Jim Crace - Genesis

Lix still had one hand free to pluck some mint for her. But he’d stood at last and now was pressing against her back, a little buckle-kneed himself. If anyone naive, some passing boatman or a marooned neighbor on another roof, had seen them there, they might just pass for a couple looking virtuously at their flooded street, as innocent as pigeons, but only if you took their swaying and their twining, their sudden shakes, to be a childish, clinging dance and their contorted faces — their mouths agape, their nostrils flared — to be a game of Visages.

When they had finished and were able to stand tall again, Lix rubbed the mint into the nape of her neck, a freshener, a waking tonic for the nose. It was a smell she’d associate forever with the advent of their son. Mint would remind her, too, of proper love, because their midday breeding on the roof (that’s what it was), their mating in the time of floods, had also been an act of fondness and affection. Everything they’d done and seen in those nine days of rain had led as surely as water runs downhill to lovemaking. Everything had proved to be a prelude to the kisses and embraces, and the child. There’d be no grander day than this.

This couple, these rooftop newlyweds, shipwrecked above the flooded streets, had done two things at once, two things connected and discrete: Had sex. Made love. What better way to start a life? What better way to start an afternoon?

A CHILDISH QUESTION now. What happened to the clouds? What happened to the clouds once they’d peeled off to give us back our hills, their scalped-to-the-bone maturity? They’d spread out as evenly as oil. The blue skies lost their pure edge as well. The wind picked up. By June, it was another summer just like all the others we endure in this safe city on the water’s edge. Not fine, not wet, but hazy and exhausting and unkind. Our world regained its shape. If we were hawks, if only we were hawks once in a while, we’d recognize that city patterns had returned to normal, the river flowing in its place, observing man-made banks, the traffic moving freely in the dried-out streets and on the mended bridges, no sheeny parks or squares to paddle in, the bipeds as busy as they ever were, observing sidewalk rules.

And, as hawks, we’d spot an unexpected confluence one afternoon in July, beyond glass roofs. Not such a rare coincidence. For cities like ours where people move around on tracks, meetings such as this are inevitable:

Alicja and Lix have gone down to the Palm & Orchid for a late Saturday afternoon treat. They’ve something to celebrate and think about. Something both pleasing and unnerving for Lix: his children stretch behind him and they stretch ahead. Her pregnancy’s confirmed.

Unluckily, for this should be a blissful, undiluted time, Freda’s already in the Palm & Orchid Coffee House with her small boy. She’s sitting almost hidden by a plant, facing out across the room disdainfully and being watched by half the men. When she sees her ex-lover, her very best RoCoCo Renegade and the father of her son, with his fat Polish wife at the entrance desk pleading with the maître d’ for an unshared table, she’s tempted first to stay where she is and ignore them, loftily. He’d not dare bother her.

They are being led to a table far too close to hers. So she gets up from her seat, brushes all the crumbs off her black skirt, and hurries out without a glance, but only once she’s sure that Lix has noticed her, seen not only how grand and beautiful she is but also how she’s still concerned, involved, engaged (and if she still is beautiful, then that’s a beauty that stems not from her genes but from her seriousness). She wants the man whom she possessed for more than thirty days to take the blame for everything, the child, the kidnapping, the ever growing problems of the city and the world.

George had not been pleased to be there in the first place, in such a disappointing restaurant. Now he is furious to be dragged away before he’s even dispatched his cake or had a chance to feed the finches with his mother’s crumbs. He drags behind his mother’s arm, afraid to make a fuss, and as he drags, he catches for an instant the eye of a man he cannot recognize but knows, a hypnotized and startled man who’s staring at him with an open mouth.

ALICJA MUST HAVE known as soon as she opened her mouth that risking such a joke in front of her husband’s most recent friends might be an error — and a costly one, because, as any Lesniak could tell you, “for every pair of ears, there is a set of teeth.” In other words, if anyone can hear what you say, then anyone can repeat it, and anyone can sharpen up the most blameless banter to give it a damaging bite, especially if the object of the joke was an as yet unrevealed public figure.

So despite the ingenuousness of Alicja’s blunder, the word went around that Lix, for all his money and success, was not much good in bed. That would always be the sweetest rumor of them all, to hear that even a celebrity could fail between the sheets. Not fail to procreate, of course, he’d not failed that, but fail to please. The word spread fast. By midnight all the dogs were barking it and all the owls were hooting it.

Alicja by now was not the woman of the roof, a little overweight, ill dressed, too eager to comply, dismissive of her parents’ wealth, in love with Lix. She had become the woman that she’d planned, free at last of her lesser, deferential self, impatient to move on. She was a working mother, hardly slimmer than she’d always been, but grand and smart enough these days to “carry it.” Mrs. Lesniak-Dern was the new director of the Citizens’ Commission and also a district senator, elected by the waitresses and office workers of the Anchorage quarter because three years before she’d done so much — without success — to fight for flood repairs and compensation for the neighborhood. Her little kindnesses had paid big dividends for her, exactly as she’d thought they might. The Quandary Queen had been the local heroine for several months, long enough to offer herself in the elections — and to win.

It didn’t seem to matter to the Anchorage voters that nowadays their senator mostly lived elsewhere. In Polish luxury, Beyond. What mattered was that she and Lix had kept the little apartment-without-a-river-view as their city center pied-a-terre, no longer their rented rooftop happiness, perhaps, but somewhere for Lix to sleep after a late curtain, somewhere for Alicja to meet with her constituents — and with her lover. So — democracy! — their homely representative could sometimes be caught walking in their streets with her little son in his stroller and could be greeted by her Christian name. Alicja could still be thought of as a neighbor and a fixer, the ear to whisper in. She was their woman to admire and claim to be their own. Though her husband, Lix, was not so patient when they greeted him, just the presence of his familiar face was further evidence that even people who had once inhabited cramped apartment rooms, even people who’d been marked at birth, could make successes of themselves. Though two successful people in one household, as everybody knew, was one too many. Successful people are too busy, as the saying goes, to take care of the chickens. So it was with Lix and Alicja. They hardly seemed to meet these days. Even their photographs appeared in separate sections of the newspaper. They lived in different and divergent worlds.

To celebrate his first contract with Paramount in Hollywood (he’d co-costar with Pacino in The Girder Man) and the outstanding reviews and ticket sales for his Don Juan Amongst the Feminists, Lix had decided to blow some of the profits from the album sales of Hand Baggage , the “travelogue of songs” he had tested out so many times in restaurants and bars when he was still unknown and hungry for loose change and cheap applause, by hosting an Obligation Feast to prove his gratitude to thirty or so good friends. These were the actor colleagues, musicians, journalists, and slighter celebrities with time to spare who clung to him now that he was recognized and famous in the city. He could not expect them to drive out to his and Alicja’s new village-style house in Beyond (as the New Extensions on the east side of the city were known dismissively by those who did not have young children or money and did not value privacy, security, and lawns). These men and women were either too busy or too grand to make the forty-minute trek. Anyway, he’d rather keep his private house — with its seven private trees — secure and secret even from them. He’d not been truly happy there. Beyond had ruined everything. Besides, he did not want his name to turn up in a tittletattle diary piece in the newspaper, ridiculed for having — what? — the wrong-shaped bath, a bourgeois sofa set, last year’s shrubs, or mocked for having in-laws like the Lesniaks who could both buy, then give away to their daughter, such a fine and current building.