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.
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