The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  “If people can’t go thirty bucks right now, maybe they can go twenty-five, whatever. We’ll just have to move more slowly on the repairs.”

  It occurred to Alex that this was an actual negotiation they were engaged in, that any instant Shapiro was going to set his own renewal form in front of him and ask him to sign. It all seemed so banal. This wasn’t some mythic battle of the forces of left and right, just two guys haggling over a matter of dollars.

  “I think people would rather wait for the Régie to decide,” Alex said.

  Alex saw his twitch of irritation.

  “Well, that’s their right.”

  Shapiro had stood. It looked like the meeting was over. Alex saw someone waiting in the hall to come in after him and realized this meeting wasn’t anything special, that Shapiro was merely going through the pile of holdouts.

  “We’re not just some holding company, Alex—my father started out here after the war straight out of a DP camp. Most of our properties are little apartment houses the same people have been living in all their lives.”

  More than anyone, Shapiro reminded him of his own brother Gus, right down to the receding hairline. Gus, the lawyer, helped manage a little apartment building their father had bought when he’d sold the farm. Alex had heard him going on about the headaches of the place in the same terms as Shapiro, the rent controls, the tenants, the repairs. Alex’s sympathies then didn’t always lean to the tenants—the building was their parents’ nest egg, their legacy, all they had to show for their years of work.

  A few days after the meeting, a worker appeared at Alex’s door saying he had come to fix the ceiling. It took Alex a moment to figure out what he meant: a patch of ceiling stucco had fallen in his bedroom months before, under the old owners, and he’d sent in a letter of complaint, but then had never bothered to follow up.

  “It’s not really a good time,” he said.

  The worker was a Slavic type who looked wound up with a sense of mission.

  “I come back.”

  “No, no, do it now.”

  If Shapiro was trying to buy him off, it was depressing how low the stakes were. The worker heaved trowelfuls of Polyfilla up to the ceiling, scalloping it into the rococo swirls Alex knew well from the elaborate plaster work of every new Italian house in his hometown but that looked nothing like the innocuous sprayed-on stucco of the rest of the ceiling.

  “I paint it whole ceiling? More same then.”

  “Forget it, that’s fine.”

  Every time Alex walked into his bedroom now his eye went at once to this Rorschach patch of hyper-white swirls. It was as if Shapiro was sending him a message. See? The building needs work.

  In August they closed the pool. Alex had used the pool, had actually got down into the not-especially-warm water of it, maybe twice in the whole time he’d lived in the building. But he immediately fired off a missive to Shapiro & Co. demanding that it be reopened without delay. This time, he had the added leverage of medical necessity: Esther used the pool almost daily. One of your tenants, Esther Rubinstein, he said in his letter, who suffers from multiple sclerosis … There was no reply, however, no conciliatory phone call, no attempt at explanation, and Esther was forced to go off to the Y for her swims. At least Alex had the pleasure of feeling his indignation grow strong in him again. Shapiro had played him, with his immigrant sob story.

  DP camp, he’d said. Not concentration.

  More than two months had passed now since the pool had been closed. In the interim another round of outages had started up, leading to the past three hellish weeks when Alex’s bathroom had been out of service almost continuously while they replaced twenty floors of piping along his line of units, Alex carrying potfuls of water to the toilet from the kitchen each time he needed to flush. By now Alex had filed five separate complaints at the Régie, each of which had cost him many hours in lineups and twenty dollars a pop in application fees, and none of which, since the Régie didn’t allow class actions, came anywhere near capturing the true scope of the landlords’ villainy, reducing everything down to the pettiest sort of private grievance. There was no sign that any of these claims was nearing fruition: six months to a year was what he was told. If the landlords had tried to invent a machine for crushing tenants’ spirits, they couldn’t have come up with anything better than the Régie.

  He passed the sixth floor. He was dripping with sweat by now. He’d drop dead soon and they’d find him here weeks from now, growing ripe along with his groceries.

  He had to quash the urge to stop for a cigarette.

  “Fuck,” he said, fighting for breath, “fuck.”

  He had reached the eighth floor.

  The hall was littered with a scattering of vaguely familiar objects—floorlamps, a headboard, three milk crates full of albums. So it was true. Alex had been to Lois’s often enough, drafting letters and plotting strategy, to recognize her belongings. Brenda, by then, had revealed herself as the borderline psychotic she truly was.

  “It would probably be really easy for us to sleep together,” Lois had said at the outset, “but I think that would be a bad idea.” Alex had been in her thrall after that. His own thinking in these situations was always the opposite, that sex was the best possible outcome, but the least likely.

  Two scrawny guys who looked as if they’d just got out of a halfway house were trying to jam a sofa into the elevator, trading curses that sounded like the slurred trills of some forgotten insect species.

  “Calisse, c’est complètement fucked up.”

  Lois came backing out of her apartment dragging a huge potted ficus. She was dressed in sweats that made lumpish and indistinct the little package her body was, and so seemed to bring it more clearly before him.

  “Alex, what are you doing here?” She looked more alarmed than caught out. “You look awful.”

  Her hair was tied up in a frowzy bun, leaving her neck exposed.

  “You’re moving out,” he said.

  “Alex, don’t start.”

  “I can’t believe you’re moving out in the middle of all this.”

  “I don’t really have the time to get into this right now, Alex.”

  Her movers had managed to get the sofa into the elevator. Lois heaved her ficus over to them.

  “Don’t tell me you made a deal with them.”

  This was how they had been whittling down the opposition, by giving them kickbacks to move out. They could jack up the rent as much as they thought they could get away with then, on the bet that the new tenants wouldn’t know enough to complain.

  “Look, I’ve been late for work twice this week because of the elevators. I can’t afford to lose my job over this. I just want to be able to wake up in the morning and know that my water is going to be on, and my electricity, and that I can get to work on time.”

  “But it’s the same for all of us. We have to stick together.”

  “Alex, we’re not fighting the fucking Sandinista revolution. It’s just an apartment building.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What is the point?”

  He couldn’t think of a convincing comeback to that.

  “Did you make a deal?” he said again.

  She was still handing stuff off to her guys.

  “Yes.” She didn’t flinch. “I made a deal.”

  “I can’t believe it! You of all people!”

  “Alex, don’t.”

  “But you sold us out!”

  “Get off your high horse, Alex, everyone knows you met with Shapiro too.”

  That stopped him short.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, didn’t you?”

  So Shapiro was truly a snake after all: good. Somehow he’d found the way to turn their meeting against him.

  “Who said that?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Just tell me who.”

  “Somebody saw you, for Christ’s sake.”

  He felt sick. I
t had never even crossed his mind back then that anyone would imagine he was selling out.

  “I wasn’t making any deal, if that’s what you think.”

  “Then why the secret? Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  “There wasn’t anything to tell.”

  Who knew how long she’d been thinking that about him, that he couldn’t be trusted. Maybe from the start.

  “I made a mistake. I don’t know what I was thinking. That I’d set him straight or something. That I’d solve everything. But then the whole thing was so anticlimactic I couldn’t even bring myself to mention it.”

  They stood silent.

  “Look, Alex, I’m sure you’re telling the truth, but that’s the thing about all of this. It’s not supposed to be so fucked up.”

  The hallway was cleared now. The two moving guys had squatted against the wall to share a cigarette.

  “I’ve really got to go, Alex,” Lois said. “I’d watch your back if I were you. Brenda’s going around telling everyone you’re some kind of spy.”

  It was only when she’d gone that Alex realized he was stuck there, still nine floors from his apartment, elevatorless. If there’d been a window nearby, he might have jumped through it. Instead he sat down in the stairwell and lit a cigarette. All his tenants’ work was shit now. He wished he’d never gone near it.

  He shifted on the step and felt something press against his backside: the letter. He’d completely forgotten about it. Some parent he’d make, some dad. It was clumpy and warped now from the sweaty pressure of being in his pocket. He imagined some crucial word smudged away, the one that would have made the difference.

  He wouldn’t open it, not now. Not in this mood.

  He had lasted all of forty minutes that morning in his vow to quit smoking. He would finish this pack and try again; the climb had decided him. But then he checked how many cigarettes remained and had to hold back his panic: only three.

  He smoked the one he had going right down to the nub and butted it out on the pristine step. It left a black scorch against the gray, a sign that he’d been there.

  – 5 –

  By the time Alex had straggled within sight of the seventeenth-floor fire door, he had moved well past the point of self-pity into sheer bloody-mindedness. He’d had a chance by then to review most of his major life decisions, then to regret them, then to not care one way or the other; he’d had a chance to resolve to change in every possible way that could make any difference and then to admit that he’d never change, that he didn’t even want to, that he preferred just to wallow in his iniquities like a pig in his shit. His head was pounding, his legs were jelly, his lungs felt like burst balloons. All he could smell was his own sweat, shaded by now into degrees of staleness, and then the awful seafood stench coming up from his groceries like the miasma off a swamp.

  At least Novak would be gone. He had seen Jiri’s bag, the same battered leather one he’d first shown up with, sitting already packed by the door when he’d left the apartment that morning. If María hadn’t been waiting for him Alex would gladly have stuck around to see Jiri safely off, to his cab, to his very train. All that mattered was that he be gone, that Alex be free to have his evening with María without the sense of Jiri’s looming presence, which had somehow managed to assert itself in every corner of the apartment since he’d moved in.

  He had called in the first week of classes.

  “Your summer all right?”

  That he was making an effort at small talk had immediately put Alex on alert.

  “A bit busy.” He didn’t ask about Jiri’s summer—he’d heard all the rumors by then, about the break up but also about some questions that had arisen regarding his relations with a certain female undergrad.

  “Good, good,” Jiri said. “Of course.”

  He’d gone on in a strained tone about a book Alex ought to look at, while Alex waited for the penny to drop.

  “By the way, it wouldn’t be for long, but I need a place to leave my things for a couple of days till my sublet’s free. I’d go to the Y but the rooms are so awful there.”

  Alex wasn’t sure from this whether he actually intended to stay with him until he showed up the next day with his bag. It was the worst possible time for Alex, with the problems in the building and his constant cramming for CanLit. To top it off, Liz had dumped Moses with him: they had run into each other over the summer, a bristly encounter on St. Lawrence when they’d exchanged all of half a dozen words, but then she’d called him out of the blue to take the cat while she went out of town. The request was so clearly an effort at détente he could hardly say no, even though pets, in his building, were strictly verboten.

  “You’ll have to be careful about the cat,” he said when Jiri arrived, though without much hope that Jiri would be careful about the cat or about anything.

  There was the question of where Jiri would sleep.

  “There’s a sofa bed, but it’s a bit lumpy.” At the silence that followed, Alex added, “You can use my bedroom if you want.”

  Jiri placed his bag on Alex’s bed.

  “It’ll just be for a few days,” he said.

  Jiri wasted no time in colonizing Alex’s bedroom, taking over his desk and making several trips to his office the next day to collect shopping bags full of books, which he set out on Alex’s desktop and in the empty slots on Alex’s shelves.

  “You didn’t need this, did you?”

  “It’s all right. I can work at the table.”

  That was the beginning. Several of Jiri’s suits appeared over the next days, displacing Alex’s clothes in the bedroom closet, as did Jiri’s little manual typewriter and half a dozen boxes of files that he arranged at the foot of the bed. Through all of this Jiri came and went as if Alex were merely some stranger the Communist Housing Committee had forced him to live with. Most of their conversations were purely practical ones—where the salt was, where to find the nearest cleaners. Alex had never used a cleaners in his life except for his Sunday suits, but Jiri took every scrap of his clothing to them, right down to his underwear and his socks, something Alex had not even known was possible.

  Alex held out hope that the bedroom might at least serve as a sanctum for Jiri, keeping the rest of the apartment Jiri-free. But that hadn’t been the case. Rather, Jiri, by seeming to anticipate every possible need or action on Alex’s part—always up before him, always in the bathroom first, always claiming the best place at the dining table, the one that faced the windows—had somehow managed to change the apartment’s usual rules of being so that what mattered were no longer the actual physical walls, which turned out to be flimsy things, but rather the psychic ones that more and more boxed Alex into the little corner of floor space occupied by his now permanently made-up sofa bed.

  Even when Jiri was out, he was not gone. His toiletries filled the bathroom, including a tar shampoo that left an odor of roofing work; his strange foodstuffs filled every corner of the fridge, greenish pastes and sock-smelling cheeses and meats, thick, non-standard juices like pear and apricot. It was as if the very culture of the apartment was under siege, as if the moment would come when Jiri’s had so completely taken over that Alex would be forced out like an alien. Even Moses, already out of sorts at being abandoned in this foreign place, seemed to sense that the apartment’s center of gravity had shifted, skulking around in a sort of counterpoint to Jiri. Jiri showed Moses about the same amount of attentiveness he showed Alex, so that Alex was constantly on edge that he’d drop Moses from the balcony or betray him to the super or let him escape one day down the elevator and into the anonymous world. Yet a relationship had developed between them, disconcerting and strange, Moses forever circling around Jiri like a petitioner, planning his approaches, stealing quick feels against his leg. He took to curling up at night at the foot of Jiri’s, formerly Alex’s, bed, something Jiri actually tolerated, so that Alex was left alone on his lumpy sofa bed like a jilted lover.

  The work on the water lines began, an
d Jiri had yet to move out. Notices had gone around about potential outages suggesting that the work would be handled with a degree of civility this time, but it quickly turned into a free-for-all, elevators commandeered, mangled pipes left in the halls, and the water going off at all hours. Jiri took to doing his toilette at the Y, where he had a membership, so that none of these disruptions seemed to leave the least blemish on him. But Alex grew more bedraggled with each day. He went to the Y as well, for Esther’s swimming, but could hardly park her somewhere while he sneaked off to take a shower. Short, then, of forking out the ten dollars for a day pass to go on his own, he was stuck taking tepid bucket baths in his tub with water from the kitchen.

  As the repairs inched upward Alex could hear the loudening din of plumbing work in his walls like a coming infestation. Then one morning, well before anything like a decent hour, two pasty-skinned workmen who looked as if they’d been holed up in a cellar for months avoiding capture showed up at his door.

  “No one said you were coming.”

  “Is okay,” one of the men said, “we start.”

  So they did. There was a lot of smashing with a ball-peen hammer to get at the pipes through the bedroom wall, then a lot of grimacing while they stared at the mess of corroded couplings and joints they’d revealed, pipes branching off in every direction. Jiri, who had already been up at work when they arrived, stood by watching all this with an intent, curious air.

  “Is bad,” one of the men said to Alex, clearly blaming him. An exchange ensued between the two workers full of grunts and heavy monosyllables, Jiri following it like a tennis match.

  “Prablyema?” he interjected.

  “Da,” one of the men said warily. “Da.”

  It wasn’t long before the three of them were down on their knees poking and prodding at the mess of pipes, to more grunts and grim pronouncements. One of the workers stepped into the bathroom and traced an ominous line across the mirror tiles above the tub.

  Jiri looked charmed.

  “Russian Jews,” he said. “My Russian’s a bit rusty, but it’s better than my Yiddish.”