Love, in Theory: Ten Stories

The Best Way Not to Freeze

1 T H E B E S T W AY N O T T O F R E E Z E ˛ They met in a camping equipment store, where he was working as a clerk and she had come to rent a pair of climbing shoes. The store was a block from the university where she taught composition in the Department of English. She was adjunct faculty there, though she referred to her status as abject. She made less than the graduate students, after all: $2,700 for each ten-week class. No health insurance, no benefits. On her salary she could not afford therapy , not even sliding scale; she could not scale it at all, she’d told the receptionist who’d quoted her prices by phone the week before, $80 to $100 an hour—“That’s a scale I’d slide right off,” she said; the receptionist asked if she’d like to make an appointment; “No, thanks,” she said. “Maybe next crisis.” Instead, she signed up for a women’s rappelling class, part of the low-cost stress-management program they were promoting at the campus health clinic. They offered yoga, they offered meditation, they offered people the chance to throw themselves off cliffs. She opted for this last, though she could not see the sense of sending T H E B E S T W A Y N O T T O F R E E Z E 2 anxious people to the brink of a bluff to cure them, but it was something she could afford and of all the options on offer only it had the cast of a vacation. According to the promotional flyer, they would travel on three consecutive Saturday mornings by bus to Taylors Falls, an hour north of the Twin Cities, a state park known for its waterfalls and scenic rock formations, hidden caves and high cliffs. The lemon-yellow flyer was optimistic, urging its readers to “confront your fears and practice techniques for self-esteem and stress management through this fun, recreational, noncompetitive sport.” She was standing in the aisle across from the cash register looking at camping equipment—at the water bottle holders made of colorful nylon and netting, at the shapely stainless steel objects (espresso makers, pots and pans), at all the many things she could not, for the most part, identify or afford but which she picked up and inspected anyway, knowing all along that she was wrong to admire them for their color and shape, ignorant of and indifferent to their uses but liking nonetheless the fleece, the nylon in neon orange and teal and violet. She pondered the nature lover’s ironic predilection for wildly unnatural colors and synthetics, trying all the while to get up the nerve to ask where they kept the shoes (store clerks terrified her; she preferred to shop from catalogs, whose models did not watch her as if she might be pilfering the goods)—when she heard his voice beside her. “Can I help you find something?” She looked up into the sort of face that, as a general rule, scared her—huge and German. He possessed an unnatural breadth and height, as if he were another species. She was embarrassed to be caught fingering the goods, as though she’d been found inspecting dildos in a sex shop, though a dildo she could’ve justified perusing as a cultural critic. Here there was no excuse. “I need to rent some shoes,” she said, “for climbing.” He was not handsome, but he held her interest the way beauty T H E B E S T W A Y N O T T O F R E E Z E 3 did, or ugliness, though he was neither. His eyes were pale as a wolf’s, and he had a large square head that seemed carved from balsa. He looked too old for her, she thought, though this was a casual unconsidered thought, the way, as casually, she would undress an attractive stranger walking toward her on the street or unthinkingly catch the scents of things—exhaust, burning rubber, baking bread, coffee. Deep grooves bracketed his mouth. A slight muscular pouch bulged at the curve of his jaw; he had a cleft chin. He looked like he should be advertising stew. “For rappelling?” His voice was soft, in contrast to his size. “Yes,” she said. His name tag...