Jim Crace - Genesis

Yet Lix had gained contentment of a sort. Desire was like a plant, he’d found. The more you watered it, the bigger and the thirstier it became, the more demanding and dissatisfied. When he’d had a woman in his life, then Lix’s sexual frustration had not diminished. Rather it had escalated. To have removed himself from the cycle of demand was for Lix a release into a long, flat period of calm.

Yet an understanding of oneself, a well-earned dread of strangers, children, love, is no defense against the concentrated moment in the arms of someone of the other sex; her textures and her odors and her voice are old and powerful. There comes a point where everything is lost, where self-control becomes abandonment, and man becomes — it’s glib to say but nothing else is true — as mindlessly and helplessly fixated as a beast.

Lix, then, can be excused by his biology? Well, yes. So can An. Biology’s the victor every time. It’s only natural that she would want to fool around with Lix, provoke him more and more. She could not help devising ways to fit her body just a shade more snugly into his when they embraced before the spellbound ticket holders any more than a bee could fly away from honey. My God, the play was tedious, she thought, but new distractions such as this at least added spice to their performances.

As the days passed and their stage kisses multiplied, she began to choose her underclothes and body scent more carefully, and even to make her bed before she left her studio for the theater each evening and to spray her mouth with TobaGo if she’d smoked in the interval before the final act. She understood ahead of Lix that it would only be a matter of time before the two of them were having sex, and so she might as well prepare for it — and so they might as well get on with it. Let’s eat the porridge while it’s hot.

On New Year’s Eve, the last performance of the year and stoked up by the wine she’d drunk a little earlier and by a lack of partners for the Night of the Mathematical Millennium and by the evidence that pressed against her abdomen, An ditched the usual protocol and when they kissed, the scripted Widow and her Devotee, she popped her tongue into his mouth, just for a second, a warm and playful sortie into perilous domains. She dipped it in and out so swiftly that his own tongue did not have the chance to mate with it, although it tried, instinctively. Both tongues briefly caught the lights and for half a second a string of glistening saliva unified their lips.

Now everybody in the theater could swear that absolutely they were making love. The only one in any doubt was Lix himself. All An had to do, she knew, was wait. Do nothing more , she told herself. Act normal during the curtain calls. Be cool. Enjoy the moment while it lasts. If he was as weak and predictable as all the other men she’d poked her tongue into, then he’d come running to her dressing room with some excuse or else he’d hang around outside the theater for her, and she could celebrate her New Year’s Eve in company.

NOT-SO-LITTLE GEORGE had witnessed all of this. He was sitting in an aisle seat on row H on New Year’s Eve, next to his mother, Freda, and her cousin Mouetta, when he encountered Lix for the second time. Was this the weirdest evening of his life? His mother had promised him four months before, on his eighteenth birthday — but only after years of secrecy and cussedness and argument — that she would “set up” a meeting with his father, “if you really have to persevere with this.” He was prepared. He’d always thought and hoped his father was the bare-chested man whose picture his mother kept in her wallet. The Czech. They would go to Prague and meet the hero in a gaslit restaurant. Freda had only laughed at the idea. “Your father’s not a hero, that’s for sure.”

“Just give me his name and his address and leave it to me,” George had said. “It’s time! You don’t even have to be involved.”

But she had always insisted, “If we have to do it at all, we’ll do it my way. You owe me that. He hasn’t shown a hint of interest in you, by the way, in eighteen years. He hasn’t contributed one single bean. So don’t expect some paragon. But still I want to make it memorable.”

“Memorable for whom?”

“For him and for you.”

She’d kept her word.

George had waited for the “setup” that she planned with (his genetic inheritance from Lix) timidity and fear. His mother’s setups always took an age to organize and, usually, another age to disentangle. Perhaps his father would prove to be less militant and complicating, and there’d be explanations, too, for why he’d never tried to get in touch himself.

Then, finally, a week before the end of the millennium, she’d said, “We’ll take a look at him on New Year’s Eve,” and handed over tickets to The Devotee , a play that normally she’d mock as bourgeois and offensive.

George knew better than to spoil her plans by asking for some details in advance. Had she arranged for him to sit next to the man, perhaps? That seemed like the likeliest. Was there some lobby rendezvous designed? Was he an actor, maybe, or one of the musicians? The possibilities at least had narrowed from the thousands he’d considered all his life: his missing father was a foreigner, a gigolo, a member of the government, an anarchist, a colleague at the university, a criminal, a beggar on the streets, a lunatic, a priest, a man too dull to care about, a man she’d hired to fill a tube with sperm. There’d always been a silence and a mystery. The only clue was that once or twice she’d described the man, dismissively, as Smudge. Then, on New Year’s Eve itself, when George, Freda, and Mouetta had been sitting in their seats, before the curtain rose, his mother had taken out a marker and ringed a name on the cast list. A famous name he recognized but could not yet quite put a face to. “That’s him,” she said. “Starring Felix Dern.”

The play itself, he thought, was a bag of feathers. What interest could it hold for anybody there who’d not come to be united with a parent? The music was ill balanced and predictable. The script was far too nudging. The female lead, an actress almost as old as his own mother, appeared a little drunk. But everybody in the audience, including Freda — and especially Freda — seemed amused, vindicated even. His mother’s was the loudest laugh, and not a mocking one.

When, halfway through the opening act, his father first appeared onstage and the spontaneous applause of recognition had abated, George himself burst into tears, which, luckily, he could disguise as laughter. That face was so familiar, of course. The celebrated Felix Dern. The photo in the magazines. The birthmark on the cheek. Now that he saw the actor in the flesh, animated, George was not only sure he’d already met the man some years before — he racked his brains but couldn’t say exactly when — but also he was certain that he’d seen him, a younger version, a thousand times, in mirrors every day. George had his hair. George had his walk. George had his father’s mouth.

If George had hoped The Devotee would offer hidden messages to Lost Boys in the audience, then he was disappointed. The drama was not relevant. Or only relevant to simple and romantic souls. George was mesmerized nevertheless, but as the evening progressed and as he weathered the two intermissions, preferring not to join his mother and her cousin in the bar, but rather to remain exactly where he was, in row H, studying that one name on the cast list, his exhilaration at being George Dern turned into embarrassment. Watching a father you have never known playing the part of someone who’s never existed, and speaking his invented lines, was bound to be a disconcerting experience for an awkward eighteen-year-old. In the last few moments of the final act, the boy’s embarrassment was total. Even Freda had been silenced by the kiss.