The Origin of Species (8 page)

“It’s fine, I’ll tell them. They’ll get their money all the same.”

There seemed no point in resisting; Félix was already ushering him out of their little executive suite into the hall. Alex’s only hope was that Mme Hertz had already left for home, if she had such a thing. But no,
here she came, barreling out of her office into reception, all chunky five foot one of her, coming right at them as if she’d had them under video surveillance the whole time.

She had her Berlitz death grin at the ready for Félix.

“I hope there’s no problem,” she said at once, by which she meant,
What is the problem?

She was wearing a big-shouldered blazer that made her look like Napoleon, her hair boxed off around her head in an eerie symmetry and showing the effects of a recent dye job.

“No problem at all,
madame
,” Félix said, a bit more icily than Alex might have wished. “I’ve offered Alex a drink. I’ve insisted on it. I hope it’s not forbidden.”

Mme Hertz seemed at a loss.

“No, no,” she sputtered. “Of course. Not at all.”

Félix let the silence hang an instant.

“I should mention that we’ll be sending a few of our interns by over the summer. I hope you’ll look after them.”

Madame’s face had frozen back into its death-grin.

“Of course,
monsieur
, of course.” Alex knew he would pay for this. “I’ll look after them personally.”

The moment they were out the door Alex felt a lightness that was vaguely disquieting, as if some mantle had been removed from him. Out here, he was simply a young man in the company of an older one he had almost nothing in common with.

On the sidewalk Félix looked uncertainly up and down the street.

“Do you know some bar near here?”

“Well, I’m not sure, really. There’s a few, I think.”

He ended up leading Félix over to the Peel Pub, out of some misplaced notion that he ought somehow to expose him to his own culture. What the Peel Pub had to do with his own culture, Alex couldn’t have said. He was only really aware of it because Abbie Hoffman had invited people back there a few months earlier after a talk he’d given at McGill, though Alex, too timid to take up the offer, hadn’t actually set foot in the place. He was mortified to discover now that it wasn’t some underground hippy retreat—though it was indeed literally underground, at the bottom of a litter-strewn stairwell that led down from St. Catherine—but just a tacky college pub. A stench of mold and cigarette smoke hit them
as soon as they stepped through the door, along with the blare of a TV set over the bar that was tuned to a playoff game. A crowd of collegiate types was huddled around the TV, hooting and bantering and using up the air in a way that sent a shiver through Alex’s spine.

“A bit loud, I guess!”

He saw Félix take the place in.

“No, no! It’s fine!”

Félix got them drinks at the bar. A Molson’s, Alex asked for, though he hated beer, and Félix, after eyeing the array of cheap whiskeys and liqueurs lined up on either side of the till, gravely ordered the same. They took a seat in a back corner. The furniture, clunky, heavily lacquered faux Canadiana, was crammed in so tightly they had to squeeze to get into their chairs, their knees bumping against each other’s beneath the table. At the bar, the frat boys, glued to the set, had started to chant:
Go, go, go, go, go
.

What was he doing here with this man, Alex wondered. Félix looked ill at ease, glancing over his shoulder as if toward some threat.

“I’ve never been to such a place,” he said. “It’s like a different city for me.”

“Two solitudes,” Alex said, taking a stab at humor.

But Félix furrowed his brow.

“
Oui, oui. C’est ça
.”

Alex wanted only to be done with this now, to be home. It had been a mistake to risk this awkwardness, to leave the safety of Berlitz, where their roles were defined.

He could have used a cigarette but didn’t want to smoke in front of Félix.

“May I ask you,” Félix said, and for some reason Alex felt his heart thump, expecting he didn’t know what, “how much do they pay you there at Berlitz?”

He was taken off guard.

“It’s not so bad,” he said, not knowing if he was allowed to reveal such things. But when he named the amount, Félix whistled through his teeth.

“Not bad for
them
, I suppose. We pay them three times as much.”

Alex would never have guessed the markup was so high. Who would pay such sums, for the likes of him? He felt devalued in Félix’s eyes, revealed for the Berlitz cog he truly was.

Félix had yet to touch his beer.

“Can’t you make more on your own?”

“I suppose. I’d have to find the students.”

“Ah.”

It wasn’t like Félix, this sort of familiarity.

“I have a proposition,” he said. “Feel free to refuse it.”

Alex felt the thump again.

“It’s very simple. We continue our lessons, the same as before, except I pay you directly. Just that.”

Alex wasn’t sure what he was hearing. This, at bottom, was why Mme Hertz ringed her people around with proscriptions, to prevent the formation of exactly these sorts of cabals.

The alarm bells were going off in his head: if he was found out, he’d be dumped at once. But what was in it for Félix? Just saving a few bucks?

“I’d give the same fee, of course,” Félix added.

“You mean what I get now?”

“No. What we pay.”

It took Alex an instant to digest this.

“That seems a lot.”

Félix shrugged.

“It’s what we pay them, why should it be less? Then for me it means to get away from that awful place. From that woman.”

Alex’s greed had already reared up to shoulder his doubts aside. It didn’t make any sense, really, that kind of cash, just to sit parsing phrases like
pie in the sky
and
let the cat out of the bag
. But all he could see were those dollars piling up, hour after hour.

“It’s very generous of you,” he said warily.

“Not so generous. It’s the company that pays.”

Alex was on eggshells after that, afraid of saying anything to compromise Félix’s misplaced faith in him. They worked out the details, arranging to meet at Félix’s home in Outremont. Twice a week; two hours a session. Alex would be making from Félix alone as much as all his Berlitz hours combined, enough to cover the whole of his rent.

“We’ll say nothing to the school, of course,” Félix said. “Just between us.”

The clouds of the morning had returned by the time they left the pub and a light drizzle had started up.
Chernobyl
, Alex thought, but that
seemed far from him now. The lights of the traffic on St. Catherine and the neon of the shops lustered against the wet.

They ducked under an awning at the corner to say their goodbyes.

“So you have the summer to relax now, I suppose,” Félix said. “From your studies, I mean.”

But all Alex saw was his dissertation looming before him like the wall of a cliff.

“I’ve finished my classes, at least. I’m having a party tomorrow to celebrate.”

“Ah.
Bonne fête, alors
.”

There was a touch of embarrassment in Félix’s voice, as if he felt it unseemly to speak of a pleasure he was excluded from.

“You could come, if you wanted. I mean, it’s just other students and so on.”

He felt foolish. He hoped he hadn’t insulted the man with his presumption.

“It’s very kind of you,” Félix said. The awkwardness between them was palpable. “Of course, if you wish it. If it’s not any trouble.”

Alex had assumed he would simply make his excuses—surely he had his own life to attend to. It seemed they had fallen into another of those protocols he didn’t know the rules of, and he was stuck giving a time, directions, an address.

“Until tomorrow, then,” Félix said, his hand wet from the rain when it took Alex’s.

Alex waited until Félix had disappeared around the corner toward the metro and lit up a cigarette. For some reason his heart was racing, as if he had embarked on some quest or joined the Resistance rather than simply signing up for a bit of under-the-table teaching work. He caught a smell in the air, something uncertain, and for a moment an insight seemed to be forcing itself on him, about Félix or something larger, Chernobyl, his son, hovering tantalizing before him but refusing to take shape. Then as quickly as it had come the feeling passed, and he tossed his cigarette out into the rain and started off home.

T
wilight had set in by the time Alex got home. He hated coming back to his empty apartment at this time of the day, hated how the light drained away from things, how listless he felt. He missed Moses, the stray he and Liz had taken in back in Toronto. He resented how they’d just assumed that Liz would keep him after the split, though he knew that if he’d actually been saddled with the cat he would have resented that more.

His apartment was a shambles still, littered with boxes he had yet to unpack, with all the junk store furniture he’d filled it with. Half of it was ancient undergrad stuff he’d had to haul up to Montreal from his parents’ basement, a cracked drop-leaf table he’d got for five bucks, the hideous floral sofa bed his parents had had at the old farm, the mattress he’d paid fifty dollars for, used, back in second year and on which he’d slept with at least a dozen different women. None of these things had the comfortable air of familiarity they ought to have had—they seemed beside the point, a charade, remnants of a life he wasn’t part of anymore. Meanwhile, there was the letter in the drawer of his desk, though every time he turned his mind to it he seemed about to fly apart in a thousand directions.

The rain had stopped. He poured himself a Coke from the fridge and went out to the balcony for another cigarette. Beyond him the lit towers of the downtown sat clustered like some beast huddling up against the night, framed by the dark mound of Mount Royal and by the river and the distant hills of the Townships. He had a sudden feeling of being stranded on the island the city was, as if it were a feeble encampment against the wild, though he knew it gave way to miles and miles of
featureless suburb where the closest thing to the wild was the local mall.

He thought he might read the letter again. He had already been over it so many times, though always fleetingly, as if it might detonate, that he had it practically memorized.
I write after many years
, it began, in Ingrid’s Swedishly tentative Oxford-summer-school English,
to tell you of our son Per, who will be five in this coming September
. He never got any further than that before his heart was already in his throat. There were details about the boy, but no picture; there was the invitation, of course, to come, because, as Ingrid had written, as if Alex were a famous sports figure the boy had followed, “he very much would like to meet you.” But then at the end: “You must have your life now so perhaps it is better not to write back, if you do not think you can be a father to him. We will manage, of course. It wasn’t you who made the choice so you needn’t feel guilty, though I remember you liked to.”

It made him squirm now to think how galvanized he’d felt when he’d first read the letter nearly four months earlier. He’d been ready to board a plane the next day, to abandon everything. But then slowly, with each day he’d delayed, his resolve had weakened. He could hardly have discussed the matter with Liz when their relationship was in its death throes at the time; and then when it was over, and he was left covered in shit the way he’d been, he couldn’t imagine trailing the noxious odors of himself into the clean, Swedish world of this innocent five-year-old. The reasonableness of Ingrid’s letter had begun to feel insidious by then. What did she mean, exactly, by
be a father to him
? Every day he had turned the phrase over in his head and every day it had seemed more ominous and obscure, a kind of test. Or maybe it was just Ingrid giving him an out, holding up to him the truth of his own nature.

He had managed to dig up a few cassettes she had sent him over the years. The instant he heard her voice he felt her real and alive before him again, saw her garden and smelled its smells, felt the wonder of those first weeks they’d spent together. What was he thinking, not jumping at the chance to go back to that? And yet; and yet. There was the age difference; there was the fact that she lived in bloody Sweden; there was Jesus. Try as he might, Alex had never quite been able to take her seriously after her conversion. Of course, all that was beside the point—he didn’t have to marry her to have a relationship with his son. And yet that phrase kept coming back to him, and what it might mean in her Christianized brain.
Be a father
. But what was a father if not a husband? The time he had visited her post-conversion—the fateful time, it turned out—she’d had sex with him only because in some corner of her mind she had believed, he knew, that he would stay.

It had been different the first time. They had met on the Helsingborg ferry—he had noticed her from the start, an attractive blonde of the sort who made his knees go weak, with that sheen of knowingness and ease that made him think of adulterous trysts in wooded motel rooms or alpine chalets. He’d stood at the rail, backpacked and bearded and unwashed, wishing he was the sort of person who could talk to such a woman, when suddenly she was there beside him, speaking to him in a foreign language.

She was holding some sort of net on a pole over her shoulder, a fishing net maybe.

“I’m sorry?” he said, alarmed, certain she’d mistaken him for someone else.

“Oh! I thought you were Swedish.”

Somehow, he’d managed not to make a mess of it. It was Ingrid, really, who’d managed it—she’d made the thing seem so natural, drawing him out, so that he didn’t simply mumble some half-hearted courtesy and slouch back into his not-yet-quite-post-adolescent shell. He’d been en route to a home stay, something he’d set up with a group called The Experiment in International Living, though all he’d had in the way of direction was an address for the Experiment office in Stockholm, where he’d been planning to head.