The Behavior of Love: A Novel - Hardcover

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Virginia Reeves is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Her debut novel, Work Like Any Other, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and Booklist named it to their Top 10 First Novels of 2016. Virginia lives with her husband and daughters in Helena, Montana, where she teaches writing and speech at Helena College. The Behavior of Love is her second novel.

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The Behavior of Love

Chapter 1

Ed’s work keeps him late. Yesterday’s pile of incomplete tasks awaits him in his office, and today’s begins the moment he steps from his car. He never knows what the first thing will be, but it always meets him here in the dirt parking lot. Yesterday, it was Margaret wandering toward the Boulder River, whose waters have already drowned one patient. The day before, it was a six-year-old named Devin eating gravel. Today, it’s a young man bursting out the front doors of Griffin Hall, a white plastic chair over his head, a denim-clad orderly close behind. The orderly’s rubber club is raised. The boy drops to the ground and curls himself into a ball. The chair topples down the stairs and scatters a group of patients.

Orderlies are to use the clubs only if they feel physically endangered. Ed made this clear the day he became superintendent of the Boulder River School and Hospital. He’s been there every day for over a year now, and the clubs are still there every day, too.

The orderly is dragging the boy to his feet, pulling him back toward the doors. Ed doesn’t recognize either of them. He’s been doing his best to learn everyone’s names, but there are 750 patients in his care, and the staff turns over constantly.

Ed lights a cigarette and walks over. “I’ll take the patient from here,” he says.

The boy’s face is averted, chin cast down toward his left shoulder, teeth mouthing tongue. He holds his hands in fists at his chest. Ed can see grime on the boy’s neck, the stuff of weeks.

“All yours, Doc.” The orderly drops the boy’s arm. “If he runs again, you’re chasing him.”

The boy makes no move to run.

Ed should reprimand the orderly. He should get his name, at least, so he can write him up. But there are five cases in front of this one, all of them more severe, and the hospital is operating with only twenty-five percent of its needed staff. Plus, what with the regular turnover, Ed may never see this orderly again.

“The average tenure is seven weeks,” Sheila told him his first day. She’s one of the few long-term employees, a nurse who loves her patients. Single and dowdy and invested, Sheila doesn’t seem to mind the poor pay or long hours or isolated location. She lives in a small apartment in Boulder’s only brick apartment building, just up the road, wears bright red lipstick, styles her short hair into a feathered halo around her head. “What do I need extra money for?” she said. “It’s just me and the cat.”

Ed wants a hundred more Sheilas.

“Seven weeks?” he’d asked.

“Long enough to get ’em halfway trained.”

Ed looks at the boy in front of him. He knows not to touch him; touch is associated with violence now, with punishment. Running and its accompanying freedom and joy are associated with that, too. This is what behaviorism is—equations. The boy is simple; his equations are simple. Running = beating.

“What’s your name, son?”

The boy flinches but lifts his head. “George,” he says, a two-syllable word in his deep voice. “Jor-Ja.”

“It’s nice to meet you, George. I’m Edmund. I like to shake people’s hands when I meet them. You want to shake hands?”

George looks at Ed’s extended hand, then back at his face. Down and up a couple times before shaking his head.

“That’s fine. We’ll try again later, all right?”

George unclenches one of his fists in a wave, open-closed, and Ed lets himself smile at the small success. None of his friends from med school understood why he wanted to work with the developmentally disabled as opposed to the mentally ill. “You’ve got no chance of fixing them, Malinowski,” a pal once said. “No cure for those issues.” But Ed has always been more taken with an example of progress like George’s than with a decrease in psychoses. Maybe it’s the innocence of mental disability, or the misunderstanding, but Ed would take this hospital over the mental institution at Warm Springs any day.

“You play outside, now,” Ed says to George and leaves the boy on the steps.

Inside the building, the day disappears—the sun, the sky, mountains, trees, muddy play yard/parking lot. The confines of the building are the only reality, the edges and walls. All institutions share this in some way—a miniaturization of space, a shuttering of time—but Boulder’s compact isolation feels stronger than that of any institution Ed has previously worked in. Chairs line the hallway, and he fights the urge to hold one over his own head and flee.

Through the windowed doors of the dining room, Ed sees patients at different stages of eating, in terms of both progress and ability. Some are nearly finished, the meal a mess covering their faces and hair, clothes and hands. Some are just starting, their focus intent on the spoon or fork, its slow, shaky rise to the mouth. Table etiquette is part of their therapy—table etiquette and toilet training and self-dressing and shoe tying.

The din of the room makes its way to Ed—restless as the ocean, swelling and receding. A man in his twenties drops a green bean into the pocket of his shirt. Why are they serving green beans for breakfast? A woman feeds toast to a man twice her age. A boy scoops porridge into the curled claw of his fingers and rubs it across the bald head of the man next to him. Ed sees only one aide for the whole room but nothing that needs his immediate attention.

The year before Ed came, the staff went on strike. The National Guard was called in to man the hospital until the state raised pay a token amount and agreed to extra compensation for overtime. It was enough to stop the strike but not the deterioration.

“Whatever you need to get us out of this mess,” the director of institutions told Ed when he took the job. “Name it, and it’s yours.”

He should’ve known the word money wasn’t one they wanted him to name.

He makes his way down the east hallway toward his office. He isn’t one to believe in ghosts, but he always feels something both more and less than human as he walks these corridors, his shoes just another click and tap along the linoleum, mixing with the squeak of sneakers and clogs, the scuff of chairs pushed and repositioned. The hall is full of hapless patients, their voices mostly guttural, wide wordless sounds that nevertheless have a current tripping along underneath, a tendon of intellect.

“What’re you hearing today, Dr. Ed?” Penelope asks. She sits in a chair, a journal in her lap. She is his favorite patient, one of the few bright spots in the entire hospital.

She was sitting in the same spot a year ago when he was interviewing for the position, and she caught him listening to the institution’s sounds then, too. “You hear that?” she said. “It’s like a song when you listen right.” Ed had been taken by her voice first, its lucidity, and then the straightforward beauty of her face, her composed smile, her tall neck. “I try to write lyrics to it sometimes.” She held out her hand and introduced herself.

“What brought you here?” he asked.

“Take the job and you’ll find...