The Origin of Species Read online

  He had never asked Liz to get the abortion. He had left it to her; it was her body after all. It was easy to see now what a cop-out that had been, or, worse, how it had been sheer manipulation, because deep down Alex believed that Liz would have agreed to keep the baby in a heartbeat if he’d made it the least bit clear that that was what he’d wanted. In his own mind, he’d thought it crazy even to consider going ahead: it wasn’t just the practicalities, that they had almost no income and the building they were living in, a drafty old tenement on Crawford, was under imminent threat of demolition; it was also that, for the first time it seemed, they had possibilities, not just from Alex’s publication but from a show Liz had been part of where she’d been singled out for praise. Now was the moment to strike out, Alex had thought, not retreat into domesticity. But of course he hadn’t said any of this to Liz: he had stood back, kept mum, and let her make her own decision.

  Asshole.

  He should never have started thinking about the matter. He might turn it over and over in his head and never see it right, whether he should have done this or that, what Liz would have done in turn. Who had been dishonest or disingenuous or manipulative, or whether, if he had just bitten the bullet and said yes, Liz, out of sheer contrariness, wouldn’t have had the abortion anyway. He thought of Liz the way Freud had thought about dreams, that there was a point where matters retreated into the unfathomable like the umbilical cord into the womb. Ever since high school there had been the same weird connection between them, long before anything like sex had come into the picture, the same weird arguments over who knew what, the same scary intimacy like a last-ditch fire they were both huddled around. There were grievances between them from back then that they had never really forgiven each other for: that Alex had turned Liz down, for instance, when she’d invited him to the Grade 13 grad. Because he didn’t want it to interfere with their friendship, was what he’d said, but they had both known he was simply waiting for a better offer, not this sexless sidekick he spent all his time with, who went around draped in such an excess of clothing—scarves, gym pants, oversize sweaters, men’s parkas—that she seemed to have no body at all. He had ended up going with a girl he wasn’t even attracted to just because she was slightly more in, something that in the Darwinian logic of adolescence, a period clearly designed by nature to kill off the weak, had somehow made perfect sense to him.

  He’d been to her house once for supper, with her reclusive sister and the crazy German father who called her a slut and the mother who was overly friendly when Alex went by after school but would shoo him away before Liz’s father got home from work. “The wop,” Liz’s father called him behind his back, according to Liz. But at supper he’d sat smiling and laughing nervously like a harmless old immigrant.

  “I know your uncle Tony there at the factory. Always joking, always joking.”

  Years later, when he and Liz were actually involved, he would feel a strange stab when he thought back to this time, how he’d pretended he didn’t see what Liz wanted, or rather puffed himself up with it and in the same instant denied it. Who knew what it was, the smell of outsiderness that had come off her or maybe simply that she was like him: this was the thing he couldn’t forgive, that there was no gain in it for him, to be with her. They were like two people poised at a brink; the only way forward was down.

  It wasn’t until the end of university, when they were both living in Toronto, that they finally slept with each other, just before he left for Africa. Gin played a part, and the titillation of being in her boyfriend’s apartment while he was away. Alex awoke the next morning feeling like he’d just discovered the proper use of something he’d long taken for granted, but Liz was already going through the room as if trying to cover up a murder.

  “This can’t ever happen again,” she said at once.

  “You didn’t seem to mind it.”

  “You know as well as I do it would never have happened if you weren’t leaving.”

  By the time he’d left the country they were no longer speaking. He’d written her once, and received no reply, and might have been ready just to cut her from his life if he hadn’t come home such an invalid, with Desmond behind him and nothing ahead. Only a matter of days had passed before he phoned Liz’s house to track her down.

  “Alex! What a coincidence!” Her mother’s over-bright voice, still with that deluded hopefulness to it, desperate and a bit chilling. “She’s actually home this weekend. She’ll be thrilled!”

  Within a month he had moved back up to Toronto and rented a tiny place in the market, but was spending most of his time at Liz’s. She was alone now, she had changed her life. After wasting her undergrad years doing a business degree, she had gone back for art, what she’d wanted. She took him to her studio at the college and showed him her work, large, vibrant abstracts that didn’t seem anything like Liz, that were utterly buoyant.

  “So that’s it,” she said. “It’s pretty passé even to be working on canvas anymore.”

  “They seem, I dunno—fun. I mean, I like them.”

  What he really felt, looking at them, was a strange arousal—that Liz had produced them, that these bright things had come out of her.

  “Fun is all right,” she said. “I can live with fun.”

  They were already sleeping together by then. Everything happened like that, without question, as if it were inevitable, as if there had never been a point of decision. They fell into sex the way they had that one night, like something they’d merely put off, then never talked about it, as if it were some secret about themselves they needed to keep. Alex felt like he was in hiding, like he’d holed up in a safe house; it grew rare for him to return to his own apartment except to collect his mail. Liz’s apartment was done up with plants and checkered tiles and plump throw pillows, everything just so—he liked that there was nothing there that was his, that reflected him, as if he had come back after the wars to a war bride who’d made a new life for him.

  He’d had a letter from Ingrid. He had spent a month with her before the Galápagos, but already she seemed a stranger to him. There was a tone to her letter, as if there was still a chance for the two of them despite the gulf between them, that he couldn’t bear. “Liz is someone I’ve known since high school and maybe the person I’m fated to be with,” he wrote back, then never heard from her again.

  When he started his Master’s at U of T he gave up his place and moved in with Liz. The apartment grew small with the two of them always there. Liz had finished art school and was using the living room as her studio, taking in ad work to pay the rent. She’d stopped doing her abstracts and gone back to figures—still lifes, disembodied hands, a self-portrait that showed her looking back over her shoulder as if at an assailant. She asked Alex to sit for her, reclining him nude on the couch draped in satins and velvets, and they ended up making love on the living room floor, in their wordless way, as if it was something their bodies did that they couldn’t be held accountable for.

  They lay on the couch afterward, and he could smell her sweat.

  “You never said why you stopped doing your abstracts.”

  “I was tired of them.” Then, lightheartedly, “I shopped my slides around, and no one seemed interested.”

  This was the first Alex had heard of this.

  “What did people say?”

  “That it didn’t fit their aesthetic, that sort of thing.”

  She was still talking in the same easy tone. Alex knew nothing of the art world except what he’d learned from Liz, but it seemed a bordello to him, a lawless place.

  “Maybe you should try something different.”

  He knew at once that he’d said the wrong thing.

  “What do you mean, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the artist. Try a new direction or something.”

  There was the smallest pause.

  “I have.”

  She abandoned the nude of him after that, letting it sit untouched on her easel a few days be
fore finally burying it somewhere. So it began, Alex thought, all the rattle and clang of recrimination and blame that he’d been expecting since he’d moved in. This was the pattern between them: they grew dependent on one another and then they turned, like animals chewing off their own limbs. Liz had slowly cut her ties with her old art school gang, most of whom had drifted off like her into the ignominy of hack work; Alex had a couple of friends he still saw from his undergraduate years, but at U of T, where a cold institutionalism reigned, he simply went to his classes and came home. Then Liz had had another of her ruptures with her parents: she had these regularly, like phases of the moon, though in this case it was just as well, since before it they had lived in fear that Alex would pick up the phone one day when Liz’s mother called—always early or late, to get the cheap rates—and they’d be found out.

  They fell into a phase of crazy arguments, reckless, pointless brawls that never had anything to do with whatever was really at issue. Suddenly, everything seemed wrong: Liz’s anal little apartment, where Alex felt she watched him now as if he were some squatter who’d broken in to despoil the place with his fetid maleness; their sex, which had grown perfunctory, until it seemed just the listless work of making Liz come so that he could.

  “Just stop,” she said once. “I feel like I’m alone.”

  He might have said something useful then.

  “I’m doing my best,” was what he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I dunno, it just feels like so much effort with you.”

  She left the apartment then and was gone the entire night. By morning Alex felt an inchoate bloody-mindedness, pacing the living room not sure if he was dreading the worst or wanting it.

  She came in just past dawn and sat beside him on the couch.

  “Maybe we should stay apart for a while,” she said.

  This was really the crux of these arguments, how far they could go before he turned her away.

  “Let’s just go to bed.”

  At some point, Liz stopped painting entirely. Alex wouldn’t let himself notice at first, the corner of the living room where her easel stood feeling like a crime scene they were both determined to ignore.

  “You haven’t been painting,” he said finally, as casually as he could manage.

  “Just waiting for a new direction.”

  This was the worst thing, he knew, letting her painting become a battleground between them.

  “Don’t blame me if you don’t know what you want to do.”

  He had crossed the line.

  “You’d be happy if I painted fucking landscapes as long as they got into a gallery! You mope around like I’d have to become famous before you’d believe in me!”

  He didn’t know if Liz believed these things when she said them, if either of them meant any of the things they said or were just spilling their worst fears as if to cast a spell against them. Yet she was right, he didn’t believe, not really, couldn’t have said if her work showed talent or not or if those painstaking hands of hers, which she’d spent weeks on, had any less merit than the cheery abstracts she used to do.

  It never really occurred to him that they should simply end things. She had taken him in so unquestioningly, as if they shared a doom—there was nothing she did, not even the bitterest things, that wasn’t somehow just a cover for this darkness that seemed to join them.

  She didn’t paint again for months, each of them keeping grimly to their little tasks until their failed selves, the specters of what they would not be, were like extra presences in the apartment. Some of Liz’s old art school cronies asked her to join a project they’d started, making over an abandoned house with art, but she put them off.

  “It’s such a gimmick,” she said to Alex. “It’s just all the losers like me who can’t get into the galleries.”

  Alex held his tongue, the subject so fraught by now there seemed no right thing to say. Then Liz finally agreed to sign on, but wouldn’t let him anywhere near her work until the opening. She’d had the entire bathroom to herself, and had done it over in an elaborate trompe l’oeil that seemed to extend it out to several times its dimensions, with a hyperrealism that mirrored the room’s wreckage but was also vaguely off-kilter, reaching off into implausible angles like an Escher woodcut.

  Alex felt the usual terror go through him—he had no idea what to make of it.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “You think it’s all right?”

  “It’s amazing. All the detail.”

  She seemed so exposed. Then the next day they went through the dailies and found a tiny review of the show in which Liz’s work, in a passing reference, was dismissed as “virtuosic.” Alex was crushed.

  “It’s just some asshole critic,” he said. “He liked that sappy wall etching in the living room.”

  But Liz had taken on an odd lightness, as if failure freed her.

  “It doesn’t matter. I had fun with it.”

  When the weekly entertainment tabloid came out, a leftist rag that always went out of its way to attack its own, Alex was afraid to look at it. Sure enough the review was a hatchet job: “Art House Old Hat.” He was ready to get rid of it at once before Liz laid eyes on it, but then his eye caught her name. “I walked into the bathroom with the idea of using the facilities”—and Alex prepared himself for it, for the jibe, the withering dismissal—“and felt like I’d stepped through the looking glass.”

  There was more of the same, excessive almost, self-congratulatory, yet unmistakable: she had been singled out for a rave. It wasn’t long before the calls started coming in, from other artists in the show, who offered their bright, bitter congratulations, from all the people who hadn’t phoned Liz in months. Liz looked positively stunned, straining to live up to the headiness of the moment as if some notion of herself that she’d held sacrosanct had been shattered.

  “I couldn’t believe it!” she said, sounding as false as her well-wishers. “I thought Alex had printed it up as a joke.”

  They had no precedent in their lives for this sort of public anointing. For many weeks afterward they moved through an air of unreality, as if they’d been entrusted with some momentous task whose precise nature had yet to be revealed. Soon someone would come to the door and hand them their new lives—that was the sense of it for Alex. He wrote his article in these weeks and sent it off, and got his acceptance in such short order that they seemed under some charm. Then they went off to England for their splurge and had sex every night, the sort of urgent, wordless sex that worked best for them, as if there wasn’t a moment to spare, as if they’d be found out at any instant.

  It was only when they were home again that it occurred to Alex they might simply slip back into their old lives and nothing would be different. He was mired in application forms for his doctorate but was already losing the spark he had felt that day in Darwin’s study—perhaps he was headed for nothing more original than the usual drudgery of academics. At the back of his mind an anger had begun to take shape against Liz. She’d had half a dozen calls from galleries after her review and yet had not so much as picked up a brush since then, going back to her ad work as if all the rest had been some youthful folly.

  They were pressed for money, because of the trip. Then the notice came of some structural flaw in their building, and the threat of eviction.

  “Shouldn’t you be doing something?” he said. She had fought her way into art school against all opposition, her parents, her boyfriend. Now the prize shimmered before her and she wouldn’t reach for it. “I mean, while people still remember the review.”

  “Like what? Showing my abstracts around again?”

  Do some fucking new paintings, he wanted to say.

  “It just seems such a waste.”

  When they found out Liz was pregnant this conversation came back to haunt him. The pregnancy had been pure stupidity—she’d been off the pill when they were in England because of a throb in her leg and they’d pushed the limit
on her safe days. It felt like they were being punished for their bit of abandon. They sat sullenly at the kitchen table as if there was actually something to decide, but everything in Alex screamed no: it wasn’t the time for them, not now, maybe not ever.

  Every argument he could make seemed forbidden.

  It’s your body, he almost said.

  “Just tell me what you want to do.”

  She never actually asked what he himself wanted, and so showed that she knew. There followed a couple of weeks of indecision that seemed like a desert they had to cross, and out of which Liz emerged looking as drawn and worn as an ascetic.

  The agony of waiting had weakened him.

  “We could make it work,” he said, not meaning it. “I could get my teaching certificate.”

  “When would you do that, exactly?”

  They went to the Morgentaler Clinic on Harbord, to avoid the red tape at the hospitals. They had to push their way past a straggle of protesters waving placards with slogans like STOP THE SLAUGHTER and EXODUS 20:13. Inside, half a dozen women sat stolidly in the makeshift waiting room, some with partners, some alone. Attendants in street clothes moved patiently among them handing out clipboards and forms, with a partisan air not so different from that of the protesters outside.

  “How are you doing?” Alex whispered.

  Liz’s voice had gone completely flat.

  “Just great.”

  The doctor came into the reception area from a back hallway, grim-faced and hurried. He had a quick word with the receptionist, then retreated without so much as glancing at anyone. Alex knew what a hero he was, a survivor of the camps, a champion of women’s rights, and yet at the sight of him, hirsute and small and slightly simian, the first thought that passed through his mind was Butcher.