Savage Love (17 page)

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 two 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.

“And there were a couple of others. I forget when,” she said. “Have you been seeing anyone? Anything to confess on your side?”

Ona Frame shook his head.

“
What about the little high school slut who stacks books sometimes? You had your dirty little eyes on her.”

“No, no,” said Ona Frame, suddenly embarrassed, who, in truth, had been watching the high school girl, who seemed anything but a slut, while he was simultaneously spying on Betsy Edger. He marvelled at how Betsy Edger divined his innermost thoughts and how different she seemed now from the untalented, mousy, demure, naive, ingenuous, quiet girl he had fallen for at the outset. Even her breasts seemed larger.

He had briefly entertained fantasies that the high-school-girl-cum-book-stacker might save him from Betsy Edger and Shelby and Majory Sass (who was rarely out of his mind)
, not to mention Emma Christmas (also rarely out of his mind — his mind dense with the detritus of old loves, fragmentary memories of pussy, orgasm, armpit smell, sharp retort, cunning absences, glances, gusts of cruel laughter, sobs). And in truth, he had once invited her for a coffee at Virgil's Roast House, where they played backgammon for an hour.

After, he had shyly taken her hand as they walked through the night toward her apartment on Beekman. She was the kind of girl he was always looking for: restrained, demure, monosyllabic, undemanding, attentive.

At her door, he remembered now, the girl had kissed him, the tiny stiff hairs on her upper lip scraping his skin as they touched tongue tips. She had invited him in and offered him Sleepytime
tea but opened a bottle of wine instead and drank from the bottle and went to her bedroom to change and came back wearing nothing and kissed him hungrily and turned her back to him so that he took her from behind and came touching herself, moaning, “I love you,” which filled Ona Frame with dread and prognostication (he could tell, he could always tell, how things would turn out).

In the drowsy aftermath of sex, she said she had left high school two years before and was trying to be a writer, which was why she liked working in the library. She met men on
Match.com
and slept with them on the first date. This was the first time the library had worked for her.

Women, too. When she was drunk, she would lose her inhibitions (What inhibitions? Ona Frame wondered) and start kissing whoever was sitting next to her. Once, she had let a man finger her to an orgasm in a booth at Orphan Annie's. She was sure other bar patrons had noticed. She said, “
You like hearing this, don't you? My last lover said I give good story.” She said it with bravado, with a mischievous gleam in her eyes.

Ona Frame had told no one about the book-stacker, especially not Shelby (for obvious reasons) or Betsy Edger (for even more obvious reasons), and he was sure no one had seen him. Although, if truth be told, he invariably felt as though someone were following him. He was forever glancing over his shoulder, half
expecting to find Shelby's
BMW
hovering at a discreet distance, partly shrouded in exhaust fumes.

During the Majory Sass episode, the so-called “Regrettable Incident,” there had been occasions when Ona Frame felt certain Shelby was following him while he was in the act of following Shelby. Once, Ona Frame had thought, We are never going to stop following each other round and round this block. We have entered some mythic space of perpetual mutual stalking.

Betsy Edger's brow suddenly clouded as if she had been reading his thoughts. A flash of anger erupted in her tannin-coloured eyes. “You disgust me,” she said, and swept out of the apartment.

Ona Frame clutched himself through the cloth of his L.L. Bean nightshirt and fell to his knees. He began to howl with loneliness and pain, with the horror of abandonment, with amazement at how low he had sunk. Twinks, terrified, crept into a corner under the bed.

But Ona Frame had never been happier, had never felt so alive. He thought, Now I know what it's like to be a fictitious character in a story, that sense of chockablock crisis and fate, of another hand stoking the drama to see how I might perform. At length, he stretched out on the floor, sobbing with gratitude;
all Betsy Edger's visit meant was that she still needed him. She needed someone to whom to be cruel, and she had picked Ona. For this he was grateful.

He took three or four vodkas, trying to calm down and
sleep, but telephoned the high school book-stacker instead.

She said, “I met a friend of yours the other day. At least, he said he was a friend of yours, even though he was trying to get into my pants.”

Ona Frame put his hand to his heart and felt the shattered rhythms of distress. Her words filled him with sudden dread for the future, for the ridiculous indignity and injustice of aging and death, for the loss of love, which was infinitely more certain than love itself, for the communality of desire, which is never singular but feeds off the desires of others, for the eternal oscillating engine of intimacy that never achieves rest.

Anticipating her answer, he whispered, “Did you — ”

And she said, “Listen, baby, love is like the telephone
— more than one can use the line.”

Her name was Amanda Hawk.

That night, Ona Frame had a nightmare. It began with a tap at the door and then Majory Sass accusing him of having an affair with Betsy Edger. He felt like a little boy caught in the act of masturbating by his stern librarian mother with her tweed skirts and her creamy blouses (with the Dutch collars) buttoned to her throat — oh, how he had adored her. When he woke up, he was not sure he was awake or if the nightmare were merely an extension of the day. His mother had been a high school history teacher, he recalled, not a librarian. She had a face like a stone. It reminded him of someone else's face, but the name escaped him.

Then he wanted to show Shelby a poem he had written. He took the elevator to Shelby
's floor but realized, as he rang the doorbell, that he'd forgotten the slip of paper with the poem. And in any case, it wasn't Shelby's building. Trying to leave, he found himself in a maze. He couldn't get out and he couldn't remember the poem. (Sometime during this sequence of events, Ona Frame intuited that he was not awake at all. He wondered if he was ever awake, if such a state existed, or if in fact he was dead, a suicide, dreaming of doubles and things he had forgotten, or if this was the state of mind of a character whose author has forgotten about him.)

Sipping his third morning vodka (he noticed the muzzy dawn light scattering the dirty crepuscules of night in the backyard), he realized how bizarre his life had become. He realized that nothing added up, nothing that happened to him became a story, because time didn't exist, a fact Shelby had pointed out in an e-mail only the week before, when they were still on speaking terms though angry with one another.

“You predict the future in your horoscopes,” Shelby had written, “but if you can predict the future, then there is no future, and if there is no future, then there is no time, and if there is no time, then nothing changes and life ceases to exist, only eddies and loops, endlessly trying to start but covering the same ground again and again. Without time, there is only repetition. You are hysterically frightened of time, aging and death, Ona Frame, but the poet knows you can't live without them. You can't abide a paradox. This is why Betsy Edger loves me more than she loves you.”

The words had confused Ona Frame because he was only twenty-six years old and because Shelby also dabbled in horoscopes. Indeed, Shelby had often filled in for Ona Frame when Ona ran out of inspiration. Shelby had once said there was little difference between writing horoscopes and writing poetry and that they were both like talking to a woman you love, the woman of your dreams.

Shelby also had a terrible habit of repeating himself, telling the same stories again and again. Sometimes they were stories Ona Frame had told Shelby a moment before.

That afternoon, Ona Frame ran into Shelby and Betsy Edger at the Price Chopper, temple of food. It was hardly an accident because he had been following them since dawn, when he woke up and discovered Shelby's ineffable
BMW
wheezing exhaust fumes outside Amanda Hawk's apartment house.

Ona Frame was behind in his horoscopes. His editor had threatened to fire him. His credit cards were maxed out. He drank vodka in the morning to calm his shattered nerves. Then he drank more in the afternoon and evening. He had spent the night having revenge sex with Marion Esterhazy, a newbie playwright and dysfunctional book-stacker at the library, who said revenge sex is the best next to
breakup sex. (Although Ona Frame was not sure if he was avenging himself against Shelby or Betsy Edger or Majory Sass or someone else entirely.)

As they wrestled on Marion Esterhazy's stale, well-used sheets, he had written an entire lyric poem in his head.

But when he woke up, he was sitting in his car outside Amanda Hawk's apartment with no idea how or why he was there except that he must have been spying on someone.

Shelby had once said that in life actions are often motivated by nothing more than boredom and banality, which, only in retrospect, take on the character of personality or fate or divine guidance.

Shelby also said the kind of woman you choose is an expression of your attitude to life.

Ona Frame thought, But Shelby only chooses women I want to be with. Or is it that I am only attracted to women Shelby would be attracted to? As always for Ona Frame, thought itself was a vertiginous experience.

The sight of the
BMW
filled him with happiness and despair. Briefly, he had thought he might have Amanda Hawk all to himself, whereas with Betsy Edger (not to mention Majory Sass) he had quickly recognized a tendency to insecure attachment. But a tendency to insecure attachment seemed to be contagious, or it was the modern thing, or it was the subterranean essence of love.