by Jim Crace
However, Lix could not truly desire the woman in Picasso blue. She was too young, for a start. Too fresh and new. Lix liked contemporaries. She was too beautiful for him as well. And dull. As dull as hotel restaurants and hotel suites. Expensive, formalized, homogeneous, and dull. He could not imagine such a woman saying anything to make him laugh or startle him, or holding an opinion. Her smoking was her only conversation. Her only talent was with clothes and makeup. And with hair.
Her perfect body was a disincentive: that’s something few women ever understand. It was not eloquent, not in itself, not even in the prospect of its nakedness. The body tells you nothing. It’s not the body but a woman’s ever undressed face that most men find enticing, the undefended and arousing glance that betrays exactly what the glancer sees in you, exactly what she’s found. The glance is more arousing than plain nakedness because the glance betrays its promises and pledges. The glance precipitates the futures that you share. A body can’t do that.
But this young woman’s face was still expressionless. There was more evidence in her fine face of self-regarding display than sexual consciousness. If Lix had sex with her, Madame Picasso in the blue, there’d be no mischief nor any joyful, human grubbiness. He’d snub his nose, his lips, his cock on her proprieties. The smells would all be bottled and the noises hushed and mannered. He would be making love but not receiving it. Her sexiness was all about herself. For sure, they’d not be having sex inside his car, beneath a stand of peering, rain-soaked pines. She was the Princess of Clean Sheets.
Madame Picasso’s colleague, though, the little woman sitting to her left, unwisely—given her plumpness—enjoying a tall creamed coffee and a plate of brandy toasts, was much more to Lix’s taste. And closer to his age. What? Late thirties, surely, at the very least. Mouetta’s age. Glasses, hair dye, lines, a sunburnmottled throat, experience. Married, but determined to enjoy herself, he judged.
Lix liked her all-black outfit—jeans, jacket, tight and nippled T-shirt—and the one dramatic statement of the shoulder-mounted silver brooch—a dragonfly, its drama somewhat spoiled by four or five white hairs, too long to be her own or even human. She was an animated talker—but a smoker, too. No niceties. Her thumb and index finger had been stained with nicotine. She laughed out loud—too loud, perhaps—given half a chance.
On those few occasions when she was not contributing to the conversation, not spilling over with her stories and her opinions, she was a goading listener with darting eyes, a touch theatrical. She reminded Lix of a character actress he had worked with—but not much liked—on a couple of occasions. Only this woman at the table was, unlike the actress, entirely without self-consciousness and not completely drunk by breakfast time! Oh, what a partner she would make. How uninhibited and amused she would be, how eager to discover something new in anyone she met and liked.
Lix could not think of her inside a hotel room. Or any room. Instead, he placed her in a forest with her dogs. Three longhaired, silvered spaniels. (There’s no accounting for the stories men weave themselves.) And in this fairy tale, the passing stranger, Lix, has stopped to pay attention to her dogs. He fondles them, their parchment ears, their wet and probing snouts. Soon, of course (the constant daydream of a man), the fondling of the dogs becomes the fondling of the woman, too. She’s keen, he thinks. She’s bored at home. Her marriage is in bits. I’m harming nobody.
He has her tearing at his trousers and his belt. The forest’s large and tiny all at once, and noisy with the breathlessness of five impatient animals. The foliage closes in as they sink down into the cushions of the undergrowth, the almost matching smells of bracken and of sex.
It was a third woman at the table, though, who truly fascinated Lix. She was what Frenchmen call une jolie laide but in this city is more cruelly known as a Prickly Pear. A fruit that’s ugly, hard to handle, but once peeled and stripped is addictively sweet and juicy beyond measure. This colleague was a woman in her fifties even, skinny and black-haired, dressed a little oddly for the office—plastic beach boots (she’d had to wade to get to work that day), white trousers, and a cardigan, half buttoned up.
Her mouth was unusually large but, sensibly, her lips were not made up and so seemed sensuous and not promiscuous. Her hair, already slightly dulled by age, was cut to within a half centimeter of her skull all over. It seemed she wanted space to emphasize her good strong bones, her solid cranium, and show her earrings off: hand-tooled silver shields.
Ugly wasn’t quite the word for her. It was certain, though, had she had the chance, had she been keen to fit the mold, she would have traded every feature on her face for something else. The too large nose, the long demanding jaw, the slightly protruding eyes too greedy for their sockets, the Apache cheekbones, the manly ears might all have benefited from some costly surgery. Everything about her except her breasts needed taming and reduction.
Whereas Lix could not imagine walking down the street with Madame Picasso on his arm or even catching her without makeup, let alone yawning, sneezing, smelling of anything other than gardenia, this Prickly Pear with her expressive features seemed to be a woman of irresistible, seductive disarray. That touch of coffee on her upper lip, the unembarrassed action of her jaw as she dispatched her breakfast fruit without the help of her plate or the fruit knife or the modesty shield of a raised hand, suggested a person eager to devour the day.
A fantasy, perhaps. How could he tell anything for certain? Her seeming eagerness might just be shallowness, an undiscerning vacancy of mind. She might be a simpleton. Still, the visual fantasy was strong and logical. From the much loved bobbled cardigan to the sea-salt residue on her beach boots, she was dressed for action, not for show. She had the footwear and the trousers for an unexpected climb, a dash to catch her streetcar, a supermarket trip, a river crossing. She was, in fact, the woman in the room who most resembled in everything but looks his now frowning wife.
Lix could not help but smile while he imagined how the beautiful Madame Picasso would get on if they turned up one blustery afternoon, say, at the Cougar’s Promenade on the cliffs above the long California beach where he and Mouetta had rented a house for their honeymoon. She wouldn’t be able to expose her outfit and her makeup to the rain-laced wind. Her hairdo would not tolerate the weather. Her skin would not enjoy the light. Her dress would flap and wrap around her knees. Her heels would sink into the rippled sand and topple her. She would not even be able to seek the solace of a cigarette. The wind would snatch her flame away and steal the smoke. No chance either that she would agree to cut off up the beach into one of the secluded bays where they might lie down on the sand and carelessly make love.
The plumper one in black, the woman with the dragonfly brooch, might well be game in such a circumstance. But she would not belong on his imagined beach, so far from bars and restaurants. She was a woman who was determined to enjoy herself—just watch her laugh and smoke—but all her pleasures would be city ones. She’d not be agile on a beach. Too heavy, obviously, and possibly—the smoking and her weight—too short of breath to much enjoy a hike. Even Mouetta when she’d had the chance to walk with her new husband on that beach in nothing worse than misty rain had preferred to stay inside their hired car to watch the sea in comfort.
But place the Prickly Pear on the Cougar’s Promenade, suggest to her they get out of the car to brave the wind and spray, and there could be no doubt that she would soon be running down the steps, across the pebble line and tidal sand, to reach the sea. Lix could place her with her beach boots in her hand, her trousers rolled up to her knees, the waves around her calves, her short hair ruffling. She’d be convincing there. No doubt of it.
Wade in yourself, he thought. Stand next to her and feel the shingle shifting underfoot. No matter that the sea is unpredictable. Suggest to her, to that large open face, deprived too long of flattery and kisses, that they should find a quieter spot up in the rocks. Lix was certain she would readily agree.
Two images: the pair of them embracing in
the middle of the sand, her hand pushed down beyond the waistband of his trousers, his hand pushed up into the warmer regions of her cardigan, reaching around to find the soft underarm anticipations of her breasts; and then the two of them, invisible amongst the rocks, fettered at the ankles by their fallen clothes, their mouths engaged, their hands employed between each other’s legs. And for the sound track? In the film? Gulls, of course. A crashing sea. In the distance, cries for help. Madame Picasso stranded by her footwear and the tides, her blue dress lost against the perfect sky, and no one wading out to rescue her.
“WHAT’S SO AMUSING?” Mouetta tapped him sharply on the hand with her coffee spoon. “I said I’m going to the restroom, Lix. You’re grinning like a little boy. Were you dreaming or dozing?”
“Pretty much both. I didn’t get enough sleep last night.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“I only need a nap, that’s all.”
“Well, that makes two of us.”
She left the table and made her way across the room toward the toilets, even smiling at the woman in blue as she passed. His wife looked disheveled from behind, as well she might. She’d slept in what she wore, her once smart skirt and favorite blouse. Made love in them. Inside a car, deep in the park. She hadn’t had a chance to wash or even brush her teeth that morning. So far she’d only used a comb, a touch of cologne, and a couple of tissues. No wonder she was the least crisp woman in the room.
Mouetta’s absence was an opportunity, but not to contemplate his undermining shame at trading in the firebrand student for six minutes’ pleasure in the car. He had to bury that at once. Rather it allowed him to concentrate unambiguously on all the women in the room. Lix could not help himself. Besides, Mouetta wanted his reply on her return. Again he studied the three attractive possibilities over the rim of his lifted cup. He tried them out. He was auditioning. He placed them in Mouetta’s seat across the table in the Palm & Orchid, imagined how they’d look and what he’d say to them if they’d been married for two years, what might occur when they drove home, how they’d react to his determined ambush on the stairs. Again the oldest woman won the day.
He had his answer then. The Prickly Pear. She was the one he chose, out of all the women in the room. She was the likeliest. She was the one that he’d prefer if he could take just one to bed. He wondered what his wife would make of that when she came back from freshening herself. Would she believe him when he pointed to the older woman, oddly dressed, boy-haired, and overdrawn as a cartoon, and said, She is the one that I desire the most?
Lix felt his cock fattening at the very prospect of it, the conversation he and Mouetta would enjoy about the woman’s face and body and clothes, how that might lead, must certainly lead, to more lovemaking when they got back home.
For surely this was Mouetta’s project, to find some sexual stimulation in the answer Lix would give, whatever it might be, while still fully retaining Lix. His passions might well drift beyond recall. His body never would. Mouetta was the only one allowed. Her question, “If you could go to bed with anybody here, which one?,” was her foreplay, a scheme to get her husband talking about having sex with someone else, encouraging his imaginary couplings, his unreal consummations, so that she herself could play the role of that new woman, give herself to Lix as someone new, an actress in a fresher part. That’s why she’d set him loose and left him to indulge these unrequitable but animating fantasies amongst the female colleagues at the table in the city’s chicest coffee shop. She wanted him to test his dreams with her.
Isn’t that what men and women did? Men and women who had shared a marriage berth for two years and a day? They’d want some shore leave, wouldn’t they, to visit—in their hearts, at least—the beds of other lovers, other spouses? We need to flirt and covet strangers for the health and spirit of our marriages. They would be wearying otherwise. There’d be no love. Oh, to begin the day, each day, with fresh desires and still stay true.
Lix could quite easily, with Mouetta safely out of sight for a few minutes, catch any of the women’s eyes, make profiles of his famous face for them, engage one in a conversation, flirt, arrange to meet her in a bar one evening, seduce her with some tickets to his show. That’s exactly what his colleagues would do, given half a chance. An actor’s touring life is cut out for adultery, affairs, the weekend fling. What harm in that? And what—if he were truly someone who would cheat on his wife, other than inside his never faithful, ever scheming head—if he were to go up to the likeliest? If he were to step across and what? Invite her to abandon her workmates and come with him onto the long-imagined beach? What harm in that?
The harm in that for him was the misfortune—was it truly a misfortune?—that every kiss produced a child. Remember? Fertile Lix had never slept with anyone without—eventually—a pregnancy. There always was an aftermath for him.
So then: How dare he take Madame Picasso from the hotel restaurant into the kissing elevator and up into his room, the bed, the mirrors and the steam? There’d be a child, impatient at the door. A boy, he thought. A mother’s boy. Well dressed for one so small—and too obedient. The little violin case in his hand told all of it, as he stood in the corridor amid the uncollected trays, patiently waiting for his parents as they created him inside the hired room. He’d do his practice every time, be quite the little fiddler though not quite good enough to win the prizes that his mother wanted so much—and which his celebrated father would be jealous of.
How dare he be the passing stranger for the plumper woman in the forest with her dogs. How dare he fondle them and her. There’d be a child. A pretty, well-built girl, her face distinguished awfully by the cherry mark inherited from Lix, but plucky and adventurous.
How dare the overfertile Lix take his jolie laide down to the beach … ? Well, to all intents and purposes, that was not so problematic, he realized at once. Her age. Of course! He studied her again. Yes, in her fifties, certainly. Her fertile years long gone. Here was a woman he could safely cheat with, if he were the cheating kind. Perhaps that’s why he’d felt so free in his imagination in her company. Whatever they might do, there’d be no child. It could be his first and only nonproductive affair. Inconsequential sex!
His heart was racing suddenly. Here was his certain risk-free, vindicated choice, ready for when Mouetta returned. He favored someone who could never bear his child.
Yet when she came back to the table, washed, refreshed, and recologned, her hair brushed back and neatened, her skirt and blouse hand-smoothed, entirely more desirable than she had been five minutes earlier, she did not sit down to pursue the answer to her question.
“Let’s go,” she said.
He recognized that tone of voice. Something troubled her. She wanted to get on. There’d be an argument. He feared that somehow she had heard that her student had been arrested—and that she’d guess the reason why. She’d hate him for such wickedness. She’d be right to do so.
It was only once they’d crossed the busy Circular that his wife even spoke. She had another unexpected question for her husband: “Which of my cousins would you like to sleep with most?”
Lix laughed. Uneasily. He was naturally relieved that nothing worse was upsetting his wife. “Ah, cousin Gracia,” he said. He’d named the oldest one, a woman already in her sixties with thick gray hair and as tall and bony as an ostrich.
“Be serious.”
“Your cousins? There’s not a serious answer. I wouldn’t sleep with any one of them. Particularly the women.”
“And Freda, then? I’m sure you’d like to sleep with her again. She’s lovely, isn’t she. More lovely than before. She dresses so beautifully. Imagine if you’d never even met me that dreadful New Year’s Eve, but Freda … well, you’d make love to her again, wouldn’t you? I’m sure of it.”
“Ha ha.”
“You can tell the truth. I promise I won’t mind.”
“Of course you’ll mind. You’ve minded all along about Freda and George.” He wouldn’t
add his own name to the list. “The mystery is, why do you still arrange to see the woman? Why do we still put up with her?”
“Because we must. She’s George’s mother, anyway. She’s family.”
“She’s not my family.”
They drove in silence to the house, the house where they would spend the third year of their marriage, where their child—now smaller than a fingertip—would take its first uncertain steps, the house where they would love and live and row, the house where nearly all his children came to stay on weekends, for the holidays, their empty house with no firebrands asleep in their spare room.
Mouetta followed Lix through the shrubs and pots of their front yard. “You still fancy Freda, don’t you, honestly? After all these years. You fancy cousin Freda.” More than me. She said it to his back.
“Not in the least,” Lix said, though there’d been moments in the car the night before and in the Debit Bar when he’d hardly been thinking of his wife. And there were bound to be some moments in the coming days, the coming months and years, indeed, as there’d been many moments in the past, when he would dwell on Freda for a while and what they’d almost, should have, shared, their George, their lost son in America, now twenty-four years old. He’d always think of her as someone he desired. Mouetta was the woman he required. This is the nature of the beast.
1
LIX LEFT IT late. Till November 1979. He was almost twenty-one and it was nearly midnight when he first had sex with anyone. Full docking sex, that is. Full snug-‘n’-comfy. Like almost everybody else his age, of course, he’d had hand jobs, not only with himself since he was twelve but twice with helpful boys at school and once (a birthday treat when he was seventeen) with an unsuspicious girl, one of nature’s volunteers. Her first time with a boy. She’d seemed surprised at what she’d done, at what she’d made him do, and with such little exertion. She jumped back just in time, so that only her sandal and her wrist were soiled by Lix’s sudden gratitude.
