Savage Love Page 5

  He said, “Every woman I have loved has been murdered.”

  “Was that before or after you had sex?” she asked.

  “Before,” he said.

  Tobin felt himself getting woozy again, talking so intimately with those large breasts, which, now that he thought of it, reminded him of his mother. Once, he had seen his mother naked on her bed, her breasts slung to the side; like boat bumpers, he thought.

  “Then you’re a virgin,” said Dolores. “How old are you?”

  “Forty-two,” he said.

  “You’ve wet your pants,” she said.

  *

  Everything reminded Tobin of everything else, as if the world were made up of signs and omens that only referred to other signs and omens. He understood that his life was ruled by a principle of recursion. It occurred to him that he might be nothing but a robot with a short circuit, that consciousness was a flaw that only caused anguish, anxiety and alienation. He filled his room with thorny houseplants — barrel cacti, firethorn, Argentine mesquite, stinging nettle, Russian thistle, acacia, goat’s thorn — so that he could sleep safely at night, though twice he tripped and impaled himself inadvertently. His shrieks went unanswered. His body was a star map of scars and punctures. He remained terrified of his father, a man now broken in health and feeble from the strain of defending himself against his son’s accusations. His father had moved into an extended care facility, but Tobin’s mother refused to tell him the address.

  “Haven’t you done enough?” she said.

  There had been a restraining order, at least once. Every day, when he left for work, he would knock on his mother’s door, give her a peck on the cheek, and say, “I love you, Mom.” Each time, she seemed to shrink from him, shuddering, growing into herself, frail and sickly.

  He tried to have his name legally changed from Thorn to Pillow. He went around introducing himself as Martin Pillow even though everyone knew him as Tobin Thorn. The house had fallen into ruin. Tobin sometimes borrowed the backhoe from the cemetery. He had undercut the foundation and knocked over the summer kitchen. One day Tobin’s mother, no doubt consumed with jealousy over his hard-won success and happiness, packed an overnight bag and ran away with a man named Reggie Wemyss whom she had met when he came to the door selling vinyl replacement windows. She wrote in soap on the bathroom mirror: Free At Last! She did not leave a forwarding address. Tobin’s new girl had roses tattooed on her breasts, a crown of thorns on her back, and a skein of barbed wire inked around her neck.

  “Nobody can touch me,” she said.

  “No need to explain,” he said.

  They had met during grief therapy. She idolized Kurt Cobain. She called Tobin Martin Pillow because that was how he introduced himself. She was overweight, with large, unmanageable breasts, lank black hair turning to grey. She seemed alarmingly familiar, like every other woman in his life, but none the worse for having spent the last thirty years underground in the backyard.

  “I thought you were dead,” said Tobin. “Murdered.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “But you’ve got me intrigued.”

  The new girl reminded Tobin of a kite come to earth, crumpled, broken, but still buffeted by the winds of desire. She showed him her paint-by-numbers Colonial America collection. She wore a cardigan sweater with deep pockets. She set the alarm clock at night and made him get up to pee. She taught him to play cribbage. They did jigsaw puzzles together. He took evening classes in power shovels and earth movers. They started a retirement account at the local credit union, bought a time-share in Boca Raton and joined the End Times Church of Christ the Reanimate, run out of a Trim-n-Buff nail salon in the mall. In his spare time Tobin began to write a self-help guide for abused children. Nights, he dreamed of being buried alive and premature ejaculation. Tobin told his therapist that his life was shadowed by forgotten things.

  “Like what?” asked the therapist.

  “I’ve forgotten,” said Tobin.

  He said he believed his parents had undergone plastic surgery and moved into the house next door under the names Mr. and Mrs. Kirpal Singh, an insidious couple with a small child named Parvati. Their cats came into his yard and did their business in the excavations. He had notified the police on several occasions. He and his new girl moved around the house in synchronized patterns like automata. At night he could hear her weeping behind locked doors. Aside from the violent rages, intermittent catatonia, nightmares, sleepwalking, chronic priapism, nervous hair-pulling, delusions of grandeur, deathly boredom, spiritual emptiness and sleep apnea, he felt that life had never been better.

  One day, Tobin spotted Aganetha in the street. It was as though he had entered the Land of the Dead. There were gods everywhere. All of life had been a promise. His iguana brain rejoiced in the sunlight. Her hair was the colour of slate. She had breasts like liquid fuel rockets. He remembered first love. She was his beginning and his end. He remembered hope. He remembered her nervous whisper, her habit of eating her hair when she was thinking. He remembered she could make quarters dance on her knuckles and disappear. Then he noticed the tall silver-haired gent guiding her toward a black SUV, and the two cherubic teenagers, a boy and a girl, both resembling their parents. They were like visitors from another planet. His ardent heart heaved with adoration, yearning, jealousy, humiliation and rage. “What about me?” he screamed, heaving a rock like a prayer. Then he threw another rock. Who are those people? he thought. The rock clanged off the SUV. Stern faces leafed toward him like pages in a book. The boy nodded omnisciently. The silver-haired gent aimed an elegant pointer finger at the tip of a long arm. They possessed all the qualities Tobin lacked — grace, affection, sang froid, maturity and wisdom. For all Tobin knew, pure ichor ran in their veins. Aganetha gave him an ominous wave, almost as if she regretted it. If she is real, he thought, what of my dreams? my life? He held his breath. He willed himself not to breathe.

  The wind suddenly picked up. A dust devil swirled toward him, whipping street grit into his eyes, stinging his cheeks like nettles. Aganetha kept waving like a railway signal, the rhythmic motion of her hand uncanny and mesmerizing. Her face was molten wax. Her eyes were like pits. Tobin felt the wind lifting him, felt himself the centre of storm. She mouthed the words, I’m sorry. The roar of the wind was terrific. He had to shut his eyes. His lungs were full of sand. His heart ached. The sound of the wind was like an explosion.

  He remembered everything — his father’s hand on a breast, the rose arbour, his mother’s hot breath on his cheek, the absolute density of the moment from which all meaning emanated. There was always someone coming between you and the thing you love, he thought. Aganetha reminded him of a kite. He was holding the reel, but the line had broken. The kite was almost out of sight. All he had was the reel and a piece of broken string.

  Light Trending to Dark

  The trouble began when Lily, a girl I had been seeing, phoned the house one night last summer and spoke to my wife. They talked for an hour, talked like old friends. I was in and out of the sewing room, caught snatches of conversation and brittle laughter, suspected nothing. Then my wife — her name is Ellen — said would I watch the children for half an hour? She had to meet someone for coffee. She never met anyone for coffee, especially not in the evening.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “No one you know,” she said, a little stiff, not to be argued with. She gets this way sometimes. She’d had a drink or two earlier.

  “No problem,” I said.

  As soon as she left, the phone rang again. It was Lily. “I just talked to your wife, Ricardo. She’s coming over to see me.”

  “Are you crazy?” I said. “And my name’s not Ricardo.”

  “You blew it,” she said. “You said you were leaving her. You said it’s a dead marriage.”

  “You’re killing me,” I said.

  “I’m killing you?” she
said. “You think it feels good to find out the man you love has been lying to you all along? She says it’s the first she’s heard. She says you have a happy, stable marriage and three daughters under the age of eight. She’s studying to be a Jungian therapist — you said she stayed home with the kids and sewed party dresses all day.”

  “I never told you that,” I said.

  “Here’s a test,” she said. “Did you have sex with your wife last night?” I tried to think. “Did you? You told me sex ended a year ago. You have to think about it?”

  I groaned. “Listen, Lily,” I said, “you can’t talk to her any more. You’ll break her heart. I was going to let her down easy.”

  “I think she’s here,” said Lily. “She thought it was kind of funny when I told her we meet up for quickies when you walk the dog.”

  “You’ll ruin everything,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. “I’ll send her back in an hour.”

  I poured myself an Old Crow on the rocks and sat on the toilet seat while the girls splashed happily in the tub. They were wild, sensing something violent and threatening in the atmosphere. Before I knew it, they were taking turns sliding headfirst down the back of the tub, sending waves of soapy water whooshing onto the bathroom floor. Sophie knocked her forehead on the spout and started to bleed. Forehead wounds are bleeders, always look worse than they are. She bled into the tub, where the blood swirled and coiled like red smoke, then turned cloudy and dark, more blood than I’d ever seen before. I clamped a washcloth over the wound, but the blood seeped through and dripped down her nose. The two littler girls started to shriek in panic. I shouted at them to get in their PJs. They tracked blood down the hallway to their room. I put Sophie’s hand on the washcloth and went to pour myself another bourbon.

  In the kitchen, I rinsed the empty ice cube tray and refilled it, listening to my hysterical children in the background. The dog was barking at some phantom out the sliding door at the back. I could see the driveway. Ellen had taken the Saab. That sucker was about to be repossessed, I thought. Enjoy it while you can. I drank my drink and shouted at the girls to get their bathrobes on. We were going to take Sophie to the Emergency Room. I poured another drink.

  Isobel came into the kitchen with her hamster cage in her arms. She said, “I think Pinky is dead.” Her face was ashen, her tone grim. Sophie sobbed somewhere in the depths of the house.

  I gulped back the drink and pushed past Isobel to the bathroom. I was a little drunk. I began to wonder if there were arteries in the forehead. Sophie was rinsing the washcloth in the sink while fresh blood bubbled out of her brow. I wrapped her in a towel and picked her up, carried her to the bedroom, and started putting her in underpants and PJs. Isobel came in after us, looking tragic.

  The phone rang. It was Ellen.

  “We have a situation here,” I said.

  “You rat,” she said. “You utter shit.”

  “Pinky died,” I said. “Maybe it’s not the best time to talk this over.”

  “I’m at Lily’s apartment,” she said. “How old is this girl?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe twenty-five, twenty-six.”

  “She’s twenty-one,” said my wife. “I can’t believe you did this.” Her voice contained a note of malicious glee. Like many of us, my wife felt obscurely persecuted most of the time. No doubt it was a relief to find her paranoid fancies confirmed.

  “Listen,” I said, “I really think I should — Jesus, can you bleed to death from the forehead?”

  “The hamster is bleeding to death?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Sophie hit her head in the tub. It’s pretty bad. I’m taking her to the ER.”

  “Oh, Christ,” she said. “Wait there for me.”

  “No, I’ll meet you,” I said. “I think I’d better get a move on.”

  I changed Sophie out of her bloody pyjamas and put fresh ones on and wrapped a towel around her head as tight as I could. Isobel stood there peering gravely down at her hamster. It looked as if it might just be sleeping soundly. “Did you poke it?” I asked. “Shake the cage a little.” I watched the hamster bounce up and down in a cloud of wood shavings. It was sleeping very soundly.

  “Honey,” I said, “we have a situation here with Sophie that takes priority.” Her eyes began to swim.

  I went into the kitchen to pour myself another drink. I thought about Lily, whom I had met at the public library during Sophie’s violin lesson. I generally dropped Sophie at her violin teacher’s apartment after school those days and waited at the library, leafing through magazines and a book on how things work I had found in the Juvenile Non-Fiction section. It made me feel good to look at the pictures and captions and begin to understand something of MP3 players, tablet computers and liquid fuel rockets. One of the problems with life these days is the way technology has gotten away from us. Everything is a black box with an on/off switch. We can’t fix a thing once it’s broken any more. It really helped to see pictures of the insides of ordinary household items, to see their mysterious inner workings.

  I trusted Sophie to walk the three blocks from her violin teacher’s place, but one day she walked in with this strange girl — swarthy complexion, thick, dark eyebrows, nervous eyes, intelligence written all over her, along with adventurousness and low self-esteem. Sophie led her to me, and we started to talk while my daughter played math challenges on the computer. We had a lot in common: we both liked to talk about ourselves and we were both polite listeners. She started meeting me when I walked the dog at night. One thing led to another. She said she loved me. I didn’t believe her and I didn’t think she believed herself. We were both playing a little game. I said I loved her. Then I would come home and tell my girls I loved them and kiss Ellen good night and tell her I loved her. I was full of love.

  Straggling through the garage door to the Subaru, we somehow let the dog out. This was bad. She was a German shepherd, frightened people. Also, when she got away she’d run down Pulver to number 81, where there was a chow permanently chained in the breezeway. I didn’t know what my dog and the chow had in common, but that was where my dog went. When she finally came home, she generally vomited once or twice on the carpets. I didn’t know what she ate at the chow’s house. Sometimes I wondered if the chow’s owners were trying to poison my dog. I kept thinking I’d go over there one night and find out what my dog’s secret life really consisted of. Isobel had the hamster cage. Katie was sniffling, somewhat catatonic with emotional overload and sleep deprivation (it was ten minutes past her bedtime). Sophie’s bleeding was beginning to ebb; possibly she’d lost all the blood there was to lose. The dog made me unreasonably angry. I thought, I’ll kill the dog.

  I seatbelted the girls and nestled my drink in the cup tray between the seats, blasted out of the garage like a Saturn rocket and swung onto the street. The house was ablaze with lights. There was a steady tick in the engine, the sound of machine deterioration, the approach of entropy. I couldn’t afford to fix it. When I complained, Ellen said I didn’t have a right. I had quit my steady job with the big stable company to chip in with a friend who owned a software start-up. He’d invented a surefire cellphone app that was going to make us rich. I spent four days a week in the air, flying home on weekends, flying high, Ellen said. We built the house. I bought the Saab, a lap pool, widescreen TVs, every gadget going. Ellen became a soccer mom (studying to be a Jungian therapist). Now the house was under water, I had my CV posted on the Internet, and I had plenty of spare time. I couldn’t get over any of this. You think you know how things work, that you have some control, then you realize you’re on a ride — you can’t see the road and you’re not sure there’s a driver. The kind of world we’re in makes us all gamblers and losers. You spend your life trying to get a handle on things, then you die, or worse, you die in some long, painful and humiliating manner. Maybe I was scared before this and didn’t know it. But n
ow I knew it. I looked down the road and I felt sick.

  I looked down Pulver now and saw my dog exiting the chow’s driveway on her way home, looking businesslike with her tail up. Isobel said she thought the hamster had moved. It wasn’t dead after all. Sophie looked asleep, white as an egg. The dog’s nonchalance enraged me. I sipped my drink and thought about scaring the dog with the car, just nudging her into the ditch to remind her who was the boss, that the angel of death hovered over her shoulder too. I grabbed the car phone and speed-dialed the Saab.

  Ellen answered. “Where are you?” she asked. “I’m at the ER. You said you’d meet me.”

  “I got delayed,” I said. “We’re on our way.”

  I gunned the engine. The dog trotted toward us down the middle of the street in the summer twilight. I could hear children’s laughter, their taunts and shrieks. Down our street toward the cul-de-sac they were playing kickball, a game that seemed to go on all summer.

  Isobel said, “Daddy, watch out for the dog.”

  “We’ll be right there,” I said into the phone. “I just have to take care of one or two things.”

  “How’s Sophie?” my wife asked.

  “She’s asleep,” I said. “Exhausted.”

  “I talked to your friend Lily,” said Ellen. “I don’t blame her. I don’t even blame you. But you have to get out now.”

  I hung up, sipped my drink.

  I had the dog in my sights. I was waiting for the twilight to fade so I could safely call it an accident. For a naturally inquisitive dog it was a long haul down Pulver, what with the garbage cans out on the curb and miscellaneous piles of crap and urine markers to identify. I just hated that dog. Every ounce of frustration, anger, envy and resentment focused like a laser beam onto that dog. Of course, it was my wife’s dog — maybe that was part of it. I just fed it, housed it, cleaned up when it vomited on the carpets, slept in a bed covered with dog hair, smelled of dog. I gunned the engine and inched forward, nosing into the middle of the street.