A Working Theory of Love Read online

  “I’m having trouble with the telescope,” I say.

  “That’s because you’ve got it pointed in the wrong direction.” She crawls over to the back of the blanket, positioning herself behind the eyepiece. She cranks the tube down so that it aims across the park, at a perfect angle to see in other people’s apartments. “There we go. Getting ready for the big night at the club.”

  “I wouldn’t have picked you for a Peeping Tom.”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t do this.”

  “I’ve made it my policy not to,” I say.

  “Ooh, she’s taking off her top. She’s got the windows wide open. Don’t you want to see?”

  “Move over.”

  And indeed there she is. A tan woman, heavyset, in a bright green brassiere, pinning her dark hair behind her head, her arms up in the style of a fifties calendar. She holds barrettes in her teeth. She lives on the top floor, and I don’t think she’s exhibiting herself. Too focused. She turns left and freezes. She turns right and freezes. Someone important is going to see her tonight, whether he plans to or not.

  “Are you aroused?” Rachel asks.

  “More like inspired.” Good luck, stranger. May your labors bear fruit. May your visions come true.

  We pack up the telescope and repair to the bedroom. We left all the lights off and I don’t turn them back on. She stands at the foot of my bed, the old Bassett mahogany bed from the plantation, its four-posters eight inches thick and shaped like gigantic crayons. I reach up to help with her checked scarf; it’s as tucked and cinched as a turban. “I don’t know how to get this off without choking you,” I say.

  “We’ll just leave it on,” she says.

  “I thought we were going to have a pure encounter.”

  “Shhh.” She puts a finger to my lips. I take it into my mouth, and then pull her close, her ribs against mine, both of our pulses beating fast. Her eyes have gone ghostly again, almost colorless in the dark. But she’s no ghost. I can feel her reality shooting up my arms like a cardiac arrest.

  • • •

  IN THE MORNING, we go to the SFMOMA to see an exhibition, which is full of burned things—canvases, wooden structures, weird ashy angel wings. We take a peek at the statue of Michael Jackson and Bubbles. We eat a cream puff. After last night, our body shyness has left us. I put my arm around her, and we walk as a unit, my hand hanging from her belt loop. I feel a jittery excitement. She’s either asking too much, or I’m promising too much. Or there’s a sliver of another possibility—that maybe these jitters are caused by my sudden proximity to a good thing. Dropped—unanticipated and unmerited—from the heavens.

  Which I don’t believe in cosmically, of course—only as a metaphor. But how can a good thing drop from a metaphor?

  Rachel and I stand on Market Street, which isn’t so grimy today, contemplating which way to walk. We’re caught in the pleasant dilemma of having no wrong choices. The sun is out, and a gale-force wind is batting at our hair, spinning loose papers through the sky like pinwheels. In the morning I’ll have to take her back to Fairfax—she opens the Coffee Barn early—and it’s with surprise that I feel a pang of something like regret.

  6

  frnd1: it’s nothing serious

  drbas: she’s humorous?

  [300244: “it’s nothing serious�� = “she and I are not in a serious relationship”; repeat]

  drbas: there’s no such thing as an unserious relationship. even married people shouldn’t have friendships across the sexes. it tempts

  frnd1: neither of us is married

  The bells on the front door jingle open. Two possibilities: UPS or Toler.

  “Noel,” he shouts. “I’m going to need your help.”

  I don’t move. I’ll come when Livorno asks for me. Not a second sooner.

  “Neill,” Livorno says.

  Crap.

  Toler is traveling without his assistant today. He’s flipping through a stack of sheets, which he spreads out on Livorno’s cluttered desk.

  “I hope you boys don’t mind,” he says, touching a finger to each page. “But I’ve started a little Turing test project myself. Code name—Program X.”

  I look at Livorno, who studiously does not look at me. Toler raises his head in the silence, arching his eyebrows above his Lucite glasses. “You guys just seem to be having so much fun.”

  Livorno clears his throat. “I hope you know what you’re getting into. We have a two-year head start.”

  “All I’ve got on my side”—Toler places a hand over his heart—“is money.”

  I again look to Livorno, hoping to gauge his reaction, but he’s flashing the genial smile—his version of a poker face. I follow him around the desk to the pages Toler has laid out. The shape of the text is familiar: it’s a lengthy chat.

  toler: what are you favorite books?

  progx: i like books about spies

  toler: do you read romances?

  progx: i wouldn’t say i “read” romances

  “Is that a dodge?” I ask.

  “I don’t think so,” Toler says. “But, Noel, here.” He points to the third page. “What do you think of the naturalness of this dialogue?”

  toler: do you know what it’s like to have emotions?

  progx: to have emotions is to feel something

  toler: where do you feel something?

  progx: typically with your involuntary nervous system

  “I made him a doctor,” Toler says. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I wouldn’t say the dialogue is natural,” I say. But the program seems to follow the conversation with incredible precision. How has he accomplished this in a month?

  “Read this bit,” he says.

  toler: why did the chicken cross the road?

  progx: to get to the other side of the road?

  “You shouldn’t have fed it that answer. The point is to assess the changes.”

  “He guessed it.” Toler shakes his head. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  I look back at the sheets. Is it possible that the program figured the joke out? I suppose a computer intelligence should help—enough searches and it might discard the irrelevance of the chicken. Why does A cross the road? To get to the other side. But Dr. Bassett doesn’t even understand that the question is hypothetical. He keeps relating it to some specific chicken.

  “What are using for your data sets?” Livorno asks.

  Toler spreads his hands. “The world.”

  • • •

  AFTER TOLER LEAVES, Livorno curses under his breath. I listen to him miss putt after putt. He must regret showing Toler his project, regret—I would assume—hiring me instead of an engineer. Livorno didn’t think he needed a genius, because he is a genius, but I’m not sure his attention hasn’t gone slack.

  I get up and go into his office. “I smell a rat,” I say. “I think he had someone type those up.”

  Livorno thumps the floor with his putter. “That’s a comforting theory.”

  “He’s a squarehead.”

  “With deep pockets. And here we are on a shoestring, bedeviled by plateaus.”

  Plateaus? Yesterday, we were zooming up like a rocket ship. I walk over to his desk, where he has a new tchotchke—a bobblehead Tiger Woods. I give it a poke, watch the impervious smirk wiggle and blur. Then I plop into the Wassily chair, uncomfortably reclined, the morning analysand.

  “He’s gone broad,” Livorno says, leaning his putter against his file cabinet. He sits in his upright Aeron and affixes his hands behind his head. “And we’ve gone narrow. His challenge will be controlling the chaos. Ours is enlivening the dead clay.”

  I narrow my eyes, but don’t say anything. The words “de
ad clay” irritate me.

  “I’ve believed for years that the weakness in this field is this fruitless pursuit of a theory of the mind. No one can make a move forward without a comprehensive theory of the mind, and these theories—while illuminating—are never complete. How can a thing understand itself? Can the eye see the eye?”

  “The eye can see other eyes. That’s what an optometrist does.”

  “I’m speaking platonically. In any case, maybe I’ve been wrong—perhaps we’ve bottomed out because of conceptual limitations.”

  “Bottomed out” sounds dire. “Aren’t you taking this development a little hard?”

  “We could try the Sins, but we don’t know what would happen.” He sits up.

  “Let’s not make any rash decisions.”

  “The Sins are modeled on EQ—emotional intelligence. They might find hidden webs of connection. Alternately, they might snarl the whole project up.”

  “Snarl?”

  “I don’t know how they would work together.”

  “Then I think we should do an intermediate step.”

  The clouds clear from Livorno’s brow. “You’re right. Let’s start simple. How does a mind get put together?”

  That’s his version of simple. “I don’t know,” I say. “We just come this way.”

  “Think about a child. Language. What is a child’s first word?”

  “Mama?”

  “I don’t mean a baby. What is the word that enters the child into the human community?”

  “No?”

  “Why. The sky is blue—why? You can’t eat any more candies—why? It’s the question that indicates knowledge of what one doesn’t know. Knowledge of the presence of an absence. What that man called known unknowns. Exformation.”

  My neck is starting to pinch. “Dr. Bassett already asks questions.” I give my shoulder a squeeze. “Computers have been asking questions since the sixties.”

  “Preformulated questions. No machine has sought knowledge. Has desired knowledge.”

  “They’re computers.”

  “You’ll go through the subject categories and double-check them. Add ones we need. Laham can handle the tag numbers. Then we will have Dr. Bassett ask questions to enrich those categories. A kind of learning tree.” He rolls his fingers on the counter.

  “But what about the desire thing?” I sit up. “How will you program desire?”

  “He will continually ask questions about his current knowledge base.”

  “He already asks questions.”

  “Preformulated questions.”

  “You were talking about desire.”

  Livorno snatches Tiger Woods from the desk. “I have to compete against a multimillionaire and one of my principal employees is of a religious mind-set.” He says this bitterly. He’s not referring to the devout Muslim in the other room, but to me. My religious mind-set, I suppose, is that there’s something particular about humans that makes them human. “You mustn’t forget: your father appearing to want to talk to you is measurably indistinguishable from his really wanting to talk to you.”

  He’s an academic, I remind myself, taking in his blank, guileless face. Nothing he says reflects real beliefs. These are all thought games, endless earnest thought games that, like their predecessors, will aim at consciousness and result in a new answering system for United Airlines.

  “We’re not talking about my father.”

  He grows sober. “We should be. We have to think big. That’s where Adam’s mind will be.”

  I surprise myself by blowing air out of my cheeks, exasperated at this bullshit.

  “Shouldn’t an old man dream?” He pats his chest to indicate that he is indeed talking about himself. “Before he’s shipped into the old folks’ home to eat baby porridge?” He turns Tiger Woods one more time in his hand before setting him down gently by the phone. “Baby porridge,” he repeats, looking at me. I sit up, annoyed. Am I supposed to say he’s young as spring shoots and will live forever?

  “What is porridge?” I say. “Is it like oatmeal?”

  “When I was a child we would sometimes eat wheat berry, with yogurt and honey. Very thick yogurt—not like what you buy in the grocery here. My mother made the yogurt. It was one of her great joys. She kept bees, as well. I was an only child, and I helped her. My mother and father were considered cursed because they only had me, but later in life my mother told me they’d done it deliberately.” His gaze drifts off, until he appears to be looking behind me with rapture. I turn, but it’s only the dry-erase board from the defunct quilting studio: double-ringed wedding Thur @ 5. “My mother’s bees, however, are what made me an iconoclast in the field. I knew intelligence didn’t necessarily rise from a central processor, a central I. The bees are individually nonintelligent, but together they produce emergent phenomena. They plan for the winter; they exert control over their environment. This is why I invented the Sins, which people still don’t understand. They think I’ve made seven separate buzzing subsystems, but the truth is that each Sin is a subsystem made up of dozens of subsystems, each as simple as a bee.”

  “That’s beautiful,” I say, though I’ve heard it all before. “And you can buy that kind of yogurt at Trader Joe’s.”

  “Yet we’ve built Dr. Bassett out of similar bees. Subsystem within subsystem within subsystem. And he’s plateaued.”

  I take a deep breath. I need to tamp down whatever is driving me to be rude to my kind, doddering boss. “Maybe we need a system for the subsystems. The contest just requires him to seem sentient for a few minutes.”

  “There is no measurable difference between seeming and being.”

  Maybe it’s my “religious turn of mind,” but this has to be wrong. I hope my be, for instance, is better than my seem.

  “I’ll give you an example,” I say. “My father said he loved my mother, but that’s not the same as actually loving her.”

  Livorno looks at me, surprised and wary. “Yes, but that’s the difference in saying and doing, not seeming and being. If he loved your mother outwardly, there’s no reasonable way to say he didn’t love your mother, who I’m sure is a splendid woman.”

  “You don’t love people because they’re splendid.”

  “I’m European, Neill. We have a more mature attitude. Romance . . . the spice of life . . . but everything in moderation. It’s the sensible way.”

  He’s done being upset. Now he beams at me over his nose, avuncular. I suspect he’s happy he steered the conversation back into the realm of Wisdom—irrefutable and trite. I force a smile. What is moderation but a grim set of half-measures? I can think of nothing more depressing than “European” marriages with their dalliances as sanctioned and regular as ski trips. Everything in balance—the life of the heart as an index fund.

  “Adam is a squarehead, however,” he says, tapping his finger on his chin.

  frnd1: everything in moderation

  drbas: it’s good to have a balance between recreation and work, family and friends

  Where did he get that idea? I know my father had his delusions, but surely he didn’t think he was buoyed on some wonderful lifestyle balance.

  frnd1: what if you really love one or the other?

  drbas: i tell my patients about ketchup. you may love ketchup but you don’t want to eat it all the time, do you?

  Ketchup. Today’s deep thought from the Dr. Bassett Magic 8-Ball.

  7

  RACHEL’S AUNT AND UNCLE—Stevie and Rick—don’t live in Bolinas, as Rachel originally told me, but outside Fairfax, on the road to Bolinas. Bolinas is on the coast, a weird holdover of the sixties. The locals tear down the highway signs, trying to prevent the uninitiated from finding it. Fairfax, home of the Coffee Barn and shops of various kitsch, is a more
typical Marin town. Beautiful, but definitely open for business. I much prefer Fairfax, and I like Rick and Stevie—who seem to have money enough to live where they want—for living there.

  Rick is a lawyer in the city. Stevie either currently has a job or used to have a job—Rachel isn’t sure. She does a lot of volunteer work, much of it involving pottery, underprivileged kids, and “that bald guru guy.”

  “The Dalai Lama?” I ask.

  “No, Lama Rinpoche,” Rachel says. She points ahead of us. “Now take the next right.”

  Their house is off the road a hundred yards, a little redwood marvel, full of windows and ringed with decks. In the drive are an old Jaguar and a brand-new Prius. What does this say about them? There’s a bit of ethical robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul on display, which I could write off as Marin hypocrisy, but this is not a time for easy judgments. They’ve generously invited me over for dinner. Rick—Rachel tells me—is grilling swordfish.

  There’s a pleasant sense of disorder in the front flowerbeds. Someone’s been working there. He/she has left a trowel, a hand rake, a pair of gloves, and a rubber kneeler. A plant—the tag reads FLAT WATTLE—rests on the cedar chips, roots wrapped in a dirty burlap sack. The garage door is open. A weathered ping-pong table is folded up, pushed against the wall.

  “Do they have kids?”

  “Stevie couldn’t conceive. Isn’t that sad?”

  “There are plenty of children in the world.” I mean it as a joke, but I hear an unexpected bitterness in my voice.

  Rachel stops and looks at me. “It made her sad.”

  We can hear talking in the backyard. I think of ketchup and balance and index funds. What’s the worst that could happen? That a settled and stable middle-aged couple could make me feel pathetic?

  More or less. Rachel takes my hand. As a gesture it feels a little forced, but what am I supposed to do: pretend we arrived separately? We walk around the side of the house, slipping on the eucalyptus leaves of the dry sloping yard. There’s an old green air conditioner on a concrete platform—a true rarity. We don’t do air-conditioning in NorCal. The house casts a shadow on us until we step into the backyard, which glitters with the sun. There are beds full of manzanita and lantana. Down the sloping yard toward the dry gully is a rough-cut labyrinth, like a Zen garden built by the Flintstones. A man—Rick, I assume—is working a grill the size of a pipe organ. He waves smoke from his face as he pokes at a thick fish steak. Clean-shaven, a little doughy in the middle, he wears cargo shorts, Crocs, a Rolling Stones concert T-shirt, and a fleece wrapped around his waist, though it’s blazing hot. He’s either an old fortysomething or a young fiftysomething—not as on in years as I’d like him to be.