Savage Love Read online

  Isobel said, “Pinky’s shivering. His legs are shaking.”

  “Pinky’s a girl hamster,” I said. I glanced over at the cage where the hamster was spasming her last, back legs outstretched, reaching for some unimaginable purchase. Lucky hamster, I thought. Found your reward.

  The dog saw me coming. She was bending to sniff at the base of the Rexforths’ County Waste can, then she sensed the oncoming Subaru and glanced up. I was just going to nudge her. I don’t know what happened. Blackout, or something. My foot went right down on the accelerator. Isobel shrieked. Sophie started awake and braced her hands on the dashboard, her eyes wide with horror under that bloody towel turban. I hit the brakes. The tires squealed. There was a thunk as I went over something in the road. Then I kept moving, the car somehow processing sideways, which seemed against the physics of wheel alignment. I took out the Rexforths’ mailbox with the passenger door, bumped up onto their brick-terraced perennial garden, and finally came to rest against the trunk of a pine tree.

  Time to take stock, I thought. Slow down and take stock. Katie and Isobel in the back seat were on their knees looking out the rear window. Sophie was slumped against the passenger door, her turban undone, fresh blood welling out of the wound on her forehead. The passenger window glass was cracked and starred. I touched her shoulder, and she turned slowly to look at me. She had her mother’s eyes, I thought. Unfriendly, calculating — that what-have-you-done-for-me-lately look. This is what marriage does to a person, I thought. In our case, it turned a warm, friendly, sexy girl into a calculating machine.

  The cellphone started to ring, a homely sound amid the carnage. Sophie’s eyes went up.

  “Don’t answer it,” I said.

  I snatched the phone from its holster and smashed the touch screen against the steering wheel eight- or twenty-odd times. Then I threw it out the window. The dog was sitting next to the driver’s door peering up at me, wagging her tail. Maybe it was the dog’s ghost, I thought. Behind us lay the flattened body of the Rexforths’ County Waste can.

  The engine raced out of gear, ticking furiously, like hammers. Wisps of smoke or steam curled from beneath the hood. All around, the ruins of civilization, the end of the world as we know it.

  “Wait here,” I said, pushing through the door.

  The Sun Lord and

  theRoyal Child

  I went to see my friend Nedlinger after his wife killed herself in that awful and unseemly way, making a public spectacle of herself and their life together, which, no doubt, Nedlinger hated because of his compulsive need for privacy, a need that only grew more compelling as his fame spread, as success followed success, as the money poured in, so that in later years, when he could no longer control his public image, when it seemed, yes, as if his celebrity would eclipse his private life entirely, he turned reclusive and misanthropic, sought to erase himself and return to the simple life of a nonentity.

  You will recall that Nedlinger began his career as a so-called forensic archaeologist specializing in the analysis of prehistoric Iroquoian ossuaries in southwestern Ontario, and it was then, just after finishing his doctorate, that he met Melusina, a mousy undergraduate studying library science, given to tucking her unruly hair behind her ears and wearing hip-length cardigan sweaters with pockets into which she stuffed used and unused tissues, notecards, pens, odd gloves, sticks of lip balm, hand lotion and her own veiny fists, her chin depressed over her tiny, androgynous breasts. In those days she wore thick, flesh-coloured stockings and orthopaedic shoes to correct a birth defect, syndactyly, I believe it is called. Only Nedlinger, with his forensic mind, could pierce the unpromising surface, the advertising as it were, to uncover the intelligent, passionate, sensual, fully alive being hidden in the shadows.

  A paradox: as Nedlinger’s notoriety waxed, Melusina all but disappeared, growing ever more waifish and anorexic, tottering about pathetically on those high heels he made her wear, along with the short skirts and neon spandex tank tops; but as Nedlinger’s fame touched the stratosphere (the money rolling in) and Nedlinger himself, unable to abide mass acclaim, turned increasingly cloistered and eremitic, Melusina began to seek the public eye, launching herself into a series of escapades in order to attract attention, courting rock stars, media types and wealthy party people, exactly the sort Nedlinger had spent his life avoiding. So that when she died, it might be said that Melusina’s public persona had nearly eclipsed Nedlinger’s or that Nedlinger was almost as well known for being Melusina’s husband as he was for his own renowned work as a so-called forensic archaeologist.

  As far as I know, Melusina was unfaithful to Nedlinger with only one other man, despite all the innuendo and gossip. When she died (the word die, in this context, is nothing but a euphemism for that horrid, public act of self-cancelling), they had no children, due, I believe, to a tragic injury Nedlinger suffered in a tractor accident as a boy on the family dairy farm near Burford, Ontario; the place is now preserved as a not-for-profit organic vegetable operation in his honour even though Nedlinger himself remembered it only as a typical Ontario family farm, a locus of sorrow, frustration, inhibition, philistinism, narrow-minded judgment, stupidity, race-baiting, poverty, animal abuse, overwork, incest, and casual, daily violence.

  His father was Neil Nedlinger, a name of infamy and universal opprobrium, and his mother was Pearl Broadnax Nedlinger, a waspish, termagant enabler of the worst sort, given, I was told, to drinking Alberta vodka from the bottle and a lifelong subscriber to Reader’s Digest. Nedlinger himself affirmed that throughout his childhood the Holstein-Friesian cows in the milking herd and a dog named Saturn were his only friends and companions. Oddly enough, Melusina revered Nedlinger’s parents, a fact that enraged Nedlinger, who could only lock himself in his study when Neil and Pearl came to visit, turning up his favourite Cape Breton fiddle music to full volume to drown out the tinkle of teacups and drone of cheerful conversation filtering obscenely through the soundproofing.

  When I went to visit Nedlinger that day, I had already been an intimate friend for twenty-odd years, dating back to the first glimmer of his fascination with the mysterious Southwold Earthworks complex, Canada’s Stonehenge, our Great Pyramid, the Iroquoian Palenque, near Iona Station on the north shore of Lake Erie, where he did the work that eventually made him world-famous, a darling of the glamour set, rich beyond imagining. Nedlinger, a graduate student with goggle eyes, a huge body and long flapping arms and legs, clad always in his trademark coveralls and clodhopper boots, would often show up unannounced at our farmhouse door to examine the baby Indian skeleton my father had exhumed while putting in the foundation for a milking shed in a corner of the property adjacent to the archaeological site.

  We kept the bones on display in a glass case on the dining room table, still half buried in a shovelful of sand, discoloured with a dusting of red ochre, a white bone pendant dangling from its fleshless neck and somehow caught in the fingers of its right hand as though the baby had been playing with it at the moment of death, a tiny, decayed moccasin dangling from the remaining toes of the left foot. The dead Indian baby, soon to be known as a result of forensic research as the Royal Child, fascinated Nedlinger, who would sit for hours at the table with his camera and notecards, staring at the diminutive skeleton, snapping pictures, occasionally jotting down an observation or wiping away a solitary tear.

  Later, during his reclusive period but before Melusina’s spectacular and grandiose suicide, he used some of that untold wealth, earned from practising forensic archaeology, to buy the farm next to ours, claiming that he believed there was a hitherto-undiscovered ancient ossuary on the property. I was still living with my mother and father at the time, two immortal, or so it seemed, hell-hounds, typical southwestern Ontario troglodytes who considered Iona Station next thing to Paris, City of Light, and drank instant Nescafé laced with Alberta vodka from morning till night, and believed themselves, practising United Church communicants, to be seated at t
he right hand of God and smarter than any university-trained forensic archaeologist or their own son, for that matter, who, though untrained in forensic archaeology, had nonetheless absorbed enough of the techniques from his master to have made personal discoveries adding a footnote here and there to the prehistory of the province, accomplishments that drew only cruel hoots of derision from those people who were closest to him and bound to support and love him unconditionally. “Who do you think you are?” my parents would sneer. “Another Armand Nedlinger?”

  Nedlinger once told me my parents reminded him of his parents, and it was true that Melusina also idolized my parents, just as she doted on Nedlinger’s parents, and would sit in the kitchen drinking Nescafé and Alberta vodka (which they called tea) with my parents while Nedlinger and I measured and remeasured the dead baby Indian’s cranial dome and took samples for radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis, until one day, out of pure spite or perhaps due to some hitherto-undiagnosed dementia, my mother tipped the dead Indian baby, glass case and sand into a plastic garbage bag and sent it to the town dump.

  At this time, there existed a peculiar tension between Nedlinger, already a world-famous forensic archaeologist, and his web-footed, non-practising librarian wife Melusina (even I, who knew her best, never saw her read a book); you could tell that they hated yet adored one another, that they fed on a symbiotic antagonism, completing each other in some malign but hugely productive fashion. She had fled to Toronto to escape the stifling mediocrity of suburban Thunder Bay City, a region of endless, tedious lakes, muskeg swamp and spruce forests, where her parents frequented country-and-western swing-dancing bars, rode mechanical bulls and drank Alberta vodka coolers laced with crème de menthe, which they called tea. Now only her alcoholic brother is left in the decaying family bungalow from which he manages an online gossip and innuendo site devoted to famous forensic archaeologists. The site is called Digging the Dirt and prominently displays digital photographs taken with a long-range lens of voluptuous coeds who often assist at forensic archaeological digs. The implication is that Nedlinger prefers this sort of student worker over the male kind, or for that matter the plain-looking, small-breasted kind, and in fact he does prefer them, although the camera has never caught him in frame with one of these girls. On the other hand, I have had to sue Melusina’s brother twice to get myself Photoshopped out of compromising pictures.

  I tell you this so you understand the kind of hell Melusina was escaping and why she was so eager to hitch herself to the rising star Nedlinger had already become even as he was cleaning up his doctoral thesis and preparing for a post-doc year at Berkeley, and why she threw herself at him despite the obvious inadequacies in her self-presentation. Of course, the truth was that in running away to Toronto she only found an exact replica of the life she had left behind in Thunder Bay City: country-and-western swing bars masquerading as chi-chi Queen Street bistros and so-called art connoisseurs who drank Alberta vodka at so-called art events, covertly referring to it as iced tea or bubbly, exactly the sort of cultural events I had disdained at Iona Station, the endless philistine and drunken bacchanals known as The Iona Station Historical Society, The Iona Station and Port Stanley Curling Club, and the ineffable Senior Citizens Contract Bridge Club of Iona Station, a crypto-fascist anti-tax cabal, where the denizens drank Alberta vodka and accused each other of suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease while plotting, in the usual fashion of ethnic Ontarians, against artistic expression of all kinds, sexual freedom, freedom of speech and forensic archaeology, which threatened their moribund, self-satisfied little lives with revelations of an Edenic woodland world, home of lithe, smooth-limbed Indian maids and hunters who practised bucolic sex in the chaste underbrush and raised their cheerful, well-adjusted children in communal longhouses while worshipping beneficent sun gods.

  Melusina wanted, as did many young people wishing to escape the cultural malaise of suburban Thunder Bay City, not to mention Iona Station and places like Burk’s Falls and Omeemee, Ontario, to become rich and famous as a librarian, become the darling of a sophisticated international set she was sure existed beyond the dank, steaming spruce forests of Thunder Bay City, known formerly as the twin cities of Fort William and Port Arthur, although, in the event, she only managed to become the wife of a famous and wealthy forensic archaeologist (she organized Nedlinger’s personal books and magazines according to the Dewey Decimal System), and as a result immersed herself in his shadow, becoming adept as a promoter of her husband’s work, hosting exactly the kinds of superbly catered, hideously expensive soirees and dinner parties that Nedlinger abhorred yet required to advance his career as a forensic archaeologist; indeed it has been said that were it not for Melusina Nedlinger’s work would never have achieved the mass recognition that propelled him into the A-list of world-class intellectuals.

  I went to see Nedlinger after she died, as I say, when he was recuperating incommunicado at the farmhouse where, increasingly as his fame burgeoned, he had sought solitude and silence; there was no television, no telephone, no cellphone signal, no Internet and no mail delivery, circumstances that Melusina complained of relentlessly when, as was her habit, she hiked across the intervening fields to visit me — now alone after the sad passing of the old folks, who had died tragically in a barn collapse deemed unsuspicious by a coroner’s inquest. No one answered when I knocked at Nedlinger’s door, but I let myself in, as usual, calling, “Hallooo!” and combing room after room until I found him in his bedroom, stretched on the counterpane in Carhartt coveralls and Greb Kodiak farmer boots caked with mud, listening to Cape Breton fiddle music with earphones, his hands folded neatly and chastely over his protuberant belly. His eyes were closed and the volume turned up; he did not notice me at first.

  A desk buttressed the wall, littered with a half-dozen laptops, stacks of books and the latest forensic archaeological magazines, page corners turned down or marked with festoons of multicoloured plastic flags, marmalade jars full of pens and highlighters — also several containing foreign currency (labelled) — mousetraps, plates with sandwich remains, drink glasses empty or half filled with cloudy fluids, the sharp smell of onions in the air mixed with mildew (there were shelves on three walls, stacked with more books, and several leak spots in the ceiling); the floor was strewn with stone implements (arrowheads, augers, knives, axe heads, adzes), potsherds, bits of bone, neatly tagged but helter-skelter, so that there was nowhere to walk.

  I glanced at the exposed beams, the steel hooks (the previous owners, a couple of retired grade school teachers from Toronto, had apparently practised some sort of S&M role playing) from which, ghastly as it seems, Melusina had suspended herself, expecting, the story went, Nedlinger to arrive momentarily from the kitchen with his nightly Scotch and soda, a mistaken assumption as it turned out, because instead of padding up the stairs with his drink, Nedlinger, on the night in question, had paused in his study, taking out his magnifying glass to examine photographs he had made of the Royal Child, the very same dead Indian baby that had long lain in its sandy cradle inside the glass case on my family’s dining room table in the farmhouse next door. Something had occurred to him, some doubt about his earlier theorizing, for he went to a bookcase and began to reread his book on the Southwold Earthworks, the story of the extinct, possibly legendary Neutral Indians (not what they called themselves), the famous sun-worshippers, deer-herding warrior-farmers, destroyers of the Fire People and the Cat tribe south of Lake Erie, soon to be destroyed themselves by marauding Seneca and microbes transmitted by the Jesuits.

  While Nedlinger perused his old work, now in its thirty-seventh printing with multiple translations and worldwide distribution — not to mention the feature film starring Nick Nolte as the Neutral chief (name translated as Sun, Sun Lord, Sunshine, Ray Of Sunlight, Cloudless Day, Naked In The Sun) and Jennifer Lopez as Morning Rain That Comes After The Night Of Clouds From The Day Before In The West (I myself wrote a small paper on Neutral meteorology as evidence
d in their naming customs; the winds in southwestern Ontario generally come from a westerly direction) — his wife was doing the herky-jerky above their marital bed before a live video camera, gasping, gurgling, wondering irritably where Nedlinger was as her violent twitchings intensified. At the obligatory coroner’s inquest (Canada’s answer to reality TV), there had been some question as to the couple’s sexual inclinations, but since there was ample evidence in Melusina’s diaries that Nedlinger had no sexual inclinations (see tractor accident supra), this line of questioning proved fruitless.

  Among other unpleasant and hitherto-unsuspected (by the eternally unsuspecting Canadian public) discoveries, the coroner’s inquest revealed Nedlinger’s festering, nearly psychotic hatred of modern life and all things Canadian (how it disgusted him that UNESCO routinely listed the country as one of the top places in the world to live), how he increasingly dwelt in the distant past, the past of the Sun Lord, the Arthurian ruler of the enigmatic Neutral Empire, how he gradually came to identify with the Sun Lord (played, as I say, by Nick Nolte in the movie), whose epic doomed love affair with his sister (see long name above) spawned court intrigues, divisions and rebellions that fatally weakened the nation, leaving it vulnerable to foreign invasion, heterodox religious proselytizers and disease.

  It seems that in his cups or in moments of psychic breakdown due to the stress of maintaining his position as a world figure and notable forensic archaeologist, Nedlinger actually believed himself to be in touch by ESP or some other alchemical emanation with the Sun Lord; worse, he sometimes believed he was the Sun Lord reincarnated as a so-called forensic archaeologist, and this is how he knew that the dead baby my father had discovered in expanding the milking shed was not just any Neutral child but the very offspring of that mythic, aberrant union between the ancient Sage King of the Neutrals and his sister, the trembling, voluptuous, savage beauty known to us as Morning Rain That Comes After The Night Of Clouds From The Day Before In The West.