Savage Love (20 page)

Susan gasped. It came pouring out of
me even as I watched her drawing away, gathering herself in disgust, as if I might contaminate her with my lascivious and libertine ways. Her cheeks were like axe heads; she blushed crimson like a match going up, seemed almost to be suffocating. She lit a cigarette, snapping her lighter nervously, and then lit another without smoking either of them. She combed fingers through her hair and slipped a hand inside her shirt to caress her breast.

I said I was lost but happy. I had nothing. With the money she gave me, I was going to get a tattoo. If she gave me enough, I would get something pierced.

“What?” she gasped again.

“You don't have to live like this either,” I said.
“You can change.”

“You're in over your head,” she repeated, handing me the money.

“Geills is teaching me tantric sex,”
I said, and my wife sighed.

She put her hand inside her pants. She said, “I despise everything you have told me.”

And I thought how Proust teaches us that all love resides in anticipation, not the beloved, that love achieved is only on loan, that we are martyrs to our desires, which are endless. I had explained this to Geills between bouts of lovemaking. She said, “Is there a French word for ‘Lick my
butthole and I'll be yours for life'?”

That day, I borrowed money from five former students before college security evicted me from the campus. I borrowed money from the agent at the rental unit office. Ramon Petunless was hanging around, waiting for me to show up because he needed a recommendation. He was in love with Proust now; he wanted to teach.

I said, “It's common practice for college professors to accept gratuities in exchange for favourable references.
”

He said, “I didn't know. How much?”

He had an addressed, stamped envelope. I tore the side off a shopping bag and wrote, “On no account accept this man into your program. Keep him away from your wives, your children, and small furry pets. He must be stopped. Do not contact me. I am in hiding from you know who.” I sealed it up and handed it back to Ramon to mail.

“I am so grateful, Professor,” he said.

“I saved your life,” I said.

Then I went to Professor Detweiler's house, Wagner booming in the background, his mousy wife putting dinner on the table, little individual salad bowls at each place full of greens for the bowels. He mentioned the fire again, which I took as fresh evidence of the narrow obsessiveness of the academic mind. He said the logician Zlotsky, who shared my office,
had been caught taking photographs of coeds' underpants with a camera attached to a cane. He offered me a large sum to stay away forever.

I said, “Thanks,” and, “See you later.”

When I got home, Frag was roasting a suckling pig and sipping port while he made up the canap
és. The tiny apartment smelled of garlic, ginger, and fennel. The dog was sitting on the couch bed, looking calm, inscrutable, and alert. I recognized it from its photographs.

“I don't know,” said Frag. “She was waiting on the porch. I gave her a bowl of kibble. Wait till Geills finds out.”
He said, “Your wife was here about an hour ago. She had something to ask you. I invited her for dinner. You don't mind, do you?”

I said, “That's still a lot of food for four people.”

Frag said, “I invited your friends from the storage
place. And some of your students. And Professor Detweiler and his wife, some nurses from the hospital, and the guys from the suicide ward.”

He was insanely genial for a man so outwardly menacing. I found it disconcerting, much as I had found all experience disconcerting since I met Geills. She had exposed me to the totally surprising nature of existence, which hitherto had remained hidden from me. She had given me a taste for recklessness. I did not long for my old self, but I was often confused and restless. I was susceptible to minute vibrations from the centre of the universe. The words “rebarbative” and “lobotomy”
drifted through my mind like spent arrows coming gradually to rest. The pig's head stared at me through the oven window. The smell of crackling filled our apartment. The dog looked wise, intelligent, and superior.

We waited together, drank port, smoked a joint. People began to drift in for the party. There were five other novelists from the rental storage place, a chess grandmaster, two landscape painters, and a gay new-music composer, along with Ramon Petunless and Akoschka Weatherby. Akoschka Weatherby struck up a conversation with the composer almost at once, revealing herself to be a surprisingly intelligent, darkly beautiful,
and even tragic young woman. The dog was alert, ironic, and affectionate. She watched intently and stepped delicately down from the couch to follow me whenever I went to the backyard to pee. Under the moon, the waiting, the gathering of friends, Geills's absence, the dog's cold nose nudging my hand, and the nearly imperceptible vibrations of things seemed strangely prophetic. Frag's Harley gleamed like a chrome statue on the parking pad.

When Susan, my wife, arrived for dinner (along with the Somali cab driver), she seemed hysterical and distant. I could understand this because crowds had always bothered her. She kissed me passionately but absent-mindedly, called me Jean-Luc, which isn't my name, and then noticed the dog. Her eyes widened. She was afraid of dogs. But Frag gave her a hit of that marijuana. She asked if she could smoke a cigarette. Several others were smoking; we were a band of jolly outsiders with a taste for life. She wore a black cocktail dress I had never seen before, hemmed above her knees with one shoulder bare, a thin gold necklace circling her throat. She had put on mascara and eyeliner, too much it seemed, and from
either tears or sweat her makeup had begun to run. I thought, She seems vulnerable and brave and beautiful, not the woman she once was nor the woman who once was mine.

Ramon Petunless ushered her away from me to explain how I had saved his life by convincing him to renounce a career in academia. Akoschka Weatherby said I had revealed the true cosmic nature of love to her one day in our Proust seminar. So beautiful and melancholy was her face as she said the words that I knew they must be true. Frag served the canapés and Asti Spumante in tall, elegant glasses and lit candles throughout the apartment.

Nervously, Susan, my wife, tried to make small talk. “Do you need more money?” she asked. “Were you hurt when the spirit stove exploded? I am not much of a critic, but I would like to read your novel.
”

She seemed bruised, delicate, afraid of rejection. The dog watched, edged closer to Susan. One of the five novelists interrupted, inquiring anxiously if I had found time to look over his revisions. To Susan, my wife, he confided that he had come to depend on my opinion implicitly. Professor Detweiler, appearing tweedy, insignificant, and chastened, asked if I might be available in the coming semester. Some extra funding could certainly be found. There was talk of an endowment for a special chair in Proustian studies.

He said, “You had extraordinary student evaluations.”

Frag served the pig, which, as usual, was delicious. We ate off china plates with monogrammed silver cutlery incised with the single letter
F
. The candles burned like a furnace. There was no sign of Geills, but the room was suffused with excitement, anticipation, love, and hope. Conversation centred on books, ideas, art, and complicated chess problems. She rarely spoke, but Susan's eyes were glossy with emotion, her dripping makeup a mask of sadness. Frag played excerpts from Rodrigo's
Concierto de Aranjuez
on an acoustic guitar. I felt swept away with the optimism and poetic beauty of the music. The subtle vibrations of things seemed like the thudding of ancient hill drums and seemed, yes, to be emanating somehow from the dog. The words “rebarbative” and “lobotomy”
came to mind and startled me.

Frag said, “Bo, I don't think she's coming back.” (My name is not Bo either.)

“Who?”
I asked.

He seemed to understand everything.

The dog jumped off the couch and drank thirstily from its bowl, startling Susan, my wife, who leaped into my lap, burying her face against my neck.

Urgently, she whispered, “I want to go away with you.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” I said.

“I don't want to be your wife any more,” she said. “I want to be your lover. I want to throw everything away for you. I want to live in fleabag hotels and work nights as a waitress to support your novel. I want to have your babies. I want you to leave me for mysterious strangers, abandon me on lonely train station platforms, skip out on me in motel rooms with flickering neon lights shining on my bare skin as I lie waiting for you. I want to be lost without you, die for love, find you, and humiliate myself trying to win you back. I don't ever want to go back to what we were.”

“But I'm not going anywhere,” I said again.

She kissed me hungrily. We had never kissed like that before. I wondered if Geills would mind. But it seemed part of the adventure I was on, the surprising nature of the universe, the aura of love.

She whispered, “I'm not wearing any underwear.”

“
What changed you so suddenly?” I asked.

“I forgot to do the laundry,” she said.

I looked to Frag for advice, but he only shrugged. Ramon Petunless gave me the thumbs-up sign. Akoschka Weatherby blew me a kiss. I thought, I would like to kiss Akoschka Weatherby. Is there any other way to be? I thought. I lifted Susan's dress to see. She had trimmed her pubic hair into a landing strip. There was a fresh tattoo, tiny and elegant, just where her belly met her thigh. The mathematical sign for infinity. Pale skin, never touched by the sun.

Then I knew Geills was never coming back, knew somehow that Geills would never be where the dog was. The dog yawned, scratched speculatively at the door. Someone would let her out soon. I was aware of Geills's mysterious absence and simultaneously the silence, the absence of that pointless, incessant barking that, night after night, had dragged us from our comfortable bed and guided our vain searches.

Frag offered me the keys to the Harley.

“I'm not going anywhere,” I said.

But Susan, my wife, gave him an impish wink. The candles flared brilliantly. The brilliant conversation buzzed around us. Already she was ahead of me, leading me into a future, indefinite and innocent.

I thought, Okay. I thought, Affirmative. I thought, Yes. And then I thought again, Yes. Yes.

acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council during the writing of this book.

Many of the stories contained in this collection have appeared in other publications:

“Crown of Thorns” appeared in
The Brooklyn Rail
,
April 2011.

“The Sun Lord and the Royal Child” appeared in
Ninth Letter
, Issue No. 13, Spring 2010, and was reprinted in
Best Canadian Stories
, ed. John Metcalf, Oberon Press, Ottawa, 2012.

“A Flame, a Burst of Light” appeared in
The New Quarterly
, No. 118, 2011, and was reprinted in
An Unfinished War
, ed. John B. Lee, Black Moss Press, 2012.

“The Ice Age” was broadcast as “Snow Days” on CBC Radio,
Canada Writes
, December 4, 2012.

“The Poet Fishbein,” “Splash,” and “Wolven” appeared in
Fence
, Winter 2012-13.

“The Lost Language of Ng” was published in
Fiddlehead
, Summer Fiction Issue, No. 248, 2011.

“A Paranormal Romance” appeared in
The Literarian
, The Center for Fiction, New York, Issue #7, January 19, 2012.

“Shameless” appeared in
The Brooklyn Rail
,
December-January 2007.

“Uncle Boris Up in a Tree” appeared in
Descant,
40th Anniversary Issue, No. 153, 2011.

“Savage Love” appeared in
CNQ, Canadian Notes & Queries
, No. 74, 2008.

“Pointless, Incessant Barking in the Night” appeared in
Best Canadian Stories
, ed. John Metcalf, Oberon Press, Ottawa, 2009, and was reprinted in
Descant
, No.
148, Spring, 2010.

Author photo: Bill Giduz

Douglas Glover's bestselling novel
Elle
won the Governor General's Award for fiction and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His stories have been frequently anthologized, notably in
The Best American Short Stories
,
Best Canadian Stories
, and
The New Oxford Book of Canadian Stories
. In 2006 Glover was awarded the Writers' Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award for his body of work. He lives in upstate New York and is on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program.

Follow Douglas Glover at the online magazine
Numéro Cinq
, where he is publisher and resident éminence grise.