Jim Crace - Genesis

Beyond was not only beyond the old suburbs but beyond the means and wildest dreams of anyone in Lix’s lunch party. “Grand and busy” is not the same as rich, not in the Arts. It was never wise to make your comrades jealous or resentful or scornful. Best that they were kept away and not invited to inspect what tainted Polish cash could buy. Childless people never understood how costly — to your purse and principles — parenthood could be. “Blood before Ink” was Roesenthaler’s mocking phrase for it. Nor do they understand — the never married ones, at least — how quickly love gets washed ashore and beached. They’d see the evidence themselves if they came out to Beyond: the shallowness, the elegance, and the formality.

So Lix had rented the Hesitation Room (as the windowless private cellar beneath the Debit’s public areas was known). Perhaps it was the lack of natural light on this aggressively bright spring day that caused the diners to behave more drunkenly and less cautiously than they should have done at lunchtime. Once that baize door — with the high flood mark of May 1989 recorded just a centimeter below the lintel — was closed and all the meals had been served, it must have seemed like night down there, late night, with hardly any traffic noise and just occasionally digestive rumbles from the nightmare streetcars reminding them of city life. Time, then, to pop a pile of corks and throw discretion to the many cellar rats, even though, out in the world, the sun had hardly passed its highest point.

More often than not Alicja would have used their son, Lech, as an excuse for not attending Lix’s “self-celebrating” meal. Lech had to be collected from his sitter. Lech had to be delivered to his grandparents. Lech had to be adored and fussed and indulged on any day that Lix would like Alicja to be his public wife. There were other useful excuses, of course. Her public duties were the perfect alibi. Sometimes she simply said that it would not be politic to be at his side at this event or that occasion. The company was not discreet, there were too many journalists, her presence might be misinterpreted politically, et cetera. It wasn’t hard to fake an alibi. She and her husband led their own lives, neither one of any interest to the other. The senate and the theater were ancient enemies.

There were no convincing reasons, though, not to join his private gathering in the Hesitation Room. It was taking place in daytime after all. Lech was at the Polish kindergarten until late afternoon and then he had a toddler party to attend. The district senate was not due to meet for two more days. The Citizens’ Commission provided an income but, since its appropriation, few responsibilities. And Lix would take offense — quite reasonably — and sulk like a carp if his wife was absent from the Feast. My God, the man could sulk the juice out of a lemon. In less than a week he would be leaving for L.A. and then the film set in Nevada and not returning home for two sweet months. Surely Alicja, he had said, could make the effort just this once and smile upon his friends.

So she’d dressed up in her ComPoneau suit, determined to enjoy herself despite the immodest and undiplomatic company of Lix’s “limpets.” Luckily, there was one of his newly minted friends she was keen to share a table with — and the Debit food was always interesting, even in the Hesitation Room, where the lighting was so blunt.

Alicja had seemed, Lix thought, almost enthusiastic at the prospect of spending lunchtime with her husband for a change. She’d had her hair styled early in the morning and had then spent an hour at home on clothes and makeup. Lix had been a spectator, more disarmed by watching her than usual. He’d always liked to watch his wife prepare herself, a homely version of the many times he’d spent in theater dressing rooms talking to half-dressed actresses in mirrors, addressing their bare backs, their pins and zippers and straps.

Yet in the past few months his and his wife’s physical intimacies, the social glue of lovemaking, had become so infrequent and fraught, and so inconclusive, that even watching her dress had become a bitter pleasure, especially as recently — and this was pitiless — Alicja seemed to have discovered a new interest in her appearance to match her status in the senate and on the street. She’d never dressed so sexily before. She’d always thought his occasional gifts of clothes hilarious and “fussy.” Now she’d taken to wearing skirts and well-cut suits and shoes with just a tiny heel and did not seem impatient as she once had at the mindless waste of time of putting on makeup and coordinating her colors and fabrics and jewelry. Clothes, at last, were fun for her, it seemed. Her mother’s influence, possibly. Mrs. Lesniak had always thought her daughter dressed “like an English dumpling,” just to prove herself a rebel. This was one rebellion that even Lix — ashamed of all the other compromises they had made — was glad to see the end of. What happened to the plump, quiescent girl, he asked himself, the woman eager to appease and please? He blamed the Lesniaks. He blamed the stultifying culture of Beyond. He blamed Democracy for voting his Alicja away from home. He faulted himself as well — and he was justified — for letting his ambitions on the stage become more vital and consuming than his marriage. His wife could not be blamed for seeking spotlights of her own. He’d mend his ways.

Alicja’s more yielding attitude to clothes, Lix understood, was just a happy product of her age, but he also hoped that she was doing what she could to rescue their relationship as well from its ever present anxiety and its heartless determination to be civilized. She wanted to display a livelier, more seductive version of herself because — the Poles, as ever, had a mordant phrase for it—“a dab of rouge resuscitates the dead.”

Relations between Alicja and Lix— dealings might be a better word, these days — had become, if not quite corpselike, then stiffly formal. Not just in bed, where, truth be told, stiffness was not always guaranteed. No, out of bed as well. They had turned into little more than domestic colleagues, starched and polite but unengaged. A child and sitter in the house did not encourage intimacy. Neither did the late nights they both kept nowadays. Nor the increasing number of occasions when they slept apart, whether divided by an angry hollow in the bed or marooned in separate rooms, in different parts of town, the Anchorage apartment or the family house Beyond. She told her mother that Lix snored. That’s why she ended up so often in a different bed. He never snored. Nor was he a restless night companion. Much worse. Her husband sighed while he was sleeping, as if even his dreams were flat and saddening. To share a bed with Lix was to wrap yourself in sheets of woe. How had the man become so wounded by success? Alicja’s dreams were livelier and full of hope and opportunity. She’d dreamed, just the night before his Obligation Feast, that he was in the flood-tossed houseboat, and lost downstream amongst the missing crocodiles and koi. She understood her dream to mean their marriage was, well, waterlogged, too swept away to save, and that this was an opportunity for her to be an adult finally, liberated from the Lesniaks and Derns.

Lix himself knew no such thing. He thought the new blouse she was putting on for him that day suggested a rapprochement of a sort, a signifier that there could be (before he fled to Hollywood) a renewed alliance between old friends. When she’d returned from the hairdresser looking like a mature bride, Lix had sat in the wicker rocking chair on the bedroom balcony with his coffee and a playscript he had to consider and witnessed her undress, throw her clothes over the back of a chair — so many layers, so many unexpected and alerting loops — and then bedeck herself before the mirror in recent purchases. A woman is renewed by clothes. Perhaps a marriage could be, too.