I know I’m opening myself to the obvious Jeopardy! joke as I say it, but Jake doesn’t make it. Of course he doesn’t.
“Why is it impossible that I’m the smartest human on earth beyond just saying that it’s crazy?”
“I don’t even know where to start.”
“That’s the whole point. You just assume it to be too far-fetched to be real. You can’t perceive that someone you know, some regular dude sitting beside you in a car, is the smartest person. But why not?”
“Because what do you even mean by smart? Are you more book-smart than me? Maybe. But what about building a fence? Or knowing when to ask someone how they’re doing or feeling compassion or knowing how to live with others, to connect with other people? Empathy is a big part of smarts.”
“Of course it is,” he says. “That’s all part of my question.”
“Fine. But still, I don’t know, I mean, how could there even be a smartest person?”
“There has to be. Whatever algorithm you create, or whatever you decide makes up intelligence, someone has to meet those criteria more than everyone else. Someone has to be the smartest in the world. And what a burden it is. It really is.”
“What does it matter? One smartest person?”
He leans a little toward me. “The most attractive thing in the world is the combination of confidence and self-consciousness. Blended together in the proper amounts. Too much of either and all is lost. And you were right, you know.”
“Right? About what?”
“About the best kisser,” he says. “Thankfully you can’t be the best kisser alone. It’s not like being the smartest.”
He leans back his way, reasserts both hands on the wheel. I look out my window.
“And anytime you want to have a fence-building contest, just let me know,” he says.
He never let me finish my story. I never kissed Doug after our lesson. Jake assumed. He assumed I kissed Doug. But a kiss needs two people who want to kiss, or it’s something else.
Here’s what really happened. I went back to the car that time. I leaned in the window and opened my hand, revealing the tiny wrinkled candy wrapper, the one Doug gave me. I uncrumpled it and read it: My heart, my heart alone with its lapping waves of song, longs to touch this green world of the sunny day. Hello!
I still have the candy wrapper somewhere. I saved it. I don’t know why. After reading those lines to Doug, I turned and ran back into my house. I never saw him again.
—He had keys. He wasn’t scheduled to be here, but he had keys. He could do whatever he wanted.
—Wasn’t there supposed to be some revarnishing done during the break?
—Yes, but that happened right at the start of the holidays. So the varnish would have time to dry. The varnish scent can be pretty strong.
—Toxic?
—Again, I’m not sure. Maybe, if that’s all you were breathing.
—Are we going to see any autopsy results?
—I can look into that.
—Was it . . . messy?
—You can imagine.
—I can.
—We shouldn’t get into the details right now.
—I hear they found a breathing apparatus, a gas mask, near the body?
—Yes, but it was an old one. It’s unclear if it still worked.
—There’s so much we don’t know about what really happened in there.
—And the only one who could tell us is gone.
Jake has started talking about aging. I didn’t see it coming. It’s not a topic we’ve ever discussed before. “It’s just one of those culturally misunderstood things.”
“But you think getting old is good?”
“I do. It is. First of all, it’s inevitable. It just seems negative because of our overwhelming obsession with youth.”
“Yeah, I know. They’re all positives. But what about your boyish good looks? You can kiss those good-bye. Are you prepared to be fat and bald?”
“Whatever we lose physically as we age is worth it, given what we gain. It’s a fair trade-off.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m with you,” I say. “I actually want to be older. I’m happy to age, seriously.”
“I keep hoping for some gray hairs. Some wrinkles. I’d like to have some laugh lines. I guess, more than anything, I want to be myself,” he says. “I want to be. To be me.”
“How so?”
“I want to understand myself and recognize how others see me. I want to be comfortable being myself. How I reach that is almost less important, right? It means something to get to the next year. It’s significant.”
“I think that’s why so many people rush into marriage and stay in shitty relationships, regardless of age, because they aren’t comfortable being alone.”
I can’t say this to Jake and I don’t, but maybe it’s better to be alone. Why abandon the routine we each master? Why give up the opportunity for many diverse relationships in exchange for one? There’s plenty of good with coupling up, I get it, but is it better? When single, I tend to focus on how much the company of someone would improve my life, increase my happiness. But does it?
“Do you care if I turn this down a bit?” I ask, adjusting the radio before waiting for his reply. I’ve turned it down multiple times on this drive; Jake keeps turning it back up. I think he might be a bit deaf. At least some of the time. It’s like all absentminded ticks—there sometimes, but other times, not so much.
One night, I had a headache. We were chatting on the phone and he was planning on coming over to hang out. I asked him to bring me a couple of Advil. I wasn’t sure he’d remember, even though I’d repeated it. It was one of the bad headaches I’ve been getting recently. I assumed he’d forget. Jake forgets things. He can be a bit of a scatterbrained professor cliché.
When he arrived at my place, I didn’t say anything about the pills. I didn’t want him to feel bad if he’d forgotten. He didn’t say anything, either. Not at first. We were talking about something else, I can’t remember, and he just said out of the blue, “Your pills.”
He pushed a hand into his pocket. He had to straighten out his legs to get his hand in. I watched him.
“Here,” he’d said.
He didn’t just pull out two pills from his linty pocket. He handed me a small ball of Kleenex, all wrapped up in itself and sealed with a single piece of tape. The package looked like a large white Hershey’s Kiss. I undid the tape. Inside were my pills. Three of them. An extra, in case I needed it.
“Thanks,” I said. I went into the bathroom for water. I didn’t say anything to Jake, but to me, the wrapping was significant. Protecting the pills like that. He wouldn’t have done that for himself.
It threw me off a bit, made me rethink things. I was going to break up with him that night—maybe. It’s possible I was. I wasn’t planning to. But it could have happened. But he put my pills in the Kleenex.
Are small, critical actions enough? Small gestures make us feel good—about ourselves, about others. Small things connect us. They feel like everything. A lot depends on them. It’s not unlike religion and God. We believe in certain constructs that help us understand life. Not only to understand it, but as a means of providing comfort. The idea that we are better off with one person for the rest of our lives is not an innate truth of existence. It’s a belief we want to be true.
Forfeiting solitude, independence, is a much greater sacrifice than most of us realize. Sharing a habitat, a life, is for sure harder than being alone. In fact, coupled living seems virtually impossible, doesn’t it? To find another person to spend all your life with? To age with and change with? To see every day, to respond to their moods and needs?
It’s funny that Jake brought up intelligence earlier. His question about the smartest human in the world. It’s like Jake knew I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve been thinking about all of these things. Is intelligence always good? I wonder. What if intelligence is wasted? What if intelligence leads to more loneliness rather than to fulfillment? What if instead of productivity and clarity, it generates pain, isolation, and regret? It’s been on my mind a lot, Jake’s intelligence. Not just now. I’ve been thinking about it for a while.
His intelligence initially attracted me, but in a committed relationship, is it a good thing for me? Would someone less intelligent be harder to live with or easier? I’m talking long-term here, not just a few months or years. Logic and intelligence aren’t linked with generosity and empathy. Or are they? Not his intelligence, anyway. He’s a literal, linear, intellectual thinker. How does this make thirty or forty or fifty years together more appealing?
I turn to him. “I know you don’t like talking about actual work stuff, but I’ve never seen your lab. What’s it like?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s hard for me to envision where you work.”
“Picture a lab. That’s pretty much it.”
“Does it smell like chemicals? Are there lots of people around?”
“I don’t know. I guess so, yeah, usually.”
“But you don’t have any problems being distracted, or concentrating?”
“Usually it’s fine. Every now and then there’s a disturbance or something, someone talking on the phone or laughing. Once I had to ‘shhh’ a colleague. That’s never fun.”
“I know how you are when you get focused.”
“At those times I don’t even want to hear the clock.”
I think this car must be dusty, or maybe it’s just the vents. But my eyes feel dry in here. I adjust the vent, aiming it fully toward the floor.
“Give me a virtual tour.”
“Of the lab?”
“Yeah.”
“Now?”