The Origin of Species (25 page)

In the meantime the secretary of the tenants’ association had resigned, under mysterious circumstances, though it was clear she had clashed with Brenda. Alex ought to have given the whole matter a wide berth, but he was dating María by then, and had started his Amnesty work, and he couldn’t muster the complacence he would have needed to stay inert. It was logical that he should be secretary—he was an English major; he had his Exec. Partner—and it wasn’t long before he was firing off letters to the building’s owners in the same tone of dignified outrage as in his Amnesty letters. Brenda had managed to get hold of the owners’ actual names, though using them made him uneasy: Ruby, Shapiro, and Schwarz.

With every letter he plodded off to the post office to send it double-registered, though all he ever got in reply was the pink proof-of-delivery card that came back, scribbled with what Alex assumed was some minor underling’s signature. But one day he got a phone call.

“Is that Alex? It’s Richard Shapiro here.”

It was as if one of the tyrants he sent his Amnesty letters to had phoned him. Shapiro, it seemed, wanted to meet.

“I have to say your letters are pretty articulate compared to some of the ones I get.”

Alex tried to gather his thoughts.

“Maybe you should come to one of our tenant meetings.”

“I don’t know. You know how those things are, it just turns into confrontation. I get the sense you’re someone reasonable.”

Alex knew it was a mistake to agree to meet privately. But then he pictured Shapiro at one of their meetings, with the madwoman Brenda and the measly half-dozen others who usually showed up.

“Nothing official,” Shapiro said. “Just, you know, to get a few things on the table.”

They met not in the sort of glitzy downtown office Alex had imagined but in Alex’s building, in a room off the pool mezzanine that was little more than a storage closet, windowless and crammed with cleaning equipment and boxes of chemicals. Rather than some slick St. James Street type Shapiro was a baby-faced man, balding and a bit fleshy, who looked like he’d just stepped away from barbecuing in the back yard.

“I appreciate you coming down,” he said, rising from a little metal desk to take Alex’s hand.

He had a bunch of forms on his desk next to a half-eaten sub, including, Alex saw, his own renewal form, still with the strokes Cournoyer had made on it.

“So what are you, an English major?”

Alex felt put out at being so easily pegged.

“Something like that.”

“I did my Master’s here at Concordia, poli-sci. We were the ones who threw the computer stuff out the windows. I don’t know if you heard about that.”

So he was an old hippie, then. Alex looked for some sign of sheepishness in him at what he’d become, but couldn’t spot any.

“All that stuff with Cournoyer,” he was saying, “that was bad. We didn’t have any idea.”

“So you’re willing to renegotiate with the people who signed?”

“We’re open to that, sure. If it’s reasonable.”

Alex didn’t know what he’d expected, exactly, what piece of his mind he’d been hoping to give to this man.

“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. It 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.

B
y 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.