The Love Experiment

by Paton, Ainslie

  He was sorry Alvarez wouldn’t be back, hoped he had the courage to fix things with his woman or move on if that’s what was best for them both.

  He borrowed some of that courage for himself, showered, patched himself up, taped his brow, it would heal, and went home to fix things with Derelie.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Derelie breathed into her rib balloons and stretched her earlobes to her shoulders. She massaged her wrist creases and balanced—in a wobbling way—in the place between neutral and enlivened. She flowed as if swimming with no effort in water. She’d made the late yoga class, and she didn’t do anything dumb like spending her not-going-to-happen bonus on clothing and shoes she didn’t need.

  She pulled herself together to try harder, sweat more, stretch farther, hold her poses steadier despite trembling limbs. It was a distraction from feeling so incredibly redneck for not understanding which way was up with Jackson Haley.

  She should’ve seen the politics for what they were. Phil getting back at Jack, Jack doing his best to derail that, Shona using it as an excuse to side with Phil then try to make Phil jealous. Derelie had been the pig-in-the-middle of a game she didn’t have the city slick to understand. But she understood it now. And she’d manage it. Artie Chan was due back in a few days. She’d re-pitch the story to Shona and do the love experiment with Artie. Jack could walk free, Phil would get his story and Shona could say she’d delivered. Derelie would have to make it the best human interest story possible to make up for the star attraction going missing.

  And she never needed to cross paths with Jack again. Her first impression of him had been on the button all along. Not the gay part—he hadn’t kissed like he wasn’t into women—the intimidating part. Beneath Jack’s contempt was the ideal place to shelter.

  She almost called home for the third time this week, just to hear Mom’s voice, catch up on the gossip, ask about Dad and Ernest, and receive all the news of his porch-sitting, back-of-the-truck-riding, varmint-chasing days, as if he was a person and not a tan and white hound. But Mom would hear it in her voice, her moment of crushing homesickness, and she didn’t have the stones left to act the part of “I heart Chicago,” and that felt like a kind of failure in itself.

  She slept badly, woke with sore muscles and made it to the office early and then resisted using that first quiet hour before the newsroom filled up to cruise shopping sites for ego-boosting purchases. It was almost research. She’d heard the other girls talking about CC creams and she didn’t know what they were and whether she was supposed to be using one. Would a CC cream have helped her understand how to deal with Jack? She got as far as learning that CC stood for color correction, discounted its effect on office politics and switched to email.

  And her morning imploded.

  Jack had written her an email. Not one of his terse instructions. It filled a whole screen and she’d have to scroll. He’d sent it at three in the morning. It had the subject heading An Experiment in Generosity. She took an ocean breath and read on.

  My name is Jackson Haley and I’m a professional question asker. It’s the way I understand the world, earn my living and define my life.

  I was recently volunteered to take part in a love experiment, a questionnaire proven to promote intimacy between strangers. My partner in questionnaire hell is a colleague who works for a different part of the paper. Her name is Derelie, it rhymes with merrily. We’d never met before we were press-ganged into the experiment.

  We’ve agreed to meet and answer thirty-six questions about our families, our hopes, fears, aspirations and thoughts on a range of topics from most desired dinner guest to last earworm, and to record our feelings and impressions about each other. The idea is we’ll go from strangers to, well, not strangers.

  My name is Jackson Haley, I’m a professional question asker, and I’ve discovered I hate being asked questions.

  Derelie rocked back in her chair. How the irony burned.

  Partly it’s the personal nature of the questions themselves, but mostly it’s having to open myself up to the scrutiny of a person I’ve only just met. I would rather repeatedly smack my head against a wall until I passed out.

  Unfortunately, I’ve made Derelie wish that’s what I’d done.

  She made a choking sound. That was funny.

  I was awful. A-triple-plus obnoxious. I dodged, ducked, weaved, disputed, belittled, distracted and minimized, just like a CEO caught with his hand in the till, and all in the face of Derelie’s consistent generosity, her unfailing good humor.

  This was Jackson Haley not only writing up the first part of the experiment, he was admitting he was a bastard and apologizing—again, but this time in writing, and it was nothing like the apology he’d made last night, the one that made her want to run and hide.

  A person with my advantages, privilege and position should be generous. I told Derelie the qualities I needed more of were patience and kindness, now I’m adding generosity to that. I’d be a better person if I was generous like Derelie. She’s also brave and intrepid and I was slow to recognize those qualities in her because I couldn’t see past my own walled-off reticence.

  This was Jackson Haley telling her she was brave. Wow. That he admired her. His words did odd things to the back of her throat, made it tight, made her eyes scratchy.

  Derelie and I are both reporters, so that should’ve been a good start to getting to know each other, but ungenerous person that I am, I was more focused on what made us different than what we might share.

  I write hard news about the business community and the power brokers who run our city. She writes the kind of stories that everyone would rather read, softer news, stories that entertain and lift people’s moods. She’s a new recruit to the city and I was born here, have its hustle and grit in my veins. It was arrogant of me to think who I am and what I do is more important than who she is and what she does, and worse, to make her think I judged her inadequate.

  I’m writing while the city sleeps and I’m slightly drunk on exhaustion, tired enough to see my own behavior as regrettable and make regret seem foolish. I’m sending Derelie these thoughts before I sober up on daylight. There isn’t any reason for her to give me another chance on the remainder of the questions. She owes me nothing.

  I owe her my honesty.

  She looked away from her screen. Why would Jack write this? He hadn’t copied anyone else, unless blindly, so this was meant for her eyes only, or it was a trick, something new he was teaching her about office politics. She could close the email now, never finish reading it, delete it, and there’d be nothing he could say because she didn’t owe him anything—that he had right.

  She closed the email. Her heart was beating too fast for a person doing nothing more physical than sitting. Jackson Haley confused her. She rearranged the items on her desk: paperclip, big foldback clip, little foldback clip, framed Ernest photo, yellow Post-it notepad, red pen, “Orderly, Home of the White Squirrel” coffee mug. He’d made her look like more of a fool yesterday. He did owe her honest answers.

  She opened Jack’s email. She could forward it to every desktop at the Courier, he’d given her that power and it wasn’t like that was an accident. She picked up the big foldback clip and opened and shut its wings while she read on.

  The last song I had stuck in my head was the Oscar Mayer wiener jingle. I can almost hear Derelie laugh.

  She dropped the clip and grinned at her screen. That was a whole lot more embarrassing than the Taylor Swift song she’d had in hers.

  My grandfather was born in Weiner, Arkansas. He used to sing that wiener jingle to annoy me. He’s been dead a long time and I still miss him trying to rile me up. I didn’t tell Derelie that, because I was mortified by the sorry state of my earworm, which haunts me every year around my grandfather’s birthday. I should’ve realized she’d laugh with me, not at me.

/>   When we talked about fame, what I should have told Derelie is that the fame I do have sometimes scares me. I’d much rather go unnoticed, but you can’t do the work I do and not have something of a public presence. That public presence aids my work. That means I have to be tolerant of people expressing their opinions about what I write and talk about. It’s only fair; they have to listen to me. But if I had a choice, I’d be less of a public figure and still be able to do the work I love. I understand completely why Derelie said fame wasn’t something she valued.

  I’m a little jealous that Derelie has a secret hunch about how she’s going to die and I don’t, although it’s clear now that my structural integrity can be dinged by a string of personal questions, so I’m not as hardy as I thought I was. I can only hope it’s as peaceful as her hunch she’ll die in her sleep. Given that I’m demanding on my bones, I think the question as to what I’d want to keep from my thirty-year-old body into my nineties had better be my brain, so far it’s in good condition if you discount how wrongheaded I was over a certain love experiment.

  One of the more probing questions was about whether I’d want to change something about how I was raised. I dodged that one hard enough to pull a muscle. I’d want to hang on to my grandparents longer, particularly my jingle-singing granddad, who is my all-time favorite person. Of all the people in the world who I’d want to have over for dinner, it’s not someone I want to interview or get to know, it’s Pops.

  There was another question about gratitude. Feeling grateful is one of those mindfulness activities that I’m hardwired to side-eye, but on reflection gratitude is like generosity, it’s a recognition that I have been luckier than most people in everything I have and do. I’m grateful for the circumstances in which I was born, to relative privilege and security that many people will never know.

  Hmm, that was more like it. Now she was learning about who Jack was behind his dinkus.

  The experiment has a question about what Derelie and I have in common. Because I was in deep jerk mode I picked the most obvious things, our profession and place of employment. I took the easy way out. The hard way out is to admit that I don’t know what we have in common other than our work in broad terms, but I have the sense that we both look for quiet spaces in our lives to help make sense of all the noise. It would be interesting to confirm that suspicion.

  That leaves a few questions, but I’m going to answer them in a bundle.

  My most perfect day would be the one where Derelie agrees to do the love experiment with me, knowing I’m on board, no side-eyeing, no being a superior twerp. I would treat the experiment respectfully. We’d escape the office and the incessant deadlines, ringing phones and pinging messages, and find a patch of sun. Maybe we could picnic somewhere there are birds chirping and a breeze in the trees, far from the sound of traffic and constant interruptions. I’ll tell her as much about me as she wants to know in four minutes or less. I’d want the same from her.

  Our first twelve questions didn’t make friends of two strangers. They gave Derelie a headache, and me a huge serving of avoidance that says more about my insecurities than I ever imagined. I can’t help but wonder what answering twenty-four more questions might tell me about myself, but if Derelie is willing to try it, I’m all in.

  She slumped back in her chair. Deny. Delete. Forward all. Reply.

  Those were her options. Every one of them put power into her hands. Jack was taking a risk she didn’t use his wiener jingle earworm, his acknowledgment he’d carried on like a turd, to embarrass him. She read it again. It was publish-ready. Though the words sounded nothing like the Jackson Haley stories that appeared in the paper. He never injected himself into his news stories, never wrote I. He reported straight without the sense of being part of the story.

  Jack might have been tired and regretting what had happened between them, but this wasn’t an emotional kneejerk, it was deliberately done. He admitted to sabotaging the experiment, he called out his own insecurities. He said wiener, and everyone knew that little jingle was about being loved, and she knew Jackson Haley was a kid who’d never had much love. He might scoff at lifestyle stories, but he knew how to write one.

  She could add her own words and offer this to Shona as part one of their love experiment.

  She stood. She had to talk to Jack, to make sure she was reading between the lines properly. Maybe there was some subtlety she simply didn’t understand. Maybe he was just showing off the versatility of his writing and this was another way to embarrass her despite the fact he’d called himself a superior twerp. For all she knew it was some sneaky kind of humblebrag trap she’d fallen prey to.

  She pushed her chair back and stood, the feeling she was being set up in some way wrapping itself around her lungs.

  “Hey, where’s the fire?”

  She looked at her cubicle mate Eunice. Ugh. “Sorry?”

  If Eunice, who wrote about arts and culture, and was the definition of focused, noticed anything Derelie did, it had to mean she’d done it violently.

  “You stood up so quick you made me dizzy. Did you get laid off or something?”

  Hell. “No.” They exchanged glances across the low cube wall. “Has it started?”

  “Heard two people, Lopez in science and some nerd in tech,” Eunice said.

  “That’s bad.”

  “Lopez is ancient. Great editor. Once upon a time we had rows and rows of them. You’ll get used to it.”

  Derelie would get used to it. It wasn’t like it was optional.

  She sat back down again. She’d reply to Jack’s email. After five minutes with the wiener jingle in her head, staring at the space she was supposed to type in, she gave up and went to the breakroom to get coffee. It helped. Back in front of her screen she typed: “Jack”; she no longer wrote Dear in her email correspondence after she’d noticed no one else did.

  I read your email and it’s too good to be true. I smell a—cliché.

  Backspace, backspace, backspace.

  I read your email and I have questions.

  That worked better, but it was cold. Back, back, back, back.

  I read your email. Thank you. I appreciate the effort you went to.

  That had the benefit of being true, even if she was still suspicious.

  Now I have the wiener song stuck in my head, so maybe this was an elaborate plot to drive me crazy.

  That also had the benefit of being true. Shit, the dumb jingle, over and over.

  I’m wondering if you meant me to sub your story. It would work for the lifestyle section, but I’m unsure if that was your intention. It would be great if you could let me know what you were thinking.

  She took her hands off the keyboard. That would do it. Professional, not too cold, not too warm. Just the right heat in the porridge for Goldilocks facing the big bear.

  And then like Goldilocks she waited. She filed two stories, attended an editorial meeting, went out to grab a sandwich with Eunice and waited for Jack to respond. She deliberately avoided his side of the office because she didn’t want to face him. Maybe they could simply do everything by correspondence, intimacy at email distance. It would be improvising like Spinoza had suggested. She liked that idea, but by the late afternoon when Shona had asked for an update and Jack hadn’t responded, she called him, couldn’t leave a message because his inbox was full and went in search of him, tight jaw, fidgety hands, pulse skipping. He wasn’t at his desk and his PC was dark.

  Just because he wasn’t there didn’t mean he wasn’t watching his messages. She went back to her desk and pinged him on Courier Messenger.

  I thought you didn’t do clichés.

  That was designed to get his attention, especially because he really hadn’t.

  Nothing.

  She gave it an hour and sauntered casually to the business writer’s bullpen. His cubicle w
as still unoccupied. While she was not so casually staring at his pristine desk, not a single photograph, a female voice said, “He’s not in.”

  She looked around for the owner of the voice. “Do you expect him?”

  The top of Annie’s head appeared above her cube wall and then she stood. “Working from home. What do you want? You know he’s on this major story, right?”

  “Er. Ah.” She wanted to make a rude gesture in Annie’s face. She wanted Jack’s home address, because what if he didn’t respond? Worse, what if this was a test and she was supposed to sub his piece to Shona or not sub his piece to Shona? She couldn’t wait around for days for find out. It was Friday and she’d be twisted into pretzel pose if she had to wait all weekend.

  Annie’s eyes flashed white and she continued stuffing folders in a messenger bag, which she balanced on top of the cube wall while she answered her phone. The bag was addressed to Jackson Haley.

  Derelie almost snatched it and ran. But she was a responsible adult, and that was master-class level stalking and Annie would probably crash tackle her if she tried it. The proper thing to do would be to liberate the parcel from the front desk before the messenger service took it—just because she grew up in crime-free Hicksville didn’t mean she lacked a conniving instinct—which is exactly what she did.

  An hour later, she buzzed Jack’s apartment, lowered her voice and mumbled the word “messenger” into his intercom, let herself into his building, up three flights of stairs and knocked on his front door.

  He answered it barefoot, without his glasses, wearing a pair of almost threadbare blue jeans, a jaw full of stubble, and skin. A lot of skin. This was the man she’d once imagined in neck-to-knee underwear made out of a burlap sugar sack.

  “Jesus jeans.” He didn’t have a shirt on, and the word “ripped” applied to both his pants and his chest.

  “Honeywell.” He frowned at her. “Did you think I always wore a suit?”

  “I mean they’re holy.” She pointed at his legs. “Your jeans have holes.” Slashed and torn across his thighs, both knees blown out. “Jesus jeans.” Jesus, she’d looked at his wiener. She’d looked at all of him and she didn’t want to stop.