Read Online The Origin of Species by Nino Ricci - Free Book Online Page B

said that? He was coming off as an ass. “Just the time, I guess.”
    Félix gave his little grunt.
    “Well, you’re still young, I suppose. Young enough.”
    Alex breathed a sigh of relief after their third session: three sessions at a go was usually the upper limit for Mme Hertz. She didn’t like her people getting too chummy with the clientele, lest the Method lose pride of place; instructors had to remain interchangeable, like priests in the Church. But then his schedule came up and Félix was still on it.
    Fucking Hertz
, he thought, thinking she had it in for him, until she headed him off before his next lesson looking distinctly unpleased.
    “He’s asked for you,” she hissed, as if he’d committed some heresy.
    Alex hardly knew what to make of that. Maybe it was because Félix had found out that he was Italian.
    “After our last session?”
    “No. From the start.”
    It was probably just that he was so innocuous, the kind of blank slate people like Félix preferred because they could leave their own mark on it. But he couldn’t help liking Félix a little better after that. Maybe he’d misjudged the man; maybe he’d been struggling as much as Alex to find some sort of common ground. Whether they actually had any was an open question, but Alex wasn’t an idiot, he could see there was something admirable in Félix amidst all that starched dignity. Things had gone better from then on. If Alex stuck to innocuous subjects like travel and points of grammar, there was a lot less of the grunting and bristling he’d had to contend with at the outset. Félix’s fondness for things Italianslowly warmed to what seemed an actual
chaleur
toward Alex, the source of that vexing deference, no doubt, though what was vexing about it was probably Alex’s fear of losing it. But what truly fired the man up was English idiom: he’d show up with some irksome new phrase he’d come across and put it before Alex like a personnel problem he couldn’t solve or an insult that had been flung at him, and then an entire session might pass tracing the byways of it, down through the whole sluttish history of the English language. Alex was on solid ground here, thanks to a course he’d done on the subject.
    He brought in some poems in Middle English, and Félix was fascinated at how much of the Norman showed through in them.
    “It’s true: we don’t think of it, but of course the court was all French then. It’s an interesting thing, these histories. All those fights between English and French, it’s like a fight between brothers. They’re always the worst.”
    This was as close as Félix ever got to levity on these sorts of issues; Alex didn’t push the point, lest he accidentally cross some forbidden border into the sacrosanct. Félix was a man of compartments, Alex sensed, everything carefully squirreled away in its separate drawer. All the weeks they’d spent together, and yet Alex had learned almost nothing about him: Félix had never mentioned his son again after that once; he’d never mentioned a home, his colleagues, a wife. Alex had learned more about Esther in an hour than he knew about Félix, though three times a week he’d been paid to do nothing but talk to him.
    Félix was still standing at the window gazing up toward the McGill campus, though Alex had taken his seat and gone through the motion of opening up his Berlitz book, in case Madame checked up on him. There was an uncertain energy to Félix today, a distractedness. Maybe it was just the clothes—he looked thinner in them, more vulnerable.
    “You know, why do we sit here in this terrible office?” he said. “We should go out. Come, I’ll offer you a drink.”
    This was definitely crossing a Berlitz line.
    “I’m not sure,” Alex started. “I should let them know—”
    “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