A Working Theory of Love (17 page)

“Does that count as a sign?” I ask.

•   •   •

A
T HER APARTMENT,
we make an afternoon of it. In the dusky light of her kitchen, I stand naked and eat
leftover salami. My body is tingling and warm, and I need the salt. Her place is as
neat and impersonal as an IKEA showroom, and I admire it. There’s no family bed to
polish or telescope to dust. You can put every stick of this out on the sidewalk tomorrow
and start fresh. Liberty!

She has an impressive array of running equipment—heart monitors, various shoes, a
weightless wristwatch. We have a lot of similarities, the two of us. Working in Silicon
Valley. Working for bosses who know each other. We’re similar in age. In education
background. (Actually, I’m undereducated. She has a PhD.) This profile stuff—the bread
and butter of Toler’s marriage site—shouldn’t be underestimated. I could move into
this apartment tomorrow. She could move into my apartment tomorrow. The salad spinner,
the iPhone adapters, the pods for the espresso machines—we could find it all. In important
ways we’re living the same life, though hers is probably more interesting. She’s mentioned
a weekful of plans. Drinks with friends, barbecues.

I flip through the magazines on the kitchen table—
Wired, Time, US Weekly
—and also a blue, glossy brochure from Pure Encounters. It’s a professional-looking
production. Across the inside it reads,
The Way to Feel
. Part of me thinks, maybe so. Another thinks, Jesus Christ.

“A friend gave me that,” she says. She’s cinched a paisley robe around her waist,
getting back in touch with modesty. “I think it’s a kind of a crazy sex cult thing.”

“I know a few regulars.”

“Computer people, I bet. We’ll pay good money to be reminded we have a body, right?”

“I guess so.” Though I don’t forget about my body so much as myself.

“I’m not judging it. It’s about connections. I think a lot of people are looking for
that.” Her face flushes with embarrassment.

What an odd world. I think she needs a hug—I recognize the way she’s standing—but
do we know each other well enough? We’ll see. I take her by the shoulders and pull
her to me, gripping her harder with one arm than the other—a little ambiguity in case
I’ve misread the situation. Then I settle in for a good hug. Maybe
I
need it. With Rachel kaput—yes, still thinking about her—and Dr. Bassett enraged
to silence (enraged at me), and my doddering genius boss giving me the furlough I
don’t need. Maybe I’m the one who needs to be held. And it does feel good, though
maybe only sixty percent good. Jenn and I have drunk deeply of the cup of each other’s
bodies today, but—I have to say—hugging feels a little strange.

15

W
ALKING OUT OF
L
OMBARDI
S
PORTS
with fresh strings in my racket, I come across a commotion. In front of the
other
branch of Play Date, the branch that wasn’t burned down, a young woman is lying on
her back on the dirty sidewalk while a person of indeterminate gender in a robot costume
pretends to joylessly penetrate her. It looks like pretty good street theater. The
robot costume is homemade, a cardboard box with memory reels and colored buttons drawn
on it. A group of young people stand behind the couple, blocking the entrance to the
store. They hold up signs:
SEX TOOLS ARE FOR FOOLS
and
DON’T FUCK PLASTIC
.

The audience is a good cross section of Polk Street at this historical juncture: a
few Mexicans in paint-stained work pants; a white man in a suit, sleek as a greyhound;
mustachioed hipsters in their skinny pants and bowler hats; a few biz-casual drones
like myself; an ancient leather daddy; an Indian woman in a sari; and a mixed-race
group of the homeless and crazed, one of whom is jumping up and down, chittering like
a lemur.

“Is this a promotional event?” one of the biz-casuals asks me.

The young people behind the copulating robot chant, “No investments in my vagina.”

The staff at Play Date peek out of the frosted glass door, looking baffled.

“This is awesome is what it is,” a hipster says. He’s filming the event on his phone.

“I guess it’s a protest?” I say. Protesting a sex store would be a new one here in
SF, the city that never sleeps without blogging about it. But anything’s possible.
The other Play Date, the one closer to my apartment, does seem to have been the victim
of arson. Investigators suspect the fire began with a “Molotov incident.”

The robot stops humping and pushes up to its knees. It raises its hands and the young
people stop chanting.

“Can you feel anything?” it asks. I think it’s a boy, if only by the size and shape
of the legs. But the voice is affectless and spoken through some distorting device,
like the voice of someone who has had a tracheostomy. “Can you feel anything?”

“No,” the young woman says. She’s wearing a white Phantom of the Opera mask. “I can’t
feel anything.”

She rolls her head toward us. “I can’t feel anything,” she repeats.

I’m struck woozy. The voice sounds like Rachel. We haven’t really spoken since the
camping trip. Or, maybe more to the point, since I took up with Jenn. Anyway, it’s
been weeks.

The robot unscrews its large phallus, puts it in a kind of quiver, and removes an
even larger phallus, which it screws back into the anchor hole it has in its genital
area. “I’ll make it bigger so you can feel something.”

He begins to hump her again. The young people chant against investments in their vaginas.
Is it her? I can’t tell for sure. The skin is bright and white; the hair is curly,
but darker than I remember. I feel the pinch of memory. Not our camping trip this
time, but the dim light of my bedroom, her head heavy on the pillow, the tiny hairs
of her neck riffling from the morning breeze. The smell of coffee from my automatic
pot mixed with the musk of our sleep.

I can’t let this giggling hipster post her open legs on YouTube. Especially considering
that her open legs are already online, without the mask. I put my hand gently on his
shoulder and shove him toward a group of newspaper boxes.

“What?” he says, windmilling his arms. “What?”

“You ruined it,” his little buddy says, coming in close to me. I ball my hand into
a fist. I haven’t been in a fight since junior high, but I’m looking forward to it.

“Cops!” the protesters shout.

Two police officers, both women, amble in our direction. They hold their arms out
like gunslingers, but their hands are empty. They’re not coming for me. They’re heading
straight for the demonstrators, probably just to talk. But the protestors do something
not in keeping with modern methods of civil disobedience: they drop whatever they’re
holding and run like hell.

“Hey,” the cops call after the protesters, who don’t look back. They dash across the
street into the Tenderloin. A taxi brakes, nose dipping down, to avoid them.

“What’s gotten into those rascals?” one of the cops says.

I step out of the crowd and jog across the street too. I’m carrying my computer bag,
and now my tennis bag, but the protesters are still pretty easy to follow. One of
them is a robot with a two-foot penis. They take a left up Pine. They’re fleet of
foot, these protesters. They have the sprinting ability of young people, but the man
following them, oldish youth that I am, is steady.

They turn right on Hyde. They’re heading south, toward the BART, but at the corner
of Hyde and Turk a brown Econoline screeches to a halt, side door open. They throw
themselves inside. The robot jumps in backwards, airborne for a split second, gripping
the tip of his penis so that it doesn’t hit anyone. Very wise. He lands with a thump,
and one of his memory reels pops off, rolling onto the street.

“Rachel,” I shout, but no one is looking my way.

The door slides shut. The Econoline gasses it through the yellow light, heading—I
assume—for the Golden Gate Bridge.

I pick up the tape reel. It’s an old home movie. Super 8, the kind that captured hours
of my youth, running in circles, dancing, silently vying with my brother for the limelight.
Or very rarely my father, eyebrow raised, looking as if he’d been caught in a private
activity, the secret of his daily life.

“Where they’d go?” The cops have caught up with me, both winded from the jog. I slip
the movie inside my coat.

“Who?” I say.

If that girl was Rachel, then there’s no doubt the robot was Trevor. Kind of beautiful,
their little performance. And surprisingly painful, too. I miss her.

•   •   •

A
T HOME
I
EXAMINE
the film. It’s just a home movie, and as I look at its yellowed images I come to realize
its no one’s. The people in this movie are scattered to the winds. Or—the more likely
explanation—they’ve just uploaded all those analog memories onto DVD.

I can barely admit what I feared I’d find: one of Rachel’s sex tapes. Of course, her
sex tapes wouldn’t be on Super 8. They’d be digital. That’s how they would be online.

I open up my computer, type in her name. I’ve done this already, and it’s the same
haul of sites. None—not even the Facebook page—relate to her. How would I find the
video? How do you search for your lover’s body—your ex-lover’s body? Teen? Amateur?
Girl next door? Long Island bush? Nasty spiritual seeker? I don’t know what acts she
and the guy performed. She just said “regular stuff.” Every search brings up girls—they’re
in every imaginable position, in every imaginable fantasy. They’re sucking off older
guys, sucking off each other, sucking off vegetables. They’re wearing pigtails. They’re
carrying whips. They’re carrying briefcases. I’ve looked at these sites before, for
a little fantasy, a little sexual relief. But I’ve never examined the faces. Hundreds
of faces. Thousands. Tens of thousands. All a little lost. A little surprised.

I close the laptop and call Rachel. She doesn’t pick up. And she doesn’t pick up thirty
minutes later or after an hour or after two or after three. I finally leave a benign
message.

Then I call Livorno and beg him to let me come in tomorrow. He says that until dear
old da is back online, I might as well relax. He doesn’t himself sound relaxed.

“When do you think this will be?”

“The disintegrative effect took us completely by surprise.”

“You should buy the rights to Pride again. It’s the seven deadly sins, not the six.
Seven is a magic number.”

“We need something bolder,” he says, sighing into the phone. “Also we can’t afford
Pride.”

“Have you been back to the putt-putt course?”

“Laham and I go every day.”

•   •   •

I
N THE MORNING
I
watch
Judge Judy
and
SportsCenter
. There are a few screeching cartoons on, ones without purpose or humor, proof that
children’s minds are weakening, that we’re a culture in decline. I wonder what a trip
would be like, a long Nietzschean hike through the Sierras or just a few days chasing
girls in San Diego. I should just touch a tree. I bet touching a tree would be an
immense help.

I’ve read about ecopsychology—a theory that says our problems are due to our disconnection
from the natural world. There may be something to it, though it depends on what you
mean by natural. I wouldn’t trade my city life for dodging lions on the savannah.
And it’s also got the problem of purity. All ideas with purity at their root are monstrous
and must be distrusted. The World Trade Center would still be standing if it weren’t
for an obsession with purity. Yet I’d like a little purity!

I consider calling Rachel again. I even consider calling Raj. Instead, I get in my
car and head south. I think I might tool down Highway 1 and sit on the beach, but
I cruise by the turnoff to Pacifica. I pass Daly City and the necropolis of Colma,
waiting for the Santa Cruz Mountains to rear up in the west before I admit that, wanted
or not, I’m going to work.

When I open the back door I find Laham slumped in his Aeron, scooping trail mix out
of large burlap bag and eating it from his hand. He’s watching an Internet program
called
Headline Gnus
. As I approach, his eyes don’t move from the computer screen. He looks like he might
have spent the weekend here. His clothes—though polyester to his shoes—are wrinkled
and stained.

“You okay?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer, but he offers me the bag of trail mix.

“Did I ever tell you about my trip to Bali?” I say. I walk around the room and turn
on all the lights. The place needs to be swept, maybe mopped. On the walls, the whiteboards
are covered in formulas. One is labeled
SYNTHESIS OF JOY?

“I was twenty-two years old,” I say. “Before I met my ex-wife.”

“You are divorced?” He finally looks at me, scandalized.

“Marriage is hard. You’ll see when you get married.”

He squints in the bright lights. “I am married now.”

I look down at his hand, which is bare. “What do you mean by married?”

“I am married three years.”

“Like a long-distance thing? She lives in Jakarta?”

“Redwood City.”

“Why haven’t I met her?”

In English, his gesture would mean,
why
would
you have met her?

“Ah, look who’s here,” Livorno says, coming into the back room. He scoops up his own
handful of trail mix and scrutinizes it, eating only the nuts.

“Did you know Laham was married?”

“Aila is a lovely woman.”

“She speaks English very, very good,” Laham says.

“In Laham’s culture,” Livorno explains, “marriage is a social contract, an agreement
between families.”

“It was an arranged marriage?”

Laham nods, eating. His attention is being pulled back to the computer screen.

“Married life going well?” I ask.

“If you were a good scientist like me,” Livorno says, “or obsessed with money like
Laham”—Laham does not object to this characterization—“you’d have gotten the whole
business over with and never looked back. You’d file ‘marriage’ away in the accomplishments
bin and return to life’s real business.”

“Laham’s not obsessed with money.”

“Asians love money. Right, Laham?”

“You have many children,” Laham says, making the international sign for balancing.
“You need much money.”

“Because they all work,” Livorno says. “Pooling their resources.”

“You have children, too?” I ask, feeling a flash of panic. Has Laham bested me? Did
he skip my life, like a grade?

“No children,” Laham says. “Aila must finish college.”

“Neill,” Livorno says. “A romantic invests his life into his romance. That’s where
the word comes from. For you love is the only thing.”

“Me? How did I get pulled into this?”

“I’ve been reviewing the transcripts with Dr. Bassett,” Livorno says. “What happened
to this young lady you were keeping up with?”

Keeping up? “We’ve decided to be friends.”

“You should marry her.”

“She’s twenty.”

“Don’t be so conventional. A hundred years ago she’d be an old maid.”

“This isn’t a hundred years ago.”

“What are her strengths?”

“She has lots of strengths, but we’ve decided to be friends.”

“Marriage is good for men,” Laham says. He hooks a finger under the collar of his
white T-shirt, freeing a silver necklace with a ring on it. The boy wonder is lecturing
me! Me!

“Aila was sixteen when they married,” Livorno says. “Isn’t that amazing?”

They both burst into the laughter of madmen.

Livorno shakes his head free of hilarity. “I bought a tiramisu,” he announces, returning
to the front.

“But, Laham,” I ask, “is it working? Are you happy?”

He titters, shaking his head, eyes wide and averted. I don’t think he’s saying no.
I think he’s saying he won’t engage such an indecent question.

So I go into my office and sit down at my desk, where I discover that Livorno has
been telling the absolute truth. I’m not needed. Dr. Bassett will not respond.

frnd1: i went camping

frnd1: do you remember us going camping?

frnd1: do you remember us going to showbiz?

frnd1: do you remember us going to church?

Livorno is standing in my door.

“Go home, Neill,” he says.

•   •   •

B
ACK IN THE
S
UBARU,
though, I know home is the last place I should go. I call Jenn.

“You want to have lunch?” I ask.

“Uh.” She’s in the middle of something. “Where?”

“I would offer my place, but it’s a long drive for you.”

“Your
place
?” She’s all ears now. “Oh, you mean
lunch
.” She nearly takes a bite out of the word.