Savage Love

by Douglas Glover

  “And there were a couple of others. I forget when,” she said. “Have you been seeing anyone? Anything to confess on your side?”

  Ona Frame shook his head.

  “What about the little high school slut who stacks books sometimes? You had your dirty little eyes on her.”

  “No, no,” said Ona Frame, suddenly embarrassed, who, in truth, had been watching the high school girl, who seemed anything but a slut, while he was simultaneously spying on Betsy Edger. He marvelled at how Betsy Edger divined his innermost thoughts and how different she seemed now from the untalented, mousy, demure, naive, ingenuous, quiet girl he had fallen for at the outset. Even her breasts seemed larger.

  He had briefly entertained fantasies that the high-school-girl-cum-book-stacker might save him from Betsy Edger and Shelby and Majory Sass (who was rarely out of his mind), not to mention Emma Christmas (also rarely out of his mind — his mind dense with the detritus of old loves, fragmentary memories of pussy, orgasm, armpit smell, sharp retort, cunning absences, glances, gusts of cruel laughter, sobs). And in truth, he had once invited her for a coffee at Virgil’s Roast House, where they played backgammon for an hour.

  After, he had shyly taken her hand as they walked through the night toward her apartment on Beekman. She was the kind of girl he was always looking for: restrained, demure, monosyllabic, undemanding, attentive.

  At her door, he remembered now, the girl had kissed him, the tiny stiff hairs on her upper lip scraping his skin as they touched tongue tips. She had invited him in and offered him Sleepytime tea but opened a bottle of wine instead and drank from the bottle and went to her bedroom to change and came back wearing nothing and kissed him hungrily and turned her back to him so that he took her from behind and came touching herself, moaning, “I love you,” which filled Ona Frame with dread and prognostication (he could tell, he could always tell, how things would turn out).

  In the drowsy aftermath of sex, she said she had left high school two years before and was trying to be a writer, which was why she liked working in the library. She met men on Match.com and slept with them on the first date. This was the first time the library had worked for her.

  Women, too. When she was drunk, she would lose her inhibitions (What inhibitions? Ona Frame wondered) and start kissing whoever was sitting next to her. Once, she had let a man finger her to an orgasm in a booth at Orphan Annie’s. She was sure other bar patrons had noticed. She said, “You like hearing this, don’t you? My last lover said I give good story.” She said it with bravado, with a mischievous gleam in her eyes.

  Ona Frame had told no one about the book-stacker, especially not Shelby (for obvious reasons) or Betsy Edger (for even more obvious reasons), and he was sure no one had seen him. Although, if truth be told, he invariably felt as though someone were following him. He was forever glancing over his shoulder, half expecting to find Shelby’s BMW hovering at a discreet distance, partly shrouded in exhaust fumes.

  During the Majory Sass episode, the so-called “Regrettable Incident,” there had been occasions when Ona Frame felt certain Shelby was following him while he was in the act of following Shelby. Once, Ona Frame had thought, We are never going to stop following each other round and round this block. We have entered some mythic space of perpetual mutual stalking.

  Betsy Edger’s brow suddenly clouded as if she had been reading his thoughts. A flash of anger erupted in her tannin-coloured eyes. “You disgust me,” she said, and swept out of the apartment.

  Ona Frame clutched himself through the cloth of his L.L. Bean nightshirt and fell to his knees. He began to howl with loneliness and pain, with the horror of abandonment, with amazement at how low he had sunk. Twinks, terrified, crept into a corner under the bed.

  But Ona Frame had never been happier, had never felt so alive. He thought, Now I know what it’s like to be a fictitious character in a story, that sense of chockablock crisis and fate, of another hand stoking the drama to see how I might perform. At length, he stretched out on the floor, sobbing with gratitude; all Betsy Edger’s visit meant was that she still needed him. She needed someone to whom to be cruel, and she had picked Ona. For this he was grateful.

  He took three or four vodkas, trying to calm down and sleep, but telephoned the high school book-stacker instead.

  She said, “I met a friend of yours the other day. At least, he said he was a friend of yours, even though he was trying to get into my pants.”

  Ona Frame put his hand to his heart and felt the shattered rhythms of distress. Her words filled him with sudden dread for the future, for the ridiculous indignity and injustice of aging and death, for the loss of love, which was infinitely more certain than love itself, for the communality of desire, which is never singular but feeds off the desires of others, for the eternal oscillating engine of intimacy that never achieves rest.

  Anticipating her answer, he whispered, “Did you — ”

  And she said, “Listen, baby, love is like the telephone — more than one can use the line.”

  Her name was Amanda Hawk.

  That night, Ona Frame had a nightmare. It began with a tap at the door and then Majory Sass accusing him of having an affair with Betsy Edger. He felt like a little boy caught in the act of masturbating by his stern librarian mother with her tweed skirts and her creamy blouses (with the Dutch collars) buttoned to her throat — oh, how he had adored her. When he woke up, he was not sure he was awake or if the nightmare were merely an extension of the day. His mother had been a high school history teacher, he recalled, not a librarian. She had a face like a stone. It reminded him of someone else’s face, but the name escaped him.

  Then he wanted to show Shelby a poem he had written. He took the elevator to Shelby’s floor but realized, as he rang the doorbell, that he’d forgotten the slip of paper with the poem. And in any case, it wasn’t Shelby’s building. Trying to leave, he found himself in a maze. He couldn’t get out and he couldn’t remember the poem. (Sometime during this sequence of events, Ona Frame intuited that he was not awake at all. He wondered if he was ever awake, if such a state existed, or if in fact he was dead, a suicide, dreaming of doubles and things he had forgotten, or if this was the state of mind of a character whose author has forgotten about him.)

  Sipping his third morning vodka (he noticed the muzzy dawn light scattering the dirty crepuscules of night in the backyard), he realized how bizarre his life had become. He realized that nothing added up, nothing that happened to him became a story, because time didn’t exist, a fact Shelby had pointed out in an e-mail only the week before, when they were still on speaking terms though angry with one another.

  “You predict the future in your horoscopes,” Shelby had written, “but if you can predict the future, then there is no future, and if there is no future, then there is no time, and if there is no time, then nothing changes and life ceases to exist, only eddies and loops, endlessly trying to start but covering the same ground again and again. Without time, there is only repetition. You are hysterically frightened of time, aging and death, Ona Frame, but the poet knows you can’t live without them. You can’t abide a paradox. This is why Betsy Edger loves me more than she loves you.”

  The words had confused Ona Frame because he was only twenty-six years old and because Shelby also dabbled in horoscopes. Indeed, Shelby had often filled in for Ona Frame when Ona ran out of inspiration. Shelby had once said there was little difference between writing horoscopes and writing poetry and that they were both like talking to a woman you love, the woman of your dreams.

  Shelby also had a terrible habit of repeating himself, telling the same stories again and again. Sometimes they were stories Ona Frame had told Shelby a moment before.

  That afternoon, Ona Frame ran into Shelby and Betsy Edger at the Price Chopper, temple of food. It was hardly an accident because he had been following them since dawn, when he woke up and discovered Shelby’s ineffable BMW wheezin
g exhaust fumes outside Amanda Hawk’s apartment house.

  Ona Frame was behind in his horoscopes. His editor had threatened to fire him. His credit cards were maxed out. He drank vodka in the morning to calm his shattered nerves. Then he drank more in the afternoon and evening. He had spent the night having revenge sex with Marion Esterhazy, a newbie playwright and dysfunctional book-stacker at the library, who said revenge sex is the best next to breakup sex. (Although Ona Frame was not sure if he was avenging himself against Shelby or Betsy Edger or Majory Sass or someone else entirely.)

  As they wrestled on Marion Esterhazy’s stale, well-used sheets, he had written an entire lyric poem in his head.

  But when he woke up, he was sitting in his car outside Amanda Hawk’s apartment with no idea how or why he was there except that he must have been spying on someone.

  Shelby had once said that in life actions are often motivated by nothing more than boredom and banality, which, only in retrospect, take on the character of personality or fate or divine guidance.

  Shelby also said the kind of woman you choose is an expression of your attitude to life.

  Ona Frame thought, But Shelby only chooses women I want to be with. Or is it that I am only attracted to women Shelby would be attracted to? As always for Ona Frame, thought itself was a vertiginous experience.

  The sight of the BMW filled him with happiness and despair. Briefly, he had thought he might have Amanda Hawk all to himself, whereas with Betsy Edger (not to mention Majory Sass) he had quickly recognized a tendency to insecure attachment. But a tendency to insecure attachment seemed to be contagious, or it was the modern thing, or it was the subterranean essence of love.

  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.