Savage Love Page 11

  Wind whipped the leafless plane trees along the avenue. I spotted a flower shop and ducked in, thinking to buy a bouquet for my love. But I must have slipped through the wrong door, for I found myself in a neat, closet-like second-hand bookstore with dark oak shelves marching back toward an ancient desk fortified with parapets of leather-bound tomes. I hovered, dripping, in the doorway, loath to enter and perhaps spatter valuable books with water but also reluctant to dive back into the deluge. I wiped rainwater off my watch face, frantic with vexation and indecision. I naturally blamed all my troubles on the Parisians, their precious City of Light, and Zoe’s love of travel, which I did not share.

  At length, an elderly gnome, about three feet high, with white braids wrapped like wheels at the sides of her head, shuffled from behind the desk in what looked like wooden clogs. Everything smelled of dust, mildew, and creosote. Her skin was the colour of ash. The high ceiling seemed wreathed in smoke. She dragged anciently toward me, taking hours it seemed, with a small book clutched in two veined and corded hands the colour of mahogany. She extended her arms, offering the book to me, almost toppling over as she held it out, her blue lips working wordlessly, foam at the corners of her mouth. But her watery blue eyes darted intelligently, anxious and beneficent.

  A folded slip of paper fell from the book as I reached for it. Then I had to grasp the old crone by the shoulders to prevent her from falling as she vainly tried to catch the escaped sheet before it landed on the damp floor. I could already see the blue cursive letters soaking through the yellowing page. I snatched it up by a corner and flung it open, hoping to preserve the message, but the letters were beginning to run. The penmanship was bold, what used to be called copperplate; the words were, surprisingly, in English. They disappeared as I read them. “I adore you. I belong to you for eternity. It doesn’t matter what you have done. I take your sins for my own. I will suffer the punishment and happily wait for you in the Afterlife. But, my heart, if I could just see you once more before I go, it would be so much easier to bear. At the Gare at seven under the clock.”

  There was a wormhole through the paper. The ink was pale with age. The book was Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror, an early edition, in French, of course. I had never read it. The aged dwarf was on her way back to her desk. It would take her a week. The rain had stopped, replaced with the sepia twilight of Paris in late autumn. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to seven, just moments before I was to meet Zoe, my future wife (and dental hygienist). A strange feeling descended on me, the feeling of being directed by an unseen hand.

  At the Gare

  It occurred to me that Zoe was always late, that I would be cooling my heels, eating bread at the table alone while the waiters crossed their arms and whispered about me behind my back. The Gare du Nord was not far. The craziness of the impulse lent it an air of spontaneity and romance. The note was a hundred years old, if not more. What Gare did the writer intend? What city? Still, I was the reader of the message and it wouldn’t hurt me to fulfill the ancient invitation. I knew that in some obscure way I would think better of myself for having done so.

  I dove down the metro steps, interrogated the route map on the wall, and raced to the platform, catching the train as the doors swept shut. The trip seemed interminable. I wondered about the handwriting, the person who wrote the note, for whom it had been intended, what crime he had committed, what terrible fate awaited her. Already I was haunted by the thought of the lovers who never met, their not-meeting whispering down the decades till the moment when the leaf of paper fluttered from the gnome’s hand. At that moment, I realized I still clutched the book. I had not paid for it.

  I raced up the steps at the Gare du Nord and burst onto the concourse. It was, yes, just seven. Now I would be well and truly late meeting Zoe. She would arrive unsupported, puzzled at not finding me at the table, embarrassed to sit by herself. I had imagined I’d find some nineteenth-century pedestal clock with Roman numerals for numbers and thick arms black with coal soot. But there was only the huge digital sign, DÉPART DEPARTURE ABFARHT, blinking destinations in waves like wind blowing across fields of wheat. Everything smelled of marble and ozone. Fresh rain fell in waves on the glass roof as if we were under the ocean. Trains gleamed impatiently between pedestrian quais where the globe lights walked into the distant dark. There were the usual chic-looking French people hurrying along with their black-rimmed glasses and baguettes like loaded rifles, also students with haversacks and Muslim women in head scarves. I waited under the digital sign, looking at my watch, feeling a little foolish. Except for me, everyone was in transit, passing through, with a definite destination in mind. An African sweeper with a barrow came by, emptying the trash. Except for the public address system blaring incomprehensible messages at me in French, I was engulfed in silence.

  I opened the book and read the words “Plût au ciel que le lecteur, enhardi et devenu momentanément féroce comme ce qu’il lit, trouve, sans se désorienter, son chemin abrupt et sauvage . . . ,” which were incomprehensible to me yet somehow seemed to find an echo in the passionate intonations of the public address announcer. I noticed a slender, melancholy figure emerging from the shadows at the rue de Dunkerque entrance, cloche hat, black lipstick, dark wool coat down to her calves. I noticed her because her eyes were fixed on me, and I could feel them. She was unique, it seemed, in a train station packed with what you would expect, and I had no doubt that it was she who had left the note for me in the book of poems (printed in an unreadable language). But as soon as I thought this thought, I realized how ridiculous it was. I remembered Zoe and the lateness of the hour and heard the clisp, clisp of the commuters’ footfalls like dead leaves falling all around me.

  The woman seemed dangerous, tragic, sad, and fascinating. I was having the adventure of my life just watching her stride across the concourse. She came toward me like Fate, ferocious and wild. I felt in my jacket pocket for the little velvet box that contained the engagement ring. Zoe would be in a panic. I was the anchor of her little world. I felt a twinge of contempt for that little world. I had answered the invitation, the lover’s call. The woman was wearing strange wooden shoes, sabots, I think they are called. I wondered how I knew that. Her eyes were blue, fierce with certainty and renunciation, also relief, the deepest happiness. I looked for the exit. I knew I could escape. But what was there to escape to? She broke into a rueful smile. I could smell book dust, mildew, and creosote. Under her cap her black hair was braided in tight wheels against her temples. Her skin was white as paper. I held out my arms for her. Up close her hair smelled like snow, like winter.

  “You came,” she whispered, clutching my hand. “It’s enough. Now I can endure everything.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “Je t’adore,” she said. “It’s all I need.”

  “Je t’adore,” I whispered. (It did not escape me that all at once I could speak three words of fluent French.)

  I knew she wasn’t real, but I suddenly realized what it meant to say my heart ached, to know what I wanted and could not have. My entire life seemed diminished, something I watched on a TV screen, scripted, flickering, but nothing I was participating in. The revelation made me sick. A strange malady. I had the feeling that henceforth the years would be haunted with the realization that nothing could measure up to this moment and this woman for whom there would never be a substitute.

  At the Café

  It took me ages to find my way to the restaurant what with the metro suffering one of its frequent shutdowns (due to electrical shortages, or maintenance problems, or terrorist threats) and the snow falling, snarling the traffic. Yes, snow was falling. Suddenly it was winter. The streets were like strips of parchment. The gas lamps hissed as I walked beneath them. Horses dragging the street trams clattered on the pavement, striking sparks with their iron shoes. Nothing, of course, surprised me. I felt a certain posthumous quality in everything I did
. I didn’t recognize my clothes.

  The café was boisterous, overheated, and brilliantly lit with gaslights and candles. Waiters in aprons, oiled hair, and black moustaches swayed amongst the tables. Women in little bonnets perched upon their upswept hair laughed coquettishly. I spotted Zoe almost at once. She was sitting with an earnest young man dressed in a modish grey suit, his hair already receding slightly, giving him an air of premature wisdom and solidity. Her cheeks were warm, her eyes vivacious. She wore a ring on her finger. They were drinking champagne out of fluted glasses, and their waiter was making a fuss, fluttering excitably around them — an intimate, everyday tableau. Bonne chance, I thought, trying out more of my new-found French, feeling a certain Continental contempt for the naive and conventional tourists.

  I sat by myself where I could watch them. I ordered Pernod and a hot grog and asked for some paper to write on. I could smell winter through the window glass, astringent, bracing, and real.

  Shameless

  When she was eight years old, Megan Strehle conceived an unnatural passion for Tamas Preltz, a fifteen-year-old apprentice butcher in the town where her father took vegetables to the local farmers’ market. She would beg her father to bring her along when he loaded his Ford half-ton pickup with cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, summer squash, beans, and Brussels sprouts. Then she would run to Roohan’s Butcher Shop and stand at the end of the counter, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, till Tamas deigned to notice her. He could tell she was in love, and a meaty, stupid boy with a square red face, he took pleasure in being cruel to her. Sometimes he would pretend not to see her the whole day long. Sometimes he would entertain Roohan’s fat daughter Rachlin by tossing bits of sausage in the air, urging Megan to catch them like a dog. Megan said, “Arf, woof,” snapping at the flying sausage ends, revelling in the laughter, which she took as applause. She didn’t realize she was the butt of their jokes; she thought it was nice of Tamas and Rachlin Roohan to include her in their games. But one day her father caught them at it and attacked Tamas Preltz with a leg of lamb that had been hanging from a hook in the window. When he had beaten the boy to his knees, he went to Roohan and paid for the leg of lamb, spoke a quiet word, took his shamed daughter by the hand, and led her away, weeping. Tamas Preltz was fired from the butcher shop. He packed his bag the next morning, gave notice to the Widow Hopkins, and left for the next bigger town along the railway line when the noon commuter train came through.

  This should have been the end of the story, but passions had been let loose, hearts wounded. Megan Strehle turned against her father, grew angry and remote, neglected her looks, which were not much to begin with, and plotted revenge and escape. She put pillows under her skirts and walked around on market days proclaiming her pregnancy, naming Tamas the father. She stood outside the window of Roohan’s Butcher Shop with her face against the glass till Rachlin appeared, then shook her belly at the fat girl and barked like a dog. “Arf, woof.” She refused to help her father in the Brussels sprouts patch, left the chicken coop open for a fox, ogled the hired man, who was toothless and nearly sixty, and wrote terrible love poetry, which she recited from the dormer roof on moonlit nights. Her father tried to win her back with chocolate almond candy, hair ribbons, and preteen fitness tapes, but when she was twelve, she hitched a ride with an itinerant computer repairman to the next bigger town and searched high and low for Tamas Preltz. No one could remember the boy. It was as if he had never existed. When the computer repairman, whose name was Evan Ravit, moved to the next, even bigger town, she went with him. He taught her code and bought her chocolate almond candy and said that the universe was a symphony of binary numbers. They slept together like children, with their clothes on. Her parents believed she had been kidnapped and went on national television to beg for her safe return. Their pleas were so moving that they appeared on several important talk shows and, briefly, had their own Christian reality TV series, before her father went into rehab and ran away with a famous country singer named Halley Ratliff who reminded him of his daughter. Evan and Megan watched her parents’ antics with embarrassment and glee. They changed their names to Mitch and Amanda Bunim, pretended to be brother and sister. Later they pretended to be married, and even later, in their innocence, they thought they were married.

  Meanwhile, Rachlin Roohan pined for Tamas though she was older than the boy by eleven years and had had no more encouragement than the occasional laugh over the idiot dog-girl Megan Strehle. When it became apparent that Tamas would never return, she stopped eating, began to lose weight, and read romance novels in the cold storage room, wearing her mother’s otter-skin coat and her father’s deer-hunting boots. Soon she was thin and quite beautiful, but eccentric and fever-eyed. She went to the bar at the edge of town and slept with men she barely knew, still wearing her father’s hunting boots and the otter-skin coat, with her hair flung wild on grey motel pillows in the sickly glow of neon lamps. Her father neglected his butcher shop in his despair over her behaviour, turned to drink, beat his wife (the innocent in all this), held dark colloquy with the bull mastiff watchdog named Edmundo, and eventually hanged himself on a meathook in the cold storage room. Some time after the funeral, a fat man with thin hair and a speech impediment took photographs of Rachlin with his cellphone camera, photographs that spread around the world on the Internet in a matter of hours. Lonely men in Mumbai and San Diego, smitten with the sad beauty, naked except for her hunting boots, besmirched with semen, smiling enigmatically, wore themselves to nubbins in masturbatory frenzies. The night the photos first appeared on the Web, a wave of suicides circled the globe. Legends swiftly attached themselves to Rachlin’s mysterious photographs. From Vladivostok to Buenos Aires, men set out in quest of her, despairing, in thrall to desire, abandoning jobs, wives, children, and elderly parents. One by one they found her, knocking timidly or pugnaciously at her motel door at all hours, sometimes stumbling over one another on her welcome mat or waiting in line on a suite of folding chairs she kept on the parking pad. She slept with them all, hungry for something, she thought, something that not one of them could supply. And one by one they slunk away, failed, empty, and still despairing. Then came a little epileptic former third grade art teacher from Nairobi, a man whose Swahili name meant Field of Cows in English. Field of Cows failed also to satisfy the mysterious Rachlin Roohan but refused to give in to despair, though he had much to despair of, only asking to be allowed to stay near her and crawl into her bed when she was alone and make her hot milk and bull’s blood toddies now and then. For her part, growing ever thinner and more beautiful on catnaps and a diet of bull’s blood toddies, Rachlin Roohan barely noticed Field of Cows. She spent her days reclining languidly against the dirty pillows between bouts of lovemaking, staring at the rainy parking lot beyond the motel window, weeping sometimes at the thought of her dead father, trying to remember what Tamas Preltz looked like, vaguely anxious that she could no longer picture the man she desired more than any other. Only when Field of Cows fell into one of his noisy fits would she stir herself to help him, shoving a dirty slipper between his teeth to keep him from biting his tongue, hugging his arms to his sides till the flailing subsided, whispering sweet endearments into his ear. “Baby, baby,” she would whisper. “Baby, baby.”

  Tamas Preltz never reached the next bigger town along the railway line. The train stopped briefly on a siding for the westbound freight. Three men, who had been drinking heavily in the bar car, stumbling back to their seats, suddenly conceived an immoderate passion of their own for this stupid, innocent-looking, blond butcher boy. They tied his hands and took turns with him in an unoccupied toilet, then tossed him off the train into a freshly manured Brussels sprouts patch beside the track. The three men, returning to their seats, grew rancorous and quarrelsome. They were guilt-stricken over the sudden access of an outré passion, which till that moment had been utterly alien to them. One wanted to go back and make certain Tamas Preltz was dead. Another wanted to confess to the tra
in conductor and send for an ambulance. The third wanted to swear an oath of perpetual silence so that they could return to their wives, children, and jobs as though nothing had happened. “Life is full of secrets,” he said. “Why should we be different from anyone else?” In the years that followed, one of the men killed himself in despair by driving his car head-on into a moving van carrying the furniture and personal effects of an immigrant mathematics professor named D’if Afghani and his thirteen children, one of whom had been accidentally packed with the family bedding and was later found uninjured amid the wreckage. The second man left his wife and moved to a large Midwestern city, where he opened a hobby shop catering to the shy, lonely inner-city boys and girls. And the third became a prominent Christian conservative politician. Meanwhile, the night of the train incident, an aged, blind herd dog named Rusty discovered Tamas Preltz unconscious in the mud and urinated on him. After regaining consciousness the next day, Tamas followed Rusty home and slept in his doghouse until discovered by a girl coming to feed her beloved pet one morning some days later. The girl would have screamed, but she was deaf and dumb, and her scream came out like the sound of wind in a pine thicket. In signs, Tamas explained what had happened to him. The girl wrung her hands and wept. She reached out and smoothed his dirty hair with her fingers. Transformed by misery and her tender, guileless pity, Tamas Preltz felt love for the first time and in that moment began to regret the way he had treated Megan Strehle. For his part, Rusty, the dog, was glad when Tamas moved in with the girl and her family because it had grown crowded in the doghouse and Tamas ate all the table scraps. Tamas worked for the girl’s family, members of a vegan organic farming co-operative, and eventually married the girl, whose name was Laurette Vitapotle. They had two children and adopted two others when Laurette proved incapable of bearing more babies. She had grown obese despite a diet of Brussels sprouts, raw carrots, and hummus. But the fatter she grew, the more Tamas Preltz loved her. They would often embarrass other members of the co-op by making love in the field rows or behind a hay rick or beside an open window on moonlit nights, their cries of joy setting off mysterious vibrations in the listener, inspiring laughter, lust, and the desire for fat babies. But the co-op prospered, cheerful children gambolled in the vegetable patches, the Brussels sprouts and cabbages won prizes at the state fair, and tour buses brought doting crowds of vegan initiates to browse in the fields, where sometimes they caught a glimpse of Laurette and Tamas scampering naked or felt the pulse of their seismic lovemaking.