The Origin of Species Read online

  “Do you really think it’s dangerous to go out?”

  “I dunno, the rain’s probably all evaporated by now. Anyway, I doubt we’re any safer inside.”

  She had risen and stood leaning on her cane at his door. Alex didn’t like to admit to his relief at finally seeing her go—they hadn’t been together more than twenty minutes, yet he felt exhausted.

  In the background, the prime minister’s interview was winding to a close.

  Well, Peter, I know Canadians just love what you’re doing here.

  “Say,” Esther said, “you know what? I have an idea. I could buy you a cappuccino, in exchange for the cigarette. I mean, if you’re not busy.”

  Alex’s heart sank. It seemed unfair somehow to brandish his excuses at her, exactly because he had such good ones. It was that face, the transparency of it, the bit of desperation he saw in it now. She’d met a man, it seemed to say—even if it was as poor a specimen as Alex—and wanted him to like her.

  “That would be great,” he said, “I’d love that,” feeling himself draw a little closer to the pit.

  The entire mood between them shifted with Alex’s acceptance, Esther’s bright, false, coming-on personality replaced with a kind of childlike triumphalism. In the elevator, she hooked an arm in his and batted her eyes at him with exaggerated coquettishness.

  “I guess you’ll just have to help a po’ little sick girl like me,” she said, then added “Ha, ha, ha,” to make clear she was joking. Alex had instinctively tensed when she’d taken hold of him as though expecting some jolt, some clammy frisson of diseased flesh, but in fact her grip was warm and firm. She had taken possession of him, it seemed to say, and would do what was needed to hold on to her claim.

  Outside, they found the rain had indeed misted off into the ether, though whether the air hummed with evil ions in its wake, Alex couldn’t have said. In Sweden, radiation had reached a hundred times the normal level, and people were taking pills to protect their thyroids. No one knew if that was the worst of it—on the news reports so far, there hadn’t been a single image from the site. Instead, they kept replaying the clip from Soviet TV where a matronly anchorwoman, posed against a background of washed-out blue, had given the first official announcement of the thing, in four bland, unhelpful sentences.

  Everything about the day, however, belied Alex’s sense of threat: the sun was out, the air was crystalline, and winter was gone, gone. There’d been ice on the ground only two weeks before, right into mid-April, the bane of Montreal living. But then a warm wind had come up and thawed the city overnight. The trees in the little church park at St. James the Apostle already had the intimation of leaves, a flock of something, starlings or sparrows or finches, chattering in their limbs.

  Then there was Esther, for whom Chernobyl seemed little more than a conversation point. It was indeed true that everyone knew Esther: there was hardly a person they’d passed on the way out who hadn’t greeted her, and then once they were on the street all the shopkeepers called out to her as well, from the little depanneur on the ground floor of their building, from the hairdresser’s next door, from the little sandwich shop at the corner of St. Catherine. Almost to a one they winked at her for the good fortune of having a man on her arm. If Esther saw any condescension in this she didn’t show it, refusing nothing, no attention or offering.

  “Oh, that’s Ilie,” she said, “he’s the one who usually gives me my cigarettes,” and “That’s Claire, she gives me free haircuts.”

  To his surprise, Alex actually found himself liking the attention they were getting. The world seemed different with Esther by his side: he’d hardly even noticed the sandwich shop on the corner before, or, for that matter, the church park. He also had never been to the Crescent Street strip, where Esther was leading him. It was only a couple of blocks over from their building, but had always seemed hopelessly tawdry and touristy next to his former haunts on the Plateau. Today, though, in the spring sun, radiation or no, he couldn’t understand why he’d avoided the place—it looked so sprightly and European and gay, with its little cafés all with their tables out front and their fancy railings and stylishly dressed servers.

  The place Esther brought him to, however, was one of the cheesier ones, a glitzy bar called Chez Sud done up in an overwrought tropical motif like some Club Med resort, their cappuccinos actually coming out with little colored umbrellas on them. Normally, Alex would never have ordered a cappuccino; it somehow irked his ethnic sensibilities, this passion everyone suddenly had for them. But he had to admit he liked the taste.

  “I love this place,” Esther said. “I come here all the time.” And indeed it was clear from how everyone greeted her that she was well known here, though the waitress gave Alex a conspiratorial smile behind Esther’s back as if to sympathize with his having got saddled with her.

  Alex pulled his chair a bit closer to Esther’s.

  “It’s just great,” he said.

  Alex had planned to quickly down his coffee and then beg off back home to his work. But he wasn’t quite as anxious to be going as he ought to have been: the sun was shining and he was out here in the world, with Esther.

  “It’s very interesting what you were telling me,” Esther said. “About the arts and sciences. That’s very interesting.”

  “Oh, well. Maybe not so interesting.”

  But then despite himself he found himself drawn out by Esther’s probing. As it happened, he was at a crisis point in his work. The university had accepted him, from what he could tell, largely on the basis of a lone, fluky publication, a sort of spoof of contemporary literary criticism that had somehow garnered much more attention than it deserved; from it, the assumption had apparently been drawn that he actually knew what he was doing. Yet the further he had tried to get into his work, the more unwieldy it had become. His original notion, of finding a way to link evolutionary theory to theories of narrative, had foundered, largely because of his almost total lack of grounding in the sciences; and so he’d been thrown back onto drab, overworked territory like social Darwinism. Instead of trying to impress Esther with the wonders of his doctoral mind, then—what would be the point of that?—he discovered himself actually opening up to her about his fears, two years into a Ph.D. without even the beginnings of a cogent dissertation topic.

  Esther listened to all of this with the kind of rapt, open-mouthed attention one often dreamt about but never got. True, she didn’t seem quite to follow everything he was saying, but then Alex was so relieved simply to give voice to something that had been gnawing at him for so long, and that he hadn’t been able to bring up with anyone else—not his advisor, not Dr. Klein, not even Liz—that Esther didn’t have to do much more than sit there without yawning for Alex to feel a tremendous gratitude to her.

  It was only when he’d finished that he saw how self-indulgent he was being: he was merely taking advantage of Esther’s innocence and need as an opportunity for easy sympathy. Liz would never have let him get away with this sort of thing; she would have seen through him at once, how all his whining and vacillation were just part of an enduring immaturity and lack of focus.

  “So are you saying you want to give it up?” Esther said.

  Alex was taken aback. Where had she got that from? He realized, belatedly, that he had, after all, been trying to impress her. See what a stoic I am, he’d been saying, to soldier on against such impossible odds. Yet as soon as she’d spoken the question he felt a kind of release.

  “Maybe I’m saying that. I’m not sure.”

  It would be so simple if he just fell back to what was normal, wrote a modest, unoriginal dissertation, finished it up in a year or two. Surely that was acceptable, didn’t even require him to resort, as he easily could, to extenuating circumstance.

  But Esther, with sudden force, said, “You can’t give it up! Listen to the way you talk about it, how excited you get—I can’t believe you would even think of giving it up.”

  This wasn’t the response he’d e
xpected: a real one. He himself, in Esther’s situation, dealing with a new person he wanted to like him, would probably have been too self-conscious to do anything other than guess what it was the other person might want to hear, and say that.

  “Isn’t it important to you?” Esther said. “Just listen to yourself!”

  “Well, yes, but, who knows, maybe it’s just some crazy idea—”

  “It doesn’t sound crazy to me,” Esther said. “It makes a lot of sense. It sounds important, except other people haven’t been smart enough to see that yet.”

  Alex felt himself blushing. Who was this girl—woman—saying things like this to a stranger? What force had sent her suddenly hurtling across his path?

  “It’s the same with MS,” she said. “People are always saying you have to accept this or that, you have to give in. But I’m never going to give in. I’m going to fight.”

  MS, that was it: multiple sclerosis. He repeated the name over and over in his head now to lodge it firmly there, though he still had no idea what it was, what was multiple about it, or sclerotic, if she was basically a well person with a few chronic but stable symptoms or if she was dying before his eyes.

  “What is MS, exactly?”

  “Oh,” she said, rising to the subject. “Actually, it’s very interesting.”

  Now it was Alex’s turn to be mystified, as Esther launched into a discussion of nerve cells and myelin sheaths, pronouncing certain words like shibboleths, though to Alex they all quickly receded into the miasma of biological terms that had been consigned to a remote corner of his brain after Grade 12 biology and had never emerged again, for all the reading he’d done since in the natural sciences.

  “It’s kind of like AIDS,” she said, which shocked him, because she made the connection so casually, as if proud to be associated with the disease of the moment. “It’s”—and she stressed the word—“an autoimmune disease.”

  “Oh. I see.” But what he saw was a vision of his friend Michael’s expartner Mario, whom he’d seen about a month before he’d died, when he’d been slack-faced with dementia and wasted to skin and bone.

  They had finished their cappuccini. There was an awkward moment, when Alex should have taken the opportunity to excuse himself or suggest he lead her home.

  “Are you going back?” he said finally, but no, she had an errand at Ogilvy’s.

  He saw her eyes go to her cane.

  “I could come with you,” he said, before he could stop himself.

  And he was quick to insist that he pay the bill, a privilege Esther was happy to concede to him.

  Although Alex had passed by Ogilvy’s any number of times and had stopped like everyone else to gawk at its elaborate Christmas windows, he had never actually been inside the place. He had thus avoided any taint of association with the reviled Anglo Establishment—most of which, at any rate, had been chased from the city by now—that the store seemed to represent. The truth was, however, that he was secretly drawn to the place: it had the air of Manhattan to it, of the 1950s, of Rock Hudson and Doris Day. Inside, it did not disappoint, with the look of some large yet intimate manor hall, marble-floored and crystal-chandeliered and humming with the background murmur of wealth.

  Even here, Esther was known, several of the saleswomen smiling at her as she came through, though more than one rather tightly, Alex thought. Esther, oblivious, pushed on past the makeup tables and perfume counters that lined the ground floor to the old brass-doored elevators, where an actual attendant, a pale young woman in a dark uniform and cap reminiscent of the Salvation Army, escorted them upward. They got out, somehow predictably, at Lingerie. Esther, moving free from Alex now and managing quite well on her cane, headed at once past the rows of designer teddies and negligees toward the sale racks at the back.

  Through this whole time, she had never really stopped talking.

  “I don’t think of myself as someone with a disease, do you know what I mean? You know, ‘Oh, no, I have MS!’ A lot of MS-ers are like that, that’s why I don’t like hanging around with them. Do you think that’s bad? That I don’t like other MS-ers?”

  Esther’s battle of the moment, Alex gathered, was against the loss of any more mobility. She had reluctantly consented to the cane after her last exacerbation, but was determined to go no further.

  “‘You have to accept it,’ everyone’s always saying to me. But I think if you just accept it, of course it’s going to happen to you. I went to this meeting of MS-ers once and it made me sick, how everyone was just saying accept this and accept that. I’ll never accept it. I’ll never stop walking. I love walking. I’d die if I couldn’t walk.”

  Esther was sorting unabashedly through bins of brassieres and discounted underwear while Alex stood discreetly to one side. Then, out of nowhere, Alex heard the strains of bagpipes. They must be coming through the speaker system, he thought, but no, lo and behold, an instant later a flesh-and-blood bagpiper emerged from a back aisle in full regalia and began wending his way through Lingerie, to the bafflingly less-than-astonished smiles and glances of the pretty much exclusively female clientele. Esther, for her part, barely looked up from her bin.

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s just the bagpipes!” Esther said, shouting to be heard above them. “They do it every day at noon.”

  The panic rose in Alex: so it was already noon. Of all the things he might be doing at that moment it seemed inexplicable that he was standing here biding his time in Lingerie while a bagpipe played and Esther rifled through the underwear bin. The piper was coming right at him now, holding his eye with the steely stare of a Scottish raider, an onslaught of tartan and noise that seemed set to obliterate him like some poor, oppressed habitant. Then at the last instant he turned, veering off from the low-end racks toward the Chantelle bras.

  Alex became aware that Esther was at his elbow, trying to get his attention.

  “Alex,” she whispered, “I have to use the bathroom.”

  “Oh. Sure. Oh.”

  There was an edge in her voice. Alex wasn’t exactly sure what his role was here: he felt suddenly parental, as if he were on an outing with one of his nieces or nephews.

  “It’s on the next floor up,” Esther said, the edge sharper. “We have to take the elevator.”

  But when they got to the elevators, one of them, to judge from the indicator, had just passed on its way up, while the other, with the Salvation Army girl at the controls, was apparently being held for the piper, who was at that moment making his way toward them.

  “It’s an emergency!” Alex said to the girl, but she couldn’t hear him above the noise of the pipes. And then the piper was there, moving relentlessly forward, and they had to stand clear.

  “Should we take the stairs?” Alex said.

  “I don’t know. Sure—I mean, okay.”

  The stairs were wide and old and unevenly worn; it was clear at once that it would not be an easy proposition for Esther to get up them. Alex could see more fully now the extent of her frailty; what she’d been able to mask until then with the occasional shuffle or lunge was exposed in the difficulty she had aiming her foot toward each step. But it was too late to turn back—she had already gone silent and grim with the effort of holding back whatever it was that wanted to come out of her.

  It seemed an eternity before they reached the upper landing. Alex had had to resort to practically carrying her, surprised at how solid and heavy she was.

  Coming out of the stairwell they ran into one of the salesclerks, an older, salon-haired woman who seemed to take their air of crisis as a sign of infraction.

  “Can I help you?” she said, with a false, saleswoman’s smile.

  “We just need the washroom,” Alex said quickly.

  Esther, ignoring the clerk, had lurched on headlong without him.

  “It’s over here!” she said.

  Esther was panting now, saying “Oh, oh, oh,” with each breath. At the washroom door, the salesclerk’s eyes still burnin
g into him, Alex said, “Can you manage all right?” and Esther said, “Yes,” before plunging ahead. She was hardly inside, though, before Alex heard her give out a long groan and her panting gave way to sobs.

  “Esther! Are you okay?”

  Without daring to look back at the clerk Alex pushed through the door. He found Esther collapsed in a heap on the tile floor, the seat of her jeans wet and a small puddle spreading around her.

  “Oh, Alex,” she said, her face torn with grief.

  Alex helped her up. He led her, still sobbing, into one of the stalls and sat her on the bowl there.

  He put a hand awkwardly on one of her shoulders.

  “It’s okay,” he said, “it’s okay.”

  The saleswoman was peering in through the doorway, her eyes going at once to the puddle on the floor.

  “Is there something I can help with?” she said, in a tone that suggested she hoped not.

  Alex wasn’t certain what to do next.

  “I could use a plastic bag,” he said.

  He handed Esther her cane from the floor as if to console her with it.

  “Just wait for me here. I’ll be right back.”

  He sprinted down the stairs back to Lingerie and made his way to the discount bin. After some quick sorting he picked out a medium panty, opting for the most workmanlike pair he could lay his hands on.

  The saleswoman was waiting for him at the washroom door with the plastic bag. He handed her the tag from the panties.

  “I’ll pay for them on the way out,” he said, and she pursed her lips as if to keep herself from suggesting otherwise.

  Esther was still on the bowl.

  “Can you get these on on your own?” Alex said.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “You can put the other ones in here,” he said, handing her the bag.

  He heard her jostling and grunting as she struggled with her clothes behind the stall door.