The Origin of Species Page 3

  “Do you want me to help?”

  “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

  When she came out, finally, her cane in one hand and the plastic bag in the other, she seemed so chastened and forlorn next to the girl who’d locked an arm in his not an hour before that Alex could hardly bear to look at her.

  He took the bag from her.

  “I guess we should get going,” he said.

  “My pants are all wet.” Her voice was cracking again.

  “It’s okay, we’ll get a cab. I’ll walk behind you. No one will see.”

  “Oh, Alex,” she said, but half laughing now.

  “At least you got a new pair of underwear. Ha ha.”

  “Ha ha,” she said.

  The saleslady was waiting nervously beyond the door. She was likely just some poor ex-housewife from Verdun, exiled here with all the clearance stuff on the store’s shabby top floor.

  He gave her a five-dollar bill for the underwear.

  “I’ll get your change, sir.”

  “It’s all right.”

  They were able to get a cab right in front of the store, though it was still a good ten minutes of traffic and one-way streets before they were back at their building. The fare was four seventy-five; because the driver was francophone Alex felt compelled to add a couple of quarters onto the five he’d already pulled out in order to bump up the tip. Alex didn’t like himself for it, but he couldn’t help doing the math on what this little excursion had cost him, some fourteen dollars in all, money he could ill afford.

  He escorted Esther up to her apartment on the eleventh. It seemed the two of them had crammed into a couple of hours several months’ or years’ worth of drama and intimacy and strain. How could they go back from that to mere politeness, to what in fact would have been the appropriate level of distance for two people who didn’t really know each other?

  At her door, he blurted out, “I’m having a party tomorrow night. If you’d like to come.”

  Esther’s face lit up like a sunrise.

  “A party? Well, yes, I’d love to!”

  There, he had done it, had added another complication to things, just in case he hadn’t enough of them.

  He saw by Esther’s watch—he didn’t wear his own, a stupid affectation that caused him no end of trouble—that it was nearly one. Shit. Whenever he was late for a session, Dr. Klein always saw it as hopelessly significant, a habit that irritated Alex deeply, implying as it did that the only thing of importance in Alex’s life was his relationship with Dr. Klein.

  “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then,” Alex said. “Eight o’clock?”

  “It’s a date.”

  Alex had the sinking feeling again. He thought of María, from his language class, and the big play he’d been hoping to make for her the following night.

  “It’s a date,” he said, already backing up toward the elevators.

  – 2 –

  It was a thirteen-minute walk, all uphill, from Alex’s apartment building to Dr. Klein’s office. Up Mackay Street to Sherbrooke; past the Unitarian church and Le Linton apartments; past Chelsea Place on Simpson, with its beautiful courtyard and Georgian-style townhouses; past Percy Walters Park, which someone had rechristened, in graffiti, Parc Merde de Chien, and which sported, for some reason, a bust of Simón Bolívar. From the park you could just see the back of Pierre Trudeau’s house, perched on the slope that rose up to Pine Avenue looking unrevealing and fortress-like, with its art deco austerity. The rumor was that you could see the Great Man himself heading off on foot every morning along Pine toward the law firm where he’d taken up a sinecure after quitting his job as the nation’s leader. Alex often took a detour from the route up McGregor in the hopes of catching a glimpse of him, making his way up to Pine by the steps at the eastern end of the park, which came out not twenty feet from Trudeau’s front door. But so far the only outcome of his skulking was that he had probably become a person of interest to the Cuban consulate across the street, which had boosted its usual phalanx of security cameras in the wake of a recent firebombing.

  Dr. Klein worked from an outbuilding of Montreal General that served as some sort of rehab. It stood at the head of another steep set of stairs that came up from Pine—and the symbolism of all this climbing was not lost on Alex—and passed along the high-fenced schoolyard of the Académie Michèle-Provost, whose children’s sounds and construction-paper-decorated windows always filled Alex with a not-so-obscure sense of shame. The rehab building sat four-square and gloomy amidst a clump of spindly pines at the top of the steps. To the west, above the treetops, you could make out the upper stories of the General; to the north, up the slopes, the red rooflines of the Shriners children’s hospital and then the undifferentiated woods of Mount Royal Park.

  Alex had never quite been able to determine what went on at the rehab except that everyone there seemed much crazier than he was, with either the vacant stare of the overdrugged or the weird, screwed-up intensity of the perpetually embattled. He had ended up there by fluke: after his breakup with Liz he had gone into the university’s counseling center when his usual low-grade depression had taken a turn for the worse, and the center, being unequipped, it turned out, for any kind of long-term treatment, had sent him on to the health clinic for a referral. That was where he had met Dr. Klein, who worked shifts there as a medical doctor.

  “Actually, I’m just setting up a practice,” he’d said, clearing his throat. “I might be able to fit you in.”

  The look of him then had hardly inspired confidence. Everything about him was boyish and gawky, his mop of hair, his adolescent thinness, the way his doctor’s smock hung on him like a disguise. Even the way he’d put the thing had sounded suspect, as if he was shilling for clients. But Alex had been feeling pretty black at the time. He had moved into the place on Mackay by then but didn’t always trust himself to go out on his balcony.

  The counseling center had warned him it might be months before he found a placement.

  “When can you see me?”

  Dr. Klein made a show of looking through his agenda.

  “I could put you in tomorrow.”

  Alex hadn’t even known Klein was a Freudian until he’d gone in the next day and seen the couch.

  “The way we’ll work is you’ll lie on the couch and say whatever comes to you.”

  That had been pretty well the full extent of their discussion of methods. Indeed, in the three months that Alex had been coming in, five days a week, fifty minutes a day, the word Freud, or, for that matter, psychoanalysis, had not so much as crossed Dr. Klein’s lips. Alex, though, who was not unfamiliar with Freud, recognized even these omissions as hallmarks of the Freudian system: the important thing was to keep the analysis free of all contaminating influences. Once, to test the waters, Alex had pointedly asked about Dr. Klein’s education, and the doctor had put him off at once.

  “I don’t think it would be useful to the therapy to talk about that.”

  In fact Alex couldn’t believe his good luck at first. Freud was about as close as anyone came to being a hero for Alex: back in first-year undergrad he had read the Introductory Lectures and had never looked back. He credited Freud with releasing him, finally and irreversibly, from the last shackles of the Catholic Church; he credited Freud with teaching him whatever little he understood about the mythopoeic mind. It had long been his dream to do an analysis, something he’d assumed would forever be beyond his financial means. But here in socialist Quebec, wonder of wonders, the treatment was fully and generously funded by the taxpayer.

  The thirteen-minute walk to the clinic meant that Alex arrived, as he saw from the hall clock, some twelve minutes late for his appointment. He was happy to be spared waiting in what passed for the building’s reception room, a squalid foyer with a torn vinyl couch and a few ratty chairs where there was not so much as a reception desk or even a sign to show what sort of facility one had entered. Alex hurried past the vaguely familiar presences shuffling through the
halls—inmates? outpatients? cleaning staff?—to Dr. Klein’s office, or at least the office he was to be found in, for there was no indication, such as a nameplate on the door, that it was actually his.

  As always, when Alex was late, the door was slightly ajar. Alex gave a knock but then pushed through without waiting for a response. There at his desk sat Dr. Klein in all his sartorial splendor, perma-press-trousered and gabardine-jacketed, not poring over some new psychoanalytic text or the notes from some other client, not even furrow-browed in concentration, but cross-legged and blank-eyed as if he had simply been waiting for Alex without a significant thought in his head. It came to Alex in a rush how contemptible he found this man—for his novice’s exactitude and adherence to the rules, for his ill-fitting sports coats and anachronistically long sideburns, for his insipid commentary and insights. For the fact that he was such a boy finally, awkward and set to his task and blind to the plodding unimaginativeness of his methods. Alex would have liked to have been in the hands of someone he might comfortably turn himself over to, not this wet-behind-his-biggish-ears apprentice who was at most only a year or two older than himself.

  Dr. Klein nodded to him as he came in, said nothing about his being late, expressed nothing in his body language that might give Alex a window into his character and hence interfere with the necessary process of transference—another word, of course, that had never crossed the doctor’s lips.

  At once, Alex removed his shoes and lay down on the couch. In all the weeks he had been coming here Alex figured he had not held Dr. Klein in his gaze for more than an accumulated total of five or six minutes: a few seconds when he came in, a few when he left, maybe one or two stolen ones while he removed or replaced his shoes. It felt increasingly ludicrous, this sort of relationship. Far from keeping Alex from any hint of Dr. Klein’s real nature, it only seemed to heighten his sense of it.

  Alex was on the couch.

  “I met a woman in my building today who has multiple sclerosis,” he said, in an attempt to follow the rules, just speak what was uppermost in his mind. But the more he talked about it, the more the whole encounter with Esther seemed tainted. There was no way he was going to mention the incident at Ogilvy’s, though he could still feel the warmth in his hands of the bag with Esther’s urine-soaked underwear.

  “She seems quite an amazing woman,” he ended lamely, thus flattenning out all the nuance of their meeting.

  Dr. Klein had yet to say a word. Alex lapsed into one of the silences that were becoming more and more frequent of late, biding his time doing an inventory of whatever of the room’s spartan furnishings he could make out from where he lay: the vaguely African etching above the couch, with its abstracted sea and animal images, in particular a largish fish that Alex figured must be somehow significant; the unframed poster on the wall opposite of the 1976 Olympics; the bookshelf near the window that held a few bound annuals from the Canadian Medical Association, a featureless tome that Alex supposed was a guide to antipsychotic pharmaceuticals, and a copy of Time that looked like it had been picked up in passing from the reception area. Yet all this evidence was ultimately inconclusive, given the uncertainty of the doctor’s permanence here.

  “Maybe you’re talking about your new friend,” Dr. Klein said finally, and Alex cringed at the phrase new friend, “because you don’t want to pick up where we left off, talking about Liz. And maybe that’s why you were fifteen minutes late.”

  Twelve minutes, asshole, Alex thought, though he also thought, You’re damn right I don’t want to talk about Liz, a topic he was thoroughly tired of but was one of the few Dr. Klein seemed to think worthy of his attention. This was a constant tussle between the two of them, what Dr. Klein deemed significant and what he deemed evasion, what he thought was the point of something, and what he thought was beside it. Once, Alex had spent almost an entire session talking about the shoe rack that had stood in the furnace room of his childhood home, a crudely fashioned thing that his father had cobbled together out of old wood scraps: in Alex’s mind it had seemed suddenly like Proust’s madeleine, the nexus of every important question that had ever pressed on him, because it had been so makeshift and dusty and insignificant and yet an integral part of his life for many years, and because now that his father had sold the farm it had probably passed away forever from the world, though his first Sunday shoes had sat there, and the shoes he’d got in Italy when he was thirteen, and then his father’s mud-caked work boots, his mother’s bloated loafers-turned-farm-shoes, the cracked hobnailed boots that his grandfather had brought over with him on the boat, a whole history of work and rites of passage and loss.

  But Dr. Klein, when Alex had finished, had said, “Maybe you’re still blaming your father for the fact that you were poor.”

  Wrong, wrong, wrong, Alex had thought. Why did everything have to go back to some childish sense of grievance? Surely it had to be possible to look beyond your little Oedipal struggles to the occasional bigger question—about the way things were in the world, for instance, and what they might mean. Take that shoe rack: what had become of it? And why did it hold such a numinous place in Alex’s consciousness, as if the weight of existence rested on it?

  “I don’t know why it’s more important to talk about Liz than about this person I’ve met who might be dying,” he said now, surprised at how pleasant it felt to put on this show of indignation.

  “Is she really dying?” Dr. Klein said.

  Too late, Alex remembered he was speaking to someone actually trained as a medical doctor.

  “Well, she does have MS.”

  Dr. Klein relented.

  “I can see how that would affect you,” he said, with what seemed almost like real sympathy, which of course had the result of making Alex feel obliged to speak about Liz again.

  The truth of the matter, which Alex was only sporadically successful at hiding from himself, was that Dr. Klein was pretty much on target where Liz was concerned: the reason Alex didn’t want to talk about her was that he still couldn’t bring himself to face up to the weirdness the relationship had taken on its final awful months. Of course, Alex had more or less admitted from the outset that it was the breakup with Liz that had driven him here, though that had been a whopping evasion in its own right.

  “The thing about Liz,” he said, trying this on, “was that everything about her was a lie. She wanted to be this bohemian, this radical feminist, but underneath that she was just a conservative. Then she hated me because I pretended to believe in this other version of her.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I just know it, that’s all.”

  There was a silence while Dr. Klein gave Alex time to ponder the irrationality of his reply. Then, because the silence had to be filled, Alex said, “I saw it all at the end. How she just wanted someone to dominate her. But then she would have hated me for that too.”

  “Maybe,” Dr. Klein said, “you’re inventing a situation that couldn’t possibly have worked so you can feel justified for having ended it. The same issue has come up, I think, when you’ve talked about your dissertation.”

  When had he talked about his dissertation? Clearly, that had been a mistake. There seemed something oddly puritan in the doctor’s take on things, as if to go on with something was somehow always more psychically sound than to end it. In this case he was wide of the mark: breaking up had been the only thing in their relationship that he and Liz had been right about.

  From the clock above the door, which he could just make out if he twisted his head, Alex saw that they were already at the halfway mark. A familiar panic went through him. What was he doing, forever fighting this man whom he’d come to for help? Why did he continue to avoid the most important things? He had yet to say a word, for instance, about Desmond and the Galápagos; he had yet to say a word about his son. These were matters of far greater import than Liz or his dissertation and yet he hadn’t gone anywhere near them, as if, for all his imagined self-knowing, he was as classically
repressed as any of Freud’s Viennese hysterics. Of course, it might also be the case that he was just an idiot, a bourgeois with too much time on his hands, bilking the already overburdened health care system to the tune of forty-three dollars per fifty-minute session. If he continued to see the doctor at all it was only for this, that since he’d started his analysis he felt unaccountably better.

  “I don’t see what my dissertation has to do with it,” he said, thus inviting exactly the mind-numbingly obvious reply Dr. Klein gave him.

  “Sometimes there are patterns to what we do. That’s what we’re looking for.”

  He wondered if Dr. Klein didn’t feel it too, that same sense of hollowness when he spoke as if they were merely following a script. More and more Alex saw their relationship less in Freudian terms than in purely animal ones: they were both of them sniffing the air, circling each other, making feints; all the rest, all the talk that passed between them, was just so much barking and clucking. It might really be as simple as that, call it transference or whatever, that the shaky respite Alex felt since he’d started here was due entirely to his making an enemy of the doctor, to his focusing on him all his simmering animal rage. Alex would have liked to talk to someone about that rage, which was pretty much a constant in his life, attaching itself to whatever was handy—Ronald Reagan, Liz, the rude servers at the Van Houtte’s—and making him feel incessantly mean-spirited and exhausted and low, even when its targets were perfectly reasonable ones. And he would have liked to talk about the endless stream of vindication fantasies that ran through his head—I will finish my dissertation; it will be published to great acclaim; I will get tenure; I will win awards; a school of thought will be founded in my name—that was the other side of this rage, the gargantuan need for some sort of revenge against the world. Revenge for what? he had to ask. Against whom? The kids who had picked on him in high school? Did it really come down to this, that his main motivation in life was this simple need to get revenge for all his petty humiliations?