The Origin of Species Page 11

  The doctor smiled.

  “I guess you got a bit of a poke there.”

  He eased Alex’s hands away and without the least hesitation put his finger and thumb to Alex’s eye and forced open the lid. Instantly light came pouring through the opening.

  “I can see!” Alex actually said this. “I can see!”

  “I guess you can,” the doctor said.

  Alex’s father was still wringing his hands by the bedside.

  “He’s okay?”

  “Just a little scared, I think. He’ll need a couple of stitches but nothing that we can’t fix.”

  His father took in a stuttered breath and started to sob.

  “I didn’t know. From how he was screaming like that.”

  The doctor was still smiling.

  “If you want you can wait outside while I sew him up. Maybe tidy up a bit.”

  Why had he had to stand crying like that at Alex’s bedside? The memory of it still made Alex wince. The two of them had already been well into their period of silence by then, but his father’s heart had been in his hands the whole time, any idiot could have seen it. It wasn’t God Alex had made a pact with then, that bloodless Nobodaddy in the clouds, but the maddening flesh-and-bone dad by his bed who’d insisted on humiliating him with emotion. Years more had gone by after that before they’d actually had anything like a real conversation, but Alex had known all along in his gut that all this hardness he bore toward the man was for nothing.

  His aunt Grace had brought him a tricycle once when he was small, a hand-me-down but utterly undented and pristine, in brilliant red and white. Right into the kitchen she had brought it, something only his aunt Grace could have gotten away with.

  “Sandro,” she’d said, which was what they’d called him then. “You like it?”

  She’d sat talking with his mother. Somehow their attention had got turned, and then he was riding down the hall, which was vast and long, and then he’d reached the head of the back stairs. He remembered hearing his aunt still chattering in the kitchen, seeming fabulously distant; he remembered the afternoon light through the hall window. For a moment he’d sat there on that wondrous contrivance staring out at empty space and feeling a freedom he had never known; and then he’d driven forward.

  There was an instant as he launched into the air when he felt what he might now call the thrill of the infinite, the sense there was nothing that wasn’t permitted. Then suddenly everything was chaos and disorder: his limbs, his trike, his entire self, had passed out of his power and there was a horrible rattling and banging in which he could not distinguish wood and metal and wall from his own bones. It ended in what seemed a heap of pure pain, him lying bloodied and wailing on the concrete and the trike lying hopelessly mangled on top of him. The tricycle he would never see again; no doubt his father, who was always complaining about the “garbage” Aunt Grace unloaded on them, had simply tossed it in the ditch.

  There it was still, he could make it out in the tiles, the little scar between his brows from that fall: his third eye. It was the one that had seen, as his trike launched out into the air, that he had limits. He could not simply imagine a thing to make it happen; he could not by mere force of will overcome the will of everything set against him, the walls and the concrete and steel, the perpetual downward pull of what he did not yet know was called gravity. All that he really had to get him through the whole muddle of it was the little package that held him, his body, which turned out to be hemmed in on every side by the force of the mute, unpredictable world.

  The water had grown truly frigid now. He pulled the bathtub plug, watched the water swirl down, and got up to prepare for his party.

  – 8 –

  As Alex had more or less foreseen, the first person to arrive that evening, precisely at eight, as if she’d simply been biding her time in the garbage closet at the end of the hall since he’d left her the day before, was Esther. She was done up in the sort of woolly dress that Alex hadn’t seen since the seventies, a vibrant green thing that exuded static and stuck to her curves like cling wrap.

  A hint of lipstick smeared her front teeth.

  “So.” She’d brought a bottle of wine with her, the middling Italian red they sold downstairs at the depanneur. “We meet again.”

  All afternoon Alex had been busy stoking up his goodwill toward her, admonishing himself to be mindful of her, to be a gentleman.

  “I’ll get you a glass. I mean, are you allowed to drink?”

  “Well, maybe a glass or two.” She put on her coquettish air. “If you promise not to take advantage of me.”

  Michael had called to say he wouldn’t be coming, which was bad news—Michael could work a room like a society matron, until there was hardly a corner of it that wasn’t abuzz. He had a hot date, he’d said, someone he’d met on the mountain, which was worrying, probably another of his sudden passions that would come to nothing or worse.

  “You know, I was reading about Chernobyl,” Esther was saying. “After what you told me. All those people working there, it must have been awful.”

  In fact, Alex had hardly given a thought to the workers except in the most general terms. His mind had gone at once to the global, to the abstract; though not, of course, with respect to Sweden.

  “They’re saying only two dead,” he said, as if to console her, but then felt compelled to add, in deference to truth, “Of course they’re probably lying.”

  “Really? You really think they would lie?”

  The next to arrive, as Alex had feared, was Amanda. There was nothing for it now but to face her. She looked around the room with her clouded look of disorientation.

  “Oh. I’m not early, am I?”

  “No, no,” he said quickly. “I guess everyone’s on Montreal time.”

  The reference seemed to go right past her. She was from one of those western cities, Calgary or Regina, he could never remember which.

  Alex felt despair coming over him like a nuclear cloud.

  “Would you like some wine?”

  “That’s okay, I brought some beer. If that’s all right.”

  He busied himself in the kitchen pouring chips into bowls, glad now to have Esther there as a buffer. Amanda, however, hadn’t seemed to notice that there was anything peculiar about Esther and so there was the awkwardness of her finding him alone with another woman, an awkwardness Esther didn’t appear to be making any effort to dispel.

  “So you’re at Concordia too?”

  “Yes, I’ll be doing my Master’s soon,” Esther said, which was news to Alex.

  It was almost nine before more people started trickling in, a few of the other women, then Katherine and, separately, Stephen, then Novak himself. Katherine had recently punked herself up to look like a street fighter, her hair shaved mental-patient close on the sides and dyed vampire black on the top. To stop people treating her like a pixie, she’d told him. Tonight she was dressed in a leather motorcycle jacket that she wore over a low-cut lacy top that made Alex’s skin prickle.

  Katherine was whom he should have slept with, not Amanda, but she’d slept with Stephen, fussy stick-up-his-ass Mr. Know-It-All. Alex couldn’t believe it when she’d told him. Of course, Stephen hadn’t turned out to be the worldly intellectual she’d imagined him to be but a typical emotionally stunted WASP. By then Alex had already fallen into the role of friend-confessor, and it was too late.

  Katherine and Stephen had yet to speak.

  “The thing about Lacan,” Novak was saying to a group of the women, though he might as well have been saying bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, “is that he repositions Freud within the discourse of language.”

  It wasn’t until Louie arrived that things loosened up. Louie was a force—all year long he had held the class in thrall with a mix of menace and sheer energy. Before Alex’s parties he used to take groups of them over to the East End on drinking sprees that were like Roman bacchanals, but in class it was always a mistake to underestimate him. For his term se
minar he’d brought in a huge stack of clippings from publications like Allô Police and Le Journal de Montréal and had gone through them with rapier precision showing how racist they were.

  Louie had skin that people in Nigeria, where they had a proper sense of the gradations of these things, would have called black.

  “No funny business tonight,” he said, putting a big, handsome arm around Novak, which made Novak look like a tiny old man. “All the women are mine tonight.”

  By the time Félix arrived, Alex had more or less forgotten about him. He felt a moment of utter dismay when he saw him there at the door, as if there’d been an awful mistake. Surely the man had some squash game to go to or some opera or wine bar instead of showing up here at his pathetic little house party.

  He was dressed in a rakish black sports jacket that made him look as if he’d just stepped away from the gaming tables of Monte Carlo.

  “Félix!” Alex tried to purge the note of panic from his voice. “It’s so great that you came!”

  From a plastic bag Félix pulled, of all things, two six-packs of Molson’s.

  “It’s what you ordered. At the pub.” He gave one of his shrugs, as if to apologize for his imperfect grasp of some cultural nuance. “I hope it’s all right.”

  Somehow, the evening took on a kind of rhythm. Félix, far from sticking out, was soon in heated debate with Novak on the retrenchment of French intellectuals after the failure of ’68, one of Novak’s favorite subjects; Louie was holding forth on Duvalier, downing Alex’s Crown Royal, which Alex smuggled back with him periodically from his father’s bar, three fingers at a go. Even Esther was managing: she’d got Stephen alone on the couch, safely buffered from Katherine, and was working away at him with Barbara Walters–like determination.

  “So you’re saying, if I don’t have the words for something, then I can’t even think about it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But what about sex?” There was an instant’s lull around them, then a burst of laughter.

  Stephen blushed.

  “I think she’s got you on that one,” Katherine said dryly.

  For a moment then, the wine he’d been downing like water finally beginning to kick in, Alex looked out over his party, and was pleased. He had friends, he was able to fill a room with conversation; perhaps his life was not such a shambles. Not just friends but people who were actually interesting, Haitian refugees and Prague Spring survivors, ethnics and WASPS, francophones and anglophones, people with disabilities. This was what he had always imagined for himself, having friends of every stripe, feeling at home with them. Citizen of the world.

  I suppose it was a kind of epiphany, Peter, just standing there in my living room, looking out over all that diversity and thinking: only in this country.

  “I was wondering if maybe we could talk.”

  Amanda was at his elbow.

  “Right. Yeah. Maybe not here—”

  “No, I wasn’t saying … I mean, I thought maybe we could get together or something.”

  Shit, Alex thought. He’d been dreading this, the after-sex debriefing. There was nothing to say except all the usual lies, so predictable he could have had cards printed up. Just friends. Made a mistake. Need space. Circle those that apply.

  “I just thought, that night, I dunno. You seemed pretty down.”

  She was already giving him an out, was already allowing he might be too damaged to be held accountable, which had the effect of making him feel truly defenseless.

  “I guess I was a little depressed,” he granted.

  “But after, you know, we never really got a chance to talk. I mean, if you wanted to.”

  Alex was starting to lose track of what issue it was that they were trying to avoid.

  “It’s just, I was thinking of staying here for the summer to do a French course,” Amanda was saying. “I mean, if people were around.”

  “Well, if you wanted to,” Alex started. “That is, if you’re going to stay anyway—”

  “Oh, yeah, no, I didn’t mean it like that—”

  The awkwardness had settled between them like a wet dog.

  “Look, I’m sorry.” Something had lurched in the pit of his stomach. Any minute he was going to retch right there where he stood. “I really have to use the bathroom.”

  He locked himself in and knelt in front of the bowl in the dark in case another spasm came on him. Why had he ever slept with her? It had all happened in a drunken haze, but that didn’t relieve him of the idiocy of the thing. He wondered if he was no better at bottom than every other sex-obsessed male, ready to sleep with whatever willing specimen washed up at his door.

  When his stomach had calmed he sat on the bowl. There were no windows in the room and the darkness was almost total, but he couldn’t bear the thought of seeing himself reflected back ad infinitum from his mirrored tiles. People had made a lot of jokes about those tiles when he’d first started these gatherings, but not so much lately.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Anybody in there?” It was Stephen. He’d have noticed that the lights were out. Alex could already see him sidling up to Novak to make some poisoned remark. Looks like Alex has a monkey in there that needed spanking.

  “Just a minute!”

  Things had definitely turned now. His paranoia had come on—he’d be going along like this in his normal deluded way and then some small thing, a gesture, a word, would seem to strip the scales from him, would suddenly reveal the world in its true malevolence. He used to think of the feeling as some kind of artist’s alienation, but it was probably just a reflex, a deep insectival part of the brain sensing he was out of place, that he’d misstepped. His ant brain, Alex called it: that was how ants must feel if they stepped out of line, the alarm bells going off all along their double helixes.

  He could hear Amanda and Stephen talking outside the door. There was more than a little of the ant to Amanda, Alex could see that now; he should have seen it from the start, at those International Socialist meetings she’d dragged him to, but he’d been too besotted with blondness then, too thrilled to be having those not-really-dates behind Liz’s back. The meetings, of course, had been a joke: maybe a dozen people, on a good day, plotting the overthrow of the capitalist order. They were held at an old community hall down in Point St. Charles, with set talks every week on topics like “The Failure of the Union Leadership in the British Coal Miners’ Strike” or “The Role of the Mullahs in Iran,” talks which were actually fairly interesting but which always managed to trail off at the end into the strange illogic of The Revolution. Did these people think the factory workers in LaSalle or the paunchy transit drivers or the racist, cushily unionized Montreal police were going to storm down to University and Sherbrooke and slit some capitalist’s throat?

  “Doesn’t it seem a little far-fetched?” he finally got the courage to say to Amanda. “I mean, who are they kidding?”

  Amanda looked crestfallen.

  “Well, I think they’ve got a good analysis.”

  That had more or less stalled things between them, which had been just as well. Where could they have gone, really? He’d never lied to Amanda about Liz, and so had been able to use her to shield him as soon as he’d needed to. But after the breakup he’d sat exposed. Then at the end of one of his after-class parties, Amanda had inexplicably stayed behind.

  “You seem kind of unhappy,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder with a sort of sad, cheery smile.

  It was true he was pretty low. At the party he’d been making dark jokes about his balcony that everyone but Amanda had wisely shrugged off.

  He felt he had to offer her something.

  “You know. Life and all that. My breakup.”

  “It’s just I had a friend who used to talk that way. She used to make jokes like that.”

  Oh, shit, Alex thought, not wanting to know.

  “Did she—?”

  “Yeah.”

  He dipped his head.
>
  “What a drag.”

  “So. I just wanted you to know. In case you were thinking—”

  “It’s not really something I’d do,” he said, almost ready to put the matter in writing just so he wouldn’t have to continue with this awful conversation.

  He’d made the mistake of offering her a drink then, and by the end of the night they had polished off several bottles of leftover wine and several inches of Canadian Club, another import from his father’s bar. It turned out that Alex was the one who did most of the consoling: Amanda told him the story of her dead friend, a childhood girlfriend back home who’d gone bad with drugs and slit her wrists. She ended up sobbing drunkenly there on the couch, so that there was nothing for it but for Alex to take her in his arms. Why he had started kissing her he couldn’t say—some sense of obligation, maybe, or because of the alcohol, or because he’d hoped to reassure himself, after his last months with Liz, that he could still have normal sexual relations. What was more likely, though, was that he’d been driven by the usual brute male imperative: here was a woman who was available to him, blond, blue-eyed, full-breasted, satin-skinned, and in the animal discourse of flesh to flesh it did not matter so much that such a near-perfect body had got strapped to such a conflicted, not-knowing-what-it-was-striving-for soul. The sex, in the end, when they’d managed to get to it, had hardly registered, given how drunk they’d been; and yet it had happened.

  Alex had read somewhere about a fish species in which the males divided neatly into two sorts: those who were perfect family men, who stuck by their wives and looked after their children, and those who acted the part during mating but were really outright cads, disappearing the instant they’d dropped their seed. Cad vs. dad was a bit of a wash in terms of surviving offspring, so that neither won out, and it was entirely likely that the cads didn’t even know they were cads, just went along every time with the best of intentions until they felt the itch again, and were gone.