Jim Crace - Genesis

What occurred, then, to turn this calamity on its head and rescue the evening? What took her up the stairs to Lix’s unappealing room? An almost-stranger’s room? It must have been the romance that she had already planned for that evening which made the difference. The bottle was uncorked. Sitting on her own (before her lover’s phone call came) in her familiar place in the sidewalk cafe had — as nowadays it often did — made her not sexually but emotionally aroused. Romantic expectation was her mood — the expectation of the stooping kiss, her lover’s guaranteed tumescence, the watchful, surely jealous eyes of the cafe owner, the passing glances of the many husbands going home to their dull families, the certainty that she was being spied on through far binoculars, that kissing one in this bright street was making love to two or more. Was this a mad indulgence for a woman of her age, that she was being wanted from many angles by several men at once? Perhaps this was the worst of vanities. But surely anyone could see how poised and heaven-sent she was for men.

Now what? No boyfriend suddenly. No prospect of a kiss. Not even any twitching curtains on that night. She’d checked. Just the complicit sympathy of the cafe owner and his waitress and the added insult of the stiffening liqueur they had offered her “on the house.” To go home was impossible. How could she bear the chatter of her roommates, the television programs, the surrender of her hopes to all the domestic chores that needed attending to? A woman who had expected to be dining out with celebrities in the Habit Bar would be at home instead, ironing blouses, defeated by the telephone.

Still, she had to eat. So rather than order anything from the sidewalk cafe — an unflattering choice of cold snacks — she went to the little fixed-menu cafeteria, the ABC, behind the railway station where single men and women stranded by their lifestyles and their trains could eat without expense — and without embarrassment. She ordered menu C, the soup, the fish, the crème brûlée, and — recklessly — another glass of the Boulevard liqueur she’d been given at the cafe. She’d pay for one at least that night, to save face.

She didn’t have anything to read. Not even a pen to doodle with. So she could be excused for looking around the restaurant and studying the gallery of faces, the exhibition of clothes and postures. Staring was polite compared to some behavior there, the table manners and the arguments, the lack of modesty. The ABC was the sort of place where you could stare. Nobody considered it rude. You stared and they stared back. No need to be genteel with such a cast of students, bachelors, artists, unemployed, third-class travelers.

She spent ten minutes gazing around, not really looking for her dishonest lover with another woman possibly, or with his work colleagues, or with his children and his wife, not really practicing what she would say to him, in front of everyone. She studied almost every visible face, the back of almost every other head. So she couldn’t miss that half-familiar blemished man three rows of tables down from her and walking in between the diners and their bags and cases, looking for a place to sit. The pattern on the cheekbone was unmistakable. It was her clandestine admirer. She knew at once he’d recognized her, too.

How could she be so reckless? That was not her style, not normally. She was the sort who only spoke when spoken to, in matters of the heart at any rate. A woman of that age even in those newly unshackled days did not initiate encounters of this kind. But now her fury and her disappointment seemed to shift and occupy a different space. Instead of standing boldly at the family table, the wife amazed, the children cowering, the lying husband silent, pizza-faced, as she’d imagined, she was instead half standing at her chair, pulling back the table, making room for Lix. For once she’d made a move on her own behalf. It had been easy, actually. She simply pointed at the place opposite her and said, “It’s free.” He had no choice. To walk on past, without a ready lie, would be unnecessarily rude. So he sat. He was blushing uncontrollably. The spy exposed.

The blushing, though, was irresistible. Not only was it evidence of innocence, embarrassment, and shame, but also of desire, arousal, fear. She’d never seen such fear on anyone’s face. It made her feel unusually powerful, to be able to bring on such involuntary discomfort in a man. The shoe should be on the other foot. Had always been before. So this was what it felt like to be male, a hunter, predatory, to have a blushing quarry within reach, the color in his face the flag of his arousal.

She made Lix look her in the eye by simply chatting at him like a cousin. It helped that he was so much younger than she was. Perhaps ten years, she judged. It helped, as well, that she had already drunk two shots of alcohol. It let her talk. Why not? It’s not unnatural — especially in the ABC — to talk when you are sharing a table with a stranger. She bullied him till he submitted to her questions. And as he spoke — about his theater studies and his agitprop, his many opinions on almost everything, including — on that day — the good news, bad news from Iran, the coming plebiscite, the confrontation planned for Nation Day, the famine in Cambodia for which he’d organized a street performance called, he said, PolPottery — she started once again to feel contented with herself, to feel attractive, passionate, even to like the woman sharing a tablecloth with him, the unmasked Peeping Tom. She wasn’t listening, of course. The theater and PolPottery? Iran?

She liked it best when he was being playful, playing someone else, that is, and not himself. His speaking voice was beautiful. And he could sing. He could do accents well. Though his repertoire of American actors was amusing, his imitation of their waiter with his odd head and his strange, strangulated voice was clever enough to make her laugh out loud.

To tell the truth, though, this snooper, for all his cleverness and youth, for all his physical difference from her older, paunchy lover, wasn’t her type of man. Not broad enough. Too loud and sensitive and too much of the student in his dress, his voice, his hair, too keen to change the world with his slogan T-shirt and his campaign buttons. And far too inexperienced with women. She could tell at once. He couldn’t flirt if he were paid for it with gems. He didn’t have the nature or the skill — unlike her own pitiless and impatient lover, who used the world — and her — so roughly and so carelessly.

This inexperience was tantalizing in a way. It put her in command. She needed more than anything, on this of all nights, to imagine she was at the steering wheel. His inexperience also made her strong enough, once they had finished eating and there was nothing on the table but their coffee cups, the bills, and their two pairs of hands, to touch his fingertips, the fingertips that had held the spyglasses in which she was desired, and then to grip his wrists, and then to say — quite shockingly—“Where do you live?” And then, before he had the chance to reply, “I know exactly where you live. The fourth floor above the cafe along the street.” How wonderful to see him blush again and squirm.

She could not stop herself. The night was beckoning and she was dressed for it. But if there was any hero in her sights, the young man (now hurrying with her out of the ABC and into Cargo Street, four flights of stairs ahead of them) was not the one. She herself was the only person she observed in her mind’s eye. The clock reversed. Again she was the woman, half a couple, waiting at the street cafe. But magnified. Enlarged. Desired. The blur of men passed by and liked her hair, her dress, her face, her legs. How better she must be than any wife, they thought. Half of the city wanted to sleep with her. She was the woman on the poster for Life magazine, the lipstick and the glass of wine, kissing everyone. Her mouth. Her tongue. She only had to lift her face and look around and smile for them, for all the men. The telephone could ring and be ignored. She’d not be caught. Four stories up the winking lenses could only catch the light.