The Origin of Species (15 page)

Alex had read somewhere about a fish species in which the males divided neatly into two sorts: those who were perfect family men, who stuck by their wives and looked after their children, and those who acted the part during mating but were really outright cads, disappearing the instant they’d dropped their seed. Cad vs. dad was a bit of a wash in terms of surviving offspring, so that neither won out, and it was entirely likely that the cads didn’t even know they were cads, just went along every time with the best of intentions until they felt the itch again, and were gone.

Cad. Dad. Circle those that apply
.

There was another knock on the door, tentative: Amanda.

“You okay in there?”

How had he gone from preening like a peacock over the little social success of his two-bit party to sitting fucked up and paranoid on his toilet in the dark?

“I’ll just be a minute!” he called out, a bit shrilly. “Feeling a bit queasy, that’s all!”

He was still steeling himself for re-entry when a raised voice from the living room had him suddenly scrambling.

“
Vous êtes raciste, monsieur! Raciste!
”

It was Louie. Alex opened the bathroom door to see Félix hurrying away from him toward the exit. Alex, mortified, practically leaped after him to head him off.

“What happened?”

“I think your friend has had a bit too much to drink,” Félix said gravely. “I hope I will see you for our lesson. I’m sorry to have given any offense.”

He gave an official little bow like a French legionnaire, and was gone.

“The man is a racist!” Everyone had fallen silent now except Louie. “A racist, my friend!”

The charge fell to Alex now; he was the one who had brought the man here. All year long they had all labored under this fear, that Louie would expose their own racist white asses.

“But what happened? What did he say?”

“What did he say? What they all say!”

“But what, exactly?”

“It doesn’t matter with them, what they say, it’s what they mean. Come to my country, but keep quiet. We shoot you in the street, keep quiet. We shove our language down your throat, keep quiet!”

“But you’re French!”

“What does it say, that I’m French? Why can they tell me, do this or learn that? I come here, I have the same rights as you or him or anyone. Not, you’re Haitian, you do what I say. That is racism pure and simple, my friend!”

Alex had never seen him this way, so enraged. That he was drunk didn’t seem to explain the matter—normally the alcohol had no more effect than water on him.

Alex felt compelled to take Félix’s side.

“I can’t believe he meant that. I know him. He’s a good man.”

“Good to you, maybe. You see your skin? It’s white. Mine is black.”

It took a while to calm Louie down. Alex felt sick, as if some desecration had been committed, as if someone had smeared shit on the walls.

“You don’t see it, my friend. You come to the shop with me—they don’t look at you, they don’t talk to you, even if you are the only one in the shop. You are invisible.”

“They can’t all be like that.”

“No, not all. But the separatists, they’re the worst. And worse than that, the intellectuals.”

Alex just wanted people to leave now. Everyone appeared to be waiting for some word from Louie that would set things in motion again, but he merely continued to mutter and sulk amidst the little circle of female supporters that had rallied to him. There was no help from Novak: he had gone into his anthropologist’s mode, watching the whole scene without a word as if he’d just witnessed some rare dominance rite.

Just when it seemed they might end up frozen for all time in their wretchedness, there was a knock at the door. Alex was afraid that Félix had returned to have the matter out, but instead he opened the door to none other than Miguel and María.

Alex stood dumbfounded.

“Miguel.” He didn’t even dare to look at María. “You’re here.”

“Yeah, man. I brought my sister, I hope is okay.”

After the fiasco with Louie people looked at them as if they were a ticking bomb Alex had brought into the room. Around María a gulf opened up at once: she stood there like a reprimand, all dark good looks and Latin-ness, dressed in the sort of party clothes—tight jeans, high heels—that most of the women in the room, fuzzy-sweatered Birkenstockers, could never have carried off.

“Is your apartment?” she said to Alex, addressing him directly for the first time since he’d met her, from what he could remember.

“Yes. I mean, I live here.”

“Is very high,” she said severely.

Somehow the party seemed to grind back into gear. Novak was making the obvious joke of putting Louie’s outburst down to Alex’s whiskey, but surprisingly good-naturedly, as if the whole incident had lightened his mood. Louie still had his circle of women but seemed to be growing bored now with their supportive coos, his eye forever straying to María. Meanwhile Miguel was just going quietly around the apartment inspecting Alex’s things as if casing the place.

It was Amanda, of all people, who finally edged up to María, along with, just as improbably, Esther. They formed a strange tableau: his three women.

“So you’re from El Salvador,” Amanda said. “That must be interesting. I mean, with the war there and all that.”

“Yes. The war.”

“Oh?” Esther said. “There’s a war?”

María’s eye went to Esther’s cane.

“You are a disease?”

Esther didn’t miss a beat.

“It’s called multiple sclerosis!” She had raised her voice to make up for the language difference. “I don’t know if you have it in El Salvador!”

Alex retreated back into the bathroom. This time he actually peed. At some point he would have to speak to Amanda, he knew that—she’d been a model one-night stand, really, hadn’t made any unpleasant assumptions when they’d woken up self-conscious and hungover the following morning, hadn’t shown up unexpectedly at his door in the middle of the night to give him a piece of her mind. What was he afraid of, then? He was afraid of this: that he would sleep with her again.

He zipped and wiped a few drips away from the seat. He didn’t know what to do about Félix—he couldn’t see the matter clearly, could only see those dollars piling up, one nearly every two minutes. But then for all he knew the whole thing had been theater. Ever since Baby Doc had been ousted Louie had been given to wild pronouncements on every subject as if casting about for some new arch enemy.

Some loose thought was floating around at the back of Alex’s brain but he couldn’t get a hold of it. Then there it was, surfacing out of the murk: he’d hadn’t called his mother.

Shit
. He’d meant to call her before her party at the club. She might already be home by now, but it wouldn’t be the same, she’d be tired or asleep, she would know he’d forgotten. He slipped into his bedroom through the ensuite door and dialed the number from the phone on his desk, then hung up after the second ring thinking it would be worse if he woke her. The truth was, it probably didn’t much matter one way or the other. “
’At’s okay
,” was all his mother would say, in her Italienglish—not to make him feel guilty, that wasn’t really her way, but just with her reflex peasant fatalism, or with acceptance or even indifference. She was a cipher, his mother—he hadn’t the least notion what went through her head, what had borne her up through all her sixty-five years. But just this once, he would have liked to have been the good son.

He flaked out on his bed, unable to face the party again. María was out there, but he wouldn’t go near her, not with this stink of paranoia and self-pity on him.

He heard Amanda’s voice, grown sloppy with alcohol, filtering in
from the living room balcony through the bedroom window. Something about the summer, and then her voice started to break.

“I dunno, I dunno. It just seemed kind of hurtful, you know?”

She must be with Katherine. So he wouldn’t be spared after all, was about to be uncloaked for the jerk he truly was.

“I just feel so alone sometimes, I can’t stand it.”

A pause, then another voice.

“You shouldn’t take it that way.” Alex felt like he’d been slapped. It was Stephen. “Anyway, she probably didn’t mean anything by it.”

She?
He felt a weird sense of affront. Here was Amanda confiding in Stephen, of all people, about something that apparently had nothing to do with him.

“Look,” Stephen said, “maybe we could get together for coffee or something.”

Alex tried to make out some sort of predatory note in this.

“Sure. Yeah. That would be nice.”

Alex slunk back into the bathroom. There was another knock at the door. He opened it to find himself face to face with Miguel.

“Hey, man, son’thing the matter?”

“Just a bit of a headache.”

“Me and my sister, we got to go. We got to see a Salvadoran friend.”

So that was it, then. He had barely so much as breathed the air that María had passed through. At the door Miguel gave him a warm Latin clap on the shoulder, but María stood well away, one eye already on the elevator.

“We gonna make you Salvadoran, jus’ wait,” Miguel said.

Louie left not five minutes later.

“This man was your friend?” he said, heading off any attempt by Alex at apology.

“Well, my student. I mean, I know him.”

“You be careful, Mr. Italian, your skin isn’t as white as a Frenchman’s.”

The party began to break up. Katherine kept pointedly clear of Stephen, but then got stuck leaving with Novak.

“You know, that paper you did could be publishable if it was fixed up a bit.”

“I’m not so sure,” Katherine said, and Alex thought,
Nice try, Novak
. But then she faltered. “I had some ideas—”

“Come by next week and we’ll talk about them.”

It came down once more to Amanda and Esther. Amanda was drunk; the usual fog around her had become a veritable pea-souper. Alex was grateful for Esther again, who hadn’t waned the entire evening, who had spoken to everyone, who was still swanning around on her cane with a pleasantly sated look.

The two women hovered near the front door but didn’t make any move to leave.

“I suppose I should be getting to bed,” Alex said.

“Yeah, sure,” Amanda said. “I just thought—sure.”

Against his better judgment he leaned in and kissed her, as fleetingly as he could manage, though a familiar whiff of her beneath the booze, fresh and a bit milky, brought a pang to him.

“I’ll call you.”

He didn’t feel relieved when she’d gone, just cowardly and ashamed. Once in his life he would like to have sex he could actually feel good about.

He’d almost forgotten about Esther behind him.

“Oh,” she said, a bit coyly he thought. “You weren’t—I mean, you and that girl—”

“No, no. I mean briefly, yes. But not now.”

Instead of leaving, she sauntered back to the couch and settled herself there like a contented chatelaine.

“I knew it,” she said. “I knew there was something.”

“Not really.”

“But you slept with her?”

He grew squirmy.

“Yes,” he stammered. “Once.”

“I thought so.”

There seemed something obscene in this line of inquiry, wrong, like discussing sex with a parent or child.

“Anyway it was a mistake,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done it.”

“But she’s so beautiful.”

“Yeah, well.” The image came to him unbidden of Amanda’s face while they were making love, of that look of tangled emotion in it, of not quite being held to the earth. He knew what she was, he knew that sense of feeling insubstantial, as if someone could pass a hand through you. “A bit messed up, I think. Or something.”

Esther reached for one of his cigarettes on the coffee table so naturally that it didn’t seem wrong, somehow, for him to light it for her.

“Guys,” she said. “They always get so weird after sex.”

He had to laugh at that.

“Has that been your experience?”

“Well, not that I’ve had any lately.”

He began to relax a bit. He took a seat next to her on the couch and poured himself an inch of some sort of whiskey from a leftover bottle.

“I liked Stephen,” Esther said. “He was so gentle. He told me about his son.”

Alex wasn’t sure he’d heard her right.

“His son?”

“He’s four, he showed me his picture. I guess the mother doesn’t let him see him much.”

Alex’s whole vision of Stephen shifted.

“He was married?”

“Just for a year or two. She was a separatist or something.”

Alex had sat just a couple of yards from Stephen for nearly a year now, yet couldn’t even have said for certain what his surname was.

“I guess you have a way of getting people’s secrets out of them.”

She stubbed out her cigarette.

“I guess I do.”

It might have been some paradoxical counter-effect of the alcohol that she seemed as queenly and poised now as someone out of a Swiss finishing school, all trace of her illness gone. She had lost any hint of the garish look she’d arrived with, so that he could imagine her just some normal young woman with a man at the end of an evening.

She reached over and took one of his hands in hers.

“Alex,” she said, looking right at him, and then she leaned in and kissed him on the lips.

A wave of revulsion went through him.

“Esther,” he said, “I don’t think this is such a good idea.”

She kissed him again.

“Esther—”

“Just try it,” she said in a coaxing tone.

“Esther, I can’t.”

“Just try.” More insistent.

“I really can’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

“I just can’t.” His mind was casting about wildly. “I’m too screwed up right now, with my breakup and everything. I just can’t.”

“Why can’t you just try?” Her voice had turned entirely. “It’s because I’m sick, isn’t it? It’s because of my disease.”

“Esther, that’s not it.”

He saw her face go through a thousand emotions.

“Oh, Alex.” The anger had already drained from her. “I just thought, it didn’t have to be any big deal—”

She broke into tears.