The Origin of Species Page 7

  He had managed to dig up a few cassettes she had sent him over the years. The instant he heard her voice he felt her real and alive before him again, saw her garden and smelled its smells, felt the wonder of those first weeks they’d spent together. What was he thinking, not jumping at the chance to go back to that? And yet; and yet. There was the age difference; there was the fact that she lived in bloody Sweden; there was Jesus. Try as he might, Alex had never quite been able to take her seriously after her conversion. Of course, all that was beside the point—he didn’t have to marry her to have a relationship with his son. And yet that phrase kept coming back to him, and what it might mean in her Christianized brain. Be a father. But what was a father if not a husband? The time he had visited her post-conversion—the fateful time, it turned out—she’d had sex with him only because in some corner of her mind she had believed, he knew, that he would stay.

  It had been different the first time. They had met on the Helsingborg ferry—he had noticed her from the start, an attractive blonde of the sort who made his knees go weak, with that sheen of knowingness and ease that made him think of adulterous trysts in wooded motel rooms or alpine chalets. He’d stood at the rail, backpacked and bearded and unwashed, wishing he was the sort of person who could talk to such a woman, when suddenly she was there beside him, speaking to him in a foreign language.

  She was holding some sort of net on a pole over her shoulder, a fishing net maybe.

  “I’m sorry?” he said, alarmed, certain she’d mistaken him for someone else.

  “Oh! I thought you were Swedish.”

  Somehow, he’d managed not to make a mess of it. It was Ingrid, really, who’d managed it—she’d made the thing seem so natural, drawing him out, so that he didn’t simply mumble some half-hearted courtesy and slouch back into his not-yet-quite-post-adolescent shell. He’d been en route to a home stay, something he’d set up with a group called The Experiment in International Living, though all he’d had in the way of direction was an address for the Experiment office in Stockholm, where he’d been planning to head.

  “But you must telephone them,” Ingrid said. “Perhaps they will send you to Malmö or some such. It’s very far.”

  She made the call for him from a pay phone just outside the ferry terminal, taking the coins from her purse and carrying on an animated exchange with someone at the other end, casting looks at him the whole time as if to hold him in the sphere of the conversation. She jotted down an address.

  “You see,” she said, “you are very lucky not to travel all the way to Stockholm because you are going to Gothenburg.”

  “Oh.” Alex had never heard of Gothenburg. “Is it far?”

  She laughed.

  “I will show you on a map. In my car.”

  After that, things took on a kind of inevitability. There was the question of time: it was mid-afternoon and the town was a hundred miles or more; it didn’t make sense to set out and risk waiting hours for a ride. Ingrid had a guest house at the back of her garden, “a little cabin,” she said. If he wanted to stay the night.

  “It’s not so easy in Sweden, to take rides and such. People are shy. Then they see a man with a beard—”

  Nothing in this was out of the ordinary. In the month and a half since he’d set out, on the remains of a student loan from his first year at university, Alex had come across any number of people who’d been willing to look after him, to feed him, put him up, go out of their way to drop him at borders or good spots for rides.

  The net she was carrying was a butterfly net for her seven-year-old, Lars. She had a daughter as well, Eva, who was nine.

  “You seem too young,” Alex said, but relieved somehow that there were children.

  “I am thirty,” she said at once. “And you?”

  Alex flushed.

  “Twenty. I’ll be twenty in August.”

  “Ah.” There was a pause he didn’t want to read. “I thought older. Perhaps because of the beard.”

  She had some errands to do in Helsingborg. Alex followed her around like her attendant, oddly comfortable with her, with the way she had annexed him. In the large central square just up from the ferry terminal, a band in traditional garb was playing a polka-like march to a scattered audience of passersby who stood as grave as mourners.

  “You see how the Swedes are, so serious,” Ingrid said. “And then they go home and drink until they are very drunk.”

  Her town, Engelström, was just inland from Landskrona down the coast. To Alex it looked like something out of Brigadoon, with its timbered houses and thatched barns and spired church. Ingrid’s house was at the far end of the town, off a little side road, a small white bungalow shrouded in shrubbery and trees. Alex expected some sort of domestic scene to greet them when she opened the door, her children, a blond-haired husband perhaps, but there was only silence.

  “The children are with their father in these days,” she said, reading his look, “so we are alone.”

  She pointed out the little cabin at the back of her garden, a steep-roofed confection with two shuttered windows and a little door low enough that Alex would have to stoop to get through it.

  “So you see, it’s true,” she said. “You will be better there than all night by the expressway.”

  But she did not take him out to it, and his backpack remained parked by the front door where he’d first set it.

  “Perhaps you would like to clean yourself.”

  He could not believe his good luck in having been taken into this place. The bathroom was small, pristine, just slightly cluttered; there was a shower stall, no bath, with a white curtain trimmed with lace. It was three days since he’d last showered, at the house of a professor in Utrecht who had taken him in; since then he’d slept in Lübeck in a kind of squat, then on the beach in Denmark after the ferry crossing from Puttgarden. He’d done the last three or four miles to Puttgarden on foot, toting a backpack laden with useless books like the Bhagavad Gita and The Genealogy of Morals that he hadn’t been able to get through in his first-year reading lists.

  In the shower he felt like he was scrubbing away all the grit of the past several weeks. The truth was he wasn’t sure he liked traveling much, having to start every day from scratch, meet new people, make his way. It had all begun to seem a bit pointless. Yet here he was in Ingrid’s house, in her shower, just because he’d been lucky enough to be standing there at the rail of the Helsingborg ferry.

  Ingrid was sitting in the sun in her garden with a sketchbook and a box of pastels when he came out.

  “It’s only something I started since the divorce,” she said. “In the way of doing something new.”

  They walked into town to get some things for their supper. At the butcher’s shop, the butcher, a lean, stoop-shouldered man with a crew cut that made his hair look singed, gave Alex a furtive glance but then scrupulously avoided his gaze. Ingrid carried on in her usual way, forthright, polite.

  “You mustn’t mind this place,” she said outside. “They are not so used to it here. To strangers.”

  They made supper together in Ingrid’s kitchen, which was modern and bright, all whites and blond wood, and ate in the garden. It was Alex’s first real meal in weeks. He couldn’t quite shed the terror that he’d commit some gaffe, but somehow he found things to say. Out on the road, staying in the hostels with cocky Americans and Aussies and the career backpackers who traded travel stories like currency, he often felt a pariah.

  Ingrid had opened some wine.

  “It’s nice to have company,” she said, though he still couldn’t quite believe there might be something in it for her, that all this wasn’t just some prize she was bestowing on him.

  They stayed on in the garden after they’d finished supper. It was late June, midsummer, and the light went on and on. As the wine went down Ingrid grew more candid.

  “A very typical Swede,” she said of her ex-husband. He worked as some sort of engineer at the shipyard in Helsingborg. “Very conservative. Ve
ry boring.”

  “Like Canadians,” he said.

  “But you are also Italian. You are different.”

  “Italian and not Italian. Not really.”

  “Then I am like you,” she said. “Swedish and not Swedish.”

  Before he knew it, it was midnight, though the darkness still had the dreamy crepuscular tentativeness of dusk.

  “It seems so cold, to make you sleep in the cabin,” Ingrid said. “Perhaps I will make a bed for you on the sofa.”

  Again, Alex felt relieved: so nothing would come of it. He stood by sheepishly while she arranged sheets, a duvet, on the long white sofa in her living room.

  “Will you sleep in your clothes?” she said, smiling.

  “No. I mean, I’ll change in the bathroom.”

  She was still waiting for him when he emerged. All the lights had been put out save a lamp in the alcove, leaving the room in shadowy gray. Ingrid waited as he settled and then knelt beside him as if tucking in a child.

  “Thank you, my young Alex, for a very lovely supper,” she said, and kissed him softly.

  There was still that part of him that had been hoping this wouldn’t happen. What little he’d had in the way of sex in his life had always left him feeling somehow dirtied, as if he’d merely done what was expected. He didn’t want to ruin things now with that feeling, not with someone like Ingrid.

  They kissed again. Everything about her seemed fresh and distilled. Something shifted in him and he felt free to touch her, her hair, her midriff, her face, though it seemed incredible to him that she would allow this, that alarms didn’t go off.

  Her hand had slipped beneath the drawstring of his pyjamas and she was touching him, gently, in a preliminary way. He was already hard; the touch was electric. Then before he was able to distract himself, he felt a surge and he came.

  He was mortified.

  “I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I’m sorry.”

  She was quiet an instant but then kissed him lightly, her hand still on him, and said, “There’s no reason.”

  She pulled a tissue from a box near the sofa to clean them, drawing the covers down and making Alex pull down his pyjamas so she could dab at his penis and thigh. The thing felt more intimate than coming, more awful.

  “Come up to my bed.”

  So he’d been given a reprieve. She led him up to a slope-ceilinged room with a futon bed and a skylight, the still-insistent afterglow of the midsummer sky casting the room in a kind of ghostly pallor. Alex had the sense that something had changed between them, that the stakes were higher now.

  Ingrid undressed facing away from him and slipped under the covers.

  “Come,” she said.

  But when he was lying next to her it seemed too much, this wasted luxury. She was touching him again, kneading him with a slow deliberateness, but the longer she went on, the more painful it grew.

  He could feel his guts knotting up.

  “I’m not sure I can,” he said, when he couldn’t bear it. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh.” He couldn’t read her, if she was surprised, put out. “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes.”

  She had drawn her hand from him. For a moment they lay there, inert, and Alex was afraid that she would throw him out, to her cabin, to the street.

  “Perhaps you can help me,” she said finally.

  He felt instantly ashamed, not to have thought of it. Then when he’d put his hand to her he couldn’t find the spot and had to be guided, though after a minute she cupped his hand once again and gently pulled it away.

  “It’s nice just to be close,” she said.

  He felt tears welling up in him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  He felt a wave of self-pity come over him, and was suddenly sobbing.

  “You are crying!” But she said this so brightly she seemed to make the matter small. “How silly! You think I am some old witch who has only brought you here for sex.”

  She was kissing his tears, as if he were one of her children who’d come crying.

  “How silly,” she said again. “After such a nice evening we had.”

  “Not very nice for you.”

  “Don’t say so. I am very happy I found you there, on that boat. It doesn’t normally happen to me, to so quickly feel close to a man.”

  He fell asleep cupped against her, feeling her heat on him, but awoke some time later with the sense he had not really slept at all, had never lost his awareness of her lying beside him. Dawn was already showing at the edges of the blind Ingrid had drawn over the skylight. Alex felt a wonder go through him again that he should be here in Ingrid’s bed. She was small, he saw, much smaller than he was. She hadn’t figured that way in his mind; in his mind, he had been the small one. He felt a surge of hopefulness, as if he had seen a way that he might somehow equal her. He imagined making love to her properly, to this different Ingrid lying beside him in the gray dawn.

  In the morning, when he awoke again to full light, her place beside him was already empty. He heard the sounds of her in the kitchen, the tinkling of cutlery and cups.

  He went down and could feel at once that something had changed.

  “Today my children return,” she said, not looking at him, “and so you must go.”

  So this was all it had amounted to. She drove him out to the expressway beyond Helsingborg and stood with him there at the on-ramp, his backpack propped against the guardrail like a third person.

  “I did not think it should be so hard to say goodbye to you, my Alex who’s not Italian,” she said. “Perhaps we’ll meet again, who can say. I could wish it.”

  But she hadn’t given him so much as a phone number. All he had from her was the bit of wetness in her eyes.

  “You’re young,” she said. “You will have many adventures.”

  It was evening before he reached Gothenburg. His host was a middle-aged man named Stig Hörby who was as thick-necked and bug-eyed and squat as a Meso-American sculpture. He lived alone out in Västra Frölunda, a suburb of trim, identical bungalows and trim, identical trees.

  “I was very worried,” he said peevishly. “They called to expect you last evening.”

  “It was too late to hitchhike,” Alex said.

  “Yes.” Stig cleared his throat. “I see.”

  And Alex vowed to himself he would not say a word to the man about Ingrid.

  In Gothenburg—Göteborg in Swedish, pronounced like someone coughing up—Alex could only think about Ingrid, how he’d had her and had let her slip from him. He had no stomach for museums or tourist sites and spent his days while Stig was at work scrambling among the rocks along the seafront near Stig’s house or watching American reruns on his TV. Stig was clearly disappointed in him, every day asking after his activities and every day making the same wheezing moue of disapproval at his lack of enterprise. He introduced Alex to a neighbor boy, Robert, a doctor’s son who oozed confidence and privilege.

  “I think you are not so happy here,” Robert said. “Is very hard for Stig because he is not so good for talking.”

  Against his better judgment, Alex told Robert about Ingrid. He wasn’t quite able to stop himself from putting the thing more favorably than had been the case.

  “You slept with this woman?” Robert said.

  “Well, yes.”

  “You know, you must be careful,” Robert said. “There are women here, they try to trick you to make a baby and so on. And then you must stay with them.”

  Alex felt himself redden.

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Maybe you don’t see it because you are a stranger. But here in Sweden you must be careful.”

  The idiot, Alex thought, bloody bourgeois Swedish prude. Yet his image of Ingrid had been sullied—why was she alone, after all, if she was so perfect? Why was she cruising young men on the ferry?

  He felt he could hardly stay on after that. SAS had a special that summer, a hundred kronor
, about twenty bucks, for a ticket anywhere in the country. He decided to fly up to Kiruna, inside the Arctic Circle.

  There was still more than a week left of his home stay.

  “But you have already paid!” Stig said. “What shall we tell the office?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I will pay for your ticket at least.”

  There was a change at Stockholm, so by the time he flew into Kiruna—which from the plane, beneath an overcast sky, looked lost in the landscape like a final outpost, a single rubbly peak presiding over it and then the rest just flat, endless bush—it was nearly midnight and the youth hostel office had closed. He set out hitchhiking, north, toward the Finnish border. A logging truck took him forty or fifty miles out of town but then just dropped him there in the middle of nowhere, a sea of evergreen stretching out around him on every side. He seemed truly to have reached the end of the world, not a car to be seen and the midnight sun sending a gray pall through the clouds that refused to shade off into night or to indicate in any way that time was passing.

  It began to rain. Alex retreated into the shelter of the trees but the mosquitoes there were unbearable. He bundled himself inside his sleeping bag and draped a T-shirt over his head, but still they found their way through to get at his flesh, to buzz in his ears. Then the rain began to drip down through the branches in erratic splats and it was worse than being in the full of it. He felt utterly bereft, wondering what had ever possessed him to come to this place, to leave home, to imagine he was the sort of person who could actually strike out on his own like this.

  He fell into fitful sleep and had an awful vision of himself as he truly was, shriveled and hopeless and small. He understood suddenly that he would never transform like a chrysalis into the perfect person he’d always longed to be, confident, charming, at home in every situation, but would probably remain forever as crippled and half-formed as he was now, closed off in his little paranoias and depressions and fears. Citizen of the World. That was what Trudeau had had pinned to his dorm room door at Harvard. But Alex was not up to that standard. He couldn’t even survive a bit of rejection from a Swedish divorcée.