A Theory of Love

by Margaret Bradham Thornton

  “Looks as if there will be soon.” Christopher pointed east to a large boat chugging toward them from Cannes. They walked around the star-shaped fort where they had come to see the cell of the Man in the Iron Mask. They found it down a corridor of six cells. Heavy, dark, iron-studded doors opened onto a room larger than they had expected. On the north wall, a window was covered by three iron grills with small square openings. A fireplace was on one side of the window, a latrine on the other. The floor was covered in small square terra-cotta tiles. The cell was strangely comforting. Christopher walked to the window and watched the tour boat dock. Helen ran her hands along the wall, feeling for secrets.

  “Ready to go?” he asked. They both wanted to leave before the passengers arrived. They walked to a patisserie and bought sandwiches and bottles of water. He looked at a map. “Same way back or different?”

  “Different.”

  They walked west around the perimeter of the island and found a natural beach, to sit and eat their sandwiches. She read the brochure they had been given with the tickets to the fort. “They still don’t know who he was.”

  “The Man in the Iron Mask?”

  “Yes, but this says it was black velvet.”

  “I’m feeling a little better about him already,” Christopher said. “I mean, peace and quiet, room with a view of the Côte d’Azur, fireplace, velvet versus iron—”

  “Stop. Aren’t you the least bit curious about him?”

  “Not anymore. Every French schoolboy at some point has to write about Jules Verne or Jacques Cousteau or the Man in the Iron Mask. You know, if your theory about emotions left in one place is correct, you could test it out here. If they really do stay where they are experienced, then you might be able to detect their presence and match them up with one of the suspects. Judging from this,” he said, taking the pamphlet from her, “there are, at this point in time, at least”—he paused to count—“seven possible candidates.”

  “First of all,” she said, taking the pamphlet back, “it has to be your own emotions. I never said you could discover someone else’s. And secondly, even if I could tell who it was, I would then become so wildly sought after that I’m not sure I would have time for you.”

  “That would be tragic.”

  “Would it?”

  “Helen, why are you saying that?”

  “It’s been hard finding time with you. I mean this holiday has been great, but I know when it’s over and we go back . . .”

  “Look, I know it’s been tough, and I know the goalposts keep changing, and now I’ve got to get to the bottom of my concerns about Marc. But if you want me to walk away, I’ll do it. I really mean that. But if I stay in, then it’s going to be bad for a bit longer. And I know we’ve talked about having kids—it’s just right now we don’t see each other enough, and adding kids would only make it worse.”

  “What does ‘a while’ mean?”

  “Hard to say—six months, a year, but I’m guessing.”

  “If you did walk away, what would you do?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it. I could always go back to law of some kind, maybe a smaller firm.”

  “I wouldn’t do that—ask you to leave your firm. I know how hard you’ve worked, and I know how much you love it, I see it. I wouldn’t ask you to do that for me. I’m not asking you to do something that drastic, but I wish we could be together more. I don’t think I’m asking that much.”

  “I understand and I will try, I promise.”

  “David asked me if I wanted to write a piece on Cuba. I have an idea about going to the places I read about in that book you gave me on the circus performer.”

  “I meant it as a metaphor.”

  “I know, but it’s a moving story. Maybe you’ll come with me. I’d like to travel around the country. You could help me. Very few people speak English.”

  “I might be able to in January or February—it just depends on what’s going on.”

  * * *

  In the evening, they walked into town and had dinner at the Moroccan restaurant they had gone to with Édouard. Helen had wanted to go to a different one, but it was the middle of August and everything had been booked for weeks. Édouard always had a table at La Salama because he was a friend of the owner, and Danny was able to get them in. They were given a table outside in the courtyard underneath an old olive tree. A stone bench ran the length of the courtyard walls, with tables for two to eight arranged along the inside perimeter. The seats and tables were low, and Christopher sat next to her so he could stretch out his legs. Last summer’s brightly colored cushions and pillows had been replaced with ones that were all white. The simplicity of the stone and white fabric reminded Helen of the cottage where they had stayed in Majorca. She forgot about Morocco. Christopher ordered a bottle of wine he recognized as being from the vineyard of the monastery on Île Saint-Honorat, the island next to Île Sainte-Marguerite. They started with grilled peppers and shared a tagine of chicken with olive and lemon.

  During dinner, she told him more about John Glenroy. “When he was seven he was playing on the streets of Baltimore doing small acrobatic tricks to amuse his friends, and a man saw him and asked him if he wanted to join the circus. When Glenroy said yes, the man went to his foster mother and asked for permission. Glenroy writes that he was delighted because he thought circus life would be ‘a life of pleasure where everyday was sunshine and with never a cloud.’ But it wasn’t. He learned to do a backward flip on a cantering horse by first practicing on a barn beam. If he fell, he would get whipped. And he writes about this in a voice that is flat and uninflected. Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”

  “I suppose in some ways emotions are luxuries—doesn’t sound as if he could allow himself any.”

  “And despite being with circuses most of his life, they were always disbanding and forming new groups so he was never with the same people for very long. At the back of the volume he included a list of the twenty-four managers he had served under. And I’ve been thinking, why? To document their existence—unlikely any of them would have been alive when his book was published. A message in a bottle to any other performers he had traveled with? What purpose did it serve? He mentioned no friends or acquaintances—only one family, the Cardenas family in Cuba. When he was ten, a man from a rival circus tried to kidnap him, and he ran to their house and asked for safety. The Marquis de Cardenas was particularly kind to him and offered him shelter.”

  “Are you going to try to find any descendants of that family?”

  “I’ll try. I would think there would be a record of them somewhere. I’m not sure how important they were to him, but they were important enough for him to mention. But having no parents or extended family, never marrying, never having a home, always being on the road, the past was, in a way, all he had to define who he was. It was as if the past were Glenroy’s only true companion. And yet, while his memory was so exact about the names of people and the identities of places, it was a memory so impersonal, so outside of himself, that it could have belonged almost to anyone, or at least parts of it. At the back of the slim volume was a list of the places where Glenroy and his troupe performed on New Year’s Day, July Fourth, and Christmas for over forty years. Why did he choose to document those holidays—days most people spend with family?” Helen asked not expecting to receive an answer. “Did Glenroy’s lists assume that memory of dates and places could stand in for affection, as surrogates for family, or do you think he reduced his experience to a set of numbers and dates as a way of making it accessible to others?”

  “Maybe lists gave him immunity from loneliness. Maybe that’s all there was to it,” Christopher said. He hadn’t read Glenroy’s account, but he seemed to have a more intuitive understanding of him than she did.

  * * *

  A few days before they left, Helen walked down to the market to buy lavender soap to bring back to her mother. The vendors in the market were packing up for the day, but she managed to find wh
at she wanted. She took the long way home through the small streets and alleyways as a way of saying good-bye to the town. As she passed by some of the shops she had taken Ghislaine to the previous summer, it was as if she had conjured her spirit. From a distance, she saw Ghislaine with another woman leaving a boutique with large shopping bags. They were heading to the port.

  “You’ll never believe who I saw,” Helen said to Christopher, whom she found reading by the pool. “Ghislaine. She was walking out of one of the shops I took her to last summer. She was with another woman who looked like the new wife of Edward Farringdon.” Helen referred to the man who was the controlling shareholder of the paper where she worked.

  “Probably was. Marc said they were spending a week with them on their boat.”

  Helen was astounded. How had Ghislaine and Marc become such good friends with the Farringdons? As far as she knew, they didn’t run in the same circles.

  “Did you say hello?”

  “No, they were a block away and heading in the opposite direction—down to the port. Is Edward Farringdon a client?”

  “No, but we wish he were. He deals almost exclusively with Goldman.”

  “Marc and Ghislaine being invited for a week—doesn’t that surprise you?”

  “Not really. The friendship could have come through Ghislaine and Farringdon’s wife. Maybe they knew each other before—they’re probably about the same age, and Ghislaine is very focused on being in the right circles. Plus, she knows she will please Marc by being friends with women married to powerful and rich men. Marc said Farringdon’s boat is amazing. It’s a classic sailing boat designed by one of the top shipbuilding firms in Italy. Apparently it’s made from the most beautiful wood.”

  “But don’t you think it’s strange that Marc is here and he hasn’t let you know?”

  “I didn’t make any effort to invite them here or suggest we get together.”

  What Christopher didn’t tell Helen was that Marc had asked Édouard about renting La Mandala for the month of August. He had learned about Marc’s inquiry from Édouard. At the time, Christopher didn’t tell Helen because he knew she wouldn’t let it go. He didn’t want to spend his energy on the topic. To give Marc the benefit of the doubt, Christopher had been so vague about his summer plans that Marc could have understood they wouldn’t be taking La Mandala. But whatever the understanding, Marc still should have come to him first.

  The day before they were supposed to fly to New York, Danny found Christopher and Helen by the pool. A storm was gathering power as it moved across southern France. It was a bad one, Danny said. The winds were predicted to exceed eighty kilometers per hour. Flights from Nice were expected to be canceled. They were not saying how long it would last, could be a day, but he had seen them last as long as a week.

  Christopher was irritated. He didn’t want to cancel his dinner with Dan O’Connor. He went inside to check on their flight. He returned and told Helen they should be fine. The mistral wasn’t expected to arrive for another day or two. He sat back in his chair and picked up the newspaper. “We should have no problem leaving tomorrow. Our flight is fine.”

  She asked him what a mistral was, and he explained that in the Mediterranean there were at least eight different types of winds. He knew the names of the winds as if they were points on a compass. He traced an imaginary eight-point compass on her back. “From the north, Tramontane, beyond the mountain; northeast, Gregale, the wind that wrecked the apostle Paul’s ship; Levanter, from the east; southeast, Sirocco, which brings with it the sands from North Africa; south, Ostro; southwest, Libeccio; west, Ponente; and last but not least, from the northwest, the Mistral, which we will happily miss.”

  “How do you know all this?” she asked.

  “The sea captain who looked after the land in Bermeja had it tattooed in the middle of his back. I spent hours walking behind him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  New York

  Helen had spent the first two days walking around New York City, going to museums and dropping by galleries manned by young interns who believed that anyone remaining in New York in August was, by definition, disqualified from buying art. At the gift shops of MoMA and the Met, she looked for a present for her eldest brother Louis’s forty-fifth birthday but she found nothing that would interest him. He collected wine and first editions of Trollope. When she returned to London she would check with Max and Theo to see what they had chosen. Maybe they could give him something together.

  She made it to the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum where the British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy had constructed two eighteen-foot domes of wood in the shape of large igloos. Inside the structures were tall columns of balanced stones. The domes were made from split rails assembled so that the stone columns could be glimpsed from the spaces between the rails. She thought about the palapas in Bermeja and the afternoon Christopher had fallen asleep under a pergola where the sun had shadowed stripes across his back. She longed to be surrounded by those lush pinks and greens and blues. Goldsworthy’s desiccated domes and stone columns felt disconnected from any sense of life, and she did not stay on the roof garden long.

  “Three days of rain,” Helen said to Christopher as she looked out the hotel window down to the street. Tops of umbrellas hugged the sides of buildings and bunched on street corners.

  He looked up from gathering papers for his upcoming meeting. “It looks set in.” He asked her about the details of Willie’s play they were planning to attend.

  “It’s being held in the basement of a small church on Mulberry Street.” She delivered the bad news with as little inflection as possible. She knew the idea of going to see a dress rehearsal of an experimental play in the middle of August in the basement of a church on the Lower East Side did not thrill Christopher. She did not tell him that Willie’s response to her email question about location indicated he was ambivalent about their coming. Nor did she tell him the working title—“Let’s Face It, My Play Isn’t Going to Pause the Progress of the Western World”—because if she had, it would have given him everything he needed to pretend to argue against their going—location, heat, and theme. But both she and Christopher knew, no matter what the conditions, he would go for Willie.

  “Anyone who can leave the city has already left” were the words he put up in his defense. “No one opens a play in the middle of August.”

  “It’s a rehearsal.”

  “Even worse. Not even a finished piece. And it will be unbelievably hot and muggy.”

  But she insisted that heat rises. “It’s in the basement. Just don’t wear a suit,” she called to him in the interval between the sound of their hotel door opening and closing.

  She returned to the window. Christopher had said he would be back sometime after five. The day stretched out before her. She wished she had gone with Nick to Calais. She could handle herself. The rain was coming down hard now.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  New York

  The theater was small, five rows of ten folding chairs. When Helen and Christopher arrived, all but a few were filled. The audience was a downtown group, proclaimed as much by their black clothing as by their youth. Christopher suspected many were students—former, current, and prospective—of Willie’s.

  The play started on time. Willie’s voice came over the sound system. It was slow and velvety as if he were trying to sell the audience a product. A young woman guided by a flashlight appeared and handed everyone a sleeping mask—the kind given out on transatlantic flights. Willie told them to put on the blindfolds. Once the masks were on, he instructed them to reach underneath their chairs to find a resealable plastic bag, open it, and feel the leaf inside.

  Christopher leaned over and whispered to Helen, “Please tell me it’s not weed. I have enough to worry about.”

  She knew he was teasing her, but she also felt splinters of truth in his last sentence.

  “You’re safe. I think it’s only an ivy leaf.”

  “Feel the v
eins of the leaf.” Willie’s voice silked on. “It’s the way we retrieve memories. One path leads to the next. It’s the connections between the cells. Remembering is not only an act of retrieval but also a creative act of imagination. Each time we remember, connections are being made. If we could draw the act of memory, we would draw a very complex map and one that changes from one act of remembering to the next. With each remembering, we lose control. It’s never the same memory twice—just as it’s never the same day twice.” Afterward neither Helen nor Christopher could connect the ivy leaf prologue with the body of the play except to surmise that perhaps the nonlinear structure tangled with tangents was in some oblique way an enactment of the prologue’s metaphor about memory’s pathways.

  At its most literal, Willie’s play was about an artist in a dysfunctional relationship with a woman who was an actress who kept going away. Each time she went away, he remembered her differently, so that the woman who returned was not the same woman he remembered as having left. The play was a succession of departure and arrival scenes. Christopher stopped counting at seven. The play ended with the artist wondering whether it was his girlfriend or his memory that kept changing. The only way he would know for certain that she wasn’t changing would be if she stayed. But if she stayed, she, by definition, would have changed. He decided it was impossible to know the answer to his conundrum. The play ended with a line about memory pulling you back and pushing you forward. Helen wanted to ask Willie what he meant by it, but his play had made her feel uncomfortable. She saw a reflection of herself and Christopher. She knew Willie had been working on his play for years. He had told her about it in Saint-Tropez, so she knew he couldn’t have based it on them, but she didn’t like the way it felt so close. The sense of doom dislodged her from any sense of happiness she had felt being with Christopher in New York.

  After the play, Willie, looking as if he had just been pulled out of the East River, appeared onstage to take his bow. Christopher and Helen waited for everyone to leave before going to congratulate him.