Jim Crace - Genesis

The blouse was beryl green, short-sleeved and halter-cut. It seemed to make her nakeder. Alicja’s spine, so girlish and inexpressive when innocently unclothed, was not removed from sight when thinly covered by the blouse and underclothes, but, rather, emphasized and sexualized by new and displaced vertebrae, where the clasps and buckles of her brassiere showed up as petite bony studs against the cloth. Her back became a pattern of raised signs.

Lix considered getting up at once to read the message of her braille. Yet again — the story of his life — he lacked the courage and he lacked the confidence. He knew that if he stood and moved toward his wife, then she would close herself to him. A woman dressing does not welcome damp fingers or damp lips. Lix would be left — as ever when he took chances, in love, in business, on the stage — standing, swaying in a fug of vertigo, that familiar nausea and loss of balance that had always made him take descending steps away from risk.

So he stayed where he was, behind his playscript, making marks on the page and imprinting marks into his own back, from the pressure of the wicker chair. He’d wait for a better opportunity. Patience is a dignified form of cowardice, that’s all.

If he waited till the evening, Lix thought, there would be other marks for him to ponder and enjoy. Throughout the day, her underclothes, mediating between the naked and the dressed, the hidden and the visible, would press their tender traceries not only on her outer garments but on her naked body too. When she undressed again, then he would find — if she allowed it, if she came home with him and did not spend the night on Anchorage Street — indentations and elastic imprints across her back and shoulders, around her waist, around her upper thighs.

The very thought of these brief nevuses which could not last beyond the hour, which were so innocent and yet so rousing, made his throat go dry. A hint of vertigo. It was not only fear of contact with Alicja but also the opposite, the shocking prospect of his fingers never touching her again. For a man who no longer had the habit or the self-belief to cross the room and hold his wife, there was something heart-wrenchingly tender, too, about the vestigial rectangles of ridge and furrow from her pressing and her folding of the blouse. Those creases and impressions were eloquent and sad, and so domestically nostalgic. They were the marks of married life — a shelf of clothes, a cupboard and a room, an ironing board, the smell of bodies and cologne and steam.

Alicja, unexpectedly, was not in the least discomforted that her husband was watching her and that — she knew the man of old; men were so visual —he was sexually aroused. She was aroused herself, but not aroused by him. Not making love to him empowered her. It was satisfying. She watched herself pull on her tights. She did not think that she was showing off, although she knew she would have dressed herself more hurriedly if Lix had not been watching from the balcony, behind his cursed script. The man was always buried in a script. It seemed that everything she’d ever said to him had been filtered through a script or blocked by one. The pages of dialogue were the shield with which her husband rebuffed conversation, consigned her to the wings. He’d lost the knack of being normal and offstage. Alicja was coming around to her father’s view of theater.

Once she was fully clad in shoes and skirt, her suit jacket folded across her arm, she pirouetted for the mirror’s sake, but also for the audience of one. Now that she was dressed and safe, she didn’t mind that Lix had got up from his chair and was standing at the balcony door, openly admiring her, with that weasel expression on his face.

“Smart,” he said. A safe remark.

Her shorter, razored hair was indeed smart and flattering, Lix thought, flattering to him as well because there is nothing more supportive of a vain and famous man than to have a wife who merits the admiration and desire of friends, a head turner. The new cut made the most of Alicja’s Polish cheeks. Her hair seemed mischievously springy and boyish once the gel had been applied. Surely Lix could reach out and feel. Surely he could touch his wife.

Sadness made Lix almost brave. He had the pretext of his empty coffee cup, which needed putting on the breakfast tray by the bedroom door. He squeezed between his wife, the mirror, and the bed and, as lightheartedly and as drained of meaning as possible, ruffled her hair as he might ruffle little Lech’s head except that he was careful not to dishevel hers. That’s all it was, a manly reassuring touch, no threat to her. Her responding smile emboldened him. What other manly, reassuring contact could he make, drained of meaning, now that he was standing by her back?

He spotted his pretext almost at once, the blouse’s white label showing at her razored neck, both a spillage and an encroachment, something public, manufactured, but meant to be concealed. He’d not resist just dipping a finger below her collar to push the label back in place and steal his second touch that day. It should have taken just a moment, but he left his finger tucked inside her collar, freeze-frame, enjoying both the fabric and the skin. He was too bold, perhaps, and certainly too obvious, but he leaned forward over his much shorter wife to kiss the nape of her neck, his lips brushing both her newly shortened hair and his own fingertips. Her perfume almost made him weep.

It didn’t matter that she pushed his hand away and said, “Not now.” Not now , indeed. Later, later was implied. He could proceed with his used cup and take the loaded tray downstairs. She had invited him to live in hope.

When Lix returned five minutes later, already anxious that they would be late for his Obligation Feast, Alicja was sitting at their dressing table. “Just touching up,” she said. She leaned toward the mirror, pouted her mouth, and coated the pink-blue of her naked lips with fashionable and less alarming plum red lipstick. She cleaned away the residue with the edge of a tissue. Sprayed a little extra perfume on her throat and wrists. Then, despite herself, or else because at last she approved this risky, finished version of herself, she air-smacked a kiss toward the mirror and her husband’s reflection. He smacked one back, with sound effects, an actor’s mwa. They routed smiles into the glass.

Did Lix have reason for some optimism, then? Certainly their drive to town was comfortable, their conversation affectionate. She wanted him to have a successful lunch. Their sexual drought was coming to an end, perhaps, Lix thought, although he was not mad enough to stretch his hand and grasp her leg. The drought might end that day, if they survived the company of friends. Fortified by alcohol and panicked by the prospect of two months apart, on different continents, once they got home and in the hour or so before Lix had to leave again for that evening’s performance, they could perhaps begin to mend some fallen bridges.

“We’re running short of time,” Lix commented out loud, not wanting to explain, or needing to.

Alicja just raised a brow.

AT FIRST THERE HAD BEEN too many of her husband’s crew crowded around the bank of tables in the rented cellar, too many for concentrated conversation, too many for any indiscretions or any intimacy. The ordering, the serving, and the eating had been intrusive and disruptive. But by three o’clock only the dregs were left, the dregs of wines and spirits, that is to say, and the dregs of Lix’s new acquaintances, those who had no desks or families to return to, no stories to file, and no higher priorities than to keep the party going till the waiters chucked them out. The Debit waiters never chucked you out. The only time the Debit Bar was closed to customers was when the police or the river took charge.