The Origin of Species (30 page)

He had gotten an idea for another of his projects, about a character, K., who woke up one morning to discover he had somehow got trapped in a novel. Suddenly the most casual objects became meaningful; conversations,
rather than the wordy, meandering things they had been, became aphoristic and terse. It wasn’t long before K. descended into paranoia, wondering at the menacing haze of significance that seemed to surround the smallest act. Bit by bit his life was stripped down to its most basic elements, parent, antagonist, spouse, the blood-stained dagger, the smoking gun; all the rest, the hundred meaningless people he might have met in a day, the endless clutter and mess of things, was sucked off into some vortex. Then there was the relentless clockwork of events: gone were the long mornings in bed, the endless hours in front of the TV, replaced by disorienting jump cuts and elisions, action piling on action until it seemed the whole of creation had become a flood tide whose sole aim was to raise the frail vessel of him to some monstrous height in order to smash it. Then, out of the wreckage, just as baffling as the rest, came the ray of light, the not-so-distant shore. Hope.

He managed to get everything gutted and diced but still couldn’t imagine how he was going to get from the jumble of foodstuffs on his counter to his end goal. He was using a recipe he’d clipped from the back of a box of arborio rice, but important steps seemed left out of it. Already he could see María standing over him, wondering how he ever managed to feed himself.

“Please,” she would say at her fund-raisers, like a command, nodding toward the tables of food that were always laid on, “you can eat.”

As if eating were a skill his own culture hadn’t quite mastered.

It was a mistake for Alex to show any gratitude for these feedings. That would be like saying he had such a low opinion of his hosts that he’d expected to go hungry. María, for her part, always paid him the courtesy of entirely ignoring his own largesse—the Doors cassette he’d given her, and which she had handed over to Miguel without so much as looking at the cover art; the membership he’d bought her for the local rep theater, and which she had never once made use of with him; the flowers he’d picked up on a whim at the Atwater market, a truly inane gesture, left to wilt in their wrapper on her kitchen counter and probably thrown in the trash the instant he’d gone.

The only thing she had ever specifically asked him for, ironically, was a novel, to practice her English.

“Son’thing from Canada,” she’d said. “You have writers, yes?”

He had given her Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale
—there She was again—because it was anti-American, though afterward he’d wondered
why he hadn’t chosen something more to his purposes than a sci-fi dystopia about sex slaves. But then that was exactly the sort of writing he couldn’t bear these days, that came out for love, say, or for all those useless emotions and shades of emotion that made life such a horror show. What was the point of these emotions, why trumpet them when they were probably just evolutionary surplus, haphazard neural responses that nature had latched onto for its own insidious purposes?

“Maybe is good,” María had said of the book. “Is very political.”

The buzzer sounded on the intercom. It was too early for María. His first terrible thought was that Jiri had returned, but no, much worse: it was Liz.

“I’m here to get Moses,” she rapped out. A small judgmental pause, and then, “You forgot, didn’t you?”

Yes, he had damn well forgotten. They hadn’t spoken since she’d dropped him off three weeks before.

Already his nerves were jangling around in him like loose coins.

“Come up.”

He sneaked a peek at her through the peephole when she knocked, to steel himself. Her face was already set, looking menacing and skewed like a shot from a Polanski film.

He opened the door.

“A phone call would have been nice.”

Already he’d set the wrong tone.

“I thought we’d decided.”

When she’d dropped Moses off he hadn’t invited her in, so thrown by her presence at his apartment that he’d taken the cat with barely a word and closed the door. For days afterward he’d kept going over the moment in his mind, how he should have handled it differently.

“Why don’t you come in.”

“I’m in a hurry, actually.”

Just the same, she moved in a little from the doorway. He saw her eye going around the apartment, to the sheets spread over the furniture, the mess of cooking in the kitchen. The whole apartment was ripe now with the smell of shellfish. It had been something that had united them, their aversion to seafood.

“So. Thanks for looking after him.”

He was my cat too, for fuck’s sake
.

“Not at all.”

At some point, Alex realized, they would have to talk, they would have to try to make each other feel normal again, even if they were only pretending.

Liz had that hardness to her, like someone in enemy territory.

“I saw your show,” he said finally.

There, he had admitted it.

“Oh.” She went a little bit harder.

“I liked it. I liked it a lot.”

He could hear how unconvincing he sounded but he was telling the truth, even if he hadn’t been able to help taking the show personally. She had split up with him and almost at once, it seemed, had started painting again. It was as if she’d been saying to him,
See how you killed me
.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Anyway. I hope your work’s still going well.”

While Liz stood waiting by the door he cleaned out Moses’s litter box, dumping the contents into a grocery bag. The smell of cat pee had grown almost comforting in the past weeks. Moses had started to fret, pacing around Alex with his back up at this new disruption to the order of things. He was making a point of ignoring Liz, in his punishing way, though Alex wasn’t taking as much satisfaction from this as he might have.

He had to reach around Liz to get the cat crate out of the entrance closet. Moses, the instant he caught sight of it, scuttered behind the couch.

“I’ll get him,” Liz said. “He doesn’t like going in there.”

I know that
.

“It’s fine,” Alex said.

He had to pull the couch away from the wall and crawl in amongst the dust bunnies and filth. He managed to drag Moses back to the open but when he tried to shove him into the crate, Moses, completely out of character, lashed out.

A thin line of blood rose up on Alex’s wrist. He felt utterly betrayed.

Liz shifted uncomfortably.

“You all right?”

“It’s nothing. Just a scratch.”

He couldn’t recover from this setback. He knew Liz had been offering him a chance in bringing Moses here, and he was blowing it.

He piled Moses’s things at the door.

“Can you manage all this?”

“I’ll be fine. My friend’s waiting with her car.”

No doubt the punky lesbian wannabe she’d been with when Alex had run into her that summer. He had recognized her from the ill-fated art history class he had briefly attended, though he’d had no idea at the time that Liz had become friends with her.

“You should be careful on the way out. We’re not allowed pets.”

“I can’t exactly hide him under my coat.”

They ended on that note. Alex had been prudent enough, at least, to lower the heat on his paella, but he came back to it to find that a crust had formed at the bottom of the pot nonetheless.
Shit
. It would have that burnt taste now. Meanwhile Liz was probably already having some snarky misandrist conversation about him with her
friend
. She was the one who had mentioned the show when Alex had run into her and Liz up near Schwartz’s. “It’s pretty amazing,” she’d said, laying the salt on. “You should check it out.”

He’d been shocked then at how different Liz had looked. She’d lost weight, she’d let her hair grow, but those were the small things: it was the whole air to her that had changed, the way she held herself, the St. Lawrence chic of her clothes, this guerilla-girl sidekick he hadn’t known she was friends with but to whom his eye had always gone across the lecture hall back in art history.

He and Liz had hardly exchanged two words.

“That’s great,” he’d said of her show, but he wouldn’t let himself say he’d go see it. “That’s great.”

It was more than a week before he got around to tracking the show down. It wasn’t at a gallery but at one of the art cafés that were becoming popular along the St. Lawrence strip—to catch the overflow of all those people who couldn’t get into real galleries, he thought, feeling the old mix of protectiveness and depreciation that Liz had always aroused in him. The lighting in the place was awful; he had to lean up over tables and shuffle his way around the handful of patrons to find angles where the paintings would actually read. Liz had abandoned her pattern work to return to her first love, the human figure, though these paintings were nothing like the luscious formal portraits and nudes she used to do in their Toronto days. There was one of an emaciated man
sitting cross-legged in a chair with a dwarfish-looking girl in a yellow dress standing to one side of him; there was one of a group of schoolgirls standing in a semicircle with their backs to the viewer as if at some game, though from the tone of the piece they might just as easily have been staring at a playmate they’d disemboweled or at a piece of road-kill. Alex found the paintings vaguely irritating and unpleasant: they were reaching for effect, he said to himself, though the truth, of course, was that they were irritating
to him
. There were nearly a dozen pieces, all fair-sized and meticulous, and all with Liz’s trademark attention to every detail. What they didn’t have was Liz’s usual impulse to please.
Fuck you
, they seemed to say. But maybe not to everyone, only to him. At the back of his mind he had somehow imagined that Liz wouldn’t actually survive in this city without him, but now it seemed she’d come into her own as if he had just been this millstone to her, this
male
.

He was down to the last stages of his preparation. The recipe called for a final baking phase to open the mussels up, but all he had in the way of bakeware was an old lasagna tray he’d got from his mother. It would have to do. He scooped the paella into it. The bit of saffron he’d used, just a few strands, had worked like a miracle, transforming the whole to an aromatic glow of orange-red like a Hindu offering. He spread all the little morsels into place until it looked like a veritable work of art, then stuck it into the oven at a low heat, thinking he would fire it up only after María had arrived.

The twilight hour had come on. There seemed something funny about the apartment: it was the emptiness, he realized, the animal sense that there was no other being in range, though he wasn’t sure if it was Moses he missed or Jiri. The apartment seemed cold suddenly, but when he cranked up the thermostat there was no telltale hiss of it kicking in. The bastards hadn’t turned the heat on yet. One more grievance for his list, he thought, but no, he was done with that.

There would be snow soon, a week maybe, not more. In his mind’s eye he could already see it covering the sidewalks and streets, could see the bogs of slush that formed at intersections, the cars skittering up Côte des Neiges against the slippage and the great yellow arsenal of snow machines that invaded the city.
Snow was general all over Ireland
. Where was that from? There had been snow the last time he’d visited Ingrid—he remembered cooking with her in her kitchen, how comforting it had
felt to be inside and warm while outside the wind was blowing and the drifts were piling up.

God
, he thought. He had left her over such a little thing. Not that he found her faith any less outlandish now than he had then, but it was probably no more outlandish than his own notions of the world would surely one day turn out to have been. Liz had been as godless as he was, yet that hadn’t stood out as any special marker of compatibility; rather, it had seemed merely one more part of her that was somehow debased in being such a mirror of him. That was what had put him off about her paintings, at bottom, how they had looked like images out of his own mind, as if the scarier notion was not that she had got over him so easily, but that they were still linked, that she still remained the guardian of his worst self.

He put on some Steely Dan to set the mood for María’s arrival. “Home at Last”: it was a nod to the
Odyssey
, he’d never caught that. Something he’d actually read. There was a detail that had always stuck with him, the twitching legs of the unfaithful maids during the great mass murder the story ended with. Who did that? Who strung people up for being unfaithful? The twitching made the scene real, as if Homer had witnessed it with his own eyes. It was the same detail the boy from El Mozote had used, the one who had survived—the twitching legs of the children who had been hanged.

Alex switched off the music. He wished he hadn’t made that connection. The last thing he needed was El Mozote on the brain when María arrived.

I don’t know if this is something you two feel comfortable talking about on the air, but I hear you got off to a bit of a rocky start in the romance department
.

(Blushing) Well, I guess rape and pillage aren’t exactly aphrodisiacs. But maybe I should let María tell the story
.

Please. Is not a joke for me. Is not a story. Is my life
.

It was Liz who had fucked him up, coming by like that. It would have been better if he hadn’t run into her in the summer; it would have been better if he had never gone to see her show. He could have handled the obvious, a few battered women, say, or a bit of leather, but not the general creepiness of it all, which still kept tugging at him like a grapple hook in his gut. Somehow Liz had managed to get the whole of their gangrenous relationship into those paintings. Maybe a stranger wouldn’t see it, some guy, say, who’d never trussed Liz up like an animal and put
his cock in her; but it was there. His tying her up and his gagging her. His fucking her while she clawed at him and screamed no. His
raping
her. There. He had let the word enter his head. For months now he had not allowed himself to so much as think the separate letters of it, but then at once his heart was pounding, he wanted to smash something, he was shouting like an idiot.