Does Not Love by James Tadd Adcox.
Title: Does Not Love.
Author: James Tadd Adcox.
Genre: Fiction.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2014.
Summary: Set in an archly comedic, alternate-reality Indianapolis that is completely overrun by Big Pharma, the novel chronicles Robert and Viola's attempts to overcome loss through the miracles of modern pharmaceuticals. Their marriage crumbling after a series of miscarriages, Viola finds herself in an affair with the gruff and mysterious FBI agent who has recently appeared at her workplace, while her husband Robert becomes enmeshed in an elaborate conspiracy designed to look like a drug study.
My rating: 7/10
My review:
♥ "My womb is become a grave," Viola, still a little drunk, whispers to Robert in bed that night.
♥ "I want to be kind towards you," Viola says to Robert. Robert is cutting up a tomato for a tomato sandwich. "Ultimately this is your loss, as well as mine. But I'm not sure if I have enough kindness right now to show towards both of us."
"I get that," Robert says. "That makes sense."
"In the future I will probably be kinder," Viola says.
♥ The night is so clear through the trees.
"Do you remember how things were when we first moved here together?" Viola asks. "When we were first married?"
"In what sense?"
"In a general sense."
"I think so."
Viola stands and walks off towards the little wood on the edge of their property. She stands between the trees, and turns to face Robert. Moonlight illuminates her face. "The laws of physics work equally well in both directions; what we interpret as entropy is, perhaps, only our preference for one state of matter over another. When you and I were first married, there was a great sense of possibility in the world. We were in love with this possibility, as much as we were in love with each other. Which is to say: we did not know what was to come. Perhaps we still would have married each other, if we knew what was to come. Perhaps we would have married each other in any case. Contemporary science teaches us that all moments in time exist simultaneously. It is imaginable that some other beings, beings greater than us, could look across points in time the way we look across points in space. For such a being, the idea of loss would be unimaginable. For us, however..." Viola gestures, as if trying to capture something with her hand that she could not quite fit into words.
♥ "It will be better later Robert."
Robert is quiet. Violas can feel the hurt radiating off of him like heat.
♥ Robert, as a rule, is not used to being angry. He's used to being level-headed. This thing that has been happening, where he feels like he's put in a situation where he gets angrier and angrier and has nothing whatsoever that he can do about it, is a new situation, one that he is unfamiliar with.
Robert considers the possibilities: He could break down the damn door. Breaking down the damn door could, to a certain manner of thinking, be seen as acting out of concern for his wife.
"I'm considering breaking down the door," Robert says. "I feel like that could be seen as acting out of concern for you. Would you see that as acting out of concern for you?"
"No."
Robert goes to bed, alone. Robert buys new two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar running shoes.
♥ "Oh Robert," Viola says.
Viola pushes back Robert's still damp hair from his forehead. She thinks: This is my husband, for whom I care very much. She thinks at the same time: I could live without him.
The ways emotions are layered, Viola thinks, and how you often can't tell which one is the real one and which one is the one you are playing at.
♥ Robert and Viola watch a DVD of Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood. The room around them begins to thicken with ghosts. From the crowd of ghosts, Viola's mother steps forwards, her face a mask of white powder, dark lines drawn in kohl around her eyes and mouth.
"What are you looking for?" Viola's ghost-mother asks, impatiently. Viola realizes, abruptly, that she had been scanning the crowd of ghosts.
"I guess," Viola starts, then says, "Nothing. Never mind. It's stupid." Then: "There's that one Gwendolyn Brooks poem? About how she feels the presence of the children she might have had? Not ghosts, exactly, but potential ghosts?"
♥ Robert and Viola drink ginger-infused ice water in the café at the front of the art museum and look out at the giant windows that cover most of the wall. "It might stop," Viola says. "We have no assurance whatsoever that it won't."
"What might?"
"How from here you can see trees and beyond them, cars, but somewhere beyond all of that, just beyond where you can see, it might just, you know. Stop."
"How are things going with your FBI agent?"
"He's not my FBI agent," Viola says. "I haven't claimed him."
..Robert and Viola stare out the window, imagining some place beyond what they can see, where the cars and parking lot asphalt and trees and people might suddenly, terrifyingly stop.
♥ At the hardware store, there to examine different kinds of faucets, he finds himself instead wandering off to the lumber aisle and breathing in the smell of untreated wood. The possibilities of newness are overwhelming.
♥ "It's possible that I may not be in love with you anymore," Viola says carefully, lying next to Robert that night. Robert is quiet in a way that makes Viola think that he maybe already knew.
"Do you want to stay married?" he says, finally.
♥ Viola comes home to find Robert in his office, watching the instructional DVD on rough sex. "If I'm being one hundred percent honest, I don't understand why you would want this," Robert says to Viola.
"You mean, what's wrong with me?" Viola asks.
"I didn't say that." Robert follows Viola out of the office and into the kitchen, where Viola starts putting away dishes a little too quietly. "Could you try to understand why this is difficult for me? People don't naturally wish themselves harm."
Viola keeps putting away the dishes. Robert sits at the kitchen table. He is suddenly very tired.
"There's a difference between hurt and harm," Viola says.
♥ Beyond the windows of Robert's car, the wind seems to assume shapes, even bodies with distinct personalities, that for a moment brush past, then dissipate, and are gone.
♥ "I still care about you very much," Viola says, in bed with him that night. "I think it's important for you to know that."
Robert continues facing the wall on his side of the bed. "I know."
♥ "There are things more important in life than happiness sometimes," Robert says, scanning the aisle.
"Like what?"
"Like family. Or ethical convictions. Or helping others."
"Don't those things make you happy? Isn't that the point?"
♥ "I think one of the problems with growing up as a kid who spent basically all of her time reading is that it's hard to accept the idea that this single life is all you get," Viola says. "You get so used to the idea of a narrative arc to things, of life as a sort of meaningful unit, of being able to switch from one life to another and from one head to another. And on some level you begin to think that that's how things actually are, that you can try something out, and if you don't like it, you can just switch. That at some point you get to be everything. Then suddenly you're twenty five years old, thirty, and you realize that you only actually get one life and one head to be inside of."
Bethany gives her a look.'
"Well, okay, I realized it before. Like, logically speaking, yes. I'm talking about, just... just this sense, not really at the level of thought, but the sense that the world works more like books than like, you know, the world."
♥ He crawls through the hole, holding the flashlight beam steady in front of him, and finds that, once inside the wall, he can stand up. It's an old house, Robert thinks, there are bound to be some surprises. Still, after living here with Viola for four years, you would think that we knew the place pretty well. Robert walks through the darkness, flashlight beam shining off into the distance, trying to figure out exactly where, in the home's layout, he is. The air feels deathly still. There are not, as far as he can tell, any spiderwebs, there don't seem to be any insects or animals at all. The ground is flat, featureless, and is the only thing he can see other than the hole in the drywall, receding farther and farther into the distance. Robert feels empty. The emptiness feels like a secret.
"If I keep walking, will I find anything?" he says.
"No," says the emptiness. "This is the space reserved in every house of emptiness. It is a space that cannot be filled."
"Once I patch up the wall, this space will continue to exist," Robert says.
"Correct," says the emptiness.
"And this is the space that consumes all of our efforts to fix things, to make them right."
"Also correct."
Robert sits down on the featureless ground and turns off the flashlight. "And if I decide to stay here?"
"You will be consumed in the emptiness. You will become part of it. This is already beginning to happen, as you have noticed. There is a yawning emptiness inside you at this very moment."
Robert closes his eyes, opens them, closes them again. There is no difference, of course.
♥ Instead, he decides they should go to Italy.
"Italy!" he says the next evening, when Viola gets home.
"What?" Viola says.
"Italy! I just bought us tickets."
"When were you going to ask me about this?"
"We can rent a small European car and drive around the countryside, taking in the beauty of the Italian landscape. In such surroundings our love cannot help but grow and grow."
"I just got back from medical leave," Viola says.
"É bella e piacente, l'Italia," Robert says. "They will be understanding. They will, they will."
Viola thinks: Is there a fresh start for us, in Italy?
Robert flies to Italy, alone.
♥ ..The world is so big. Even the tiny part of it that we see in a single lifetime is so big.
Your Robert.
PS. I love you and I believe you when you tell me that you care about me. What other choice do I have?
♥ There is an air of menace to the FBI agent. It is not exactly in the things that he does-or rather, if it is, it is hard to pin down exactly what those things are. Menace seems to adhere to him, as a quality.
It is cultivated, he tells Viola. The air of menace is a part of the job.
"That doesn't make it any less menacing," Viola says.
.."How do you cultivate it? The air of menace," Viola asks, intending this as a sort of peace offering.
There are ten basic methods, the FBI agent tells her, though of course individual agents are free to come up with their own variations. "Method number one: The scowl. It should not be a simple, straightforward, or otherwise thuggish scowl. It should contain elements of both disappointment and resolution. One should look as though one is scowling in spite of one's own inclinations, that one would rather not be scowling but that one recognizes the necessity of the scowl. It should be clear, in other words, that the necessity of the scowl arises from circumstances outside of oneself.
"Method number two: The question of what to do with one's arms. This is a difficult one; fidgeting of any sort betrays weakness. Many people, in attempting to portray an air of menace, will cross the arms in front of the torso. That is incorrect. It telegraphs to the target one's own insecurity, that one must so forcefully project confidence. Much better to keep one's arms at one's sides, loose and ready. Rather than mask fidgeting, one demonstrates thereby that one simply isn't going to fidget.
"Method number three: Cleanliness. Method number three-b: Clean-shavenness. Methods number four through eight, classified. Method number nine: Righteousness. One should never give the appearance of so much as a moment of self-doubt. It should be clear that any violence that one is to visit upon the other, no matter how distasteful personally (see method one), is absolutely necessary from a grander perspective. Method number ten: Dark, freshly-pressed suits."
♥ She thinks: When we were first married, I thought that you were a well of stability, in which I could drown.
♥ "I can't imagine a point in my life when I would not love you," Robert says, looking down at his bowl.
♥ Robert and Viola have dinner with Trey and his date at a new restaurant. All we ever do is go to new places, Viola thinks. The constant churn of the new. Once, newness was invigorating. Now, I am not sure if I could identify the difference between one new place and another.
♥ Somewhere around the main course Viola and Robert end up in a fight. No one is sure how it happens, not even Robert and Viola. They are fighting about the secret law, which Robert is in favor of and Viola opposes, except that really they are fighting about the fact that Robert suspects Viola is having an affair.
♥ "It's like I've got a hole inside me where I should have an assurance of love," Viola says. "I look at other people going about their day, doing the kinds of things people do, shopping for groceries, driving cars, picking up and putting down objects of various sizes, and the only way I can imagine that they can keep doing all of that is that somewhere inside them they have an assurance of love. They don't even have to think about it, because they know it's there. But I think about it all the time, because it's not."
♥ "She did love me, once," Robert says. "I think that just... it was a lot to deal with. For both of us. My friend Trey thinks it's treatable. Her condition."
"What is her condition?"
"That she doesn't love me anymore."
Hugo looks at Robert with concern.
♥ All around him he hears voices, a messy, conflicting jangle. His head feels thick, part hungover, part still drunk. These voices, he thinks. Is this an unintended adverse effect? Eventually he realizes that the television is on. He turns it off. The radio is on. He turns that off, too. He goes from room to room, turning off televisions and radios. I don't remember turning any of this on last night, he thinks. Perhaps Viola did it. Perhaps she came home at some point while I was sleeping and turned on every television and radio in the house. Why would she do that, he thinks. Could that be an unintended adverse effect, the need to be surrounded by voices? To be blanketed by them? He can see how, in a certain way, it would be comforting. He tries to think back to the unintended adverse effects that Trey listed for him. He cannot remember if "needing to be blanketed by voice," or some corresponding scientific term, was on the list.
♥ Sometimes Viola likes to think that because of the NSL nobody else can actually see the FBI agent when she's with him. She imagines the drivers of cars they pass reacting in horror at seeing her driving in a car that drives itself. She imagines the other drivers so surprised that they crash into railings and trees and other cars behind the FBI agent's car. Viola sits beside the FBI agent picturing constant car crashes in their wake.
♥ It is not the content of the interrogation that is important, she thinks, but the form... If you hurt someone enough, scare them enough, they will say whatever you want them to. It is a way of turning someone else's body into a kind of puppet. Content becomes meaningless: you may as well be talking to yourself. But the form, the ritual... A tornado, a whirlpool, violence swirling around emptiness. Love, too: a kind of violence, drawing everything into the emptiness at its center... Eye, she thinks. That's the term for it, the center of a tornado, that kernel of nothing. The eye.
♥ When I was younger, she thinks, I wanted to live a life that was not just for myself. I wanted to do something large, something important, something pure and full of grace. When did life become such a small thing? When did I become an animal that mostly reacts? Oh yes, I loved men before Robert, and I was hurt by them, and I found Robert and decided that he would not hurt me. This is how life becomes small: you grow up, which is to say, you get hurt, and then you adjust your life in ways in which you hope you will no longer get hurt. But of course you get hurt again, and what difference does it make, who's responsible?
"I feel so bad, so much of the time," the FBI agent says. She rubs her hand through his hair.
"It's okay," she says, shushing him. "It's okay."
Somewhere, I am being watched, she thinks. On other screens. Images of me, scattered throughout the nation. She considers the FBI agent. This is not his fault, she thinks. Or not entirely. I was in the process of becoming a certain type of image-fitting a certain role-long before. Can I say that it is Robert's fault? No, not entirely-I had as much to do with it as anyone-
Robert, who was once her husband, which is to say, who was once married to an image of her, calls, over and over again, on her cell phone. She can never quite convince herself to answer it.
♥ Beyond the complex's gates, rows of bright orange roll-up doors stretch off into the distance. Small fires are everywhere. Guinea-piggers look up at Robert, sweating, shaking, their eyes glazed over, many of them not seeing him as he walks past, or, if they do see him, not knowing whether he is an hallucination. Others don't even bother to look up, but continue feeding their fires with pieces of junk mail or gathered sticks. Huge flakes of ash float through the air like terrifying moths.
"This is horrible," Robert says.
"This is the underside of the world," Hugo proclaims, voice suddenly taking on dramatic-movie tones. "This is-oh, hi kids."
A group iof half-dozen kids runs by, throwing pieces of ribhble at each other. One of them throws a piece of rubble at RObert, which hits him, hard, on the shoulder.
"Hey!" Hugo says. "Don't throw rubble at Robert. Robert doesn't even know how to play the rubble game."
Robert rubs his shoulder. "Did those kids have horns?"
"Horns?" Hugo asks. "Oh. The bony protrusions. Yes, certain of the younger children here have bony protrusions. It was a statistically insignificant birth defect resulting from a previous phase I drug trial that their parents participated in."
"That seemed like a lot of kids with horns that just ran by."
Hugo shrugs. "Statistics," he says.
♥ Robert is filled with sympathy. There is so much suffering in the world, he thinks. Why are we made like this, that we can only feel someone else's suffering when we can imagine it to be our own?
♥ It is impossible to say how many people he is in the middle of, it could be a hundred or a thousand, the world seems filled with them and Robert's options, suddenly, limited to the terrified mind of this press of bodies.
♥ The doctor sighs and looks up at the ceiling. The orderly to Robert's left holds Robert's left arm behind his back and twists it, firmly but without undue violence, until it feels as though it might wrench free from its socket. Robert screams. The orderly to Robert's right hands him a pen.
"Here," the doctor says, indicating the appropriate line on the form. "Thank you. Here, as well, please," the doctor says. "Initial here."
"This isn't legally binding," Robert says. "I was under duress."
The doctor flips through his forms until he comes to one that affirms the patient has signed all forms free of duress, and the orderly twists Robert's arm behind his back until he signs it.
♥ "Do you imagine that she sounds different, when she's with another man? So much of who we are depends on who we are with."
♥ "There were moments when she loved me," the man says. "Even if she did not love me all the time, there were moments when she did. I have photographic evidence of this. Video stills of her eyes, magnified to hundreds of times other original dimensions, in which one can see-scientifically, objectively-that she loved me, at least during that moment."
♥ Robert throws one picture after another into the fire. It is hard. He is not throwing away what might have been but what was. Viola helps him. She holds him when he cries, with her hand she brushes the sides of his face, his hair. She insists, though, on feeding them into the fire. When Robert has trouble placing the next photograph into the flame, she guides his hand, gentle, unyielding.
♥ They work in silence, as if afraid that any unnecessary sound might break the truce, however brief, that has been called forth between them.
They sleep in different rooms, pass each other in the hallway like memories.
♥ "Look, I can find my own way back."
"That's ridiculous," Robert says.
"I don't want to be in a car with you right now," Viola says. "I don't want to share so little space."
"I came down here because that's what we do," Robert says. "We support each other. That is how this is supposed to work."
"This doesn't work," Viola says. "Jesus, Robert. None of this works."
♥ Viola's uncle stands just outside the security checkpoint, longing after her like a ghost.
♥ Viola keeps expecting the FBI agent to reappear at the library, to call her, to materialize out of the shadows as she goes to unlock her car some night. It is like a long pause after a note, when you can't be certain another note will follow. Finally, she tops waiting.
♥ Viola thinks of what it means, that she wants someone to hurt her during sex. Does it mean that she's a bad person? Does the fact that Robert is unwilling to hurt her during sex mean that he is a fundamentally good person? Will he stay always by her side? Is he true? Is he chivalrous? Is he well-mannered? Well-heeled? Will he defend her against the evils that arrive time and time again in life? Or is he lacking in backbone? She thinks about when they were in North Carolina, when he chased and tackled the mugger. Was that backbone? Or was that an attempt to redirect other, overwhelming frustrations in his life, and hence (perhaps) a lack of backbone? Does she want backbone? Does it take any backbone to hit her during sex, when she so vocally wants to be hit? And what does any of this have to do with her upbringing?
It doesn't have a damn thing to do with her upbringing, she decides.
Robert holds Viola down on their bed. He slaps her. He doesn't feel anything. He slaps her again. She is breathing hard. He can feel how she pushes against him, he can tell-the word that occurs to him is "observe," he is observing-how much she is enjoying it. He thinks, I could continue to do this. He thinks, There's nothing actually difficult about this, about not caring. There's no particular reason I need to care. I could live my entire life in this space, empty, performing the actions that I need to perform at any given moment. Viola makes sounds like she is about to come and then she comes.
♥ What is holding me in Indianapolis anyway, he thinks.
Robert goes to a bar on the west side by himself. He is sure that someone has followed him.
Viola lies in bed, eyes towards the darkened ceiling, asking herself, Is this the time he won't come back? Is this?
Driving home, Robert thinks, Can I even say the word love without swallowing my own tongue?> I love, Robert thinks. That is a true statement. But what the hell does it mean? Can love exist without an object? Can love be a state of being, unfocused?
Viola thinks. Robert thinks. Viola thinks.
After a time, Robert crawls back into bed beside his wife.
He doesn't want to think that this is all love comes down to, that every night that he's able, he crawls back into bed beside his wife.
Viola thinks, Okay. Robert thinks, Is that all? Is it as cheap as that? I come back, she comes back, I come back? Viola thinks, Okay. That's something.