The Origin of Species (11 page)

Lars held out a model of a Plymouth Duster with a tiny spoiler at the back.

“My friend had one in high school,” Alex said.

“Is very fast, I think.”

“Yes. Very fast.”

By suppertime, Lars had assumed a protective custody over Alex.

“You sit here, please,” he said, pulling out the chair next to his own. He crowded the platters of food around Alex’s dish as if he were to test them.

“Lars is wondering if you have such vegetables in Canada,” Ingrid said.

They were having potatoes, cucumber salad. He saw Eva suppress a smirk.

“Yes. We grow them on our farm.”

Lars seemed duly taken with that.

“He wants to know if you are a farmer, then.”

“Well, no.” Alex could see the disappointment. “My parents’ farm.”

He seemed such a little man, full of dignity and pride, so clearly Ingrid’s son yet so different from her, so utterly male. Alex marveled at the perfection of his little body, as streamlined as a cheetah’s. He hadn’t thought so much of that, of the flesh-and-boneness of children, but that was what he noticed. At bedtime they all sat together on Ingrid’s bed while Alex read from
Charlotte’s Web
, and it was hard to separate Ingrid from these extensions of her, to sort the carnal from this other new territory of awareness.

In the living room afterward, Ingrid put a finger to her lips when he was about to speak.

“We will wait till they sleep. We’ll speak in the cabin.”

He hadn’t so much as put a hand on her the entire day. In the cabin she took a seat at the desk and left him to the bed, which stood so low he was practically squatting beneath her.

“Alex, why did you come?”

The truth was he didn’t know. Because he could.

“I don’t know. I missed you.”

She let that pass.

“It’s not a joke now, Alex. Yes, in the beginning, it was for fun. But now when you are bored in this place or that, ‘Oh, well,’ you think, ‘Ingrid will take me.’”

“It’s not like that.”

She let him stew.

“I missed you,” he said again.

“And next week, or next month, when you are home, what then?”

He had no answer to that. He had not thought beyond the next hour or day, really, the next swing of his mood.

“Do you want me to go?”

He didn’t dare to look at her, sitting hunched there beneath her like a repentant schoolboy.

“I don’t say so. Somehow we’ll manage.”

And so he stayed on. He felt like a drowning man going down for the third time: each time the water grew more insistent, more familiar, the urge to resurface more dim. Maybe this was the life he’d always been headed for, with a house and a garden and the sound of children in the background.

“You need only make a place for them,” Ingrid said. “You must make a house inside you for them.”

She was the one making the house, of course, for him too, though maybe he could manage something more modest, a little cabin, at least.

That was where he remained, in the cabin, though soon they were making love there almost nightly after the children had gone to bed. Once Ingrid fell asleep with him on his little cot and Lars came out in the night to knock sullenly on their door.

“Do you know where is my mother?”

They were more careful after that but it was clear their trysts had not gone unnoticed. Ingrid gave no sign of apologizing for them, which with Lars seemed to have the effect of making them acceptable. Eva was harder to read—she seemed so anxious to please, to avoid unpleasantness, that she gave off the air of waiting with bated breath for some imminent catastrophe.

He lost track of the days. July passed and the end of the summer loomed and yet he was still there in Engelström, in a country that had
barely figured in his thoughts when he had set out. He followed Ingrid into Landskrona to the school where she taught to help her prepare for the coming year, feeling the ghost of his childhood at the sight of the desks in their rows, the smell of the construction paper and chalk.

“Perhaps you will be a teacher,” Ingrid said. “I see it in you with Lars.”

It would have been the death of him to have a teacher like Ingrid—he would have built altars to her, would have pined away to nothing.

“I haven’t really thought about it that much.”

This was not the truth—he thought about it hourly, his exalted future, though nearly as often the actual vehicle of his exaltation shifted, as if he were still a child playing at doctor and fireman. In his mind he had already mapped out a version of himself that would fit Ingrid—he could do a degree here, become a teacher of English perhaps. There was his family, of course, his studies, his friends, but then these were exactly the things he had fled.

One weekend they took the children’s kite out to where he and Ingrid had picnicked along the coast, a deserted stretch of meadow and cliff where the wind off the sound raised the kite until it was the smallest speck.

“I think you must have kites in Canada,” Eva said.

“Yes, but I don’t think I’ve ever flown one.”

“But you are so good!”

It was just the wind, any idiot could have done it, but still he took Eva’s praise strangely to heart. Afterward he felt they had had a perfect day, together like that in the wind and the salt air. At night, making love with Ingrid, he could still taste the sea on her. It crossed his mind that it could actually come to pass, his remaining here. The oddest sensation went through him at the thought, not unpleasant but hard to place, like an unfamiliar smell.

But lying beside her later, he felt a sort of shame come over him.

“Is everything all right?”

It was pointless to hide things from Ingrid. She sensed every shift of mood like an animal sensing a threat.

“Just tired, I guess. I’m fine.”

He lay awake after she’d gone. Everything about the day seemed to skew—they were all just play-acting, really, he saw that now, were all just
putting the best face on things the way Eva had done with the kite, trying to make all this seem normal. But there was nothing normal in any of it. He was just a kid; there was no question, really, of his staying. He had known that from the start, that all this was just an excursion from his real life.

In the morning they got to talking about his friends in Copenhagen.

“It felt different there, I guess,” Alex said. “Like people were trying to live differently.”

“Ah,” Ingrid said, clearly surprised at this. “But I thought you were unhappy there.”

“That was more just personal things.”

“In what way different, then?”

“I dunno—I guess that they didn’t just close themselves off in their own little world. That they were trying to change things.”

There was an awful pause.

“But that is what I do, is that what you say?” Ingrid said evenly. “That I close myself off?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Alex stammered. But he knew he’d intended exactly the meaning she had taken. “You’re so curious about everything.”

Ingrid forced a smile.

“It doesn’t matter, you are right. I think so too, sometimes, living here in my little village.”

They never got back on track after that. Someone other than Ingrid might have pretended, might have let the matter pass.

“I think tomorrow you must go,” she said when she came out to his cabin that night.

Alex couldn’t believe the relief that flooded through him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“There’s no need. You are young, you could not stay here.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think I could.”

“It’s a shame for both of us, is the only thing.”

The children came with them to the ferry the next day. It was like having chaperones, yet Alex was grateful for them. The relief he had felt had given way to something less certain.

“I will write to you,” Ingrid said. She didn’t seem as stricken as he might have hoped. “I will miss you, my Italian who is not Italian. Perhaps another time.”

But he doubted if he had the gumption to have to face this sort of decision again.

All that seemed far from him now, that summer with Ingrid. He’d lived a lifetime in a matter of weeks, from child to man, then had spent all his time since regressing: he was slightly older now than Ingrid had been when he’d first met her, yet he felt less wise, less grown, than he’d felt then, still awaiting some beginning to his life that would set it on course. Maybe he’d missed his chance—if he had stayed, he might have saved himself all his false starts.

He had yet to crack open a book for his exam the following day. A repeat of the interview with the prime minister was playing on the radio, though by now he would be winging his way to the Tokyo Summit, to lick the Americans’ feet and beg for a place at the table. A group called the Middle Core Faction had vowed to blow the summit leaders to kingdom come, and Alex felt an instant’s thrill at that prospect of apocalypse, maybe because all his private sins would seem small then.

An update on Chernobyl came on. There was apocalypse if he wanted it. Then he was back to Sweden, and his son: for all he knew it was raining fire over in Engelström. He felt anger rising up in him. At whom? The Soviets? Madame Curie? But it was simply that he was still here, so irrelevant. Already he’d missed the boy’s crucial first years—that wasn’t something that could ever be got over, that could ever be fixed, as enduring as a genetic flaw. She hadn’t had the right to do that. She hadn’t had the right to make that sort of decision on her own.

He put in some time with his notes. When he grew bleary-eyed, he switched on the TV: more updates. The winds had shifted, thankfully, blowing the cloud that had spread into Sweden back onto the Ukrainians and Poles. Better them; they were used to disaster. No images yet from the site, though from Sweden they showed the lineups at clinics for thyroid shots, long vistas of blonds who looked already bleached through by radiation.

He had to go to him, of course. Sometimes a visceral sense of his connection to him would rise up in Alex like a flood tide. But what was just as compelling was the fear the feeling might pass, the sudden realization that minutes had gone by, hours, an entire day, when he had
hardly given the boy a second thought. The thing was slipping from him with every day that passed. Soon doing nothing would seem a real possibility, maybe the only one.

He had a last smoke on the balcony. At this hour the black hump of Mount Royal looked like a hole cut out of the city. He made a mental note to remember to call his mother the next day for her sixty-fifth. He would be the only one missing from the brood. On account of exams, he’d said, though the truth was he couldn’t bear these family gatherings. They were all pleasant enough, his family, as families went, and yet the moment he was among them he would feel all the life drain out of him.

During his summer with Ingrid, he had missed one of his regular Sunday calls home. When he’d finally phoned days later and no one had answered he’d tried his sister Mimi.

“Jesus, Alex, where have you been?”

He had known at once that matters were grave.

“I dunno. Nowhere. I’ve been here. In Sweden.”

It turned out he had ruined his parents’ vacation. They had thought of canceling, then had gone on regardless but had been calling home three or four times a day.

“What was it, Alex? Why didn’t you call?”

He’d been gone over two months by then. It hadn’t occurred to him that anyone would care one way or the other.

“I guess I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

Mimi let that sit. Of his five siblings she was really the only one with whom he had what he would call a relationship.

“Well,” she’d said finally, holding back all the things she might have said, “at least you’re all right.”

His life was full of this sort of bad family karma, much of it involving phones, which was maybe why he didn’t just put himself out of his misery and phone Ingrid—he had her number, of course, it would be so simple. But each time the notion crossed his mind, he resisted: tomorrow, he would think. Until he actually called, his logic seemed to go, he still had the call in reserve as a last resort. This logic was all the more compelling, perhaps, in being so perfectly circular.

He changed, brushed his teeth, slipped into his bed. He could do it now, he could dial the number; it would be morning there. He thought of
those glorious mornings that first summer, waking to sunrise at four, with Ingrid beside him.

He could do it: ten digits or so, and she’d be there. Or not now—he was tired, it was late—but surely tomorrow. Tomorrow, he vowed, he would call.

T
he English Department was a warren of dirty stairwells and windowless classrooms that occupied the back end of the downtown Y, the air there forever underlain with a chlorine stink from the Y’s pool. The exam room was already a hush of fevered thought by the time Alex arrived, so that he made the mistake of sitting next to Amanda, who glanced over at him with such heartbreaking furtiveness that for some time he couldn’t focus on the questions in front of him. Then the first one came clear and he felt doomed: Jameson. Of all the gobbledygook Alex had had to wade through that year, his had been the worst. It was hard to believe the man was a Marxist. If The Revolution ever did come, Alex hoped Jameson got one of the first bullets.

Exactly because he was trying to avoid her, Alex found his eye returning again and again to Amanda. Amanda ought to have been beautiful, blue-eyed and porcelain-skinned and classically, fulsomely blond. He couldn’t say what it was that made her seem otherwise—the energy of her, maybe, something in her eyes, a kind of involution there that scared him, a snarling of the life force. He’d had occasion to look into those eyes at close quarters and hadn’t been able to forget the pit they had seemed:
mistake
,
mistake
, was what had screamed through his head at the time, though by then it had already been far too late. It had been too late, in fact, from the first moment he’d talked to Amanda at the beginning of the year—about Jameson, as it happened, whom he’d actually pretended to admire—and seen the need in her, and chosen to ignore it. Or not ignore it exactly: use it. He’d always had that radar, that ability to home in on weakness and find his shelter there. Not that anything untoward had happened, not then, except for the few outings he’d made to
Amanda’s International Socialist meetings, about which he hadn’t been entirely candid with Liz.