The Origin of Species Read online

  Alex’s armpits were dripping with sweat.

  “I think I’m up,” Liz said.

  His head filled with blasphemy while he waited. It seemed now that they had not asked themselves a single question about what they were doing here—what a fetus was, for instance, or how they could know such a thing, or how anyone could; what it could mean to have one scraped out of you. Once, before she’d decided, Liz had talked about the baby as if it were alive, how taken over she felt, how her whole body seemed to be shifting to make a place for it. But just that once.

  She came out still dopey with sedatives and unhappy with pain. Alex had a feeling like there was grit in his soul.

  “You okay?”

  “Not really.”

  At home he dared to ask her how it had been.

  “It was awful.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “I just want to sleep.”

  That was it, all they ever said. For a few days Liz moved bitterly through the apartment, unapproachable, but then gradually her mood seemed to lift, or she made the effort for his sake, or just put up her walls—who knew, really, who wanted to know. It wasn’t any big deal in any event. People had abortions all the time. Liz went back to her work, her restaurant ads and her layouts for industrial newsletters and her two-bit logo designs for local hair salons; Alex buried himself in his applications.

  There was a cat that had started hanging around their back veranda, a big gray tabby with a collar but no tag who would stare in through the kitchen window but showed no interest when Alex set out bits of salami for him. Then one morning, somehow, he was in the kitchen.

  Liz had let him in.

  “He must be lost,” she said, though it was the first time she’d given any sign that she’d even noticed him.

  The cat moved through the kitchen as if he’d memorized it, sniffing corners, rubbing against chair legs, then doing some sort of quick calculation and suddenly leaping up to a stool and onto the counter. The faucet had a leak they’d never bothered to fix; the cat leaned out to it, with unmistakable intent, and lapped his tongue at the drips. It was what he’d been staring at all these days, those tantalizing droplets.

  Liz had watched the cat’s progress as if he were simply some natural event, making no move either to show him any welcome or to shoo him away.

  “We should put up posters or something,” she said. “We should find the owner.”

  What Liz meant by this, it turned out—Liz, who was allergic to everything, who hated hairs on things, who wasn’t the type to court any compromise to domestic hygiene—was that they were taking the cat in. She put out a water bowl, bought cat food and litter at the Dominion, spread the litter in a cardboard box in a corner of her sanctuary, the bathroom. It was nothing short of deranged, either that or one of her insidious paybacks. She knew Alex thought pets were indulgences, that it was one of his little political credos.

  He put up posters, but the days passed, and no one came. The cardboard litter box grew soggy, and Alex bought a proper one.

  “We should give it a name or something,” he said.

  Liz had put her brave face on.

  “What do you think?”

  “How about Moses?” Alex offered. Because of the water. Because of the little bed of dried leaves and debris that he used to sleep in on the back veranda.

  Exodus 20:13.

  “Moses is great.”

  He wanted to strangle the cat, he wanted to stick it in a sack and dunk it in a barrel. He’d be sitting at his little desk in the bedroom—it was hopeless to work there, the room was Liz’s, not his, every inch of it—and the cat would jump up into his lap, where it would purr and purr like an outboard motor.

  He came upon Liz petting him once on the bed, sitting cross-legged while Moses lay stretched out before her like a sultan.

  “I want to go up to Montreal,” he said. “To look at the universities. You could come.”

  She didn’t look at him. He wished she would scream at him so he could harden himself, so he could think again, It was just a fucking abortion.

  “Were you planning on moving there?”

  He let that pass.

  “We could think of it. If you wanted.”

  By the time they actually moved to Montreal, what he’d thought of as a new start already had the feel of a nightmarish blunder. They had a vicious argument during the move, then arrived in the dark, in pouring rain, to an apartment that had seemed extravagantly roomy and full of character when they’d rented it but now looked merely derelict. Alex slumped down in an armchair with a cigarette, numbed from the drive, from the clatter of argument, while Moses wandered arch-backed and watchful from room to room.

  “I could use a bit of help here,” Liz said tersely from the kitchen, and Alex thought, Bitch.

  Somehow they got through the first year. There were moments, enough of them, that seemed strangely untainted, as if they put on workaday selves for daily use who were able to make supper, have sex, take walks on the mountain, without dragging with them every hurt and resentment. But then some tension would arise in the unlikeliest place. They audited an art history course together until Alex made the mistake one class of grandstanding in front of everyone on the subject of sexism.

  “I’m sure Rembrandt wouldn’t care if you found his paintings sexist or not,” the professor said dryly, and everyone laughed.

  He didn’t want to go back after that, but Liz simply brushed the matter off.

  “I’m not giving up art history just because you’ve become a feminist all of a sudden,” she said. But what she meant was, You made me get an abortion.

  Winter came on with a brutality that sapped Alex’s spirit. They’d left a room in the apartment for Liz’s studio, but she used it mainly as a sort of guest room for Moses, whose little bed she’d arranged in a corner with his litter box beside it like an en suite. They hardly went out—Alex had the people he met at school and a couple of secondhand acquaintances, but Liz had no one, nor did she seem much taken with the friends Alex brought home. What Liz did a lot of, when she wasn’t working on the few contracts she’d managed to bring with her, was watch TV—talk shows, sappy dramas, bad sitcoms. She had set up her old black-and-white in the bedroom, which more or less killed the prospect of sex.

  “I can’t believe the time you waste in front of that thing,” he said, which in their new bitter shorthand meant, Why aren’t you painting? The TV became another war zone after that, so that they could not even sit down to watch the news together without this sense of freightedness between them.

  Alex was taking a course called “Sex and Text” that had spurred his little feminist outburst in his art history class. Liz only ridiculed the course, leafing through his readings and pulling out phrases laden with the blind self-importance of academe. But after the theory they strayed into grayer zones, to books with titles like Big Daddy and I Once Had a Master that had to be picked up from behind the counter at the gay bookstore on St. Lawrence. Some of this stuff was like nothing Alex had read: there were cattle prods, razor blades, harnesses of every sort; there was role-playing that seemed to go to the very limits of the imaginable.

  Liz picked up one of these books one night and began to skim through it.

  “What is this stuff?”

  “It’s from my course.”

  “It reads like something from Penthouse Forum.”

  “Maybe.” He felt like he’d been caught out in a perversion. “That’s the question.”

  She was still reading.

  “What a joke. So all that theory you guys talk about is just an excuse to read porn.”

  The incident left a residue between them. Even in his class there was always a tang in the air when they discussed these books, an unspent charge.

  “You probably like that sort of stuff,” she said in bed, though not quite in judgment.

  He knew that if he just put her off with “Do you?” the moment would be ruined.

  “Maybe l
ike isn’t the right word.”

  When they had sex he was rougher than usual, shifting her how he wanted, feeling his blood pound when she gave way. The thought went through his head, She likes this.

  He could never say that to Liz.

  “Wow,” he said after, circumspect. “Was that all right?”

  Already he could feel her pulling back.

  “I guess you should read that stuff more often.”

  The memory of the rush he’d felt stayed with him. It was there like a goad when they made love again: She likes this. There was nothing wrong in it—he knew now that people gave themselves over to the wildest excesses. He had learned some tricks from those books of his, things he could do, such as pinning Liz’s shoulders or holding her wrists, that were enough to give them a jolt without their having to admit what they were up to. That seemed the crux of it, the not admitting. It was how their sex had always been, this looking away as if it were shameful, as if its being shameful was what drove them to it.

  The books were there in the apartment when he was out. Maybe she looked at them, maybe she lay in bed and masturbated or thought of him coming home and doing the things they described, forcing them on her. Not just what hurt, the whips and electrodes, the razor blades along the skin, but the head fucks. Get on your knees. Bend over. Fucking slut. It was a different kind of limit, a different place. He wouldn’t let himself think these things through, they were too awful, really, too delicious, yet he thought he could see the inside of her head in a way he never had. Those late nights when her father had locked her out of the house and she’d slept in the garage, her mother pretending not to know; her silent sister. All the things they never talked about, the deep, viscous places they wouldn’t go.

  They carried on as if things were the same, had the same arguments, kept the same routines. But it felt all for show—every day seemed to move relentlessly toward the night, everything they did until then just a stalling, a way station. If they took care not to argue, it was for that, so they should arrive there; if they picked a fight it was the same, for that, to avoid risking the thing by making it clear. It was surprising how easy it was to move from their usual pettinesses into being these profligates, these goats, each time slipping closer to violence as if to find the point where they crossed over. Take it inside you. Turn over. Dirty bitch.

  She would bend in half to take him, she would look at him, something she never did, she would come while he was fucking her instead of in some elaborate work of fingers and hands. She came as if it had got loose from her, as if she had wet herself. He wouldn’t let himself wonder what went through her head then, when he called her names, when he fucked her as if she were anyone, as if she had no choice.

  She’d let him hold her afterward as if it was something she owed him.

  “I’m just going to have a bath,” she’d say. “You go ahead and go to sleep.”

  For months he’d felt closed up in their apartment as if it were all he knew, but now something was different—not better, perhaps, but different. He was glad he had never brought up the whole question of their relationship, though a thousand times he’d wanted to; they’d never have got to this place then, whatever place it was. A dangerous one, maybe. It was just sex, after all, not revelation. Sex was what animals did: he thought of sex and saw the rabbits they’d kept on the farm, the males starting to hump before they’d even stuck the thing in, the females squirming away. Half the time the males seemed to shoot in the air—they’d have fucked corpses, dead rats, bits of fur on a stick. And yet. He would come into the apartment and Liz would be reading cross-legged on the couch or standing at her drafting board with her hair tied up, and he’d feel the thrum in his loins again, thinking what he would do to her.

  He stopped to stare at the window of a sex shop off St. Lawrence, done up like a Halloween display.

  “I think this is good for you,” the woman inside said, a gravel-voiced Quebecoise. She held up a harness with so many clasps and chains you might have shackled a bear in it.

  “That’s fine,” Alex said, mortified. “That’s fine.”

  When he gave the thing to Liz, gift-wrapped in black paper, she was on her guard at once, so out of character was it for him to bestow random gifts on her.

  She pulled off the wrappings.

  “Is this some kind of a joke?”

  The harness had been priced well beyond anything that could qualify it as a joke.

  “Not exactly.”

  “What, then?”

  “It’s just something to use. I thought you’d like it.”

  “It’s your sick fantasy, isn’t it?” He knew by then that the situation was unsalvageable. “Mister fucking feminist.”

  They said every manner of thing after that, whatever entered their minds—her art came into it, and this fucking city he’d brought her to, and how he had sponged off her from the moment he’d come home. Alex went to his fallback, that he couldn’t do anything right, that she was deranged. But he never quite said the things he’d sworn he wouldn’t say, because he didn’t have words for them, maybe, or was holding them back for some final onslaught, or just because he knew he’d made a fatal mistake. He had tried to pretend what they did was a game, the way it was in his books: you got whipped, you let yourself grovel at someone’s feet, but it was all to a plan, it had a limit. Sex as therapy, was what it came down to. It wasn’t that for him and Liz. It was avoidance, maybe, lies, the kind of knowing and not knowing that was like walking on a knife edge, but it wasn’t therapy.

  It was days before they spoke again, slowly shuffling back toward civility with the tired will-lessness that always set in after an argument. Meanwhile the harness, a final sale, sat stuffed in a back corner of the hall closet. Each time Alex reached in there he’d feel a twinge, of anger or shame or regret, he wasn’t sure which.

  “Look, I’m sorry about that thing,” he said finally. “Let’s just forget about it.”

  She had reached the point in her anger where she was just looking for an excuse to drop it.

  “I probably overreacted.”

  They were both worn out by then. They ended up watching a movie together, silently nestling into each other on the couch as if letting their bodies do the work of forgiveness they couldn’t. They smoked a joint, from a new batch he had, and got hopelessly stoned.

  “I feel kind of weird,” Liz said.

  They hadn’t had sex since the argument. In the bedroom they undressed, together but not quite so. He looked at her naked, at her taut, Teutonic body, always more shapely than he imagined it. It wasn’t quite beautiful and yet there was something to it, an uncertain quality like a family resemblance that made him quicken and squirm.

  She had slipped under the covers.

  “You should get that thing,” she said.

  Her voice sounded disembodied.

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “We should try it.”

  She wanted to please him, which sent a strange gratitude through him, since he’d imagined himself beyond such efforts. The whole enterprise was a mistake, he knew it, yet he felt too stoned to properly reason it through. She had to lie prone on the bed while he bound her limbs. There were so many straps to do up. Moses got into the room, sniffing at the leather, batting at the straps, until Alex took him roughly out.

  She was bound up like a trussed pig, ankles to wrists.

  “It’s a little tight,” she said.

  It was ludicrous for them to be doing this. They weren’t the people for it. He had to pick his way into her as if negotiating a thicket. With each thrust, Liz’s limbs strained against the harness.

  “Is it hurting you?”

  They were both talking with the same slowed remove, as if impersonating themselves.

  “No, no. It’s fine.”

  The smell of her came up in waves. He pushed into her and felt her body giving in to him. At some point he slipped over to another territory, as if she were an island or a country beneath him.


  “I love fucking you,” he said. “I love you.”

  In his memory afterward, all of this was like what electroshock might have been, an overload, a sort of blinding of the brain. They came, somehow. Liz was already crying by the time he started to undo her.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I dunno.” She shifted awkwardly against the straps, trying to turn from him. “It’s just the pot.”

  Behind the image of Liz trussed up beneath him was his blurting out I love you to her like a turn-on, like taking a gun to her head.

  In the morning they both seemed determined to act as if the previous night hadn’t happened. They bickered over his smoking, which he’d promised to quit, and he went out in a huff to the Van Houtte’s and smoked half a pack, coming home stinking like an ashtray. They argued in earnest now.

  “Half the time it feels like you don’t even live here. I might as well be alone.”

  “I might be around more if you didn’t ride me like a fucking harpy.”

  They were just following a script—they might as well have been trailer trash, might as well have been their parents.

  It was all beside the point.

  “Why don’t you just leave then, if I’m so awful?” she said. “Why do you even stay with me?”

  At last, the Big Question had been brought into play. It was like a probe sent up, a test rocket, something to be contradicted, but now it was out there.

  The actual work of breaking up took many months, through their second summer and fall in the city and into the winter. By then he had failed his theory comp, which had put his funding in danger, and lost all faith in his dissertation, matters he kept from Liz, instead holding them against her like grudges. Meanwhile Liz didn’t crumble as he’d expected. From out of nowhere she had patched together a life, had got a teaching gig in Mount Royal, had landed a couple of contracts, saw friends whom Alex knew nothing of. She had started painting again, tight, intricately patterned abstracts like Islamic arabesques or bad acid trips that seemed to say, You are killing me.

  This was the language between them now, these were the rules. They acted like people who had nothing to do with each other, whom they had to share space with like roomers, but to whom in some other moment, some shift in the warp of things, they might have to answer. He brought Katherine home under these new rules, back when she still had the look of Anne of Green Gables, and Liz came across them having tea in the kitchen, though he never drank tea.