Jim Crace - Genesis

So in expectation of fifteen thousand out-of-season visitors, all eager to procure a night of pleasure, the bunting and the streamers were prepared. The historic city center closed to traffic. The whole of Company Square was equipped with braziers and licensed for the sale of alcohol. The airport lobby was emblazoned with the banners THE TIME IS RIGHT (at last!) FOR HAVING FUN, and WELCOME TO THE CITY THAT TRULY COUNTS. Prostitutes took rooms downtown and women hoping to be wifed abroad bought new, provoking clothes and carried their final school grades in their evening bags as “proof.” And a midnight fireworks show which would be “visible from the moon” was readied on Navigation Island, in the mud.

The foreign revelers, regrettably, were sick of new millennia by then. The disappointment — and the hangovers — of the first would last them for a thousand years. One anticlimax was enough. Therefore they did not come to us in their expected droves. Instead, our hotels were half filled with math curmudgeons, mostly male, Dutchmen, Scandinavians, and Yanks, academics, intellectuals, and bachelors, who’d refused the year before to recognize the numerically premature end of the millennium but now had got an opportunity to demonstrate their bloody-mindedness and learning. Imagine it, on New Year’s Eve, our city full of nitpickers, hairsplitters, pedants, and rationalists, and local women dressed like queens scaring them to death, with their grade C’s in science, languages, and art. And what did these math curmudgeons want to do to celebrate the passing year? They wanted to avoid the crowds.

In fact, the streets were full enough that night. With citizens. We’ve always liked a fireworks show and alcohol and women in provoking clothes. “There is, indeed, good cause for all of us to celebrate,” Jupiter wrote in his Sunday column on New Year’s Eve. “Contrary to the evidence of our own eyes, we are making measurable progress in this city. Now we are only a year behind the rest of the world. Let’s see if we can close the gap by 3001.”

Lix had been onstage till ten in his revival of The Devotee , not the most testing of romantic comedies but an easy and welcome opportunity for him to sing and act and show his famous face before an uncritical audience that normally would not spend time or money in the theater. No need to exert himself. No need for nuances or subtlety. Just be certain, he reminded himself before each performance, that the laughter clears before the next amusing line, and that the next amusing line is timed to end before the laughter starts. “And don’t forget, of course,” his stage director said, “to beam and bounce.”

The audience did not want art at that time of the year or intellectual theater. They’d only come, that evening anyway, to pass the time before midnight by watching two luminaries make love onstage, and then to boast they’d seen the celebrated Lix in the flesh. They’d seen his birthmark and they’d seen his shaved and naked chest. What’s more, they’d watched their television star, the man who’d made a fortune from his songs about their city, kissing Anita Julius, the actress who was equally famous for her Channel Beta talent show, her range of tempers, and for her fleeting love affairs with older men, younger men, men with chauffeur-driven cars, and then the chauffeurs, too.

So when, finally, and as the curtains closed, An and Lix reached the moment of that much vaunted promised kiss — the one the theater posters reproduced, the one so many times reprinted in the magazines, the one that all the gossip columnists would use when the scandal broke on New Year’s Day — the otherwise inattentive audience grew tense and quiet. Opera glasses were lifted up. People shifted in their seats to gain the clearest view. Men licked their lips and cleared their throats, as if they believed their turn would come, that An would jump down off the stage to plant her lovely lips on theirs. Not one single person looked elsewhere. They watched through narrowed eyes. You’d think that Life magazine had got it wrong in 1979 when it recorded so much affection on the streets and that for us public kissing was still as exotic, rare, and disconcerting as a total eclipse. Miss it and it wouldn’t come again for years; stare too long and openly and you’d go blind.

It wasn’t only the actual kiss that mesmerized and silenced them. It was also the unexpected display of what they took — mistook — as privacy, the unembarrassed breaching of a hidden world which only chambermaids and paparazzi ever stumbled on. Four famous lips engaged in lovemaking while all the world, sunk and squirming in their seats, looked on and felt the pangs of exclusion. Here was a life denied to ticket holders in the audience, a life of cash and fame and sex and unself-consciousness. No wonder no one dared to breathe or be the first to clap.

The audience that night was witnessing something new and dangerous, however. In every performance until this one on New Year’s Eve, the lovers’ kissing had been a cleverly rehearsed sham. They were, to use the actors’ phrase, “kissing like puppets” or “dry-drinking,” their lips stitched shut, their mouths as passionate and hard as stones, their breaths held in until the kissing was completed.

It’s true, all the audiences so far had seen both Lix and An put out their tongues a little as their faces closed in, as their noses touched. A little strip of reflective mouth gel achieves that trick. The stage lights had caught the wet and fleshy tongue tips exactly as the stage director planned. It might have looked as if the actors’ mouths were busy with each other’s tongues; everyone would swear to that. But they’d been fooled. They wanted to believe, they wanted to be duped. What was rolling the actors’ cheeks, convincing the balcony and the orchestra seats that this was more than theater, was only the mockery of tongues. Lix and An were performing in the pockets of their own mouths with their own tongues—“playing solo trumpet” is the term — with no more sexual passion than they’d need to free a wedge of toffee from their teeth. That’s show business. It’s trickery and counterfeit. The actors have to seem to care when they do not.

The fact was this, however it appeared onstage: until the final act on New Year’s Eve, their tongues had never touched. An did not truly fancy Lix, no matter what the gossips and the posters might imply, no matter what they did onstage. He did not truly fancy her. Yet if theater was powerful and could transform an audience, then how could it not affect the principals themselves, eventually? How could their nightly kissing on the stage not spill over into life — particularly on New Year’s Eve when all the cast and all the staff, including Lix and An (especially), had oiled the way by drinking to one another’s health before the show? It isn’t love that’s blind, it’s alcohol.

The twenty minutes he’d spent sharing wine with his costar in the Players’ Lounge that evening had left Lix — who never had a head for drink — a little off balance and even more bewildered than usual by his offstage feelings for his irritating little colleague, so lively and so noisy, so “unstitched.” On the one hand, anyone could see — to use the idiotic jargon of our city’s most expensive psychoanalyst, a man whom An had “couched” herself on more than one occasion—“their compasses were pointing at a different north.” She might be only a couple of years younger than Lix, but she was the product of a different age. You’d think her only gods were clothiers and coiffeurs. She liked a man in uniform, she claimed. She liked him even better out of uniform. She’d never voted, never would. She dined and dieted instead. She held strong views but only about the sounds and fashions of the day, whose singing voice was sexiest, what went with mauve, how best to get away with hats. She’d told a journalist that if the Mother Nature Beauty Clinic had intended her to stay at home with a good book on a Saturday night, it wouldn’t have equipped her with such high heels, such long fingernails, and “plastic breasts that didn’t jiggle when she danced.” Lix had read the press releases before The Devotee had opened, and they had made him blush. Bring back the Street Beat Renegades.