Jim Crace - Genesis

The man was by now almost in tears again.

“What should we do?” She had to put her arm around his waist. Today was not the day, she realized, for admitting her affair. It would have to wait until he got back from America.

“What can we do? They’ve taken everything and gone.”

“We ought to call the police. We’d better not touch anything. I’ll telephone my father …”

“Call the police? Call the police on what? They didn’t leave a telephone,” he said. “Let’s leave your father out of it.”

“Go to the neighbor’s house and call from there.”

Lix did not want more invaders yet, tramping through the house, unnerving him with questions. And Alicja preferred to deal with problems in the order in which they arose. So they did not tell the police or call for help for twenty minutes more. Instead, she suffered him. She had first to restore at least one of the orgasms she had denied in front of all his friends downstairs below the Debit Bar. She had to make amends and reassure her failing husband. That was only fair. A marriage should be straightened out before it’s pulled apart.

HE MADE HER pregnant again, of course. The contraceptives, not much used in recent months, were kept in Lix’s missing wallet. Thanks to burglars perhaps, their second son was taking shape. Thanks to the purchase of a blouse. Thanks to the risky game of Never. Thanks to the guilty fondness that endures, survives the breakup of a marriage, she would have a second son.

By ill fortune and good luck, Lix had done as much as any man could do in natural history to see his scoundrel rival slink away, his tail and nothing else between his legs. Vasectomized Jupiter, the columnist, would speedily lose interest in the senator when he discovered she was pregnant. So Lix would never have to hear the truth about his lunch pal Joop — because by the time he got back from Nevada, his wife’s new relationship would be over and she’d be two months pregnant.

We should not, though, expect a reconciliation, for this would be the last occasion Lix and his Alicja, his plump and much improving wife, would ever kiss, embrace, make love. For it was love, this final time. Not perfect sex. Not orgasms and passion such as she would have with Joop and with the fellow after Joop or with the man who’d be her second husband and the father of her only daughter, but tender love nevertheless, two bodies being thoughtful, being kind and fond, and being slightly desperate, because at moments such as these the truth is always on display.

Alicja had not admitted anything just yet, and Lix had not dared to ask. His cowardice was without boundaries. Besides, her beryl blouse was lying on the bed, and her indented body was so engaged with his that he could hardly think or grieve. Perhaps it was just as well that when the sex was over and before they called the police they could lie in bed and not feel obliged to talk. Talk at that time was dangerous.

Then Lix was in the car again, the smell of her not quite removed by showering, not quite hidden by his spray cologne. He’d have to be Don Juan Amongst the Feminists at eight o’clock that night, and if he didn’t hurry he’d arrive too late for staging notes and makeup calls. It was as dark by now as it had seemed when they were dining in the Hesitation Room. He was heading into town while traffic from the offices and shops was heading out. The actor’s face was flecked and flashed by lights and indicators, profile, profile, then full on.

He parked his car behind the theater, depressed, elated, but relieved to have the pressure of the sex removed. The anger was reduced as well. He’d been a fool. He was resigned to what the future held if it held anything. He was content to be back in the ancient town, amongst the places that he loved. The buildings seemed to shimmer in the shifting lights, as offices winked off their lamps and bars and restaurants and clubs sprang to life.

Lix waited for a bus to pass, its windows full of backs and coats, before he crossed to the theater and made it to his dressing room without needing to exchange a word with anyone. He closed the door and he was Don Juan.

An hour later, costumed and made up, he stood at the window with his playscript looking out on the heads of the first arrivals at the theater, his captive audience. The building shook a little to the digestive rumbling once again of the nightmare streetcars that didn’t suspend their timetables for mere theater. Instead they did their best to remind his audience every night that they were watching an artifice and that only one street away the city’s aged transit system labored on, taking uninvented people to their uninvented homes.

There was a point in Don Juan’s last speech each night when Lix could almost guarantee a streetcar. Some of the audience would laugh. Such incongruity, a streetcar. Others, though, would look alarmed as the auditorium amplified the rattle of the carriages into something that might be the distant and approaching earthquake the city had been promised by geophysicists “within a hundred years.” Then the theater would shake with nervousness and they would ask themselves, Will we survive? What will survive? Uncannily, the answer came from the stage. “Of all the edifices in our town,” Don Juan explained as streetcars passed by, “no one can doubt, not anyone who’s lived at least, that love’s the frailest tower of them all, meant to tumble, built to fall.”

THEY’D NEVER TRULY KISSED before, Lix and An. It was undeniable, though — there were nine thousand witnesses so far — that their lips had touched, and had done so every night for fourteen weeks — in character, in costume, and onstage, abetted by their scripts. They were obedient professionals. The play demanded that they fall in love, so they obliged convincingly. They were old hands at that.

They’d been respectful colleagues, yes, cheerful and supportive. Yet nobody could claim that they were even friends offstage. If they ever coincided in the Players’ Lounge or in the bar behind the theater, they were polite with each other but uninvolved, the lively little actress, not so young and not so pretty anymore, and Mr. Taciturn, who’d led God knows what kind of life since his divorce and his success. The gossip columns couldn’t even guess, beyond the rumors circulating still that he was either egotistical in bed or impotent. The evidence was thin either way. Lix had no public life, no politics. Reclusive was the word the papers used these days to describe the actor. Or, better, secretive , because that suggested he was concealing something. You’d not expect a man like that to couple up with An, for whom concealment and reclusion were anathema. But this was the break of New Year’s Day, New Century’s Day, and both of them were lonely, and exhilarated by the date, 1/1/01. Conception Day for Rosa Dern.

THE THIRD MILLENNIUM for us started one year after everybody else’s, because some bored and playful speculators from the Tourist Bureau had decided and decreed that the City of Balconies and the City of Kisses could now be marketed for a lucrative month or so as the City of Mathematical Truth, the Capital of Calendar Authenticity, and would thereby reap and thresh the ripest crop of revelers from abroad who’d want a replay of the false new millennium they’d already celebrated so memorably, so profitably, one year before. We’d be the only place where you could observe the accurate millennium, they said. We’d be the only town where you could mark the Advent of the Future twice. Sudden fortunes would be made by hotels, restaurants, and breweries, normally closed down for the winter, and by the opportunists from the Tourist Bureau who’d put in place some subtle private deals.