The Origin of Species Read online

  By the time they were out on the street again the sun had dropped below the skyline and the air had turned positively cold, as if the seasons had changed in an hour. Esther, in a flimsy sweater and frock, was woefully underdressed. Alex took some pleasure in blaming Molly for this.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Tired.”

  He knew Esther had a show at five that she wanted to catch. She watched a lot of TV these days, after Molly was gone and the restrictions were loosed, soap operas and cheesy dramas that she guarded her addiction to like some old woman in a nursing home, saying nothing of them to anyone but growing irritable and out of sorts if anything kept her from them. Her evenings now were this regimen of favored shows, which she’d eat her supper in front of, which she’d watch while Rachel tried to piece through for her whatever assignments were due for her courses. Then around nine her body would give out as if its engine had stopped, and she’d fall into a dead sleep.

  St. Catherine was in shadow now, abuzz with the queer energy of late afternoon. Alex wheeled Esther through the traffic, which seemed all to be moving against them, as if they were fighting a current. The City had recently cut slopes into some of the curbs to accommodate wheelchairs, but haphazardly, so that you could sail out into the street only to find yourself stranded at the other side.

  He made a tentative stab at what they were avoiding.

  “How are you feeling about your swimming?”

  “All right. I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “It’s just … it’s getting hard.”

  He ought to drop the matter.

  “Do you think you might want to give it a break for a bit? Until you feel stronger?”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea? Do you think I should do that?”

  “Maybe. I guess it depends on how you feel.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel. I’m just so tired sometimes.”

  He should never have brought the subject up. She was actually looking to him, she was weighing what he said as if he had answers.

  “Maybe I won’t get stronger,” she said. “Maybe I won’t get better.”

  “You don’t know that. It happens to people. They come out of it.”

  He didn’t dare say more.

  “It wasn’t so awful, was it?” Esther said finally. “When I wanted to sleep with you. Was it so awful?”

  Why was she saying these things to him? Who was he, that they should matter?

  “No, it wasn’t awful. It wasn’t awful at all.”

  When they got back to the apartment, Esther’s mother was loading Tupperwared provisions into the fridge. Her eye—Alex waited for it as he’d wait for a bullet—went straight to his cigarettes.

  “Take some soup with you,” she said. “There’s extra. I’ll split it.”

  “No, it’s fine. I should go.”

  “Here. Wait.”

  He wouldn’t say anything about the swimming. Not to her. To Lenny, maybe.

  She was holding a container out to him.

  “Take it,” she said, as if anxious to be rid of it. “For your supper.”

  Supper, he thought. His paella.

  “I should probably go.”

  “Esther, say thank you.”

  “I don’t have to say thank you to Alex, Ma, he’s like family.”

  Esther’s mother forced an unhappy smile.

  “If you want, I’ll bring more soup for you tomorrow.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I’ll leave it with Esther for you.”

  Outside the door, Alex hesitated. Esther had already wheeled herself toward the TV.

  “I can take her again tomorrow if you want,” he said.

  “It’s all right, Lenny can do it.”

  “No, really, it’s fine. I’d like to.”

  For an instant her mother’s eyes went to his with a questioning look he’d never seen in them.

  “I’ll bring the soup,” she said, and closed the door.

  – 7 –

  Alex still had a good couple of hours ahead of him before María was likely to show up, if she showed up at all, though the certainty was building in him that she would call at the last minute with some excuse. From Esther’s he went down to the laundry room to collect his sheets from the dryer, only to find them suffused with a lemony chemical smell from the dish soap, then he popped in at the depanneur on the slim chance they carried saffron. To his amazement, Ilie, the owner, pulled a dusty little clear plastic box from a shelf behind the cash. Inside were maybe a dozen crimson strands of what looked like the wriggling chromosomes in the sex education films they used to watch in health class.

  “Will be six ninety-nine, sir.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. I could buy heroin for less.”

  Ilie, whom Alex had liked once, until he made an off-color remark about Jews, put on the teacherly air he often donned with his customers.

  “You know, this the most expensive thing in the world,” he said, as if Alex should be pleased by this. “More even than gold.”

  He needed wine as well, and cigarettes. He thumbed through his wallet: fourteen dollars. He would have to choose. Good, he thought, he’d be forced now to keep his vow to quit.

  The wine rack near the cash held its usual questionable array of no-name Italian and Canadian.

  “Give me a pack of Player’s as well.”

  By now his paella had run to a week’s worth of regular groceries. The thought made him loath to actually start in on it, especially when the chances were the whole thing would just end up sitting in his fridge going bad. Everything felt out of joint. He had his bed to make but such a powerful smell was still coming up from his sheets that he draped them over his dining chairs to air them out, the odor of citrus mingling with the stink of cat pee from Moses’s litter box in the bathroom. The apartment was a shambles. He started going through it trying to return it to its pre-Jiri state, reshelving books, shoving file boxes into the bedroom closet, though it was only once he’d moved his computer from the living room back to his desk that he felt some sense of order had been restored. For the first time in weeks, he was able to sit at his own desk in his own chair. He powered up the computer. At its blips and whirs, its familiar orange glow, he felt relief go through him like a drug.

  He still had his CanLit lecture to finish for the next day. He called up his notes and felt sick at how little progress he’d made. Three hours he had to fill every week, six to nine, and this mostly with part-timers who’d been at work all day and who already by ten minutes into class had the glassy-eyed look of the undead. He couldn’t blame them. After weeks of eating, breathing, and sleeping Canadian literature, Alex himself felt ready to crawl into a hole and die there.

  But it’s part of us, isn’t it, Alex, all that Scots Presbyterian pessimism and dourness.

  I didn’t think “Gzowski” was exactly a Scottish name, Peter.

  He could feel Ingrid’s letter bulging from his back pocket. The whole afternoon he’d let it sit there getting molded to his backside. He didn’t want to risk having it ruin his evening—souring his mood was what he told himself, blindsiding him if it wasn’t what he’d hoped for, whatever that was, but what he was really afraid of was that it would distract him, make this whole obsession of his with María seem the sordid and foolish thing it truly was. There was nothing that connected him to María, he was coming to admit, but the simplest sort of animal lust; beyond that they were oil and water, completely unsuited. He ought to have learned from Amanda that if he couldn’t have a normal conversation with a woman, if he couldn’t look her straight in the eye, then the last thing he ought to be doing was having sex with her.

  They were onto Atwood’s Journals of Susanna Moodie, more in the long line of Canadian gothic. Alex, to set the tone, had been planning to open the class with Atwood’s chilly hook-and-eye poem. Now, though, all he could see was Amanda impaled on that hook. He wished he hadn’t start
ed thinking about Amanda. It was too much, trying to hold her and Margaret Atwood in his head at the same time—it made him feel like some bumbling, cunt-addled oaf from an Atwood novel. He had gone out for supper with Amanda not a week after his end-of-term party, but it had been one of their typical encounters, full of awkwardnesses and convolutions.

  “What happened with us,” he’d finally had the courage to say, “I didn’t want you to think … I mean, if things had been different—”

  “Oh, sure, no, I wasn’t expecting … I mean, I wouldn’t want to lose you as a friend.”

  He started sifting through the big stack of articles on Atwood that he’d photocopied out of the academic journals, wondering if Atwood knew how many trees out there were being sacrificed so that people like him could deliver lectures on her. “Let me sum up Canadian literature for you in three words,” one of his professors in Toronto had quipped. “Margaret Atwood, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Atwood.” Alex himself had practically cribbed his entire CanLit course out of her Survival, which dredged up some two hundred years of Canadian literary history from under the rocks where it had been properly buried and divvied it up into neat little categories like “Nature the Monster” and “The Casual Incident of Death.” Yes, Canadian literature existed, she’d shown everyone, and a good thing it did, too, otherwise where would people turn when they needed every shred of good feeling stripped from them by the description of one more protagonist ruined by unpardonable ambition or one more child frozen to death in the snow?

  He would probably have put Amanda from his mind after their dinner if Katherine hadn’t brought her up. She had come by his place, unannounced, something she never did, but his first hope that she needed solace from some romantic crisis was quickly dashed.

  “I’m worried about Amanda. I dunno. She seems kind of weird.”

  Alex had known enough to tread lightly. Katherine had that sororal tone of hers, as if women were a union she couldn’t break ranks from.

  “How, weird?”

  “Just weird. Paranoid, I guess. Accusing me of things. Crazy things.”

  He had never told Katherine that at his party he’d overheard that conversation about her between Amanda and Stephen.

  “What kinds of things?”

  “About Stephen. About you. That I was coming onto you.”

  It wasn’t lost on Alex how far from the realm of the possible she’d made that seem. He had called Amanda again, arranging to meet her at a dingy shawarma place on Guy, to avoid any suggestion of a date.

  She had sat chain-smoking the whole time.

  “I figure, you know, it’s just what you do for yourself, that’s what it comes down to. Just getting my work done, that’s what I’m focusing on.”

  Katherine was right, this wasn’t the Amanda he knew. The Amanda he knew, the one he felt comfortable being uncomfortable with, was the one who would slash her wrists to show empathy for you, not this tightly wound psychobabbler.

  “Have you been seeing anyone? I mean, friends or anything?”

  “Oh, yeah, there’s some people I still see from the International Socialists and things. I’ve been pretty busy though.”

  It was Katherine who finally took Amanda into the university counseling center, something Alex, who had mentioned nothing of his own Dr. Klein, was happy to let her do. Men were too known for this kind of thing, for screwing women over and then trying to convince them they were crazy when they took it badly.

  Amanda actually called him afterward, sounding more sane than he’d ever heard her.

  “I guess I just get caught up in my head sometimes. It can get a bit weird. It’s great that you guys took the trouble.”

  Took the trouble. As if they’d brought her chicken soup while she’d had the flu.

  “It’s no trouble.”

  She had decided to spend the rest of the summer back home.

  “I’ll call when I get back. I mean, if that’s all right.”

  “That would be great.” Though afterward he could hardly believe that it had flashed through his mind then that they might have sex again.

  He started off a new section of notes under the heading “The Double Voice.” He was getting good at these sorts of labels now, nature versus culture, the garrison mentality, old country versus new. He built up whole structures this way, sprawling networks of thought that spread out against the otherworldy glow of his computer screen like mystic cities. But then he would get into class, and it would all seem just words. He could picture a sprite-sized Margaret Atwood, hook-nosed and wild-haired and sibylline, sitting on his shoulder the whole time making pronouncements against him in her famous nasal drone. The real problem with Canadian literature—pause here for effect—is that it’s being taught by people who don’t know anything about it. Peggy, her friends called her. Alex had always wondered about that, how you got from “Margaret” to “Peggy.”

  Well, Peggy, we had Alex Fratarcangeli in here the other day, and he was saying there just isn’t anything out there of real quality.

  That’s just stupid. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

  There were drawings spread through Alex’s edition of The Journals of haunted-looking figures pasted collage-style against sinister landscapes, woman with trees, gentleman with rodent and hills. One of them showed an Ophelia-like creature who bore a distinct resemblance to Amanda floating in the riverine sediment beneath a village street. Alex had yet to call Amanda since the term had begun: he knew she was out there somewhere in the underground, he could almost feel her beneath his steps, and yet each time he tried to screw himself up to phone, the will failed him.

  He would call in the morning, first thing.

  He shut his computer down. Less than two months into the term and already he felt worn out by the grind of teaching—it wasn’t just his ignorance, it was the whole enterprise, this closing people up in airless rooms to look for themes and image motifs when they could just as well have been home watching something decent on TV. It had begun to seem a questionable proposition to him that what happened in a classroom actually enhanced the experience of reading rather than taking away every possible good from it. What exactly that good might be, he was finding it harder and harder to put into words. Back in his undergraduate days he had thought of literature as a kind of religion, as the straight road to whatever truth might exist out there in the ether, but nowadays he couldn’t pick up a novel without a great feeling of irrelevance coming over him. His bookshelves were littered with books that had markers of one sort or another showing the places where he’d abandoned them. It was as if he’d been rifling through them searching for the answer to some intractable problem: not this, his brain seemed to say, each time he picked up another one, not here.

  He had gotten an idea for another of his projects, about a character, K., who woke up one morning to discover he had somehow got trapped in a novel. Suddenly the most casual objects became meaningful; conversations, rather than the wordy, meandering things they had been, became aphoristic and terse. It wasn’t long before K. descended into paranoia, wondering at the menacing haze of significance that seemed to surround the smallest act. Bit by bit his life was stripped down to its most basic elements, parent, antagonist, spouse, the blood-stained dagger, the smoking gun; all the rest, the hundred meaningless people he might have met in a day, the endless clutter and mess of things, was sucked off into some vortex. Then there was the relentless clockwork of events: gone were the long mornings in bed, the endless hours in front of the TV, replaced by disorienting jump cuts and elisions, action piling on action until it seemed the whole of creation had become a flood tide whose sole aim was to raise the frail vessel of him to some monstrous height in order to smash it. Then, out of the wreckage, just as baffling as the rest, came the ray of light, the not-so-distant shore. Hope.

  He managed to get everything gutted and diced but still couldn’t imagine how he was going to get from the jumble of foodstuffs on his counter to his end goal. He was using a rec
ipe he’d clipped from the back of a box of arborio rice, but important steps seemed left out of it. Already he could see María standing over him, wondering how he ever managed to feed himself.

  “Please,” she would say at her fund-raisers, like a command, nodding toward the tables of food that were always laid on, “you can eat.”

  As if eating were a skill his own culture hadn’t quite mastered.

  It was a mistake for Alex to show any gratitude for these feedings. That would be like saying he had such a low opinion of his hosts that he’d expected to go hungry. María, for her part, always paid him the courtesy of entirely ignoring his own largesse—the Doors cassette he’d given her, and which she had handed over to Miguel without so much as looking at the cover art; the membership he’d bought her for the local rep theater, and which she had never once made use of with him; the flowers he’d picked up on a whim at the Atwater market, a truly inane gesture, left to wilt in their wrapper on her kitchen counter and probably thrown in the trash the instant he’d gone.

  The only thing she had ever specifically asked him for, ironically, was a novel, to practice her English.

  “Son’thing from Canada,” she’d said. “You have writers, yes?”

  He had given her Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale—there She was again—because it was anti-American, though afterward he’d wondered why he hadn’t chosen something more to his purposes than a sci-fi dystopia about sex slaves. But then that was exactly the sort of writing he couldn’t bear these days, that came out for love, say, or for all those useless emotions and shades of emotion that made life such a horror show. What was the point of these emotions, why trumpet them when they were probably just evolutionary surplus, haphazard neural responses that nature had latched onto for its own insidious purposes?

  “Maybe is good,” María had said of the book. “Is very political.”

  The buzzer sounded on the intercom. It was too early for María. His first terrible thought was that Jiri had returned, but no, much worse: it was Liz.

  “I’m here to get Moses,” she rapped out. A small judgmental pause, and then, “You forgot, didn’t you?”