Genesis
Page 21
LECH AND KAROL are not home. Alicja, their mother, has a Lesniak Trading creditors meeting to attend. Now that her father has retired she is in charge. So she has driven her two sons by Lix out of Beyond and into town for tennis coaching at the new floodlit courts on Navigation Island. Karol is the natural sportsman of the two and already taller. He’s on his college football team, has diving ribbons and vaulting cups, but most excels at racket sports. He will be fourteen in a month and then eligible to represent the city in the junior tennis leagues. His elder brother, Lech, does not excel at anything, except the competitions of the tongue.
The tennis courts are not playable. Clay is an unreliable surface in the best of times. The afternoon rain has left its puddles on the serving lines and made the courts too slippery. Their mother has arranged to pick them up at ten. Now they have the evening to themselves, in town, and not one single Lesniak around to stop them from having fun.
Lech has the matches and the cigarettes. A girl from their tennis group has money they can spend. Her friend has tokens for the streetcar. The four of them walk across the river on the reconstructed pedestrian bridge, coughing from the cigarette smoke which, oddly, makes the boys’ cocks go hard. They’ve never been alone with girls like these before. In point of fact, it’s not the girls who make them hard, but nicotine. Tobacco is an aphrodisiac when you’re their age.
Karol hasn’t much to say. He is good with rackets, not with words. Yet Lech has found his expertise. Before the evening’s out, he thinks, if he can lose his brother and the other girl, then he can try his luck with the one who has the tokens for the streetcar. She’s prettier than anyone he’s ever seen before. If he cannot steal a kiss from her before ten o’clock, then, he fears, his nose will bleed, his heart will burst out of his chest. He lights another cigarette. They cough like foxes in the night.
IT’S ONLY AFTERNOON in Queens. George is cruising in a cab along the Van Wyck Expressway on the way to JFK for his early evening flight back home. His pregnant girlfriend, Katherine, is at his side. She’ll see his mother for the first time at the trial, and meet his famous father, too. She’s seen the videos. She recognizes George in Lix’s craggy head.
She’s nervous, nervous of the flying, nervous about her pregnancy, nervous of Freda, but currently most nervous of the New York cab. The driver has a brutal head. He’s brutal with the brakes. She holds on to her boyfriend’s arm and braces her feet against the cab floor, expecting the worst. She wishes she hadn’t volunteered to go.
“Think of it as a holiday,” George says. He sounds American. He has the vowels. “There won’t be proper holidays, not when the baby’s small. So make the most of this.”
He tells her how they’ll spend their time, the walks along the old embankment to the medieval square, a visit to the island and the MeCCA galleries, a cake and coffee at the Palm & Orchid Coffee House, free seats to the theater “if Father’s doing anything.” My God, he thinks, there isn’t much to do if they’re reduced to sitting through another disaster like The Devotee. His city’s only worth a two-day trip and they’ll be there for ten. His mother’s trial will surely only last an afternoon. Then what? “We could go to the zoo,” he adds, and then looks out to count the avenues of Ozone Park as JFK draws close. The zoo, in fact, is quite a good idea, he thinks. He hasn’t seen the city zoo since he was eighteen, New Year’s Day 2001, when he met his father and his two half brothers for the first time, and Father missed an opportunity by courting Mouetta instead of courting him. A disappointment, like the play.
George puts his hand on Katherine’s so that three hands are resting on her swelling stomach, and says again, “We could go to the zoo by riverboat. We’ll take the baby to the zoo.”
BEL KNOWS EXACTLY who her father is. Her version of his birthmark makes him unmistakable. She is twenty-six already and has not been greatly tempted to turn up at blood’s front door to claim her heritage. Her mother is embarrassed by the very thought of it. It would not be fair or just to rock the life of someone who’d been little more than shy and innocent and careless all those many years ago, she says. “I’m sure he won’t remember it. He didn’t even ask my name when we …” She doesn’t want to say “had sex.” She doesn’t want to say “made love.”
Bel adores her mother fiercely, without reservation, like many only children of single parents do, and so will not pick up the phone to call Lix until her mother finally succumbs to the lymphoma that has plagued her for the past six years. Bel has a daughter herself, a one-year-old called Cade. A child needs grandparents. So possibly, with her mother gone, there’ll be good cause to show the child to Felix Dern. Bel has prayed that that day will never come.
Her streetcar, as luck would have it on this evening, is almost empty. She has space enough to leave the stroller uncollapsed on the wooden-slatted floor, its wheels wedged in the grooves to keep the sleeping baby safe. Bel likes the smell and polish of an almost empty streetcar, the loving details of the ironwork, and the heave and judder of their progress through the town. The city senate must be mad to try to phase them out, and build instead a rapid transit system underground. What if the city flooded again? What were the views from underground?
She hopes her husband’s at her stop when they arrive. He often comes to meet them if he gets off work in time, and then they go together to the shops, then go together to the local eatery where there are baby chairs and simple food and friends with children of their own, then go together—yes, the three of them—to bed. Bel puts her finger in her mouth for luck. She lets it hang across her lower lip like a coat hanger. The longer she leaves it there, the more likely it will be that her husband is waiting. What sweeter prospect can there be than having someone meet you from your streetcar?
The few other passengers have other homes to think about, but one young man—the sort who wonders what the stories are that occupy the other benches of his streetcar, especially the stories of young women his own age—is keen to catch Bel’s eye and smile at her. She’s pretty in an interesting way. The smudge of birthmark on her cheek is kissable. Otherwise her face is like her baby’s face, as still and innocent as sleep. She’s like a little girl herself, he thinks—that girlish finger in her mouth, that girlish look of love uncompromised—and hardly old enough to be a mother. She does not look at him. She looks ahead, into the quickly gobbled streets. The streetcar counts off its rosary of stops. The baby sleeps.
The details of our lives are undramatic, if we’re lucky, and a little dull. We hear the streetcar, but we have not yet heard the helicopter sweeping through the sky above, amongst the thermals that we have made with all our efforts and our industries all day. The helicopter’s payload is a photographer and cameras, keen to strip us to the bone, keen to catch us at our best, at our most mesmerizing, from above at night, with all the detail washed away by distance and by darkness. It’s Fifty Cities of the World again, but for international Geo magazine this time. Life has folded long ago. Our City of Kisses will become, in this aerial depiction, the City of a Million Lights, a two-page spread with staples in the sky. Our celebrated city is being photographed to be a shirt of light with its black tie of river.
Then everyone will see our slo-mo shift of moon and stars in Geo magazine. They’ll see a thin and shaking glow, unspecified, of early evening smudged. They’ll see the colored mesh of still and moving lights, enhanced by rain—a half a million windows laying out their rhomboids of reflected brilliance, five thousand cars, ten thousand headlights peeping at the world, a hundred bright and heated streetcars, six floodlit tennis courts unused, two pinprick glowing cigarettes not quite ashore. No kissing this time. No flesh and blood. No lips. Such things cannot be spotted from afar. Still, the streaks and pricks of light are eloquent. They tell of people going home. They tell of love and lovemaking, of children, marriages, and lives. You think, But this could happen anywhere. It does.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
CONTINENT
THE GIFT OF STONES
ARCADIA<
br />
SIGNALS OF DISTRESS
QUARANTINE
BEING DEAD
THE DEVIL’S LARDER
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
Copyright © 2003 by Jim Crace
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2003 by Viking Penguin, Great Britain, as Six
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
www.fsgbooks.com
Designed by Cassandra J. Pappas
eISBN 9780374706081
First eBook Edition : April 2011
First American edition, 2003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crace, Jim.
Genesis / Jim Grace.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-374-22730-6 (hc : alk. paper)
1. Actors—Fiction. 2. Conception—Fiction. 3. Fatherhood—Fiction. 4. Fertility, Human—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6053 .R228G46 2003
823’ .914—dc21
2003005952