Love, in Theory

by E. J. Levy

The Townhouse Country bar was packed when we arrived a little past nine. At first glance it was hard to tell it from any other country western joint, with rough-hewn beams and cross rails enclosing the dance floor, a wooden bar and gambling in back. Men and women in cowboy boots, bolos, chaps, and spurs. But look closer and you noticed the rainbow flag beside the dance floor and that the predictable paintings of cowboys and Indians were actually beefcake pics of shirtless braves and cattlemen with well-oiled pecs beside a poster of k. d. lang, and those meaty cowboys gracefully two-stepping across the dance floor held other meaty cowboys in their arms.

  As we leaned on the bar, waiting to order, a spark plug of a man with a handlebar mustache and ten-gallon hat approached and asked Jake to dance.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know that step,” Jake said with an easy smile.

  “He’s straight,” Kate shouted over the music.

  “Can’t blame a boy for trying,” the cowboy winked, tipped his hat, disappeared in the crowd.

  Around us a few people laughed in a nice way. And I began to like Jake just a little. His ease in what some might find an uneasy circumstance.

  We found a table near the dance floor, a high small round table, the sort of impractical table that dance bars favor in order to discourage patrons from staying seated too long. We commandeered three stools and leaned our heads together to be heard over the music.

  Jake told us ranching jokes and rodeo tales from the West. He told us that in Salt Lake City they serve a beer called Polygamy Porter, whose label features a naked man embracing seven naked women and the slogan Why Have Just One?

  “The thing is,” he said, smiling, “they’ll only serve you one beer at a time. It’s illegal to have more than one drink per customer on a table.”

  “Oh, it has a moral,” Kate said. “I love an anecdote with a moral.”

  We laughed, and despite myself, I warmed to him. He had the appeal of the American West, a boastful self-contentment, an optimism and physical vigor that seemed at once decadent and innocent. It seemed to me that he had something like the delight that animals must take in themselves, a simple pleasure in the body, in life, which I had once taken in life too.

  It turned out that Jake, like Kate, had been getting a PhD when he gave it up for journalism. “I don’t believe in knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” he said. “It has to be applied.”

  “That’s what I tell my students,” I said.

  “A man after your own heart,” Kate said.

  “So Kate tells me you’re a philosopher,” he shouted, when Kate went to get some more drinks.

  “I teach philosophy. Just the basics: Platonic Forms, the Poetics, Ethics 101.”

  “So tell me,” he leaned close enough that I could smell his faint cologne. “What exactly was the Greeks’ position on sex?” He smiled his half smile.

  I felt a charge pass between us, a thrill of desire.

  “They had a lot of positions,” I said, dismissing the question.

  He laughed. “Is that a pun?”

  “Not at all.”

  I looked away, watching the dancers on the floor, men in one another’s arms.

  When Kate returned, we drank another round, shouting over the music, but all I would remember later of that conversation was the heat between me and him, the pressure like a hand on my chest, real as the railroad ties that enclosed the dance floor.

  If Kate noticed, she gave no sign.

  “I’m going to go snoop around,” she said. “You two okay here?”

  “We’re fine,” he said.

  “Hurry back,” I said. But she was gone already into the crowd and we were left alone together, with the shock of desire arcing between us like a downed live wire and the awareness that whatever we said, we were saying something else.

  The semester that Jake came into our lives, I was teaching two extension classes at the local branch of the state university: Introduction to Platonic Thought, from 3:30 to 4:45 Mondays and Wednesdays, and a course on Ethics 101 Thursday nights. I had eight students in each, which was just enough to ensure that the administration could not cancel. Enrollment is often spotty and sometimes my classes do not make and I have to pick up a class in composition or the dreaded Study Skills, in which underprepared students work through a softback manual comprising drills on procrastination and time management. I try to be philosophical about it. I take what I can get.

  The extension classes with catchy titles do best: Love among the Runes—which purports to teach students “to divine one’s destiny by casting ancient runes” (which are, in fact, brand-new, American-made, plastic bits with faux Norse symbols pressed into their surface)—always has a waiting list. So does Introduction to Astrology. There is a brisk trade in divination these days—astrological columns, palm readings—people seem less interested in preparatory contemplation than in foreknowledge, which seems to me to have it backward.

  After all, what good is knowing what’s to come if you’re ill prepared to cope with it?

  We began to see a lot of Jake. We became a threesome. He dragged us out to obscure Mexican joints in what passes for a barrio in the Midwest, insisted we canoe from Minneapolis to St. Paul by way of a chain of city lakes. We went to foreign movies: Ken Loach films that required subtitles; a film by von Trier that required Dramamine; Almodóvar. And each time we met I felt more acutely the tension between us, like a private joke we were keeping from Kate; I noticed that he took care not to brush my hand when handling the canoe in a portage, he no longer shook my hand in greeting as he had done before. I began to think about him more and more, to find myself distracted by thoughts of him. Things he’d said. To feel an embarrassingly adolescent thrill whenever Kate came home with stories about Jake from work, whenever he called.

  I had thought he was gay when we first met, but the thought had passed. Now I asked Kate as we sat reading on the couch one night; she seemed not to have considered it.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, continuing to flip pages in The Nation, “but I can see what you mean, I guess. The peach sweater.”

  “And the goatee,” I said.

  “Goatees are gay?” she asked.

  “They’re defensive,” I said. “All beards are an assertion of masculinity. Goatees are lowercase masculinity. Ambivalent.”

  “Where do you get this stuff?” she asked.

  “I make it up,” I said. “To amuse you.”

  I considered, abstractly, the possibility of having an affair with Jake—but I dismissed it. I didn’t reject the idea on moral grounds. Morality, in my opinion, is overrated, especially in the American empire. “Morality,” as Adorno says, “may well appear self-evident to those who feel themselves to be exponents of a class in the ascendent,” but for those of us who see little correlation between being powerful and being good, the issue is not so simple.

  I didn’t believe in monogamy. I remembered a drive that Kate and I had taken once along the shore of Lake Superior; we had driven past pine forests and root beer–colored waterfalls, waves breaking on the rocky shoreline, the sky overhead huge and swirled with cirrus clouds, and I had felt an almost painful joy. I’d reached out and pressed her hand with mine and said “I love you,” and in that moment knew for the first time that what I meant when I said that was “I love all of this.” And that to try to compress that joy and that desire into a single love is a kind of mutilation of spirit.

  Honesty restrained me instead: Kate and I were scrupulously frank with one another. I wanted to discuss my crush with her, but something prevented me. Maybe it was a recognition that Jake was her friend, or that he was a man, or that mine was more than the usual attraction. In any case, I didn’t mention it.

  We’d been seeing Jake regularly for several months when we went to the U Film Society to see Vanya on Forty-second Street, a film about a cast of actors rehearsing a Chekhov play and the sexual intrigues among them. I was trying to keep my mind on the movie, off of him, when I put my arm around Kate and my hand landed on
his shoulder by mistake, and we both started.

  “Shhh,” Kate said, setting her hand high on my thigh, nuzzling her head against me.

  I looked over at him, his profile flashing in the light from the screen, his eyes forward, refusing to meet mine.

  At home that night, I told Kate that it would be better if they went out without me from now on. I told her that I had too much work these days to join them, that I found him a little tiresome.

  “You never like my friends,” she said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “You don’t have any friends.” I regretted it as soon as I’d said it, but it was too late to take it back.

  To my surprise, Kate laughed.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I don’t like many people. That’s why I wish you liked Jake.”

  I told her that I did, that I was just preoccupied.

  She leaned up and kissed me. “A misanthrope and a hermit, we make a great pair.”

  When he came by after that, I contrived to go out. When they went out, I stayed in. I heard through Kate that he often asked after me; he asked her if I played racquetball, said he’d like to play a game with me sometime, if she didn’t mind. She said she’d pass on the message; I told her I’d rather not. I avoided her office, picked her up at the curb.

  I still thought about him, but I thought about him less.

  In class, I often tell my students stories. Stories, I’m convinced, are what we remember, how we learn. Stories, like education, are a species of seduction: seducing students to care about something other than themselves. Drawing them out of their assumptions into a world of surprise.

  That term, I began the class with the story of Zeno of Elea and his famous paradoxes. The fifth-century philosopher is not properly a subject for a course in Ethics, but his paradox of the arrow is a favorite story of mine so I told it anyway (such are the prerogatives of the pedant). Zeno pointed out that, if one reasons it through, one will see that an arrow shot at a target will never arrive: It will always be half the remaining distance to its goal (given that an object moving from one place to another must first move half the distance toward its goal, then half that distance, et cetera, he demonstrated that an arrow can never reach its mark). If you think about it, you can’t get there from here. And yet we do. The arrow pierces the target, defying logic.

  Zeno told the story to demonstrate the illusory nature of change by demonstrating the contradiction inherent in any description of motion. I told it to get my students to test philosophical assertions against the world in which they live.

  The whole point of an education, as I see it, is to help you take the world personally, to put you on a first-name basis with history. But most of my students seem to think that a college education is an extension of adolescence, the intellectual equivalent of training wheels; they live in a state of semi-adulthood, while parents foot the bill. When I asked one young woman recently what she was majoring in, she looked at me with frank disdain, as if choices were for losers, and said, with a shrug, “Y’know, Pre-life.” Life in the academy, my students seem to think, is not the real thing. This is practice. This is only life in theory.

  In early March, Jake heard from his landlord that his building had been sold and that he had thirty days to move, so Kate and I agreed to help him. The morning was wet and soggy with melting. As we walked up the steps to his building, I smelled the heavy scent of wild mushrooms. We were making good time, shuttling boxes down stairs, until Jake and I found ourselves alone in his apartment. The pale, March light poured in the French doors from the balcony and the room was very still.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” he said.

  I picked up a box. “I’m not avoiding you.”

  “What have I done?”

  “Nothing,” I laughed and pushed past him.

  He caught my arm. “I must have done something.”

  “No,” I said. “You haven’t done anything. It’s what I don’t want to do.”

  He didn’t ask me to explain. He raised his hand as if he meant to touch my face, when Kate walked in and we both stepped back. I joked that we were the prime movers unmoving. Kate said she didn’t know how prime we were but we’d better move, because she wasn’t doing this by herself. Afterward, we went to Jake’s new place for pizza and beer. The two of them talked and joked, while I maintained an uncompanionable silence.

  On our way home, Kate was cross. She asked why I couldn’t be nice to Jake, why I had to be so difficult. I watched the sparkling of the streetlights, like orange emergency flares going up one after another. I felt the terrible weight of regret that sometimes heralds a loss. I told her, as gently as I could, that I was attracted to him, that I loved her but was attracted to Jake. She must have sensed that this was not our usual talk about infatuation. My mouth felt dry.

  “Have you fucked him?” her voice was steady, emotionless, the tone she used to use in a heated seminar debate.

  I shook my head. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “But you want to?”

  “Look,” I said. “I don’t understand it myself. I love you. This has nothing to do with us.”

  I wanted her to understand that it was like a philosophy problem. A question I needed answered: I wanted to understand what was between me and him. Early on Kate and I had agreed that we didn’t want ours to become a small love, the sort of love we saw all around us, resentful, limiting, couples whose lives were less for all the sacrifices they’d made for the other. Guys who’d given up mountain climbing, women who’d given up jobs or ambitions. We promised each other we’d never be like that. But lately I’d had my doubts about us, and my attraction to him worked on those.

  She asked if he felt the same way.

  I told her that I thought he did.

  We were quiet for a while.

  “The heart has its reasons,” I said, quoting Pascal, “which reason knows nothing of.”

  “You’re so full of shit,” Kate said.

  When I woke in the night I heard her crying beside me. In the morning I told her that I wouldn’t see him again. And for awhile, that seemed to be enough.

  The philosopher Iris Murdoch once called marriage a “long conversation,” but before I met Kate I treated my love affairs more like a drawn-out argument in which my task was to disprove the premise that ours was a viable relationship. I treated love like a suspect premise to be tested. My concept of courtship (a lawyer lover once told me) bore a strong resemblance to moot court.

  With Kate, though, I was trying. I had my doubts, of course. But ours were not big problems, though we often fought about small things. Kate wanted us to go on drives in October to watch the leaves turn, to play miniature golf, buy a barbecue, get cable, and while there was nothing inherently sinister about any of these, I was thirty-three at the time and the thought of these diversions made me feel old.

  For a while, though, things were better between us than they had been in a long while. We began going to concerts, to plays, and between us there was a new tenderness; we were both making an effort, even if the effort weighed on us a little. Kate suggested we meet in the afternoons for drinks; we made love on the couch, the sunlight pouring in.

  When Kate told me that Jake was seeing the Sex Goddess, a lonely hearts columnist from a local alternative paper who emphasized toys and leather, I was happy for him and happy to find I didn’t care.

  When I ran into Jake a month or two later at Kate’s office, we were polite.

  “You’re looking well,” he said.

  “Actually,” I said, smiling, “I look like you.”

  He laughed.

  It was true. We both wore jeans and men’s v-neck undershirts and suit coats. He mentioned that his birthday was that weekend, that he’d be spending it alone (things having gone awry with the Goddess). It seemed only reasonable to invite him out for a drink.

  “You should never age alone,” I said.

  I’d forgotten that Kate was going out of town to cover the Polar Pl
unge in Ely, a fact I recalled only later that night at home. I considered canceling but decided it was better just not to tell her. I didn’t want to upset her, and it hardly seemed worth mentioning. It was just a drink after all. So we met at the Lexington, a bar in St. Paul the three of us had liked, at the irreproachable hour of seven p.m.

  We ordered martinis and sat at the bar. We discussed gin preferences. The virtues of a twist versus an olive. Slowly we relaxed. He told me about the Sex Goddess, who turned out to be a former gymnast from Cloquet, a Norwegian Lutheran with blue eyes and an uncannily flexible body. I told him about my latest idea for a New Yorker cartoon: If Philosophers Had Majored in Business, featuring Cartesian Waters (I Drink Therefore I Am); Platonic Girdles, For that Ideal Form; and Ecce Home Furnishings. He laughed, raised his glass: “I drink, therefore I am.” I had forgotten how much I liked his company. I forgot the time. By one a.m., it seemed wise to accept his offer of a ride home. It seemed only polite to invite him in.

  I made us coffee while he looked at the bookshelves, the volumes of Adorno, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Kant, German Idealists, English Empiricists. When I returned with the coffee, he took the cup then set it aside and asked if I would kiss him. It was a curious locution. He did not ask if he might kiss me, but whether I would kiss him—my volition the issue at hand. And I liked him for this, even though the kiss was bland. Even though I was aware of the hard length of his tongue, the musty gin taste in my mouth, and then I was aware of none of these things, only of the sickening lurch of desire in my stomach, his mouth, his smooth chest.

  Desire confounds categories.

  Systems fail us when it comes to matters of the heart. They leave out too much, lead us to false conclusions. We assume instead of knowing. Our only hope is to learn through experience. Kate was the one who reminded me that the phrase “the exception proves the rule,” means not validates but tests. Desire proves love. Tests it. At least exceptional desire does, but isn’t desire always exceptional to those engaged in it?