Love, in Theory

by E. J. Levy

  When she hears a knock on the door, her heart, despite her, leaps, and she knows it is Gil come to talk things over, come to give her the chance she didn’t think they’d ever have again but now thinks perhaps they will, the chance most people never get, to rewrite history and give it a different, happier ending. When she pulls back the door it is not Gil, but the driver.

  “May I come in?” he asks, leaning on the door frame.

  “Why don’t we go out,” she says.

  She has no real desire to be unfaithful. She has never been before. She simply craves relief. Gil’s slow withdrawal from love has been so painful for so long. An affair has the appeal that she imagines Reagan’s reign had for Republicans—it offers an optimism untainted by concern for consequences, for who might get hurt.

  She likes the fact that he is a driver, that it is his job to transport people. She wants him to take her somewhere, anywhere, fast. All her life she has taken comfort in the thought that she can leave, as had her mother before her. Renee has held onto the hope that if she works hard she will get somewhere. That has been the trouble with Gil all along. Her sense that they were getting nowhere, that they might drown in domestic contentment. His saintly disregard for ambition, his divine attention to inconsequential things, has made her suspect that there is nowhere to get to, that whatever Renee thinks she is searching for, is all, already, here. She is simply missing it.

  The driver leads her down the creaky wooden steps out into the night, past the goat pens, past the trailer where Gil is asleep, to a field behind the Siva temple on the high hill where a phallic stone lingam rises out of the ground and the stars spin crazy overhead. They lie on the wet grass. He speaks to her in a language she does not understand as he removes her clothing and his own. His back is hard under her hands, his scalp like sandpaper, and she thinks of Alice, who told her that nothing beats sex with a bald man. “It’s like fucking an atomic bomb,” Alice said. But sitting on the belly of this stranger, her knees pressed into the grass as she sways under an empty sky, Renee thinks this act recalls nothing so modern, this reaching out in the dark for a hand to hold.

  In the night, winter comes suddenly, belatedly, and the ashram wakes to ice. The leaves outside Renee’s window hang like glass ornaments from the trees, which are bowed with frost.

  Although attendance at the morning six o’clock meditation and eight o’clock asana class is mandatory, Renee slips on her boots and coat and steps out into the livid morning. She walks south along the main drive until she comes to a path that leads into a field and beyond that into woods. She follows it. She walks past the dry remnants of Queen Anne’s lace and timothy grass, walking over bright red and yellow leaves shellacked to the path by ice.

  As she walks, Renee thinks about the driver, whose name she does not even know, and about Gil, the man she has loved for so long it is as if he is a part of her. A limb she cannot stand to lose. It’s not that she wants Gil back, she realizes; it is too late for that, she knows. She loves him but love is not enough. She simply cannot bring herself to give up the fight. She thinks of Swami Ramananda on that mountain-top in India at this very moment, surrounded by a dozen monks who chant without cessation from the Bhagavatam while he fights to die, to launch his spirit free of his body as she once hoped to push a child out of hers.

  And then she sees it—something dark to her left—and stops. It is a bird. Perched in a bush a few feet from the path, on a branch bent low with ice. A tiny, black-capped Chickadee. Stock still. Renee has hardly ever had the chance to see a feral thing at such close range, and even though it is just a common bird, her heart pounds. She is so close she can look into its small, black eye; at the wrinkled lid, half closed; its black cap like a tiny yarmulke. Inky feathers fan across its throat, each one like a brushstroke. When she steps toward it, ice cracks off a branch into the snow, but the bird doesn’t start. Renee clicks her tongue. Pitches a piece of twig. Until this moment, she hadn’t thought it possible to freeze while in motion. She’d figured, if only you could keep moving, the encroaching cold couldn’t stop you. A gong sounds from the main house, announcing breakfast, but Renee ignores it and starts toward the tiny bird—pushing her body into the tangle of branches, wading toward the overburdened bush—hoping against hope that it will be all right, knowing it probably won’t be.

  At breakfast, she can’t tell if she’s imagining it or if people are really giving her dirty looks. Gil is cool, and there is a nervous twitch in his eyelid and he looks pale.

  “You missed meditation,” he says.

  “I went for a walk,” she says. “I needed air.”

  Everybody seems clumsy. Dishes clatter against silverware; people bump the table as they stand and leave. No one seems to be talking. The bus driver is nowhere in sight, but Renee doesn’t want to ask. “How was your night?” she asks instead. “Did you sleep well?”

  Gil keeps his face to his plate. Renee thinks maybe he hasn’t heard her, and she is about to repeat herself when he says, “My night was uneventful.” It’s his tone, hard as river ice, that lets her know he knows. His left hand lies on the tablecloth and more than anything she wants to hold it, to be able to unmake whatever is being made here. To be, as they once were, contra mundum, to feel what she realizes she may never feel again—safe. But she knows it is too late for that. From the beginning it was too late. They will never be safe. They can only hope to be courageous.

  The flecks of mustard seed in her scrambled tofu look like hard, black eyes. She pushes it around her plate, tries to swallow. The room is oppressively still. The light seems tacky and dead.

  “Gil.”

  She wonders if the word came out of her mouth. It sounds so far away. Then she sees it is the swami, in the dining room doorway. “Can I see you for a moment?”

  “Be right there,” Gil says. He gets up from the table. Renee can hear his knees click.

  “Gil,” she says.

  “What,” he says. His eyes look red and tired.

  “Nothing.”

  Renee is in the pantry, washing her dishes, when Gil comes in. He stands behind her, beside the table, and plays with the four green apples in the wicker basket there.

  “The swami asked me,” he says, “if I’d ask you to leave.”

  The water runs over Renee’s hands, bubbling and cold. The hot water seems to have run out hours ago. She watches it swirl into the drain. She has always wondered what Gil would do if push came to shove, whether he would protect her. Or as her mother might have put it, whether he’d have hidden her if the Nazis came or said, “The Jew’s in the attic.”

  “It’s not personal, Ren.”

  “Of course it’s personal.”

  “There are rules here. It’s disruptive when people break them.”

  “What if the rules are wrong? What if the rules are stupid?”

  “They’re not stupid.”

  She hates Gil’s tone of voice, his martyred calm, his reasonableness. “Fear of garlic is not stupid? Come on. You’ve undergone a conversion, not a lobotomy.”

  “Henry already left this morning,” Gil says. Henry, she had not even known his name.

  “You left a long time ago.”

  “I don’t want to fight,” Gil says.

  “That’s the problem. You won’t fight. For anything.”

  Gil sits down in a chair and Renee leans against the sink. From here, she can see that the part in his hair is uneven and she wants to reach out and touch it, but she doesn’t.

  “I’m going to go pack,” Renee says. Gil nods. He touches her back as she walks past.

  When Renee comes downstairs, Gil offers to drive her to the pharmacy that serves as a bus stop in Wilmington, the town adjacent to the ashram. She tells him there is no need. The bus doesn’t come till one. She has two hours and could use the walk.

  “The road’s pretty icy,” he says. “It’d be safer if I gave you a ride.”

  “It’ll never be safe,” Renee says.

  He walks her outside
and they stand on the stoop, looking at the ice-glazed trees, the mountains wrapped in fog. When she turns to Gil, he opens his arms to her and she lets herself be folded into them. For a moment, she is safe. She knows that in another minute she will start to cry, so she stands on tip toe, kisses his cheek, then turns to go. She strides a hundred yards or more down the gravel drive before she lets herself look back. She is loath to look back, superstitious and afraid of losing love as easily as Orpheus did. But Gil is right there, standing on the chipped concrete of the stairs. She waves and turns away, knowing that he is behind her as she leaves him, that he is keeping watch as she reaches the road, turns the corner, moves out of sight.

  When she gets back to her apartment, the day is already too far gone to salvage so Renee sits on her bed opening the mail that came while she was away. Among the requests for charitable contributions, a warning from her credit card company, she finds a brochure her mother has sent from a cactus zoo outside Phoenix, where all the plants have name tags. It is a thing Gil would have loved. A Guide to the Garden. She flips through the manila pages, glancing at the black-and-white photographs of leafy and spiny succulents: agave, Opuntia phaeacantha (prickly pear); Mammillaria microcarpa (fishhook pincushion); Echinocereus engelmannii (hedgehog); Yucca brevifolia (Joshua tree). In the background of each shot she can make out a desiccated landscape, austere as the surface of the moon, where against all odds the stubborn prickly things still grow.

  Out the window, the sun is burning down on the other side of the Hudson and Renee considers the exquisite impermanence of it all, of her mother pulling the heads off begonias so they will flower and flower and flower, trying desperately to pass on their seed, and of Gil in the misty Catskills where the valleys are filled with pale vapor at this hour and the round-backed hills break the surface like breaching whales, and she knows that Gil is praying at this very moment, desperately, earnestly, as he once made love to Renee, when he still believed—as she now does—that feeling is a kind of knowledge and love an unregarded path to enlightenment.

  MY LIFE IN THEORY

  PHILOSOPHERS, IT WOULD SEEM, HAVE LITTLE TO TELL US about love; I know, because I am one. Despite the name philosopher—lover of wisdom—we are not known for our success in the realm of Eros. Truth is, our greatest minds have been losers when it came to love. Søren Kierkegaard, for instance, had just one sexual experience in his life and that a failed one, with a prostitute. Perhaps that’s because philosophy seeks a system, and love—as any lover knows—is unsystematic in the extreme. Love’s a messer-upper, and philosophers, on the whole, are a tidy bunch—at least I am, or was, until we met.

  Kate, my girlfriend, introduced us.

  I had been away at a regional APA conference, and for most of the flight home, I had been thinking about making love with Kate, the freckled expanse of her skin. So I was disappointed, when I returned home, to find her going on about a new reporter at the paper, recently transferred from one of those N-states in the West—Nebraska or New Mexico. I could tell from the way she spoke of him that she was a little infatuated, but it didn’t worry me.

  We liked to tell each other about our little crushes; it kept us on our toes, kept us honest. We had been together several years by then and shared a belief that we wouldn’t stray so long as we kept our theoretical dalliances between us. Our revelations were like a ménage à trois without the social awkwardness, and we always made love afterward with the urgency of adulterers.

  Kate and I had met in a Wittgenstein seminar five years before, where she’d impressed us all with her dry wit, long neck, and beautiful breasts. She is not what most people would call a beautiful woman—her expressions are too difficult, too interesting for that—but she is compelling. Though her mother is American, she grew up in South Africa, before her parents’ divorce, and the African sun has left its mark—giving her eyes their squint, her mouth its premature lines. She had short copper hair and green eyes and could talk any of us under the table. She dated several of us that term, but I was the only one to last past qualifying exams, and I felt lucky, though luck is not a thing philosophers on the whole take an interest in. Superstition is largely outside our realm of concern. Although we traffic in abstractions, we think ourselves empiricists, skeptics; my peers and I snubbed the mystics among us (the Buberians—as we called them—seemed unrigorous, too sentimental for our taste). We favored Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. We grew up in the eighties after all.

  The night I returned from the APA, as Kate described her new friend, I tried to imagine him, the way one tests a new flavor on the tongue. I tried to see what she saw in him, my interest in him an extension of my interest in her. It was not hard to imagine; she described his face, his voice, his body. “You know the type,” she said, with the air of amused and proprietary dismissal that signals a crush, “beauty and the Beats—goatee, khakis, the collected work of Bukowski.”

  I wondered if she wanted to sleep with him. I wondered idly what he’d be like in bed. I’d slept with a few men before—in prep school and as an undergrad—there was something noncommittal in the whole exchange. We were friends, those guys and I; we didn’t mistake sex for love. We were after pleasure, biding our time, until we met the right woman and settled down.

  In Philosophy Made Simple—or PMS, as my students call it—the philosophy textbook from which I’m required to teach at the local university, love gets no mention in the index. Remorse does, as does tyranny and the unmover unmoved. Rewards are mentioned, revenge, respect for others, paradoxes, pain, lying, heat, and happiness. Suicide, socialism, abortion, and sexual morality. But love is nowhere to be found. To learn about love, evidently, you have to do your own research.

  The majority of people seem content to love by rote, to acquiesce to cant—love is true (or untrue), men are dogs, women are nuts, love is hell or makes the world go round. Most do not need to ask what love is, any more than they question what is the good or the real. They live and love and ask questions later. But I couldn’t help but wonder, even as I was happy with Kate, Is this love? In settling down, have we merely settled?

  It occurred to me from time to time that the heart might not be the source of my troubles, but the mind. Ever since I’d defended my dissertation in the spring, I’d felt a dull dissatisfaction. The examined life no longer seemed worth living. Kate called it postpartum depression. But I wondered if it might be something more.

  My colleagues at the university were little comfort. In the grim warren of grad offices my fellow adjuncts assembled like an accusation. This—they seemed to say—is what education leads to. This is the image of the examined life: frail women in cardigans, men with unruly facial hair and glasses. I had heard that one of my colleagues was once a homeless man. Now he had a long red beard and no plans to complete his dissertation. He joked about being unmanned by the microwave, offered me herbal teas.

  Times were tough and the administration had shunted together the philosophy adjuncts with the English lecturers and comp instructors, and there was a subtle war on among the posters: Virginia Woolf facing off against Nietzsche, Joyce against Adorno. We held in common only our disdain for our subjugated status and student papers: “Marijuana should be legalized,” one comp instructor said, “so that I won’t have to read another paper about it.”

  Kate jokingly referred to this state of affairs as the Pedagogy of the Depressed. It’s the reason she left academia. Maybe it’s the reason I’ve stayed. Despair can arrest action: I didn’t act; I only thought about it. That is, until I met Kate’s new friend, Jake.

  Kate introduced us about a week after I returned from the APA. We were leaving her office, when he came over to say goodnight. He was wearing a peach-colored sweater, something suggested—Kate would later tell me—by a men’s magazine to which he subscribed; his hair was blond, cut in a sloppy shag that seemed meant to say, I am handsome without trying, I am a free spirit trapped in a day job. He was taller than me—six foot, I’d guess—with a lanky, cowboy’s build. He had, of
all things, a goatee.

  It was dislike at first sight.

  He told me his name and offered me his hand. “Kate has told me a lot about you,” he said.

  “She speaks well of you,” I said, taking my hand back.

  He smiled with only half his mouth, as if he were too hip to bother with symmetry. While they talked, I observed his languorous slouch, his half-closed eyes, lids drooping as if he were hypnotized by Kate’s presence. I wondered if this routine often worked on women. I wondered what Kate saw in him.

  “We should have dinner sometime,” he said, his voice mellifluous as a late-night jazz announcer’s. “The three of us.”

  I was relieved when Kate said we had to get going, she was starved, relieved to follow her after a brief flurry of goodbyes out the door.

  On the drive home, Kate fumed about her day. When we’d first gotten involved five years before, sex had sustained us—we had more sex then than any three couples we knew combined—but over time our bond had become one of mutual indulgence. Sounding board more than sex partner. To be fair, she had a lot to complain about. The new features editor at the paper disliked “girl reporters,” so Kate’s beat had changed after his arrival. She used to cover environmental stories (illegal sewage dumping, unlawful development, Environmental Impact Statements); lately he’d assigned her coverage of stolen fava beans and cock fights. That week it was the national gay rodeo that was coming to town. For background, Kate wanted to check out a gay, country western bar in St. Paul.

  “I’ve invited Jake to come along,” she said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Why should I mind?” I said, knowing that a question is not an answer.