Chapter Twenty-Two

What to do? That was the question of the hour for nearly every hour (both waking and not) after I had spoken to Jerry on the beach.

It was like torture and, to be frank, it was distracting me at work. I was far behind in the plans for management and had only just established the list of employees who I deemed worthy of having made the initial pass. On the same weekend, I was to have a meeting with the head of the union to determine that the letters of warning that were to be sent to everyone else in the flagship location were in keeping with the union guidelines.

We’ll just have to see about that kept echoing in my head as I tried to focus, paired with the cocksure grin coming from Jerry.

It was so cruel and, in my more irate moments, I wondered if he had done such a thing to sabotage me. After all, the slower I was with getting the Fresh Face Co-Op back into the black, the longer I’d be stuck in Milwaukee, the longer I’d have time to spend with him.

Don’t flatter yourself, I thought as I sat over my disorganized papers scattered all over the desk in the cramped maintenance closet. There’s no way he’s that into you; you’re not living inside some tacky romance novel where the brooding hero employs insidious tactics in the name of true love.

Even within that context, I hate that the phrase “true love” popped up in my head. I didn’t even think it deserved to be used ironically; it was just such a tacky concept to me, silly and saccharine. It was one of the less original and compelling concepts shilled by card companies. It grossed me out.

It’s not that I didn’t think people didn’t love each other. It’s just that I didn’t appreciate the mysticism people liked to force on interpersonal relationships in that regard. I guess I sort of got that point of view from Elijah.

“I would never even let myself jokingly talk about concepts like ‘true love’ or ‘at first sight,” he liked to say. “When you talk about that stuff too much, the idea imprints itself into your consciousness, you start to think about it more abstractly and you start to believe in it.”

The theory seemed sound to me, if not a little pseudoscientific. I had never thought to question him about it until I was talking to him on the phone in my temporary apartment in Milwaukee.

It was a few hours before my meeting with the union representative for the Fresh Faced Co-Op and I was taking the time to get into the zone of being comfortable and relaxed so that I could be my most charming and reasonable seeming.

Then why would you use that time to talk to someone like Elijah? You might ask.

To be frank, I did not call him myself. The long answer was that my phone rang and I saw his name on the caller I.D. I felt a little bad as I had been too stressed out to talk to him for many weeks and he probably felt neglected since I was the only friend he had that talked regularly with him. The short answer is that I’m stupid.

We chatted about this and that for a while, until the unwelcome specter of my situation with Jerry crept up in the back of my mind. I recalled all the things Elijah had said about romantic love over the years and since the conversation had hit a bit of a lull, I decided to ask him about it.

“So Elijah, I’ve always wondered,” I said, continuing my streak of being incredibly awkward. “You don’t believe in love, do you?”

I figured this was the case because, even though we agreed on ideals like “true love” not being real, Elijah was a cynic and, therefore, he absolutely had to have a grimmer view than I did on nearly every topic, especially this one.

There was a long pause on the other end of the phone.

“What made you think of that?” Elijah asked.

“It’s just that you’ve always had such a hard stance on this sort of thing,” I said a little disingenuously. “I thought I’d like to get your straightforward take on it.”

There was another pause.

“You’ve met someone, haven’t you?” Elijah asked.

Curse him; I could never get anything past Elijah. It was both a blessing and a curse. I suspected it was that way for him as well.

“Not really,” I said.

I was full of it on that day and I knew it. It’s just that I wasn’t ready to spill the whole situation to him when I wasn’t even sure how to define it myself.

Elijah sighed, which was a good sign for me because it indicated that he was willing to drop the topic in favor of answering the original question. It was his number one tell that he had resigned himself to playing by the rules of another.

“It’s not that I don’t believe in love,” he said. “I believe in it very much. I think it’s an incredibly necessary function for determining our survival as a species in the infancy of mankind.”

“In English, please,” I said in a half mocking manner.

“Without love, how would a mother protect her child in a harsh environment despite the great risk to her own well-being?” he asked.

“So, you’re chalking it all up to the benefit of the propagation of the species?” I asked.

“Basically,” was Elijah’s response.

Now I knew why I had taken so long to question him about this topic. Frankly, his viewpoint would have seemed less grim if he had said he didn’t believe in it at all. The worst part of his explanation was that I wasn’t wholly certain that he was incorrect.

Of course he’s not incorrect, I thought to myself. What you should be concerned about is why you want him to be.

I couldn’t pin down for sure why I wanted him to be wrong or, at least, there was a part of me that didn’t want to admit that Jerry was a catalyst in wanting Elijah to be wrong about this. A month or two before this conversation, I wasn’t so sure that his explanation would have bothered me so much.

Perhaps Elijah had picked up on how grim he had made me feel because the next words he uttered were filled with a conciliatory tone.

“Hey Ron?” he asked.

“Yeah?” I asked back.

“When you really think about it, that’s more uplifting in a weird way,” he said.

“How so?” I asked.

Elijah chewed on the words roiling around in his head for a bit.

“Okay,” he said, when I knew he had composed some semblance of a coherent series of thoughts. “You’re thinking in terms of romantic love, right?”

I nodded, temporarily forgetting that we were talking on the phone and he was unable to see me. It didn’t matter, though, because he took it as a point of fact that I understood and kept going.

“Okay, so, the standard of romantic love in the west is monogamy,” Elijah went on to say. “You could say that there are evolutionary reasons for this. Jealousy is a byproduct of people not wanting to share a potential mate’s resources in both a literal and biological sense.”

So far, I was following, but I didn’t see why Elijah seemed to think this was comforting. If anything, it was more cold and clinical than whatever he had said before.

To be fair, though, he hadn’t actually promised an uplifting reprieve from the darkness I had been feeling at the bottom of my soul (not that Elijah believed in the “soul”, anyway). I had only inferred that this would make me feel better by reading the tone of his voice.

So, I just indicated to him that I understood by saying, “uh-huh” and let him carry on.

“But that’s only the expectation you have for your partner,” Elijah said. “When you’re paired off, your attraction to other potential mates doesn’t just go away.”

This perked up my ears. I was beginning to understand what Elijah was getting at. However, I didn’t exactly relate to this biological prototype he was setting forth. Sure, I had been able to assess the aesthetic appeal of other human beings for a long time: the symmetry of their faces, the thickness of people’s hair, the interesting way they carried or presented themselves and the rest. But then again, I could never recall having the connection that I felt with Jerry nor could I remember ever being so infatuated with anyone ever. In fact, I could not remember being infatuated with any idea ever.

The only possible exception was my desire to get back to California; I wanted that more than anything else in that moment. But that was a wholly different concept to say the least.

“But, if you’re doing it right, you defy all the feelings of attraction for other people in favor of accommodating your mate’s comfort and happiness,” Elijah said. “Isn’t that incredible? Billions and billions of years of evolution are telling you to do something and the best among us don’t do it because it is what we are willing to eschew for the people that we love.”

I stayed silent at this because it simply didn’t apply to me.

But you don’t have to defy anything, I thought to myself. There is Jerry and only Jerry. Nobody else has ever even compared up until this point.

And I sincerely doubt anyone ever would.

“Well,” said Elijah. “That’s just what I think.”

My head was a mess at that point. I was certainly in no position to negotiate with a union leader who was more than likely to be pretty hostile toward what I was trying to do. Poor Elijah had thought he was clearing things up for me, but he had only succeeded in making things more of a muddled mess.

“Yeah,” I said. “It certainly makes sense if you look at it from a certain point of view.”

I did not say that it was not my point of view, nor could it be.