The Origin of Species (58 page)

There but for the grace of God.

“I guess what I never saw was that Liz probably felt the same. That there was always a part of her that wouldn’t ever accept me.”

Rake back the shit
, Alex thought. All his agonizing over Desmond, all these years of carrying him around like his albatross: more shit. Desmond had been a blight, a scum-sucker, a bottom feeder. Alex had wanted him dead, he had wished it, and he had got his wish. A happy ending. All the rest was whitewash, his wily ego’s way of letting him have his cake and choke on it, too.

Why stop at Desmond? There was still what went to the core: Per, his little contribution to the gene pool. If Alex had any real hope about the matter, it was that he would continue getting off scot-free, making his token dad gestures and then doing exactly as he pleased. Progeny without price, every man’s dream. In any event the kid would surely find a way to bash Alex’s head in with a hammer if he got half a chance.

Alex was beginning to feel sick.

I suppose in a Darwinian view it makes sense, doesn’t it? That the whole Freudian thing is just a sop. It turns out we wouldn’t just kill our fathers if we could, we’d probably eat them for breakfast
.

I’m starting to think that, Peter, to be honest. That Freud was really just Darwin stepping back from the void
.

The sound from the doctor’s chair was less a squeak this time than a groan.

“I’m afraid our time’s up.”

Alex rose heavily from the couch. Dr. Klein’s suit was a bit rumpled now and his hair was already falling back to its usual boyish disorder. Alex wondered why he had made such an enemy of him, why he hadn’t thought of him as on his side.

Once, after a session, Alex had found himself trailing Dr. Klein as he left the hospital, and there had been such a sad cast to him seen from behind like that—the too tight blazer, short at the sleeves, the sag of cloth at his too flat ass—that Alex had felt as if he had seen his life in a glance, the little boy walking home alone from school, the books laid out on the kitchen table while his mother cooked and his dad, taking comfort from the thought that the world was going to Sheol in a hand-basket, watched the evening news. All of this had been months before Marie and Duddy Frankenklein.

I’ll try harder
, Alex thought, giving a last tug to his shoelace.

Dr. Klein cleared his throat.

“About our sessions.”

He was standing in front of the door as if to bar Alex’s exit. For a minute, they were actually face to face.

“I should tell you,” he said. “I’ll be leaving soon.”

Alex wasn’t sure he had heard right.

“On vacation?”

“No, permanently.” His head moved in a strange bob, of restrained
triumph, maybe, or simple awkwardness. “I’ve taken another position. In Toronto.”

“Oh.” Alex still couldn’t believe he had understood. “You mean, we’ll be ending?”

“I’ll let you know exactly when, of course. I can direct you to another therapist if you’d like to continue. That’s something we can talk about.”

Alex’s blood was pounding.
You’ll need to make a commitment
, the doctor had said at the outset.

“I don’t think I’ll be continuing.”

“Well. As I say. We can discuss it.”

Dr. Klein had stood aside. For more than a year Alex had been coming to him, an hour a day, five days a week. Forty-three dollars a session. He didn’t like to do the math. He could have sponsored a refugee. He could have fed several families in Bangladesh.

Some question was on his lips, he wasn’t quite sure what it was, but before he could give it a shape the door had closed behind him.

H
e passed through Emergency on his way out, hoping to catch another glimpse of Stephen and Ariel, but they had gone. All afternoon he had been carrying the image in his head of Ariel clutched to Stephen’s chest like a frightened chimp, though no doubt Ariel had been fully reassumed into the mother-son covenant by now.

He could still feel the whoosh of Dr. Klein’s door closing behind him. Fucking careerist.
Go on and take your plum Toronto job
, he thought.
Take your filthy lucre
. Yet beneath his spite he already felt a spreading relief, a thrill of the sort he got at the end of bad relationships. He had escaped. He was free.

The sun had mellowed to a late-afternoon shimmer. Along Pine, the exhaust-embattled trees had all sprung into leaf. In a matter of days the world had been made over—all up the slope of the mountain the green stretched, impossible, but there. What little chromosome in the mind made it sing at that, what made it hope? He could feel the memory urging itself on him of the permanent spring smell of the air in Sweden, of the blue of the Öresund. They would go there together, to the coast. Per had told him of his visit to the Tycho Brahe museum on Ven—
Tikuh Brawh
, he pronounced it. He liked planets and stars; he liked dinosaurs; he liked machines. Reassuringly ordinary things, as if there was still a chance for him, as if he was a boy like any other. Alex saw, suddenly, that there was probably no special puzzle in the boy, only the usual ones. It felt as if some screen between them had dropped. The screen of Dr. Klein, perhaps. He need never mention Per to him now, had managed to save him for himself.

I suppose, Peter, it was a bit like Calvin with God. Not wanting the priests in between all the time
.

You don’t have to tell me about it, sir, I’ve got kids of my own. And while you’re at it, you might as well get Mother Mary off to a nunnery
.

He veered off onto McGregor from Pine rather than continuing toward Trudeau’s house. After months of skulking past the place under the watchful eye of the Cubans he had finally caught sight of the man, when he had practically knocked Alex over bounding up the steps that rose from Redpath.

“
Pardon, monsieur!
” he had said with a grin.

It wasn’t until this apparition had headed up the walk of the former prime minister’s house as if he owned the place that Alex realized it was The Man Himself. He was so odd-looking and small, wizened and gnomish like a character from the Brothers Grimm. This was the man who had faced down the bottle throwers at City Hall, who had made the nation’s women weak at the knees, who had brought the Constitution home. Yet here he was gamboling along the streets like a schoolboy hurrying home for lunch. The encounter left Alex with the queerest sensation, as if he had had a brush with a supernatural being but had somehow failed to make proper use of it, to take away some special power or insight.

All that had been before Alex had made the mistake of getting into a discussion about Mr. Trudeau with one of Félix’s friends that had left a particularly bad taste in his mouth, all the more lingering and sharp because he had actually defended the man. Now he had to pass his house, day after day, and each time be reminded of failures he couldn’t quite name, as if he had somehow fallen short of the mark in a contest he hadn’t even known he’d signed up for.

From the curve that opened out to
Parc Merde de Chien
from McGregor he noticed that the bust of Simón Bolívar had disappeared from its pedestal. Anti-Fidelistas, no doubt, or maybe anti-Trudeauites. At least the placards weren’t here, not in this bastion of Anglo-Scots privilege. In Félix’s neighborhood, one hung from nearly every balcony and porch:
NE TOUCHEZ PAS À LA LOI 101
. The infamous language law. In the beginning the slogan hadn’t seemed much of a rallying cry for rebellion, but then a protest at City Hall had brought people out by the tens of thousands and everything that had felt dead, consigned to the wastes by the pragmatists and the technocrats, had come alive again, all
the old Péquistes crawling out of their post-referendum cocoons to spray-paint English signs and smash things in the streets. Outside his building one morning Alex had passed a car with Ontario plates on whose dusty hood someone had inscribed, apparently without irony, “Anglo go home.”

None of these things made Alex feel especially broad-minded. Rather they made him feel like a redneck, a bigot, the sort of person who looked at a couple of workers whose bum cracks were showing and who stank of cigarettes and thought,
Fucking Quebecois
. At bottom he had Citizen Trudeau to thank for the whole farrago, with his precious Constitution. Alex himself didn’t much care whether the city’s signs were in English or French or Swahili—they were just fucking signs, after all, not Proust. But now the Constitution had come into play and principles were at stake, guillotines being sharpened in the wings while the language police tracked down each misplaced apostrophe. Big-Endians and Little-Endians. Alex wondered which side Fidel, if he were in charge, would have rounded up for the jails.

“I’m of two minds,” Félix had said, in his usual Gaulish pose of fair-mindedness. “Of course, if we were separate we would protect our minorities like any state, but this way it’s different. This way
we’re
the minority.”

There was no placard at Félix’s place, at least, that wasn’t his style, but nonetheless Alex had felt a sort of suasion beginning to set in there, Félix’s speech peppered now with telling catchphrases that all seemed joined in some long, unacknowledged assault against an unnamed enemy. Phrases like,
Of course
, and
It’s different
, and
If we were separate
. Alex had never quite forgotten Félix’s argument with Louie: there was always that part of him that kept waiting for Félix to slip up, for the true fascist to show himself beneath the cultured façade.

Félix and Louie had actually met again, in the gay ghetto, of all places, one night when Alex and Michael had run into Louie prowling the streets of the East End and had dragged him to the California. The California was strictly gay lite, the refuge of straight women who didn’t want to get hit on and straight men like Alex who liked to think of themselves as enlightened. It turned out Louie knew the place.

“I’m going to sleep only with white men,” he said. “And only on top.”

Heads turned as soon as Louie walked in. He stood surveying the room like an African prince, drinking the attention in.

He nodded toward the bar.

“Alex, look. It’s your friend.”

Sure enough, Félix was there, in the trademark cashmere pullover he wore in his after-hours incarnations, chatting up a young man at the bar who looked decidedly fresh-faced and sheepish and Alex-like. Alex thought he caught Félix about to turn away and pretend he hadn’t noticed them, but Louie hadn’t taken his eyes from him.

“Alex!” He was coming over to them, his face lit in a smile that came so naturally it seemed real. “What a surprise! And your friend, I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.”

Louie held out a big hand as if all was forgiven.

“But I remember yours, my friend, I remember yours!”

The group of them settled at a table and Louie and Félix, bizarrely, talked for half an hour or more in rapid French, while Michael worked the crowd and Alex was left to make halting conversation with Félix’s young companion, a boy from Rimouski who couldn’t have been more than twenty. Alex couldn’t figure what game Louie and Félix were at: they were acting as if they were old comrades-in-arms remembering their days battling the regime back in Port-au-Prince. Félix’s hand came out again and again to touch Louie’s shoulder.

“So I guess you guys made up,” Alex said, after Félix had picked up the tab and gone off with his Rimouskan.

“The man is a dead man,” Louie said grimly.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s got it. The virus. The bug. You can smell it.”

Alex didn’t have the stomach to stay on very long after that.

“Did you get that?” he asked Michael. “That he’s sick?”

“It’s not like people wear a star. Maybe he’s just old.”

At their next lesson, Félix acted as if the evening had never happened. That corner of his life, picking young men up in bars and such, seemed set apart. Something had shifted between them, though, as if there was an understanding now, a sort of convoluted agreement to know and not know.
He’s a dead man
. Alex couldn’t get the stone certainty of Louie’s voice out of his head. Félix continued to go to work, he drank his wine, he traipsed off on his holidays, yet there was a change, perhaps, he was more wan or more thin, more tired. Or perhaps the same.

Alex made an effort to stop smoking around him.

“But you must,” Félix insisted. “It’s the one vice I don’t have. I can enjoy it from you.”

And afterward Félix always had a pack of cigarettes around, Alex’s brand, which he’d lay out on a side table before their lesson.

Their relationship had begun to seem a kind of theater by then. Surely their lessons were beside the point—Félix already spoke better English than Alex did, and in any event he wasn’t going to have much use for it if he was dying. Alex didn’t know what the average life expectancy was these days, but he knew that gay men were dropping like flies: one month they looked healthy, the next they were skin and bone. Félix ought to be getting his affairs in order, not swanning around the gay bars or wasting his time with the likes of Alex.

The invitations for drinks had stopped by then, after Alex had begged off a few times, but now Félix invited him to dinner.

“It’s just a few close friends, nothing very formal,” he said. “No one to be afraid of.”

Alex hadn’t dared refuse, wondering at Félix’s intentions but telling himself that he had probably merely needed a fourth, or a sixth, or an eighth, and Alex would do. In the liquor store he agonized over what wine would be up to Félix’s standards and settled finally on a thirty-dollar Barolo, then regretted the excess of it as soon as it was paid for. When he arrived at Félix’s door he realized he hadn’t even so much as wrapped the bottle and was ready to turn around and head back home.

“Alex! So you’ve come! Come in, come in, I’m just finishing up in the kitchen.”

The house was filled with cooking smells. The dining room, a cavernous place with oak paneling and exposed beams that sat closed off and dark during Alex’s visits, was completely changed now, decked out with tableware and flowers and billowing napkins folded into the shape of some kind of bird. From the living room came a loud hum of conversation, but Alex followed Félix into the kitchen, clutching his little offering.