The Origin of Species (3 page)

It was only when he’d finished that he saw how self-indulgent he was being: he was merely taking advantage of Esther’s innocence and need as an opportunity for easy sympathy. Liz would never have let him get away with this sort of thing; she would have seen through him at once, how all his whining and vacillation were just part of an enduring immaturity and lack of focus.

“So are you saying you want to give it up?” Esther said.

Alex was taken aback. Where had she got that from? He realized, belatedly, that he had, after all, been trying to impress her. See what a stoic I am, he’d been saying, to soldier on against such impossible odds. Yet as soon as she’d spoken the question he felt a kind of release.

“Maybe I’m saying that. I’m not sure.”

It would be so simple if he just fell back to what was normal, wrote a modest, unoriginal dissertation, finished it up in a year or two. Surely
that was acceptable, didn’t even require him to resort, as he easily could, to extenuating circumstance.

But Esther, with sudden force, said, “You can’t give it up! Listen to the way you talk about it, how excited you get—I can’t believe you would even think of giving it up.”

This wasn’t the response he’d expected: a real one. He himself, in Esther’s situation, dealing with a new person he wanted to like him, would probably have been too self-conscious to do anything other than guess what it was the other person might want to hear, and say that.

“Isn’t it important to you?” Esther said. “Just listen to yourself!”

“Well, yes, but, who knows, maybe it’s just some crazy idea—”

“It doesn’t sound crazy to me,” Esther said. “It makes a lot of sense. It sounds important, except other people haven’t been smart enough to see that yet.”

Alex felt himself blushing. Who was this girl—woman—saying things like this to a stranger? What force had sent her suddenly hurtling across his path?

“It’s the same with MS,” she said. “People are always saying you have to accept this or that, you have to give in. But I’m never going to give in. I’m going to fight.”

MS, that was it: multiple sclerosis. He repeated the name over and over in his head now to lodge it firmly there, though he still had no idea what it was, what was multiple about it, or sclerotic, if she was basically a well person with a few chronic but stable symptoms or if she was dying before his eyes.

“What is MS, exactly?”

“Oh,” she said, rising to the subject. “Actually, it’s very interesting.”

Now it was Alex’s turn to be mystified, as Esther launched into a discussion of nerve cells and myelin sheaths, pronouncing certain words like shibboleths, though to Alex they all quickly receded into the miasma of biological terms that had been consigned to a remote corner of his brain after Grade 12 biology and had never emerged again, for all the reading he’d done since in the natural sciences.

“It’s kind of like
AIDS
,” she said, which shocked him, because she made the connection so casually, as if proud to be associated with the disease of the moment. “It’s”—and she stressed the word—“an
autoimmune
disease.”

“Oh. I see.” But what he saw was a vision of his friend Michael’s expartner Mario, whom he’d seen about a month before he’d died, when he’d been slack-faced with dementia and wasted to skin and bone.

They had finished their
cappuccini
. There was an awkward moment, when Alex should have taken the opportunity to excuse himself or suggest he lead her home.

“Are you going back?” he said finally, but no, she had an errand at Ogilvy’s.

He saw her eyes go to her cane.

“I could come with you,” he said, before he could stop himself.

And he was quick to insist that he pay the bill, a privilege Esther was happy to concede to him.

Although Alex had passed by Ogilvy’s any number of times and had stopped like everyone else to gawk at its elaborate Christmas windows, he had never actually been inside the place. He had thus avoided any taint of association with the reviled Anglo Establishment—most of which, at any rate, had been chased from the city by now—that the store seemed to represent. The truth was, however, that he was secretly drawn to the place: it had the air of Manhattan to it, of the 1950s, of Rock Hudson and Doris Day. Inside, it did not disappoint, with the look of some large yet intimate manor hall, marble-floored and crystal-chandeliered and humming with the background murmur of wealth.

Even here, Esther was known, several of the saleswomen smiling at her as she came through, though more than one rather tightly, Alex thought. Esther, oblivious, pushed on past the makeup tables and perfume counters that lined the ground floor to the old brass-doored elevators, where an actual attendant, a pale young woman in a dark uniform and cap reminiscent of the Salvation Army, escorted them upward. They got out, somehow predictably, at Lingerie. Esther, moving free from Alex now and managing quite well on her cane, headed at once past the rows of designer teddies and negligees toward the sale racks at the back.

Through this whole time, she had never really stopped talking.

“I don’t think of myself as someone with a
disease
, do you know what I mean? You know, ‘Oh, no, I have MS!’ A lot of MS-ers are like that, that’s why I don’t like hanging around with them. Do you think that’s bad? That I don’t like other MS-ers?”

Esther’s battle of the moment, Alex gathered, was against the loss of any more mobility. She had reluctantly consented to the cane after her last exacerbation, but was determined to go no further.

“‘You have to accept it,’ everyone’s always saying to me. But I think if you just accept it, of course it’s going to happen to you. I went to this meeting of MS-ers once and it made me sick, how everyone was just saying accept this and accept that. I’ll never accept it. I’ll never stop walking. I love walking. I’d die if I couldn’t walk.”

Esther was sorting unabashedly through bins of brassieres and discounted underwear while Alex stood discreetly to one side. Then, out of nowhere, Alex heard the strains of bagpipes. They must be coming through the speaker system, he thought, but no, lo and behold, an instant later a flesh-and-blood bagpiper emerged from a back aisle in full regalia and began wending his way through Lingerie, to the bafflingly less-than-astonished smiles and glances of the pretty much exclusively female clientele. Esther, for her part, barely looked up from her bin.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s just the bagpipes!” Esther said, shouting to be heard above them. “They do it every day at noon.”

The panic rose in Alex: so it was already noon. Of all the things he might be doing at that moment it seemed inexplicable that he was standing here biding his time in Lingerie while a bagpipe played and Esther rifled through the underwear bin. The piper was coming right at him now, holding his eye with the steely stare of a Scottish raider, an onslaught of tartan and noise that seemed set to obliterate him like some poor, oppressed habitant. Then at the last instant he turned, veering off from the low-end racks toward the Chantelle bras.

Alex became aware that Esther was at his elbow, trying to get his attention.

“Alex,” she whispered, “I have to use the bathroom.”

“Oh. Sure. Oh.”

There was an edge in her voice. Alex wasn’t exactly sure what his role was here: he felt suddenly parental, as if he were on an outing with one of his nieces or nephews.

“It’s on the next floor up,” Esther said, the edge sharper. “We have to take the elevator.”

But when they got to the elevators, one of them, to judge from the
indicator, had just passed on its way up, while the other, with the Salvation Army girl at the controls, was apparently being held for the piper, who was at that moment making his way toward them.

“It’s an emergency!” Alex said to the girl, but she couldn’t hear him above the noise of the pipes. And then the piper was there, moving relentlessly forward, and they had to stand clear.

“Should we take the stairs?” Alex said.

“I don’t know. Sure—I mean, okay.”

The stairs were wide and old and unevenly worn; it was clear at once that it would not be an easy proposition for Esther to get up them. Alex could see more fully now the extent of her frailty; what she’d been able to mask until then with the occasional shuffle or lunge was exposed in the difficulty she had aiming her foot toward each step. But it was too late to turn back—she had already gone silent and grim with the effort of holding back whatever it was that wanted to come out of her.

It seemed an eternity before they reached the upper landing. Alex had had to resort to practically carrying her, surprised at how solid and heavy she was.

Coming out of the stairwell they ran into one of the salesclerks, an older, salon-haired woman who seemed to take their air of crisis as a sign of infraction.

“Can I help you?” she said, with a false, saleswoman’s smile.

“We just need the washroom,” Alex said quickly.

Esther, ignoring the clerk, had lurched on headlong without him.

“It’s over here!” she said.

Esther was panting now, saying “Oh, oh, oh,” with each breath. At the washroom door, the salesclerk’s eyes still burning into him, Alex said, “Can you manage all right?” and Esther said, “Yes,” before plunging ahead. She was hardly inside, though, before Alex heard her give out a long groan and her panting gave way to sobs.

“Esther! Are you okay?”

Without daring to look back at the clerk Alex pushed through the door. He found Esther collapsed in a heap on the tile floor, the seat of her jeans wet and a small puddle spreading around her.

“Oh, Alex,” she said, her face torn with grief.

Alex helped her up. He led her, still sobbing, into one of the stalls and sat her on the bowl there.

He put a hand awkwardly on one of her shoulders.

“It’s okay,” he said, “it’s okay.”

The saleswoman was peering in through the doorway, her eyes going at once to the puddle on the floor.

“Is there something I can help with?” she said, in a tone that suggested she hoped not.

Alex wasn’t certain what to do next.

“I could use a plastic bag,” he said.

He handed Esther her cane from the floor as if to console her with it.

“Just wait for me here. I’ll be right back.”

He sprinted down the stairs back to Lingerie and made his way to the discount bin. After some quick sorting he picked out a medium panty, opting for the most workmanlike pair he could lay his hands on.

The saleswoman was waiting for him at the washroom door with the plastic bag. He handed her the tag from the panties.

“I’ll pay for them on the way out,” he said, and she pursed her lips as if to keep herself from suggesting otherwise.

Esther was still on the bowl.

“Can you get these on on your own?” Alex said.

“Yes, I think so.”

“You can put the other ones in here,” he said, handing her the bag.

He heard her jostling and grunting as she struggled with her clothes behind the stall door.

“Do you want me to help?”

“It’s okay. I’m okay.”

When she came out, finally, her cane in one hand and the plastic bag in the other, she seemed so chastened and forlorn next to the girl who’d locked an arm in his not an hour before that Alex could hardly bear to look at her.

He took the bag from her.

“I guess we should get going,” he said.

“My pants are all wet.” Her voice was cracking again.

“It’s okay, we’ll get a cab. I’ll walk behind you. No one will see.”

“Oh, Alex,” she said, but half laughing now.

“At least you got a new pair of underwear. Ha ha.”

“Ha ha,” she said.

The saleslady was waiting nervously beyond the door. She was likely
just some poor ex-housewife from Verdun, exiled here with all the clearance stuff on the store’s shabby top floor.

He gave her a five-dollar bill for the underwear.

“I’ll get your change, sir.”

“It’s all right.”

They were able to get a cab right in front of the store, though it was still a good ten minutes of traffic and one-way streets before they were back at their building. The fare was four seventy-five; because the driver was francophone Alex felt compelled to add a couple of quarters onto the five he’d already pulled out in order to bump up the tip. Alex didn’t like himself for it, but he couldn’t help doing the math on what this little excursion had cost him, some fourteen dollars in all, money he could ill afford.

He escorted Esther up to her apartment on the eleventh. It seemed the two of them had crammed into a couple of hours several months’ or years’ worth of drama and intimacy and strain. How could they go back from that to mere politeness, to what in fact would have been the appropriate level of distance for two people who didn’t really know each other?

At her door, he blurted out, “I’m having a party tomorrow night. If you’d like to come.”

Esther’s face lit up like a sunrise.

“A party? Well, yes, I’d love to!”

There, he had done it, had added another complication to things, just in case he hadn’t enough of them.

He saw by Esther’s watch—he didn’t wear his own, a stupid affectation that caused him no end of trouble—that it was nearly one. Shit. Whenever he was late for a session, Dr. Klein always saw it as hopelessly significant, a habit that irritated Alex deeply, implying as it did that the only thing of importance in Alex’s life was his relationship with Dr. Klein.

“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then,” Alex said. “Eight o’clock?”

“It’s a date.”

Alex had the sinking feeling again. He thought of María, from his language class, and the big play he’d been hoping to make for her the following night.

“It’s a date,” he said, already backing up toward the elevators.

I
t was a thirteen-minute walk, all uphill, from Alex’s apartment building to Dr. Klein’s office. Up Mackay Street to Sherbrooke; past the Unitarian church and Le Linton apartments; past Chelsea Place on Simpson, with its beautiful courtyard and Georgian-style townhouses; past Percy Walters Park, which someone had rechristened, in graffiti,
Parc Merde de Chien
, and which sported, for some reason, a bust of Simón Bolívar. From the park you could just see the back of Pierre Trudeau’s house, perched on the slope that rose up to Pine Avenue looking unrevealing and fortress-like, with its art deco austerity. The rumor was that you could see the Great Man himself heading off on foot every morning along Pine toward the law firm where he’d taken up a sinecure after quitting his job as the nation’s leader. Alex often took a detour from the route up McGregor in the hopes of catching a glimpse of him, making his way up to Pine by the steps at the eastern end of the park, which came out not twenty feet from Trudeau’s front door. But so far the only outcome of his skulking was that he had probably become a person of interest to the Cuban consulate across the street, which had boosted its usual phalanx of security cameras in the wake of a recent firebombing.