Love, Theoretically

Twenty-four hours before the events of the prologue, Elsie attends a family gathering with Greg Smith, a man who has hired her to pretend to be his girlfriend through the Faux app. Elsie has had Greg as a client for months, though this goes against Faux’s guidelines, as she feels sympathy for him and is slowly becoming his friend. Elsie explains how she ended up working with Faux: because she did not get the stable position in academia she hoped for after she obtained her PhD, and her multiple jobs as an adjunct professor cannot pay her bills. Greg uses Faux because his wealthy and clingy mother, Caroline, is fixated on the idea of her son having a partner.

While Greg is hiding from his mother in the bathroom, Elsie runs into Jack, Greg’s arrogant brother who Elsie thinks hates her. Elsie thinks about how she can read everyone she knows and can tailor her personality to fit what they want, just as she does with her clients at Faux. She reflects that she has been doing so since childhood—when, she believes, her diagnosis of Type I diabetes put a burden on her parents. Jack, however, is the only person Elsie cannot figure out, and she believes he sees through her people-pleasing tendencies. Elsie and Jack play a game of Go, and his grandmother, Millicent, is shocked that the game ends at a draw, as Jack has rarely lost a game. Greg and Elsie discuss meeting up for the last time the following month; he is about to go on a silent retreat and will not be able to be contacted for the next week.

Elsie’s students email her constantly with requests for extensions for assignments that she did not assign and inappropriate images as ways to ask for excused absences. Another email is from her mother, who demands Elsie’s help with her troublesome older brothers. A final email is from Dr. Monica Salt, a member of the MIT physics department at which Elsie is applying for a professorship. Elsie knows this tenure-track position would give her the stability she’s always wanted and help her break free from her busy and demeaning life as an adjunct, but she knows that MIT is also interviewing another candidate. She talks with her roommate, Cece, a linguistics PhD candidate, cinephile, and fellow Faux employee, who asks what Elsie’s academic advisor has to say about her chances. Dr. Laurendeau, Elsie’s PhD advisor, who is still very involved in her career and to whom Elsie attributes all of her academic success, is the person who secured Elsie’s jobs as an adjunct across three Boston universities and believes Elsie is entitled to the MIT position. In preparation for her interview, Elsie thinks it best to use the same tactics she does as a fake girlfriend to impress the hiring committee. She has come up with a protocol she calls APE, which stands for “assess the need […] plan a response” and “enact” (41) to become what the other person wants her to be.

Elsie has her first part of the MIT interview that night: a dinner with the physics department at which she meets Monica Salt early to discuss the process. Monica compliments Elsie excessively and tells her that she thinks Elsie should be the one who is hired, but also warns her of the academic politics at play. They discuss the long-standing feud between theoretical physicists like Elsie and Monica and experimental physicists, like Jonathan Smith-Turner, who wrote an infamous article discrediting theoretical physics and who has recently joined the department at MIT. In his article, Jonathan posed as a theoretical physicist and came to bogus conclusions, but the article supposedly underwent rigorous peer review and was published in Annals of Theoretical Physics, the journal that Laurendeau, Elsie’s advisor, edited. Not only did the article discredit the field of theoretical physics, but it also got Laurendeau fired and disgraced him as an academic. Though their areas of study closely overlap, Elsie is distraught when she learns that Jonathan is on the hiring committee and that the other candidate is an experimental physicist he has collaborated with. Monica tells her that most of the faculty members Elsie will meet with have already decided to hire George, the other candidate, but suggests that Elsie can still change their minds. She warns Elsie about Jonathan and how he might try to make her look bad before leading her to where the hiring committee is arriving in the restaurant. Elsie is determined to get the job, not only because she wants and needs it but because it will help her avenge her advisor and make Jonathan angry. Yet when Monica mentions that Jonathan Smith-Turner has arrived, Elsie turns to see Jack Smith, her client Greg’s older brother.

It takes a moment for Elsie to register the fact that the Jack Smith who hates her for dating his brother is the Jonathan Smith-Turner who made a joke of her entire field of study. Jack is just as surprised to see Elsie, under the impression that she is a librarian, as she told his family. Before dinner begins, Jack insinuates that he knows Elsie is lying without the other professors knowing. Elsie quickly rushes to the bathroom under the guise that she needs to wash her hands; a moment later, Jack does the same and leads her into the men’s room to discuss the situation. Jack accuses Elsie of lying to Greg because she never told him her real career, which she didn’t do only because it is Faux’s protocol to hide as much of herself as possible from her clients. Elsie wants to tell Jack the whole truth, but telling him that she is just pretending to be Greg’s girlfriend would reveal the secret that Greg is hiding from his family. Jack and Elsie hear two men’s voices coming nearer, and Jack pushes Elsie into a bathroom stall, leading to the moment mentioned in the prologue. The men who enter are two other professors, who make sexist comments about Elsie and bring up Jack’s article and his hate for theorists. Once they are gone, Jack threatens to tell Monica about how Elsie lied about being a librarian and brings up the fact that neither of them can contact Greg to tell the truth, as he is on a silent retreat for the week. Before storming out of the bathroom, Elsie vows to get the position and make Jack miserable.

Elsie tells Cece about what happened at the department dinner, and Cece—who dislikes but unknowingly benefits from Elsie’s chronic people-pleasing—is surprised that Elsie actually stood up for herself for once. Elsie tries to find out who her competition for the job is and comes across Georgina Sepulveda, a scientist whose work she admires, but then she stumbles across a paper by George Green. George has worked on two low-impact articles with Jack, but other than that, Elsie does not see why he would be considered for the MIT position. Thinking she is finally receiving a return call from Greg, Elsie answers a call from her mother. She thinks about how her parents only want her to be successful and stable but do not really care about anything happening in her life. Not only a people-pleaser, Elsie is also a peacemaker in her family, particularly for her twin brothers, Lucas and Lance, who are currently fighting over a woman. Elsie’s mom wants her to make her brothers stop fighting but doesn’t care about her chance at the MIT job when Elsie brings it up, not trying to understand the difference between an adjunct and a tenure-track professor.

Elsie meets with Laurendeau, who has only ever called her “Elise,” to talk about the position. He is taken aback when he hears she is not happy with the adjunct jobs he secured for her, not seeing how it does not grant her the financial stability she needs to simultaneously live and attend to her health issues. Elsie knows that “Elise” is the version of herself she presents to her advisor, who is one of the only people in her life who acknowledges her doctorate, as she was his first mentee years after the Jonathan Smith-Turner scandal. He believes that Elsie should withdraw her application to MIT because he “cannot allow [her] to work in the same department as that animal” (78) referring to Jack, the man who destroyed his career. Elsie tries to persuade him against it, as she cannot imagine another year of adjunct teaching and paying out of pocket for her insulin. Laurendeau concedes when he recognizes that her working at MIT could be an opportunity for revenge against Jack.

Elsie goes to perform her teaching demonstration for the hiring committee, but Monica tells her she will be teaching to a group of PhD students who are biased toward experimentalists. Shortly after she begins her lecture, a student asks her what the point of theoretical physics even is. Elsie tactfully answers his question and shifts the discussion to how theoretical and experimental physics help one another, persuading the students. Yet when she looks at Jack, Elsie still cannot read his expression and has no idea what he thinks of her. After her teaching demonstration, Elsie meets with the members of the hiring committee individually and recounts how she alters her personality to impress each of the professors. She goes to meet with Jack, who ignores her and continues his work when she enters his office. Jack asks her why she thinks he hates theorists, as he respects many, including Elsie, whose every published work he has read. Elsie mentions that Laurendeau was her mentor and that he hasn’t forgotten what Jack did 15 years prior, but she suddenly realizes that must have made Jack only 17 when he published the article. Jack is evasive when she asks why he wrote the article, turning Elsie’s questions around to ask why the article was even accepted. The two argue about Elsie’s lies to Greg and how she believes Jack hates her as a person and not just because she’s a theorist. Jack reveals that though he does not know why Elsie does it, he knows that she shapes herself to be the person everyone else wants her to be, and Elsie is stunned he understands her so well when she cannot understand him at all.