Savage Love

Douglas Glover

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, one-time small-time movie actress with the lumi­nous face, who had at­tracted both Ona and Shelby, briefly, 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 book­stacker 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 blonds with unfin­ished doctor­ates and fetishis­tic erotic ten­den­cies were the usual). 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, occa­sion­ally, doing 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 men at once, that she knew she had to decide. 

Ona Frame loved 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 love-making between Ona and Betsy had dwin­dled to an occa­sional hasty encounter in the dark between his foetid 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 Area at the cor­ner of Rte 67 and Middle Line Road while appar­ently engrossed in doing the Sunday cross­word on a park bench. He had also seen them fondling in a booth at the Dunkin’ Donut 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, 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 the afternoon’s assig­nation. But at half-past-eight, 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.