Lesje is walking beside William, hand in cool hand. There are no dinosaurs here; only similar walkers, on the prowl like themselves, an apparently aimless prowl through the lighted grid of the central city. In passing, Lesje glances into the windows of dress shops, department stores, appraising the cadaverous mannequins who stand with their pelvises thrust forward, hands angular on hips, legs apart, one knee bent. If these bodies were in motion they would be gyrating, jerking, a stripper’s orgasmic finale. Since they are frozen plaster and wire, however, they are in good taste.
Lesje has been spending quite a lot of time lately in these same shops, on her way home from work. She flips through the racks, looking for something that might become her, something she might become. She almost never buys anything. The dresses she tries on are long, flowing, embroidered, very different from the denims and subdued classics she habitually wears. Some with full skirts; the peasant look. How her grandmother would laugh. That little sound, like a door creaking, that used to come from behind her tiny walnut-colored hands.
She’s thought about getting her ears pierced. Sometimes, after checking through the dresses, she goes to the perfume counter and tries the testers on her wrists. William says he isn’t interested in clothes. His one stipulation is that she must not cut her hair. This is all right, since she doesn’t want to cut it. She’s not betraying anything.
William asks her if she’d like something to drink. She says she wouldn’t mind a coffee. They didn’t come out to drink; they’d intended to go to a movie. But they spent too much time poring over the entertainment pages of the Star, trying to decide. Each wanted the other to take the responsibility. Lesje wanted to see a re-run of King Kong at the university film series. William finally confessed that he’d always wanted to see Jaws. Lesje didn’t mind, she could see how well they’d done the shark, which was after all one of the more primitive life forms still extant. She asked William if he knew that sharks had floating stomachs and if you suspended one by its tail it would become paralyzed. William didn’t know this. By the time they got to Jaws it was sold out and King Kong had started half an hour earlier. So they’re walking instead.
Now they’re sitting at a little white table on the second level of the Colonnade. William is having a Galliano, Lesje a Viennese coffee. Gravely she licks whipped cream from her spoon, while William, having forgiven her for causing him to miss Jaws, is explaining his latest problem, which has to do with whether more energy is lost in the long run by using the heat from incinerated garbage to run steam generators than by just letting the stuff go up in smoke. William is a specialist in environmental engineering, though the small raucous voice that occasionally makes itself heard behind Lesje’s studiously attentive face refers to it as sewage disposal. However, Lesje admires William’s job and agrees with him that it’s more important to the survival of the human race than hers is. Which is true, they’re all in danger of drowning in their own shit. William will save them. You can see it just by looking at him, his confidence, his enthusiasm. He orders another Galliano and expounds on his plans for generating methane gas from decomposing excrement. Lesje murmurs applause. Among other things, it would solve the oil crisis.
(The real question is: Does she care whether the human race survives or not? She doesn’t know. The dinosaurs didn’t survive and it wasn’t the end of the world. In her bleaker moments, of which, she realizes, this is one, she feels the human race has it coming. Nature will think up something else. Or not, as the case may be.)
William is talking about dung beetles. He’s a good man; why is she so unappreciative? Dung beetles were once of interest to her. The way in which Australia solved its pasturage problem — layers of dried sheep raisins and cow pads keeping the grass from growing — by a massive importation of giant African dung beetles, was once a beacon of hope. Like William, she saw it as elegant ecological problem-solving. But she’s heard it before, and before. Finally it’s William’s optimism, his belief that every catastrophe is merely a problem looking for a brilliant solution, that gets to her. She thinks of William’s brain as pink-cheeked, hairless. William Wasp, she used to call him, fondly enough, before she realized that he found it a racial slur.
“I don’t call you Lesje Latvian,” he’d said, aggrieved.
“Lithuanian,” she said. “Litvak.” William had trouble with the Baltic states. “I wouldn’t mind if you did.” But she was lying. “Can I call you William Canadian?”
Billy Boy, charming Billy. Where have you been all the day. Shortly after this they had an argument about the Second World War. It’s William’s opinion that the British and, of course, the Canadians, including his father, who was a captain in the Navy, making William the world’s authority, entered the war from superior moral principles, to save the Jews from being reduced to gas molecules and vest buttons. Lesje disputed this view. Saving a few Jews was a sideline, she said. Really it was grab and counter-grab. Hitler could have frizzled Jews to his heart’s content if he hadn’t snatched Poland and invaded the Netherlands. William found this point of view ungrateful. Lesje then produced the corpse of her Aunt Rachel, who hadn’t been saved, whose anonymous gold teeth had plumped some Swiss bank account. What reply to this indignant ghost? William, routed, went into the bathroom to shave. Lesje felt a little cheap.
(Then there was her other grandmother, her mother’s mother, who’d said: We welcomed Hitler at first. We thought he would be better than the Russians. You see what’s happened now. Which was ironic, since her husband had been practically a Communist, back in the Ukraine. That’s why they had to leave: the politics. He wouldn’t go to church even, he wouldn’t put a foot in a church. I spit on the church, he’d say. Long after his death Lesje’s grandmother was still weeping about it.)
She’s noticed recently that she’s no longer waiting for William to propose to her. Once she thought it would follow as a matter of course. You lived with someone first, to try it out. Then you got married. That’s what her friends from university were doing. But William, she now sees, finds her impossibly exotic. True, he loves her, in a way. He bites her on the neck when they make love. Lesje doesn’t think he’d let himself go like that with a woman of, as she once caught him putting it, his own kind. They would make love like two salmon, remotely, William fertilizing the cool silvery eggs from a suitable distance. He’d think of his children as issue. His issue, uncontaminated.
This is the crux: William does not want to have a child by her. With her. Though she’s hinted; though she could spring one on him unannounced. Guess what, William, I have a bun in the oven. Your bun. Well, he’d say, take it out.
Oh, very unfair to William. He admires her mind. He encourages her to use technical language in front of his friends. It gives him a hard-on when she says Pleistocene. He tells her she has beautiful hair. He gazes into her sloe eyes. He’s proud of her as a trophy and as a testimony to his own wide-minded-ness. But what would his family in London, Ontario, think?
Lesje pictures this family as numerous and pinkish blond. The members of it spend most of their time playing golf, between strenuous rounds of tennis. When they aren’t doing this they gather on terraces — she sees them doing this even in the winter — and drink cocktails. They are polite to strangers but make remarks behind their backs, such as, “Fellow doesn’t know who his own grandfather is.” Lesje is confident about her grandfathers; it’s the great-grandfathers that are the problem.
She knows William’s family isn’t really like this. But, like her parents, she grants extra rungs on the ladder to anyone with an authentic British name who doesn’t noticeably live on a park bench. She knows she shouldn’t do this. William’s family probably doesn’t have much more money than her own family does. They only have more pretensions.
Once she’d been afraid to meet them, fearing their verdict. Now she’d love to. She’d paint her teeth gold and come in jingling a tambourine and stamping her feet, her head covered with fringed shawls. Living up to their horrified expectations. Her grandmother clapping diminutive mole-paw hands together, creaking with laughter, cheering her on. Blood will tell. “We was talking to God when they was talking to pigs.” As if age, in people as in cheese, was a plus.
“There were no dung beetles in the Neo-Devonian,” Lesje says.
William is brought up short. “I don’t follow you,” he says.
“I was just wondering,” she says. “About the parallel evolution of dung beetles and shit. For instance: which came first, man or venereal disease? I suppose hosts always have to precede their parasites, but is that really true? Maybe man was invented by viruses, to give them a convenient place to live.”
William decides she’s joking. He laughs. “You’re putting me on,” he says. He thinks she has an offbeat sense of humor.
An Albertosaurus, or — the name Lesje prefers — a Gorgosaurus, pushes through the north wall of the Colonnade and stands there uncertainly, sniffing the unfamiliar smell of human flesh, balancing on its powerful hind legs, its dwarfed front legs with their razor claws held in close to its chest. In a minute William Wasp and Lesje Litvak will be two lumps of gristle. The Gorgosaurus wants, wants. It’s a stomach on legs, it would swallow the world if it could. Lesje, who has brought it here, regards it with friendly objectivity.
Here’s a problem for you, William, Lesje thinks. Solve this.