.”

  Viola’s ghost-mother passes her hand through the crotch of Robert’s pants. “Not terrible,” she says, after a moment. “Still, he doesn’t get you off.”

  “Whose sex life is exciting after four years? We’ve talked about the possibility of an open relationship.”

  “But he doesn’t want that.”

  “I don’t know that I want it,” Viola says. “I think I’d rather him get some on the side and just not know. He’d be careful. He wouldn’t put my health in danger, which is the main thing. I trust him.”

  “You really think this guy would try to get some on the side?” Viola and her ghost-mother watch Robert watching Throne of Blood: the banquet scene, in which the new emperor, driven mad by his murderous acts, is drawing his sword on thin air. “Milquetoast!” Viola’s ghost-mother calls at Robert.

  “He’s been willing to explore things with me.”

  “Isn’t that nice of him?” In the crowd of ghosts, various ghosts pass through the objects in the room, bump into each other, fall down, get up. Other ghosts just stand there, mouths open, silent. “Look, Vivi, we both know there’s a difference between ‘being willing’ and fucking your brains out.”

  Viola looks down at one of the smaller, clumsier ghosts, who’s fallen squat at her feet. “I’d forgotten that you called me that. Did you always call me that?”

  “What, Vivi?”

  “My aunt calls me that. I thought that was her name for me.”

  “It’s a family name,” Viola’s ghost-mother says, helping the clumsy ghost right itself. “You had a great-grandmother who lived to something like a hundred and twelve, that’s what we used to call her.”

  Both of them watch the smaller, clumsy ghost wander away, bump into another ghost, fall down near the doorway to the kitchen. Viola gets a little weirdly choked up.

  “The fuck do you even presume,” she says. “I am feeling some very reasonable anger right now. Some abandonment issues. All very reasonable. Stemming from for example how I haven’t seen you in twenty-five years or so. And when I do? You want to like, criticize my life decisions. Me, being angry right now? Me, raising my voice? Very, very reasonable.”

  “I know what you thought of me, Vivi.”

  Viola stands and starts picking things up, books, magazines, old cups, but in her anger isn’t sure what to do with them, so she starts putting them back where they were. “You know what? Don’t call me Vivi. Don’t fucking even.”

  “You were afraid of me. You didn’t want me to come back.”

  “I was six years old,” Viola says. “Jesus. I don’t have to defend my six-year-old self to you. Grow up.”

  Viola’s ghost-mother who is actually a year or two younger than Viola looks at her for a long moment, eyebrows raised. “Right,” Viola says. “I guess that’s not something you can actually do at this point. But still.”

  On the television screen the emperor is shot full of arrows. He stumbles, breaking off the ends of the arrows, a look of wild disbelief across his face. More arrows. “Did they do an okay job, your aunt and uncle?” Viola’s ghost-mother says.

  “Great,” Viola says. “They did a really fantastically great job.” A coldness spreads throughout her body. She is not looking at her ghost-mother now.

  “I’m glad,” Viola’s ghost-mother says. “I was jealous of them, you know that? I gave her hell for marrying that fat-ass, but I was jealous of them. I wish I had something to give you, Vivi, some sort of advice or something like that. I feel like I didn’t really ever give you anything.”

  “I was fine,” Viola says, still cold.
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  Viola’s ghost mother shakes her head sadly, but whether at Viola or herself is unclear.

  Mists envelope the image on the television screen. The ghosts slowly make their way from the room, Viola’s ghost-mother among them. There is a single piercing note from a Japanese flute as the last of the ghosts exit.

  “Do you want more wine?” Robert asks. “There’s maybe enough for another glass.”

  “It’s okay, you go ahead.”

  ~ ~ ~

  At the Indianapolis Museum of Art is an exhibition of dozens of tiny rooms set behind glass. Each room is labeled: Louisiana Bedroom, South Carolina Bedroom, Virginian Drawing Room, and so on. Robert and Viola wander through the exhibition, peering through the glass. Displays throughout the exhibition show how craftsmen had built e.g. the tiny chairs, joining the joints the same way one would built a similar life-sized chair. Everything is exactly to scale, one inch to one foot; the rooms are each about two hand lengths high. Something about the tiny rooms makes Robert nervous, or makes him feel like he is out of place, maybe.

  “I am working on acceptance. I am thinking about it as a sort of project,” Viola says. “My friend Nikola on the internet suggested to me the idea of the pink bubble.”

  “Pink bubble?” Robert says.

  “You imagine putting the thing you find distressing in a pink bubble, and then you picture it floating gently out into the distance. You tell yourself that it will be okay, this thing, it will be safe in the pink bubble, and you let it go. Off into the distance. It’s a meditation technique.”

  “Why pink?”

  “I don’t know. Other colors might be okay too.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Sometimes I think it helps.”

  Above the fireplace in the Virginia Drawing Room is a mirror that reflects their faces back to them, full-sized among the miniature tables, chairs, vases, rugs. Viola puts her hand to her mouth and leans in to get a better view. For a moment, the effect is quite shocking.

  She imagines a craftsman working over a single chair in the Virginia Drawing Room, spending hours or days on it, getting it right, getting it not-quite-right, starting over. At no point do you know that what you are doing is the right thing to do. You could be wasting all of your time, doing the wrong thing.

  I am thirty-four years old, Viola thinks. Soon I will be middle-aged, and after that, old.

  Through each of the rooms’ windows are miniature bushes, trees, gardens. The windows have been designed so that one can imagine the scene going on and on into the world outside the windows, so that the viewer can’t quite see where it all stops.

  “Someone had to make all of this,” Robert says suddenly, as if it had just occurred to him. “By hand. Someone had to carve each of the legs of that table. Someone had to carve each of the drawers of that dresser.” Robert and Viola look through the glass into the little room, at the miniature dresser. “Do you think they open?” Robert asks.

  Robert and Viola examine a framed schematic of the dresser, drawn in pencil.

  “They open,” Robert says.

  At the end of the exhibition, there’s a book for sale, containing full-page color photographs of each of the rooms. “They just look like rooms,” Robert says, disappointed, as he flips through the book.

  Robert and Viola drink ginger-infused ice water in the café at the front of the art museum and look out at the giant windows that cover most of the wall. “It might stop,” Viola says. “We have no assurance whatsoever that it won’t.”

  “What might?”

  “How from here you can see trees and beyond them, cars, but somewhere beyond all of that, just beyond where you can see, it might just, you know. Stop.”

  “How are things going with your FBI agent?”

  “He’s not my FBI agent,” Viola says. “I haven’t claimed him.”

  “I have some contacts in the CIA, maybe,” Robert says. “Guys I knew from law school.”

  “I’m not sure how much good a CIA contact would do,” Viola says. “I think there’s a pretty high degree of animosity between the FBI and the CIA.”

  “Sure, but with the recent attempts to consolidate the intelligence community…”

  “How is your case? The case you’re working on?”

  “Fine. It’s fine,” Robert says, in the voice that he uses when he doesn’t want to talk about something.

  Robert and Viola stare out the window, imagining some place beyond what they can see, where the cars and parking lot asphalt and trees and people might suddenly, terrifyingly stop.

  ~ ~ ~

  “Do you want to try having sex again?” Viola asks Robert.

  “Okay.” Viola kneads Robert’s erection through his boxers. Robert massages Viola’s breast through the t-shirt that she wears to bed. Viola takes Robert’s hand and puts it between her legs.

  Robert decides to remodel the house.

  “The whole house?” Viola asks. “Just like that?”

  “No of course not, not the whole house,” Robert says. “Something small. I was thinking maybe the downstairs bathroom, just the countertops and the sinks, actually.”

  Robert pictures the joy of working with his hands. He imagines the satisfaction of starting a job and finishing it and knowing, once he had, that it was finished. At the hardware store, there to examine different kinds of faucets, he finds himself instead wandering off to the lumber aisle and breathing in the smell of untreated wood. The possibilities of newness are overwhelming.

  “Black marble,” Robert says. “The countertops. Kitchen and bathroom. What do you think about black marble?”

  Viola gives it some thought. She is trying to be supportive. “I think it might be a little ostentatious,” she says. “I feel like it’s something that’s very fashionable right now but will very possibly look dated in a few years.”

  “Ostentatious,” Robert says, screwing up his face. Robert scrutinizes the kitchen isle.

  “I’m not even sure I wanted a kid,” Viola says to her aunt, on the telephone. “Robert, he definitely wanted a kid.”

  “You’d be a great parent,” her aunt says.

  “I’d be terrible. I’m pretty sure this is a sign. Like, I’d be watching a movie or just getting to the really good part of a book or something, and that’s when the terrible thing would happen. The kid would find the matches or stick something in a socket or drown in the bathtub. This is God saying: Viola, honey, you and I both know that you’d let the poor thing drown in the bathtub.”

  Viola’s aunt laughs, a great hacking laugh.

  Viola considers the possibilities of opening a bottle of wine at ten-thirty a.m. on a Thursday. The arguments against opening the bottle of wine, for the most part, have to do with antiquated cultural norms, Viola thinks.

  “Do you believe that life is the most important gift that one human being can give another?” Viola asks her friend Tabitha, who has come over for coffee.

  “What else is there?” Tabitha asks.

  “We don’t generally consider it to be taking something away from someone if we don’t give life to someone who was never alive in the first place,” Viola says. “Outside of certain fundamentalist religions, there is no commonly recognized onus on people of childbearing age to bear children.”

  “I think you would be a really good mother,” Tabitha says.

  “That’s not the point.”

  On television, commercials herald end-of-the-world survival courses: it’s a franchise deal, with the local version being taught in a nearly abandoned mall on Lafayette Street. Such courses rose to prominence just before the new millennium, in response to Y2K fears, and have persisted, fed on a steady occurrence of new signs and dates: the fall of the twin towers, the evangelical minister Harold Camping’s predictions of the Rapture, the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012. A survivalist, interviewed by a local news station, recommends an “end times emergency kit,” consisting of a compass, a canteen, waterproof matches, iodine tablets, a fixed-blade knife with
a full tang, a hatchet, a sewing kit, waterproof bags, maps (local and national).

  “Condoms actually work quite well as watertight containers for smaller objects,” the end-times survivalist says. “It’s worth keeping in mind that life without electricity and running water and heat is a very different kind of life than what we’re used to here in America.”

  Viola and Tabitha look through the paper at the weekend events. Now they are drinking wine. “What do you think about the shootings downtown?” Tabitha asks.

  “I haven’t really been paying attention,” Viola admits.

  “Doesn’t Robert work for that pharmaceutical company?”

  “He doesn’t work for them. He works for a law firm, and they are a client of his firm.”

  Viola reads: “This discovery (alienation) of conditions takes place through the interruption of happenings. The most primitive example would be a family scene. Suddenly a stranger enters. The mother was just about to seize a bronze bust and hurl it at her daughter; the father was in the act of opening the window in order to call a policeman. At that moment the stranger appears in the doorway. This means that the stranger is confronted with the situation as with a startling picture: troubled faces, an open window, the furniture in disarray. But there are eyes to which even more ordinary scenes of middle-class life look almost equally startling.”

  Viola folds over the edge of the page and puts the book down on the coffee table and looks at a small statuette, a replica Rodin, sitting under a lamp on a small table beside the bookshelf.

  “It’s possible that I may not be in love with you anymore,” Viola says carefully, lying next to Robert that night. Robert is quiet in a way that makes Viola think that he maybe already knew.

  “Do you want to stay married?” he says, finally.

  ~ ~ ~