Savage Love (18 page)

Oh, he thought, we are always looking for our one true love, but invariably she suffers from a tendency to insecure attachment, or has slept with thirty-three other strangers through
Match.com
, or wants to share herself with your best friend. Perfection eludes us. We are doomed to disappointment and negotiation. The other is always,
always
, someone else.

Ona Frame had watched in horror tinged with satisfaction as the newly luminous Amanda Hawk descended her plank stoop and let herself into the
BMW
. He had not tried to conceal his presence, driving just behind the
BMW
, once nudging its rear fender at a stoplight. (He had a theory that if you stalked openly, it wasn't stalking any more, only an intimate friendship.)

He had trailed the couple to the Family Passive Recreation Park (an old trysting ground, which Ona Frame had discovered with Emma Christmas one Christmas), then Virgil's Roast House, the library, and Shelby's apartment. Sometimes Ona Frame found himself driving ahead of the
BMW
, or so it seemed. Again, it occurred to him that the roles had reversed and Shelby was following him. At the library, Amanda Hawk jumped out of the car without waiting for it to come to a full stop, glared at Shelby, spat words Ona Frame could not hear, then slammed the door getting back in. At the Family Passive Recreation Park, Shelby attempted to have finger sex while pretending to do the Sunday crossword, but this only erupted in an argument.

In the Price Chopper, Ona spied from behind a pyramid display of Bush's Baked Beans as Betsy Edger marched Shelby through the organic foods. There was something simian about Shelby's affect, in the way he crouched beside her, swinging his arms below his knees. He wore a winter scarf, though it was midsummer, no doubt to conceal the livid blue weal that betrayed his recent suicide attempt. His pupils were dilated, from the Vicodin, Ona Frame thought (he had long known of Shelby's flirtations with addiction, how he loved gum surgery, for example, for the painkillers after).

Shelby seemed afraid of Betsy Edger, often winced when she turned to address him. When he spoke, she had to lean down to hear his hoarse whispers and often seemed impatient at having to do so.

Once, when Shelby'
s wandering glance seemed to focus in Ona Frame's direction, Ona Frame offered a tentative wave and a nod of his head and then pushed his cart into a parallel aisle. (He had absent-mindedly loaded the cart with plastic cartons of sliced pineapple, overripe avocados, and super-economy-size maxi-pads.)

Shelby cornered him breathlessly by the breath mints. He looked worse, more desperate, up close, also sinister, if not malevolent. His florid face seemed ready to explode into flame. (There had always been a struggle with high blood pressure, which Ona Frame assumed would one day be the end of Shelby, given his incompetence at killing himself.)

In a barely audible whisper, so soft that Ona Frame had to lean into his friend's face to hear the words, Shelby said, “She's insatiable. Ona, get out while you can. Save yourself. She's been talking about leaving me for you. I can't bear the contempt in her voice.”

And Ona Frame said, “Been writing, have you? You always look like this when you're doing your best work.” He pitched his voice to sound affable but barely concealed a sneer.

Shelby caught himself in full paranoid flight and took a breath. He said, “Why, no. You know I can't write when things are like this. She'll destroy me before I write anything worthwhile again. You're the one who always comes up with something brilliant when the situation has turned to cinders and ashes. Remember what happened after Majory Sass?
”

Ona Frame was taken aback at this outright denial of what he knew to be true. It was Shelby who was hooked on love, who wrote on love, who needed the brutal excitement of the mutual psychic invasion that is love in order to create. True, Ona Frame's Majory Sass poem had been published, not his first either. But he had never been in Shelby's class, never considered himself a real writer. He foretold the future — not very well. There were often complaints from irate readers who foolishly took his advice.

Shelby said, “She says we look alike. Even our you-know-whats are the same, she says. She says that with the lights out,
she can't tell who she's with. It enrages me. It's as if I don't exist. You know she only comes when she's by herself.”

The two men dragged cases of bottled water off the shelf and, using the maxi-pads as cushions, made themselves comfortable in the aisle. Shelby asked Ona Frame for a cigarette, which he fitted into a six-inch amber holder and lit with a monogrammed lighter (OF for Ona Frame —
Shelby had stolen the lighter but refused to acknowledge it). He lit one for Ona Frame as well, although Ona Frame rarely smoked except under stress, which, when he thought about it, was most of the time. Ona Frame expected someone to object, but many shoppers seemed delighted to see a pair of desperate outlaws in their midst. Several asked for cigarettes as well. A blue haze, a fog of smoke, drifted into the steel rafters.

Someone offered them a beer, and someone else broke out the Planters Deluxe Mixed Nuts. A conversation erupted that had nothing to do with Betsy Edger or love or shopping but seemed, insofar as Ona Frame paid attention, to be about Schopenhauer's aesthetics, or perhaps it was Schoenberg's atonal music. A joint began to make the rounds as more and more shoppers joined in. Gusts of laughter swept the aisle.

A tiny black-haired woman, with spectacles on a garnet chain, peered over her lenses and said, “You are Frame, the poet. I recognize you.”

A pair of young lovers stood to one side watching, smiling to themselves. The girl was pregnant. She seemed radiantly happy and took the boy's hand, whispering something in his ear, and he blushed and kissed her hard suddenly.

Ona Frame and Shelby could see Majory Sass flirting with a checkout boy, a teenager, at the foot of the aisle. At a distance, her face animated, a good-natured smile playing across her broad, appealing features, a hand now and then dragging through her bobbed hair, she seemed beautiful, guileless and innocent, not the infernal succubus they had come to know so well.

Ona Frame whispered hoarsely, imitating Shelby, “She's very good with strangers. She calls it her ‘
ongoing conversation with the world.' It's charming. Have you got any of that Vicodin left?”

“OxyContin is better,” said Shelby. “You know,
my back doesn't hurt any more, either.”

“Mine is killing me,” said Ona Frame, “especially after last night.”

“Actually, nothing hurts any more,”
said Shelby, an uncertainly optimistic smile beginning to play across his features.

Time passed. Although neither man believed in time. So it passed very quickly.

They talked of love and poetry in the old way, watching Majory Sass, who seemed to be exchanging e-mail addresses or phone numbers with the checkout boy.

Someone had replaced the Price Chopper muzak with a Stevie Ray Vaughan selection. Shelby loosened his scarf. He said something about the magical charm of atmospheres, how things might change for no reason except that you suddenly felt better, because of Stevie Ray Vaughan and a little 420 action in Price Chopper and customers turning into people, against all odds, and holding conversations. Although you could never write a story like that.

“You must introduce me to your new girl,
” Shelby said, throwing the tail of his scarf over his shoulder with panache. “I'm sure she's wonderful.”

“I don't know,” said Ona Frame. “She reminds me of someone. It might not work out.
” He fingered the broken, raised scar at his throat, wondered why he was suddenly whispering.

Betsy Edger (or was it someone else entirely?) was helping the checkout boy with the bagging and gently humouring a dour, waspish-looking, elderly woman with arms like sticks and eyes like cudgels.

“All the best stories end with a wedding,” said Shelby. “Think of Shakespeare.”

Ona Frame thought,
Hamlet
,
King Lear
,
Macbeth
? He didn't like it when Shelby turned manic and expansive, the usual prelude to Shelby stealing Ona's girl. But there was also something appealing in the new mood.

Suddenly, Shelby rose to his feet and began organizing stoned Price Chopper customers. An altar improvised with crates of Bush's Baked Beans cans appeared in the aisle. He threw his scarf over it like a cloth and motioned the young pregnant couple (still kissing) to come forward. A towering fat man, the shape of a gourd, in khaki cargo pants, checked shirt and Tilley hat, with a beaming face, stood up for the bride. Betsy Edger drifted in at the back of the congregation, arm
in arm with the teenage checkout boy. She looked about his age, which made Ona Frame wonder if he ever saw anything the way it really was. She pushed the checkout boy forward, and he stood by the groom, awkward and shy, but pleased with his sudden ascension. He wore a blue Price Chopper polo shirt and a name tag that read,
Brad, Front-End.

He could have been the groom's brother, they looked that much alike.

Shelby began to intone the order of service, what he could remember of it. Sometimes Ona Frame would have to whisper a correction or fill in a gap.

“Dearly beloved,”
he began, “we are gathered together today in the sight of God —”

And between the two of them, they managed to get through the entire ceremony with only a slip here and there, Shelby's voice growing deeper and stronger, soaring, as he went. And Ona Frame found himself caught up in the words, which he had heard before, the old words, that seemed to point at some human meaning he could no longer access. “. . . holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted by God in the time of man's innocency . .
.” He felt wistful about that (and wondered when the time of man's innocency was), wistful about Betsy Edger, who, when he glanced at her, was positively luminous. “. . . for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have for the other
. . .” The crowd of shoppers, though they knew they were only pretending, grew into their roles as bridesmaids, ushers, mothers, fathers, cousins, uncles, best friends of bride or groom, old classmates. “Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour and keep her, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her, so long as you both shall live?” Ona Frame noticed that the marriage service mentioned nothing about a tendency to insecure attachment and remembered countless times he had misremembered that phrase as “as long as you both shall love.” Or perhaps, he thought, that was the modern translation, meant to accommodate all those tendencies to insecure attachment.
The young couple exchanged rings from a costume in the seasonal aisle, and when Shelby said he could, the blushing groom kissed the blushing bride, a chaste and adoring kiss, almost a first kiss (leaving out the pregnancy that made straight-on hugging difficult). Grown men wept and said they had never attended a more moving ceremony. Betsy Edger ran up and kissed the checkout boy, as if kissing were suddenly contagious. Onlookers enthusiastically shook Ona Frame's hand and congratulated him. He didn't know why. He had tears in his eyes. He didn't know why he had tears in his eyes. Someone said there would be a reception by the cold beer. The black-haired, garnet-chained poetry reader asked him if he would be giving the speech. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Of course.” Although normally he was terrified of public speaking, which was Shelby'
s forte. Anything seemed possible suddenly. He had spotted a young woman in the crowd, dark hair bobbed, plain determined face, nothing luminous but something strong inwardly, a quiet, undemanding girl for whom the words “comfort” and “honour” and “innocency” might really mean something. He made his way through the throng, a small poem forming on his lips, or a horoscope. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Shelby surging in the same direction. But then Shelby stopped, something stopped him. He smiled at Ona Frame, and turned away.

Pointless, Incessant
Barking in
the
Night

I went to the hospital to visit my neighbour Geills after her suicide attempt. She explained that she had used a generic brand of garbage bag, which
tore inconveniently along a seam, and that she had been in love with me since we met in the alley behind our houses the night the dog barked.

I remembered that night for its knot of misunderstandings and embarrassments. Susan, my wife, had been asleep in the bedroom. I was working late on my dissertation in the breakfast nook, still wearing my teaching uniform, tie and a cardigan with leather patches on the elbows, my glasses smeared with powdered sugar from the doughnuts I habitually ate when I was working. She misinterpreted the sugar traces as evidence of a drug habit, which intrigued her. She also thought my late-night tie wearing was symptomatic of a deep fetish attachment, perhaps an interesting S&M thing, she said later.

For my part, when I realized it was her dog we were searching for, I began to berate her for disturbing her neighbours in the middle of the night. She began to weep, twisting her chubby little hands in the lap of her T-shirt nightie, dragging it off her shoulder and revealing the butterfly tattoo,
which alarmed me with its suggestiveness. In the silence that followed, we both heard the dog again, now baying woefully a block or two away. I said good night, wishing to cut short this evening of cross-purposes, and left her scurrying through the weathered plank gate that led into her backyard.

I was brushing my teeth when she came knocking tentatively at my back door. She had locked herself out of the little basement apartment she rented from the Wallingfords, two doors down. She didn't want to wake them. I was the only person she knew in the neighbourhood who was awake. She couldn't go walking around dressed as she was. It was too chilly to wait outside till sun-up. She said her name was Geills. She inadvertently showed me her tattoo again. She balanced first on one foot and then on the other (bare feet) in my mud room. We could hear the dog, almost at the foot of the yard, howling,
wolflike. She had blue hair — I didn't know it was blonde underneath till later — and a gleaming ball on her tongue that flashed as she rolled her eyes anxiously.

I could not bear the anxiety she seemed to feel. I ushered her into my kitchen and brought her a blanket and a pair of slippers and made English Breakfast tea in a pot with two cups though I wasn't intending to drink any myself. I poured her a small schnapps
, but she refused it. She seemed almost afraid, shivering violently across the little nook table from me. There were papers strewn all around. Distracted, I read a half-finished sentence on a torn scrap: “The most beautiful and melancholy line in all literature, the summa of love . . .”

Clumsily wrapping herself in the blanket, she swept the pages onto the floor, then I caught a glimpse of her pale nipples when she knelt to pick them up. There was some tension in the air, something indefinable, set off earlier by that pointless, incessant barking in the night. I said not to worry about the papers. I had jumped up so violently that my chair fell to the floor with a crash loud enough, I was certain, to wake Susan, my wife. Geills stepped into my arms urgently but also as if it were the natural thing to do. I was relieved to feel her shivering subside. But then I noticed that I was shivering.

She said, “
You know we look alike.”

I couldn't think what she meant.

She said, “You can do whatever you want.” She peered up at me with timid eyes that seemed all sclera.

It would have been heartless to refuse, though, in the event, I cannot think why I abandoned my habitual circumspection in that moment. Something to do with the dark of night and that incessant barking,
which seemed to mock the reason and orderliness of day. Geills climbed onto the breakfast nook bench on her hands and knees and I took her from behind like a dog, neither of us able to see the other's face, both lost in some private erotic dementia, submitting not to one another but the moment, the act itself, submitting to submission, willing the universal catastrophe.

I had the sensation of being in a dream, driving a car fast along some impossible hairpin zigzag of a road, completely out of control but also somehow certain that if I just kept going very fast, nothing bad would happen to me. I came with a shout, upsetting the teapot onto the floor, smashing it (still Susan, my wife, didn't wake).

Geills kissed me once and whispered, “Please, don't regret this.”

And then I remember practically nothing until about sunrise when Susan, my wife, came downstairs and found the broken teapot and Geills curled up asleep on the floor with the blanket and me equally asleep with my head on my arms at the breakfast nook table. I woke to the reek of schnapps and the snap of Susan's cigarette lighter (she had stopped smoking but liked to snap the lighter in stressful situations) and the semi-conscious realization that I was not who I thought I was. Susan was about to realize this as well, and the entire constellation of essences and relations that had constituted our marriage, which had hitherto seemed immutable, was about to go smash. But I was determined not to be humiliated by the situation (difficult, given that my pants were still around my ankles).

I said, gesturing with my hand, “This is exactly what it looks like.”

“
How long has it been going on?” she asked.

I peered at my watch. “About three hours,” I said.

“I mean how long has
this
been going on?” she repeated, nodding at Geills,
who was beginning to stir.

“Three hours,” I said. “I'm certain because I checked my watch when the dog was barking.”

I thought, Is this what love is like? So desperate, so catastrophic? Susan looked at me as if surprised by my thoughts.

Geills said, “Oh shit.
” Her tone gently ironic, as if this were the usual thing, the usual morning-after mess.

She wrapped the blanket around her breasts, which were trying to make another escape from her nightie. She glared at Susan, which I took to be a defensive gesture, an act of defiance. But then Susan faltered. Her face went suddenly vague, a kind of indeterminate softening engendered by confusion and doubt. Once, she had confided to me that when her mother read her bedtime stories, she had left all the love scenes out. We had been married four or five years, and the marriage had fallen into a dispassionate routine, two people running on separate, parallel tracks for the last
— what? — four or five years. So that nothing should have surprised her, except, I suppose, finding a blue-haired, tattooed, naked teenager in her kitchen at six a.m. on a weekday (not to mention her husband with his pants around his ankles).

She snapped her lighter once or twice more and then shivered so hard that she needed to wrap her arms around her shoulders to control it. (The shivering seemed to pass from one to the other, I thought, like the symptom of an infectious disease, like a possession, like the touch of angel wings.) Susan shrugged vaguely, then swept abruptly out of the kitchen and retreated upstairs toward the bedroom.

“Shit,” said Geills. “Do you love her?”
she asked.

I thought for a moment, pulling my pants up, a humble, universal moment. For that moment, I was Everyman, every man who had ever been tested by God and a blue-haired woman in his kitchen.

“Yes,” I said, “I must. I must have. I married her. Isn't that why you get married?”

Geills furrowed her brow and peered down her nose at me as though she feared for my sanity. I could see what she was thinking.

She tried to kill herself later in the week, was found unconscious in her bed by a friend known only by the monosyllabic nickname Frag, who sometimes slept there on what she later assured me was a non-sexual basis except for a blow job now and then when he was needy. That afternoon I cancelled my Proust seminar (another story of difficult love) and took the hospital elevator up to the third floor, where the doctors had placed her in an observation ward with several other incompetent suicides, three of whom were playing a noisy game of Monopoly when I walked in.

She said, “How did you find me? This place is kept secret. The elevator skips this floor. It has no number.”

I said, “That's ridiculous. I came up the elevator.”

She said, “If you're going to be my lover, you have to stop being so literal.”

I had not seen her since the fateful night, though every day I had walked through the alley and knocked on her door in vain. Not only that
, but Susan had asked me to leave, and Geills could not have missed the rented van parked on the tree lawn all Thursday afternoon as I hefted crates of books, a Morris chair, a reading lamp with a swing arm and counterweight, a laptop computer, and my file boxes of acid-free manila folders out of the house.

“Look,” she said, “this gown thingy they gave me has no back.”

I said, “Stop that.”

She said, “It's depressing in here. They put me in with all these geeks who are trying to kill themselves.”

I admit I was a little breathless. These were more words than we had yet exchanged, not that many of them made sense, and she was lying on the hospital bed on her belly with the back of her gown spread wide and her buttocks slightly elevated.

I said, “Do you have anyone? Is there anybody who can help?”

Someone at the Monopoly board used the word “rebarbative”
in a sentence, which made me want to investigate, made me feel ever so slightly schizophrenic. The whole place had a menacing and miasmatic air, something like a summer camp for very depressed people, with special workshops for hysterical mourning, melancholy silences, and impotence, much like the college where I taught, much like the house I lived in, like the house I had grown up in, like my life — a place where you could play board games and talk about love till you got so downhearted you had to jump out a window.

“I love you madly,” she said.

“Really, you don't know me,”
I said.

“I know everything I need to know,” she said. “But you should have told me you were married before you led me on like that.” I gave her a look. “Just kidding,”
she said.

The cheeks of her buttocks squeezed together impishly. I caught myself drifting into reprehensible fancies. I extended a forefinger and ran it up and down between her cheeks. She craned her neck to gaze at me, eyes glossy with tears, wonder, and sudden terror. Her breath came in quick, fluttering whispers, the bellows of arousal.

But she said, “Don't start something you're not going to finish.”

I thought, She is beautiful in a bobbed, blue-haired, tattooed, chunky teenager-ish sort of way. I thought, Am I insane?

“I know what you're thinking,” she said.

I explained about moving out, about how I was sleeping in a rental storage unit by the malls and showering at the college gym. I was surprised to see how many unattached men lived in rental storage units. I owned a little spirit stove I used for cooking in my shared office at the college. She said I could move in with her.

“What about Frag?” I asked.

“He's cool,” she said.

I didn't know what she meant. Did that mean Frag would move out, or would he merely acquiesce to sharing Geills with me? So far I had only heard about Frag, but I remembered seeing a dirty, bearded man in a fatigue jacket loitering in the neighbourhood. I associated him with the barking dog, car alarms going off in the night, terrified old ladies behind locked doors.

Someone behind me said the word “lobotomy.” And I thought of the dog, how its pointless, incessant barking had first drawn us into the night and then driven us to adultery in the breakfast nook. I thought of her tattoo.

“Show me the butterfly,” I said.

I thought how this was the most exciting thing that had happened to me so far, and I thought that actually not much had ever happened to me. I thought of Susan, my wife, and the mysteries of love and marriage, how once I had adored her, albeit in a tepid way, how habit is the death of the heart. Though now, as I stood there with my finger in Geills's ass, I remembered how Susan had been the instigator, how in fact she had regarded me, in a small way, as a trophy husband. She liked it that I had enough degrees to paper a wall and that her friend Diane would always be saying, “I can'
t talk in front of your husband because he'll think I am stupid.” (Though subsequently I learned that Diane thought I was a bore.) But then the evening after she discovered me with Geills (with my pants around my ankles) in the kitchen, Susan said that I had betrayed her and that she had lost the element of trust essential to our relationship. She went on, but the general drift was such that I thought, She doesn't know what to say. She is speaking from a script and cannot access what is true and real in her heart. I felt sorry for her, though when she began hectoring me on property division, spousal maintenance, and child support — “What children?”
“I might have some later,” she said — I began to feel less sorry. At some point, I said, “I'll move.” Susan seemed at a loss. She seemed to want the conversation to continue, dreary and dispiriting as it was.