Does Not Love

by James Tadd Adcox

  In the morning, Robert takes stock of their house. It has a large living room connected to an open kitchen, with a kitchen island forming a sort of border between the two. The downstairs contains as well a dining room, a guest bedroom, and a half bath. A set of stairs leads from the living room to an “open”-style second floor, with a wrap-around hallway leading to the bedroom, full bath, and an office that looks out on the street. The walls could use repainting, he thinks. Something darker, more serious. It is true that white walls open a place up, but they scuff so easily. Robert walks around the house, examining scuffs in the off-white walls. It’s the default choice, Robert thinks, white walls. There’s no particular cause for it. They don’t mean anything. Robert pictures the walls in new colors: burgundy, beige, a light but stately blue.

  ~ ~ ~

  At the library, the FBI agent presents Viola with a National Security Letter. “I am in love with you, desperately,” he says, handing over the order. “Your very resistance to the secret law that I serve has won my heart. You are hereby forbidden as per section 520 of the secret law from discussing any aspect of our interactions, or for that matter so much as acknowledging the existence of said interactions. I will be emailing you with a series of questions, pertinent to an ongoing investigation, that you are to answer precisely and in full. Failure to comply with this order incurs the severest penalties of the secret law, up to and including disappearance.”

  “But this is ridiculous,” Viola says, staring down at the order. “People have seen us interacting. Everyone at the library knows that you’re here.”

  “The secret law makes no distinction between the known and the ought-to-be-known. You are to comply with the order exactly as it is written.”

  Viola goes to get after-work martinis with Elizabeth, from circulation. It’s the first time that they’ve gotten after-work martinis since Viola came back. “Those flowers on your desk,” Elizabeth says. “All those roses. Are they from Robert? Is he trying to make up for something?”

  “I don’t think I’m allowed to say who they’re from,” Viola says, frowning.

  “A secret admirer?” Elizabeth asks, faux-scandalized.

  “Do you think that that man outside would give me a cigarette?” Viola says.

  The man outside wants to talk to Viola about the dangers of the New World Order. Viola smokes and smiles at Elizabeth, uncomfortably, through the glass. Elizabeth smiles back. “That’s what you get for smoking,” she says, when Viola returns.

  ~ ~ ~

  “I thought our relationship was good,” Robert says. He and Viola are sitting on the edge of their bed. Robert is staring down at the carpet. “I thought we were strong. That we were going to be strong together, throughout this difficult time.”

  “Robert, it is good. In many ways it is very good. Possibly in all of the ways that count.” Viola gets undressed. Robert gets undressed. Robert has a patch of sandy blond hair that extends in a nearly straight line from his navel to his pubis.

  “Robert, I want you to touch me like you don’t care about me. That is what I want from you right now.”

  “I don’t know that I can do that,” Robert says.

  Viola closes her eyes tightly. “Robert, please. Robert please just please.”

  At work, Robert thinks about the deposition. The questions that the case raises are important, but they are far off, beyond the horizon. Robert is adrift in a sea of facts, small facts, facts that float meaninglessly through and beyond his life.

  ~ ~ ~

  Viola buys an instructional DVD on rough sex. A gratingly cheerful woman demonstrates on a smiling fellow porn-star the body parts that can be safely hit and how, how hard, etcetera. Several famous rough-sex porn stars give testimonials about their experiences. “I think that any man who has never been dominated isn’t really a man,” says one, a youngish balding porn star lounging shirtless on a bed with burgundy sheets. “I can’t watch this,” says Viola, who has become suddenly, painfully embarrassed.

  Robert, alone in his office downstairs, watches the instructional DVD on his laptop while Viola is at work. “A lot of times I find it really hot to start gentle and build up to higher intensities,” the cheerful woman says, demonstrating on her likewise cheerful assistant. Robert writes down: Start gentle and build to higher intensities. Robert resumes the DVD and continues watching it, scanning his notes.

  Robert and Viola discuss the concept of safewords. “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t just tell me to stop, if you wanted me to stop,” Robert says.

  “It’s not just for me,” Viola says. “You could use the safeword too.”

  “Why wouldn’t I just stop?”

  Robert is really not trying to be obtuse. It’s that he feels that the whole safeword thing calls their mutual trust into question. Of course he would stop, as soon as he realized that she wanted to stop. Why would they need a special word for that?

  Robert holds Viola down on their bed. He slaps her. “I’m sorry,” Viola says, shaking her head.

  “What?” says Robert, suddenly burning with self-consciousness.

  “It doesn’t,” Viola tries to explain. “I don’t know, it just feels awkward.” He’s trying so hard, she thinks. Which is of course part of the problem.

  Her talk therapist seems uncomfortable talking about Viola’s sex life. “Do you think these… desires… may have some connection with the recent losses you’ve experienced?”

  “No,” Viola says. “It just didn’t seem as important to insist on it before, somehow.”

  “Hm,” Viola’s talk therapist says, looking carefully away from her.

  Robert watches the DVD again in the fading light from his office window. What was awkward, he thinks. What was so fucking awkward.

  ~ ~ ~

  Near the dumpsters behind the library, Viola talks with Ricky, the African-American biker, about mojo.

  “From the West African mojuba,” Ricky says, “meaning a prayer or homage; more broadly understood in contemporary Hoodoo as one’s overall spiritual valence, akin to for example the Japanese notion of life-force or Ch’i.”

  “Chee?” says one of the other bikers.

  “Nah,” says Ricky, “it’s pronounced ‘key.’”

  “Hoodoo,” Viola says.

  “Well sure, that’s where mojo comes from, the Hoodoo system of beliefs.”

  ~ ~ ~

  The young hoodlums across the street have taken to experimenting with small explosives. So far nothing they’ve blown up has been of any importance, but it’s a concerning development nonetheless.

  ~ ~ ~

  Viola takes a late lunch at an Indian place up the street from the library. Sitar versions of popular songs play, piped in from speakers hidden behind silk plants. The restaurant is nearly empty. Viola sits at a table near the back waiting for her chicken masala, reading a young adult novel about a plucky young girl who transforms into a squid to escape the semi-romantic intentions of her evil stepfather. Plucky young girls turning into things are a staple of the sort of young adult novels that Viola reads. Viola reads a lot of young adult novels, because of her job, of course, but she suspects that young adult novels would be most of what she read as an adult in any case.

  She never read young adult novels when she was actually a young adult. When she was a young adult, she read the British Romantics.

  She’s just gotten to the part about the squid-girl’s new life underwater when the FBI agent sits down at her table. “Viola St. Clair?”

  “Did you follow me here?” Viola says. “Jesus, you followed me here.”

  “You are magnificent,” the FBI agent says. “Can I buy you a drink, Ms. St. Clair?”

  Viola starts to say something, pauses, tries again, quieter. “I’m just having lunch. And it’s Mrs. Also, Wilder-St. Clair. With, you know, a hyphen.”

  The waiter, seemingly unbidden, brings two gin-and-tonics.

  “Hope you’re thirsty,” Viola says, pushing hers towards the FBI agent. He pushes it back
. Viola takes a little sip, just because she’s feeling so damn awkward, really.

  “Cigarette?” the FBI agent says, producing a pack.

  “There’s no smoking in here. Besides, I’m not really a smoker.”

  “I know the owner. We have an understanding.”

  The FBI agent lights Viola’s cigarette. A waiter rushes to their table carrying an ornate ashtray featuring painted scenes from the history of the Gupta empire, so delicate that Viola feels a twinge of guilt each time she ashes in it.

  “You think I’m up to something,” the FBI agent says, leaning back in his chair, smoke swirling around him. “You don’t trust me. You are not a trusting person.”

  “I would not say I am a trusting person overall, no,” says Viola, ashing.

  “Furthermore, you believe in the importance of the confidentiality between a librarian and her patrons for the sake of a free society, whether said patrons have an interest in cookbooks or anarchism or porn or whatever else.”

  “Yes,” says Viola.

  “You’re idealistic,” the FBI agent says. “I love that. God, you’re beautiful.”

  “I don’t know what you’re up to, but flattery’s not going to work,” Viola says, taking a long drag on her cigarette. “Anyhow I’m married.”

  “Well sure you’re married. I noticed the ring,” the FBI agent says, taking her by the wrist to examine it. “It’s a really lovely ring. Men too often think that women want something ostentatious, something with a lot of diamonds.”

  “I’m against the diamond trade.”

  “Well sure you are. Injustice anywhere sickens you. A person can tell that just by looking at your face. Is it okay, me holding your wrist like this?”

  “It’s actually, um, it’s actually a little uncomfortable. It’s really, it kind of hurts, actually.”

  The FBI agent presses her wrist tighter.

  “Let me tell you a story,” he says. “It’s a sort of parable, about the importance of stability and the secret law. When I was a kid I lived for a while on a military base in Germany. These three blond Germans nihilists would always hang around one of the cafés not far from the base. They were in their late teens or early twenties, all students, you know, avoiding real life as long as possible. One of them had a mohawk and wore an extra-large safety pin in his cheek. My father, the Chief Master Sergeant Michael H. Augusto, didn’t like the looks of these guys, and he would tell them that whenever he passed them. In return for which they’d ask him all sorts of searching questions about life, which really got to him because, you know, he was a military man, he didn’t have time to be thinking about all that. They were all like, ‘Hey, how do you deal with the uncertainty of man’s position in the Welt, in which he is simultaneously master und worm?’ And he’d get so frustrated with them that he’d come home and push my mother into mirrors. We kept having to buy new mirrors, because he kept pushing my mother into them. There were mornings where there wasn’t a single mirror in the house when you needed to brush your teeth or comb your hair. It was frustrating, never knowing if you were going to have a mirror to look into when you needed to comb your hair. And I was fourteen, just getting into girls, so that was a big deal, you know, at the time.

  “And so one Saturday I sat at the café several seats down from them, and waited for them to walk back to the shabby little German apartment that they shared, and I kicked in their door and beat the three of them with a sock full of pennies. One of the nihilists, I broke his jaw and his nose, and the other two I put into the hospital with concussions.”

  “Jesus,” Viola says.

  “Do you understand what I am trying to tell you, here?”

  “This is actually getting really painful,” Viola says, blinking away tears. “This is actually, I’m worried that you might break my wrist.”

  “I’m not going to break your wrist,” the FBI agent says, quiet and very close to her face. “Do you believe me? Do you believe that I’m not going to break your wrist?”

  A long still moment. Viola nods.

  “Good,” the FBI agent says.

  ~ ~ ~

  Viola comes home to find Robert in his office, watching the instructional DVD on rough sex. “If I’m being one hundred percent honest, I don’t understand why you would want this,” Robert says to Viola.

  “You mean, what’s wrong with me?” Viola asks.

  “I didn’t say that.” Robert follows Viola out of the office and into the kitchen, where Viola starts putting away dishes a little too quietly. “Could you try to understand why this is difficult for me? People don’t naturally wish themselves harm.”

  Viola keeps putting away the dishes. Robert sits at the kitchen table. He is suddenly very tired.

  “There’s a difference between hurt and harm,” Viola says.

  “Okay,” Robert says. “Which do you want?”

  ~ ~ ~

  Robert goes to a Mexican restaurant with his friend Trey, who works as a drug representative for Obadiah Birch, the pharmaceutical company Robert’s firm represents. A large mariachi band is playing in one corner of the restaurant. The restaurant’s hostess, a tiny blond with noticeable acne scars, winces every time the trumpets hit a high note. “Welcome to Fiesta Friday,” she says, wincing. “Ándale to this table over here, compays.” Their table’s next to the band. The guitarist, a skinny, dark man with small, straight teeth, leers at the hostess.

  “Amy, my love!”

  “Antonio, shove it.” She tosses their menus on the table. “Hope you don’t mind the band. We can’t sit parties with female members anywhere near them, not since Antonio’s started his treatment for ADHD. Better than it used to be, though. At least he doesn’t change keys fifteen times a song anymore.”

  The guitarist approaches Robert and Trey’s table, still strumming. “That is totally unfair. Like, sirs, I may be the slightest bit passionate, which is one-hundred percent acceptable and even encouraged in the music biz, but I have never let that interfere with my art. Oh, let me introduce myself. Yo me llamo Antonio and this is the Tijuana Six. We are here most Fridays, and we sing about love, which all of us have some experience with, however painful or ill-fated.”

  “You don’t really sound Mexican, you know,” Trey observes.

  “Oh we’re from Northern Cali, mostly. Except for Hugo over there. He’s Hungarian. But he is an illegal immigrant, if that makes you feel any more confidence in our authenticity as a mariachi band.”

  Hugo takes the trumpet from his lips and shrugs. “I am running from the military service.”

  “Do they have democracy over there yet?” asks Trey.

  “Yes, as of March 1990.”

  “Well good to hear it.”

  They order bistec and enchiladas and Mexican beer which comes with a little sombrero-shaped bowls of limes. Robert messes with one of the extra limes, while the band plays softly nearby. “This one was the furthest along. I think that’s part of it.”

  “I’m amazed by how well you’re taking all this.”

  “Honestly, me too,” Robert says.

  They order another round of beer.

  “It’s just that it feels selfish sometimes, you know?” Robert says. “Like she wants to keep all the sadness to herself. I get that this is difficult on her, God knows. But it was my kid too. Sometimes I feel like she doesn’t even understand that. I am trying to be supportive.”

  “It’s not unusual, in these sorts of traumatic situations, for conditions to manifest,” Trey says.

  “I don’t think it’s a condition,” Robert says, louder than intended. “I think she’s being fucking selfish.” Robert looks down at his beer. “Sorry,” he says.

  “Hey, buddy, it’s okay. I’m on your side here,” gripping one of Robert’s shoulders and giving it a squeeze. Robert exhales.

  Robert has known Trey since high school, where they played football together, Robert as a center and Trey as a running back. They once pulled a counter-run in which Robert, along with the right guard and
right tackle, blocked left, while Trey feinted to the left then cut to the right, grabbed the handoff, and shot through the hole created by the offensive line’s misdirection. It was a very good play.

  “Love is a complex process,” Trey explains. “A chemical process. A series of chemical processes, in the brain. Basically, a Rube-Goldberg machine of chemical interactions. Ridiculously complex. In purely physical terms, it is very easy for it to go wrong. There’s a long list of ways it can go wrong, in fact, many of which we’re currently researching: Obsessive Love Disorder, Hypersexuality, Hypoactive Desire Disorder. ED, of course. Erotic paranoia. Erotomania, also known as de Clérambault’s syndrome. Sex and Love Addiction, Codependency. Erotophobia, genophobia, phallophobia. Female Sexual Arousal Disorder. Anorgasmia or Coughlan’s syndrome. Vaginismus. Sexual Aversion Disorder. Love-shyness.” Trey cocks his head to the side, clearly thinking. “I’m missing something, I’m sure. Anyhow, there are a lot. The problem is that love is so romanticized in Western culture that people don’t even realize they can get help.”

  “Huh,” says Robert.

  The lights lower for the band’s grand finale. Antonio, the mariachi guitarist, sings a song about his melancholy amor, whose melancholy forced her, quite against her will, to be infiel. His amor, he sings, was so melancholy and so infiel that in the end she died of her infinite sadness, which until that moment he had not known could be fatal. Hugo plays a funeral dirge on his trumpet. Trey motions for the check.

  ~ ~ ~

  Outside the wind is so strong that bits of parking lot gravel and small stones fly through the air like hail, and Robert and Trey have to shield their faces and stumble half-blind to their cars. Trey calls out what Robert assumes must be a goodbye from across the parking lot, his words twisted by the wind into a series of sounds only just recognizable as human speech. Robert yells back and doesn’t recognize his own voice in his ears.