The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  “Alex says you’re a painter,” Katherine said, and asked to look at her work. She had ideas about it, which she brought up, and Liz was animated, appreciative.

  “What a bunch of pretentious crap,” Liz said the instant Katherine had gone, by which she meant, You want to fuck her.

  He was angry at her all the time now. He was angry if she reprimanded him for some oversight and angry if she didn’t, angry if she let him have sex with her and angry when she put him off. He was angry about his furtive outings with Amanda, that he had this secret life but it was so pathetic. He was angry about his smoking. It wasn’t as if Liz hadn’t smoked her own share before this campaign of hers, but now it had become a thing, a moral imperative. Because of her asthma, because of her allergies. Because of the fucking cat, even, that was how low he was, willing to poison the animal for his habit. These were the kinds of accusations she made. It didn’t matter that he didn’t smoke in the apartment anymore, that she hadn’t had an allergic reaction since he’d known her; what mattered was that he give in. Half his energies went to hiding his smoking from her, to sucking mints, finding bathrooms, carrying gum and oranges in every pocket. He’d squeeze spray from the orange peels onto himself to hide the smell from her; he’d pick fights so he wouldn’t have to get near her. It didn’t make sense: he was a grown man. But then none of it made sense. It didn’t make sense that they never talked about breaking up except as the last screaming threats in the arguments they had. It didn’t make sense that they still had sex.

  The sex was like his smoking: it had its own life now, its own will, always worked out whatever logic it needed to stay alive, whatever excuse. It was most intense after they’d fought—maybe they fought just to have it, or fought to pay for it, or fought so there wasn’t a chance they might have to talk about it, and so end it. Moses in his litter box was fussier than they were: at least he covered his shit, and hunched himself sheepishly to let it out, while they shat and then wallowed in it as if there wasn’t any point anymore in vying for each other’s good opinion.

  She took an X-Acto knife to his books once, his expensive theory texts and a 1901 edition of The Origin he’d paid fifty pounds for in England. It must have crossed her mind then, as it did his, how thin the line might be between this step and the next, though all he could think of, seeing that knife in her hands, was how he would fuck her. How he’d make her pay.

  “Why don’t you go fuck Katherine?” she said. “Why don’t you go read her your fucking literary theory?”

  She was as angry as he was, he knew that, but he wouldn’t let himself think of it, wouldn’t let himself be blunted. Blunted from what? From getting up a feasible escape velocity, maybe, but also from the sex, which had to be fed, which they had to break up the furniture for, the walls, until they’d burned down the house.

  Somehow they managed to carry on until Christmas. Liz was on the outs with her parents and he went home alone, feeling putrid with secrets. His parents were in their new house now, a warehouse of a place full of cold, empty rooms without uses or histories. Christmas Eve they served salted cod, baccalà, and Alex thought he would retch.

  “Give him those bones you left for the dog,” his father said, and Alex actually left the room and sat crying on the toilet as if he was five again.

  He spent New Year’s Eve with a friend in Toronto, without telling Liz. When he got back to Montreal the chill in the apartment was so palpable it was like stepping into a meat locker.

  Liz went around the apartment furiously throwing things into a bag in a show of leaving.

  “Where were you, exactly?”

  “Home.”

  “You weren’t fucking home, I called.”

  That would have been the best thing, if she’d actually left and never returned. Just end it, he thought. Instead they had one of their free-for-alls, pulling out every stop, until Liz was in hysterics, accusing him of every manner of perfidy, throwing things at him, bawling. He thought of her closed up here over the holidays, slowly going mad.

  “Let’s just stop,” he said. “Let’s stop.”

  But already he was thinking ahead to the sex. He took her there on the couch while she was still crying.

  “Tell me the truth,” she said. “Tell me you’re not cheating on me.”

  How could she ask him that, how could it matter? It was as if she was lowering herself. It was as if they still had a chance.

  Alex was in his bed. Over in Chernobyl it would be mid-morning already, and they’d be dumping planeloads of sand on the fire; in Engelström Ingrid would be making coffee in her kitchen, setting out the children’s breakfasts. Even now, he could call. He had a flash of generic blondness and tried to conjure something real, something flesh and blood, but couldn’t get beyond the barest intimation.

  Who knew how long he and Liz might have gone on like that, if Ingrid’s letter hadn’t arrived. They might still be at it now, wasting away in that apartment while Moses circled them, wondering at their derangement. Ingrid’s letter, with its odd, familiar stamps and script, seemed to reach him from another dimension: different rules applied there, humans were different, and what was expected of them. When he read it his first reaction wasn’t at all what he later liked to tell himself, that he should go to her at once, but a kind of shrugging off like someone turning over in a bed, feigning sleep. It wasn’t important, was what he’d thought. I could ignore it.

  He put the letter in the bottom of a drawer, where Liz wouldn’t see it.

  Some days passed, a few or several, he lost track. It was bitterly cold, he didn’t go out, he and Liz fought and had sex. He had dreams in which the boy tracked him down, and he had that sick sense of no redemption, no excuse.

  Liz sensed something different in him, watching his every move, waiting to catch him out. He couldn’t bear it.

  See, he thought, I have a child after all.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out, for Christ’s sake. Just out.”

  He came home late from his theory class, drunk, and Liz was just sitting in the dark in the living room in her robe, waiting.

  “You’re fucking her, aren’t you?”

  “What?”

  “You’re fucking Katherine. Just admit it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She sounded so certain and hard that Alex thought she might be telling the truth.

  “You’re fucking crazy,” he said. “You’re fucking nuts.”

  “I don’t even know who you are,” she said.

  Alex’s brain told him, Say something stupid. Say anything.

  “The truth is I’d fuck her if I had the chance. At least it would be something normal.”

  “You fucking asshole!” She was hitting at him. “You fucking asshole!”

  He felt a surge of adrenaline: this could be it, the end.

  “Hit me! Hit me!” He tussled with her. “Get the knife, why don’t you!”

  They had fallen back onto the couch. He knew what would come next, they both must have, it was what happened with them, though a part of him thought he should cross a line this time, so they couldn’t go back.

  “Get off of me! Get off!”

  She hit his lip with the flat of her hand and he tasted blood. After that he couldn’t have said what exactly happened—there was just the mess of clothing and limbs, the sense of resistance, but there was always resistance. He held her wrists down, what he always did, heard her sharp intake of breath, felt her hips against his, either fighting him or rising to meet him.

  He still had his pants around his ankles when he rolled off her onto the floor.

  His head was spinning.

  “Fuck.” He hung his head between his knees. “Fuck.”

  He wouldn’t look at her. He was trying not to think, was waiting to see how she would cast the thing, waiting to see what it had been.

  He heard her turn away and pull her robe around her. Moses was watching him from the kitchen doorway.

  �
�I think you’d better go,” Liz said.

  That was it, like a door closing. He jammed some stuff into a suitcase, just random handfuls that he grabbed from the bedroom, and stumbled out. When he was on the street he threw up on the sidewalk, once and then again.

  two

  — October 1986 —

  So now all who escaped death in battle or by shipwreck had got safely home except Ulysses.

  HOMER

  The Odyssey

  – 1 –

  Alex stood in the concourse of the convention center, a huge seventies-era hangar in soaring concrete and plate glass, and scanned the sea of milling delegates trying to spot María. She had insisted on coming over on her own. Around him, people were talking about protocols and polar vortices and catalytic cycles, the crowd a weird mix of science geeks and guys in business suits and greenies in jeans and tie-dye. It was the greenies who seemed to be spewing the most jargon, everyone else busy elbowing toward the complimentary doughnuts at the coffee table.

  From somewhere he heard a shout of “Ah-leex!” loud and unabashed, like a mother calling a recalcitrant son.

  “Ah-leex! I am here!”

  She was over by the registration table, wearing her trademark pullover and tight jeans. His heart still stopped a bit whenever he saw her, at the sheer abundance of her, though in the three months or so that he’d been dating her, if that was what you would call it, he hadn’t got any more share of that abundance than the fleeting salutational kisses on the cheek she allowed him.

  He came up to her, and gave her one now that she hardly acknowledged.

  “Queekly,” she said. “Soon they will start. I have your card.”

  Somehow she’d managed to get him accreditation. She’d been in the country less than a year but already knew her way around bureaucracies, official languages, the nuts and bolts of existence here, better than Alex did.

  “I don’t think I can stay long,” he said tentatively. When she let that pass, he added, “You’ll still come by my place later? For supper?”

  She had taken him by the elbow.

  “Come, we must hurry.”

  He was an idiot wasting his time here; he should have been home preparing his lecture for Canadian Literature. The course had looked like a good idea when he’d agreed to teach it back in May, but now the workload for it occupied most of his waking life.

  It was the first plenary. It remained a mystery to him that María had got involved in this Greenpeace stuff, which he’d always considered the soft end of political activism. Some kind of post-traumatic sublimation, he figured, throwing her lot in with tree huggers so she wouldn’t have to think about the vicious war—he’d been reading up on it—that she’d left behind back home.

  They had come to a table at the entrance to the auditorium neatly arrayed with what looked like Sony Walkmans.

  “You must give your license or son’thing,” María said.

  “Sorry?”

  “For the translation.”

  Instead of his license he pulled out his part-time faculty card, with the obscure intent of impressing someone—María, who couldn’t have cared less? The girl at the table, who looked all of sixteen?—but then actually regretted parting with it.

  The girl handed him his Walkman without so much as looking up at him.

  “Aren’t you taking one for yourself?”

  “Is no need,” María said.

  He still couldn’t believe he was really with her. He felt like the dog who had caught the car: this never happened to him, that he actually wound up with a woman he coveted. When María’s class at St. Bart’s had ended he’d assumed he’d never see her again, but then out of the blue Miguel had called and invited him to a party at their apartment.

  “To return the favor,” he’d said. “Is Salvadoran way.”

  Alex hadn’t put much store in the thing. He’d figured Miguel’s tiny apartment would be so crowded with Latin revelers he’d never get anywhere near María, if she was there at all. But then he’d got there to find just a tiny handful of other invitees—a shy couple just arrived from San Salvador who didn’t speak half a dozen words of English; a paunchy former-hippie type from St. Bart’s, Bernie, who had loser written all over him; another Salvadoran, Luisa, rake-thin and with a decided limp in one leg but who had a streak of acid to her, directing asides in Spanish to the others the whole evening that were clearly barbs against him and Bernie. Then there was Miguel, of course, the impresario; and María.

  The place looked different from when he’d come before. In what had been Miguel’s room the kitchen table had been set up with a brightly patterned tablecloth and plates of hors d’oeuvres, the porno and musclemen removed from the walls and colored shawls placed over the lamps to dim the lighting. It all looked so civilized and formal, not at all what he had expected. Then there was the strange intimacy of the event, this odd mix whose precise chemistry Alex couldn’t reckon. Before they sat down to dinner—since that appeared to be what was going to happen, though Alex, who hadn’t understood this, had wolfed down a sub before heading over—they were practically standing on each other’s toes, María’s room still curtained off and no one making any move to colonize the kitchen. Alex, as usual, ended up talking to the person in the room he was least interested in, trading half-hearted anecdotes with Bernie about life at St. Bart’s. But then they sat down to supper and he actually found himself next to María.

  “Oh,” he said awkwardly. “Is this all right?”

  “Is your place,” she said.

  Once they were seated the dynamics in the room grew clearer. From the fun Luisa kept poking at Bernie and the arch looks she directed at Miguel, it was plain Miguel was setting them up. That left Alex, however; Alex and María.

  He asked María about the hors d’oeuvres but then made the mistake of using the word specialty, botching his explanation of it so that she thought it referred to some kind of ingredient.

  “Is Miguel,” she said, closing the topic off. “All food tonight is Miguel.”

  He hadn’t realized how rudimentary her English was. He was beginning to despair of actually having a conversation when he discovered she was fluent in French.

  “I study in Paris,” she said. “One year.”

  Alex wasn’t sure what to make of that. It was what the bosses did in those Latin countries, sent their children off to Harvard and the Sorbonne.

  “C’est très beau, Paris,” he offered.

  “Oui, oui, c’est évident. But I missed my own country.”

  He had to struggle to keep up with her. It was probably the first time since he’d moved here that he’d had an actual conversation in French. He was exhausted by the end of the evening, not just from the French but from the feeling he’d been engaged the whole time in some long, irresolvable argument—over what, he couldn’t have said, except that there was hardly a comment of his that María hadn’t found a way to resist or contradict. He lingered behind after the others had gone, but without much hope.

  They had switched back to English by then.

  “I suppose I should go,” he said, unable to screw up the courage to make any sort of play.

  María’s eyes flitted briefly to Miguel.

  “Next week,” she said. “Is Salvador party. You can come.”

  So it had begun, their series of dates that were not quite dates. After the first party there had been dinners, fund-raisers, Salvadoran art shows at tiny hole-in-the-wall spaces on St. Lawrence or Duluth, Salvadoran soccer games at Jeanne Mance Park. Once, early on, Alex had dared to suggest that the two of them go out to dinner somewhere on their own.

  “Is boring, no, only two?” she’d said.

  After that, he’d just gone along with whatever agenda she set, even though he couldn’t rightly say he was making any progress with her, however that might be judged. Mostly, when they were together, there wasn’t even a chance to talk properly: the music was too loud, or María was speaking in rapid Spanish to her other friends, or there w
as just too much going on, pupusas were being handed around or someone had started a sing-along or there was some heated argument on a fine point of Salvadoran politics. The worst of it was that he didn’t really possess any extra verbal communication skills—María had quickly given up taking him onto the dance floor, though that never stopped her from finding other, more suitable partners. Seeing her move out there, with a visceral precision that seemed its own dialect, he felt like a closet WASP, as if this tight-assed, godforsaken country of his had somehow beaten him down to its own image.

  They’d reverted to English as their lingua franca, the only real asset Alex brought to the table, but the switch hadn’t given him much advantage in their exchanges, or deflected María from the thankless but necessary work of challenging his every utterance. If he disparaged something, she’d find a way to sing its praises; if he tried to raise something up, she’d be quick to dismiss it. Alex figured this was some sort of Latin courtship ritual, like a tango, though more often than not she caught him out. She’d torn a strip off him when he’d claimed Canadians were less racist than Americans, using the unfair advantage of actual experience.

  “Canadians, they think they are very good,” she said. “But in Canada, only six thousand Salvadorans. In U.S., six hundred thousand.”

  Never mind that all of them were there illegally and that the Americans were shipping bombs to her country as if they were Corn Flakes. Yet he had to take her point: even in the Land of Reagan some sort of place had been found for those hundreds of thousands, while the Canadians let in their piddling handfuls and thought they were saving the world.

  After a few of these batterings, Alex grew more careful. Most of what passed for his worldview suddenly seemed horribly glib: he’d always thought of himself as holding the right opinions, but there was a whole order of things he’d never seen through to, that his little cocoon-life had always protected him from. He’d had an image of being a sort of confessor to María, but grew more and more uneasy about picking his way into the minefield of her personal life.