by Jim Crace
Lix considered getting up at once to read the message of her braille. Yet again—the story of his life—he lacked the courage and he lacked the confidence. He knew that if he stood and moved toward his wife, then she would close herself to him. A woman dressing does not welcome damp fingers or damp lips. Lix would be left—as ever when he took chances, in love, in business, on the stage—standing, swaying in a fug of vertigo, that familiar nausea and loss of balance that had always made him take descending steps away from risk.
So he stayed where he was, behind his playscript, making marks on the page and imprinting marks into his own back, from the pressure of the wicker chair. He’d wait for a better opportunity. Patience is a dignified form of cowardice, that’s all.
If he waited till the evening, Lix thought, there would be other marks for him to ponder and enjoy. Throughout the day, her underclothes, mediating between the naked and the dressed, the hidden and the visible, would press their tender traceries not only on her outer garments but on her naked body too. When she undressed again, then he would find—if she allowed it, if she came home with him and did not spend the night on Anchorage Street—indentations and elastic imprints across her back and shoulders, around her waist, around her upper thighs.
The very thought of these brief nevuses which could not last beyond the hour, which were so innocent and yet so rousing, made his throat go dry. A hint of vertigo. It was not only fear of contact with Alicja but also the opposite, the shocking prospect of his fingers never touching her again. For a man who no longer had the habit or the self-belief to cross the room and hold his wife, there was something heart-wrenchingly tender, too, about the vestigial rectangles of ridge and furrow from her pressing and her folding of the blouse. Those creases and impressions were eloquent and sad, and so domestically nostalgic. They were the marks of married life—a shelf of clothes, a cupboard and a room, an ironing board, the smell of bodies and cologne and steam.
Alicja, unexpectedly, was not in the least discomforted that her husband was watching her and that—she knew the man of old; men were so visual—he was sexually aroused. She was aroused herself, but not aroused by him. Not making love to him empowered her. It was satisfying. She watched herself pull on her tights. She did not think that she was showing off, although she knew she would have dressed herself more hurriedly if Lix had not been watching from the balcony, behind his cursed script. The man was always buried in a script. It seemed that everything she’d ever said to him had been filtered through a script or blocked by one. The pages of dialogue were the shield with which her husband rebuffed conversation, consigned her to the wings. He’d lost the knack of being normal and offstage. Alicja was coming around to her father’s view of theater.
Once she was fully clad in shoes and skirt, her suit jacket folded across her arm, she pirouetted for the mirror’s sake, but also for the audience of one. Now that she was dressed and safe, she didn’t mind that Lix had got up from his chair and was standing at the balcony door, openly admiring her, with that weasel expression on his face.
“Smart,” he said. A safe remark.
Her shorter, razored hair was indeed smart and flattering, Lix thought, flattering to him as well because there is nothing more supportive of a vain and famous man than to have a wife who merits the admiration and desire of friends, a head turner. The new cut made the most of Alicja’s Polish cheeks. Her hair seemed mischievously springy and boyish once the gel had been applied. Surely Lix could reach out and feel. Surely he could touch his wife.
Sadness made Lix almost brave. He had the pretext of his empty coffee cup, which needed putting on the breakfast tray by the bedroom door. He squeezed between his wife, the mirror, and the bed and, as lightheartedly and as drained of meaning as possible, ruffled her hair as he might ruffle little Lech’s head except that he was careful not to dishevel hers. That’s all it was, a manly reassuring touch, no threat to her. Her responding smile emboldened him. What other manly, reassuring contact could he make, drained of meaning, now that he was standing by her back?
He spotted his pretext almost at once, the blouse’s white label showing at her razored neck, both a spillage and an encroachment, something public, manufactured, but meant to be concealed. He’d not resist just dipping a finger below her collar to push the label back in place and steal his second touch that day. It should have taken just a moment, but he left his finger tucked inside her collar, freeze-frame, enjoying both the fabric and the skin. He was too bold, perhaps, and certainly too obvious, but he leaned forward over his much shorter wife to kiss the nape of her neck, his lips brushing both her newly shortened hair and his own fingertips. Her perfume almost made him weep.
It didn’t matter that she pushed his hand away and said, “Not now.” Not now, indeed. Later, later was implied. He could proceed with his used cup and take the loaded tray downstairs. She had invited him to live in hope.
When Lix returned five minutes later, already anxious that they would be late for his Obligation Feast, Alicja was sitting at their dressing table. “Just touching up,” she said. She leaned toward the mirror, pouted her mouth, and coated the pink-blue of her naked lips with fashionable and less alarming plum red lipstick. She cleaned away the residue with the edge of a tissue. Sprayed a little extra perfume on her throat and wrists. Then, despite herself, or else because at last she approved this risky, finished version of herself, she air-smacked a kiss toward the mirror and her husband’s reflection. He smacked one back, with sound effects, an actor’s mwa. They routed smiles into the glass.
Did Lix have reason for some optimism, then? Certainly their drive to town was comfortable, their conversation affectionate. She wanted him to have a successful lunch. Their sexual drought was coming to an end, perhaps, Lix thought, although he was not mad enough to stretch his hand and grasp her leg. The drought might end that day, if they survived the company of friends. Fortified by alcohol and panicked by the prospect of two months apart, on different continents, once they got home and in the hour or so before Lix had to leave again for that evening’s performance, they could perhaps begin to mend some fallen bridges.
“We’re running short of time,” Lix commented out loud, not wanting to explain, or needing to.
Alicja just raised a brow.
AT FIRST THERE HAD BEEN too many of her husband’s crew crowded around the bank of tables in the rented cellar, too many for concentrated conversation, too many for any indiscretions or any intimacy. The ordering, the serving, and the eating had been intrusive and disruptive. But by three o’clock only the dregs were left, the dregs of wines and spirits, that is to say, and the dregs of Lix’s new acquaintances, those who had no desks or families to return to, no stories to file, and no higher priorities than to keep the party going till the waiters chucked them out. The Debit waiters never chucked you out. The only time the Debit Bar was closed to customers was when the police or the river took charge.
There was the little dancer from Don Juan, intense and talkative in a way that Alicja could not admire, despite the woman’s obvious desire to draw attention to herself and despite the dancer’s admiration, many times repeated, for people such as “District Senator Lesniak-Dern” who’d invested so much of their energy in civic life.
“Dance never, never does a bit of good,” she insisted, and Alicja had felt obliged to disagree, saying—lying—that politics was not as good at bettering the world as politicians wanted everyone to believe, and that dance, at least, provided uncomplicated joy.
“Perhaps you’re right,” the dancer said, “in both respects.”
To Alicja’s left—ignoring her—there was the fussy trumpeter from Lix’s recording group whose flattened mouth and hamster cheeks, especially when flushed with drink and two desserts, made him look like a cheery doll. A cheery doll that liked an argument.
Farther up the table, engaged by a cigar that would not draw, there was an actress who had once been as celebrated as Lix but had lost her passion for theater and had turned inst
ead to poetry, which she had published at her own expense while neglecting to renew her wardrobe or her anecdotes. To Alicja’s right, beyond the dancer, there was the undernourished couple who owned the studio where Lix had recorded his LP/cassette; the disheveled husband scarcely able to survive three minutes without tobacco or a cough; the wife scarcely twenty-two years old and drunk and bored and sitting next to Lix with her hand on his shoulder and her chair turned sideways to the table so that she need only talk to him and no one else could talk to her.
On Lix’s other side was “Joop the Scoop,” Jupiter the columnist, a man who would never give his proper name but whom everybody knew to be the embarrassed but untouchable younger brother of the garrison commander who more than any dancer or district senator at that time, the spring of 1992, controlled the city’s destiny, controlled the bettering, controlled the joy. Alicja would have much preferred Joop as a neighbor at the table, of course. Any woman would. He had the chiseled Roman face to match his name, though on the evidence of his own newspaper column he was hardly the celestial Guardian of Honor or the God of Oaths, Treaties, and Marriages. His pen was cruel and snobbish, perhaps, his politics unworthy of a citizen his age, but in person he had shown himself to be attentive and a little shy, a man who was not disposed to flirting openly, who hardly raised his voice, who rationed and so enhanced the value of his studiedly melancholy smile. He seemed exactly the opposite of Lix and not a bit like Mr. Lesniak.
Alicja had wondered when she first encountered Joop while waiting for Lix in the lobby of the theater some months before if he was a homosexual, besotted with her husband. She’d asked. She had to know at once. No, not homosexual, he’d said. He was simply so self-conscious about his early baldness that he thought it best not to bother bright and pretty women such as her. He had no reason to be self-conscious, actually, she’d told him, touching him for the first time on his forearm. The baldness made a handsome, intellectual monk of him.
“Your skull is sculptural,” she said, longing not so much to touch it as to smell it.
“I’ll have it cast in bronze, Senator, and give it to the city. I’m sure that you can find a plinth for it. The empty plinth in Company Square, perhaps.”
“Amongst the cobblestones, yes.”
They had embarked on an affair. Alicja and Jupiter.
So now she listened to the dancer’s anecdote about Swan Lake, Nureyev, and the bearded French ambassador and watched her lover paying polite attention to his host. Any moment he would catch her eye, and she would smile for him, the risky smile that says, I’m Yours, the risky smile that can’t suppress the showing of the tongue.
What if Lix looked up and caught her eye? Well, let it be. That evening, when they were home, or preferably as they were driving home protected by the darkness in the car, while he was trapped behind the wheel, she’d find the courage to talk to him. She owed it to the man who’d been her husband for more than three years, the father of her child, the first who’d ever earned her love, to be direct with him, to send him off to Hollywood understanding that everything would be rearranged while he was gone. More than that, she owed it to herself. She’d got a career. She’d got constituents. She’d got the promise, if she watched her step for a year or two, of joining the Executive and making history. No other woman in the city had ever gone so far. She’d got a well-connected lover, too, whose appeal included a vasectomy. What she didn’t want was a husband or another child to hold her back. The time had come, the time was good, for the city senator and the celebrated Lix to separate.
So Alicja can surely be forgiven for her nervousness at lunch, the shrill and wine-fueled conversations that she held, her unexpected gaiety, her robust appetite, her pleasure in the word games that were passing around the table, and then the risque games of Truth or Dare and Ultimatum.
Perhaps it was because playing Never was her lover’s suggestion, his way of flirting with her across the table, she imagined, that Alicja joined in too readily and so incautiously. The game was this: each diner at the table had to admit to something they’d never done that everybody else there most certainly would have done. If it proved that you were not alone in your humiliation, then you were out of the game and could not join the second round, when further admissions of inexperience were required. “You have to use the word never in your confession. And lying’s absolutely not allowed,” said Joop. “This isn’t journalism.” It was an invitation to disclose failings, cowardice, defeat, and limited horizons. The prize? “The mocking disrespect of all your friends.”
“It’s your idea. You first,” Alicja said to Joop. Already she had persuaded herself—or else his roguish grin persuaded her—that his own contribution would convey a private message. Almost everything he said turned out to be a tease. He kept her on her toes. “I’ve only ever loved one person in my life,” he’d say. “I’ve never loved another.” Or (a confirmation of a trip they’d planned), “I’ve never shared a hotel room. Not yet.” Instead he disappointed her. He said, “I’ve never been on a motorcycle or scooter. The very idea terrifies me.” But he was out of the game at once, because it seemed that the dancer had never risked a motorcycle either.
So now the dancer’s go. She claimed for herself that she had never seen the sea. No one could rival that. How was it possible to reach your thirties and not have seen the sea, especially when travel was so easy during the Big Melt?
“Not even from an airplane?” Lix asked.
“I’ve never been on an airplane,” she replied. Three goes in one. No motorcycles, no airplanes, no sea.
The trumpeter went through to the second round with his “mortified” claim never to have swallowed an oyster, an embarrassing and squeamish admission, he said, because he’d spat one out one evening in New York when his bass player had drawn attention to an oyster’s semen smell.
“Tasted, yes, but never stomached one, never passed one through.”
The twenty-two-year-old had never had sex with a person younger than herself, she claimed. “And never will.”
“So I’m in with a chance,” the trumpeter said, parping out his cheeks.
“Hardly. I’ve never had sex with a hamster either. And absolutely never will.”
The actress-poet’s contribution was “I’ve never smoked a cigarette, not one. Only my cigars.”
“Not even after you’ve made love?”
“When I’ve made love I always take a shot of peppermint liqueur. To take away the taste.” Their laughter bounced around the room.
Now Lix’s turn. He lied. He lied because he wanted Alicja to challenge him and be reminded of their early married days. He claimed, “I’ve never had sex standing up.” No challenges from anyone. Surprisingly, he went through to the second round unopposed, even by his wife.
“Too drunk to stand up, Lix?”
“Or wasn’t the goat tall enough?”
Lix had chanced a glance in Alicja’s direction and he could not mistake the look of embarrassment on her face. He’d meant the claim as a joke, a challenge, a hasty response to the raised sexual playfulness of the twenty-two-year-old’s boast never to have had sex with a younger person and the actress-poet’s unexpected indiscretion. It was only an invitation for his wife to contribute some mordant reply of her own and to remind her of a happy afternoon with river views.
He’d also expected Alicja to say either, “Well, if he’s not had it standing up, then I’ve not either, of course. So he’s out of the game.” Or better, she might say the truth, “He’s lying actually. We had sex standing up during the floods. On the roof of our apartment. At least, I think it was Lix. I couldn’t see his face. I was looking in the wrong direction. Disqualified!” Then his trap, his joke, would be pleasingly rounded off by her.
She should, as well, have challenged and matched the earlier winning claim “never to have had sex with someone younger than myself,” he realized. Lix was eight months older than his wife. She’d been a virgin almost to their wedding day. She’d said nothing then,
and she said nothing now. She only frowned and reddened and let her fingers gallop on the tabletop. She evidently didn’t want to enter into the spirit of the game. Because, he thought, matters sexual were not to be discussed at table with people she hardly knew. It wasn’t “politic.” It wouldn’t do for Madame Senator L.-D. to let her hair down for a change amongst his friends. Oh well, her loss. The Lesniaks were famous for their prudery and fear of fun. The Papal Stain. “Your turn,” he said to her.
Alicja was annoyed with her husband, but mostly not for the reasons he suspected. Social proprieties and reticence, especially with a newspaper columnist at the table, should be sensibly observed, she’d always thought. But she was more embarrassed than irritated. He should not have reminded her of their lovemaking on the roof in such a crude and clumsy way. She remembered most the massage of the herb leaves and the blessing of her pregnancy. He remembered best the unromantic standing up. Men were the enemies of romance. The sex gets in the way of loving.
Joop had said that “absolute truth” was essential to the playing of Never. Well, her husband had not been absolutely truthful. Then neither would she. She could not ratify or challenge Lix’s Neverness without betraying herself. For within the last three weeks, Alicja had also had perpendicular sex—quick sex—with Joop more than once while she was standing. In the vestibule of his apartment house; leaning on the sink with the water running in the Anchorage Street apartment; at his office desk one evening, her back to him, her nose pressed up against the window blinds. She’d smudged her lipstick on the blinds. Here was a lover who always took his time, who never let her off lightly. The absolute truth? Well, now was not the moment to tell her husband that she’d been sleeping—standing—with another man. The truth would have to wait.
“Come on,” he said again, an impatient, disappointed edge to his voice. He panicked her. Otherwise she’d not have made her great mistake. The consequences of this moment were immense. She was suddenly the center of attention for the first time that day. She’d show them she could be as mischievous as anyone. She shelved her boast that she had never learned to swim. Too dull. The dancer, probably, had never learned to swim either. She pushed aside the claims that she had never once been drunk, had never worn high heels, had not so far attended the ballet or a soccer match, had never had a filling in her teeth, could not remember ever having had the hiccups, even as a child, had swallowed oysters but never semen so couldn’t be put off by the smell. Her shocking, teasing boast was shouting at her from a poster twenty meters high: “Take risks. Surprise them all. Be truly mischievous.” Bring back the roguish grin to Joop’s fine face. She only meant it as a private joke. It wasn’t absolutely true. She said, “I’ve never had an orgasm.”
