Savage Love (16 page)

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Bjorn dreams that Pulch, the cobbler, accosts him in the street with a shout. “Your shoes are ready!” Pulch holds out a pair of strangely shaped workboots with hobnails and laces up to the ankles. But the boots are only half complete, with toe tips missing and gaping open like a cross-section. Bjorn knows somehow that these are miner's boots. He needs them to go underground. At the pithead, there is a bustling confusion of smoke, flame,
and milling crowds. An awesome black tower of girders and cables rises above, supporting the machinery of the mine lift, a mighty gate to nowhere. Bjorn descends in a cage filled with grim soot-faced men, women, even children, also dogs, horses and pigs, all with lamps, helmets and shovels. Their faces are sombre and frightened as the lift drops down and down, faster and faster, and the rank walls of the mine shaft disappear and are replaced with an inky blackness. The mine shaft is inexpressibly cold. Bjorn's face aches with the wind of the cage's falling. In the distance now, he sees stars, whole constellations and galaxies he doesn't recognize. Still the lift descends. A beautiful woman (who somehow reminds him of Olga) touches his cheek with a finger and whispers, “You're going home. Don't you know?”

The story ends with a wedding. One evening Jannik catches Tamara Winzcheslon's eye as she polishes bird glasses behind the gleaming phalarope-shaped beer spigots — a little girl
's pout, vulnerable dip of her irises, look of love. The curve of her belly just inside her pelvic crest is the most beautiful thing Jannik has ever seen in his life. Like all dead fishermen's wives, she is a sexual renegade between the sheets simply because she already knows how things will end. Is it love he feels? Jannik is dazed by the sublime horror and mystery of the question. And he cannot answer it. But, as a lifelong wastrel, he is equally incapable of denying the instinct that tells him marriage to a woman who owns a profitable bar is a prudent option. It will be neither the first nor the last time a human being does the right thing for the wrong reason. The wedding is supposed to take place under a tent in the front yard at the farm. But the weather is so promising that Pa orders the tent taken down as an aesthetic monstrosity that obstructs his view. Then a fog rolls in off the salt marsh, and a gentle rain begins to fall. Music is provided by an itinerant klezmer band called Prophets in the Wilderness (friends of Daphne). The local justice of the peace officiates (a man named Frank Mahovlich who has narrow shoulders, a pot-belly, bad breath, a wandering eye, a moth-eaten tailcoat, and is otherwise extraneous to the story — you can just assume he has his own plot problems). Two couples stand up before Frank Mahovlich: Lisel and Joran Boze and Jannik and Tamara Winzcheslon. Everyone agrees the occasion is sweet and holy. The young women (Tamara, actually, not so young) wear the usual white meringues that make them look awkward, overweight, embarrassed, and brazen all at once (Lisel somewhat encumbered as well with her breathing apparatus). The grooms wear identical too-tight dinner jackets and canary-yellow cummerbunds (Pa picked the colours); freshly shaved and glistening, they look, to Bjorn, like penises tied with bows. Muttering to himself, Uncle Boris rehearses dirty jokes for his speech, picking his way nervously amid goose squirts and cow pats. A fresh batch of shoats gathers beneath the banquet table (Pa buys them for companionship; they don't seem to last long). A general atmosphere of bashful lustiness, uncertainty, mystery, solemnity, terror, and misplaced hope pervades the drizzly scene. At the last moment, in an access of joy (Ma had just bent over to taste the turnip salad and he caught a glimpse of the rabbit mole on her breast), Pa falls to his knees and proposes that they marry again. Ma squeals and exclaims that it's the best proposal she's ever had, and she accepts.

Bjorn, misty-eyed from the mist, can't help but smile. For no reason, he gives Olga a little poke in her deflated belly. She glances up at him irritably. Bjorn is thinking about Bjorn 2, how they have become inseparable, united, apparently, by their inability to love one another. No one has ever understood Bjorn as well as Bjorn 2. With a jolt, a sudden ache like a gas pain, Bjorn realizes that maybe this is love. Olga sees that he is smiling and thinks, Oh, Bjorn is being idiotically sentimental or just idiotic. But he keeps smiling, and there is something strange in his eyes, an expression that is at once sad, distant, weighing, thinking, alive. Olga feels a pang of compassion. It occurs to her that Bjorn can see his death coming toward him. Bjorn thinks: The universe is a complete mystery to me. How should one behave? What does it mean to be a human being? All my life I have seen my death coming toward me. Then he says an astonishing thing, words that break the form, a blind leap. He says, “We should get married too.” Olga says, “What?” Waspish, irritable, impatient, surprised, puzzled, bitter. Bjorn says, “We should get married again. I think I haven't loved you enough. I married you the first time out of pity because you were the last of the ugly Klapp girls and without a dowry. Don'
t mistake me — I thought that was love at the time, but now I see it differently.” He keeps smiling that inane smile. He feels suddenly free. All the world's cares, responsibilities, and claims seem to drop away. He understands that he is giving up on himself, and that, paradoxically, he has never felt more like himself. He feels like a corpse climbing out of a grave. Olga takes a breath and thinks, Perhaps I have been holding my breath these ten years. There is a trace of a smile on her lips. She says, “I am plain as a pine plank.” “Whoever said such a thing?”
says Bjorn. “The author,” says Olga. “Besides, it's true.” She says, “I was always afraid you'd never like me, that you'd run away.
” “It doesn't matter,” says Bjorn, a bit irritated about the author. “I love you now.” Olga asks, shyly, tentatively, still with the faint wisp of a smile breaking on her thin lips, “Even after all the bad things I have done?” “Because of everything you have done,
” Bjorn says. “They are signs of life,” he says. “I want to start again,” he says. There is another of those pregnant silences. Suddenly, Bjorn and Olga realize everyone is watching. No one has seen Bjorn and Olga hold a remotely friendly conversation in years. Now they are clasping hands, shyly offering themselves to Mahovlich's ritual mumbling.

Four couples get married under the tree, a mass expression of baseless, irrational optimism. Uncle Boris watches the ceremony from his perch on the branch. He forgets his speech. He can't get his new safety harness undone, so he ends up sleeping in the tree til
l morning, much fretted by mosquitoes. And, truth be told, except for the catering assistant found with a pitchfork in her throat behind the barn after the reception, everyone lives happily ever after. For a while.

Savage Love

On Tuesday, Ona Frame went to see his friend Shelby to discuss the Betsy Edger affair, which had erupted in the spring just when he was getting over what they both referred to as the “Regrettable Incident” involving the drug-addicted, emotionally intense but self-centred former small-time movie actress with the luminous face, who had briefly enticed Ona and Shelby into an insanely competitive if not vicious romantic triangle that threatened the foundations of their friendship.

Ona Frame had initially regarded Betsy Edger, a would-be author and part-time book-stacker at the local public library, as a transitional love object, someone whose tranquil, no-affect disposition promised little drama and fewer demands and also seemed, prudently enough, the antithesis of Shelby's type (dramatic, histrionic, large-breasted blondes with unfinished doctorates and fetishistic erotic tendencies). But then Shelby fell harder than ever for Betsy Edger, and the same situation had developed as before.

Quiet, calm, immature, undemanding, monosyllabic, untalented, plain, auburn-haired Betsy Edger had turned sexually voracious overnight, it seemed, and would leave Ona's narrow bed in the moonlight, dress quickly and carelessly in the clothes she had just slipped out of, sometimes leaving a soiled intimate article apparently by accident, and rush, with neither apology nor excuse, across town to Shelby's palatial, adults-only condominium with the hot-tub-and-pool combo and the wet bar beside his computer workstation where he did his day trading and wrote poems he published in national journals. Ona, it must be said, made a spare living writing a horoscope column for the local newspaper and doing occasional private readings for individuals of his acquaintance.

Betsy Edger would tell Ona she loved him but could not erase her desire for Shelby, who made her feel pampered and filthy and expected her to do things she had only read about in books or peeked at on the Internet. When she left Shelby to return to Ona Frame
's apartment, she would roll her eyes in an agony of guilt and say that she loved Ona for his unimaginative steadiness, that she thought he would be the one to father her children, that with Shelby it was only about sex and the fact that he could help her get her stories published. To both men, she said her behaviour was uncharacteristic, that she had never been with two lovers at once, that she knew she had to decide.

Ona Frame adored her honesty. He felt that no one had ever levelled with him in such an extraordinarily forthright manner. But then her eyes would dip, she would cross and uncross her legs and adjust her bra straps, and he would know that she was thinking of Shelby, would in fact soon abandon him for some
outré
rendezvous. While lovemaking between Ona and Betsy had dwindled to an occasional hasty encounter in the dark between his fetid sheets, often so mechanical and dispassionate as not to disturb Twinks his cat, sleeping at the foot of the bed, Shelby and Betsy had embarked on a fugue of compulsive exhibitionism and public sex.

Ona Frame himself had recently spotted them fingering each other in the
Family Passive Recreation Park at the corner of Route 67 and Middle Line Road while apparently engrossed in doing the Sunday crossword at a picnic table. He had also seen them fondling in a booth at the Dunkin' Donuts and having torrid intercourse only half hidden behind the hydrangeas in Congress Park at dusk.

He had, in fact, developed his own compulsion for following Betsy and Shelby, spending long hours watching Shelby's darkened windows for signs of movement or trailing Shelby's
late-model, atrociously undependable
BMW
as it wound through the streets, watching the two heads in front of him combine and separate then combine once more in a dangerous dance of eros and imminent pedestrian death (or so he thought). Once, he trailed them to the public library where Betsy worked and came upon them masturbating together in the fiction stacks by the letter
M
for, as Ona Frame thought, mischief, menopause, malicious and mad. They paid no heed to Ona or the four or five other readers gawking at them over their books, their eyes fixed on one another, on their pulsing fingers, on the convulsive movements of their thighs, Betsy's left hand wandering strangely over the books at her back, her mouth whispering unintelligible words.

When she arrived at his little bachelor apartment, with the Edvard Munch prints, the dried field-flower bouquets
, and his grandmother's yellowing lace doilies, for their regular Thursday night peppermint tea and Scrabble date, Betsy was as prim and collected as ever and made no mention of that afternoon's assignation. But at half past nine, just as Ona had assured himself of victory with an eight-letter triple-word score (
oxymoron
), Betsy emerged from the bathroom clutching at her wristwatch and anxiously announcing that she had to leave. She said Shelby had turned frantically jealous of her relationship with Ona and that she had to get back to him before he did something desperate and self-destructive.

“Self-destructive?
” Ona Frame repeated.

“He's capable of anything,” she said. “He's been losing in the market. He hasn't written in weeks. He is totally obsessed with me.”

Her eyes gave a little dip, which made Ona shudder. Some hint there, he thought, of self-consciousness, of pleasure taken in the drama she was creating. Oh, to have the whole suicidal world of men at your feet, he thought. But it made him love her all the more.

The phone rang. It was Shelby. He asked to speak to Betsy. But Ona held the phone and said, “S., are you desperate and self-destructive?”

And Shelby whispered harshly, “Yes, you idiot. I'm standing on a kitchen stool with a noose around my neck. Put her on.”

And Ona waited, thinking, before saying, “
No, S., go ahead and hang yourself. I found her first. We can't both love her.”

Betsy's expression of frantic agony turned to despair as she ran out, leaving the door open in her wake. There was a tremendous crash at the other end of the line, followed by a lengthy guttural moan, then silence.

Ona Frame hung up the phone, poured himself a thimble of lime vodka from the freezer to calm his shattered nerves, and returned to the horoscope he had been preparing that afternoon. “Scorpio: The path you are on will surely lead to disaster unless you learn flexibility and humility. Avoid ropes. Value old friendships.”
Shelby was a Scorpio. Ona didn't need to check the star charts to write that one.

An hour later — it was getting late, past ten-thirty — Betsy Edger called from the Emergency Room to say that Shelby was not dead but could not speak above a whisper due to an injury to his throat. She said she needed to stay with Shelby, who was sedated and popping Vicodin for the pain, and also that she was disappointed in Ona for his callous behaviour. She did not think they should see each other again.

When she hung up, a wave of self-pity broke over Ona Frame. It had been the same with the luminous small-time movie actress. When she deigned to bless him with her presence, even if it were only to express her contempt, he was euphoric and cocky. But then she would punish him by going to Shelby, and he would be grief-stricken, terrified at her absence. Her absence made him love her all the more desperately.

It seemed to him that Betsy Edger had gradually taken on an air of luminosity not unlike that of the small-time actress. And she had begun alluding to a drug-filled past, occasionally disappearing from both Ona and Shelby only to explain later, somewhat enigmatically, that she had been at a “meeting,” while insisting that she herself was not an addict. Indeed, he had begun to detect a frenzied dis-ease gradually infiltrating Betsy Edger's calm self-possession; or perhaps, he thought, he was only beginning to notice the effort it took her to be calm and self-possessed, while underneath there churned a vast ocean of obsession, self-hatred, impulsiveness
, and grandiose fantasies.

At first, he put this down to Shelby's malign influence. Shelby was a lovely man, Ona's best friend since college, when they had both briefly dated the same charmingly accident-prone field hockey player. But around women, Shelby's dark side erupted. He encouraged them to liberate themselves, act outrageously, and transgress convention; the only life was constant change, he said. With Shelby, women turned into libidinal monsters of aberrant desire, nymphs of catastrophe, even on casual first dates.

These women would then drive Shelby crazy because, despite all signs to the contrary, he was a man of habit and routine. But, to Ona Frame'
s discredit, these chaotic women — he thought of them as Shelby's creations — invariably fascinated him. Easily bored, he found he needed catastrophe in his life. When you hit a bump, he thought, you know you're awake.

In a moment of cruel candour, the small-time actress (her name was Majory Sass) had admitted to Ona Frame that she was addicted to pornographic sex with Shelby, although it disgusted her even when she was “getting off.” She said,
“He only comes when I tell him what I do with you and I touch him with my fingers.” Hearing the words, Ona had descended into a delirium of sadness, self-reproach, and hatred even as he discovered himself in possession of what Shelby liked to call a throbbing bone-daddy and threw himself upon Majory Sass, who took him avidly, with an expression of pity and contempt on her virtuous features.

Ona Frame thought of the days that followed Shelby's suicide attempt as an interregnum, a hiatus, a breathing space. He had experienced many such in the past, during the Majory-Sass-small-time-movie-actress episode, for example, but also in earlier (now that he thought of it) chapters in his long and conflicted relationship with Shelby
, who, it must be said, seemed to feed off Ona Frame's pathetic shadow existence, who seemed to need a failed doppelgänger as a sign of his success in life.

During this period, Ona Frame did not see Betsy Edger except, of course, when he went to the library and spied on her or obsessively drove by Shelby's apartment, occasionally catching a glimpse of their furtive shadows against the windows.

On the third day, he received a postcard from Betsy, a reproduction of Edvard Munch's
The Scream
(exactly the same as the print over his bed) and the words: “Ona, Please stop following me. I think we should leave each other alone for a while. Love, Majory.”

He marvelled at the cavalier insouciance of her cruelty. She, who had incited, even encouraged his compulsive passion, now pretended to be the virtuously aggrieved victim of his unwelcome attentions. Whereas he knew, he knew, because she had told him, that she “got off” while being watched in the act of love (on five or ten occasions, mostly with strangers). Although now he was not sure if it was Betsy Edger or Majory Sass or someone else entirely who had told him the stories.

It alarmed him to realize that he had misread the signature at the bottom of the message, that it in fact did say “
Betsy” and not “Majory.” Although from time to time he would snatch a terrified peek, and it would read “Majory” and not “Betsy,”
so that he could never be sure which was real and which he imagined.

And it was difficult for him to give up his spying because he was addicted to the sudden submissive rush, the flood of near-orgasmic bliss, that accompanied each decision to humiliate himself, to break with the conventions of manhood, self-respect, and dignity. Every moment of secretive observation was an agony of not wanting to be caught and wanting to be caught.

But Ona Frame, with a heroic effort, managed to reduce his library visits to five or six a day, and only spent eight hours and thirty-four minutes outside Shelby's apartment over the next two nights — mostly because he fell asleep the second night. (He dreamed of watching Betsy Edger deliver a baby; in the dream, the baby had Shelby
's face and the doctor was also Shelby, and he, Ona Frame, when he looked in a mirror, was Shelby.)

He spent his spare time trying to write a poem that he thought would impress Betsy, who was always going on about what a wonderful poet Shelby was, how it was his mind that turned her on sexually, while Ona Frame, who could only tell the future, could not write a poem to save his life.

He knew that it was Shelby's habit to be especially self-absorbed and productive after a suicide attempt. Yes, there had been earlier failed self-murders. Shelby was a habitual attention-seeker, a perverse dramatist of macabre exits at which he was incompetent. But these dismal attempts somehow freed his heart to write exquisite poems of which, prior to killing himself, in the ordinary course of his life, he was incapable.

Ona Frame knew, too, there would be no
outré
sexual shenanigans
chez
Shelby, that Betsy Edger would grow bored in her role as the virtuous nurse of an intensely concentrated poet who paid attention to words and not to her, that by telling Ona to stop coming around she had put an end to her only source of distraction, that the whole exercise would expose the emptiness at the centre of her life, which their love triangle had hidden from her.

He imagined that she might try to work on her own writing, which he knew had not produced much except for, yes, conventionally enough, a terse fragment dealing with her abortion years before and a pornographic scene involving two men in a storage room above a Subway in lower Manhattan. Shelby said Betsy Edger's chief fault as a writer was an inability to lie, just as her chief fault as a person was an inability to tell the truth. Which Ona Frame took to be a harshly unjust summation of their mutual love's shortcomings, though, as usual, he admired Shelby's linguistic panache.