by Jim Crace
For the moment everything was quiet. Apart from the parked police vans and the helicopters, the city, still in debt and shock, still riotous at heart, had—physically, at least—returned to normal. Sunshine, traffic jams, shopping and commuter crowds, and floods. Floods are normal here: the usual flooded passages and streets along the riverbanks, the flooded underpasses and the flooded gutters where, as usual, the drains had let us down. The city had been overwhelmed by rain.
Mouetta and Lix had stopped for breakfast at the Palm & Orchid Coffee House on their way back home. She held his arm across the tabletop. She pinched his hand. She wanted to inflict some gentle pain. “Come on,” she said. “The truth.” The coffeehouse—a converted botanic conservatory—was chockablock with unsuspecting women for her husband to choose from.
Lix, as usual, misread her mood. He took her question as a kind of erotic afterplay, a sign that she was still stimulated by their recent lovemaking and wanted to continue it, not physically perhaps, but somewhere else inside her head, some secret fold. A female thing. Men recovered after sex more speedily. For women—he had said as much onstage (a play by Palladino)—intercourse was just the overture. But for a man an orgasm was—the playwright’s metaphor again—“the final, rushing note.” The music stopped—and now he could embrace the wider world again. For men (another common metaphor) lovemaking pops the champagne cork. The captive gases dissipate. The pressure is released. The pressure he was feeling now was of a different kind.
Here, for breakfast, Lix was happy to indulge his wife. He liked her question. It also made him wonder if, on their return back home, the as yet untested stairs might earn themselves a second chance. “You really want the honest truth?” Again she dug her nails into his palm.
Lix thought he understood the boundaries and rituals of her now familiar game. He’d made mistakes before—thinking, possibly, that her invitation to search the restaurant, the bar, the hotel lobby, the departure lounge, the cast of a film, and, on a couple of occasions, the pages of magazines, for someone he would like to make love to was her way of testing his fidelity. In which case, the only answer was the reassuring, diplomatic one, that out of all the women he could see Mouetta was the only one for him. That was clearly not the answer she was seeking, though. He’d tried it out before—and it had irritated her. She truly wanted him to look around. And choose. And tell the truth.
“Come on! Which one, if you were free?”
“But I’m not free.”
“You’re free to choose. You’re just not free to act.”
“I see. I am your prisoner, then. At liberty to think and look but not to move.”
“Exactly so. Like through binoculars.”
“And no parole.”
“Not till I’m dead. And, anyway, wives nearly always outlive the men. So I’ll be free before you are.”
There was another lesson Lix had learned, through his mistakes. Mouetta would not welcome it if he showed too much ardor in his choice. He should not seem aroused. He should not lick his mouth or breathe too heavily. He should not need to touch himself or rearrange his trousers. She would not welcome any vulgarity either, though he was always tempted by vulgarity. He had to be dispassionate and analytical, but not too coldly scientific. “It’s just my private chemistry,” he’d said on one occasion previously, when he’d been free to choose amongst the women at a reception they’d attended and had selected someone Mouetta had dismissed as “short and plain.” By chemistry, he’d meant a little more than just the dopamine and oxytocin, or any other agents of libido. He’d meant the chance and random fusions that could occur in the test tubes of two strangers. She’d been disappointed and upset—and evidently baffled—for reasons that he never really understood. From then, he’d always found it wisest to start off with a wary, playful joke. A decoy, as it were. Then he could judge how serious she was, how easy to offend.
Lix looked around the crowded coffeehouse, packed with breakfasting commuters. Here were the city’s office staff, mostly women dressed for desk work and warm weather—although the Palm & Orchid boasted that its “atmosphere” was always semi-temperate—their makeup as yet unsmudged, their skirts and tops fresh from hangers and drawers. Still crisp and fragrant. He’d sleep with fifty women there, if life were simpler.
“The little waitress, obviously,” he said at last.
Mouetta pinched his hand again. “Be serious.”
“I’m being serious. I like my women old and gray. And wearing sandals. I like a lived-in face with lots of chins. And I’m especially fond of bunions. You should be pleased.”
“Oh, yes? My pleasure knows no boundaries. I can get some gray highlights put in today, if that’s your preference.”
“I’m joking but I’m serious. Old’s fine by me. Up to a point. It means I’m not the sort to dump you for some frisky pony as soon as you begin to …” He hesitated, searching for a further equine metaphor. “ … refuse the jumps.” He had to laugh, despite the warning tilt of Mouetta’s face. “The truth is, I can’t wait till you’re sixty—and serving me with your tray and apron. Naked otherwise, of course. Bare bunions.” Lix made his lecher’s face. “I’ll have a double latte please. And honey cake. Give me the little waitress anytime.”
“Why am I less than thrilled with that good news?” she said.
Mouetta could not find it in herself to be pleased with anything that morning. She wasn’t still mentally stimulated by their lovemaking in the car, as he’d imagined. Far from it. She felt, illogically, as if he’d poisoned her. She was in toxic shock. Her temperature was wrong. Her stomach ached. The seat belt strap, her pillow for the night, had left a ridge across her cheek that had not yet repaired itself. Her head and heart were dulled by something out of her control. She could not, dare not, put a name to it. A woman of her age and hopes who has no children yet is always nervous of an early menopause. She’d not slept well, of course. Who does, in cars? But there was something else that bothered her, something undermining and elusive that she’d squeeze out of her husband’s palms with her fingernails, an answer she could only draw with blood.
It was, of course, mostly the onset of her pregnancy that had disrupted her, the gelling of the early cells, the hormone parties striking out to colonize new settlements, the stiffening of glands. How could she know at this precocious stage? How could she yet understand her sudden listlessness, the unusual and overwhelming irritation that she felt for Lix, the nagging private voice that seemed to say her world had changed? Mouetta was a morning person, normally. Only moody after dark, when she was tired. So this was worrying.
SHE’D WOKEN UP in their Panache, aching and perspiring, soon after dawn. The leather front seats of a car are disappointing mattresses. Her body felt precarious, subjected to confinements and contortions for too long. She checked the dashboard clock. Five-forty-six. The only sounds inside the car came from her husband’s nose.
The celebrated Lix had not looked handsome with his great head lolling on one side. The angle rucked up folds of fat around his chin. His hair was unkempt and the infuriating vestiges of his Tartuffe makeup—so oddly stimulating when they were making love—were smeared from his lashes and his eyebrows across his cheek and on his shirt collar. It looked as if his cherry birthmark had been leaking its pale juice.
Mouetta let him sleep (if he was truly sleeping) and stepped out of the car in her bare feet, without her underwear, her own short hair flattened and unflattering. The ground was sodden still. Silver sheets of water spread across the park, low-lit and shadowy. The mud pressed up between her toes. She wanted shelter, privacy, a pee. And then some breakfast at the Palm & Orchid Coffee House. She’d earned it, hadn’t she?
Already there were signs that this could be a fine, dry day. Retreating clouds, hugging the roofs of office blocks. A clearing wind. The skies prematurely busy with geese, commuter jets, and bees. No army helicopters yet above Deliverance Park, but she could hear their chudder from across the river and—something she could n
ot recognize at first—the drum-‘n’-bass of flood machines, already pumping out the rain from underpasses, cellars, and low roads.
Mouetta half stood, half crouched behind the car, her legs spread like an outfielder’s. She held her skirt up around her waist and looked about both nervously and recklessly. Perhaps there’d be somebody walking their dog, or a jogger, or someone else who’d slept out in the park. Well, then, hard luck. They must have seen a woman passing water before. And if they hadn’t, let them look—and learn how everyday it was. How pleasurable, in fact.
She was surprised to see how deep into the park Lix had driven her the night before. The car wheels had churned up ugly and irresponsible ruts across the grass. The service road was almost out of sight, but anyone could find them there—and issue reprimands. Their tracks were deep and almost unbroken. She stretched her arms and legs. She tried to warm herself, loading up on early sun. It would serve her husband right if he got caught and fined for Damage and for Reckless Parking. The celebrated Lix.
Now that her bladder had been emptied and her limbs untangled, Mouetta felt refreshed and comfortable enough to concentrate on her ill temper. It was the product of their anniversary, that much she knew. Was it their failings—well, Lix’s failings—with the student that bothered her? Perhaps, to some extent. She’d set her heart on that “sweet boy.” On having him at home. On taking him from Freda. And, yes, her husband had been feeble, as he usually was when there was any challenge to be faced, or any risk, or any threat to his good name. Actually, the firebrand student had almost faded from her memory. What then? The night of damp discomfort in the car? Her husband’s hurried lovemaking, the sudden sated ease with which he’d dropped asleep? Not that. A woman’s used to that.
Freda, then? Was she to blame? Was her arrest the cause of this uneasiness? No, that was an ancient memory as well, surprisingly. She ought to, she knew, collect her cell phone from the car at once and scroll through her contacts for a sympathetic and earlyrising lawyer. She ought, at least, to let her cousin know that the student had not been rescued yet. The poor boy would want feeding. But Freda’s predicament had lost its urgency overnight. The detainee would have to wait, Mouetta felt, till she and Lix got home and she had showered, changed her clothes, and settled into a less disgruntled mood. Besides, what Lix had said the night before was true. Her cousin would probably be freed in time for breakfast, with or without lawyers. She’d welcome the celebrity, her “night in chains”! Freda was too well known and well attached to stay in custody for long. As soon as they got home, they’d find a message from her winking on the answering machine, her piping, fruity voice, undulled by its experience, with her usual slogans and her provocations, her infuriating “Ciao.” Sweet, slender cousin Freda, oh so brave and beautiful! And oh so undermining.
So now—she only had to listen to her inner voice—Mouetta recognized the truth. Freda was the problem she had woken to. Not the night locked up, or the student trapped beneath the desk. It was more personal—and not a problem to be fixed by lawyers. It was the certainty that she, Mouetta, was second best to her tall cousin yet again. Second best even with her husband still, even on their wedding anniversary. The small rejections of the evening before, in the Debit Bar, which normally she’d shrug away as meaningless, now seemed insufferably huge, inflated by the disappointments of the night. She could not readily forget how Lix had stared into Freda’s lap—goddammit, yes, her cousin’s magnetizing lap—when he’d approached their dining table after his performance. And, yes, of course, how jealous and how sulky he had been when it was clear the student firebrand in Freda’s office was her cousin’s lover. She’d noticed how he’d blushed and could not look either of them in the eye while they were eating, and how oddly exasperated he had seemed when they left the bar.
Mouetta felt defeated suddenly, defeated by the body and the face of someone else, defeated by her not so groundless jealousy and by the past, defeated by her childlessness (while her cousin had already proved herself with Lix in that regard, of course, so many years before. Freda could boast The Lovely George, their lovely George, whom she had raised and trained all on her own, without—she always liked to claim—“a sniff or glance” from Lix).
Mouetta could not bring herself, despite the damp, despite the early morning cold, her lack of underwear, to get back in the car, to join her sleeping, disappointing husband. The moment she’d married him, she’d married jealousy. She drummed her fists against the windows and the roof of the Panache. His morning call. What must she do, who should she be, to be more certain of her husband’s love? The whole thing was a mystery. What urged and motivated men? Who would he truly go to bed with if he had the choice? Was it the undefeated cousin or the wife? In those first sunlit minutes of the day, she’d kicked up loops of water high across the grass with her bare feet.
So now, in shoes but still no underwear, Mouetta waited for her answer amongst the foliage and the breakfasters, her husband easily within her reach, across the teas and pastries in the Palm & Orchid Coffee House. Coffee fixes everything. She did not feel defeated anymore, just baffled and impatient for his choice. She looked around the room herself. It seemed that there were beauties everywhere. “What about the one in blue?” She tilted her head toward a group of office colleagues two noisy tables to her right. “She’s pretty, isn’t she?”
“Which one?”
“You know which one. I saw you staring at her earlier. Stop playing games.” She sighed at him, her lower lip stuck out. A famous warning sign. Mouetta sighs with that shaped mouth, and there’ll be arguments.
“I mean, which one in blue? I’d sleep with anyone in blue. You’re dressed in sort of blue yourself. I’d go to bed with you. When we get home.”
“You’d not choose me before all these others.” She was ashamed to set so transparent a trap.
“Of course I would.”
“Of course you would.”
They let their conversation simmer for a while and pretended to concentrate, in practiced and contented silence, on their breakfasts, the Aztec coffee in the paysanne cups, the glace fruits, the local—and expensive—savories, the honey slice. The Palm & Orchid was a place where it was easy not to talk. The talkers missed the beauty of the place, the filtered shafts of colored light, refracted and intensified by the patchwork of stained Portino glass in the conservatory roof, the somber rhomboids of shade from the woven kites of green rattan suspended from the rafters, the massive earthenware pots of fessandra bushes, hugging crotons, lace trees, and tiger palms.
Then there was the entertainment of the birds. They roosted in the kites and in the plants at night, but during the day they gleaned vacated tables for their crumbs. Tea sparrows, they were called colloquially. But they were urban finches, actually, reluctantly tolerated by the owner because his customers appeared to like their noisy cabaret. So Lix and Mouetta, glad not to be talking for the moment, turned slightly in their seats and looked beyond their coffee cups, across the breakfasters, into the foliage. Had anybody looked at them—a well-known actor such as Lix must always expect to be looked at—they’d see only surface harmony.
“Don’t lie,” she said finally. Out of the blue, “Don’t lie.”
Her husband didn’t dare or bother to reply, just yet. He knew this already expensive breakfast might get costlier unless he was prudent.
Lix indeed had spotted the red-haired woman dressed entirely in Picasso blue, a crisp belted linen dress with matching shoes and bag and eyes. All the best coordinates. Who could miss her? She was a beacon of high taste, and beautiful, amongst the otherwise unremarkable possibilities. And the woman in the blue, Lix knew, had spotted him as well, had recognized his birthmarked face though, possibly, she had not yet recalled his famous name. He’d silenced her by staring back at her, and even smiling, once. Now she’d lost the knack of being natural in company. She’d be dreaming already, Lix was sure, of being lovely in a film.
Lix watched her, dreamt of casting her. She’d look g
ood through a lens. No doubt of it. She’d be no intellectual, of course. No theorist. She had the body, not the mind, for cinema. She had the looks but not the conversation. Her silence suited her. It flattered her, in fact.
It obviously didn’t matter to her friends that the woman had fallen silent so suddenly and that her interest in their conversation had evidently ended. She held her council amongst her colleagues at their noisy table, as only lovely women can, barely smiling, barely speaking, and barely audible when she did speak. No taking part. No looking up. No grimaces. She was auditioning. She smoked. That was not a blemish in Lix’s estimation. Not when the smoker smoked so stylishly. Not when the smoker lizarded the corners of her mouth after every inhalation and seemed to love the smoke so much.
She was a study in provocation. Just like a woman in a Manet bar.
Lix could imagine making love to her, Mouetta’s choice. It would not be hard to make a fool of himself with this starlet. He could—it only took a moment’s contemplation—place her easily across the table in a hotel restaurant, a lucky bedroom waiting on the lucky seventh floor. He would be talking. She’d be smoking, her tongue a constant incitement. She’d kiss him in the elevator, her lips on his, no more than that. She’d not want her makeup smudged, not publicly, not while there was a chance that someone else might join them in the elevator. Lix would behave himself, as they sped through the floors, though he’d be shaking for the opportunity to lift her dress, to see if there was blue beneath the blue. In moments—once his shaking hand had got the shaking key into the lock—he’d see the room, the bed, the swift disposal of the dress, the tissues on her face, removing blusher and mascara, her showering, their double nakedness, the mirrors and the steam. Not hard at all to see himself with her. A body of that quality was rare and overpowering.
