The Origin of Species Page 6

  “Of course, my own son, he’s like you,” Félix said, adding salt to the thing. “Latin, Greek, it doesn’t matter to him, only TV and sports.”

  Alex doubted, indeed, that Leamington High, where he’d spent most of his time mooning over girls he’d never had a hope in hell with and working hard to keep his marks below the eighties, had come anywhere near the rigors of a classical lycée. What he remembered most about high school now, in fact, were the stupid fights he used to get into, over every minor insult. He’d had the rage back then as well: someone would cross him and he’d feel the blackness rise up, the sense he’d do anything to cause harm, although the instant he’d struck the first blow something would recoil in him and the fight would be lost. Somehow he couldn’t picture Félix in fights back at Brébeuf—he was probably one of those swanners who belonged to the tennis club and thought of themselves as the elite-in-waiting. Alex had managed to get out of Hertz that he was some sort of big wheel over at the Alcan head office: part of the maîtres chez nous generation, Alex figured, all those Quebecois technocrats and middle managers who’d seen getting ahead in the system as a way of sticking it to the English.

  No doubt Félix came to Berlitz just to sharpen up his pronoun agreements for his business junkets to Toronto and New York, lest the Anglos get one over on him. It was not for Alex to pass judgment, of course, not in the Method, not over Félix’s thin-skinned nationalism or his Reaganite socialism or his perorations on Latin and Greek. But that didn’t mean he had to pander to him. He would sit there in stoic forbearance, ceding nothing, hoping language rights didn’t come up or native land claims or how to divvy up the national debt.

  Alex hadn’t waited long, however, before putting a bit of distance between him and the Anglos by slipping in a mention of his own Latin roots.

  “Ah, vous êtes italien,” Félix said, as if registering a mental correction.

  Afterward, Alex wished he had left Félix to keep imagining him an Alex Brown or an Alex McPhee—Mme Hertz didn’t like to advertise surnames, given that ones like his own didn’t exactly trumpet competence in English—because Félix, it turned out, knew Florence, and now Alex had to put up with being bested on his own turf, Piero della Francesca this and Santa Croce that. The closest Alex had ever got to Florence was a short stop in the dingy outskirts for gas during a family trip when he was twelve, some spindly tower rising up in the hazy distance that to this day he couldn’t give a name to.

  “But you must go, of course,” Félix said gravely, as if Alex’s humanity depended on it. “Or perhaps you are not so interested in art and so on.”

  “No, no, it’s not that, my last girlfriend was an artist.” Why had he said that? He was coming off as an ass. “Just the time, I guess.”

  Félix gave his little grunt.

  “Well, you’re still young, I suppose. Young enough.”

  Alex breathed a sigh of relief after their third session: three sessions at a go was usually the upper limit for Mme Hertz. She didn’t like her people getting too chummy with the clientele, lest the Method lose pride of place; instructors had to remain interchangeable, like priests in the Church. But then his schedule came up and Félix was still on it.

  Fucking Hertz, he thought, thinking she had it in for him, until she headed him off before his next lesson looking distinctly unpleased.

  “He’s asked for you,” she hissed, as if he’d committed some heresy.

  Alex hardly knew what to make of that. Maybe it was because Félix had found out that he was Italian.

  “After our last session?”

  “No. From the start.”

  It was probably just that he was so innocuous, the kind of blank slate people like Félix preferred because they could leave their own mark on it. But he couldn’t help liking Félix a little better after that. Maybe he’d misjudged the man; maybe he’d been struggling as much as Alex to find some sort of common ground. Whether they actually had any was an open question, but Alex wasn’t an idiot, he could see there was something admirable in Félix amidst all that starched dignity. Things had gone better from then on. If Alex stuck to innocuous subjects like travel and points of grammar, there was a lot less of the grunting and bristling he’d had to contend with at the outset. Félix’s fondness for things Italian slowly warmed to what seemed an actual chaleur toward Alex, the source of that vexing deference, no doubt, though what was vexing about it was probably Alex’s fear of losing it. But what truly fired the man up was English idiom: he’d show up with some irksome new phrase he’d come across and put it before Alex like a personnel problem he couldn’t solve or an insult that had been flung at him, and then an entire session might pass tracing the byways of it, down through the whole sluttish history of the English language. Alex was on solid ground here, thanks to a course he’d done on the subject.

  He brought in some poems in Middle English, and Félix was fascinated at how much of the Norman showed through in them.

  “It’s true: we don’t think of it, but of course the court was all French then. It’s an interesting thing, these histories. All those fights between English and French, it’s like a fight between brothers. They’re always the worst.”

  This was as close as Félix ever got to levity on these sorts of issues; Alex didn’t push the point, lest he accidentally cross some forbidden border into the sacrosanct. Félix was a man of compartments, Alex sensed, everything carefully squirreled away in its separate drawer. All the weeks they’d spent together, and yet Alex had learned almost nothing about him: Félix had never mentioned his son again after that once; he’d never mentioned a home, his colleagues, a wife. Alex had learned more about Esther in an hour than he knew about Félix, though three times a week he’d been paid to do nothing but talk to him.

  Félix was still standing at the window gazing up toward the McGill campus, though Alex had taken his seat and gone through the motion of opening up his Berlitz book, in case Madame checked up on him. There was an uncertain energy to Félix today, a distractedness. Maybe it was just the clothes—he looked thinner in them, more vulnerable.

  “You know, why do we sit here in this terrible office?” he said. “We should go out. Come, I’ll offer you a drink.”

  This was definitely crossing a Berlitz line.

  “I’m not sure,” Alex started. “I should let them know—”

  “It’s fine, I’ll tell them. They’ll get their money all the same.”

  There seemed no point in resisting; Félix was already ushering him out of their little executive suite into the hall. Alex’s only hope was that Mme Hertz had already left for home, if she had such a thing. But no, here she came, barreling out of her office into reception, all chunky five foot one of her, coming right at them as if she’d had them under video surveillance the whole time.

  She had her Berlitz death grin at the ready for Félix.

  “I hope there’s no problem,” she said at once, by which she meant, What is the problem?

  She was wearing a big-shouldered blazer that made her look like Napoleon, her hair boxed off around her head in an eerie symmetry and showing the effects of a recent dye job.

  “No problem at all, madame,” Félix said, a bit more icily than Alex might have wished. “I’ve offered Alex a drink. I’ve insisted on it. I hope it’s not forbidden.”

  Mme Hertz seemed at a loss.

  “No, no,” she sputtered. “Of course. Not at all.”

  Félix let the silence hang an instant.

  “I should mention that we’ll be sending a few of our interns by over the summer. I hope you’ll look after them.”

  Madame’s face had frozen back into its death-grin.

  “Of course, monsieur, of course.” Alex knew he would pay for this. “I’ll look after them personally.”

  The moment they were out the door Alex felt a lightness that was vaguely disquieting, as if some mantle had been removed from him. Out here, he was simply a young man in the company of an older one he had almost nothing in common
with.

  On the sidewalk Félix looked uncertainly up and down the street.

  “Do you know some bar near here?”

  “Well, I’m not sure, really. There’s a few, I think.”

  He ended up leading Félix over to the Peel Pub, out of some misplaced notion that he ought somehow to expose him to his own culture. What the Peel Pub had to do with his own culture, Alex couldn’t have said. He was only really aware of it because Abbie Hoffman had invited people back there a few months earlier after a talk he’d given at McGill, though Alex, too timid to take up the offer, hadn’t actually set foot in the place. He was mortified to discover now that it wasn’t some underground hippy retreat—though it was indeed literally underground, at the bottom of a litter-strewn stairwell that led down from St. Catherine—but just a tacky college pub. A stench of mold and cigarette smoke hit them as soon as they stepped through the door, along with the blare of a TV set over the bar that was tuned to a playoff game. A crowd of collegiate types was huddled around the TV, hooting and bantering and using up the air in a way that sent a shiver through Alex’s spine.

  “A bit loud, I guess!”

  He saw Félix take the place in.

  “No, no! It’s fine!”

  Félix got them drinks at the bar. A Molson’s, Alex asked for, though he hated beer, and Félix, after eyeing the array of cheap whiskeys and liqueurs lined up on either side of the till, gravely ordered the same. They took a seat in a back corner. The furniture, clunky, heavily lacquered faux Canadiana, was crammed in so tightly they had to squeeze to get into their chairs, their knees bumping against each other’s beneath the table. At the bar, the frat boys, glued to the set, had started to chant: Go, go, go, go, go.

  What was he doing here with this man, Alex wondered. Félix looked ill at ease, glancing over his shoulder as if toward some threat.

  “I’ve never been to such a place,” he said. “It’s like a different city for me.”

  “Two solitudes,” Alex said, taking a stab at humor.

  But Félix furrowed his brow.

  “Oui, oui. C’est ça.”

  Alex wanted only to be done with this now, to be home. It had been a mistake to risk this awkwardness, to leave the safety of Berlitz, where their roles were defined.

  He could have used a cigarette but didn’t want to smoke in front of Félix.

  “May I ask you,” Félix said, and for some reason Alex felt his heart thump, expecting he didn’t know what, “how much do they pay you there at Berlitz?”

  He was taken off guard.

  “It’s not so bad,” he said, not knowing if he was allowed to reveal such things. But when he named the amount, Félix whistled through his teeth.

  “Not bad for them, I suppose. We pay them three times as much.”

  Alex would never have guessed the markup was so high. Who would pay such sums, for the likes of him? He felt devalued in Félix’s eyes, revealed for the Berlitz cog he truly was.

  Félix had yet to touch his beer.

  “Can’t you make more on your own?”

  “I suppose. I’d have to find the students.”

  “Ah.”

  It wasn’t like Félix, this sort of familiarity.

  “I have a proposition,” he said. “Feel free to refuse it.”

  Alex felt the thump again.

  “It’s very simple. We continue our lessons, the same as before, except I pay you directly. Just that.”

  Alex wasn’t sure what he was hearing. This, at bottom, was why Mme Hertz ringed her people around with proscriptions, to prevent the formation of exactly these sorts of cabals.

  The alarm bells were going off in his head: if he was found out, he’d be dumped at once. But what was in it for Félix? Just saving a few bucks?

  “I’d give the same fee, of course,” Félix added.

  “You mean what I get now?”

  “No. What we pay.”

  It took Alex an instant to digest this.

  “That seems a lot.”

  Félix shrugged.

  “It’s what we pay them, why should it be less? Then for me it means to get away from that awful place. From that woman.”

  Alex’s greed had already reared up to shoulder his doubts aside. It didn’t make any sense, really, that kind of cash, just to sit parsing phrases like pie in the sky and let the cat out of the bag. But all he could see were those dollars piling up, hour after hour.

  “It’s very generous of you,” he said warily.

  “Not so generous. It’s the company that pays.”

  Alex was on eggshells after that, afraid of saying anything to compromise Félix’s misplaced faith in him. They worked out the details, arranging to meet at Félix’s home in Outremont. Twice a week; two hours a session. Alex would be making from Félix alone as much as all his Berlitz hours combined, enough to cover the whole of his rent.

  “We’ll say nothing to the school, of course,” Félix said. “Just between us.”

  The clouds of the morning had returned by the time they left the pub and a light drizzle had started up. Chernobyl, Alex thought, but that seemed far from him now. The lights of the traffic on St. Catherine and the neon of the shops lustered against the wet.

  They ducked under an awning at the corner to say their goodbyes.

  “So you have the summer to relax now, I suppose,” Félix said. “From your studies, I mean.”

  But all Alex saw was his dissertation looming before him like the wall of a cliff.

  “I’ve finished my classes, at least. I’m having a party tomorrow to celebrate.”

  “Ah. Bonne fête, alors.”

  There was a touch of embarrassment in Félix’s voice, as if he felt it unseemly to speak of a pleasure he was excluded from.

  “You could come, if you wanted. I mean, it’s just other students and so on.”

  He felt foolish. He hoped he hadn’t insulted the man with his presumption.

  “It’s very kind of you,” Félix said. The awkwardness between them was palpable. “Of course, if you wish it. If it’s not any trouble.”

  Alex had assumed he would simply make his excuses—surely he had his own life to attend to. It seemed they had fallen into another of those protocols he didn’t know the rules of, and he was stuck giving a time, directions, an address.

  “Until tomorrow, then,” Félix said, his hand wet from the rain when it took Alex’s.

  Alex waited until Félix had disappeared around the corner toward the metro and lit up a cigarette. For some reason his heart was racing, as if he had embarked on some quest or joined the Resistance rather than simply signing up for a bit of under-the-table teaching work. He caught a smell in the air, something uncertain, and for a moment an insight seemed to be forcing itself on him, about Félix or something larger, Chernobyl, his son, hovering tantalizing before him but refusing to take shape. Then as quickly as it had come the feeling passed, and he tossed his cigarette out into the rain and started off home.

  – 5 –

  Twilight had set in by the time Alex got home. He hated coming back to his empty apartment at this time of the day, hated how the light drained away from things, how listless he felt. He missed Moses, the stray he and Liz had taken in back in Toronto. He resented how they’d just assumed that Liz would keep him after the split, though he knew that if he’d actually been saddled with the cat he would have resented that more.

  His apartment was a shambles still, littered with boxes he had yet to unpack, with all the junk store furniture he’d filled it with. Half of it was ancient undergrad stuff he’d had to haul up to Montreal from his parents’ basement, a cracked drop-leaf table he’d got for five bucks, the hideous floral sofa bed his parents had had at the old farm, the mattress he’d paid fifty dollars for, used, back in second year and on which he’d slept with at least a dozen different women. None of these things had the comfortable air of familiarity they ought to have had—they seemed beside the point, a charade, remnants of a life he wasn’t part of
anymore. Meanwhile, there was the letter in the drawer of his desk, though every time he turned his mind to it he seemed about to fly apart in a thousand directions.

  The rain had stopped. He poured himself a Coke from the fridge and went out to the balcony for another cigarette. Beyond him the lit towers of the downtown sat clustered like some beast huddling up against the night, framed by the dark mound of Mount Royal and by the river and the distant hills of the Townships. He had a sudden feeling of being stranded on the island the city was, as if it were a feeble encampment against the wild, though he knew it gave way to miles and miles of featureless suburb where the closest thing to the wild was the local mall.

  He thought he might read the letter again. He had already been over it so many times, though always fleetingly, as if it might detonate, that he had it practically memorized. I write after many years, it began, in Ingrid’s Swedishly tentative Oxford-summer-school English, to tell you of our son Per, who will be five in this coming September. He never got any further than that before his heart was already in his throat. There were details about the boy, but no picture; there was the invitation, of course, to come, because, as Ingrid had written, as if Alex were a famous sports figure the boy had followed, “he very much would like to meet you.” But then at the end: “You must have your life now so perhaps it is better not to write back, if you do not think you can be a father to him. We will manage, of course. It wasn’t you who made the choice so you needn’t feel guilty, though I remember you liked to.”

  It made him squirm now to think how galvanized he’d felt when he’d first read the letter nearly four months earlier. He’d been ready to board a plane the next day, to abandon everything. But then slowly, with each day he’d delayed, his resolve had weakened. He could hardly have discussed the matter with Liz when their relationship was in its death throes at the time; and then when it was over, and he was left covered in shit the way he’d been, he couldn’t imagine trailing the noxious odors of himself into the clean, Swedish world of this innocent five-year-old. The reasonableness of Ingrid’s letter had begun to feel insidious by then. What did she mean, exactly, by be a father to him? Every day he had turned the phrase over in his head and every day it had seemed more ominous and obscure, a kind of test. Or maybe it was just Ingrid giving him an out, holding up to him the truth of his own nature.