Genesis (9 page)

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Authors: Jim Crace

BOOK: Genesis
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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 stuck 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.
THEY WERE in love, the blemished student actor and the swan-necked girl. Theirs was a clumsy love, admittedly, rushed and bodily and bruising, as first loves often are. It was (to use the country phrase) “a jug thrown by the potter's toes,” ill formed.
We excuse the lovers for their gaucherie. They were scarcely adults then. This was only 1981, the first—and only—year of what we called at the time (depending on our politics and age) either the Big Melt or the Laxity, when, having practiced kissing for twenty months or so—life after
Life
—and having benefited from the unexpected tourist revenues and the unforeseen attention of some foreign capital, our city governors withdrew into their meeting rooms and chambers, their dining clubs, to concentrate on getting rich and getting laid. Thus letting all the rest of us get on with life.
Remember it, how brief it was, the melting of the civic snows, the urban thaw? Remember how for not-quite-long-enough even the policemen let their sideburns grow and let their patience lengthen also, how foreign books, LPs, and films came in, uncut, unmarked, the shock of glamour magazines, how we Last Tangoed and Deep Throated amongst ourselves as if the untried ardors of the cinema could light the way to paradise?
It's hard to credit now our absurd lightheartedness, our determined disregard for any law and regulation (the pettier the better), our contempt for grammar, and proprieties, and common sense, and modesty. All the things our parents should have cared about (if they'd not been melted by the Melt themselves) were flouted on the street, without a care, with appetite.
It was possible, without much fear of being challenged, to walk around without IDs, to pilfer food in the spirit of democracy and beg for cigarettes, to make a din at night and hang out in the squares all day, to ride the streetcars without a ticket, to park our parents' cars on prohibited sidewalks, and to boulevard ourselves as brashly as we wanted to, as drunk, as stoned, as underdressed.
How effortlessly modern and valiant it seemed, after all those years of being sensible and neat, just to dress badly. An hour of impulse shopping at the new black-market gutter stalls that sprang up everywhere that year equipped you for the revolution. The streets were full of gypsy partisans, denim clerks with hairstyles from the L.A. seventies, wiry Bolsheviks in fat-man overcoats, white aboriginals in T-shirts with slogans calling for the replacement of God with punk and government with Panarchy,
and women in skirts of every cut and cloth and color, displaying lengths of flesh or tights that previously had only been approved for foreign visitors and imported magazines. Even Navigation Island was prized free from its wardens for a while and turned into a nonstop festival of music, drugs, and picnicking. Woodstock Nation—finally. Our city had some catching up to do.
Remember all the litter and the buskers in the streets, the open windows and the jaywalking, the sudden obligation to sample newly tolerated taboos in bed, the suicides, the debts, the pregnancies, the jazz, the reggae, and the rock, the blissful loss of self-control, the arguments, the endless, carefree jousting with the couldn't-care-less police? Ah yes, the laxity that only lasted, only could be tolerated, for a year, but which briefly made us Free at Last, free to speak our minds, free to organize and demonstrate and not be “disappeared.”
We understood and we forgave the lovers, then. Forgave them for their arrogance and foolishness, the risks they took when risks were safe to take. They were only the excited products of their time, no more responsible for how they were than lungs are guilty for the air.
That December Thursday was their twenty-seventh day together, the high point of their reckless, infinitely short affair. A day of intercourse and action. Never in their lives again would
Fredalix,
these two guileless doctrinaires, feel so apprehensive and elated, so nauseous with fear, so poised, so eager, and so licensed to escape into the refuges of flesh once they had done their foolish duty for the world.
 
 
LIX CAN'T BE SURE even to this day whether it was his shared infatuation with this lofty campus beauty (shared by anyone who laid eyes on her) or merely a desire to prove himself a decent partisan before both the Laxity and his student days were over, that had prompted him to stand up at the November meeting of the Roesenthaler Comrades Cooperative (so named mostly to achieve the acronym RoCoCo) and suggest, as if he were proposing nothing more perilous than leafleting, that they kidnap Marin Scholla.
His idea had been a crudely simple one, and only mischievous. That was the Spirit of the Times, his public contribution to the Big and Famous Melt. He'd meant to draw attention to himself, to say what he had guessed the firebrand Freda would like to hear. He'd not intended to be taken quite so seriously.
The Arts Academy where Lix was in his final year of Theater and Stagecraft Studies had been endowed the semester before with nearly $7 million by MeisterCorps, the electronics and engineering giant from Milan, Berlin, Boston, and Hong Kong, to pay for a new cafe, a theater, a concert hall, a gallery, and a cinema on the campus, all in one custom-built star-shaped complex. A pentacle of creativity.
These were tainted millions, actually—or so the more progressive of the students judged. They'd not be seduced by the prospect of new facilities and subsidized alcohol, especially as their own studies would be over by the time the pentacle was built. These dirty dollars, they claimed in the student newsletter, had been made from low wages in the Far East, “the blanket marketing of
shoddy and environmentally damaging products in dishonest packaging,” arms-for-timber deals in Africa, and from stock market trickery (which many of their parents had fallen victim to).
Now, on Thursday the seventeenth of the coming month, just as the students would be going home for their winter vacations, MeisterCorps's American chairman, Marin Scholla, would be visiting the city to open the company's new central offices in the tower block that we have known since then as Marin's Finger and to pass on (or so the rumormongers claimed) his yellow envelopes of thanks in thousand-dollar bills to our finest councillors and planning commissars. He was a worthy target, certainly.
Lix stood before the nineteen students in RoCoCo, then, with something safely moderate in mind at first. It's always best to stand, if you are tall enough, to concentrate an audience. He held a photocopy of a news report he thought would interest them. He read it out in his trained voice, reducing to a whisper almost when he reached the part about the chairman's final appointment of the day.
Lix knew, of course, that he was being watched by everybody in the meeting room (stagecraft again)—and that included Famous Freda Dressed in Black, the campus beauty with the sculptor's head who could have been a model had she chosen, who could have slept with anybody there, then dined on them, and still had volunteers, who could have been in films or (on our newsstands finally) stapled into
Playboy
magazine. At 5 p.m. or thereabouts, Lix read, Scholla planned to “drop in” at the campuses to lay the first stone of what is still the MeisterCorps Creative Center for the Arts, or MeCCA. (Though MeisterCorps
itself, of course, is no longer with us. It finally buckled to its creditors in the Labor Day Free Fall, “the Wall Street Dive of Two Thousand and Five.”)
“We'll have to organize a vigil,” someone said. Exactly Lix's thought.
Then Freda spoke, not bothering to stand, not bothering to raise her voice. A typical riposte, uncompromising and seductively extreme: “Pickets are a waste of time. You know they are. The police just box you in.”
“A moving picket, then!”
“A picket or a vigil, what's the difference? Somebody, please, suggest a petition. Or a delegation! Or a letter-writing campaign. Just as ineffectual.” Freda had discovered that she could say exactly what she felt. Her beauty licensed her. Nobody dared to take offense, especially if she spoke as softly as a kindergarten teacher or a nurse. “A line of little placards or a bit of paper with some signatures isn't going to trouble MonsterCorps, is it? Correct-me-if-I'm-wrong.” A little singsong phrase. She raised her eyebrows, waited for a moment, looked around the room. “No, we need to give Marin Scholla a surprise. And shake him up a bit. Something memorable. If what we do doesn't put us on the evening news, then what's the point?”
Her unruffled escalation shut the meeting up, or almost did—for out of somewhere, wide of script, entirely unrehearsed, ad lib, Lix saw an opportunity, a rash and sexual opportunity. He said, to her, “Why don't we grab him? Lock him up. Give Meister Scholla a chance to …” To what? Lix hesitated for the words. He
wanted to seem breezy and ironic. He'd almost blurted out, too solemnly, “We give him the chance to quantify his crimes.” Surely Freda would approve of that. Instead, he said, in the perfect accent of a tenth-generation Bostonian,
“You've dined, old man—and now it's time to face the waiter and the bill.
” Rescued, flattered even, by a legendary movie line. Burt Lancaster.
He noticed Freda leaning forward as he spoke. She'd had to twist her madly lengthy neck to stare at him along the row of student radicals. Her earrings hung as heavily as pears. Her bangles clacked as she pushed back her hair to clear her view and show her throat. Lix was, for once, pretty certain that she was not staring at the blemish on his face. Her mouth was open, and her eyes were bright. She was admiring him. She'd hardly even noticed him before.
“Then what?” somebody asked. “It's risky, isn't it? Kidnapping millionaires is only officially authorized in Italy. What do we do with him, anyway?”
“You grab the millionaire. You grab the headlines, too. That's it.” Lix was performing like a lovestruck teenager, unable to restrain himself. “And then you have to let him go, of course. Eventually.” He hardly recognized himself. He'd transformed for her. Picasso syndrome, it was called: the artist's style of painting changed for every woman in his studio or bed.
“We let him go, but only when he's signed an Admission of Responsibility, an Admission of
Liability,
” said Freda, not bothered by whether or not she sounded breezy and ironic. “That would look good in the newspapers. That'd be front page.”
“He won't do that. He wouldn't even sign the Seven Principles. Even GlobeOil signed the Seven Principles.”
“Even Nescafé.”
“We keep him till he does.” She craned her neck again and smiled at Lix.
His
neck rushed red for her. He came out in a sudden sweating blush which seemed to fill his eyes and drench his hair. His pulse had quickened, and his mouth was dry. Men fall in love more speedily and much more bodily than women. It was for Lix a joyful new experience, this unexpected triumphing of self. How brave he must appear to her—and must continue to appear. And how he wished he'd never said a word.
So it began, the kidnapping, the love affair, the making love, the life of Lix's second child.
 
 
AS IT HAPPENED, theirs was little more than flirting talk at this stage. RoCoCo was not truly dangerous, any more than the Laxity was truly a revolution. It was only striking poses in the names of Liberty and Love, with no more consciousness of the consequences than a T-shirt has for its silk-screened slogans. RoCoCo's members were soft and inoffensive youngsters, essentially, freshly baked survivors of their teens, trying to sound less mild and dreary than they really were, and only wanting to be a part of this great city's quest for romance and advancement. They could alarm nobody but themselves. RoCoCo walking down the street, all nineteen of them in a gang, despite their voices and hair, their leather belts and wallet chains, would not
cause anyone to step aside. A bunch is no more chilling than a single grape.
Theirs was the sort of reckless moment, then, that could not hope to flourish in maturer company. A wiser group would quickly audit all the pros and cons and realize that kidnapping could only backfire on the kidnappers. The headlines would be roasting. Their protest would bear bitter fruit. The only lasting victims would be themselves. So the prudent ones at the meeting sank into their chairs, voted to support the “action,” but did not volunteer themselves. They sat with faces like a Chinese Monday hoping not to catch sweet Freda's eye. They knew how prevailing she was, and how seductive just a glance from her could be. And dangerous. A kidnapping, even if it were short-lived and justified, could put them all in jail, despite the Melt, or jeopardize their academic grades or disappoint their lecturers. Their parents would not sympathize. Not all their parents could afford to buy them out. Their job prospects would be undermined. Travel visas would be denied them, long after the events. Anyway, they were not sure (though silent on this matter in such company) if kidnapping was “right.”
So in the end, in this most skittish time, there were just four from RoCoCo prepared to spread their wings beyond a picket line and stand with Freda: a glumly cute gay woman from the Language School (who wanted more than anything to disappoint her lecturers and undermine her job prospects), two tall and overweight post-Maoist anarchists from Freda's science faculty, and Lix, all of whom it was soon apparent aspired to more than comradely
contact with their dazzling colleague. They were the four comrades most unhinged by her and most ardent for her approval. The heart controls the head and makes us mad and brave and radical. The revolution rides the lustiest of mares.

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