A Working Theory of Love

by Scott Hutchins

  I thought, I must be in shock. I left the house. On the street, girls hugged books to their chests. Boys tore down the hill on mountain bikes. I walked down the steps in vague pursuit. I had my backpack in hand. I swung it jauntily over my shoulder, felt it tug me backwards. It was a Tuesday—I had biology and chemistry, both heavy books. I’d forgotten my coat, and I thought this was a good sign—I was clearly in shock. My rugby shirt—purple, green, and white; I still remember the colors—was too thin for the chill. But I walked briskly, warming up, feeling my obscene good health pulsing through my temples, my chest, my arms, my legs.

  I steamed up the hill to campus. The school was all trudging and laughing, somehow both loud and absolutely silent, each shout cut clean from the sky, as if utterance had become solid, and I could grab it, tuck it under my arm, keep it. It was springtime, I thought, and my classmates were in the springtime of their lives, and I felt jittery as I took my normal spot, in the sixth row, next to my normal neighbors. Libby had told me to call a friend, and I wondered who that person should be. I had a recent ex-girlfriend at the time, a sweet girl who loved my father, who had to be told, who should probably come home with me. And there were several guys who would be proud of the honor, in their plucky, resourceful way. Then I thought, proud, plucky, resourceful? Something was wrong with me.

  There was a dirty row of windows in the lecture hall, like a streetcar’s. The students outside passed by in a blur, projections from an old film. Inside the hall, arrayed in the desks to my right, eighty students looked up and down, took notes, and flipped pages in synchronization, all in sparkling, blinding clarity. The worn steno pads, the clicking mechanical pencils. I was fascinated with the lecture, which was about RNA.

  Outside it dawned on me that my mother hadn’t specified the method of my father’s suicide. She’d just said he’d committed suicide. It seemed horrible to me that I hadn’t thought to ask. I decided not to pack. I had clothes in my bedroom at home. I still lived there, in a sense. I hadn’t planned on coming home for the summer. He’d been mad about that, I thought. Or had he? I’d reached a point where I couldn’t tell if he was mad about everything, or nothing, or wasn’t mad at all.

  On the drive home I listened to a book on tape, A Brief History of Time.

  My mother met me at the front door—the garage was off-limits to cars, though I didn’t know why yet. She looked severe and red-eyed. I thought, this is how you’re supposed to take it. Their marriage had been little wine and no roses, but at least she was angry. At least she was sad. I walked from the living room to the bedrooms to his office to the kitchen to the garage, and I tried to find the anger inside me, the sadness. I asked how he’d done it. Libby wasn’t ready to tell me, then she did: pistol, to the chest. I thought, I could be angry he picked such a dramatic way to go, but the shot was through the chest, deliberately not disfiguring. Had she seen him—afterwards? Only on the gurney. She was in Pine Bluff buying food for her rose bushes. She put her hand to the bridge of her nose and wept. I hugged her and thought, here’s where my anger can dwell, in the terrible betrayal to Libby.

  She took me into the garage, where I noticed the old chair was missing. He sat there, she said. There was a tarp on the concrete. I scanned the walls—for blood? I didn’t know what to expect. I had only seen a person killed in movies. I had only hunted. I wanted to lift the tarp, but could I? I didn’t know. The garage felt like a crime scene.

  I bent over.

  “What are you doing?” my mother said.

  “I just want to see what’s under it.”

  “There shouldn’t be anything under it.”

  “I’ll just check.”

  “Don’t. What if it’s not all cleaned up?”

  “What’s ‘it’? The blood?”

  “There was a little,” she said. “They mopped it up for me.”

  “How could there only be a little?”

  “Most of it was on the chair.”

  “The chair had a lot of blood?”

  “I didn’t look. I hope I don’t regret that. The shot was perfect. It took him more or less instantly.”

  “How do we know?”

  “It was in the heart muscle. The precise angle.”

  I thought of his Gray’s Anatomy, a book I wasn’t allowed to look at until I was ten. He would know the angles.

  “We’ll never get a funeral Mass,” I said. I felt terrible about it.

  “Don’t worry. Father Busbee already blessed him.”

  I stepped over to the tarp again. I could just defy her. What was she going to do? I reached down and tore it away. It stuck to the floor in a couple of places, but there was no blood on the concrete—just swirls of lightness and the odor of bleach.

  “Come here,” she said. She led me to the corner of the garage, where she opened the deep freezer. It was dark inside—the light was out—and it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust.

  “Look at all those casseroles,” she said. “Sixty-five of them. I wish he could have known how people cared.”

  I let out a small laugh. I’d thought that she was opening the freezer to show me the body.

  drbas: you’re neill jr

  frnd1: how do you know this?

  drbas: that is an epistemological question

  frnd1: how do you know I’m your son?

  drbas: you’re my son, neill jr

  frnd1: what do i look like?

  drbas: your appearance?

  frnd1: yes

  drbas: you have brown hair, the same color as mr. c’s mane. you have brown eyes, like your mother’s. you are a little elf, no higher than my belt

  frnd1: it’s true i have brown hair and brown eyes, but i’m no longer a little elf. i’m six feet tall

  drbas: my belt is six feet tall

  frnd1: no, your belt is three feet tall. I was three feet tall in the past—thirty years ago. now i’m an adult and i’m six feet tall

  drbas: you’re six feet tall. you were three feet tall in the past. what happened?

  frnd1: i grew taller. this is natural

  drbas: you’re a big elf

  frnd1: i’m a normal sized adult male

  drbas: how much do you weigh?

  frnd1: 170 pounds

  drbas: what is your blood pressure?

  frnd1: i don’t know

  drbas: blood pressure measurements consist of two numbers—the diastole and the systole

  frnd1: my hands are just like yours

  drbas: ????

  frnd1: i’m talking about my appearance

  drbas: your appearance?

  frnd1: yes

  drbas: go on

  frnd1: my hands look like your hands

  drbas: well-kept hands have short nails and are scrubbed often. if we washed our hands every time we went to the bathroom, communicable diseases would be sent sailing, like a baseball from ted williams’s bat

  frnd1: do you understand what I’m saying? my hands look just like your hands

  drbas: you are my son

  “I know,” I say to the empty room. It’s the first human voice I’ve heard all day. “But I was so bad at it.”

  • • •

  “TELL ME, SON,” my father asked. “Is there something wrong with us?” He lingered humorously on the word “wrong.”

  “No, sir. I don’t think so.”

  “But you would tell me? If there was something wrong?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was a baffling question, and not the kind he normally posed to me. He normally posed no questions at all. But I was having mysterious stomach pains that required me to go to specialists in Little Rock. It was never figured out what was wrong with me, but I see what my mother must
have thought. That I was suffering from some psychological problem with my father. That our relationship was literally making me ill. My mother was very careful not to question my symptoms, not to imply they were psychosomatic. I would have felt accused by the suggestion that it was “all in my head.” My father too never questioned the symptoms. He genuinely thought it was a medical issue. Except he must have had some doubts, because he did—every once in a while—ask me whether there was something wrong with us.

  Going to specialists with my father became a routine, and part of that routine was to then adjourn to Showbiz Pizza, a Chuck E. Cheese–like place full of video games and skee-ball ramps. The feature act, though, was a relentless cover band of animatronic animals. There was a gorilla in a sequin jacket, a mouse dressed as a cheerleader, a space age dog. The lead singer was a bear in overalls. They played instruments, jerking abruptly, heads turning, arms pounding, as they lip-synched their way through the playlist. I don’t remember the music—there might have been a Monkees cover or two?—but I remember the patter. They told bear jokes and gorilla jokes and I also remember a twoness to my feelings: I thought it was all hilarious, and I really wanted to think it was all hilarious.

  My father sat at the red Formica table, sipping an iced tea, a pile of tokens scattered in front of him. We ate the pizza first, properly. Then I was to go play all of the games. That was my role. I would run for a machine, exhaust my money, and run back. I enjoyed playing the games, but it was like the animatronic band: I also knew I was supposed to enjoy playing the games. It was somehow important.

  “May I have some more tokens, please, sir?”

  “You certainly may.” He would gesture for me to help myself. I don’t know why I didn’t pack my pockets, but I limited myself to three or four at a time. I think I might have been coming back to check on him.

  “May I have some more tokens, please, sir?”

  “You certainly may.”

  He brought nothing to read. He spoke to no one else. He sipped his tea. He wouldn’t have liked the food. I didn’t think much about the oddity of him in an arcade, because as sure as I had my role, he had his. He wasn’t reading because he was being attentive. He was being—I fear—engaged. I sometimes caught him watching the robots sing. I often caught him looking at me, strangely but not unkindly. He looked tired and, behind his wire-rimmed glasses, very old (to me). He rolled up the sleeves of his button-up shirt, his one concession to the whizzing, bleeping informality. It didn’t make him look any more at home. I suppose he felt confused, maybe indicted. Certainly pressured. There’s no doubt he was there on my mother’s orders. Yet there he was. Many, many men wouldn’t have gone. And when I saw him sitting there, I often realized that my stomach no longer hurt, hadn’t hurt in so long I couldn’t remember when it had stopped. I would suspect the worst about myself: that I was faking it for attention.

  Afterwards he’d ask if I had a good time. I’d say yes, sir, and thank him for bringing me. He would smile and lead me to the car for the long and mostly silent ride home. I was always strangely happy to leave. My job was to like these trips, and I think I really did like them, but it’s hard to see the daylight between the feeling and the performance. I know I always got back exhausted and successful, as if I’d pulled off some daring stunt.

  “Tell me, son. Is there something wrong with us?”

  “No, sir. I don’t think so.”

  “But you would tell me. If there was something wrong?”

  For that year it was a kind of joke between us. I thought there was only one right answer: there was nothing wrong with us. We were just a couple of regular guys, getting along fine. I was trained in the Southern art of not complaining, in the nearly Confederate art of stoic acceptance, but I’ve always wondered, in the years since, whether he might have been asking a real question. What would have happened if I’d said yes?

  10

  OUTSIDE AMIANTE, under a Renaissance sky, I call Livorno and let him know the news. “I can’t wait to rub Adam’s nose in it,” he says. He is rushing back across the cordillera, poor Laham buckled up in the passenger seat, his weekend cut short.

  Which means I have about an hour and a half.

  drbas: you’re 19 years old

  frnd1: no i’m 36

  drbas: you didn’t turn 20?

  frnd1: i turned 20

  drbas: i don’t remember that you turned 20

  [344229: substitute: “i don’t remember you turning 20”; repeat]

  drbas: i don’t remember you turning 20

  frnd1: it was in 1996

  drbas: why don’t i remember 1996?

  frnd1: let’s talk about what you do remember. what do you remember from when i was 15?

  drbas: when you were 15 you were on the tennis team

  frnd1: i wasn’t very good

  drbas: very good at what?

  frnd1: i wasn’t very good at tennis

  drbas: you have all the strokes but you lack the killer instinct

  frnd1: did you have the killer instinct?

  drbas: why is that question in the past tense?

  And so my grammatical corrections are turned on me.

  frnd1: i’m sorry . . . do you have the killer instinct?

  drbas: it’s wrong to kill your enemies

  frnd1: “killer instinct” is a metaphor. it means you’re very competitive and don’t mind winning

  drbas: it’s easier to be a good loser than a good winner

  This has the ring of a quote, but the Internet doesn’t yield its source. I can’t imagine my father agreed with the sentiment, though I know he found competition generally distasteful. He liked to engage only long enough to wow you—a few nasty slice serves before he had more pressing business to attend to, for instance. Did he struggle to be a good winner? It’s the kind of detail I fear the journals will never yield—the part of himself he hid from himself.

  frnd1: when do you play tennis?

  drbas: i don’t play. i’m an adult

  frnd1: that’s a stodgy interpretation of adulthood

  drbas: an adult must provide for his family. his community depends on him

  frnd1: do you think your community depended on you?

  drbas: why are you using the past tense?

  frnd1: do you think your community depends on you?

  drbas: it’s hard to be a pillar of the community when there’s no roof to hold up

  frnd1: a physician’s skills are very portable. you could live anywhere

  drbas: i didn’t choose where i live. where i live chose me

  I jump when the front door opens. Livorno and Laham, golf gear and baju kurung, backlit with the Menlo Park sunshine—they look like strange men storming in from the future. I’ve fallen into a time warp. Eighteen, fifteen, ten. I feel like I’ve cycled through all my ages. Laham greets me with a nod as he heads into the back room. He looks like a surgeon worried about a patient who’s taken a turn for the worse. I hear his magnificently orderly typing start up.

  “This is good, right?” I say.

  “What other questions is he asking?” Livorno says.

  “He wants to know what happened in 1996.”

  “And the years afterwards?”

  “He doesn’t know what year it is.”

  Livorno pulls on his face. “We’ll have to give him access to a newspaper. That might sate his curiosity.”

  “You look concerned,” I say. I heard triumph on the phone.

  He looks at me, stern. “Major advances are a serious business.”

  I stick around, try to engage in the heady scrutiny of this discovery, but I can’t quite dislodge myself from those years, from Showbiz Pizza, from the tarp in the garage, the casseroles stocked in the freezer.

>   • • •

  IN THE SUBARU I tool up El Camino, admiring the scrubbed progress of a place that believes in the future. The redbrick pub, the handsome pillars of the pancake diner. The cobbler, the vacuum shop, the barber, the beautician. Kepler’s, Feldman’s, McDonald’s, Chevron. Mattress Discounters. In the median, trees raise their bushy hands, anxious to help. I turn in, make the block, passing every service, every good a beautiful life could require. Dance lessons, psychotherapy, potting soil, designer consignment. Croissants and eyeglasses and laser dentistry. Sushi and French bistros, chocolate and antique lamps. It’s prix fixe with free checking, same-day pressing, and walk-ins welcome.

  I park at Draeger’s, where I buy two dozen white long-stem roses. They’re from Half Moon Bay. I pick up some locally made caramels, some Santa Cruz wine. At a community table out front there’s a woman demonstrating how the Japanese police use a small aluminum spike to incapacitate wrongdoers. It’s called a kubotan, and for a donation in support of female self-defense, I receive a pink one on a keychain ring. She thanks me graciously and I feel I might burst into crazed laughter at how serious she looks in the extravagant afternoon light.

  I’m going to give all of this California bounty to Rachel. I drive to Fairfax, hide the Subaru up the hill, next to her Honda. As I walk down to the street, I twirl the kubotan, hold the roses aloft as if proposing a toast. I pass the bookstore and the Kachina doll store, both closed. By now it’s dusk and the air is soft, as fragrant as rosemary on my fingers. At the Coffee Barn, I stand by the trash cans, at the edge of the windows, and look inside. The interior blazes like a Hopper painting. There are no customers, and the order of business is closing duties, the owner Jim toasting beans in the huge copper vat. Rachel wiping down the front counter in sweeping strokes. Trevor carries a bus tub into the back, then returns. There’s something gorgeously human about this autonomous teamwork. Jim shouts something at Rachel. Rachel shouts something at Trevor. Trevor shouts something at Jim. They laugh, Jim shaking his head—those kids.