The Origin of Species Read online

  Yes, he had damn well forgotten. They hadn’t spoken since she’d dropped him off three weeks before.

  Already his nerves were jangling around in him like loose coins.

  “Come up.”

  He sneaked a peek at her through the peephole when she knocked, to steel himself. Her face was already set, looking menacing and skewed like a shot from a Polanski film.

  He opened the door.

  “A phone call would have been nice.”

  Already he’d set the wrong tone.

  “I thought we’d decided.”

  When she’d dropped Moses off he hadn’t invited her in, so thrown by her presence at his apartment that he’d taken the cat with barely a word and closed the door. For days afterward he’d kept going over the moment in his mind, how he should have handled it differently.

  “Why don’t you come in.”

  “I’m in a hurry, actually.”

  Just the same, she moved in a little from the doorway. He saw her eye going around the apartment, to the sheets spread over the furniture, the mess of cooking in the kitchen. The whole apartment was ripe now with the smell of shellfish. It had been something that had united them, their aversion to seafood.

  “So. Thanks for looking after him.”

  He was my cat too, for fuck’s sake.

  “Not at all.”

  At some point, Alex realized, they would have to talk, they would have to try to make each other feel normal again, even if they were only pretending.

  Liz had that hardness to her, like someone in enemy territory.

  “I saw your show,” he said finally.

  There, he had admitted it.

  “Oh.” She went a little bit harder.

  “I liked it. I liked it a lot.”

  He could hear how unconvincing he sounded but he was telling the truth, even if he hadn’t been able to help taking the show personally. She had split up with him and almost at once, it seemed, had started painting again. It was as if she’d been saying to him, See how you killed me.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Anyway. I hope your work’s still going well.”

  While Liz stood waiting by the door he cleaned out Moses’s litter box, dumping the contents into a grocery bag. The smell of cat pee had grown almost comforting in the past weeks. Moses had started to fret, pacing around Alex with his back up at this new disruption to the order of things. He was making a point of ignoring Liz, in his punishing way, though Alex wasn’t taking as much satisfaction from this as he might have.

  He had to reach around Liz to get the cat crate out of the entrance closet. Moses, the instant he caught sight of it, scuttered behind the couch.

  “I’ll get him,” Liz said. “He doesn’t like going in there.”

  I know that.

  “It’s fine,” Alex said.

  He had to pull the couch away from the wall and crawl in amongst the dust bunnies and filth. He managed to drag Moses back to the open but when he tried to shove him into the crate, Moses, completely out of character, lashed out.

  A thin line of blood rose up on Alex’s wrist. He felt utterly betrayed.

  Liz shifted uncomfortably.

  “You all right?”

  “It’s nothing. Just a scratch.”

  He couldn’t recover from this setback. He knew Liz had been offering him a chance in bringing Moses here, and he was blowing it.

  He piled Moses’s things at the door.

  “Can you manage all this?”

  “I’ll be fine. My friend’s waiting with her car.”

  No doubt the punky lesbian wannabe she’d been with when Alex had run into her that summer. He had recognized her from the ill-fated art history class he had briefly attended, though he’d had no idea at the time that Liz had become friends with her.

  “You should be careful on the way out. We’re not allowed pets.”

  “I can’t exactly hide him under my coat.”

  They ended on that note. Alex had been prudent enough, at least, to lower the heat on his paella, but he came back to it to find that a crust had formed at the bottom of the pot nonetheless. Shit. It would have that burnt taste now. Meanwhile Liz was probably already having some snarky misandrist conversation about him with her friend. She was the one who had mentioned the show when Alex had run into her and Liz up near Schwartz’s. “It’s pretty amazing,” she’d said, laying the salt on. “You should check it out.”

  He’d been shocked then at how different Liz had looked. She’d lost weight, she’d let her hair grow, but those were the small things: it was the whole air to her that had changed, the way she held herself, the St. Lawrence chic of her clothes, this guerilla-girl sidekick he hadn’t known she was friends with but to whom his eye had always gone across the lecture hall back in art history.

  He and Liz had hardly exchanged two words.

  “That’s great,” he’d said of her show, but he wouldn’t let himself say he’d go see it. “That’s great.”

  It was more than a week before he got around to tracking the show down. It wasn’t at a gallery but at one of the art cafés that were becoming popular along the St. Lawrence strip—to catch the overflow of all those people who couldn’t get into real galleries, he thought, feeling the old mix of protectiveness and depreciation that Liz had always aroused in him. The lighting in the place was awful; he had to lean up over tables and shuffle his way around the handful of patrons to find angles where the paintings would actually read. Liz had abandoned her pattern work to return to her first love, the human figure, though these paintings were nothing like the luscious formal portraits and nudes she used to do in their Toronto days. There was one of an emaciated man sitting cross-legged in a chair with a dwarfish-looking girl in a yellow dress standing to one side of him; there was one of a group of schoolgirls standing in a semicircle with their backs to the viewer as if at some game, though from the tone of the piece they might just as easily have been staring at a playmate they’d disemboweled or at a piece of road-kill. Alex found the paintings vaguely irritating and unpleasant: they were reaching for effect, he said to himself, though the truth, of course, was that they were irritating to him. There were nearly a dozen pieces, all fair-sized and meticulous, and all with Liz’s trademark attention to every detail. What they didn’t have was Liz’s usual impulse to please. Fuck you, they seemed to say. But maybe not to everyone, only to him. At the back of his mind he had somehow imagined that Liz wouldn’t actually survive in this city without him, but now it seemed she’d come into her own as if he had just been this millstone to her, this male.

  He was down to the last stages of his preparation. The recipe called for a final baking phase to open the mussels up, but all he had in the way of bakeware was an old lasagna tray he’d got from his mother. It would have to do. He scooped the paella into it. The bit of saffron he’d used, just a few strands, had worked like a miracle, transforming the whole to an aromatic glow of orange-red like a Hindu offering. He spread all the little morsels into place until it looked like a veritable work of art, then stuck it into the oven at a low heat, thinking he would fire it up only after María had arrived.

  The twilight hour had come on. There seemed something funny about the apartment: it was the emptiness, he realized, the animal sense that there was no other being in range, though he wasn’t sure if it was Moses he missed or Jiri. The apartment seemed cold suddenly, but when he cranked up the thermostat there was no telltale hiss of it kicking in. The bastards hadn’t turned the heat on yet. One more grievance for his list, he thought, but no, he was done with that.

  There would be snow soon, a week maybe, not more. In his mind’s eye he could already see it covering the sidewalks and streets, could see the bogs of slush that formed at intersections, the cars skittering up Côte des Neiges against the slippage and the great yellow arsenal of snow machines that invaded the city. Snow was general all over Ireland. Where was that from? There had been snow the last time he’d visited Ingrid—he remember
ed cooking with her in her kitchen, how comforting it had felt to be inside and warm while outside the wind was blowing and the drifts were piling up.

  God, he thought. He had left her over such a little thing. Not that he found her faith any less outlandish now than he had then, but it was probably no more outlandish than his own notions of the world would surely one day turn out to have been. Liz had been as godless as he was, yet that hadn’t stood out as any special marker of compatibility; rather, it had seemed merely one more part of her that was somehow debased in being such a mirror of him. That was what had put him off about her paintings, at bottom, how they had looked like images out of his own mind, as if the scarier notion was not that she had got over him so easily, but that they were still linked, that she still remained the guardian of his worst self.

  He put on some Steely Dan to set the mood for María’s arrival. “Home at Last”: it was a nod to the Odyssey, he’d never caught that. Something he’d actually read. There was a detail that had always stuck with him, the twitching legs of the unfaithful maids during the great mass murder the story ended with. Who did that? Who strung people up for being unfaithful? The twitching made the scene real, as if Homer had witnessed it with his own eyes. It was the same detail the boy from El Mozote had used, the one who had survived—the twitching legs of the children who had been hanged.

  Alex switched off the music. He wished he hadn’t made that connection. The last thing he needed was El Mozote on the brain when María arrived.

  I don’t know if this is something you two feel comfortable talking about on the air, but I hear you got off to a bit of a rocky start in the romance department.

  (Blushing) Well, I guess rape and pillage aren’t exactly aphrodisiacs. But maybe I should let María tell the story.

  Please. Is not a joke for me. Is not a story. Is my life.

  It was Liz who had fucked him up, coming by like that. It would have been better if he hadn’t run into her in the summer; it would have been better if he had never gone to see her show. He could have handled the obvious, a few battered women, say, or a bit of leather, but not the general creepiness of it all, which still kept tugging at him like a grapple hook in his gut. Somehow Liz had managed to get the whole of their gangrenous relationship into those paintings. Maybe a stranger wouldn’t see it, some guy, say, who’d never trussed Liz up like an animal and put his cock in her; but it was there. His tying her up and his gagging her. His fucking her while she clawed at him and screamed no. His raping her. There. He had let the word enter his head. For months now he had not allowed himself to so much as think the separate letters of it, but then at once his heart was pounding, he wanted to smash something, he was shouting like an idiot.

  “Fuck! FUCK!”

  How had he got to this place? Any minute María would be at the door.

  “Fucking Christ!”

  He pulled out a cigarette and fumbled to light it. Surely it hadn’t been like that: she would never have come here then, she would never have stomached his presence. But then he knew Liz, how her mind reworked things. How she would soften it all in her memory to try to bring it back within the realm of the normal, of the bearable.

  The apartment, he suddenly realized, was blue with smoke. Not just cigarette smoke: something more savory. His paella. He rushed to the stove to discover he had somehow set the oven to broil rather than low, a cloud of smoke taking the breath from him when he opened the oven door. The paella, he could see, had not fared well—it had taken on the scorched look of a crème brûlée, the mussels he’d carefully spread on the top open-mouthed as if caught in their death throes. Alex opened a window to air the place out, but such a bitter wind blew in that he had to narrow it to a crack for fear of losing what little heat there was in the place.

  In the kitchen he carefully prized away the more cauterized bits of his meal until it took on a look that could almost pass for intentional. He felt a bit calmer. Gradually his mind eased back from the precipice it seemed to have come to: in a couple of days, he thought, he would call Liz and arrange to speak to her. Who could say what had actually happened between them? Who could know?

  He still had his bed to make. Instead he poured himself several fingers of the rotgut Crown Royal that had survived Jiri’s stay and took it out to the balcony. He couldn’t believe the cold out there. The wind, though, had abated, giving way to a stillness that had something familiar to it, some dim hint of promise. Then while he stood at the railing a fleck fell to the back of his hand, then another. Snow.

  It seemed a cosmic joke. After the first few flakes a flurry of them burst out of the sky, so that for a moment it was just as Alex had imagined it, the lights of the city and the veil of white, the darkling blur where the mountain was. Snow was general all over Ireland. What was it that made the heart soar at the most unlikely things? It was too much, he felt tears coming up, in a moment he’d be blubbering like a child.

  Down at street level the snow hadn’t made any impression, maybe already vaporized by the time it had passed through the last clotted layers of atmosphere. Then, as quickly as it had started, it was done. A moment later Alex saw what seemed a familiar black head rounding the corner from the direction of the metro: María. She had come after all. In a matter of minutes, she would be at his door. He downed the last half inch of whiskey in his glass, butted his cigarette, and hurried back into the apartment to make ready a way for her.

  – 8 –

  María was talking. Alex had never really heard her go on like this before, so volubly. The conference had energized her—somehow, amidst all the boring white men and the splinters and factions, she had been in her element.

  “I had the same feeling from my own country. From the beginning, you know, before the killings. Everyone was in the street in those days, everyone. Was almost a festival then. Of course, here is different, is more serious, but still you can feel it.”

  Alex was trying to take heart from her new openness, even if it had very little to do with him. He was waiting for the moment when the debonair side of him would kick in, the one that felt it was normal for him to be alone with a beautiful woman, but it hadn’t happened yet. At least the heat had actually come on at some point, wonder of wonders, and he hadn’t had to resort to keeping the oven going or burning the furniture to warm the place up. As for his paella, María had had the one reaction to it he hadn’t anticipated: she had hardly noticed it. He could have cooked rice and beans, for all it would have mattered; that might at least have sparked some glimmer of familiarity from her, some comment like, “So you have learned our national dish.” Instead, she had made a few distracted stabs at the paella as if it were some food substitute he’d served up—but how foreign could it be, really? it had rice; it had seafood; it was Spanish—then had seemed to lose all interest in it.

  “I always wondered why you got involved with an environmental group,” Alex said, not entirely innocently. “I mean, of all the possible things.”

  María gave a dismissive shrug.

  “Is not so strange.”

  Alex was searching his mind for a layman’s term for sublimation.

  “It’s just, I would have thought you would have wanted something more political.”

  “More with killings, you mean.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You think after five years of war that I still want to hear about killings.”

  Alex had foolishly been looking forward to a little moment of glory on this subject, to showing María how he understood her better than she understood herself.

  “I guess I meant more to do with human rights.” But he was entirely on the defensive now. “I just figured something like this would seem beside the point.”

  “Is because you don’t know. Is only one thing they fight for in my country, is the land. People don’t eat human rights. If there is no land, then there is no food, no freedom, no country. So you see is very important.”

  He was floundering. Here she was in his apartment, final
ly, the whole obscene fullness of her sitting in one of his chairs and her blue-jeaned knees practically wedged between his own beneath the table, and he was picking a fight. By now the kiss from that morning seemed a fantasy he’d had.

  “I saw your friend again after,” María said. “Félix.”

  “Oh?”

  “Is a homosexual, yes?”

  Alex felt blindsided.

  “I don’t know,” he sputtered. “I’ve never really asked.”

  “But he is your friend.”

  “Well, yes. My student. But yes, I think of him as a friend.”

  “But you don’t know if he is a homosexual?”

  Alex felt his color rising.

  “It’s not a big issue.”

  “You don’t think about it?”

  “Yes, I’ve thought about it. I mean, it’s crossed my mind.”

  “So, such an important thing but you don’t ask him. Is strange, no?”

  Somehow, though he ought to have had the high ground on this one, she had managed to turn the tables on him again.

  “Like I told you, it’s not a big deal,” he said, but then he added, rashly, “Maybe in El Salvador it’s not the same.”

  María stiffened.

  “Yes,” she said. “Is not the same. In El Salvador, if someone is your friend you know what they are eating, what they are thinking, what they believe.”

  He had crossed a line.

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “No.”

  “I just thought—”

  “Yes. That we are backward.” But she seemed to relent. “Is okay, is the truth, is very macho in my country. On the right, if you are homosexual, maybe they kill you. But on the left is more accepted.”

  A better man than him, more debonair, say, would have taken this rare concession from her as a chance for good grace.

  “But people still hide it.”

  “Yes. They hide it. Like your friend.”

  They sat silent. By now María had pushed her food to one side, as if to be spared the sight of it. Alex thought of the work that had gone into it, of the expense. She hadn’t even bothered to pick out the bits of seafood, though Alex had left his own behind as well, piling them discreetly at the edge of his plate.