Jim Crace - Genesis

Lix, actually, like many young men, was practiced in the art of watching women from afar, not always through binoculars, of course, but women he could only dream of touching, women he could only scheme about: his voice tutor at the Arts Academy, the swan-necked student called Freda from one of the science faculties, the daughter of the concierge at his apartment house, the overscented cashier in the campus cafeteria, the tiny half-Greek actress in his course, the bursar’s haughty wife in her white suits, the many tough and visionary women in his “groups,” and — let’s admit the universal truth — any female under fifty simply chancing into view. All worshipped from afar. They’d all be judged and sifted, feeding his mind’s eye, as casually and unself-consciously as a sea anemone might sift the random flotsam in its reach.

When you’re that young and inexperienced you take in fantasies with every breath. You mean no harm. But then you don’t expect a distant fantasy to walk up to your room. You don’t imagine that the woman waiting for her boyfriend every evening after work in the sidewalk cafe below your kitchen window will ever be so close and intimate except through your binoculars. You cannot know, might never know, that she will be the mother of your eldest child.

SHE’D NOTICED HIM standing there with his binoculars many times in the preceding weeks, behind the twitching curtains in the rented rooms. The shifting lenses caught the light and signaled to the street. As did the pale and transfixed face beyond, with its dark birthmark on the upper cheek. She hadn’t minded that he was spying on her. Being watched and waiting for your lover was much less tedious than simply waiting unobserved. She did not display herself, exactly. She stayed demure; crossed legs, with a newspaper or magazine to read, perhaps, or a letter to write to her sister in Canada. Sometimes a book. Occasionally a cigarette. She always seemed so self-contained and concentrated, this little information clerk in her expressive outfits. Always looking down. She had learned to watch the upper window in the building opposite without lifting her head. Men weren’t as undetectable as they imagined. And she did seek out the best-lit tables in the sidewalk cafe, the ones most favored by the evening sun, the ones directly opposite the snooper’s room. She liked this silent and seductive rendezvous.

It had occurred to her, of course, that any man so patient and persistent with binoculars, and fixated enough to waste his time staring through his lenses at her, might not be honorable or sane or attractive even. She’d seen the remake of the classic Peeping Tom. She’d read the trial reports of dangerous voyeurs. There was something animal about his spying, too: faces at windows, figures in caves. She should have been more fearful and more wary. Yet she felt safe. She had spotted her admirer once, out on the street. There’d been no mistaking that birthmark, or how unmenacing he seemed. The young man was striking. The blemish on the face was beautiful, an unexpected touch of innocence for one so secretive and scheming. She was surprised, as well, how adolescent he was. That made his voyeurism charming almost, more forgivable, appropriate. How satisfying to have magnetized a fellow scarcely out of his teens when she — a mere month off her thirtieth birthday, not married yet herself but desperately dependent on a married man — had almost dismissed herself as being attractive to no one single.

It can be no surprise, then (given how her sense of worth had been diminishing), that the daily half an hour between her ending work and her part-time lover getting to the cafe became for a month or so the best part of her day. She sat with a perc of coffee, out on the street, her body trim, and was desired. Desired sexually. Desired simply for the way she looked by the young man now swinging from the door frame only a meter behind her, with his sweet, appealing midriff and the kiss-me birthmark on his face. She did not want him for a lover. She didn’t even want him for a friend. She wanted him just once, just for the hour, and just to reassure herself. A “little interlude” to salve her wounds.

Her “little interlude” had not been planned. She’d never cheated on a man before. Never needed to. But when the call had come through to the cafe that evening to tell her that her lover had been delayed and that he’d phone the next day at her office “when he got the chance,” then she’d been troubled and offended beyond words. The small offenses irritated most — the effort she had expended after work, before arriving at the cafe, touching up her makeup, fixing her hair, changing into clothes he liked, the time she’d squandered during the day imagining their meeting, rehearsing their embrace — although the larger implications were unignorable and frightening. The pattern was familiar. This was the third time in ten days that he had let her down in one way or another. This was the third cheating husband in the last two years who had disillusioned her. She took the hint. She felt the chill. Another cooling, flagging man was scuttling from her life.

She’d started out the day as a woman with some status, not bloated with self-regard like some people she could name but confident enough to know that she was valued somewhere. Whenever she was waiting in the cafe — an almost daily routine for the past three months — she had a purpose and a role. She was the early half of a couple, waiting to be validated by her man — and that was satisfying. The owner and the little waitress understood that she would arrive before the boyfriend, that she would order a coffee and — occasionally — a glass of mineral water. They were used to her eager nervousness — the frequent checking in the little vanity mirror she carried in her purse, her habit of shaking her watch as if to hasten time, the way she stared into her book, her writing pad, her newspaper, but never seemed to turn a page. And then, when he arrived, the lover always just a little bit too late but standing over her at last to stoop a kiss onto her cheek, they’d be familiar with his embrace, her hand bunched up across his back.

Some days they’d only stay at the table for a few moments and then depart separately. The briefest meeting, just to hug. Once in a while, they’d share a beer, though clearly the man was not comfortable in such a public place. On other days, they’d go off hand in hand to possibly a restaurant or the hotels on the wharf. Then their passion would be almost palpable. It made her beautiful, the waitress thought.

Where was the beauty, though, in being so publicly stood up? Her borrowed husband could at least have called her to the cafe owner’s telephone, to whisper in her ear from his safe distance with his excuses and apologies. Why would he be so cowardly as to trust his betrayals to a messenger if he were not ashamed? Or lying? She’d had to smile and nod and seem wholly unperturbed when the cafe owner — the co-conspirator, it seemed to her — had come to pass on the shaming news: “Your friend said to tell you that he’ll phone tomorrow, when he gets the chance.” She felt exposed. Demeaned. A woman with no purpose in that cafe. She could drink a thousand coffees there and still not count as half a couple waiting for completion. She was a laughingstock — a woman revealed as exactly what she was — unmarried, only half successful in her work, the tenant of a less than homely apartment shared with two women just as unfulfilled as she was, reliant on the rationed attentions of a married lying man with children and a home he’d never abandon. She could hardly hold her coffee cup without shaking, she was so angry and upset. The evening had been so promising. They had planned to spend some time together in a restaurant, the famous — and expensive — Habit Bar where all the singers and the actors went. There’d be no grubby hour in a hotel room before he hurried home on this occasion. There’d just be food and wine and romance. She’d always liked that better than the sex. Love must be fed or it grows thin.