The Origin of Species (17 page)

She came in just past dawn and sat beside him on the couch.

“Maybe we should stay apart for a while,” she said.

This was really the crux of these arguments, how far they could go before he turned her away.

“Let’s just go to bed.”

At some point, Liz stopped painting entirely. Alex wouldn’t let himself notice at first, the corner of the living room where her easel stood feeling like a crime scene they were both determined to ignore.

“You haven’t been painting,” he said finally, as casually as he could manage.

“Just waiting for a new direction.”

This was the worst thing, he knew, letting her painting become a battleground between them.

“Don’t blame me if you don’t know what you want to do.”

He had crossed the line.

“You’d be happy if I painted fucking landscapes as long as they got into a gallery! You mope around like I’d have to become famous before you’d believe in me!”

He didn’t know if Liz believed these things when she said them, if either of them meant any of the things they said or were just spilling their worst fears as if to cast a spell against them. Yet she was right, he didn’t
believe, not really, couldn’t have said if her work showed talent or not or if those painstaking hands of hers, which she’d spent weeks on, had any less merit than the cheery abstracts she used to do.

It never really occurred to him that they should simply end things. She had taken him in so unquestioningly, as if they shared a doom—there was nothing she did, not even the bitterest things, that wasn’t somehow just a cover for this darkness that seemed to join them.

She didn’t paint again for months, each of them keeping grimly to their little tasks until their failed selves, the specters of what they would not be, were like extra presences in the apartment. Some of Liz’s old art school cronies asked her to join a project they’d started, making over an abandoned house with art, but she put them off.

“It’s such a gimmick,” she said to Alex. “It’s just all the losers like me who can’t get into the galleries.”

Alex held his tongue, the subject so fraught by now there seemed no right thing to say. Then Liz finally agreed to sign on, but wouldn’t let him anywhere near her work until the opening. She’d had the entire bathroom to herself, and had done it over in an elaborate trompe l’oeil that seemed to extend it out to several times its dimensions, with a hyperrealism that mirrored the room’s wreckage but was also vaguely off-kilter, reaching off into implausible angles like an Escher woodcut.

Alex felt the usual terror go through him—he had no idea what to make of it.

“Wow,” he said.

“You think it’s all right?”

“It’s amazing. All the detail.”

She seemed so exposed. Then the next day they went through the dailies and found a tiny review of the show in which Liz’s work, in a passing reference, was dismissed as “virtuosic.” Alex was crushed.

“It’s just some asshole critic,” he said. “He liked that sappy wall etching in the living room.”

But Liz had taken on an odd lightness, as if failure freed her.

“It doesn’t matter. I had fun with it.”

When the weekly entertainment tabloid came out, a leftist rag that always went out of its way to attack its own, Alex was afraid to look at it. Sure enough the review was a hatchet job: “Art House Old Hat.” He was ready to get rid of it at once before Liz laid eyes on it, but then his eye
caught her name. “I walked into the bathroom with the idea of using the facilities”—and Alex prepared himself for it, for the jibe, the withering dismissal—“and felt like I’d stepped through the looking glass.”

There was more of the same, excessive almost, self-congratulatory, yet unmistakable: she had been singled out for a rave. It wasn’t long before the calls started coming in, from other artists in the show, who offered their bright, bitter congratulations, from all the people who hadn’t phoned Liz in months. Liz looked positively stunned, straining to live up to the headiness of the moment as if some notion of herself that she’d held sacrosanct had been shattered.

“I couldn’t believe it!” she said, sounding as false as her well-wishers. “I thought Alex had printed it up as a joke.”

They had no precedent in their lives for this sort of public anointing. For many weeks afterward they moved through an air of unreality, as if they’d been entrusted with some momentous task whose precise nature had yet to be revealed. Soon someone would come to the door and hand them their new lives—that was the sense of it for Alex. He wrote his article in these weeks and sent it off, and got his acceptance in such short order that they seemed under some charm. Then they went off to England for their splurge and had sex every night, the sort of urgent, wordless sex that worked best for them, as if there wasn’t a moment to spare, as if they’d be found out at any instant.

It was only when they were home again that it occurred to Alex they might simply slip back into their old lives and nothing would be different. He was mired in application forms for his doctorate but was already losing the spark he had felt that day in Darwin’s study—perhaps he was headed for nothing more original than the usual drudgery of academics. At the back of his mind an anger had begun to take shape against Liz. She’d had half a dozen calls from galleries after her review and yet had not so much as picked up a brush since then, going back to her ad work as if all the rest had been some youthful folly.

They were pressed for money, because of the trip. Then the notice came of some structural flaw in their building, and the threat of eviction.

“Shouldn’t you be doing something?” he said. She had fought her way into art school against all opposition, her parents, her boyfriend. Now the prize shimmered before her and she wouldn’t reach for it. “I mean, while people still remember the review.”

“Like what? Showing my abstracts around again?”

Do some fucking new paintings
, he wanted to say.

“It just seems such a waste.”

When they found out Liz was pregnant this conversation came back to haunt him. The pregnancy had been pure stupidity—she’d been off the pill when they were in England because of a throb in her leg and they’d pushed the limit on her safe days. It felt like they were being punished for their bit of abandon. They sat sullenly at the kitchen table as if there was actually something to decide, but everything in Alex screamed
no
: it wasn’t the time for them, not now, maybe not ever.

Every argument he could make seemed forbidden.

It’s your body
, he almost said.

“Just tell me what you want to do.”

She never actually asked what he himself wanted, and so showed that she knew. There followed a couple of weeks of indecision that seemed like a desert they had to cross, and out of which Liz emerged looking as drawn and worn as an ascetic.

The agony of waiting had weakened him.

“We could make it work,” he said, not meaning it. “I could get my teaching certificate.”

“When would you do that, exactly?”

They went to the Morgentaler Clinic on Harbord, to avoid the red tape at the hospitals. They had to push their way past a straggle of protesters waving placards with slogans like
STOP THE SLAUGHTER
and
EXODUS 20:13
. Inside, half a dozen women sat stolidly in the makeshift waiting room, some with partners, some alone. Attendants in street clothes moved patiently among them handing out clipboards and forms, with a partisan air not so different from that of the protesters outside.

“How are you doing?” Alex whispered.

Liz’s voice had gone completely flat.

“Just great.”

The doctor came into the reception area from a back hallway, grim-faced and hurried. He had a quick word with the receptionist, then retreated without so much as glancing at anyone. Alex knew what a hero he was, a survivor of the camps, a champion of women’s rights, and yet at the sight of him, hirsute and small and slightly simian, the first thought that passed through his mind was
Butcher
.

Alex’s armpits were dripping with sweat.

“I think I’m up,” Liz said.

His head filled with blasphemy while he waited. It seemed now that they had not asked themselves a single question about what they were doing here—what a fetus was, for instance, or how they could know such a thing, or how anyone could; what it could mean to have one scraped out of you. Once, before she’d decided, Liz had talked about the baby as if it were alive, how taken over she felt, how her whole body seemed to be shifting to make a place for it. But just that once.

She came out still dopey with sedatives and unhappy with pain. Alex had a feeling like there was grit in his soul.

“You okay?”

“Not really.”

At home he dared to ask her how it had been.

“It was awful.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“I just want to sleep.”

That was it, all they ever said. For a few days Liz moved bitterly through the apartment, unapproachable, but then gradually her mood seemed to lift, or she made the effort for his sake, or just put up her walls—who knew, really, who wanted to know. It wasn’t any big deal in any event. People had abortions all the time. Liz went back to her work, her restaurant ads and her layouts for industrial newsletters and her two-bit logo designs for local hair salons; Alex buried himself in his applications.

There was a cat that had started hanging around their back veranda, a big gray tabby with a collar but no tag who would stare in through the kitchen window but showed no interest when Alex set out bits of salami for him. Then one morning, somehow, he was in the kitchen.

Liz had let him in.

“He must be lost,” she said, though it was the first time she’d given any sign that she’d even noticed him.

The cat moved through the kitchen as if he’d memorized it, sniffing corners, rubbing against chair legs, then doing some sort of quick calculation and suddenly leaping up to a stool and onto the counter. The faucet had a leak they’d never bothered to fix; the cat leaned out to it, with unmistakable intent, and lapped his tongue at the drips. It was what he’d been staring at all these days, those tantalizing droplets.

Liz had watched the cat’s progress as if he were simply some natural event, making no move either to show him any welcome or to shoo him away.

“We should put up posters or something,” she said. “We should find the owner.”

What Liz meant by this, it turned out—Liz, who was allergic to everything, who hated hairs on things, who wasn’t the type to court any compromise to domestic hygiene—was that they were taking the cat in. She put out a water bowl, bought cat food and litter at the Dominion, spread the litter in a cardboard box in a corner of her sanctuary, the bathroom. It was nothing short of deranged, either that or one of her insidious paybacks. She knew Alex thought pets were indulgences, that it was one of his little political credos.

He put up posters, but the days passed, and no one came. The cardboard litter box grew soggy, and Alex bought a proper one.

“We should give it a name or something,” he said.

Liz had put her brave face on.

“What do you think?”

“How about Moses?” Alex offered. Because of the water. Because of the little bed of dried leaves and debris that he used to sleep in on the back veranda.

Exodus 20:13.

“Moses is great.”

He wanted to strangle the cat, he wanted to stick it in a sack and dunk it in a barrel. He’d be sitting at his little desk in the bedroom—it was hopeless to work there, the room was Liz’s, not his, every inch of it—and the cat would jump up into his lap, where it would purr and purr like an outboard motor.

He came upon Liz petting him once on the bed, sitting cross-legged while Moses lay stretched out before her like a sultan.

“I want to go up to Montreal,” he said. “To look at the universities. You could come.”

She didn’t look at him. He wished she would scream at him so he could harden himself, so he could think again,
It was just a fucking abortion
.

“Were you planning on moving there?”

He let that pass.

“We could think of it. If you wanted.”

By the time they actually moved to Montreal, what he’d thought of as a new start already had the feel of a nightmarish blunder. They had a vicious argument during the move, then arrived in the dark, in pouring rain, to an apartment that had seemed extravagantly roomy and full of character when they’d rented it but now looked merely derelict. Alex slumped down in an armchair with a cigarette, numbed from the drive, from the clatter of argument, while Moses wandered arch-backed and watchful from room to room.

“I could use a bit of help here,” Liz said tersely from the kitchen, and Alex thought,
Bitch
.

Somehow they got through the first year. There were moments, enough of them, that seemed strangely untainted, as if they put on workaday selves for daily use who were able to make supper, have sex, take walks on the mountain, without dragging with them every hurt and resentment. But then some tension would arise in the unlikeliest place. They audited an art history course together until Alex made the mistake one class of grandstanding in front of everyone on the subject of sexism.