The Origin of Species Read online

  Dusk was settling in when they left for home. They passed a cul-de-sac of small restaurants and shops glistening against the dark like a secret refuge.

  “There must be a lot of foreigners here,” he said. “To teach English and so on.”

  “Yes, I suppose.” They were both trying to pretend this had nothing to do with them. “It’s very requested these days, to have native speakers.”

  There was a carefulness between them now as if they had run out of innocuous things to say and had been left with only the dangerous ones. The closer Christmas got the more Alex felt he was coming to the end of an amnesty, when everything that had been allowed would be called into question. He helped with the preparations for Christmas Eve, the big day for the Swedes, but was aware that each step he took now made the way back that much longer.

  Ingrid’s ex came by to take the children the weekend before Christmas. There was a curt exchange between Ingrid and him at the door as the children dressed, and then suddenly they were shouting.

  “You must always have your way!” her ex said in English, clearly for Alex’s benefit. “What of the children? What do they want?”

  Alex had never seen Ingrid so furious. The children were waiting by sullenly in their coats and Ingrid shut the argument down, though after they’d gone she was still seething.

  “He is such a stupid man!” He had arranged a last-minute ski trip without consulting her that would keep the children away till the very afternoon of Christmas Eve. “As if he thinks of the children when it’s only his way to punish me!”

  Alex didn’t dare ask what she was being punished for.

  “Sometimes I wish he were dead. It would be easier then.”

  She was in a funk the whole day. Alex skulked around the house trying to keep out of her path and feeling vaguely to blame for things. It was only toward the evening that the cloud over her seemed to lift.

  “You mustn’t mind me,” she said. “It’s not so often now that we argue. Before it was worse.”

  When they made love that night, in Ingrid’s bed, Alex couldn’t shake the image of her ex-husband shouting at her in the doorway. Carl, his name was, it came back to him. Like a cat coughing up a fur ball. Ingrid’s animosity toward him seemed more bitter now than in the past, as if over the years their divorce had gone bad just as their marriage had.

  Afterward they lay silent under her skylight, the black midwinter sky stretching over them like a curtain.

  “We needn’t go to the church in the morning if you prefer,” Ingrid said.

  He could hear the hesitancy in her voice, how she was weighing things between him and her god.

  “No, I’d like to.”

  But at the church people’s smiles seemed tighter than before, their questions less leading. Erik and Anna had left for the north to see Erik’s family, and without them or the children to shield them Alex and Ingrid seemed hopelessly exposed. The pastor pumped Alex’s hand again after the service and grinned his shy grin but then quickly excused himself, so that Alex and Ingrid found themselves alone.

  “People weren’t as friendly this time,” he said in the car.

  “I hadn’t noticed so much.” But it was clear that she had. “They are only timid, perhaps. We needn’t mind them.”

  They sat making Christmas decorations at the dining table after lunch, but the matter stayed with them. This wasn’t like the incident with the busybody at Ingrid’s school—Ingrid seemed to feel betrayed, as if she had trusted people to accept her, to be Christian, and they had turned away from her.

  Why was he still here, Alex wondered, why hadn’t he left Ingrid to her life? He pictured accusation sessions in the dead of night at her church, the two of them exposed and brought to the scaffold while someone hung their bloodied sheets. Or somehow her ex would wrest the children from her and she and Alex would end up in Lund living in a version of the life he’d imagined but feeling banished and embittered like Vronsky and Anna Karenina.

  He was making a paper chain using the children’s school glue, not very adeptly.

  “You should try the tape,” Ingrid said, eyeing him. “It will be quicker.”

  He wondered why she had ever given in to him. It was as if God had been merely a place holder until the proper man had come along.

  “It looks better with the glue,” he said.

  “Ah.” She let the silence stretch as if he were Lars. “In the meantime, you are getting glue all over the table.”

  There was always this suburban streak in her, he thought. She always has to have her way.

  “You’re always doing that. You make it sound as if you’re concerned for somebody but you’re just trying to make them do what you want.”

  He regretted the words as soon as they were out.

  “Maybe you’d prefer if I’m rude, like you are! That it’s more honest!” Her anger fell as quickly as it had risen, and she sat fighting back tears. “How can you say such a thing? How can you say it?”

  “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”

  This was it, he figured. He had broken immunity. Now the floodgates would be opened, now she would throw in his face the thousand ways he had failed her.

  But she looked abject.

  “Perhaps you think badly of me for letting you come, is that it? For letting you be with me.”

  “It’s not that.” But she had touched the heart of the matter.

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just not sure sometimes what we’re doing. What you’re thinking. If you think I’ve been sent by God or something.”

  He was still waiting for the barrage.

  “Yes,” she said finally. “Yes, it’s true. It’s very difficult.”

  Somehow, out of the blue, they were at the crossroads.

  Ingrid had taken his hand.

  “I think you must go soon,” she said. “You will stay for Christmas, yes, but then you must go.”

  It took Alex an instant to admit that the suffocation he felt, the sense of his insides being sucked out, was mainly relief. All the hundred ways he had tried of looking at the matter had come down to this one, that he would go.

  “We will try with the glue,” Ingrid said. “Here, I will help you.”

  Somehow, they got through Christmas. The children returned Christmas Eve and after that things were a blur—there was the tree to fetch and trim, the Disney Christmas special on TV, the dinner and gifts. Alex felt like he was walking underwater, waiting for the moment when he might surface again for a breath. For their gifts they had been limited to things they had made, though when Alex came to Lars’s he was at a loss: it was a crayon drawing of a tractor and cow, done in the crude hand of a five- or six-year-old.

  Alex looked to Ingrid.

  “You must ask Lars,” she said. “It was his secret.”

  The title “From our visit to the farm” was written across the top in a more mature hand.

  “It was from the last time,” Lars said. “When you went with us to the farm.”

  It began to come back to him. The picture had been taped to Ingrid’s fridge his first visit. It was a miracle that Lars had held on to it. But the way Alex remembered things, the visit to the farm was something that had happened before Lars had even met him.

  He shot another glance at Ingrid.

  “Of course,” he said. “I remember.”

  “You drove the tractor, I think. You knew from your farm in Canada.”

  He seemed so sure of himself that Alex felt a moment of doubt. He barely remembered Lars from his first visit. Yet clearly in Lars’s mind, Alex formed some important subplot to the story of his life.

  “Thank you, Lars. I can’t believe you kept it. Thank you.”

  Ingrid crossed over to Copenhagen with him when he went to arrange his flight. It felt odd to be boarding the ferry with her rather than leaving her behind—almost at once she seemed different, more than he deserved, like the stranger he had yearned for from a distance five years earlier on
the ferry to Helsingborg.

  They spent their last night together at Ture’s apartment. Ture gave up his bed to them, a loft that was like a floating seraglio or tent, curtained off and festooned with colored Christmas lights. The ashtrays had been emptied and the sheets changed; the squalor of the rest of the apartment seemed far from them.

  They made love and he fell asleep with the glow of their sex still on him, then awoke to a feeling of deadness. Ingrid had to return home that morning to collect the children from their father’s. He ran a hand over the curve of her hip and wondered how it was that he hadn’t memorized every inch of her body, every rounding of flesh and hollow of bone.

  “I think I must go,” she said.

  He saw her to the ferry station, past where the city center gave way to the port lands. For the longest time the station was deserted, but then suddenly there was a crowd, and the boat had pulled in, and people were boarding.

  Ingrid had his hand.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Did you ever think you would stay? Was it possible?”

  She ought not to have asked. She ought not to have given him this power over her.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “So.” She squeezed his hand. “If one day you know.”

  She gave him a fleeting kiss.

  “Don’t wait,” she said. “Just go.”

  That last kiss had stayed with him. Even now, sulking in his apartment after his abortive dinner, he could feel it, light as a waft of air or the flit of a wing. He often wondered if Ingrid had known then, in some wordless, animal way. It was their last unguarded roll in Ture’s bed that had done the damage, surely—she was at the end of her period and they had forgone a condom—though it had seemed every risk had already passed by then, that they were at a point in their story that would properly have been the denouement. Structurally, then, the pregnancy was a mistake. It didn’t seem right that in life, any more than in art, something so random and flukish should end up claiming so much emotional space.

  It was late. Alex sat staring at his computer screen, watching the cursor throb like something panicked. He had managed another paltry page and a half of notes: Persephone and Demeter. Death and Rebirth. Meanwhile poor Susanna Moodie was still trapped beneath the streets of Belleville, waiting to be resurrected as Margaret Atwood.

  He saved his work and shut his computer down. He had the strong sense that there was something he’d forgotten, though his hand went to his pocket before his mind did: the letter. He pulled it out. The pillowy thickness of it had been flattened now to the matted warp of something that had been rescued from a flood. He couldn’t find where Jiri had put his letter opener and began rummaging through his drawers looking for it, growing more and more irritated. He should never have let Jiri stay with him, never have put himself in Jiri’s power in the first place. But then he should never have moved to Montreal, never have shacked up with Liz, back and back. When he got to Ingrid, though, he stumbled: it still wasn’t clear what his mistake had been, to have gone to her or to have left.

  He gave up on the letter opener and shredded a crease of the envelope with a pen nib. The pages inside had stuck to the envelope glue; he managed to prize free a few sheets of onionskin, but another thicker sheet remained welded to the back of the envelope. At least the onionskin was still legible, filled edge to edge with Ingrid’s elegant script. “Dearest Alex,” she started, but then he couldn’t bring himself to take in more than snatches of phrases. “Very angry,” he read, and “your cold, cold letter to me,” and “finish the contact.”

  He couldn’t have stayed with her, he knew that. He’d been only twenty-five then, five years younger than Ingrid had been when he’d met her. With a baby in the picture he wouldn’t have lasted a month—he would have thrown himself into the Öresund, he would have drunk himself to death, he would have ended up strung out on junk on the streets of Copenhagen. It had just been a dalliance for him, the older woman, the children, the house, like one of those science fiction scenarios where you tried on a different life. Who knew what he’d been working out, what deep Oedipal patterns? It hadn’t been lost on him that Ingrid’s ex and Ingrid and he and Eva had formed a nearly perfect helix of descending ages, a tidy boy-girl symmetry in the shadows of which Lars the young Hamlet no doubt awaited the moment for a final bloodletting.

  Alex lit a cigarette and started the letter from the top again, more slowly: there was hope, maybe, the tenor wasn’t quite what he’d thought. The few references to his own letter were mildly encouraging—she mentioned his humor, for instance, though he couldn’t remember having been especially funny. “I can see this has somehow been also for you a difficult time,” she wrote, and he felt humbled that she could still give him a place. He couldn’t have stayed, it was true, he hadn’t had it in him, but he had a sudden sense of what he had missed.

  She gave an account of her life, harrowing in its concision, from when he’d left her at the Copenhagen pier. Her discovery that she was pregnant and then the series of Hardian misunderstandings between them, the letter she’d sent, the dismissive one he’d sent back.

  “I knew if I told the truth, you would come, but I thought, he must come only if he truly wishes it. Then your letter arrived, your cold, cold letter to me. I cannot say how awful it was, how I wished I had never met you! I was so very angry then, that you wrote to me about a woman as if you thought I was a person to tell your love stories to. ‘She is the one I am destined for,’ you said, or some such thing, and I thought, he is a child after all. Next week it will be a different one and then a different one again. Perhaps you think I was hard on you but you must understand what it was to hear such things as I was then.”

  There was more—about the shame, for instance, which she said had been a test (a test of what? what sorts of diplomas were granted for these things?), about how with each month and then each year that had passed it had seemed harder to break her silence. All of this stung him in a peculiar way he couldn’t quite name. There was the guilt, yes, but also a sort of hopelessness, that this child existed, wasn’t a figment, that his own loss of him—all the years he hadn’t known him, all that he could never be to him—was something real.

  “I say all these things not to punish you, but only so you understand why I acted as I did.” This was where she softened him up for the letdown, he figured, where she told him how extraneous he was, how he couldn’t expect to go waltzing into her life like a callow bohemian again. “Now, however, I think I was wrong to keep the truth from you. I was thinking only of myself, and not of you and your son.”

  His throat went tight at the phrase you and your son. It was as if she was offering the boy to him, handing him back.

  “I am sorry also for my first letter to you, which perhaps frightened you to think you must do as I wanted. But it is not for me to decide what sort of father you are to your son. It was a very funny thing, not to know that one day he must grow curious of you. I feel I have been sleeping here all these years in my little village, and now he has woken me. You mustn’t feel guilty as you will because it was not so unpleasant, to be asleep, to be here safe in my home with our son.”

  He felt as if he’d been threading his way through an impossible maze of narrow passages and had emerged, unaccountably, into light. Where had this forgiveness come from, what turn had he made to reach it? It seemed to loom before him even more ominous than accusation: there was no wall in front of him now, only empty space.

  “We hope you will come, your son and I, we hope you will stay with us for a time. Not as before, perhaps, not the same, but still as our family.”

  She’d ended not with the sort of blessing she always used to include, the divine invocation, but simply “With love.” God had hardly been mentioned, only the “test” she’d referred to, but then she might have failed it, might have cursed the Great Examiner and sent him packing. There would be no obstacle between them then. No excuse.

  There was a postscript that made reference to
a picture. “He did it himself, of course, but I thought I must send it, it was such a surprising thing. Perhaps you still have the other.” It was that sheet still stuck to the envelope. He pulled it free to reveal a child’s drawing of some sort of vehicle, a tractor perhaps, big spiky wheels at the back and smaller ones, a bit lopsided, at the front. Across the top, in Ingrid’s hand, was the title “From Our Visit to the Farm.”

  For an instant he couldn’t make sense of it. There was Lars’s picture, yes, packed away now in some box in his parents’ basement, but this seemed merely some parody of it, some practical joke. Then his eye went to the bottom corner, and the tears welled up in him. “From Per,” it said, in a child’s simple lettering, “for Father.”

  It was past one. He felt exhausted, drained, as if he’d lived a lifetime in the space of a day. But for the first time in months the fog over him seemed to have lifted. María, Liz, all the rest, felt suddenly manageable: he would put his lands in order.

  He thought of calling Sweden. They would just be rising now. He could say he would catch the first flight. He could say a millstone had been lifted from him. But it felt too soon: he wanted to relish this last bit of his old life, before he turned into someone new.

  He fell asleep almost at once, dead tired now, but awoke some time later to a sound of ringing. The phone: it was Ingrid. A panic went through him. He clambered up from his bed, groping toward wakefulness, and his first lucid thought was, He’s dead.

  The horror of phones in the night: car crashes, drownings, sudden death. He had to stumble around in the dark, disoriented after his weeks on the couch.