Savage Love Read online

  Years later, a grown woman with three children of her own, married to Evan Ravit, who had made a fortune selling erotic cellphone ring tones over the Internet, Megan Strehle, known to everyone as Amanda Bunim, discovered her husband in bed with an office intern named Pesh Afghani, a beautiful brown girl with a mathematical turn of mind and a strange story about once having been locked for days in a family linen trunk. “I’m in love with her,” said Evan, now known as Mitch. “I’ve never known love before this.” “That’s funny,” said Megan. “I’ll go tell the kids we made a mistake.” “She’s a brilliant programmer,” he said, “and she does the funky-funky dance with her bottom.” Broken-hearted, Megan barricaded herself and the children in the east wing of the family mansion and sought a restraining order against her husband, although, in fact, he didn’t need any restraining, indeed, spent most of his time playing table tennis with Miss Afghani or chasing her around the bedroom. Their cries of delight depressed Megan Strehle. She couldn’t deny that Evan Ravit seemed happier than she had ever known him to be. And she remembered how he had picked her up on the road to the next bigger town all those years before, her belly lopsidedly swollen with a pillow, her tears running into an old sock she carried instead of a handkerchief, her heart bursting with love for a boy whose name she could no longer remember. (Her eldest son was, however, named Tamas, and she had long ago given up eating meat on account of some vaguely disagreeable memory associated with butcher shops.) Evan had offered her twelve-year-old self a ride out of kindness and empathy for her loneliness; he too was lonely, as only an itinerant computer repairman could be. She thought now that he was right, they had never properly been in love. And she realized she had always been lonely, even in Evan Ravit’s arms. She found a vegetarian online dating service called Hearts of Palm and met sixteen gentle, sensitive, candlelit-dinner-and-long-walk-loving, whole earth, organic, environmentally conscious, horny men the first hour and settled on one named Darter who lived on iceberg lettuce, vegan turkey substitute, and generic-brand diet colas. He ran ultra-marathons, had lost an eye and a foot in a war, talked incessantly into a wireless headset, and said, upon meeting Megan, “Babe, I’m moving you out of the holding pattern onto the incoming flight path.” “Who do you talk to on that headset?” she asked him. “No one,” said Darter. “I just wear this thing so I won’t be embarrassed talking to myself.” Then Darter told her a sad story about how he had once seen the picture of a woman in hunting boots and an otter-skin coat on an amateur porn site, how he couldn’t get her out of his head, how he gave up everything and spent thousands of dollars to track her down (somewhere he had a wife, a college-age child, and a toxin-laced but profitable electroplating shop), how he found her in a motel, attended by an ancient, diseased African, so thin she was almost translucent, how he made love to her and yet even in that moment of supreme triumph felt all the possibility of happiness drain away. Sometimes, he said, he returned to that desolate place and watched the men waiting to be entertained and then slipping away abashed, wounded, and lorn. He saw himself in every one. Megan thought he would do as an interim lover and invited him into her bed, where she tried to do the funky-funky dance with her bottom. But they both felt they were only going through the motions, both yearning for something else, as though sacrificing to distant gods, but the gods never appeared.

  Tamas Preltz had forgotten Rachlin Roohan when he caught his nine-year-old son, Stalton Preltz, deaf and dumb like his mother, surfing pornographic sites on the Internet. The boy was staring at the dark, blurry image of a woman, naked except for a pair of hunting boots and an otter-skin coat thrown back to reveal her nether hair and breasts. Father and son were transfixed, barely able to breathe, and when they finally shook themselves awake, their eyes met in a moment of shared understanding. Tamas forgot about reprimanding the boy. He gently pushed Stalton away from the screen and took his place, still not recalling Rachlin Roohan specifically, only aware suddenly of something deeply buried and lost, the memory of a memory of an experience he had never had, of a woman he had never met, infinitely desirable, ineffably sad. He was disturbed presently by the sound of Stalton’s weeping. The boy’s eyes remained fixed on the screen, his hands tugging distractedly at the front of his soccer shorts as if pulling at some imaginary knot. The sight of his son suffering in the toils of a desire he had no way of understanding brought Tamas to his senses. The boy was trying to speak, his lips making a sound like wind in pine trees. Tamas switched off the computer and swept Stalton into his arms, whispering, “Shh, shh, my love,” grasping the boy’s hands in order to stop their obscene pulling. He rushed out, found Laurette washing Brussels sprouts for market, made signs to her to take the boy, then rushed out again, seeking solitude, his soul cracking under the weight of guilt and melancholy. When he emerged from the vegetable shed, another one of those vegan tour buses was just pulling into the driveway and he was forced to stand and greet, grinning insanely, his mind contaminated with the images of Rachlin Roohan and Stalton Preltz twisted together with memories of butcher shop cruelties and commuter-train bathrooms. When Laurette found him that evening, he was hiding behind a machine shed in a patch of pampas grass, staring at clouds that seemed to resemble lovers, entwined at first then sadly drifting apart in tatters and fading to nothingness. She took him by the hand and wiped his cheeks with the sleeve of her coveralls. In signs, she told him she had put their son to bed, though she doubted he would sleep long. She knew, she said, that something terrible had happened, something to do with the past and desire and a hunger all men suffer. She did not judge Tamas, for he had never betrayed her, had brought her nothing but happiness and love. But she remembered how she had found him, bleeding and broken and living with the dog. She only knew now that he must take his son on a journey to the place of sorrows and find the thing they both desired and lose themselves or find themselves. Naturally, she had her preference. But that was for Tamas to decide, and though he might never return his son to innocence, he might find a way to teach him to bear the burden, give him the father-law, and bring him back to her a man before his time. Her words terrified Tamas Preltz, the more so since he didn’t really understand them, only that he had to take Stalton away. The next morning they set off for the city, where Tamas hired a private detective to find the Naked Madonna of the Internet, as she had begun to be called. Tamas thought she would be difficult to track, lost somewhere in the electronic ether, but in fact everyone knew where she lived. She had become another roadside attraction, a pop culture icon. Talk shows buzzed with debate, support groups proliferated, preachers thundered from pulpits, public health officials pointed fingers, and politicians wrung their hands. Meanwhile young women all over the country had taken to wearing otter-skin coats and hunting boots. The detective confessed that even he had paid her a visit, and when Tamas looked into his sad eyes, he knew it must be true. He felt a shudder along his spine as though someone had walked over his grave. Something about the detective was familiar to Tamas; it turned out he had once been a prominent Christian conservative politician until he was caught soliciting young men in a train station restroom. “You must have seen me on TV,” the detective said. “Say, don’t I know you from somewhere?” he asked. But Tamas thought not. The next day he and Stalton drove to the little farming town where he had once worked as a butcher’s apprentice. On the outskirts, they found a fusty motel where the t in the neon sign no longer shone and creepers grew over the windows. A lone bug zapper sizzled and spat in the twilight, waiting men smoked and jiggled their car keys nervously in their pockets and made anxious telegraphic conversation with their neighbours, hawkers sold french fries and soda, and a local Women’s Vigilance Committee had set up a permanent protest. Stalton asked what a “moel” was, and Tamas, feverish with excitement, was unable to answer. Someone came out of the door of number seven, a young man in a neat suit, with a wedding band on his finger. He seemed dazed, unaware of his surroundings, crestfallen, and disappointed. The motel unit door suddenly re-opened an
d a little black man in voluminous cargo shorts and a vest undershirt scampered out, handing the young man an expensive leather briefcase. The young man looked at the briefcase as though he did not recognize it. Then he walked through the parking lot and disappeared into the twilight. The word “shriven” came unbidden to Tamas Preltz’s mind, and he thought how the young man seemed at once ascetic and corrupt, dignified yet shameless, wise and yet powerless to apply that wisdom. It made Tamas shiver to see, some truth there, he thought, no one really wanted to find. He waited two days with his son in that dismal, church-like parking lot, with its pews of waiting acolytes and its mystery of mysteries, holy of holies, watching the men enter and return — always the same expression. Either they are better men or they will kill themselves, he thought on the second day. And then he thought of Stalton, who seemed somehow not there, twisting his hands in his lap, white as fired clay. In vain Tamas tried to hold the little boy’s hands, but Stalton would snatch them away with a squeal of impatience. At the end of the second day, weary and dirty, they were bidden through the door by the black attendant, now seen more clearly as elderly, yet wiry, slender, and opaque, blacker than black. The light was dim, the room unkempt, filthy, smelling unspeakably of old rubber and vomit. Takeout food cartons littered the floor. Used condoms hung from the ceiling fixture. The bathroom gas tube flickered and buzzed, casting a sickly green glow. The woman lay drawn up against a stack of pillows at the head of the bed, her coat thrown open, one leg cocked to the side so that her dark triangle splayed open. Dried semen hung like salt or wisps of spiderweb on her thighs and belly. Her ribs all but poked through her skin. Her breasts were tiny and androgynous, all black nipple. She smoked a brown cigarette with a harsh blue smoke that wreathed the room, dug in her ear with a little finger and coughed and smiled enigmatically when she saw the boy and his father, then sucked on the cigarette till ashes fell on her chest and patted the bed in invitation and laughed mirthlessly with a sound like wind in pine trees. She barked something in Swahili, and the African — we know him as Field of Cows — nudged Stalton forward into the yellow glow of an overhead light. The boy fidgeted, his face pale and pinched, his eyes glassy with fatigue and desire and terror, terror because he did not know what desire was or what he desired, only felt an inchoate and unappeasable need. But he recognized the woman from the Internet site and managed a lugubrious smile, then fainted into a pizza box. Tamas Preltz leaped forward. Rachlin Roohan gasped, staggered to her feet on the bed, and covered herself with the otter-skin coat. “This is the one,” she said. “Not him!” she hissed, as the African known as Field of Cows made for Stalton with a short thrusting spear native to his country. “The other,” she said. “The one who brought the boy.” And simultaneously Tamas Preltz remembered the voice and the face. He remembered the butcher’s fat daughter, her nervous laughter, and the dog-girl Megan Strehle barking, “Arf, woof.” Now, through Stalton’s eyes, he saw the inhuman endlessness of desire, our inability to contain it, the dark tide on which we ride unwitting and unprepared, though even in that moment he wanted to touch Rachlin Roohan, mount her, and bury himself in her body. The universe suddenly seemed alien, death was everywhere, the colours all grey and black and shades of sickly green. Rachlin Roohan’s body was skeletal, her face a death’s head. He saw himself hung on a hook in a walk-in freezer and then crushed between that woman’s emaciated thighs, feeding off her poisonous breasts. One moment he had been happy, with a fat wife, and now the weight of the past, the burden of flesh and the Fall, crushed his heart. He saw his son, innocent and trusting, now trammelled in a web of desire as ineluctable as Fate. He reached for the fallen boy — certain only that coming here had been another in a long line of mistakes leading to some unassimilable ending. But at that moment the African’s assegai slid between Tamas Preltz’s ribs and into his heart. He had only sufficient time to think the word pity and touch Stalton’s hand as he subsided to the floor. Stalton, recovering from his swoon, recoiled from his father’s touch, staring at the Internet whore who, in truth, did not look like much wrapped in her coat. He could not speak, but something came out. It sounded like “Arf, woof.”

  Some time later, a one-eyed man with a limp descended from a tour bus, followed by a woman Laurette knew but did not know. Stalton caught the sudden tension in his mother’s stance; he was washing Brussels sprouts in a diluted food-grade hydrogen peroxide solution under an awning in the open air. He looked just like his father, only younger, somewhat the way Tamas had looked when he was fifteen and worked at Roohan’s Butcher Shop. The woman from the bus went rigid at the sight of him, then grasped her friend’s hand (his good eye had a desperate cast, a sad glint of corruption that Stalton recognized instantly). Laurette had grown enormous, though her feet and hands remained dainty, her movements graceful and lithe, and her face as friendly and pretty as it had been the day she found Tamas Preltz in Rusty’s doghouse. She welcomed the couple and gave them a special tour, including the Tamas Preltz Memorial Industrial Salad Spinner and the Tamas Preltz Ultimate Frisbee Field and the Tamas Preltz Patented Breathable Plastic Bagging Plant. There were photographs of Tamas Preltz over every doorway: Tamas Preltz as a young man eating his first Brussels sprouts with evident distaste, Tamas Preltz swimming naked in the irrigation pond with Laurette, Tamas Preltz with his famous one-ton pumpkin at the state fair, Tamas Preltz with his beloved children. Megan Strehle grew increasingly agitated as the day wore on. Finally, she could stand it no longer. She broke away from Darter, reached a beringed finger to one of the photographs, and ran the finger around and around the contours of Tamas Preltz’s face. She tapped the picture with her nail and said, “I knew him once, long ago. I have looked for him all my life. Sorry, darling,” she added, turning to Darter. “It’s true.” She had tears in her eyes and might have broken down completely except that Laurette Vitapotle embraced her suddenly, crushing her to her oceanic breasts. Megan said, “I am Megan Strehle. He must have spoken of me.” And Laurette Vitapotle said, gently, in signs, “Yes, yes, of course. He spoke of you often. He whispered your name in his dreams. I was so jealous.” They both knew that this was untrue but became fast friends in that moment.

  Meanwhile, Stalton Preltz was not alone. Rachlin Roohan, disguised in a hairnet and dark glasses and co-op coveralls, worked at the washing tubs beside him. She had found her way to the farm to beg forgiveness, to try to make amends for all the trouble she had caused. The day she arrived, Laurette Vitapotle and Rachlin Roohan secluded themselves in a sorting shed. The murmur of their secret colloquy emanated from the shed until nightfall and then through the night. No one dared go near. Once, there was a shriek and a low moan — whether it was Laurette’s voice or Rachlin’s, no one could tell. More than once there came the bubbling sound of crying, another time there was laughter, then more laughter near the end. In the morning, the two women emerged hand in hand, one hugely obese, a primordial Venus, the other skeletal, both in tears. Rachlin Roohan found a bed in the field-hand barracks. And neither woman ever talked about that night except once Laurette said she had asked Rachlin if she had gotten what she wanted. And Rachlin Roohan had said no, she had never known what she wanted, and what she thought she wanted had only been a screen of error. But from the moment of her arrival, Stalton Preltz’s melancholy had begun to lift, as though seeing the real Rachlin Roohan dressed in ordinary clothes (aside from the hairnet and dark glasses), and not the Internet fantasy, somehow relieved his obsessions. One day, much later, he met a girl his own age and they fell in love and were married. Once in a while she would dress up in an otter-skin coat and hunting boots and their lovemaking would be tinged with sadness, though perhaps this is so of all love.

  Field of Cows was arrested for Tamas Preltz’s murder, which he confessed to unreservedly. Some alert police officer noticed that his passport had expired, and he was declared an Enemy Combatant and waterboarded until he confessed again. He was put on a black flight to an undisclosed East European country for further questioning,
where, under torture, he confessed yet again. Several intelligence agencies were determined to break him and find the truth, but he stuck to his story: he and he alone had killed Tamas Preltz with a Masai lion spear at a remote motel somewhere in America. One night, in an attempt to end it all, Field of Cows jumped from his turret cell window over a cliff and into a raging river at the bottom of a gorge. He was found more than half dead the next day by a former Romanian state garlic farmer named Nicola Romanescu, nursed back to health, and he lives there now, tending Nicola’s crops, an embittered and rancorous old man whom no one can understand, for which reason he is considered mystical and wise by the locals. An investigation into his mysterious crimes and disappearance is ongoing on four continents and is considered a matter of national security in several world capitals.

  When the tour bus left, Megan Strehle and her companion Darter stayed on. They liked the place. Some feeling remained of the joyous lovemaking, and there was a sense of shared humanity, something straight to the heart that came from having a connection with the past that was at once harsh and cruel and exciting. All the survivors remembered Tamas Preltz fondly. No one, they felt, was to blame for the disconcerting vagaries of life. All their hearts were good and true, they thought. Soon a younger generation began to pair off (as has been indicated above) and sounds of love, peals of laughter, and whispers like the sound of wind in pine trees filled the summer nights anew.