The Origin of Species (55 page)

That was it, then. It wasn’t some vague threat, the whole union business she’d tried to put him off with. She was a target.

“Then how can you go back? It’s just crazy.”

“Things have changed now. It’s not so dangerous.”

“How can you be sure?”

“There are ways to be sure.”

Her moment of candor had passed.

“There are things you don’t know,” she said finally. “It’s not so simple, our politics.”

The same old line.

“I’m not an idiot.”

But the subject was closed. María stared down at the table.

“You will look after my brother, I think.”

He had the sense, from the shift in her tone, that this was where she’d been headed all along, was what she had traded for.
Great
, he thought. Now he’d be truly saddled with Miguel.
Es mi hermano
.

“He’s a big boy. He can look after himself.”

María ignored this.

“He’s like you,” she said.

He wasn’t sure if this was another of her Delphic pronouncements.

“You mean he likes me.”

“Yes. Also that.”

Fuck it
, he thought. All along he had imagined that Miguel was the one who had been wooing him for María’s sake when it had been the other way around. He felt past caring. If he had never met María, none of this would ever have touched him. All those bodies piling up down there, how much difference would another one make?

María glanced at her watch.

“Alex,” she said, “you will tell Esther? You’ll give her the rosary?”

“Of course I will.”

Her voice had gone uncharacteristically tentative.

“You mustn’t think,” she began. “You mustn’t blame her. I was the one to make the secret about us. To ask her not to say.”

It was what he’d suspected. To avoid him. To keep clear of his stinky gringo flesh.

“Thanks for saying so, at least.”

“It wasn’t for you. Not because of our problem. It was only to be with her. I can’t say so well in English what I mean. To be with someone like this. Someone with God, maybe to say, but you don’t believe it.”

He couldn’t quite bring himself to admit to her that he understood. He didn’t know what she’d taken from Esther, what wisdom or solace, but he could see at once that he would only have been an impediment.

“You will give her the rosary?” she said again.

It was her way of letting Esther know she was off the hook, he saw now, by giving him this commission.

“Yes, of course.”

She had stood. He imagined her as if she were just some new refugee girl walking into his class at St. Bart’s for the first time, dark-skinned and smallish, after all, with callused fingers and a bit of down on her upper lip. He had the sense he had seen her only in bits and pieces until then, never whole, as somehow more and less than she was.

“What will you do there, in El Salvador?”

“I am a teacher. I will teach.”

He couldn’t muster the courage to hug her and only kissed her cheeks, which felt hopelessly inadequate.

“I think you are a good man, Mr. Alex,” she said. “You don’t believe it, but it’s so.”

The benediction took away some of the sting of the many months he had felt like such a non-entity in her eyes. It was what he would have to settle for.
Good. Nice
. It was maybe what he wanted.

He was late for his session now, but had been holding his pee ever since the emergency room and felt ready to burst. He slipped into the bathroom off the lobby, but before he could get a stream going a grizzled lug with liver-colored tattoos running all along his arms stepped up to the urinal next to him.
Fuck
. It was hopeless now; he couldn’t pee in company. One of the workers from the lobby, it looked like, draining off the coffee they spent the day drinking instead of working, the piss kept cascading out of him like Montmorency Falls.

Alex flushed to cover his failure. It was pathetic, this little problem of his. He couldn’t help seeing it as some sort of manhood issue, like
impotence or premature ejaculation. Back in the animal days of staking territory he would have been doomed, he and his kids would have starved, because he couldn’t get up the piddle to claim his patch.

He washed his hands to complete the charade. On the nameplate on the hand dryer, someone had gone to great trouble to scratch out “Canada” on the company address. Probably Mr. Tattoo. By now Alex’s mood had soured completely: his bladder ached; his head had started to throb from his having missed lunch. In the lobby two workers were wheeling a cart laden with construction waste toward the service elevator, moving along at a snail’s pace, blocking everyone’s path, and Alex thought,
Fucking Quebecois
, though they could just as easily have been Poles or Slavs or Russian Jews, who knew in this bloody waste-bin country.
Just stay home
, he thought.

As he passed the cart it suddenly veered in front of him and a jutting two-by-four jabbed his shoulder.

“
Pardon, monsieur
,” one of workers mumbled, deadpan.

Alex had an urge to grab the two-by-four and bean the two of them with it.

“Next time watch where you’re going.”

“Eh, buddy,” the other one said. “Fuck you.”

U
p in the psych ward he headed straight for the bathroom, which was mercifully empty. The pee burned as it came out from being held in so long. At the mirrors he pulled his shirt down over his shoulder and saw the patch of blue that had started to spread under his collarbone.
Assholes
. The image played in his mind again of him busting the guys’ heads with a two-by-four. A couple of good wallops was all he wanted, the satisfying thunk of wood against bone.

It was in this state of bloodlust that he arrived at Dr. Klein’s door. Recently the doctor’s pod-person neutrality at his late arrivals had started to give way to little throat clearings and grimaces that looked suspiciously like impatience. But today he actually stood, gangly and stooped, and held the door for Alex like a young loan officer hopeful of landing a client.

He’d had a haircut, it looked like, and got a new suit, not his usual sheeny gabardine but a well-cut Sunday suit in dark wool.

“Sorry I’m late. One of the workers in the lobby bashed into me with a two-by-four.”

He had gotten increasingly better over time at stretching the truth. He had been sobered, briefly, by what Amanda’s therapist had said about lying, but then slowly had begun to take it as a kind of license. Everyone lied in therapy, it turned out.

“You’re all right?” the doctor said, with such naked concern that Alex felt ashamed.

“It’s fine. Just my shoulder.”

Alex took off his shoes and lay down on the couch, which, as always, had the effect of instantly calming him. He felt the admonition
go through him, also as always, that he should talk about something real for once. They had gotten a good couple of weeks out of Amanda’s suicide, once he’d finally admitted to it, though even that had begun to seem merely fodder after a while. Maybe what he ought to talk about was his urinary complex, there was something real. Or those two dick-heads in the lobby, and the fantasies of psychotic violence he spun with surprising frequency in the course of any given day.

“I think we were talking about your recurring dream,” the doctor said. “About going back to high school.”

Fucking dream work. Evasion, evasion. He started churning things out, the connections, the predictable insights—if dreams were so smart, he wondered, then why were they so obvious?—but the whole time his thoughts were elsewhere. His head was still jangling from his talk with María, which had left him with a sense of burgeoning untidiness. He could feel the clutter stretching out around him, growing more and more unruly. These sessions were merely part of the problem now, spewing psychic debris that was just left to molder in their wake. In any event, he’d be ending them soon. Once the loose ends were tied, his apartment, his grants, the okay from Jiri—he didn’t let himself think of Esther, though she was the crux of it—he’d be gone. He relished the thought of making the announcement to Dr. Klein.
I have a son, you see
. Trump that.

So on the one side, there’s your K. novel, if I can even call it a novel, but that’s another story, and I don’t mind admitting I was ready to slit my wrists when I finished reading the thing. Not exactly big on hope. But then look at your life. It’s just one damned thing after another—the Galápagos, Liz, Amanda, then this amazing woman who’s a novel in herself but who’s dying in front of your eyes and this whole other woman who suddenly picks up and heads home though she’s got a death warrant on her. And yet at the end of it: hope. This little child. This gift. It’s a bit ironic, isn’t it?

(Sheepish) Well, Peter, I guess just because I don’t believe in hope doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist
.

He had fallen silent.

“You haven’t mentioned Liz,” Dr. Klein said. “I think you met her in high school.”

Liz. He had started with her and seemed set to end with her. Try as he might to get past their relationship, it kept coming back to torment him.
Klein had stuck to it with the obstinacy of a not-very-bright dog to his bone, until Alex had actually called her to arrange a meeting, as he had long promised himself to do, in the hope of clearing her from his mind.

Liz had immediately assumed her most bitter, take-no-prisoners tone, though he couldn’t tell if this was her official stance with him now or just an opening gambit.

“What is it you want, exactly?”

“I dunno. Just to talk.”

He had known what he’d wanted, of course: exoneration, unconditional pardon, the record expunged, though he would settle for a grudging truce. Anything to escape this sense of an accuser out there on the loose, holding intact this demon version of him.

When they met, though, at a café on Duluth, she looked merely uncertain and on edge. She was waiting for him at a little table by the window, a bottle of Perrier in front of her. The same awkwardness seemed to go through them both as he came up.

Neither of them made any move toward actual physical contact.

“So,” Liz said.

He had a little speech he’d put together that consisted mainly of various levels of apology. He was sorry for the abortion; he was sorry he hadn’t supported her more when they’d moved here; he was sorry for how things had ended. There were certain words he planned to avoid, certain specifics, but if it came to it he was ready to be sorry for other things as well. The speech was structured like a kind of plot diagram: rising action, conflict, awful climax. The denouement, he hoped, would be them sitting here saddened but reconciled in this café on Duluth, as in the last scene of a Woody Allen film. This was when he would tell her about Ingrid. He would tell her about his son.

It took a matter of seconds for the whole scheme to crumble.

“Look, this is stupid,” Liz said. “We can’t go around pretending to hate each other for the rest of our lives.”

He latched onto the word like a drowning man: pretending.

“No,” he said, lowering his gaze as if he were the one who was mainly at fault in this.

“We were both pretty messed up. I can hardly even bring myself to think about it. I don’t know—the two of us. Maybe we’re just too much alike. Maybe we know each other too well.”

All of this was so far from what he’d expected that he felt he could only follow her lead until he’d figured out where exactly they were headed.

“I always thought that,” he said carefully.

“It’s not as if either of us is especially well adjusted. I suppose that was what I liked about you.”

It stunned him that she could still talk about that, about liking him.

“I guess I made a lot of mistakes.”

“Yeah, well. We both did.”

She was being so reasonable, so measured. It was almost as if they were talking about some other breakup, a normal one. Maybe it
had
been normal.

“So. That was all I wanted to say.” The initiative had gone over to her entirely by now. “I just didn’t want to have to go around feeling all the time like there was this
thing
between us.”

That was it, then. No specifics, no who-did-what, no Jesuitical haggling over the fine points of blame. She was actually letting him off the hook, more or less as he’d hoped. What he couldn’t figure was why he felt so strangely bereft, as if he’d been robbed somehow of his fair portion.

“Look, Liz,” he started, not even sure what he was about to say, which almost certainly meant he was about to put his foot in it. He was saved by the waitress, who chose this moment to grace them with her presence.

Alex, in his bad French, ordered a cappuccino, the first thing he could think of. The waitress gave him a withering smile.

“
Et pour madame?
”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

By then, whatever urge it was that had risen up in him, the need to make a concession, the need
to know
, had passed. He couldn’t bring himself to go back there now, into that swamp.

“I should tell you I’m moving back to Toronto,” Liz said, looking away as if she had said something awkward.

“Oh.” It was what he had always figured, that she would go. He might have felt relieved at this except for the shadow that had seemed to cross her, that had seemed to put their conversation in a different light. What he had understood was this: she was the one who didn’t want to know. “I guess it never worked out for you here.”

“I don’t like it here, to tell you the truth. I feel like a foreigner or something.”

It was true: even sitting in this café she looked out of place. Something, some quality in her, didn’t fit.

He couldn’t bring himself to ask about Moses.

“If you need any help,” he said.

“It’s fine. I’ll manage.”

He’d been left to drink his cappuccino alone, everything that he’d been planning to say, to get rid of, still sitting in him like a bad meal. That had been the crux of it: he had wanted to hand everything over to her, like a suitcase stuffed with a body he had cut up.
Here, take this
. It astounded him that he had even remotely considered dragging his son into the discussion, though in his mind he’d envisioned bringing pictures out and Liz growing maternal and good-humored, gently chiding him for not having mentioned the boy sooner.
Bollocks
. It was his baby, not hers; hers was in the suitcase. It would have seemed a mockery to her, that he’d been handed this grown child in perfect working order like a manufacturer’s replacement for the one that hadn’t panned out.