Jim Crace - Genesis

Lix watched her, dreamt of casting her. She’d look good through a lens. No doubt of it. She’d be no intellectual, of course. No theorist. She had the body, not the mind, for cinema. She had the looks but not the conversation. Her silence suited her. It flattered her, in fact.

It obviously didn’t matter to her friends that the woman had fallen silent so suddenly and that her interest in their conversation had evidently ended. She held her council amongst her colleagues at their noisy table, as only lovely women can, barely smiling, barely speaking, and barely audible when she did speak. No taking part. No looking up. No grimaces. She was auditioning. She smoked. That was not a blemish in Lix’s estimation. Not when the smoker smoked so stylishly. Not when the smoker lizarded the corners of her mouth after every inhalation and seemed to love the smoke so much.

She was a study in provocation. Just like a woman in a Manet bar.

Lix could imagine making love to her, Mouetta’s choice. It would not be hard to make a fool of himself with this starlet. He could — it only took a moment’s contemplation — place her easily across the table in a hotel restaurant, a lucky bedroom waiting on the lucky seventh floor. He would be talking. She’d be smoking, her tongue a constant incitement. She’d kiss him in the elevator, her lips on his, no more than that. She’d not want her makeup smudged, not publicly, not while there was a chance that someone else might join them in the elevator. Lix would behave himself, as they sped through the floors, though he’d be shaking for the opportunity to lift her dress, to see if there was blue beneath the blue. In moments — once his shaking hand had got the shaking key into the lock — he’d see the room, the bed, the swift disposal of the dress, the tissues on her face, removing blusher and mascara, her showering, their double nakedness, the mirrors and the steam. Not hard at all to see himself with her. A body of that quality was rare and overpowering.

However, Lix could not truly desire the woman in Picasso blue. She was too young, for a start. Too fresh and new. Lix liked contemporaries. She was too beautiful for him as well. And dull. As dull as hotel restaurants and hotel suites. Expensive, formalized, homogeneous, and dull. He could not imagine such a woman saying anything to make him laugh or startle him, or holding an opinion. Her smoking was her only conversation. Her only talent was with clothes and makeup. And with hair.

Her perfect body was a disincentive: that’s something few women ever understand. It was not eloquent, not in itself, not even in the prospect of its nakedness. The body tells you nothing. It’s not the body but a woman’s ever undressed face that most men find enticing, the undefended and arousing glance that betrays exactly what the glancer sees in you, exactly what she’s found. The glance is more arousing than plain nakedness because the glance betrays its promises and pledges. The glance precipitates the futures that you share. A body can’t do that.

But this young woman’s face was still expressionless. There was more evidence in her fine face of self-regarding display than sexual consciousness. If Lix had sex with her, Madame Picasso in the blue, there’d be no mischief nor any joyful, human grubbiness. He’d snub his nose, his lips, his cock on her proprieties. The smells would all be bottled and the noises hushed and mannered. He would be making love but not receiving it. Her sexiness was all about herself. For sure, they’d not be having sex inside his car, beneath a stand of peering, rain-soaked pines. She was the Princess of Clean Sheets.

Madame Picasso’s colleague, though, the little woman sitting to her left, unwisely — given her plumpness — enjoying a tall creamed coffee and a plate of brandy toasts, was much more to Lix’s taste. And closer to his age. What? Late thirties, surely, at the very least. Mouetta’s age. Glasses, hair dye, lines, a sunburnmottled throat, experience. Married, but determined to enjoy herself, he judged.

Lix liked her all-black outfit — jeans, jacket, tight and nippled T-shirt — and the one dramatic statement of the shoulder-mounted silver brooch — a dragonfly, its drama somewhat spoiled by four or five white hairs, too long to be her own or even human. She was an animated talker — but a smoker, too. No niceties. Her thumb and index finger had been stained with nicotine. She laughed out loud — too loud, perhaps — given half a chance.

On those few occasions when she was not contributing to the conversation, not spilling over with her stories and her opinions, she was a goading listener with darting eyes, a touch theatrical. She reminded Lix of a character actress he had worked with — but not much liked — on a couple of occasions. Only this woman at the table was, unlike the actress, entirely without self-consciousness and not completely drunk by breakfast time! Oh, what a partner she would make. How uninhibited and amused she would be, how eager to discover something new in anyone she met and liked.

Lix could not think of her inside a hotel room. Or any room. Instead, he placed her in a forest with her dogs. Three longhaired, silvered spaniels. (There’s no accounting for the stories men weave themselves.) And in this fairy tale, the passing stranger, Lix, has stopped to pay attention to her dogs. He fondles them, their parchment ears, their wet and probing snouts. Soon, of course (the constant daydream of a man), the fondling of the dogs becomes the fondling of the woman, too. She’s keen, he thinks. She’s bored at home. Her marriage is in bits. I’m harming nobody.

He has her tearing at his trousers and his belt. The forest’s large and tiny all at once, and noisy with the breathlessness of five impatient animals. The foliage closes in as they sink down into the cushions of the undergrowth, the almost matching smells of bracken and of sex.

It was a third woman at the table, though, who truly fascinated Lix. She was what Frenchmen call une jolie laide but in this city is more cruelly known as a Prickly Pear. A fruit that’s ugly, hard to handle, but once peeled and stripped is addictively sweet and juicy beyond measure. This colleague was a woman in her fifties even, skinny and black-haired, dressed a little oddly for the office — plastic beach boots (she’d had to wade to get to work that day), white trousers, and a cardigan, half buttoned up.

Her mouth was unusually large but, sensibly, her lips were not made up and so seemed sensuous and not promiscuous. Her hair, already slightly dulled by age, was cut to within a half centimeter of her skull all over. It seemed she wanted space to emphasize her good strong bones, her solid cranium, and show her earrings off: hand-tooled silver shields.

Ugly wasn’t quite the word for her. It was certain, though, had she had the chance, had she been keen to fit the mold, she would have traded every feature on her face for something else. The too large nose, the long demanding jaw, the slightly protruding eyes too greedy for their sockets, the Apache cheekbones, the manly ears might all have benefited from some costly surgery. Everything about her except her breasts needed taming and reduction.

Whereas Lix could not imagine walking down the street with Madame Picasso on his arm or even catching her without makeup, let alone yawning, sneezing, smelling of anything other than gardenia, this Prickly Pear with her expressive features seemed to be a woman of irresistible, seductive disarray. That touch of coffee on her upper lip, the unembarrassed action of her jaw as she dispatched her breakfast fruit without the help of her plate or the fruit knife or the modesty shield of a raised hand, suggested a person eager to devour the day.

A fantasy, perhaps. How could he tell anything for certain? Her seeming eagerness might just be shallowness, an undiscerning vacancy of mind. She might be a simpleton. Still, the visual fantasy was strong and logical. From the much loved bobbled cardigan to the sea-salt residue on her beach boots, she was dressed for action, not for show. She had the footwear and the trousers for an unexpected climb, a dash to catch her streetcar, a supermarket trip, a river crossing. She was, in fact, the woman in the room who most resembled in everything but looks his now frowning wife.