Savage Love Read online

  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 till 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.

  But at the time, during the interregnum, when, in fact, Betsy was staying with Shelby exclusively, Ona Frame continued to write bad poems, struggled with his stalking addiction, foretold the future, and alternately hated Betsy Edger and thrilled to fantasies of torrid sexual congress. Though, in truth, after titillating him with stories of wild exhibitionism, swinger sex, mischievous infidelities, and rare fetishes, she had confessed to preferring the missionary position while also claiming she had never had an orgasm that way. She only had orgasms when she was by herself.

  With such contradictory signals emanating from the one he loved, Ona Frame had felt sexually whipsawed. All desire had left him except the desire to conform his desire to Betsy Edger’s desires, which were, in the end, incomprehensible. He had felt himself being sucked into an infinite regress of assertion and contradiction that left him trembling and powerless, a state which he adored. With Betsy Edger gone and her sternly written admonition to stay away tacked to the otherwise empty corkboard above his kitchen table, he was in an ecstasy, sure only of his passion and, yes, that Betsy Edger would return. He was, as he thought, only awaiting new instructions.

  It was a Wednesday evening, late, about ten o’clock, and Ona Frame was tucked up in bed with Twinks the cat wrapped around his head like a hat, when he heard a tentative tap at the door. He had some trouble getting up, Twinks refusing to relinquish his perch and scratching Ona Frame’s forehead. A trail of blood beads erupted down the bridge of his nose. He had an erection tangled in his L.L. Bean flannel nightshirt. (He had, of course, been dreaming of Majory Sass or Betsy Edger or perhaps the accident-prone field hockey player — whose name, by the way, was Emma Christmas.)

  When she saw his nightshirt-tent, Betsy Edger gave him a triumphant half smile, self-satisfied and libidinous. She said she had missed him but that they could only be friends. Sex was out of the question, she said, her head dipping slightly as she glanced at his diminishing erection. She seemed beautiful in that prim librarian sort of way, with her hair neatly bobbed, no makeup, and a skirt that came to her knees.

  “But we can be kind to one another,” she added.

  Naturally, Ona Frame thought. Naturally, sex will be out of the question. As long as I desire her, she no longer needs to give in to my desires.

  Long ago, he had wondered if she was happy, playing this endless push-me-pull-you game of desire and denial, playing the t
wo men off against each other, never giving either precisely what he wanted. He wondered if she was happy since, in fact, she never seemed to get what she wanted either, lived only for the sake of inciting and denying desire in others, for the anhedonic bliss of the chase — a woman’s fate.

  “Friends,” he said. “Yes, of course. Only friends.”

  She glanced at him with a malicious gleam in her eye (or so it seemed to Ona Frame). “I haven’t been totally candid with you, Ona,” she said.

  “No?” he said weakly.

  “When we were still together, I had an affair — that night I spent in New York when I went to my brother’s concert.”

  “Oh,” said Ona Frame, thinking, What part of being friends and kind did I not understand?

  He felt the bellows of passion fanning his rage, his love, his self-disgust. His erection fought to rise against the L.L. Bean nightshirt. He pawed meekly at Betsy Edger’s arm. She twisted away, though she seemed not to be paying attention in any case. She was leafing through his mail on the bookshelf.