Jim Crace - Genesis

There was the little dancer from Don Juan, intense and talkative in a way that Alicja could not admire, despite the woman’s obvious desire to draw attention to herself and despite the dancer’s admiration, many times repeated, for people such as “District Senator Lesniak-Dern” who’d invested so much of their energy in civic life.

“Dance never, never does a bit of good,” she insisted, and Alicja had felt obliged to disagree, saying — lying — that politics was not as good at bettering the world as politicians wanted everyone to believe, and that dance, at least, provided uncomplicated joy.

“Perhaps you’re right,” the dancer said, “in both respects.”

To Alicja’s left — ignoring her — there was the fussy trumpeter from Lix’s recording group whose flattened mouth and hamster cheeks, especially when flushed with drink and two desserts, made him look like a cheery doll. A cheery doll that liked an argument.

Farther up the table, engaged by a cigar that would not draw, there was an actress who had once been as celebrated as Lix but had lost her passion for theater and had turned instead to poetry, which she had published at her own expense while neglecting to renew her wardrobe or her anecdotes. To Alicja’s right, beyond the dancer, there was the undernourished couple who owned the studio where Lix had recorded his LP/cassette; the disheveled husband scarcely able to survive three minutes without tobacco or a cough; the wife scarcely twenty-two years old and drunk and bored and sitting next to Lix with her hand on his shoulder and her chair turned sideways to the table so that she need only talk to him and no one else could talk to her.

On Lix’s other side was “Joop the Scoop,” Jupiter the columnist, a man who would never give his proper name but whom everybody knew to be the embarrassed but untouchable younger brother of the garrison commander who more than any dancer or district senator at that time, the spring of 1992, controlled the city’s destiny, controlled the bettering, controlled the joy. Alicja would have much preferred Joop as a neighbor at the table, of course. Any woman would. He had the chiseled Roman face to match his name, though on the evidence of his own newspaper column he was hardly the celestial Guardian of Honor or the God of Oaths, Treaties, and Marriages. His pen was cruel and snobbish, perhaps, his politics unworthy of a citizen his age, but in person he had shown himself to be attentive and a little shy, a man who was not disposed to flirting openly, who hardly raised his voice, who rationed and so enhanced the value of his studiedly melancholy smile. He seemed exactly the opposite of Lix and not a bit like Mr. Lesniak.

Alicja had wondered when she first encountered Joop while waiting for Lix in the lobby of the theater some months before if he was a homosexual, besotted with her husband. She’d asked. She had to know at once. No, not homosexual, he’d said. He was simply so self-conscious about his early baldness that he thought it best not to bother bright and pretty women such as her. He had no reason to be self-conscious, actually, she’d told him, touching him for the first time on his forearm. The baldness made a handsome, intellectual monk of him.

“Your skull is sculptural,” she said, longing not so much to touch it as to smell it.

“I’ll have it cast in bronze, Senator, and give it to the city. I’m sure that you can find a plinth for it. The empty plinth in Company Square, perhaps.”

“Amongst the cobblestones, yes.”

They had embarked on an affair. Alicja and Jupiter.

So now she listened to the dancer’s anecdote about Swan Lake , Nureyev, and the bearded French ambassador and watched her lover paying polite attention to his host. Any moment he would catch her eye, and she would smile for him, the risky smile that says, I’m Yours, the risky smile that can’t suppress the showing of the tongue.

What if Lix looked up and caught her eye? Well, let it be. That evening, when they were home, or preferably as they were driving home protected by the darkness in the car, while he was trapped behind the wheel, she’d find the courage to talk to him. She owed it to the man who’d been her husband for more than three years, the father of her child, the first who’d ever earned her love, to be direct with him, to send him off to Hollywood understanding that everything would be rearranged while he was gone. More than that, she owed it to herself. She’d got a career. She’d got constituents. She’d got the promise, if she watched her step for a year or two, of joining the Executive and making history. No other woman in the city had ever gone so far. She’d got a well-connected lover, too, whose appeal included a vasectomy. What she didn’t want was a husband or another child to hold her back. The time had come, the time was good, for the city senator and the celebrated Lix to separate.

So Alicja can surely be forgiven for her nervousness at lunch, the shrill and wine-fueled conversations that she held, her unexpected gaiety, her robust appetite, her pleasure in the word games that were passing around the table, and then the risque games of Truth or Dare and Ultimatum.

Perhaps it was because playing Never was her lover’s suggestion, his way of flirting with her across the table, she imagined, that Alicja joined in too readily and so incautiously. The game was this: each diner at the table had to admit to something they’d never done that everybody else there most certainly would have done. If it proved that you were not alone in your humiliation, then you were out of the game and could not join the second round, when further admissions of inexperience were required. “You have to use the word never in your confession. And lying’s absolutely not allowed,” said Joop. “This isn’t journalism.” It was an invitation to disclose failings, cowardice, defeat, and limited horizons. The prize? “The mocking disrespect of all your friends.”

“It’s your idea. You first,” Alicja said to Joop. Already she had persuaded herself — or else his roguish grin persuaded her — that his own contribution would convey a private message. Almost everything he said turned out to be a tease. He kept her on her toes. “I’ve only ever loved one person in my life,” he’d say. “I’ve never loved another.” Or (a confirmation of a trip they’d planned), “I’ve never shared a hotel room. Not yet.” Instead he disappointed her. He said, “I’ve never been on a motorcycle or scooter. The very idea terrifies me.” But he was out of the game at once, because it seemed that the dancer had never risked a motorcycle either.

So now the dancer’s go. She claimed for herself that she had never seen the sea. No one could rival that. How was it possible to reach your thirties and not have seen the sea, especially when travel was so easy during the Big Melt?

“Not even from an airplane?” Lix asked.

“I’ve never been on an airplane,” she replied. Three goes in one. No motorcycles, no airplanes, no sea.

The trumpeter went through to the second round with his “mortified” claim never to have swallowed an oyster, an embarrassing and squeamish admission, he said, because he’d spat one out one evening in New York when his bass player had drawn attention to an oyster’s semen smell.

“Tasted, yes, but never stomached one, never passed one through.”

The twenty-two-year-old had never had sex with a person younger than herself, she claimed. “And never will.”

“So I’m in with a chance,” the trumpeter said, parping out his cheeks.

“Hardly. I’ve never had sex with a hamster either. And absolutely never will.”

The actress-poet’s contribution was “I’ve never smoked a cigarette, not one. Only my cigars.”