Savage Love (19 page)

*

Frag had promised to drive Geills home from the hospital but did not show up, and she called me on my cell in the middle of my Proust seminar makeup
class. Akoschka Weatherby was droning on about Proust and queer theory. She had a hunch, only a hunch, mind you, because she had not read the book or the assigned critical texts or even browsed the Internet for information, a hunch based primarily on five lines of back-flap copy, that Proust was gay and possibly this influenced his writing. Akoschka Weatherby assumed her symmetrical features, healthy bosom, and finely plucked eyebrows would make up for any defect of thought. And she was right in a Proustian sort of way. I had my face in my hands with the tips of my little fingers holding up my eyelids on account of serial nights of insomnia brought on by the barking dog (incessant and pointless), marital discord, career anxiety, questions about the future, and my new friends at the rental storage unit dropping in at all hours to borrow cups of cooking wine.

Out of a sense of duty, I had gone to see Susan. She was very calm though thinner, tighter, obsessively fondling her cigarette lighter; thinner, tighter, as in impossibly so, as in growing denser, as in the universe before the Big Bang. She said it was not so much that I had been conducting an affair behind her back — men being men and all, you expect that kind of thing —
but she realized I was squandering energy better spent on my dissertation, my job prospects were dwindling, and I was turning into a disappointment. I said I was thinking of chucking the dissertation anyway. So far the only person impressed with my academic credentials had been her friend Diane, who didn't like me. Also, Professor Detweiler, chair of the department, had taken my office key away after the fire.

I said, “Have you heard the dog barking, that pointless, incessant barking in the night?”

Susan looked at me as if I were a loon.

After Geills's phone call from the hospital, I told my class I was leaving, not likely to return, and that it was no loss because there wasn't a single one of them with an ounce of talent, insight, or originality, not one capable of rudimentary thought, and only one or two with the ability to put more than three words together to form simple sentences in any language. I said they should all go out and get jobs as office cleaners.

Someone in the back row said, “Right on!” demonstrating that he had not heard a word I said.

As I packed my monogrammed Lands'
End briefcase (a gift from Susan, my wife), Ramon Petunless, a colonial studies doctoral candidate of mixed Ethiopian and Puerto Rican heritage, asked if he could have my address in case he needed a recommendation one day. I gave him a business card from the rental storage place, of which I had taken a small stack for keeping notes, and said I would be there for the foreseeable future.

I took a cab to the hospital, where Geills was more than happy to see me, although they would not let her leave until I pretended to be a relative,
which was difficult given the enthusiastic and lewd manner in which she embraced me and continued with her arms around me and her crotch pressed into my thigh.

Nurse: “Are you a relative, sir?”

Me: “Ur, yes.”

Nurse: “What is your relation to this child, sir?”

Me: “Put down ‘sibling.'”

Nurse: Silence pregnant with disapproval.

Me: “Put down ‘uncle' then.
”

Nurse: “All right, sir, but you know it is a federal offence to knowingly and fraudulently give incorrect information to a health official.”

Me: “A very distant uncle, an uncle with several removals. I am the brother of her mother's third cousin-in-law by marriage.”

Nurse: “Thank you, sir. And what name shall I put?
”

Me: “Ramon Petunless.”

At this point Geills had her hand down the back of my pants and was heading south.

Me: “Can we leave now?”

Nurse: “You understand that you are responsible for all medical expenses?
”

Me: “Sure. How much would that be?”

Geills was dragging me by a belt loop toward the exit, looking more cheerful than she had a right to be.

Nurse: “$22,681.23.”

Me: “Gosh. Can you bill me?
” I gave her one of my rental storage cards. “I am the owner.”

Nurse: “You can't leave like this. She needs to be in a wheelchair till she gets out of the hospital.”

Me: “But she can walk. She tried to kill herself with a plastic bag. It didn
't damage her legs. Her legs are in perfect working order. It's her mind that's damaged.”

Nurse: Silence pregnant with disapproval.

We made love in the back seat of the cab, much to the delight of the driver, a Somali expatriate with an unpronounceable name, a smooth, handsome face, and a tendency to laugh and say, “Oh, boy,
” when he looked in the rear-view mirror. It was sudden and surprising.

One minute we were discussing Proust and what the French call Monopoly and the next she was saying, “Listen to this,” and sticking one of her iPod earplugs in my ear.

“What's this?
” I said.

“An iPod,” she said. “It's for playing music.”

I gave her a look.

“Just kidding,
” she said. “It's Modest Mouse. You heard them before?”

I had to admit I hadn't. She had the other earplug in her ear and she took my hand and interlaced our fingers and squeezed gently and smiled with a sort of contentment, and I kissed her. She started the bellows-breathing thing again, which got me excited — her excitement inciting my excitement.

“I like it when you look at me,” she said. “It's hot.”

Susan had never called me hot. Sometimes she said, “It's hot in here.” But I never took that as a compliment.

“You like ska?” she asked, fiddling with the iPod.

“I've never done it, but I'm open to new experiences,” I said.

“
You're so cute,” she said. “You're adorable.”

And then suddenly she hiked up the gypsy floral skirt with the black lace and bows at the hem and swung herself over me as if mounting a horse, the motion revealing a complete lack of underdrawers. She blew air out her mouth and preened her neck back and loosened her shirt till I could see that butterfly. She wore an expression that was both sad and beautiful, lorn from absence, from the knowledge that whatever happened between us
, it would end badly, that all love ended badly, that we would one day part out of boredom or disgust, or that we would grow old and not be the people we were this minute, or that one or both of us would die and the electric liquid thing that was passing between us would dissipate in the ether. I caught her mood; the moment was worth any loss, any excess. It was worth the sneers of the Somali taxi driver, although, to tell the truth, he wasn't sneering, he was smiling.

Geills lived in a bachelorette apartment in the Wallingfords' basement, no bigger, possibly smaller, than my unit at the rental storage place. The closet had been converted to a bathroom. There was a stove,
a refrigerator, a sink, and a foldaway couch that, when extended, fit snugly between the sink cabinet and the facing wall. If you were sleeping, you could not open the door. When we arrived, Frag was in the kitchenette cooking a homecoming meal. I am a private person. I knew I would not be able to use the toilet while Geills was home or Frag was cooking. I also wondered about her relationship with Frag and how things would work out if he wanted to sleep over. There were black-and-white photos tacked to the walls, all pictures of a dog, sometimes alone, sometimes with Geills. Dusty boxes of paperback books climbed the corners of the room. The books on top were pop psychotherapy and diet manuals, guides to a better sex life and animal training how-tos. A camera tripod leaned against the boxes, but there was no sign of a camera. On her bedside table there was a tube of Astroglide, a vibrator, and a copy of
Winnie the Pooh.
I could see clearly we had nothing in common.

I glanced back at the dog pictures, curling at the corners — a vicious, ugly beast with a droll eye. In one of the pictures Geills was kissing the tip of its nose. I suggested that perhaps I should keep my unit at the rental storage place. Frag said he would move to the rental unit. What kind of furniture did I have? He had an open face, an aggressively friendly manner, wore a military fatigue jacket over camouflage pants, T-shirt and combat boots, had a heart and the name
Irma
tattooed on the back of his right hand, and a tic in one eye. To me, he looked schizophrenic, threatening, violent, homeless, and sad. But he shook my hand warmly,
asking if I liked red or white, and said he usually cooked Provençal but tonight was a paella the way they made it in Alicante and had I ever been there?

Geills went into the bathroom. I could hear her pee hitting the water in the toilet. Frag took me by the arm and walked me outside, a charming and genteel gesture that at once made me ashamed of myself.

He said, “
It really isn't her dog, you know. Not exactly. She got it from a shelter, part pit bull, part greyhound. A street dog from the city. Too wild for her. And she was hitting the booze and doing drugs. It ran away. This was a while ago.”

I asked, “What kind of drugs?”

“Oh, the usual kind,” he said. “
Crystal meth, 'ludes, horse, crack, acid, OxyContin. Mostly booze, though. But also Valium, Percocet. I could go on.”

“No, don
't,” I said.

I said, “I think I'm in over my head.” When I said this, I realized it was the sort of thing Susan would say, that I was in over my head.

Frag said, “
Is there any other way to be?” He grinned infectiously.

I thought of a dozen sane replies to that, but Geills called from the kitchen, her voice cheerful and pleased with itself, pleased with the world.

Frag said, “Don't fuck this up.”

At dinner, she told Frag that she had decided to stop giving him blow jobs because she wanted to be scrupulously loyal to our new love. Frag said he was cool with that. He gave us both a half-dozen assorted pills for dess
ert and the next thing I knew it was hours later and I was awake on top of Geills with what I believe used to be called a blue-steel boner slapping in and out of her. This went on and on in concert with moans, murmured entreaties, and sighs (and snores — Frag was asleep in some impossibly cramped position on the floor next to the bed). I thought I would never come, but when I did, I felt as if someone were unscrewing the top of my head and red-hot lava was erupting from my eyeballs and my cock had turned inside out and liquefied all at once, flooding her insides with a strange electroluminescence
such that I could see the shadows of her ribs and her heart beating beneath her breasts and the blood shifting through her arteries and capillaries and could hear the ancient conversations of tiny one-celled creatures in her gut and the hysterical cheeping of my sperm driving themselves toward her womb.

I said, “I've never felt like this before.”

And she whispered, “Drugs get a bad rap.”

And then we heard a furious scratching at the door, harsh pants, subterranean whimpers.

“It
's the dog,” she said urgently.

I thought, Hulking, flame-mouth, blood-drizzling beast, half man, half wolf, size of a small elephant. I started to bark, an insane, pointless, incessant barking in the night. Howling upon her bed. Frag stirred, his eyes snapped open, confused orbs. But she slapped me awake and we rolled the bed up to open the door (Frag's legs became entangled in the bed frame — some obvious discomfort there). And when we finally looked out, the dog was gone. Then the barking began again in the alley beyond the fence, something like my own barks a moment before, assertive, obsessive, insisting on some definite if untranslatable communication, warning us perhaps or demanding food or love or a scratch behind the ear, all maddeningly self-contradictory, for the animal refused to come close enough to receive the attention it desired.

Wrapped in blankets, barefoot despite the hoarfrost that had descended on the city, Geills and I ran after the dog, trailing its barks through alleyways and parking lots, past construction site hoardings, past city parks, past homes where people slept, past dumpsters, dosshouses, cardboard jungles, and rental storage buildings where more people slept — the whole dark and desolate labyrinth of human existence. My feet were bleeding when we returned, and when I woke up she was gone, and Frag was snoring next to me in the bed, with his arm flung over my shoulder.

A few days later, in an act of desperation symbolic of how low I had fallen, I went next door and asked Susan for the loan of a hundred dollars. She said I was in over my head.

I said, “I know. Is there any other way to be?”

She said, “That doesn't sound like something you would say.”

And I said, “Maybe fifty dollars?”

I told her about the dog, about Frag, about my burgeoning love for Geills, about the spirit stove explosion and my subsequent dismissal at the college, about the rental unit and my new friends there and the Thursday evening bridge nights, about the Monopoly players at the suicide ward, about the Somali taxi driver, about the novel I had started, writing longhand with a pencil, the old-fashioned way, on paper shopping bags from Safeway.