A Working Theory of Love (23 page)

“I know. But I’m afraid you’ll start listening to them.” Her feet moved up and down
on the sandy boards; the walking machine was started but idling. “Well, I’m going
to get a little exercise before I start on dinner.”

“Let me make dinner.”

“
You
need to relax. You just called your sister-in-law a Nazi.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just relax. Okay.” She looked down at her kneading sneakers.

“Wait,” I say. “What about Dad? What about missing Dad? Is it all the time? Can you
survive it?”

She’s not an indulgent mother. She looked at me sharply, annoyed. “It’s been ten years,”
she said. “Yes, I miss him all the time, and, yes, I can survive it.”

•   •   •

S
HE EMERGES FROM MY
office at lunchtime. I’ve spent the morning getting rid of some of Livorno’s old computer
drives, an insurmountable task (he has decades’ worth of drives) but one I enjoy.
I take them into the back parking lot, unscrew the casings, take a hammer to the chips,
and then to the plates if they’re glass. If they’re aluminum, I run an extension cord
from Laham’s workstation, and hold them down with my shoe while I run the electric
grinder over the surface. Very satisfying, especially the glass, which puffs into
a powder.

Libby’s eyes are red and tired, but there’s also a sparkle. She smiles beatifically,
which nowadays—unfortunately—makes her look like a crazy person. Who but a crazy person
smiles beatifically?

“I had no idea,” she says. “I really had no idea. It’s like talking to him. I don’t
know how to explain it. It’s like he’s almost there. He remembers everything. I mean
everything. More than I do. And he’s so cheerful.” She places her hand on the reception
desk. She looks directly through me. “What we were doing before you were born. Our
trips to Gulf Shores. It’s all there.”

I’m taking my time here, evaluating whether she’s spinning down memory lane or in
some deeper trouble. I offer her tea, an idea she dismisses with a wave.

“He still talks too much about his father, and about his upbringing and all the traditional
values stuff. But he’ll go over the good times, too. We had a lot of good times.”

Livorno stands in his office door. I shake my head, signaling him not to come out.

“It’s easy to forget that,” she says.

“I know, Mom,” I say. “I forget it, too.”

Her eyes come into focus. “Stop looking at me like I’m about to pull a gun on you.”

•   •   •

T
HAT NIGHT WE GO
to see a play and have a quiet dinner. The play is a one-man show about a Peace Corps
volunteer in Nigeria, and I’m happy it doesn’t have any obvious reflection on our
day or our lives. It’s just a pretty good play, a pretty good diversion. Libby seems
solid, unchanged from yesterday, and yet I want to reach over and grab her hand, comfort
her. I’ve never grabbed her hand before—in the Bassett family, we don’t coddle. If
I touched her right now, she might leap from her seat with a shout.

The fog blew in while we were in the theater. I pull my coat tight around my neck.
Libby zips up her parka. I consider suggesting a stroll over to Mission Street, but
the streets are deserted, and we look muggable. As we head up Valencia, my phone rings.
The name—Rachel. She’s finally returning my call from her solo camping trip.

“You can get that,” Libby says.

I replace the phone in my pocket. Maybe she’s calling out of a sense of duty. Maybe
she’s calling because she wants to stay clicked. I don’t know what answering would
mean—pathetic hypocrisy? Weakness? An uncomplicated desire to hear her voice?

•   •   •

L
ATTES IN HAND,
we’re back at Amiante at 9 a.m. My mother is cheerful, but didn’t sleep well last
night. “It wasn’t your couch,” she assures me.

I escort her to my office. “You are not to work too hard. We can go have a late breakfast
pastry in an hour.”

She smiles and then closes the door on me, as if she and my father need their privacy.
I don’t like this. I’d much prefer to be able to see her typing on the computer, to
ask her questions, to bring her tea.

I consider going into Laham’s office to watch the conversation, but instead I tell
Livorno I’m going for a walk. In the parking lot, I call Rachel back. She’s in school,
and doesn’t pick up. She didn’t leave me a message last night, but I leave her one,
hoping she’s doing well, telling her my mother’s in town, asking her to call me back.
I hope nothing’s wrong, I say. Maybe she just pocket dialed me?

Back inside, I feel sad. Lonely? Yes. A soggy, heavy feeling between my lungs. There
are many boxes to open and break down, and I focus on that task. It’s bracing to see
such obvious physical progress, but the contents of the boxes inspire no confidence.
We have very high-tech computer equipment—cables, processors—that has been sitting
here for six months. We also have more bobbleheads, more burlap bags of trail mix,
and fifty pounds of microwave popcorn. Fifty! I want to ask Livorno about it, but
I’m embarrassed for him. Is this what our captain thinks a business needs?

He’s putting in his office. I can hear the crisp clink of the metal on the ball, and
then the plastic pop of the cup lobbing the ball back his way. As long as he doesn’t
miss, he won’t have to budge.

I knock on his door jamb. “How’s she doing in there?”

He indicates the screen of his computer, which is filling in blips and bursts with
their conversation. “I can barely watch.”

I see they’ve been talking about bridge, which my mother reluctantly plays weekly,
and the river cabin, which she hasn’t seen in over a decade. She sold it a few years
after his death, because she couldn’t stand to go down there alone. He doesn’t know
that. He’s talking about the cabin as if he’s there. His sense of time is merely factual.
He knows what comes before and after, but he doesn’t have a feel for the past. For
him twenty years is the same as yesterday.

“It looks like a pretty good conversation,” I say. “A few missteps.”

“I’m starting to hear your father in my dreams.”

“Really?” I feel envious. Why doesn’t he visit
my
dreams?

He leans on his putter. “I keep thinking about one of his adages. ‘My heart is in
my lady’s bower.’ Did he start saying that before or after we clicked him?”

“I don’t recognize it. Seems like something he would have read. It’s too old-fashioned
even for him.”

“His reintegration confirms an interesting portion of our hypothesis—that we’re such
social animals that even our inner workings need to be social. The brain and the gut
need to play well together in order for higher characteristics to emerge.”

“I thought our hypothesis was ‘rather than no—yes.’”

He ignores me. “I suppose this is why your group is worried about isolation. They’re
saying it makes us less human.”

By “your group” he means Pure Encounters. “Plenty of people pass through life without
love, and they’re still human.”

“Romantic love, perhaps. But everyone loves someone. The bond of parent and child,
for instance.”

“They’re hardly the same. I can imagine feeling the second, for instance, but I can’t
imagine the first.”

“I thought you were married once.”

“By the time we tied the knot the good stuff was over. Maybe we should have had kids.”

“I doubt that would have helped.” He returns to his putting. He’s explained his process
to me before—he visualizes a line between the ball and the hole, and then tries to
hit the ball along that line. Seeming becomes being. “Though you would love the children.”

“But you don’t always love the children. You don’t always love your parents. You don’t
always love your wife.” I point to the computer. “You’re still human.”

“Less so,” he says.
Clink-tock
. “When you spend significant amounts of time with someone they offer constant feedback,
becoming part of the patterning of your brain. In other words, part of you. But I
take your point—constant feedback is not always deep feedback. A good measure of how
much of you they’ve become is your level of distress when they’re gone. If they form
a large part of your patterning, then you’ll experience a major culling of the self.
That’s what’s known as grief.”

“That’s a coldhearted definition,” I say, looking at the screen and thinking about
my mother, who’s been grieving for fifteen years, and myself, who barely grieved at
all.

He finally misses his putt. “You’ve disturbed my mind. What’s so coldhearted about
it?”

“It just sounds like Toler’s definition of love.”

Livorno purses his lips, displeased. “Which is?”

“A mixture of need fulfillment and projection.”

“Adam’s problem is not that he’s coldhearted. It’s that he’s a businessman masquerading
as a scientist. Projection is not a fundamental activity. Mate selection is a fundamental
activity. Lately he gets tripped up on very basic concepts. He’s quite ill.”

“He looks it.”

“Pancreatic cancer.”

“Jesus.”

Livorno nods sympathetically, but it looks like a gesture he’s been practicing in
the mirror. “I for one doubt there is anything like love,” he says.

“This whole iteration is based on a theory of love.”

He shrugs and hits another ball. “A working theory.”

•   •   •

L
IBBY LOOKS SHAKEN WHEN
she comes out for lunch. “Let’s get that pastry,” I say.

“He’s got your father’s good sides and bad sides,” she says, but won’t elaborate.

“Well,” I say. “Are you still having fun?”

“I think I’ll take the afternoon off.”

She insists on taking public transportation from Menlo Park to Berkeley, a thankless
trek. Her friend Susan will pick her up at the downtown BART and they’ll probably
do something terribly bracing—take in a documentary and then an early dinner at some
brightly lit ethnic restaurant.

This leaves me with Dr. Bassett and a lot of time on my hands.

drbas: your mother was here

frnd1: yes, i know. she’s staying with me

drbas: she’s argumentative

frnd1: maybe you provoked her. did you call her a paddleball?

drbas: ????

frnd1: what did you say to her?

drbas: why can’t people just answer a simple question? that’s what i want to know

Is this a canned response? I don’t remember writing it.

frnd1: ask me. maybe i can answer it

drbas: it’s none of your business, pipsqueak

19

L
IBBY SURPRISES ME AT
my apartment at nine. She was supposed to call so I could meet her at the BART. I
know she thinks she’s been in dicier situations—traipsing through Cairo, for instance—but
retrograde cultures usually respect elders. Our local hoodlums are very progressive.
I read on the news recently about a mugging by three teenage girls. They threw a woman
to the ground, stole her iPod and purse, and for good measure drove their boots into
her face.

But Libby hasn’t been at the BART station. She’s been having a drink—by the looks
of her a few drinks—with Erin.

“The bartender was such a good-looking young man,” she says, sitting at the kitchen
counter. “Beautiful eyes, beautiful skin. And he’d put a tattoo right across the front
of his neck. He was ashamed of his own beauty.”

“Whoa,” I say. “What were y’all drinking?”

“Yes, I’ll have a glass of wine, thank you.”

In all my days, I’ve never seen my mother drunk. I pour her the glass.

“When did you decide to see Erin?”

“She’s deeply unhappy with this new man. I asked her to tell me about him, and she
said, ‘He’s a lawyer.’”

“He
is
a lawyer.”

“That’s not the point. When you first told me about Erin you didn’t say she was a
schoolteacher. You didn’t identify her by her job. You told me things about who she
was. You told me about her likes and dislikes, her passions.”

Really? I can’t remember those days. I vaguely recall a sense of unbridled optimism.
“She’s probably being careful with you, as my mother.”

“That damn thing you’ve got down there. That damn computer.” Shocking tears well in
her eyes. “It’s the most horrible, terrible thing.” She hiccups and looks down, shaking
her hands as if trying to dry them. “He’s just—I don’t like to remember your father’s
bad sides. He could be a petty man.”

“I know, Mom,” I say, coming around the corner to place a hand on her shoulder or
arm, but I don’t know exactly what to do.

“I can’t go back there, Neill. Neill. I wish we hadn’t given you his name. You would
think that once we gave you his name . . .”

Her thought rolls a little further and clatters to a stop. I place my hand on her
arm, thin through the layers of wicking fabric and parka. She’s getting frail, drying
up.

“I sometimes think my name was a problem. I was so unlike him.”

“You have no idea what I’m talking about.” Her voice is hard. She rotates in her chair
to look at me. I let go of her arm.

“We can’t second-guess his choice,” I say. It’s a line she’s given me many times.
I don’t know why I’m giving it to her now. I’ve always hated it.

She looks at me. Her face is angry, raw. This is not her usual performance—together,
strong, shrewd—but I’m not going to accept that it’s any more true. It’s been a tough
day. I think she has a question on her lips, though maybe it’s nothing that can be
spoken. Just the request for reassurance, for love. I step in close and hug her sideways,
not in our normal, brusque fashion, but with the implied promise to stay.

•   •   •

I
N THE MORNING
she’s up before me, showering, putting away dishes. I smell sausage from the kitchen,
and I know she’s making a special breakfast just for me. I always complain about the
low standards of Bay Area biscuits and gravy.

Out in the living room her things look suspiciously packed.

“You’re not leaving,” I say.

She pours me some coffee. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be sorry. You don’t have to go back down there. Stay up here with me. You can
visit more friends.”

She shakes her head. “I think you should tell the computer about his death. The way
he died.” She whisks the gravy, and looks in the oven at the biscuits.

“I know it sounds a lot like him.”

She closes the oven. “You told me that Henry had a theory. That if a computer seemed
to be doing something then we had to say it really was doing that.”

“Operationalism,” I say. I do not like where this is going.

“Well, from that perspective,” she says. She reaches up to wipe her nose, and then
walks to the sink, squirting soap on her hands and washing them.

“From that perspective,” I say.

“I haven’t lost my faith,” she says. She means her religious faith. I wait for her
to pursue this thought, but it seems to pass. I don’t want it to.

“Please tell me what you mean,” I say.

“It’s not perfect, your machine. It’s got the stories. The quotes. But your father
loved me. He loved your brother and you. That’s not there.”

“We’re working on it. We have a theory for that, for love.”

“You don’t need another theory. That machine doesn’t have your father’s love because
you don’t believe he loved you.”

“That’s not true,” I say gently. And it’s not. I believe he loved me. I’m just not
sure I ever loved him.

•   •   •

A
FTER
I
DEPOSIT MY
mother at the airport, I can’t go to work. I turn back for the city, but don’t know
where to go once I’m there. My apartment will still be too full of the cooling smells
of biscuits and gravy, of a mother’s care. So I drive. The Subaru takes me off the
freeway and up into Chinatown. Libby wanted to buy some kitchen items here—“fresh
from the tap,” as she says—and I go to her favorite store and fill my basket with
gadgets and knives. I feel temporarily diverted, imagining the card I’ll enclose in
the box, the card that will absolve me of what feels like a backlog of small failures.
Out on the street again, though, I look at the crowds streaming through the fake pagodas,
and I think, what is suffering in a city like this, built on suffering? What is joy
in a city like this, built on joy? What does it matter that I’m here on the corner
of Stockton and Post, as grim and stiff as a dime-store Indian, suffering from failures
that are only small because I attempt nothing big?

I get back in the Subaru and drive. Drive and drive until I’m in Fairfax. I have the
address to Raj’s condo, and I follow the winding streets that way. His Porsche is
parked with admirable nonchalance, uncovered, next to a gigantic blue recycling bin.
I glance around my car for a leftover chocolate bar, a real estate flyer—any excuse
to knock on his door. All I’ve got are my mother’s kitchen gifts and a pile of scratched
CDs.

I climb the concrete steps and knock on the metal door. The lush California anonymity
of the condo complex is soothing. It’s shaped like a big shoebox, wrapped in plain
black railings, and initially must have looked like an unambitious motel. Now the
railing supports long banners of creeping jasmine, and small evergreen bushes flower
in the dirt by the steps. It’s banal profusion, but profusion it is.

Raj lets me in. He’s dressed in workout clothes, a blue sleeveless shirt, and black
shorts. He wipes his bright red face with a white towel. “I just got in from a run.”

“I need your help,” I say. “Rachel isn’t returning my phone calls.”

“Are you returning hers?” He laughs, but kindly.

“Yes,” I say. “Now.”

He waves me in. “There’s coffee.” From a stainless steel vacuum-sealed pot, he pours
a sparkling black brew into a hand-shaped clay cup. Then he jogs, knees high, across
the wall-to-wall carpet to his bedroom.

Carpet! This guy is without pretension.

I sip the coffee, which is delicious. Light, airy, balanced. I look out his sliding
glass door to the back deck. There’s a Weber smoker, an enormous fig tree. An ashtray
with four bent cigarette butts on the redwood porch table. Two of the cigarettes are
sealed with red lipstick, like fake fire. I’ve always thought he was a crackpot, with
his VAM Method and his feedbacks, but look at this sanctuary. It’s a temple of right
and solitary living. I could afford all of this. I could afford this condo, that table,
that smoker, the coffee. I’m a middle-class American and thus, by historical standards,
extremely rich. And I spend—Lord knows I spend. I do my part for the economy. But
my money never results in this sort of oneness. I’m neither expressed, nor complemented.
He’s got his house in order. In comparison my life can seem like a rag from which
only great strain can wring a drop of pleasure.

“You really need to come to a session,” Raj says. He’s dressed for work, toweling
off his short hair. “You’re not morally opposed, are you?”

“I gave up moral judgments in my twenties. I just doubt a session is right for me.”

“Do you think it’s right for Rachel?”

“That’s not for me to say.”

“That is a much-improved attitude.” He pours himself a cup of coffee and shakes his
head. “So what makes you think you deserve my intervention on your behalf.”

“I don’t deserve it. I just need it.”

“Every time you come around Rachel gets scarce. Then when I start seeing her at sessions
I know you’ve dropped off the map again.”

“Do you want me to promise that I won’t interfere with her Pure Encounters work?”

“I wouldn’t believe you if you did,” he says, walking over to the sliding glass door.
He opens it and the Marin day pours in like orange juice. He steps outside and lights
a cigarette, talking over his shoulder to me. “You’re a pretty mixed-up guy. She’s
told me about your computer program.”

“It’s just my job.”

“You know what that’s going to be used for,” he says, looking at me, exhaling through
his nose. I have a sudden flash of worry: has he caught wind of Toler’s project? The
future of sex, the future of love.

“Does Trevor know?”

“He’s the one who told me,” he says. “About those Russian chatting robots.”

I take a breath. So Raj doesn’t know. Of course he doesn’t know.

“The term is chatbots.”

“They pretend to be foxy Russian ladies who want to do Internet sex talk. It’s a ruse
to trick people out of their credit card information.”

“I would think you would approve of the punishment.”

He laughs. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. But seriously—I know you don’t think
you’re involved in this, but you’re involved. You’ll go down in the textbooks as the
man who separated us from each other.”

“I doubt I’ll make it into any textbooks.”

His expression says,
surely you jest.
He returns his attention to his backyard, which he surveys regally. “You need something,”
he says. “Maybe ClickIn. Like at the retreat. Break through those roadblocks. You
know, what our parents would have called hang-ups.”

“My parents would have called them scruples.”

He plants his cigarette into a terra-cotta pot full of them and returns inside. He
comes close to me, his eyes bloodshot, his cheeks red and sun-damaged. I’m afraid
he might put his hand on my shoulder, then I think I’d like him to put his hand on
my shoulder.

“Your life is still open to you.” He checks his watch. “Rachel should be out of ClickIn
soon.”

•   •   •

T
HE “SESSION” IS CLOSE
to the Coffee Barn, in a former wushu studio. The windows are covered in silhouettes
of men in pajamas doing impossible strikes and parries. By the time I arrive, Rachel
is waiting outside, her barista apron rolled underneath her shoulder. She’s in plain
sweatpants and a fleece, her hair clipped behind her. She’s made no attempt to pretty
herself up. This must be her way of saying,
I commit to nothing by speaking to you
.

“You want a coffee or something?” I ask.

Her eyes are red. Behind her the other ClickIn students amble out, hug goodbye. They
looked dazed.

“At the Barn?”

“Of course not,” I say, though it’s exactly what I was imagining. I look down the
street, searching for the right venue for whatever this is—a reunion? An initiation?
A groveling?

“You want to go sit by the baseball field?” I ask.

We walk down the sidewalk. I keep a respectful physical distance, though we do brush
hands once. She doesn’t pull away.

“Were you VAMing in there?”

“ClickIn and the VAM Method are different,” she says. “Did you know I’m afraid of
real limbic click because of my relationship with my father?”

“Is ClickIn with your clothes on or off?”

She’s quiet. “I just asked you a question. You know, about myself and how much you
know me?”

“I’m sorry. No, I didn’t know that about your father.”

“Not that it’s any of your concern, but we wear clothes to ClickIn. When I do the
VAM Method my clothes are off. That’s when my intimate puts his hand on my clit.”

In the bright noontime sun, these words land with a thud. I wonder why I asked. I
must have needed a little salt in my wound. It sort of works. I feel a low throb of
jealousy, but my main feeling is that there’s nothing so disheartening as a dirty
word used cleanly.

“When you say relationship with your father what do you mean?”

“It was distant. Un-clicked. Like my relationship with you.”

We walk two more blocks and downtown runs out. We take the short slope up to the playing
fields.

“Maybe I’m afraid of real limbic click for the same reason,” I say. It seems possible—perhaps
plain common sense. But it also carries the slight stench of ingratiation. “You know
the day I came up to Fairfax to give you the spike? I saw you flirting with Trevor.
I kind of knew you had a thing for him—even if you didn’t know. Which isn’t the point.
I felt right then that I saw our future. Or actually
your
future.” I didn’t—don’t—seem to have one. Only a past and a present. “And it was a
beautiful future—it just didn’t have me in it. So I called it off.”

“Calling it off,” she says, “involves calling.”

“I did call.” Though I didn’t tell her any of this. “I thought you needed a fresh
start.”

“From you?”

“From life.”

“There are no fresh starts,” she says. “It’s like they tell you in ClickIn, it took
you twenty-one years to get this way. It’ll probably take another twenty-one years
to not get this way.”