Love, in Theory

by E. J. Levy

  Sometimes it occurs to June to wonder what her ancestors would think of her. Not the Korean forebears her father lit candles to, but the ones off the other boat, the Mayflower Puritans, the Soules, from whom she’s also come (on her mother’s side). The DAR never imagined her. Her tobacco-brown face, her soft tea-stained skin, the delicate epicanthic folds of her eyes.

  At home, she stands in the bathroom, whose structures seem to her surprisingly low and cramped, not at all as she remembers them from childhood; it’s as if the rooms were under pressure, squashed, or as if she has expanded, grown ungainly, gargantuan. She studies her face in the mirror, looking for the link to others, to her mother, finding none.

  Others have called her beautiful. She can see that she is pretty, her oval face, her almond-shaped eyes. She recalls the Korean grocer on Seventh Avenue, who addressed her in Korean, speaking to her in a tongue not native to her, who asked her name, and when she said June, he’d said, no, no, her real name, her Korean name. When she said she didn’t have one, he’d snapped at a clerk and turned away, annoyed.

  She washes her face, pats it dry, brushes her teeth, and spits.

  June is getting into bed on the fold-out couch in the living room, when it occurs to her that she doesn’t want to be here when her mom comes in. She doesn’t feel up for a heart to heart, so she goes into her old room and drags several rugs onto the floor and makes a bed. She strips the linens from the couch and fits them to the pile of rugs. She pulls a small prayer rug onto herself, comforted by the familiar sense of weight. It’s a pity, she thinks, to keep all these and not have any use for them.

  Unlike her mother, June cultivates detachment—recycling each day’s paper, keeping only half a dozen books at any given time (bringing those she’s read to the Strand to sell). When Greg phoned her a few weeks back, she hadn’t cried (he’d said he was so glad she was okay with this. He’d hoped they could be friends, as they had been, and she’d said, “Sure, why not,” and had been glad she was okay with it as well). Okay. She is okay.

  And then she is asleep.

  She wakes to snow falling, the hush that as a child seemed so promising. She opens the window and the cool pillowy winter air pushes back her hair from her face like a gentle hand, it moves the nightgown around her as a lover might. She hears her mother come in, hears the kitchen faucet turn on, turn off, a giggle and a shush, the toilet flush, then her mother’s bedroom door open and close.

  When the house is quiet again, June goes into the living room, as she did as a child on Christmas morning, trying to catch Santa in the act. But this year there is no tree, no stockings—her mother must imagine she’s outgrown all that. There is only the rug—like an honored guest—regally sprawled across the couch. Did the bride make it for herself, June wonders, or was it a gift her mother made? Was she engaged or merely hopeful when she began to fill her trousseau?

  And then she sees Mark’s coat, navy blue cashmere, slung over the back of a chair, and her stomach drops, like she’s in a fast-rising elevator.

  June steps back into the bedroom. The rugs on the bed, where once June slept, look all wrong, with their borrowed patterns, cheap copies of ancient designs, trite facsimiles of what once had meaning and use to the families who made them. When she hears a noise from her mother’s room, she pictures them—her mother and the man—and she is immediately sorry. She tries not to think of them, but trying only makes it worse.

  She thinks of what this apartment contains: rugs and books and patterns, a mother, a boyfriend, a daughter. In the bathroom are razors, pills, bleach under the sink. In the kitchen are well-sharpened Trident knives. Beneath June’s skin, a familiar itch.

  And it comes to her. What she must do. It’s not destruction she’s after, but an opening, to let something out or in.

  It will be hours and hours before her mother and the new man rise; June has lots and lots of time. As she steps into the living room and passes the couch, she wonders if the dowry rug maker ever married, or if she wove to fill her waiting. Waiting that became a way of life.

  June goes into the kitchen and selects the sharpest paring knife, then she settles herself on the living room couch, beside the costly glorious rug. She gathers the dowry rug into her lap as if it were a child, strokes its rough surface with the palm of her smooth hand. She pushes up the sleeve of her nightgown and draws the knife across her forearm, as a lover might draw a fingertip, testing the sharpness of the blade, giving in to the painful pressure, which is almost like pleasure, before she raises the tip and drives it in. At first it is difficult to fit the blade under the tightly woven yarn, the weave is close and holds on. Clinging to what it has always been. But bit by bit, it gives. She begins to unravel the tiny knots at the back, letting them pull free of the strain they have been under for so long, and as June cuts, it seems to her that she can hear each knot give way beneath the blade with a sound like a relieved sigh.

  THEORY OF TRANSPORTATION

  WHEN THE TWO OF THEM WERE YOUNG DANCE PARTNERS IN a De Mille revival on Broadway, Christopher looked like a sailor out of Querelle, packed and muscly and beautiful, with a plump round face like Sluggo, the cartoon character. “You do not realize how much a face can change,” Tuni will tell me later, but what frightens her that day in the hospital is how little Christopher looks like himself. How generic illness makes one, how in the end the very old and the dying young look alike, as if it were not life but particularity that ebbed away, and its lack that finally kills us.

  As they walk down the hall to his room, there are friendly catcalls and wet smacking kisses from the doorways they pass. “Love those hoofer legs,” calls a six-two brunette in room 504 whom Christopher introduces as Leroy. “Charmed,” Leroy says, getting up from a makeshift vanity on which he has arrayed face creams, waxy lipsticks, powders, to offer Tuni a soft, pawlike hand. “Just visiting?” he inquires.

  “Just visiting,” Tuni smiles.

  “Lucky you,” says Leroy wistfully.

  Christopher has made a lot of friends here in part because he spends a portion of each day distributing to other guys the gifts people send to him. The rest of the time he keeps busy redecorating the nurses’ stations and ordering in remarkable foods. When they reach his room, an order of pickled herring and cheese pierogi has just arrived from an East Village Ukrainian restaurant that never delivers. “Dan, up the hall, had a hankering. So,” Chris says as he fishes for cash in the pocket of a coat hanging in the closet. “I know the owner at Veselka’s. I called. Made a little deal.” He gives a twenty to the delivery guy and waves away an offer of change. “I figure, since I’m here I might as well have a good time.” He picks up the brown paper bag and starts out the door. “I’ll be right back. Make yourself at home.”

  Tuni sits down on Christopher’s bed and begins examining the various bottles on the night table when Leroy, now in full makeup with a bedpan on his head and a flower behind one ear, runs past the door, shouting, “Can we get some help in here?”

  “This is really sick,” Tuni says, when Christopher returns.

  “That’s why it’s a hospital, dear,” he says. He takes her hand to lead her to the cafeteria. “Don’t worry about the grub,” he says. “I’ve ordered in sushi.”

  In the cafeteria they set up their picnic at a window-side table with a view of the river. The trees below look skeletal in the winter light and the water is gray as a cadaver. Christopher seems not to notice, absorbed instead in the slow dissection of a California roll.

  “My sister from Cincinnati calls me every day to console me,” he tells her. “She says, ‘Christopher you’re dying. My little brother’s dying.’ Then she bursts into tears and hangs up.” He looks up from his plate. “I suppose it makes her feel better to be able to pity me.”

  “Jesus,” Tuni shakes her head.

  “Anyway, it takes her mind off the bastard she’s living with. She was always envious.” Christopher spears a cylinder of rice encased in seaweed and inspects it for a moment on his fork.
“Thomas has been fabulous since all this started.” He looks up at Tuni. “Honestly, I don’t know if I’d do the same in his shoes.”

  “You would.”

  “Don’t try me.”

  “I won’t.”

  For a moment they can’t seem to find anything to say, and Tuni feels the silence spreading around them like a rising tide, threatening to strand them on separate shores. She wants to ask him about the medications he’s taking—what the blue pills are, the pink. She wants to make a place for him to teach her about the world as he did when they were younger and stood together in the wings of the Majestic practicing lifts and falls.

  “It’s funny,” Christopher says, finally. “People keep telling me I’m dying, and I really resent that. ’Cause I’m not. I’m living.”

  Tuni wouldn’t like it if she knew I was telling you this. She says she has copyright on her life, that I’m moving in on her.

  “You know what I’m talking about, Fran,” she said over coffee at the Barbizon Hotel one afternoon late last summer after I’d picked her up at work. It had become my ritual to meet her at the clothing store where she was working then. Our rendezvous being the only sure thing in my otherwise unpunctuated week. I’d recently quit my job as a copy editor, my cat Waldo had died of a stomach ulcer, and my lover of five years had announced that she was leaving me for God. It always rained when I met Tuni at work, but I’d go anyway. Inevitably I’d catch the wrong train and have to walk ten blocks in a downpour along Madison from the East Sixties to reach her. That day was no exception. I ducked into doorways. Ran two blocks at a stretch against the lights. I arrived soaked to the skin and had to stand just inside the entrance, dripping on the welcome mat of the beige boutique full of beige women in beige clothing.

  “This is my friend, Fran, who is embarrassing me,” Tuni announced to the room of beautiful clerks at the wrap desk.

  “We really need to buy you an umbrella, sweetie,” she said, kissing me as she eased my sopping bag from my shoulder.

  “Try an ark,” I offered.

  “Lena,” Tuni said, grabbing one of the nubile youngsters at hand. “I want to introduce you to my friend Fran.”

  “Ahhnn, so you’re the famous Lena,” I said mimicking the emphatic nasal cant of Tuni’s kin, known as rabbi-speak.

  “God, you guys sound so much alike,” Lena effused. “Are you two sisters?”

  “Just friends.”

  “About to be enemies if this keeps up,” Tuni said.

  “I borrow Tuni’s personality on occasion. When mine’s at the dry cleaners. It shrinks in the rain.”

  Lena smiled at us in good-natured confusion. Tuni and I smiled at each other venomously.

  “Friends often begin to sound like friends when they spend a lot of time together,” I remind her later at the Barbizon.

  “This is different and you know it. You’ve taken over my personality.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” I say. “You’re not so readily duplicated.”

  She talks about me like I am a virus, replicating her cell by cell, replacing her with a bad copy. Telling her stories, stealing her lines.

  Every Wednesday since I moved to the city, Tuni and I have met at this same cafe to tell each other stories. We have covered a lot of ground in two years: we have swapped rape stories, discussed Balanchine’s upper lip, the surrealists, the Hasidim, Tuni’s unwavering desire to have sex with rabbis, our wavering desire to have sex with each other, Coptic art, the Diaspora, god, history, favorite breakfast cereals, literature, always literature. Last Wednesday she told me about Christopher. Christopher who has lymphoma but is careful to say he doesn’t have AIDS. Christopher, the former soap star, former Dance Machine producer, the perfect date who brought her roses and didn’t ask her to suck his dick. The last of her dancing partners, the one-who-wasn’t-dead. Christopher who has been shy around Tuni for years, avoiding her, because she is the sort of woman he would fall in love with, he told her once, if he did that sort of thing, but he doesn’t.

  The café is on the border of the West Village where wealth becomes this city. Not far from here beautiful men in pairs and trios stroll the streets and the windows are dressed to kill: teddy bears bound in leather chaps and studs, faux Fabergé eggs, shops given over entirely to roses and chocolates. The homeless are here like everywhere, but fewer. And slumped beside the illuminated crèche at the corner of Carmine and Bleecker or against the windows steamy with heat and dressed with tinsel and lights, even the mendicant can seem picturesque as they do in foreign countries where one doesn’t have to take suffering personally.

  I arrived at the café at the usual time, a few minutes before eight, and took a table by the window where I could look out at the traffic drifting north on Sixth Avenue and the gold peaked roof of a midtown building lit up in green and red floodlights like a Toulouse-Lautrec whore.

  Tuni arrived a few minutes after me, looking foreign and regal in layers of black velvet and brocade with a tall velvet hat like a Parisian stovepipe.

  “Why do the Kennedys always have tears in their eyes during sex?” she asked, setting her Batman lunch box on the table. I shrugged and smiled. “Mace,” she said. Most people tend toward platitudes in despair, Tuni inclines toward vaudeville. So I know when she is funny, that something is awry. That night she leaned across the table to tell me condom jokes. Safe sex puns.

  “What’s up?” I asked. She turned from me to watch the red swarm of taillights beyond the window. I watched her watching the street.

  “Isn’t everyone I know who’s going to die of AIDS dead already?” she asked after a while. When she finally looked at me, her eyes were watery and her mouth was straining as if she were about to smile. “Life’s so uncertain,” she said.

  I know what she means. Last spring my lover, Margaret, announced that she was leaving me to become a monk. It wasn’t that she didn’t love me, she said. It’s that love doesn’t last. “I want to make something of my life,” she told me. “I want something that will last, that will count.”

  “Don’t I count?” I asked her, the room blurring with tears.

  She put a hand to my cheek. “We always knew we were just crossing paths.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

  That night, after coffee, I took a cab home all the way to Brooklyn. I wanted to feel protected, to feel I could afford to be taken where I asked. Cab rides are a pleasure specific to New York: One feels exempt, taken care of. In the back of a yellow cab heading anywhere—crosstown along Houston, or up Sixth to Central Park—you can drop your guard. For an instant. Let go your bag. Unlock your jaw. You can read the name of the cabbie on his permit posted by the meter and forget it. For once you don’t have to look with an eye out for mug shots, for police lineups. You don’t have to look into faces in case you’ll have to remember them later. Cab rides in New York are like a love affair: one surrenders oneself to the care of strangers, trusting that they will take you to the right place. To the place you cannot get to on your own.

  “Love your boots,” Christopher says when he opens the hospital room door. “Inappropriate for every occasion.” Tuni laughs and thrusts a bouquet of daisies toward him. “Tell me what I should do with these,” she says, awkwardly holding the flowers before her like they might be contagious.

  “I forgot you’re the woman whose idea of nature is a potted plant,” Christopher says, taking the paper-wrapped bouquet as Tuni steps in.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time I tried to go on a vacation in the country?” she asks. “I took a train all the way to Vermont and spent an entirely miserable weekend. I kept trying to hail a cab. No one would sell me a knish.” Christopher laughs and closes the door behind her. It is one of his good days, she can tell. By now she has grown accustomed to the cycles of illness. The paranoia and despair, the euphoria when he is convinced he’ll be the first person to come back from this. At first she didn’t believe Thomas when he said you get used to it after awh
ile. But she has. It’s amazing what you can get used to.

  When I arrive at the café the following Wednesday, I find Tuni browsing the obits in the Times, Actors Equity News, SAG. She scrolls down the page, points out a dancer she worked with under De Mille, a famous Irish actress who was always trying to sleep with her ex-fiancé, someone from summer stock in Connecticut.

  “It’s weird,” she says. “I read these things and get really depressed.

  Then I become elated. Then I buy an unnecessary hat.”

  “Nothing like an obit to make you feel alive,” I say, and lean down to kiss her. Tuni is beautiful and sometimes when the city is tender with evening and falling snow I remember that once we might have been lovers. We met five years ago in summer at a Buddhist monastery in northern New Mexico, just the other side of the Colorado border. We spent an afternoon together on the front porch of the zendo, sitting in the shade, watching the red-tailed hawks ride the thermals in that ultramarine sky, while Tuni told me about growing up in the ballet. She explained to me the distinctions between the Kirov and Bolshoi; fouetté pirouettes; why all ballerinas hate Audrey Hepburn. “She was what you were supposed to be and never would,” she confided. “She was Balanchine’s ideal. He married four of her, you know. He had four wives all with long necks and small round heads. Like neolithic art objects. You could never measure up.” I read her passages from Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and told her stories about fish fries in country taverns in Wisconsin. Two days later, when we were lying naked beside each other in a cold stream in the middle of an unmown field, she told me I was brilliant and had perfect breasts and asked me to marry her. She offered to fly me to New York, no strings attached.