Genesis

by Jim Crace

  She could not stop herself. The night was beckoning and she was dressed for it. But if there was any hero in her sights, the young man (now hurrying with her out of the ABC and into Cargo Street, four flights of stairs ahead of them) was not the one. She herself was the only person she observed in her mind’s eye. The clock reversed. Again she was the woman, half a couple, waiting at the street cafe. But magnified. Enlarged. Desired. The blur of men passed by and liked her hair, her dress, her face, her legs. How better she must be than any wife, they thought. Half of the city wanted to sleep with her. She was the woman on the poster for Life magazine, the lipstick and the glass of wine, kissing everyone. Her mouth. Her tongue. She only had to lift her face and look around and smile for them, for all the men. The telephone could ring and be ignored. She’d not be caught. Four stories up the winking lenses could only catch the light.

  “So,” SHE SAID again. “It’s quite a view you’ve got up here.” She meant it as an undemanding invitation for the man, the boy, to step across and wrap his arms around her waist. Somebody had to close the gap between the sidewalk table and the room. Surely that was partly his responsibility. She soon knew, as seconds passed like struck bells, the binoculars still heavy in her hand, that this young man would never take the single step across the kitchen to press against her at the windowsill, his lips against her neck, his cock lengthening against her leg. He was too scared and innocent. She’d have to make the move herself.

  The act was simple. She reached across and touched the bare torso above his belt, the boyish plume of hair. “So!” she said again. The word seemed unavoidable, as did the pouting moue that delivered it. Then, “You’re quite the little spy.” She wanted him to talk before she kissed, before they made their way to his untidy bed in his unruly room. She wanted to discover what she looked like in the lens. “Tell me … why you look at me.” She nodded at the street below, the almost empty cafe, as if she were still sitting there.

  Lix did not consider himself to be a spy or a snooper, of course. His frequent reconnaissances from behind the kitchen curtains were just routine for him, something for the wasting moments of the day, which at least allowed him to imagine that he had a part to play in all the kissing that was taking place that year. What else was there to do when he was home—an empty home—except put on the radio or choose an album for the record player, then browse the street with his binoculars. This was the closest he could get to contributing anything to Life’s portrayal of the city.

  The woman from the cafe standing with her fingers wrapped around his belt was wrong if she imagined she was special. He did not only have eyes for her (though it was hard, for the moment, to think of anybody else while she was pushing up his T-shirt). He was indiscriminating in his interests, so long as his attention could be held by someone female and attractive. His eyes were robbing women from the street as nonjudgmentally as a mugger.

  And his excuse, should he be caught? And his excuse, now that he had been caught and challenged by the woman breathing in his face, so close that he could smell her perfume and her scalp? It was his duty to observe, of course. Watch people in the street, his drama teachers had instructed his group. Watch how they behave. Follow them even, to see and learn what people do when they are innocently on their own. He was only studying, through his binoculars.

  “It’s just part of my course,” he said. “You’re always there. I always watch, that’s all.”

  “It’s something more,” she said. “I know about you men.”

  She wanted him to tell her that he’d always wanted her, that he had thought about this moment many times before. She wanted him to say, “I was excited when I caught you in my lens.”

  Instead he said, “I’m finding this embarrassing.”

  He meant that the impulse that had taken him to seek arousal at the kitchen window was hardly targeted. He was not seeking consummation with a woman with a name but only giving vent to haphazard randiness, that wild anarchic master of the unattached. He only meant to satisfy himself. Now he faced the fear and the embarrassment of achieving the impossible, of doing something he had never had to try before. He must transfer his universal and unfocused longing for any woman safely chancing by at a distance to this particular and all too present woman.

  She slipped her shoes off, kicked them across the kitchen floor, becoming short and vulnerable without her heels. “Kiss, kiss. Are you allowed to study kissing, too? Come on.” She shocked herself, on tiptoes, in bare feet, her tongue surprising his, her hands pushed up inside his shirt as if he were the woman. She was in the mood for shocks. She’d had a shocking and unhappy day and she was hoping for some pleasurable revenge.

  She should not, though, have kissed his birthmark quite so readily. She should not have held its short soft hairs between her lips. He gasped and tried to pull away. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For this … the blotch.”

  His birthmark would unman him all his life, he’d always thought. This red and hairy nevus would repulse the girls. It would be the obstacle denying him a wife. He’d never met a single female who had not stared at it for a moment when they first laid eyes on him or who otherwise had battled with themselves to fix their attention elsewhere. He felt that people’s eyes were darting constantly, mockingly, to his cheekbone, that it fascinated and repulsed them like a harelip or a walleye, like some unsightly boil. He felt as if his body had no other purpose than to haul his flaming cheek around. His burning cheek, his everlasting blush. His boyhood friends had teased him about it, called him Smudge, indeed, a pitiless nickname which he had foolishly adopted and still allowed when he went home, just to show that the blemish did not really bother him these days. But, oh, it did. It shaped the way he was.

  Lix had developed the habit while still a young boy of holding a hesitant hand up to his eye when he spoke to strangers as if shielding it from sunlight. It drew attention to the birthmark, of course, rather than hiding it, and gave the boys something more to tease him about at school. He had tried to keep that hesitant hand in his trouser pockets, to be—or seem—relaxed about himself. Too frequently he also felt obliged when making new acquaintances to introduce himself as Smudge and then point out the cherry-colored birthmark as if it had not already been noted and ignored. He made jokes about it at his own expense. He was overinsistent, in fact, and made some old acquaintances so uncomfortable that they started calling him Felix and looking fixedly at their feet when they conversed rather than give offense by flickering a glance at his face.

  What Lix could not accept, would never realize, but which the woman from the sidewalk cafe had recognized at once, was that the nevus was attractive rather than ugly. How tender it had been to kiss him there. It was like kissing someone better on a bruise, or kissing someone’s eyes to stop the tears. Here was an invitation to be tender. The birthmark was the sweetest part of him. It lent to an otherwise inexpressive face a sardonic and whimsical note, a touch of innocence and beauty. What small romantic successes Lix had enjoyed in his teens had been encouraged rather than hindered by what the mark did for his face. Lix did not understand. All his personal and public failures he blamed upon the stain.

  Perhaps that’s why Lix grew to love the cinema so much. It was a refuge where his birthmark was not seen, where everybody faced the front and no one stared at him. It does not explain, however, the oddly self-exposing decision he had made that he would be an actor, someone stared at for a living. Or, possibly, as his best friend cleverly observed when Lix announced that he had won a place at theater school, “He’s looking for a job where he can cake himself in makeup.”

  If only his best friends could see him now, a woman on her tiptoes kissing him, again, again, on his birthmark as if the cherry stain were fruit. Here was proof for them at last that love—or passion, anyway—was blind, that it could overcome, ignore, forgive the blotches and the blemishes.

  She kissed him there again, prevented him from pulling back. He was a
timid soul, birthmark or not. Another man, most other men, would not conceal themselves behind the curtains of an upper room. They’d be out on the streets themselves, consummating their desires. Another man would not require cajoling and encouragement. But here, still at the kitchen door, still with her lips pressed to his cheek, she realized quite soon, was someone who, if he (just like the city) had hardly kissed before—and that seemed possible, to judge by his hesitation—almost certainly had not made love before either. He was more than inexperienced. A virgin, then? She felt more purposeful.

  Thank goodness someone there was purposeful. Lix was all at sea. His only physical contact with women—other than that one startled volunteer—was onstage or in his acting classes when there was a drama coach or stage directions to guide him: Take her arm or Seize her roughly or Embrace. And he obeyed the script. And she—whichever student actress it might be that day, instructed to be his Blanche, his Juliet, his Beatrice, his Salome—responded by the book.

  These were the licensed touches of the theater, unconsummated congresses, studied passion, love technique that’s only there to dupe the audience.

  Of course, the flesh he handled was not fake. Those onstage partners in his embrace were genuine women, ready with the action and the words. These were real lips. Those hands he took to kiss or shake, those costumed shoulders he enveloped in his arms, were not from props. The peasant’s dress that dashed against his ankles when they danced was fraudulent, just dressing up, a play. Yet when his hand supported her—the girl in his stage group, whoever she might be that week, his partner—for her cartwheel, then those glimpsed legs were alarmingly real, as was the heady smell of bottled perfume from Chanel, as was the bra strap, textured and insinuating against his palm.

  None of them were quite as real as she’d become, the little shoeless woman from the sidewalk cafe who now was backing him out of the kitchen, across the wooden boards of his small room, until his legs were pressed against the endboard of his bed and he was toppling.

  She knew enough about young men to please if not utterly satisfy herself before she let him ejaculate, although their lovemaking had been so urgent and frantic that neither of them had removed a single item of clothing. Not one, except her pair of shoes, abandoned in the kitchen. His underpants and trousers were around his thighs. Her underclothes had just been pulled aside. Her brassiere, still fastened at the back, was riding underneath her chin. Thank goodness for the Sandinista rough-look skirt. She could go home by streetcar and look respectable, and not appear unbecomingly disheveled. Despite her tears. For there’d be tears as soon as she descended from his room.

  THE WOMAN HADN’T yet revealed her name to Lix. She was feeling guilty actually and would have lied if he’d inquired what she was called or solicited her phone number or suggested that they make the ABC their occasional rendezvous. But he had not inquired, solicited, or requested. Having sex had doubled his embarrassment, not eradicated it. His tongue, so active just a few minutes before, was now entirely tied. No matter. She didn’t think they’d meet again anyway. She didn’t even think she’d go back to the sidewalk cafe anymore. Her future, dearly, was elsewhere. Her catch would have to find another friend for his binoculars.

  They lay in bed, his narrow bed, for far too long, looking at the posters on the ceiling—rock groups she’d never heard of, demonstrations and campaigns she’d never join, experimental plays she’d hate, and on the facing wall an illustrated slogan by Roesenthaler which declared that “the Artist is the Armourer.”

  “What must you think of me?” she said.

  “I don’t think anything. Well, nothing bad.”

  “Am I your first?”

  “First what?”

  “First one in bed.”

  “First what in bed?”

  She shrugged. Men always disappointed her. “Where can I wash?”

  “They’ve got a shower down the corridor. I use the kitchen usually …”

  Lix followed her into the unlit kitchen and waited at the door (a host at last) while, finally, she began to take off her clothes, a silhouette against the darkened window, and drape them over his radiator. She tied the towel he gave her around her waist.

  “I’ve got some coffee if you want.”

  “I do need coffee, yes.”

  Lix leaned across her at the sink to fill the saucepan with water. Her breasts were hard and cold against his arm. “I’ll have to boil some water for you too, if you need to wash,” he said. “There isn’t any hot. Not from the tap.” The gas flame dramatized the room. “I have a question.”

  “Go on.”

  He wanted to ask, “Am I okay in bed? Can I be confident with girls? What should I know that I don’t know?” She was an older woman after all. It was her job to put his mind at rest. Instead, he said only, “What’s up?”

  “‘What’s up?’” Already she could see how irritating he could be.

  “You know, I mean, what’s going on?”

  She leaned against the window frame and looked down on the street below without the aid of his binoculars. Nothing moved. It was past midnight. The sidewalk cafe had been packed away, its shutters drawn, its chairs and tables folded and padlocked. “I came with you,” she said, “because the guy that I am always waiting for, down there, did not show up. That’s why.”

  “Let’s go to bed again.”

  She was astonished, not that the object of her “little interlude” didn’t seem to care about her lover dumping her—why would he care? Nobody cared—but that this innocent had been transformed so quickly into something more familiar to her, the predatory man forever wanting to make love, demanding it, cajoling it. She’d been a fool to take her clothes off while he watched and then to stand half naked in the semidark, her body silhouetted in the streetlit window frame. It had been a provocation, obviously. He was provoked. Quite clearly so. His body, his erection, flattered her. She almost welcomed it, this second visitation. How could she not? She was, she believed, its single cause. His body was awakening again to her close presence in the room. It validated her and no one else. Lix, though, was not intent on flattery.

  This time it was not left to her to close the gap between the sidewalk table and the room, to take the single step across the kitchen. He was no longer scared and inexperienced, it seemed. He pressed himself against her at the tiny sink next to the window. He pushed his trousers down.

  She was a little nervous suddenly. She’d lost control. This was, when all was said and done, a stranger’s room, a dangerous place.

  “We’ve done it once,” she said.

  “You’re beautiful.” Already he had one hand on her breasts and the other was pushing up the towel. “Let’s lie down in the other room.” He shouldered her toward the door. The sycophant became the psychopath in seven seconds flat.

  Where was the tenderness in this? It was, of course, too much to ask for love in these odd circumstances. But tenderness? How kind was Lix with her? Perhaps it was too soon and he too young for tenderness. The heart and brain are slow to play their parts when men discover sex. We can allow him some excuse: he meant no harm; he’d seen too many films and thought that making love was an aggressive act; he wanted to redeem himself in his own eyes. And we should recognize this tender and forgiving truth, in later years Lix proved to be a man who was not cruel or casual in his consummated passions but, with one costly exception, only copulated with the woman whom—for the moment at least—he adored.

  Cupid is by nature mischievous, irrational, and irresponsible. By now, even without the kindness and the tenderness, she was aroused herself to tell the truth. The words “You’re beautiful” will always do the trick. There was something else that had alerted her and quickened her: the window frame, the windowsill, the curtains still not drawn against the prying night, the empty street below, and his binoculars still hanging from their peg.

  “Let’s do it here,” she said. “Be quick.” She turned her back on him and braced her arms against the window frame. She s
tuck her bottom out, a silent fat-lipped purse of soft flesh, and reached behind her legs for him, to guide him in. “Come on, come on.” Her senses were all genital. She hardly felt his fingers on her back, she hardly heard his breathlessness, the kettle boiling on his stove, the rattling woodwork of the window frame, the division and adhesion of their skin. She pressed her forehead up against the glass but noticed no one passing in the street below, no cars, no revelers, no cheating husbands too late to meet their patient mistresses, not even any cats to catch her eye. Lix might be lost in her. But she had half forgotten him. She’d not delude herself. She was not passionate for this probationer. She was the subject and the object of her own desires. She lost herself, four stories up, in only what was happening to her, a woman in so many places all at once, it seemed, the cafe, the bed, the ABC, the gloomy streetlit room, the city’s dark, conspiring boulevards, a woman who had only meant to reassure herself.

  So now, at last, we’ve reached the early moments of Lix’s oldest child. A girl, in fact. A girl called Bel. She’d have a vestige of her father’s nevus on her cheek, the slightest smudge. By now she’d be, what? in her mid-twenties and still waiting for the moment when she’d want to, dare to, make the phone call to her unsuspecting “dad.” She’d phone one day. She’d write. She’d send a photograph. The ball was bouncing in her court. For the moment, though, on that midnight of induction in 1979, in that year when we began to kiss, Lix had no idea how this encounter would prolong itself … so physically. He felt the kettle’s hot steam massage on his back. But he could not remove himself from her just yet. His legs were suddenly as weak and boneless as the towel that had unraveled from her waist. He had to gasp for oxygen. Otherwise he’d never felt so free and ready for the world. Courageous, too.