Genesis (14 page)

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Authors: Jim Crace

BOOK: Genesis
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Lix often spooled it through his memory, that hour in that little room. He could not identify the point of separation. Nor specify his guilt. He'd let her be in charge, despite his fantasies. He'd let her hurry him. He had not tried to hurry her—for he well knew that Freda was a young woman who dismissed that underpinning law of physics, that an action of any energy or force should only result in a reaction of equal energy or force. Anything mildly unwelcome, the breeziest of pressures, she would greet with the fury of the seven spinster winds. So, certainly, she would not tolerate an overzealous lover, too keen to dominate her on a bed, too eager to have his way. She'd called the shots, the modern woman making up for all quiescent females in the past. There'd been benefits in that for him, of course. Uncomplicated penetration for a start, though under her and not on
top. She'd been audacious and abandoned because the politics and history said she could.
In fact he had been glad, aroused, that she had pushed him back and held his wrists. Like that, he was too trapped and too engrossed by her urgent passion to make his own mistakes. As she hovered over him, directing him—how would he ever come with her on top demanding that he come?—he had not seen much evidence of romantic love in Freda, nor in her sudden interest in his ribs, his kerchief, and his shirt. She hadn't spoken his name. Or even looked him in the eye. Yet her passion was all too evidently real. Passion's something that truly can't be faked, not even on the stage or in the films. An actor never quite captures the randomness, the disarray. So there can be nothing more honest and reassuring—in the short term—than a partner's lust. These are the moments in your life that are sincere. You mean it, absolutely mean it, until the moment's absolutely gone.
Lix absolutely meant it, too. Some cultures claim that when lovemaking has reached perfection, the earth has moved, or the yolk has separated from the albumen, or the clocks have chimed in unison, or the lovers' bodies have dissolved. Here we say “the bed grew roots.” The bed grew roots that afternoon for Lix.
The universe was suddenly minute: its all-consuming detail pressed against his face, snagged at his toes, the linen and her skin almost impossible to tell apart. If anything or anybody but this long-necked girl, her breasts and earrings swinging like a hypnotist's watch, had crossed his mind that snowy evening, then it was only briefly and diffusely. A car horn from the street below, perhaps.
The tock of high heels on the wooden stairs, as someone else came home. The clink of cups and bottles from the sidewalk cafe below. And possibly, but only for an instant, the aging memory of that little information clerk, their bruising minutes at the kitchen windowsill—and then her tears illuminated by the cruel and sudden timer lights as she, that troubled stranger, fled. And now, the rattle of his bedroom window frames as what was forecast—wind and snow—announced itself across the city in gusts of frozen air.
 
 
WE LEAVE THEM lying on his bed, intimately awake, relieved from their desires, engaging with the calm that only sated fervor can provide, and looking forward to some time alone. Not quite tranquillity, but self-possession. The farce of MeisterCorps had ended without too much embarrassment, without too many tears or bruises. They could forget it easily or portray their happy failure as something heroic. Nobody from RoCoCo had been shot or dragged away. Nobody had been compromised. They were the victims only of bad luck and bad timing. Finally, though, they'd got it right: exactly as they'd hoped and planned, Lix and Freda had honed and blunted all the sexual edges of their day. Now was the time to disengage. Withdraw.
Let's not forget, though, that this bed on Cargo Street was cursed. This narrow student's cot with its new sheets and its cheap coverlet had played its ancient trick on Fredalix. The roots it had grown were tougher, deeper, than they'd bargained for. Some mischievous coincidence had made this little room high
above the wharfside district dangerously fertile, an efficacious city version of the Vacuum Cave in fairy tales where couples spent the night to guarantee a pregnancy (and risk pneumonia). Lix had already produced a child in it, a girl—and now that he'd been mad enough to take a second woman there, another child had been implied, a son, a George, an heir.
The explanation is mundane. The contraceptive Lix had readied and slipped beneath the bed had let the lovers down and either Lix had spilled his semen or Lix had pulled on the sheath too late. Or their lovemaking might have dragged the contraceptive loose, shortened it and buckled it, like ankle socks, cold and corrugated on his shrinking penis end. Or they had stayed with it just half in place for far too long after he'd ejaculated, allowing his emissions to leak and seep and fertilize.
So Lix and Freda might
imagine
that their day of lunacy and passion had let them off scot-free, no police, no blame, no aftermath. Except? Except that Freda had become some moments earlier the unexpecting mother of his child. It was a pregnant woman now who slumped down on Lix's chest and concentrated only on the pumping of the once loved lover's lungs. It was a pregnant woman, too, who hugged the actor to her chest and whispered that she had to wash and dress, who peeled herself away from him, separating their adhering clothes, despite the vents and furrows of their skin clinging on with semen glue and sweat. It was a woman quick with child who was already imagining the pulling over of the sheets, her journey home, the getting on with life and no regrets. It was a mother who pulled aside the window blind in Lix's room and looked down on the office
workers, overworked, as they made muffled progress to their streetcars and took on the trembling rearrangements of the weather-laden wind, the scrim of falling snow which seemed to make our city both lighter and darker at once.
Cargo Street was full as ever at that time of the evening on a weekday, but more tentative than usual. The fallen and impacted snow had made the sidewalks treacherous. So everyone was concentrating on their balance, their collars up, and either heading home where it was safe or making for a bar or restaurant where it was dry and welcoming and full of other weather refugees. Nobody was aware of Freda watching them, four stories up above their heads and hats.
This was a night of pregnancies, and not just Freda's pregnancy The snow is sexier than sun. The cold encourages us to get to bed and hug the person we love. Our folklore says it's so. As does demography. The snow is consummate. Fine weather brings the birth rate down. So this was only one of many rooms that benefited from fertility that night, and Fredalix was only one of many pairs. None of them as yet was counting on the cost, the cost of lovemaking, the cost that lasts for threescore years and ten. Nobody thought, when all the hugs and kisses had been finished with, to tell themselves, Things never end. They only stretch ahead from here. We have to thank our lucky stars for that.
A HIGH APARTMENT with a river view would be ideal, they'd thought. Three or four rooms facing east, with a small balcony in the City of Balconies where they could taste the air. The water and the sunset seemed important then. So did remaining close to the city's ancient, motivating heart, near neighbors to the bustle and the stir, of course, but also close to graduated couples like themselves who'd once been untroubled students and were now more compromised. Couples, that is to say, who wanted permanence but were not prepared quite yet to celebrate that fact. They were still young, but not so immature as to imagine as they'd once done that marriages could prosper in cramped, cheap rooms. They required somewhere they could stay until they were ready not for children but for a single child. Five more years, perhaps.
Somewhere big enough and bright enough for privacy and rows and lovemaking.
Alicja and Lix had not been made of money when they'd moved in together. His meager, irregular fees from the stage and, more frequently, from busing in the local restaurants, and her low wages as a consultant-volunteer on the night shift at the Citizen's Commission were not enough to rent a river view.
Their income wasn't quite enough, even, to pay the rent on the more modest, unbalconied apartment they'd finally settled for, their two ill-kept low-ceilinged attic rooms on Anchorage Street, a busy neighborhood—too much bustle, too much stir—nine blocks from the grander embankment residences they'd aspired to. It was hardly larger, though more expensive, than Lix's old fourth-floor student room-‘n'-kitchen near the wharf. They fell in love with it as soon as they pushed back the sloping door in the bedroom alcove and found that they could step out on the roof. Still no river view. But somewhere to smoke and drink a beer, their urban version of the rural stoop. Somewhere to grow their herbs and vegetables in pots. Somewhere to be expansive and look out across the city, through the pylons and the tower blocks, the aerials and radio masts, beyond the leaf-fresh suburbs and the new commercial parks, across the plains toward the faint, uncivil hills.
This “private roof patio” was the landlord's justification for the scarcely manageable rent. They'd had to borrow from the bank and made do at first with thinly furnished rooms. They had a bed, an electric stove, two bamboo chairs, a pair of bicycles, a fly larder, and little else to make the first months of their marriage
comfortable, except their books, their gramophone, and what Paul Knessen has called “the conciliating rigors of the flesh.” Well, they had love, of course, the most essential furnishing of all, especially when poverty and hardship share the home. It was a calmer and less threatening love than Lix had had for Freda, but a thorough love, nevertheless, and one that would not soon be ripped apart by passion.
They could have had a river view quite easily and a fully furnished apartment on the embankment. The Lesniaks were made of money Alicja's parents, despite their mistrust of Lix (‘Actors never pay—and actors never stay!”), would have cleared the rent and swallowed all the decorating bills rather than have their daughter share a staircase with waiters and shop assistants on a street unfashionably “mixed.” They had a friend who ran an import/export enterprise and who, if leaned on not too gently, could sort out some stylish furniture. (“And no bamboo!”) A new business colleague, eager to impress, might well be happy to provide a television and a fridge. “You want a telephone and no delays with the connection?” her father asked. “For me a working telephone is just a call away. I only have to whisper in a friendly ear. I only have to say our name.”
The Lesniaks would pay to have Lix's cheek “spruced up” as well. A fashionable surgeon was in their debt. How could their son-in-law expect to succeed on the stage when he was branded like that? Besides, a birthmark such as Lix's spelled trouble and adversity for anyone who came too close. A Polish prejudice, perhaps, but never wrong. It seemed a pity that their pretty daughter had ended up with such a curiosity. Every problem could be fixed,
however. Mrs. Lesniak would make the phone calls; Mr. Lesniak would write the checks. Alicja only had to nod and she could have an apartment and a husband, neither of which would offer much offense to the eye. Polish parents are the best.
Alicja, despite her husband's counsel of caution, turned every coin down. “I like things as they are,” she said. She meant she loved the man she'd married, would not want to change a cell of him. More than that, she wanted freedom from the Lesniaks, a chance to flourish as herself and be resolute on her own account. Finding a husband such as Lix would set her on her way. Her married name, Alicja Dern, provided instant anonymity Anonymity was exactly the base upon which she was determined to construct her successes and achievements—for this was something hidden from the world: buried underneath her sweetness, her patience, and her eagerness to please, Alicja was driven by a need to climb and conquer a different, higher summit than her father had.
Lix's ambitions, however, were not concealed. How could they be concealed? To be an actor, even one who's not in work, is to declare a public dream and purpose. But he had not yet got his call from Hollywood. He'd not recorded his first album. He'd not been cast as Don Juan or hosted any television shows. In his late twenties now, he'd ended up a table singer, as dependent on tips as any waiter, and—no more the Renegade—a minor, disappointed stalwart of touring theaters and the city's lesser ones, famous only in his dressing room. So Mrs. Dern could still be judged mostly by her own achievements and campaigns and by the impact she'd make on platforms of her own. She took up
causes in the neighborhood, chased complaints, investigated failures of the city government, but never made a nuisance of herself. His sweet, plump, tireless wife, Lix said unkindly to her face when they'd been stopped once too often in the street by troubled locals, was “a problem magnet.” She'd be upset to know his nickname for her was the Quandry Queen. Yet she was more respected and well liked than any Lesniak had ever been. That was more important than a sunset and a river view—and harder to acquire than foreign furniture.
Now, only three months later, finally, they had a river view without the help of Lesniaks.
On the same day they gained their river view, they conceived their son as well. Five years ahead of time. Much sooner than they'd planned or wanted. We can be sure it was Alicja's first child. She was a virgin when she first met Lix, a lapsed but well-trained Polish Catholic, fearful of the wrath not so much of God as of her all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful mother. It was true that Alicja had “sacrificed herself” to Lix, “surrendered herself immodestly” while the family was “dining” (her mother's later version of events), before they'd married. But only a month before. She was hardly dissolute or precocious. Despite her hidden appetite for change, she would not consider sleeping with anyone apart from the man she married, for three more years at least.
Lix was not a virgin, as we know. Already he'd had sex, penetrative sex, with Freda (even if the penetration had only been a short P.S. on all but one occasion). Nineteen times, in their not-quite-a-month of passion, on and off the picket line. And twice
with the nameless little clerk, who back then would have been about the age Lix was now, approaching thirty
This would not be his first child, or even his first son. It would be the timid actor's third mistake. His first—his birthmarked daughter, Bel, the product of binoculars—was undiscovered still, undiscovered by Lix anyway, though very nearly nine years old already and full of life while Lix's life, to tell the truth, was emptying. The vessel full of dreams and plans had sprung a leak—no wad of fame to plug it.
Several times the girl had been within a hundred meters of her father. This city isn't all that large. You meet and pass and meet again. They'd shared a crowd, a streetcar, a shopping street, a flu virus, they'd strolled the same catalpa avenue in Navigation Park one Sunday afternoon, bought nutcake from the same vendor. And recently, when she'd been in the Play Zone by the zoo, her mother had seen Lix walking past, beyond the roses. Unmistakable. Not a face she could forget. If it hadn't been for the roundfaced woman on his arm, she would have found the courage to go up—for Bel, for her daughter's sake. A blemished child has a right to meet the author of her blemishes—and introduce the pair of them, acquaint their family nevuses.
His second grand mistake—Freda's six-year-old son, George—was still an awkward and rancid secret that Lix had kept from Alicja. What was the point in telling her? He never saw the child himself, had not even been identified as its father by anyone other than its mother. Alicja had hated Freda, anyway, and Freda despised her, “Lix's dreary compromise.” A little clear-skinned boy, especially if he had his mother's neck and hair, would not appeal
to his wife, nor would it delight any of the Lesniaks. So Lix was happy to keep his past secret and resigned to being not so much an absentee parent as an evicted one. It had been Freda actually, when she was six months pregnant and her relationship with Lix was long dead, who'd commanded him to stay away: “The child is mine, not yours. My pregnancy My body. My responsibility My private life. My kid!” she'd said, rapping out her arguments on the palm of her hand with knuckles that had once shown love for him. “You understand?”
“Five very eloquent mys,” he'd said as mordantly as he dared. Her throat and earrings tortured him. This had been the dream once—to be with Freda and his son, a sort of neofamily. “Consider me as good as dead.”
And that had been it—at least for the time being, anyway. Fredalix split in two. Then three. They went their separate ways. She had—and raised—his unacknowledged son.
 
 
COULD LIX HAVE any idea yet that there was a curse on him, a more insistent version of the happy curse that falls on almost everyone, that if they persevere with sex, then chances are—not quite as sure as eggs is eggs, but close—a pregnancy will follow? Certainly that one mistake he knew about had freighted all his fantasies and practices of sex with Cargo Consequence. Had he become afraid of making love because of Freda and her son? Before Alicja, he'd not had intercourse with anyone since he and Freda split up in 1981. That was seven years. Key years for young men in their twenties. His month with her had been a costly farce
and a disaster from which he'd not recovered yet. How pleased Freda would be if she discovered how she'd blighted him and all the women in her wake, even—especially—Alicja.
Certainly, Lix had been slow on the night a month before they'd married to respond to Alicja's un-Lesniak initiatives. She'd never been that intimate before or so daring. She'd seemed excited that her parents were downstairs with dinner guests and hired staff, immediately below, separated only by a rug, the ceiling joists, and plaster. The wine they'd smuggled into her room had helped. As had the cannabis. She locked her bedroom door and put on music as a sound track and to disguise the noise they might make. The actors always made a lot of noise in films.
He'd not encouraged her. Because he understood the dangers better than she did? Because he feared the consequences? Because she was not Freda? Because there wasn't a single condom in the house? No, actually, because he had not yet succeeded with an erection. Nervousness was playing havoc with his potency Fear dispatches its adrenaline to the lungs, the muscles, and the heart, and undermines the blood flow to the genitals.
Alicja, however, had thought his reluctance considerate and endearing but had surprised herself by pressing forward with inflamed resolve and—always the ones you remember—inexperienced but persuasive hands. Finally, Alicja was “graduated,” as they say. She and Lix had made the light shade swing above her parents' table. She liked to think she'd peppered everybody's soup with ceiling plaster. But Lix's imagination had almost let him down that night, and let her down as well. His fear of those five
mys
was not an aphrodisiac.
 
 
THIS WAS the season of his third mistake.
Although their marriage was already three months old, he and Alicja still had no table, or any reason to join the city's morning rush hour. Lix had no rehearsals at that time, and it would be another year before his fortunes changed so magically, and so disruptively. So neither of them needed to leave the apartment until the afternoon.
In those days, their marriage was an embarrassment of time and poverty and self. In other words, if it was free or very cheap, then they could do it all day long. So they would take their breakfasts and their books out onto the roof during that late spring and sunbathe with their backs against the slates in their nightclothes, the matching pair of long fake-granddad shirts she'd bought from Parafanalia and which he hated. These were beloved times, in fact, despite the shirts. They had the whole apartment building to themselves. By the time they'd settled on the roof, all their neighbors were already sitting at their desks or standing at their tills or setting tables for lunch, “earning corns.”
Alicja had planted up some heavy gray pots—to match the roof tiles—with mints, marjorams, and balms and four or five fessandra shrubs. They flourished there, with the help of coffee dregs, abandoned cereal, and bowls of used soapy water, and—once in a while, when Lix was on his own and too idle to go indoors—urine. Otherwise they had the sweetest-smelling roof in town. The foliage provided a civilizing fringe of green along the roof parapet, muffling much of the traffic thrum from the Circular
but still allowing Lix with his binoculars—the householder at last, the lord of everything in sight—to study the hats and shoulders of passersby, the roofs of streetcars and automobiles, the shadows and the silhouettes in adjacent attic rooms, the ornamented summit of Marin's finger, and anything that moved between the city and the hills.

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