The Origin of Species (16 page)

“Esther—”

He put his arms around her and she melted against him.

“You don’t know what it’s like. Sometimes I go months and no one even touches me. It’s like I’m already dead.”

He rocked her in his arms, feeling the wet at his shoulder from her tears. Maybe it wasn’t so far to go, just to touch her, to make her feel human. But he couldn’t shake the sense of that awful revulsion that had gone through him.

“It’ll work out for you,” he said. “You’re so wonderful. Someone will see that.”

“You see it, and you’re still not having sex with me.” But she laughed, a sort of snort that came out between sobs. “Anyway, I guess I can still make a joke.”

He helped her back to her apartment. By now the wine and the late hour had started to show. She fumbled with her key at her door and Alex took it from her and turned the lock. He caught a glimpse of her darkened apartment, the foreign shapes looming up, the bedroom doorway fading out to black.

“Would you like me to stick around for a bit?”

“Not if you’re not going to have sex with me.”

His own apartment looked like a battlefield, strewn with cigarette butts and dirty glasses and empty bottles. He glanced at the bottle he’d drunk from earlier: it was one of the fancy Scotches he himself had passed over at the liquor store. Stephen had brought it. Alex would never have done that, would never have left behind half a bottle of premium Scotch.

He retreated to his bedroom, unable to face the mess. His proposal was still sitting on his desk there. He’d made the mistake of skimming through it after his meeting with Novak and had been shocked at how lifeless it seemed next to the description of it he’d given Esther the day before. On impulse he pulled out his
Canadian Studies
essay from the shelf above his desk, to take solace from it. He didn’t like to think he cared that much about it anymore, yet its pages had started to darken at the edges from his having thumbed through them so often. There were passages in it that still made him chuckle. “As for me and my horse,” the epigraph read—and that was the joke, a satire à la Swift of the wonky postmodern notion of “misreading” using the wonderfully grim Canadian standard
As for Me and My House
—“we will serve the Lord.”

He had written the paper on a whim, one of the many brilliant ideas for projects of one sort or another that he got on a daily basis and almost invariably never pursued. That had been at the height of his cynicism, when he’d been sick to death of the ambitious young things he’d run into at conferences and the fat-cat professors who used their graduate students to write their books. But then the acceptance had come from
Canadian Studies
—and sending it there had been another whim, though he’d taken the trouble of typing his covering letter on letterhead he’d filched from the university English office—and after the initial disbelief he had begun to feel a little glow inside him. For the first time in a while he had dared to think that there might still be a place for him in the world, that he might still be a star.

In the end the article hadn’t been the new start he had hoped for but instead had inserted itself in his life like a poltergeist, wreaking havoc in every direction. It had probably been responsible, at a deep, Faustian level, for Liz’s abortion; it had led Ingrid to him, in seeming repayment for Liz; it had landed him in this ill-advised Ph.D. It was as if he had sold out somehow without quite realizing it, as if it had been enough just to covet this little bauble held out to him for all the cosmic forces to turn against him. The abortion, really, had been the turning point: though his mind still rebelled at the thought of their having kept the thing, he could see how different his life would have been then, how much more orderly. He’d probably be pulling in a big salary with the Toronto school board, with summers off, instead of slumming at Berlitz and growing more desperate by the hour about his dissertation; and all the problems between him and
Liz, next to the miracle of a child, would no doubt have grown small. Even the issue of Ingrid would have been resolved: he could hardly have been expected to move across the ocean if he’d had a perfectly good family of his own already. He could then have assumed the only relationship with his Swedish offspring that made any sense, the amiable but distant father kept away by completely reasonable circumstance.

He had never asked Liz to get the abortion. He had left it to her; it was her body after all. It was easy to see now what a cop-out that had been, or, worse, how it had been sheer manipulation, because deep down Alex believed that Liz would have agreed to keep the baby in a heartbeat if he’d made it the least bit clear that that was what he’d wanted. In his own mind, he’d thought it crazy even to consider going ahead: it wasn’t just the practicalities, that they had almost no income and the building they were living in, a drafty old tenement on Crawford, was under imminent threat of demolition; it was also that, for the first time it seemed, they had possibilities, not just from Alex’s publication but from a show Liz had been part of where she’d been singled out for praise. Now was the moment to strike out, Alex had thought, not retreat into domesticity. But of course he hadn’t said any of this to Liz: he had stood back, kept mum, and let her make her own decision.

Asshole
.

He should never have started thinking about the matter. He might turn it over and over in his head and never see it right, whether he should have done this or that, what Liz would have done in turn. Who had been dishonest or disingenuous or manipulative, or whether, if he had just bitten the bullet and said yes, Liz, out of sheer contrariness, wouldn’t have had the abortion anyway. He thought of Liz the way Freud had thought about dreams, that there was a point where matters retreated into the unfathomable like the umbilical cord into the womb. Ever since high school there had been the same weird connection between them, long before anything like sex had come into the picture, the same weird arguments over who knew what, the same scary intimacy like a last-ditch fire they were both huddled around. There were grievances between them from back then that they had never really forgiven each other for: that Alex had turned Liz down, for instance, when she’d invited him to the Grade 13 grad. Because he didn’t want it to interfere with their friendship, was what he’d said, but they had both known he was simply waiting for
a better offer, not this sexless sidekick he spent all his time with, who went around draped in such an excess of clothing—scarves, gym pants, oversize sweaters, men’s parkas—that she seemed to have no body at all. He had ended up going with a girl he wasn’t even attracted to just because she was slightly more in, something that in the Darwinian logic of adolescence, a period clearly designed by nature to kill off the weak, had somehow made perfect sense to him.

He’d been to her house once for supper, with her reclusive sister and the crazy German father who called her a slut and the mother who was overly friendly when Alex went by after school but would shoo him away before Liz’s father got home from work. “The wop,” Liz’s father called him behind his back, according to Liz. But at supper he’d sat smiling and laughing nervously like a harmless old immigrant.

“I know your uncle Tony there at the factory. Always joking, always joking.”

Years later, when he and Liz were actually involved, he would feel a strange stab when he thought back to this time, how he’d pretended he didn’t see what Liz wanted, or rather puffed himself up with it and in the same instant denied it. Who knew what it was, the smell of outsiderness that had come off her or maybe simply that she was
like him
: this was the thing he couldn’t forgive, that there was no gain in it for him, to be with her. They were like two people poised at a brink; the only way forward was down.

It wasn’t until the end of university, when they were both living in Toronto, that they finally slept with each other, just before he left for Africa. Gin played a part, and the titillation of being in her boyfriend’s apartment while he was away. Alex awoke the next morning feeling like he’d just discovered the proper use of something he’d long taken for granted, but Liz was already going through the room as if trying to cover up a murder.

“This can’t ever happen again,” she said at once.

“You didn’t seem to mind it.”

“You know as well as I do it would never have happened if you weren’t leaving.”

By the time he’d left the country they were no longer speaking. He’d written her once, and received no reply, and might have been ready just to cut her from his life if he hadn’t come home such an invalid, with
Desmond behind him and nothing ahead. Only a matter of days had passed before he phoned Liz’s house to track her down.

“Alex! What a coincidence!” Her mother’s over-bright voice, still with that deluded hopefulness to it, desperate and a bit chilling. “She’s actually home this weekend. She’ll be thrilled!”

Within a month he had moved back up to Toronto and rented a tiny place in the market, but was spending most of his time at Liz’s. She was alone now, she had changed her life. After wasting her undergrad years doing a business degree, she had gone back for art, what she’d wanted. She took him to her studio at the college and showed him her work, large, vibrant abstracts that didn’t seem anything like Liz, that were utterly buoyant.

“So that’s it,” she said. “It’s pretty passé even to be working on canvas anymore.”

“They seem, I dunno—fun. I mean, I like them.”

What he really felt, looking at them, was a strange arousal—that Liz had produced them, that these bright things had come out of her.

“Fun is all right,” she said. “I can live with fun.”

They were already sleeping together by then. Everything happened like that, without question, as if it were inevitable, as if there had never been a point of decision. They fell into sex the way they had that one night, like something they’d merely put off, then never talked about it, as if it were some secret about themselves they needed to keep. Alex felt like he was in hiding, like he’d holed up in a safe house; it grew rare for him to return to his own apartment except to collect his mail. Liz’s apartment was done up with plants and checkered tiles and plump throw pillows, everything just so—he liked that there was nothing there that was his, that reflected him, as if he had come back after the wars to a war bride who’d made a new life for him.

He’d had a letter from Ingrid. He had spent a month with her before the Galápagos, but already she seemed a stranger to him. There was a tone to her letter, as if there was still a chance for the two of them despite the gulf between them, that he couldn’t bear. “Liz is someone I’ve known since high school and maybe the person I’m fated to be with,” he wrote back, then never heard from her again.

When he started his Master’s at U of T he gave up his place and moved in with Liz. The apartment grew small with the two of them
always there. Liz had finished art school and was using the living room as her studio, taking in ad work to pay the rent. She’d stopped doing her abstracts and gone back to figures—still lifes, disembodied hands, a self-portrait that showed her looking back over her shoulder as if at an assailant. She asked Alex to sit for her, reclining him nude on the couch draped in satins and velvets, and they ended up making love on the living room floor, in their wordless way, as if it was something their bodies did that they couldn’t be held accountable for.

They lay on the couch afterward, and he could smell her sweat.

“You never said why you stopped doing your abstracts.”

“I was tired of them.” Then, lightheartedly, “I shopped my slides around, and no one seemed interested.”

This was the first Alex had heard of this.

“What did people say?”

“That it didn’t fit their aesthetic, that sort of thing.”

She was still talking in the same easy tone. Alex knew nothing of the art world except what he’d learned from Liz, but it seemed a bordello to him, a lawless place.

“Maybe you should try something different.”

He knew at once that he’d said the wrong thing.

“What do you mean, exactly?”

“I don’t know. You’re the artist. Try a new direction or something.”

There was the smallest pause.

“I have.”

She abandoned the nude of him after that, letting it sit untouched on her easel a few days before finally burying it somewhere. So it began, Alex thought, all the rattle and clang of recrimination and blame that he’d been expecting since he’d moved in. This was the pattern between them: they grew dependent on one another and then they turned, like animals chewing off their own limbs. Liz had slowly cut her ties with her old art school gang, most of whom had drifted off like her into the ignominy of hack work; Alex had a couple of friends he still saw from his undergraduate years, but at U of T, where a cold institutionalism reigned, he simply went to his classes and came home. Then Liz had had another of her ruptures with her parents: she had these regularly, like phases of the moon, though in this case it was just as well, since before it they had lived in fear that Alex would pick up the phone one
day when Liz’s mother called—always early or late, to get the cheap rates—and they’d be found out.

They fell into a phase of crazy arguments, reckless, pointless brawls that never had anything to do with whatever was really at issue. Suddenly, everything seemed wrong: Liz’s anal little apartment, where Alex felt she watched him now as if he were some squatter who’d broken in to despoil the place with his fetid maleness; their sex, which had grown perfunctory, until it seemed just the listless work of making Liz come so that he could.

“Just stop,” she said once. “I feel like I’m alone.”

He might have said something useful then.

“I’m doing my best,” was what he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I dunno, it just feels like so much effort with you.”

She left the apartment then and was gone the entire night. By morning Alex felt an inchoate bloody-mindedness, pacing the living room not sure if he was dreading the worst or wanting it.