Jim Crace - Genesis

On the other hand, it had to be admitted that the little featherhead could act. It had to be admitted, too, that as each day and each performance had passed, his dismissal of and disdain for An had ebbed. Now when he was reminded what she’d said about her bulky plastic chest, he was more curious and amused than irritated. She certainly had pluck. She certainly was fun. She certainly was beddable. Whereas during rehearsals and the first few days of performance their stage kissing, dry though it was, had been an embarrassment and an ordeal for him — fencing and wearing weight bags were the only things he hated more — he had since become resigned to it, and then addicted. Some things are inevitable. Once again, the old refrain, “Such is the nature of the beast.”

Lix had discovered as each night passed in this long season of The Devotee that truly not wanting a woman, not in his head, not in his heart of hearts, not in his Perfect Future, was not a logic that the lower body valued much. Anita Julius might not be the kind of partner he dreamed of waking up with in his own bed or — horror at the thought of it — engaging in a conversation over breakfast cups on his expensive balcony, but lately, as the final curtain cut the audience away on their supposedly unfeeling kiss, he had felt increasingly perturbed. His face was numb, perhaps. His lips were little more than bruised by her hard mouth. The insides of his cheeks were tender from too much “trumpeting.” But elsewhere Lix was suffering what actors call “an impromptu,” that is to say an unexpected intervention by an unpredictable performer. His cock was enlarged. His “rubbery zucchini” was ripe.

It stirred a little more each evening, a little earlier in the plot, a little more insistently. It could not help itself (the truest and the weakest excuse you’ll ever hear in life). It responded to his costar as unjudgmentally, it seemed, as mushrooms react to light.

By late December, Lix had become wearied by his performance, its drudgery and duplication, and only became truly involved in the closing moments of the play, when finally An’s body crossed the boards to hold her Devotee. He was not nervous around his costar anymore. He trusted her. Her skin and hair now smelled familiar, like family. They were becoming intimates. He enjoyed the laundered and rustling contact of their costumes, the comic stiffness of her breasts, the gelid perspiration on his fingertips from her back and neck, like offstage lovers do. He prized and cursed the audience. Without the audience, he thought, his cock would not stir for her. They were a love triangle, the star, the costar, and the crowd.

It would be ingenuously optimistic — the stuff of theater — to hope that An herself had not become aware of Lix’s extra contribution to the play. There could be no disguising what was going on from her. Their costumes were too thin and flexible. The stage directions said, “They hold each other tightly and they kiss. The curtain slowly falls.” She would have felt the difference up against her abdomen. That’s not to say that his erection was abnormally large and resolute. It was a meekly modest one, like most men’s are, most of the time.

Nevertheless, An would have known exactly what it was and who was causing it. After all, it couldn’t be edema or a hernia. It came and went too readily. For her, a woman used to provoking men, the explanation would have been a simple one. Her charms were irresistible. After all, she could deliver erections to half a theater. She’d made a living out of it. Usherettes at other shows had told her several times about the witless stiffening of men standing at the back of the gallery, thirty meters from the stage — and out of range, you would have thought. And during her brief appearance in Regina Vagina before it was raided and banned, she had heard reports of husbands who had to squirm and rearrange their trousers while their wives preferred to concentrate elsewhere. The “members of the audience,” some wit had said at the time, “stood up for Anita Julius.”

It would be unusual, then, and perhaps a little disappointing, if Lix, a youngish, active, divorced man and not a homosexual, so far as anybody knew, did not respond to her, especially when her body was so close, especially when her long nails were digging through his shirt.

Lix, really, was not as active as An imagined, not as busy with the women as anyone with his celebrity and power ought to be. Perhaps that’s why he’d lost control with her so easily and why his penis had informed on him as incautiously as an untrained boy’s. He was the celibate celebrity, unused to having women in his arms.

Lix had been divorced now since 1993. He’d been physically apart from Alicja since he’d taken flight to Hollywood and Nevada. His wife had gone. His anchor was pulled up. He was entirely— free is not the word — at liberty. Yet here’s a truth that’s hard to credit, given what we hear about the opportunities of fame, but more common than you’d think in men who are divorced and past their prime: he’d not had any full sex or any romance since then, not since that afternoon of burglary in fact when Karol was conceived. That’s more than seven years on his own. That’s more than seven years’ losing confidence. You’d never guess it from the way he spoke and walked, the city’s movie star, the celebrated Lix. You’d think a man like him, with distinguished looks, a mighty income, and acclaim, could have as many women in his bed as he wanted, and any way he wanted. You’d think, you’d hope, he had so much passion that he wearied of it.

Well, that’s the daydream. But even if the opportunities were manifold, Lix like many actors did not trust strangers even in the dressing room. He’d not invite the audience to watch the shedding of his costume and his makeup, the stowing of his wig and sword. He’d not disarm himself in public. That’s the point. That’s what he studied for, pretense and privacy. So certainly he could not have much appetite for being the naked animal in bed with someone he hardly knew, that chance encounter in a bar who recognized his face and didn’t want to waste the opportunity, that theater student intent on ways of furthering her own career, or that waitress who’s only there, in bed with him — oh, there’d been offers many times for Lix from waitresses — because she’d like, just once, to squeeze up close to fame’s gold ribs.

Lix had been tempted, naturally. The magnetic force of casual sex is almost irresistible, like gravity. In those seven years, he had almost succumbed half a dozen times at most, but he always managed to avoid true intimacy. He did it Freda’s way. No penetration, that is to say, and therefore hardly any chance of pregnancy. Heavy petting was the best he could offer. Initially his sexual reticence baffled his admirers. Then — once they had realized that here was a man unable to yield himself — it angered them. They did not persevere with him.

But mostly Lix did not engage at all. He was fearful — and, as ever, timid. Fearful of the body in the mirror. What would these conquests think when he took off his clothes to show the gray hairs on his arms, the raised veins on his legs, his paunch, his meagerness, his tremor, the telltale addition of purple tints to his skin’s pale palette? Fearful also of the future and the past. He dared not expose himself again to that cruel battleground. He was ashamed of his near celibacy as well, as if it were a character flaw and proof that he was insufficiently advanced for love. He’d never been — not even once, he judged — much good with love or sex, except onstage. (And in photographs, of course. Freda and Alicja were always smiling for him in the photos that he kept.) Certainly he’d not impressed the three women he’d slept with so far: one had only stayed the night, one had only stayed a month, and one had told the world she’d never had an orgasm, so packed her bags and left. His was a history of love rebutted and love devalued. Besides, the poor man felt the force of his unfortunate fertility. Three children was enough, he judged: two children whom he rarely saw, a son he’d never loved or met, and more calamities attending in the wings, no doubt. He was, he understood too well, best left alone: the unshared frying pan, the undivided loaf. He’d turned into a reluctant kind of man, disconcerted, hesitant, persuaded that he had little future as a lover, except the futures he dreamed up alone, and hardly any past.