Jim Crace - Genesis

How dare he be the passing stranger for the plumper woman in the forest with her dogs. How dare he fondle them and her. There’d be a child. A pretty, well-built girl, her face distinguished awfully by the cherry mark inherited from Lix, but plucky and adventurous.

How dare the overfertile Lix take his jolie laide down to the beach …? Well, to all intents and purposes, that was not so problematic, he realized at once. Her age. Of course! He studied her again. Yes, in her fifties, certainly. Her fertile years long gone. Here was a woman he could safely cheat with, if he were the cheating kind. Perhaps that’s why he’d felt so free in his imagination in her company. Whatever they might do, there’d be no child. It could be his first and only nonproductive affair. Inconsequential sex!

His heart was racing suddenly. Here was his certain risk-free, vindicated choice, ready for when Mouetta returned. He favored someone who could never bear his child.

Yet when she came back to the table, washed, refreshed, and recologned, her hair brushed back and neatened, her skirt and blouse hand-smoothed, entirely more desirable than she had been five minutes earlier, she did not sit down to pursue the answer to her question.

“Let’s go,” she said.

He recognized that tone of voice. Something troubled her. She wanted to get on. There’d be an argument. He feared that somehow she had heard that her student had been arrested — and that she’d guess the reason why. She’d hate him for such wickedness. She’d be right to do so.

It was only once they’d crossed the busy Circular that his wife even spoke. She had another unexpected question for her husband: “Which of my cousins would you like to sleep with most?”

Lix laughed. Uneasily. He was naturally relieved that nothing worse was upsetting his wife. “Ah, cousin Gracia,” he said. He’d named the oldest one, a woman already in her sixties with thick gray hair and as tall and bony as an ostrich.

“Be serious.”

“Your cousins? There’s not a serious answer. I wouldn’t sleep with any one of them. Particularly the women.”

“And Freda, then? I’m sure you’d like to sleep with her again. She’s lovely, isn’t she. More lovely than before. She dresses so beautifully. Imagine if you’d never even met me that dreadful New Year’s Eve, but Freda … well, you’d make love to her again, wouldn’t you? I’m sure of it.”

“Ha ha.”

“You can tell the truth. I promise I won’t mind.”

“Of course you’ll mind. You’ve minded all along about Freda and George.” He wouldn’t add his own name to the list. “The mystery is, why do you still arrange to see the woman? Why do we still put up with her?”

“Because we must. She’s George’s mother, anyway. She’s family.”

“She’s not my family.”

They drove in silence to the house, the house where they would spend the third year of their marriage, where their child — now smaller than a fingertip — would take its first uncertain steps, the house where they would love and live and row, the house where nearly all his children came to stay on weekends, for the holidays, their empty house with no firebrands asleep in their spare room.

Mouetta followed Lix through the shrubs and pots of their front yard. “You still fancy Freda, don’t you, honestly? After all these years. You fancy cousin Freda.” More than me . She said it to his back.

“Not in the least,” Lix said, though there’d been moments in the car the night before and in the Debit Bar when he’d hardly been thinking of his wife. And there were bound to be some moments in the coming days, the coming months and years, indeed, as there’d been many moments in the past, when he would dwell on Freda for a while and what they’d almost, should have, shared, their George, their lost son in America, now twenty-four years old. He’d always think of her as someone he desired. Mouetta was the woman he required. This is the nature of the beast.

LIX LEFT IT late. Till November 1979. He was almost twenty-one and it was nearly midnight when he first had sex with anyone. Full docking sex, that is. Full snug-‘n’-comfy. Like almost everybody else his age, of course, he’d had hand jobs, not only with himself since he was twelve but twice with helpful boys at school and once (a birthday treat when he was seventeen) with an unsuspicious girl, one of nature’s volunteers. Her first time with a boy. She’d seemed surprised at what she’d done, at what she’d made him do, and with such little exertion. She jumped back just in time, so that only her sandal and her wrist were soiled by Lix’s sudden gratitude.

On that night of his induction — if it were not for the birthmark on his cheek — you would not recognize the celebrated Lix. Less heavy for a start, less grand. And much more volatile, as you’d expect of someone in his first semester free of parents and the family home. He was training for the stage at the academy. This was a time when Theater, newly unleashed from the censors, was argumentative and powerful. Lix truly wanted to improve the world, believed that Art was Revolution’s smarter twin, that Acting and Action were equal partners. Collaborators, in fact. He’d signed up with the Mime/Scream Community Drama Collective in his first month as a student and was active, too, in Street Beat Renegades, Provocations & Co., and the Next Stage (as in Paul Roesenthaler’s “The next stage is the elimination of captains, chaplains, and kings”). He didn’t have a repertoire, Lix said (adapting Roesenthaler yet again, our city’s feted radical), he had “an onstage manifesto.” Actors seemed to be the partisans of change back in those simpler times when appointees and the army controlled our lives even more completely than they do now, now that — to chant the cynics’ chorus — theater is unfettered and trifling, all our leaders have been democratically imposed, and Freedom has destroyed our impulse to be free.

Lix had a democratically modest fourth-floor room amongst the tenements down on the wharf, with not only skylight views across the newly named City of Kisses toward the river but also a narrow glimpsing view from his box kitchen into Cargo Street, where now there are boutiques and restaurants instead of groceries and bars and “working folk.”

The woman who had set her heart that night on Lix stood with his binoculars (where he had stood and spied on her so many times), her back against the little stove, her face veiled by the curtains, the rubber eyecups pressed against her lids and focused on the late night customers, the waitress, and the owner in the sidewalk cafe below, across the street. His stolen daily view of her. She was surprised how large the people seemed — they filled the lens — and how unsuspecting, uninhibited, they were, free to mutter to themselves, or stare, or rearrange their belts and straps, or swing their legs, with no idea that they were being scrutinized. “So!” she said. So this was where the owl had his nest. “I’ve often wondered what the view would be like if I were looking down on me!”

Lix was embarrassed, obviously. Caught out. He was also frightened and aroused. For all his noisy confidence, he’d never had an unrelated woman in his room before. What might it mean? He watched her from the kitchen door, his arms stretched up to grip the lintel, his printed T-shirt riding high above his belt to inadvertently display an adolescent abdomen and the apex of his pubic hair.

She, too, seemed large and detailed, in a way she’d never been through his binoculars. Her outfit was familiar, of course, her general shape. He recognized the fashionable “Sandinista” tunic suit with its half sleeves and “rough-look” calf-length skirt. He recognized the matching spangled rebel scarf. But mostly she was unfamiliar. The angle, for a start, was different. He’d mostly seen her from above, the shoulders and the head. Binoculars had shortened her. Binoculars diminish the world, reduce the senses to one. Precision optical instruments, no matter how finely ground, fogproof, waterproof, and vision-adjusted, could not hope to convey true proximity, the candid softness of the flesh, the spiciness of scent, the rustling, independent simpering of clothes, the clink of her bracelets, the perfect imperfections and the blemishes of someone close to thirty years of age. Until that night, he’d only seen this woman from afar.