Jim Crace - Genesis

So he hid himself and concentrated on his wife. He concentrated on the naked contours of her legs, the dimpled hollows behind her knee, the flexing ligaments, the moles and veins and creases. She liked caresses — who doesn’t like to be caressed? — even when her father was standing in a rocking boat and talking to her as if she were still a teenager. “Be sensible,” et cetera, when she was anything but sensible — and hoping never to be sensible again.

This was not yet a sexual act between the two of them. They’d often lain together on the bed, tweaking toes or massaging the other’s neck and back, without it ending as intercourse. Marriages would combust if every touch was sexual. Caresses of fondness and affection are only little passing gifts, the fleshly version of a word which gives reassurance to your partner that everything is going well, that no one’s cross. The fingertips convey no message other than the whispered tenderness of skin on skin.

For the moment Lix’s fingertips were restricted to her middle leg, the knee, the calf, the upper shin. Alicja welcomed this as just a simple intimacy, an unspoken symbol of support in the war amongst the Lesniaks. But tender touching never lasts quite long enough with men. They seek possession. They want to occupy the land and harvest it. They want to plunder it. They have to stretch and reach — as Lix was doing now — out of the realms of charity, beyond the zones of tenderness.

He pushed a hand under her nightshirt and began caressing her behind, a tactic that had succeeded several times before. He pushed her shirttail up to her waist and she could feel him breathing on her naked skin, could feel his face too close to her. She did not like that quite as much as massages. A parent’s presence made her feel unwomanly. If she allowed her husband to proceed, she understood he’d slip his finger into her while she was talking to her father. That was something she did not want. Not yet. Her head said no. Indeed, she shook her head. Yet instinctively her body, her grander, baser biological self, was already preparing for the possibility of sex, the likelihood that her husband would not despair of her, not give her any guilt-free peace until they had made love. Her vagina had already softened and lengthened for his stiffening erection.

Alicja knew what was expected of young wives, that she was expected to feel excited beyond recall. Those were the footnotes to Lix’s script — and she was cast to be the active and obliging star, being intimately touched by a lover crouching in the hems and shadows of her clothes, with nothing on underneath, but seeming to the world below the apartment as if she were simply chatting like a less than sensible daughter but with an inexplicably thickening voice.

Alicja would not accept the role. She pushed her husband’s hand away, coughed, and persevered with her assurances until her father gave the order for the engines to be started and for the launch to go back where it came from. She felt infuriated with the pair of them — her father for his bullying, her husband for his fickleness. Two nights before he’d been too distracted even to notice that she wanted to make love. Now, because he’d changed his mind, she was expected to respond to him like some trained horse. She shook her legs until he moved his hand away.

That might have been the end of it. Another moment lost. No unplanned pregnancy. No ill-timed son. But Alicja was more dutiful by temperament than resentful. She got her way by giving way. Besides, the weather was disarming and liberating and the circumstances of the flood so bizarre and stimulating that it would be a shame to punish the whole day by not responding to her husband, a husband who could sulk for a week if he so chose.

She watched her father’s launch proceed along the street, sending wakes of water up against the windows of the second-floor rooms and rocking all the floating debris that had surfaced in the night, the plastic dustbins and the furniture, while Lix sat at her feet and persevered.

Finally, of course, she warmed to him. She put her hand back on his head and gripped his hair. “No need to stop,” she said, in case he thought she was rebuffing him again. Actually her first rebuff had quieted him, reminded him how single-minded she could be, and how resistant to his bullying. He tried to be more tender and more circumspect. He pulled a leaf off one of the fessandra bushes and ran it down the back of her right knee. He’d never really paid much attention to the smell of fessandras before, but the pressure of his forefinger and thumb had bruised the leaf and let the odor out. It was oddly pungent, like cough lozenges with lemon undertones, bittersweet and cloying like a teenager’s perfume. He smelled his fingertips and was aroused by what he smelled. Physically aroused, that is, and — unlike an animal — imaginatively aroused as well because it was not hard to imply and to anticipate what might ensue, this moment rushing forward to the next at his behest but out of his control. The busy fingertips, at first, but then the lips and tongue. The gentleness, at first, but then the gripping and the biting, the fingernails. The man, at first, and then the beast.

Let’s not forget that Lix, indeed, was just an animal, compelled by base impulses to spread his seed in his selected mate so that his species could, in principle anyway, negotiate from eighty thousand genes an offspring more efficient than themselves. He was content to be “just an animal” on these occasions in his married life, to be instinctive and unambiguous in ways he couldn’t be when not aroused, to be unembarrassed by his irrational self, to be unself-consciously brave, patient, and cunning.

So Lix, the mating mammal, folded the fessandra leaf and rolled it up and down her leg, perfuming her, a ruminating little courtship play that would not ill suit gorillas or baboons. His wife stayed at the balustrade and let her husband put his leaf to work. She knew the smell, of course. She often rubbed the shrubs and brushed up against them, and she’d always found the odor stimulating, half kitchen and half dressing table. Someone ought to bottle it, she thought. An aphrodisiac. An aphrodisiac that at this moment truly worked. She felt her flood of irritation seep away, and then the swooning shift of mood that tossed her inhibitions to the far side of the roof. She felt intensely physical, exactly as she should, for her body was in free fall, in a kind of benign but toxic shock.

Her skin was turning red. Blood was pumping to the surface of her face and chest. Blood congested in her lips and nose, her earlobes and nipples, her breasts and genitals. The arteries were working faster than her veins. Her pulse had passed the hundred mark. Her blood pressure was up. Her lungs seemed hardly capable of reaching for breath. She was sweating visibly. You’d think the woman was not well, and that she should be hooked to sugar drips and heart machines and monitors.

Alicja was concentrating now. She had to draw the moment in. She stood a little straighter to allow the released odor to reach her nose directly. Her legs were buckling. She had to rest her hands on Lix’s shoulders for support. “Fessandra,” she said, as if this were an identification test. Lix took her comment as a cue. He snapped off leaves from balm, much damper leaves, more succulent and ticklish, and rolled them once again on Alicja’s lower leg. This time the odor was much fruitier and clogged, the smell of bed and sweat and oranges, as pungent as a potpourri and heavier than the fessandra perfume. It didn’t float as readily, but gathered in the curtains of her shirt. “I can’t smell that.” Again an invitation to move up. Again he pushed her shirt aside and tested out the balm on the softer, plumper skin between her bottom and her waist. And then some marjoram. “It’s balm,” she said, a little late.