Jim Crace - Genesis

“So,” SHE SAID again. “It’s quite a view you’ve got up here.” She meant it as an undemanding invitation for the man, the boy, to step across and wrap his arms around her waist. Somebody had to close the gap between the sidewalk table and the room. Surely that was partly his responsibility. She soon knew, as seconds passed like struck bells, the binoculars still heavy in her hand, that this young man would never take the single step across the kitchen to press against her at the windowsill, his lips against her neck, his cock lengthening against her leg. He was too scared and innocent. She’d have to make the move herself.

The act was simple. She reached across and touched the bare torso above his belt, the boyish plume of hair. “So!” she said again. The word seemed unavoidable, as did the pouting moue that delivered it. Then, “You’re quite the little spy.” She wanted him to talk before she kissed, before they made their way to his untidy bed in his unruly room. She wanted to discover what she looked like in the lens. “Tell me … why you look at me.” She nodded at the street below, the almost empty cafe, as if she were still sitting there.

Lix did not consider himself to be a spy or a snooper, of course. His frequent reconnaissances from behind the kitchen curtains were just routine for him, something for the wasting moments of the day, which at least allowed him to imagine that he had a part to play in all the kissing that was taking place that year. What else was there to do when he was home — an empty home — except put on the radio or choose an album for the record player, then browse the street with his binoculars. This was the closest he could get to contributing anything to Life’s portrayal of the city.

The woman from the cafe standing with her fingers wrapped around his belt was wrong if she imagined she was special. He did not only have eyes for her (though it was hard, for the moment, to think of anybody else while she was pushing up his T-shirt). He was indiscriminating in his interests, so long as his attention could be held by someone female and attractive. His eyes were robbing women from the street as nonjudgmentally as a mugger.

And his excuse, should he be caught? And his excuse, now that he had been caught and challenged by the woman breathing in his face, so close that he could smell her perfume and her scalp? It was his duty to observe, of course. Watch people in the street, his drama teachers had instructed his group. Watch how they behave. Follow them even, to see and learn what people do when they are innocently on their own. He was only studying, through his binoculars.

“It’s just part of my course,” he said. “You’re always there. I always watch, that’s all.”

“It’s something more,” she said. “I know about you men.”

She wanted him to tell her that he’d always wanted her, that he had thought about this moment many times before. She wanted him to say, “I was excited when I caught you in my lens.”

Instead he said, “I’m finding this embarrassing.”

He meant that the impulse that had taken him to seek arousal at the kitchen window was hardly targeted. He was not seeking consummation with a woman with a name but only giving vent to haphazard randiness, that wild anarchic master of the unattached. He only meant to satisfy himself. Now he faced the fear and the embarrassment of achieving the impossible, of doing something he had never had to try before. He must transfer his universal and unfocused longing for any woman safely chancing by at a distance to this particular and all too present woman.

She slipped her shoes off, kicked them across the kitchen floor, becoming short and vulnerable without her heels. “Kiss, kiss. Are you allowed to study kissing, too? Come on.” She shocked herself, on tiptoes, in bare feet, her tongue surprising his, her hands pushed up inside his shirt as if he were the woman. She was in the mood for shocks. She’d had a shocking and unhappy day and she was hoping for some pleasurable revenge.

She should not, though, have kissed his birthmark quite so readily. She should not have held its short soft hairs between her lips. He gasped and tried to pull away. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“For this … the blotch.”

His birthmark would unman him all his life, he’d always thought. This red and hairy nevus would repulse the girls. It would be the obstacle denying him a wife. He’d never met a single female who had not stared at it for a moment when they first laid eyes on him or who otherwise had battled with themselves to fix their attention elsewhere. He felt that people’s eyes were darting constantly, mockingly, to his cheekbone, that it fascinated and repulsed them like a harelip or a walleye, like some unsightly boil. He felt as if his body had no other purpose than to haul his flaming cheek around. His burning cheek, his everlasting blush. His boyhood friends had teased him about it, called him Smudge, indeed, a pitiless nickname which he had foolishly adopted and still allowed when he went home, just to show that the blemish did not really bother him these days. But, oh, it did. It shaped the way he was.

Lix had developed the habit while still a young boy of holding a hesitant hand up to his eye when he spoke to strangers as if shielding it from sunlight. It drew attention to the birthmark, of course, rather than hiding it, and gave the boys something more to tease him about at school. He had tried to keep that hesitant hand in his trouser pockets, to be — or seem — relaxed about himself. Too frequently he also felt obliged when making new acquaintances to introduce himself as Smudge and then point out the cherry-colored birthmark as if it had not already been noted and ignored. He made jokes about it at his own expense. He was overinsistent, in fact, and made some old acquaintances so uncomfortable that they started calling him Felix and looking fixedly at their feet when they conversed rather than give offense by flickering a glance at his face.

What Lix could not accept, would never realize, but which the woman from the sidewalk cafe had recognized at once, was that the nevus was attractive rather than ugly. How tender it had been to kiss him there. It was like kissing someone better on a bruise, or kissing someone’s eyes to stop the tears. Here was an invitation to be tender. The birthmark was the sweetest part of him. It lent to an otherwise inexpressive face a sardonic and whimsical note, a touch of innocence and beauty. What small romantic successes Lix had enjoyed in his teens had been encouraged rather than hindered by what the mark did for his face. Lix did not understand. All his personal and public failures he blamed upon the stain.

Perhaps that’s why Lix grew to love the cinema so much. It was a refuge where his birthmark was not seen, where everybody faced the front and no one stared at him. It does not explain, however, the oddly self-exposing decision he had made that he would be an actor, someone stared at for a living. Or, possibly, as his best friend cleverly observed when Lix announced that he had won a place at theater school, “He’s looking for a job where he can cake himself in makeup.”

If only his best friends could see him now, a woman on her tiptoes kissing him, again, again, on his birthmark as if the cherry stain were fruit. Here was proof for them at last that love — or passion, anyway — was blind, that it could overcome, ignore, forgive the blotches and the blemishes.

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.