Savage Love by Douglas Glover Page A

in nature, barely worth mentioning, a minor blot on Melusina’ s prismatically loyal adoration of the famous one, although, as was admitted at the coroner’s inquest, she and I did relapse once or twice, a handful of times at most, not, as Nedlinger’s regrettable lawyer insisted, “obscenely fucking nearly continuously in front of my client’s nose for the last twenty years” but, yes, as in being compulsively if not to say violently drawn to one another in a wallow of resentment, hatred, lust, rage and envy such that to this day I think all those emotions are love, are beneficent, are, in fact, the only species of grace the Lord can vouchsafe the losers of the world. At the end our lovemaking degenerated into a perverse parody of passion: I would fondle her webbed toes then ejaculate, dribbling my thin sperm onto those fishy fans of translucent flesh while she watched, touching herself, squirming in an ecstasy of humiliation, self-disgust and hatred. (Both Melusina and I joined Sex Addicts Anonymous at various times; for me, it was a good place to meet new women.)
    I tell you this in the spirit of full disclosure, as they say these days, a phrase of hypocritical cant that discounts the existential impossibility of full disclosure, of knowing the true dimensions of the human heart, its capacity for pain, corruption, obsession, and deception. I tell you this so that you can understand my motive in going to visit Nedlinger some months after Melusina’s death, after fortifying myself with several shots of Alberta vodka. I wanted, yes, purely human things such as closure, intimacy, unconditional love and revenge. I wanted Nedlinger’s forgiveness and I wanted to torment him, favour him with lurid descriptions of the lustful spasms I shared with his wife (albeit in a compulsive nexus of bitterness, despair and jealousy), spasms that he himself had never been able to enjoy, wounded as he was (that tractor incident) and lost in the mysterious and ethereal world of his own researches at the very limits of forensic archaeology.
    He had been like a god to us, distant, incomprehensible and untouchable. In truth , the fame and money had never meant much to him, and that made his success all the more aggravating. Now events had brought him low, his trajectory declining into a more human orbit where disappointment, lost love and death shamble among the survivors. It was in the twin spirits of schadenfreude and ressentiment (the patron spirits of our desperate, dystopian age) that I ventured tipsily across the fields dotted with scaffoldings, mounds of earth and half-filled trenches — old diggings, long abandoned — to visit my friend Nedlinger. (And I thought, staggering past those gaping wounds, how in Nedlinger ’s desire to uncover secret depths he had forever missed the surface of things.)
    As usual, when I found him, he did not notice me at first, the eternal afterthought, the toady, the hanger-on, which only enraged me even more. (I was never a man of large spirit, I admit; I am the son of my parents, a shallow, envious, unachieved southwestern Ontario farm boy incidentally touched by greatness, an experience from which I have yet to recover.) I ripped Nedlinger’s headphones off with a sweep of my hand. His eyes blinked open in surprise, then clouded with confusion and disappointment. I tried to speak, but words failed me as they always had. I began to weep. He placed his paternal hand on my forehead, a kind of benediction, and said, “Lennart —” (My name is Lennart Wolven, not that you need to remember it.) He said, “Lennart, I have terrible news for you ” — words that made no sense since, prior to coming to visit Nedlinger, I had spent hours and days priming myself to deliver terrible news to him, confessional revelations of illicit sex congress with his now-dead but revered Melusina, and yet here he was consoling me for some hitherto-unlooked-for