A Working Theory of Love (28 page)

“He’s manipulating us,” I say.

“Ask him what he needs,” Livorno says.

frnd1: what would you need to participate in the contest?

drbas: i need 1976

“Tell him you’ll get it.”

“How?”

“Tell him.”

frnd1: i’ll get it

drbas: willie’s mother knows everything. ask her about 1976

“She lives in Arkansas,” I say.

“Then you’re off to Arkansas,” Livorno says, angry.

“I’ve got plans this weekend.”

drbas: cathy beerbaum. catherine beerbaum

“You had plans,” Livorno corrects.

“I’ll go on one condition,” I say. “No little black box. No sexual nature.”

He gestures angrily at the screen. “Like father, like son—both a couple of blackmailers.”

•   •   •

“
I
DON’T HAVE
any choice,” I say to Rachel over the phone. “It’s work research.”

“Is what’s-her-face going?” She means Jenn.

“Just me.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Then I’ll come with you. I’ll put it on my credit card.”

“My ticket cost seventeen hundred dollars.”

“I can afford it.”

That’s two months’ pay for her. “It’s work. I’ve got to be focused.”

“Eighty percent. Ten percent. Just like I said.”

“That’s not true. This is just something I’ve got to do by myself.”

“This relationship isn’t real to you.”

“Of course it is.”

“Then show me where you’re from.”

“I’m the son of a suicide, Friend. The place I’m from doesn’t exist.”

23

I
HAVE A PHOTOGRAPH
of my mother in 1976. Technically, it’s a photograph of me, but I’m just a red-faced
bundle in the arms of a very beautiful woman. I say she erased sex appeal from her
appearance years earlier, but that’s not exactly right. In this picture, her hair
hangs in heavy orange waves. Her smile is wide, confident, womanly. She’s twenty-nine
years old.

My parents had been married for six years at that time. My brother was three. My father
had just started his clinic, which he would lead to become a respected regional institution.
At that time, my mother was still managing the finances. They were a team, and if
I couldn’t guarantee that they were happy, I still can’t imagine her having an affair.
Of course, life is complicated. She was twenty-nine; she was beautiful. I don’t know
that my father was the best audience for her excellences. I have no knowledge of their
love life, but that lack may be knowledge in itself. There was certainly no earthy
joking. He didn’t call her his “little girl” or his “sweet miss.” He didn’t spank
her on the bottom. They slept in pajamas, neck to ankle.

Not that this establishes anything. He was a Victorian—and Victorians were as randy
as anyone else.

•   •   •

C
ATHERINE
B
EERBAUM,
W
ILLIE’S MOTHER
, lives outside my hometown, in an even smaller town, Kingsland, Arkansas, birthplace
of Johnny Cash. A monument close to the K-thru-12 school refers to Cash as a gospel
singer, which doesn’t tell you much about him, but says a lot about Kingsland.

I turn off Highway 79 before the little high school and take the blacktop through
the south of town and out for a mile, before turning onto a rough gravel road. This
would eventually take me to our old river cabin, where my father’s canvas shoes are
probably still sitting. But I only go a little farther and turn off into Mrs. Beerbaum’s
drive, a well-maintained red dirt road guarded by a cattle gate. I get out to slide
open the gate’s latch. From here I can’t see the house. The dust unsettled by my rental
car burns in my nose, the smell of my childhood. The world is contracting, systolic.
The Primitive Baptist Church around the corner, the old chicken farm, the isolated
country houses framed by chain-link fences, the roads flashing by in the thick pine
forest. Once upon a time I knew where every road went.

Nineteen seventy-six was the year of my birth, an uneventful year according to family
lore. After a bad miscarriage the year before, my mother was taking exacting care
of her health and me, the fetus. My brother was running around in diapers. It was
a bumper muscadine crop. What could Willie’s mother add to this quiet picture?

I pull the Lumina through the gate, drag it shut, and head up the road, gravel pinging
the oil pan. I round a strange hill—more like a mound—and see a long ranch house in
the distance, remarkable only in that it seems to be made of logs and bousillage.
Azaleas dot along the concrete foundation, but that’s the extent of landscaping. All
else is yard, where the grass is the bright artificial green of Easter tinsel. A woman
in a broad-brimmed pink hat is mowing it, piloting her little Massey Ferguson around
a small river birch at breakneck speed. She does not wave as I approach.

I park in the drive and stand waiting for the woman to turn off the mower. It buzzes
insistently.

“Excuse me,” I shout. “I’m Neill Bassett Junior. I’m here to visit Mrs. Beerbaum.”

The woman holds on to the wheel, zooming in circles. She looks at me finally as she
straightens out, heading across the yard. She has eyes the color of blue ice. She
points at the front door and says something, but I can’t hear her.

I knock on the front door. “Beerbaum” is bolted in brass letters to the doorframe.
Two imitation stone tablets angle out of the azalea beds, listing the Ten Commandments.
It gives me a jolt—a sign I’ve become a Californian. Growing up I was no more surprised
by an old woman’s religiosity than I was by her cross-stitching.

I knock again. I ring the bell. Behind me the mower buzzes, carving a large rectangular
yard out of the grass. I try the handle, which is unlocked. I open the door slightly.

“Mrs. Beerbaum? Mrs. Beerbaum? It’s Neill Junior.” I exercise caution on her threshold:
Willie would have already shot me.

The lawn mower traces up the side lawn and around the house, out of view. It turns
off. I hear the clanking of the slowing blade in the garage and then the hum of an
electric motor. The pink hat emerges from the kitchen, gliding on an Amigo. The tray
on the front of the scooter carries two glasses of iced tea.

“Mr. Bassett,” she calls to me. I’m still standing outside. “You’re letting all the
cool air out. I’m not made of money.” Her accent is harsh and country.

“Sorry, ma’am,” I say.

“I hope you like sweet.”

“That’s just fine.”

Inside the log cabin we’ve jumped from frontier days to Revolutionary splendor, which
in Arkansas is a jump back. No sectional sofas here. Upright chairs and buffets in
the Federal style. The house isn’t particularly cold, but I get a shiver. This must
have meant a lot to her, all this adopted tradition, but she has no one to pass it
on to. Willie was an only child and he had no offspring.

“That’s great you mow your own lawn,” I say.

“The field?” She pats her forehead with a red bandanna. She doesn’t remove the hat,
and it’s difficult to make out her face. “Who else is going to mow it?”

“You could hire someone.”

She looks shocked, as if I’ve just asked her to smell my finger. “There you go again,
thinking I’m rich.” Sweat beads in her transparent mustache; her cheeks droop below
the jawline. If she hadn’t been so gracious on the phone, I’d think I wasn’t particularly
welcome.

“You have a beautiful house,” I say.

“Not much like California, I suppose. When I went out there everybody lived in a white
box. Didn’t matter what the thing looked like on the outside. Inside was white, carpet
was white, sometimes they’d even have a white picture hanging up on the wall. Made
me think I was at the doctor’s.” She laughs—a nasty laugh—then looks at me shyly.
The doctor’s
would have been my father’s clinic.

“That sounds like Southern California. I live in the north part of the state.”

“San Francisco,” she says. “I hope you don’t have San Francisco values.”

“Oh, no, ma’am,” I say, surprising myself. I don’t argue with the elderly, but it
usually takes me a brief second to capitulate.

“Did you know the Bible says homosexuals will burn in hell? That’s in Paul’s letter
to Timothy.”

“I think that depends on how you translate ‘homosexual,’” I say.

She narrows her eyes. “Are you a homosexual?”

“No, ma’am, I’m not.”

“You’re not married.”

“I’m divorced.”

“But you’re a Roman Catholic.”

We sit in silence, her scandalized by my bad Catholicism, me wondering if Catholicism
isn’t why I’m here: penance for being a bad son.

“Your daddy was as good as gold.” She smiles. The tumblers in her head have shifted.
“He helped my husband through his cancer. Jimmy was in terrible pain, just agony,
and your daddy felt it. You could see it in his eyes. I thought he was going to cry
at the funeral. And he was so good to Willie. I just wanted Willie to straighten up
and fly right. Dr. Bassett was Willie’s friend, despite it all.”

“Yes,” I say. I take a sip of my tea. “They were great friends.”

“He had a big heart. He was a man who could forgive.”

This, I think, sounds like what I’m here for. “I’m sure there was give-and-take.”

She looks at me, seeming awakened. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You know, Willie does something for Neill, Neill does something for Willie. It’s
the way of friendships.”

“This was
not
the way of friendships,” she says. She looks at her tea, the glass sliding in her
slack grip. She arrests its fall with her other hand. “I just pray Willie is not burning
in hell.”

“God is a loving god.” Maybe? What do I know?

“What is it you wanted to know about my son?” she asks. “You mentioned some forms
on the phone?”

I did—it was my alibi—but I don’t have any forms. I open my bag and remove a stray
questionnaire, some personality profile Livorno has sent with me.

“You look just like Dr. Bassett about to write me a prescription. You’re not a doctor,
too, are you, Neill?”

“No, ma’am. I’m a scientist.”

“Isn’t that wonderful?” She looks into the distance, seemingly at a mounted deer head
that stares eternally surprised into the room. “Willie and your father were the best
of friends.”

“He was like my uncle.”

She returns her iced-over gaze to me. “Just like an uncle.”

“I loved to go for rides with him. On real estate deals.”

“In one of his awful sports cars, I’m sure.”

“Yes, ma’am—the Corvettes.”

“And he was probably wearing a hankie around his neck and stank of perfume.”

“And his corset—he was wearing his corset.”

“Willie never wore any corset.”

“Whatever it’s called—girdle.”

“He wore no corset and he wore no girdle. People said terrible things about him, said
he was light in the loafers. Sometimes I think that explains the way he was with the
women. So many women. If they had just left him alone. And where is he now? Is he
in hell? Do you think he’s in hell?”

“No,” I say. But I don’t think anyone is in hell. That is, anyone who’s dead.

“But he is. He has to be. That’s what the Bible says, in Paul’s letter to Timothy,
but in Corinthians, too, and in the Commandments. Did you see the Commandments as
you came in?”

“I did, yes.”

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. Number Ten. It can’t get much clearer than
that. Can it, Neill?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I’m not surprised Willie coveted many a neighbor’s wife, but
is she saying he coveted my mother?

“You remind me of him. Of course.” She sniffs, touches her hair. “You’ll like this
story. When Willie was a boy he got kicked by our jackass, Herbert Hoover. It’s a
wonder he didn’t get killed, but he was standing just the right distance away, so
he only got a shove into the fence. Oh, he came limping into the house, tears in his
eyes. ‘Momma,’ he said, ‘that’s the last time I trust a Republican.’ Isn’t that funny?
Everybody was a Democrat back then. He had two bruises on his chest from old Herbert’s
shoes. Like two big closed eyes.” She leans forward, takes on a rough voice. “‘Momma,
that’s the last time I trust a Republican.’ You can’t say he didn’t have spirit.”
She frowns. “And that’s what got him into trouble. The people around here . . .” She
doesn’t finish the thought. She waves her hand into the distance, as if brushing these
people off an imaginary table.

“This is going to be strange question, Mrs. Beerbaum,” I say. “But do you remember
anything—an event, an argument—from 1976, related to my father and Willie’s friendship?
That was the year I was born.”

She leans back in her chair. “He wants me to take a blood test,” she says, quietly
alarmed. It seems to be a thought that’s broken free from her mind.

“Who?” I ask, though she must mean me.

She drinks her tea. She looks as startled as the stuffed deer. For the first time
she seems aware that she might be confused.

“Anything you could tell me about that year,” I say. “It could be big. It could be
small.”

“It belongs to him anyway.” She argues quietly to herself. “Am I doing wrong to keep
it?”

“I’ll give it back,” I say. “You can trust me.”

Her eyes regain their focus. “Trust you to do what?”

“Return whatever it is you’d like to show me.”

She backs her scooter up, drives over to the front window. “Why don’t you go say hello
to Willie?” I approach her, can smell the grass and heat from her clothes. Over her
shoulder I see the top of the strange mound I noticed on the way in. It’s a cemetery.
“I’ll get down my records from 1972.”

“Seventy-six.”

“Seventy-six. Now go say hello.”

“I’m happy to wait on you,” I say, but she watches me in silence until I step out
the front door. Nothing to do but obey, I guess. I pass the Ten Commandments and walk
through the yard, crossing the long lines of cut grass. The cemetery is ringed by
a wrought iron fence. Inside are a dozen tombstones. I put my hand on the latch, but
I don’t need to go in. I can see all the graves from here, festooned with plastic
flowers, the marble polished to a high-gloss shine. They are all Beerbaums: Belinda,
Robert Sr., Robert Jr., James, William, and Catherine—that woman up there, who’s perfectly
alive but has her final moving plans drawn up.

“Hi, Willie,” I say. “Where are all your wives?”

From here the log house looks like a gas station trying to hawk local crafts. All
those careful reproductions, all that timber. If she’s lucky she’ll go the way her
son did—in tongues of flame.

I walk back up the hill and ring the bell. I knock a few times, then try the door,
which is now locked.

“Mrs. Beerbaum,” I call out. “Mrs. Beerbaum.”

“He told me to mind my own business.” Her voice is like a snake hissing in my ear.
She’s sitting by the open window, invisible behind the screen. “I told him it was
my business to keep him out of hell. He said he’d never met a woman like your mother.
He wasn’t going to let nobody influence his behavior. And then you came along. His
spitting image. I don’t know how Dr. Bassett stood it. He just acted like nothing
had happened. Buddy-buddy. There was evil in that friendship.”

•   •   •

I
N THE
L
UMINA,
I feel sick, as if I’ve unexpectedly lost a fight, my old opponent having darted in
some fatal blow. She’s clearly not in possession of all her faculties. But—I bend
the mirror to take a look at myself. I have to say, it’s a face of uncertain provenance.