Jim Crace - Genesis

Thank goodness someone there was purposeful. Lix was all at sea. His only physical contact with women — other than that one startled volunteer — was onstage or in his acting classes when there was a drama coach or stage directions to guide him: Take her arm or Seize her roughly or Embrace . And he obeyed the script. And she — whichever student actress it might be that day, instructed to be his Blanche, his Juliet, his Beatrice, his Salome — responded by the book.

These were the licensed touches of the theater, unconsummated congresses, studied passion, love technique that’s only there to dupe the audience.

Of course, the flesh he handled was not fake. Those onstage partners in his embrace were genuine women, ready with the action and the words. These were real lips. Those hands he took to kiss or shake, those costumed shoulders he enveloped in his arms, were not from props. The peasant’s dress that dashed against his ankles when they danced was fraudulent, just dressing up, a play. Yet when his hand supported her — the girl in his stage group, whoever she might be that week, his partner — for her cartwheel, then those glimpsed legs were alarmingly real, as was the heady smell of bottled perfume from Chanel, as was the bra strap, textured and insinuating against his palm.

None of them were quite as real as she’d become, the little shoeless woman from the sidewalk cafe who now was backing him out of the kitchen, across the wooden boards of his small room, until his legs were pressed against the endboard of his bed and he was toppling.

She knew enough about young men to please if not utterly satisfy herself before she let him ejaculate, although their lovemaking had been so urgent and frantic that neither of them had removed a single item of clothing. Not one, except her pair of shoes, abandoned in the kitchen. His underpants and trousers were around his thighs. Her underclothes had just been pulled aside. Her brassiere, still fastened at the back, was riding underneath her chin. Thank goodness for the Sandinista rough-look skirt. She could go home by streetcar and look respectable, and not appear unbecomingly disheveled. Despite her tears. For there’d be tears as soon as she descended from his room.

THE WOMAN HADN’T yet revealed her name to Lix. She was feeling guilty actually and would have lied if he’d inquired what she was called or solicited her phone number or suggested that they make the ABC their occasional rendezvous. But he had not inquired, solicited, or requested. Having sex had doubled his embarrassment, not eradicated it. His tongue, so active just a few minutes before, was now entirely tied. No matter. She didn’t think they’d meet again anyway. She didn’t even think she’d go back to the sidewalk cafe anymore. Her future, dearly, was elsewhere. Her catch would have to find another friend for his binoculars.

They lay in bed, his narrow bed, for far too long, looking at the posters on the ceiling — rock groups she’d never heard of, demonstrations and campaigns she’d never join, experimental plays she’d hate, and on the facing wall an illustrated slogan by Roesenthaler which declared that “the Artist is the Armourer.”

“What must you think of me?” she said.

“I don’t think anything. Well, nothing bad.”

“Am I your first?”

“First what?”

“First one in bed.”

“First what in bed?”

She shrugged. Men always disappointed her. “Where can I wash?”

“They’ve got a shower down the corridor. I use the kitchen usually …”

Lix followed her into the unlit kitchen and waited at the door (a host at last) while, finally, she began to take off her clothes, a silhouette against the darkened window, and drape them over his radiator. She tied the towel he gave her around her waist.

“I’ve got some coffee if you want.”

“I do need coffee, yes.”

Lix leaned across her at the sink to fill the saucepan with water. Her breasts were hard and cold against his arm. “I’ll have to boil some water for you too, if you need to wash,” he said. “There isn’t any hot. Not from the tap.” The gas flame dramatized the room. “I have a question.”

“Go on.”

He wanted to ask, “Am I okay in bed? Can I be confident with girls? What should I know that I don’t know?” She was an older woman after all. It was her job to put his mind at rest. Instead, he said only, “What’s up?”

“‘What’s up?’” Already she could see how irritating he could be.

“You know, I mean, what’s going on?”

She leaned against the window frame and looked down on the street below without the aid of his binoculars. Nothing moved. It was past midnight. The sidewalk cafe had been packed away, its shutters drawn, its chairs and tables folded and padlocked. “I came with you,” she said, “because the guy that I am always waiting for, down there, did not show up. That’s why.”

“Let’s go to bed again.”

She was astonished, not that the object of her “little interlude” didn’t seem to care about her lover dumping her — why would he care? Nobody cared — but that this innocent had been transformed so quickly into something more familiar to her, the predatory man forever wanting to make love, demanding it, cajoling it. She’d been a fool to take her clothes off while he watched and then to stand half naked in the semidark, her body silhouetted in the streetlit window frame. It had been a provocation, obviously. He was provoked. Quite clearly so. His body, his erection, flattered her. She almost welcomed it, this second visitation. How could she not? She was, she believed, its single cause. His body was awakening again to her close presence in the room. It validated her and no one else. Lix, though, was not intent on flattery.

This time it was not left to her to close the gap between the sidewalk table and the room, to take the single step across the kitchen. He was no longer scared and inexperienced, it seemed. He pressed himself against her at the tiny sink next to the window. He pushed his trousers down.

She was a little nervous suddenly. She’d lost control. This was, when all was said and done, a stranger’s room, a dangerous place.

“We’ve done it once,” she said.

“You’re beautiful.” Already he had one hand on her breasts and the other was pushing up the towel. “Let’s lie down in the other room.” He shouldered her toward the door. The sycophant became the psychopath in seven seconds flat.

Where was the tenderness in this? It was, of course, too much to ask for love in these odd circumstances. But tenderness? How kind was Lix with her? Perhaps it was too soon and he too young for tenderness. The heart and brain are slow to play their parts when men discover sex. We can allow him some excuse: he meant no harm; he’d seen too many films and thought that making love was an aggressive act; he wanted to redeem himself in his own eyes. And we should recognize this tender and forgiving truth, in later years Lix proved to be a man who was not cruel or casual in his consummated passions but, with one costly exception, only copulated with the woman whom — for the moment at least — he adored.

Cupid is by nature mischievous, irrational, and irresponsible. By now, even without the kindness and the tenderness, she was aroused herself to tell the truth. The words “You’re beautiful” will always do the trick. There was something else that had alerted her and quickened her: the window frame, the windowsill, the curtains still not drawn against the prying night, the empty street below, and his binoculars still hanging from their peg.

“Let’s do it here,” she said. “Be quick.” She turned her back on him and braced her arms against the window frame. She stuck her bottom out, a silent fat-lipped purse of soft flesh, and reached behind her legs for him, to guide him in. “Come on, come on.” Her senses were all genital. She hardly felt his fingers on her back, she hardly heard his breathlessness, the kettle boiling on his stove, the rattling woodwork of the window frame, the division and adhesion of their skin. She pressed her forehead up against the glass but noticed no one passing in the street below, no cars, no revelers, no cheating husbands too late to meet their patient mistresses, not even any cats to catch her eye. Lix might be lost in her. But she had half forgotten him. She’d not delude herself. She was not passionate for this probationer. She was the subject and the object of her own desires. She lost herself, four stories up, in only what was happening to her, a woman in so many places all at once, it seemed, the cafe, the bed, the ABC, the gloomy streetlit room, the city’s dark, conspiring boulevards, a woman who had only meant to reassure herself.