The Origin of Species Read online

  That wasn’t a sentiment that Alex was ever likely to voice around Félix—there were certain places, he realized, where Félix’s sense of irony wouldn’t go. Whenever they got anywhere near these sorts of issues Alex could feel an East bloc carefulness coming over him.

  “It isn’t so much to ask, to learn the language of a place.” That had been Félix’s brisk dismissal of the spat with Louie. “It’s not racism to say so. If I come to your country, I do the same.”

  There was no argument to make to this sort of reasonableness. Félix was right, surely, Louie had simply been grandstanding, yet the more time Alex spent with Félix the more he felt surrounded by the unsayable.

  Félix lived in Outremont, on the other side of the mountain. The streets there were laid out in long rows of stately two- and three-story multiplexes, dark-bricked and white-trimmed and close as if the hodgepodge of the rest of the city had found here its perfect order. A hundred years earlier the place had been no more than unpeopled bush, yet Alex had the sense in its streets of an old, foreign life going on around him reaching back to the notaries and priests of the ancien régime and to squint-eyed officials in drafty offices near the port recording customs duties and census rolls.

  He passed whole families of Hasidic Jews hurrying along the sidewalks sometimes, looking, in their strange jackets and curls and hats, as if they had just stepped fresh from the eighteenth century.

  “They were very smart,” Félix had said. “They bought a lot here before the referendum, very cheap. Now, of course, it’s worth much more.”

  Alex tried not to listen too carefully to comments like these, afraid of the moment they might overstep. In any event, different rules seemed to apply out here, on the other side—the feeling he’d always had of living in the midst of a mongrel non-culture, without claims or preferments, yielded to a sense of hegemony and right. Félix’s house, up toward the mountain, where the multiplexes gave way to restrained single-family homes, was a four-square place in brick and rusticated stone that conveyed a sense of generational solidity. Inside it was all rich wood hues and high ceilings and original moldings, books everywhere and polished antiques and framed posters of art exhibitions, Klimt at the MOMA, Man Ray in Paris, the Hermitage exhibition at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.

  They had their lessons in a room lined with leather-bound books from Félix’s classical education. Félix brought out wine and crudités; he allowed Alex to smoke.

  “So,” he’d said, their first lesson, settling in an armchair and tucking up his pant legs like a Gentleman at Home, “maybe we should start by getting to know each other a little more. Now that we’re free of Mme Hertz.”

  That had remained the tenor of their sessions, this sense of being slightly delinquent, beyond jurisdiction. Félix kept a notebook where he’d jot down phrases and points of grammar he wanted to discuss, but after the calculated featurelessness of the Berlitz offices, it was enough for Alex simply to look around him to find a conversation point. Photographs that Félix had taken lined the hallways, carefully matted and framed like works in a gallery. He had done a series on the street kids of Rio, brooding black-and-white shots that Alex wouldn’t have expected of him, that would have required him to wander in dangerous neighborhoods, to speak to these children, to gain their trust.

  “It’s a hobby since I was young. Just, you know, to keep the soul alive.”

  There were shots of gaunt-faced uncles and aunts, of a brother in the priesthood, of weddings and feasts. In the entrance hall was a family shot Félix had taken as a young man in front of the house he’d grown up in in Longueuil, a bungalow in fieldstone and yellow brick that might have been in any fifties suburb on the continent. His family, a sprawling bevy of them, were poised on the front steps like a paradigm of the middle class, the males with their hair slicked back and the females all in bobs.

  Alex had read about Longueuil in White Niggers of America, where it had figured as one of the lower circles of hell, a place of unpaved streets and tarpaper shacks specially designed for Quebec’s suburban proletariat.

  “Oh, yes, he makes a lot of fun of us in that book,” Félix said, with surprising bitterness. “Those of us on the other side of the fence. We were the sellouts. But my father was getting up every morning at five to take a bus to the East End, and coming home at eleven, when that group was out drinking cognac in the cafés.”

  It was one of the few chinks Alex ever saw in Félix’s nationalist armor. He was cut from a different cloth, it seemed, than the White Niggers crowd, with their manifestos and bombs. His father had raised himself up by his bootstraps, running a depanneur in the East End to put seven children through school.

  “It’s no use talking about independence if you can’t support yourself. They don’t understand, that type. They’re like children who want to leave home but won’t get a job.”

  These sorts of pronouncements were not invitations to debate. That suited Alex fine: who was he to say, in any event? He’d gone out for drinks with Félix a few times, to sleek-looking places in chrome and exposed brick nothing like the half-deserted dives in the Anglo ghetto Alex normally frequented, and he’d begun to feel as if he’d been living in some small provincial town when around the corner was this foreign city he’d never entered. People spoke French there; they wore elegant clothes; they seemed at the center of things. Félix had friends at these places, though Alex seldom got beyond the simplest pleasantries with any of them. He was afraid the talk would come around to politics and he’d commit some horrible gaffe, but that never really happened. He could always feel it, though, the moment he was left behind, as if there were little burrows people fell into, comfortable places full of innuendo and slang that he couldn’t enter. Félix might translate a bit but soon enough he’d get caught up in things, so that Alex could only sit there in smiling incomprehension.

  “Ça va?” Félix would say, and Alex would scramble to reassure him.

  “Oui, oui, ça va.”

  The truth was that Alex, though he suffered guilt for this, never made quite as much effort on these outings as he might have. Perhaps he was afraid of being unmasked somehow, or maybe he just wasn’t up to the work of bridging the solitudes. But there was more to it: out in the world like that, this impoverished young man next to the graying, affluent one, he felt like Félix’s boy. It was clear by then, Alex wasn’t an idiot, that Félix was gay—he’d known it, really, the instant he’d stepped into Félix’s house, from how self-sufficient it seemed, how devoid of any feminine presence.

  Alex had consulted Michael.

  “Of course he’s gay. What does he look like? I’ve probably seen him on the mountain.”

  “I don’t think Félix is really the type for the mountain.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  Michael, of course, claimed even Trudeau made appearances on the mountain, in the wooded enclave on the eastern slopes where gay men went for their liaisons, which was why, Michael insisted, Trudeau had bought a house not a five-minute walk from the place. His assessment of Félix was summary and sure: he was one of those deeply closeted men of a certain age who could barely admit they were gay even to themselves.

  “He was trained by the Jesuits. How could he not be fucked up? He’s probably having sex with truck drivers when you’re not around.”

  All of this accorded more than Alex liked to admit with his own suspicions. If Félix was gay it was his own business, and not something he should feel obliged to reveal to his English tutor, any more than Alex was ever going tell Félix about his twisted sex with Liz. And yet. Gay men like Félix were always falling for straight ones like Alex, according to Michael—it was a way they had of feeling normal, by falling for someone who was.

  “I can’t imagine anyone thinking of me as normal,” Alex said.

  Michael gave him a look.

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  It was a stretch to imagine Félix having fallen for him, when he didn’t seem to ha
ve a romantic bone in his Cartesian body. But there was the wine he served up and the little dishes of paté and Camembert; there was the hand that came out sometimes to touch Alex’s shoulder; there was that sense, meeting here in Félix’s home behind Berlitz’s back, that they were up to no good. Then Félix took him so seriously, much more so than his passing expertise in the English language seemed to warrant—they’d even begun to talk of CanLit, of all things, it was almost embarrassing, Alex trotting out stuff he’d only learned himself the week before while preparing for his course as if he’d become some sort of gateway to Anglo culture.

  Then there was the matter of Félix’s son. The whole time at Berlitz, after his first chilly mention of him, Félix had seemed to guard the secret of him as if it were something too irksome to go into. But now, suddenly, every lesson brought the story of some new outrage. He’d failed two of his courses at university; he’d been caught smoking dope; he’d blown three hundred dollars on a leather jacket he didn’t need. Somewhere out in the city this son was wreaking havoc, abetted by a doting mother who had apparently broken Félix’s balls and was now bleeding him for support, and yet there wasn’t the least sign of either of them in Félix’s house. Not so much as a photograph, from him who took photographs for his soul; not so much as a Styx poster or sweaty T-shirt. There was a guest room upstairs that Alex had glanced at but it was in the same fussy state of decorum as the rest of the house—books, a framed Bouguereau print, a hand-stitched quilt in masculine colors. It was entirely possible that mother and son were the purest invention, though the alternative seemed more depressing, that they truly existed in some shadow strain of Félix’s world but merely as a cover for his real life. It bothered Alex how the son—Lionel, his name was, and Alex hoped it was not after the famously anti-Semitic Abbé Groulx—had become this cipher between him and Félix of what was not said. It bothered him that whenever the son came up, it seemed for Alex’s benefit, the Bad Son to Alex’s Good.

  But it also pleased him.

  In Paris, the first time he’d been there, he had let himself be cruised by a man at the Tuileries. He had gone out to supper with him, had returned to his apartment and gone as far as climbing into the man’s bed before he’d declared himself. He would have found it hard to explain what he’d been thinking—he’d known from the start what was happening and yet had pretended to himself that he had not. He’d just wanted a bed, maybe. Or he’d been lonely, and had liked the attention.

  Félix paid him attention. He also paid cash.

  Alex had reached the Unitarian church at the corner of Simpson. His own church, he distantly thought of it as, on account of Darwin, who’d had Unitarian leanings on his mother’s side. The notice board for Sunday’s sermon read “What then must we do? Building a social ethic for our time.” Once, seeing the church’s door ajar and hearing organ music coming from inside, he had gone into the place and been surprised at how august and churchlike it was, with its dark pews and stained glass. Up at the front a mannish-looking organist in a black dress and a young woman in jeans were rehearsing an aria, Bach maybe.

  A trim, gray-haired man with his sleeves rolled, as if he’d been gardening or tidying a closet, stood listening in the shadows at the back of the pews. He smiled over at Alex.

  “Stunning, aren’t they? That’s our organist, Wilhelmina, and our mezzo-soprano.”

  Alex regretted at once having gone in.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Are you one of us? Are you Unitarian?”

  “No. I mean, I’m interested in it.”

  “Here. I’ll give you a brochure with a bit of our history. Feel free to come in any time.”

  Sure enough, the brochure mentioned Darwin. A potted history traced Unitarian roots all the way back to the Arian heresy against the tripartite nature of God, though this was not a debate that Alex was particularly up on. When the dust had settled, in any event, the Unitarians seemed to have ended up more or less as Alex had imagined, as a kind of squishy liberal catch-all.

  Now whenever he passed the church Alex was afraid that the door would swing open and the gray-haired man would suddenly be there on the steps, beckoning. Brilliant day! Stunning! Alex already had his back to the place and was heading down Mackay, but he still felt a shiver. Darwin, he knew, hadn’t lasted long among the Unitarians—he’d flunked out of medical school and set his sights on a parsonage with the Church of England, where he’d be free to study his beetles and slugs. But Alex had no such excuse. Who did he think he was, exactly, mister arrogant shit-for-brains, looking down on people’s honest attempts at some sort of direction in life when half the time he lived his own life in the gutter?

  He wondered what the Unitarians had to say about sex. Stunning, isn’t it? Brilliant! But was it one, or was it tripartite? “A featherbed to catch a falling Christian” was what Darwin’s grandfather, the cranky Erasmus, had said about the Unitarians. Squishy liberals even then, not quite able to look squarely into the void.

  He passed the Liberal Arts Building. Jiri Novak had been bedding down here after his wife’s departure, on the little couch in his office, until the dean had got wind of the situation and had forced him out. Jiri was in his fifties, surely, and yet his life could come down to that, to having to curl up in the nearest warm spot like a stray. Not that Jiri was the least bit bowed; not that he’d admitted to anything. It infuriated Alex, that kind of resilience, but also awed him.

  A statue of Norman Bethune stood shit-encrusted in the little delta that de Maisonneuve broke up into at Guy. Every day he was there, iconic and staunch, another Canadian hero with all the sex appeal of cat pee.

  It’s not that I don’t think he was a great man, Peter, but it all ends up looking so bland, somehow. So nice.

  I don’t know if a lot of people realize this, but he actually had quite a dark streak.

  Some people say you’ve got a pretty good dark streak yourself.

  Well, I’ve never been one for leather harnesses and that sort of thing, if that’s what you mean!

  Maybe Bethune had used harnesses, maybe he’d dressed up in women’s underthings. Who knew why humans were built this way, to crave whatever seemed forbidden—in Paris, after he’d put that man off, all Alex had been able to think about was what it might have been like to give in. He didn’t know if that made him enlightened, or just a freak. Not that the idea ever crossed his mind with Félix: he shuddered at the thought, felt positively ill at it, never mind that with Félix, of course, there were other concerns. Alex ought to have taken better note of his suit that morning, of the fit. At home, for their lessons, all his clothing seemed to run a bit big on him, as if he’d lost weight, or was losing it.

  Not concerns, perhaps: probabilities. The disease was out there in Félix’s demographic; that was a fact. Alex had remained careful, however, to make a point of touching everything Félix touched, of eating the food he brought, of drinking his wine.

  At his building, he caught a movement of overalled workers through the lobby windows. Certain they were up to some new mischief that would set his blood boiling, he decided to continue on to the Faubourg to fetch what he needed for the paella he planned to make for María. He checked his wallet: thirty-one dollars. It would have to do. He had a scholarship check coming in any day, but all he had to get by on until then were his sporadic hours at Berlitz and his handouts from Félix. He wished he hadn’t run into Félix at the conference. All he’d be able to think of now was that Félix was buying his supper, so that the whole evening he’d be there like a spoiler, mucking up Alex’s libidinal flow. Already the kiss of that morning seemed hopelessly burdened: Félix had come into it, and the Unitarians, and Norman Bethune, so that there would hardly be sitting room at the table.

  He ought to have canceled the swimming with Esther.

  “Do you think there’s a God?” she had asked him recently, in her urgent tone, as if his answer actually mattered.

  Of course there’s a God, he could have said. He’s the fucki
ng bastard who put you in this wheelchair.

  “I don’t know, Esther. I don’t know. I hope so.”

  “But you don’t think so. That’s all right. You don’t have to say it.”

  María had God, even the Unitarians did, why shouldn’t Esther? It would make things a lot easier. Alex thought of God as a kind of Santa Claus, something the human race would eventually outgrow, but to what end? The dark, the dark, was all he could see, like the deadness that came over him at twilight.

  Darwin himself had always grown Delphic and coy when the question of God was put to him, though to his own Emma, whose fortune had saved him from the parsonage, he’d confessed his doubts. To his regret: it had been the great shadow in their marriage, Emma’s fears that they should be separated in eternity. Not long before he died Darwin had taken out the letter Emma had written him years before about these fears and had scrawled at the bottom of it, “When I am dead, know that many times, I have kissed & cryed over this.”

  He could only kiss and cry, but not make the leap. It was the image that Alex carried of them in his head, as if people got exactly the heaven they believed in, Emma alone in the clouds with her Just God and Charles still bound to the earth in cold mineral death.

  – 4 –

  The first signs of the new regime in Alex’s building since it had been bought up by a company called Le 1444 Mackay Enregistré were visible the instant you stepped into the lobby. What had previously been a clean, well-lit, and almost poignant monument to the failed optimism of a bygone era, with its built-in planters that had probably never been planted in, its spacious seating area that had probably never held seating, was now a perpetual construction site, forever cluttered with stepladders and drop cloths and power tools and shotgun-blast-sized holes riddling the walls and wires dangling from ceiling. Alex felt his guts clench whenever he entered the building against the prospect of whatever new devilment the owners might be up to. Many of their innovations defied understanding. They had removed the trash can that sat in the mailbox foyer, handy for the immediate disposal of useless ad mail and scrupulously emptied by the old super, Guy, so that now people had taken simply to dumping their flyers and their half-filled coffee cups and trash into the empty planters, which had become little cesspits, though under Guy you could have eaten a meal from them.