Jim Crace - Genesis

“Now do you remember where you saw him once before?” his mother asked after the final curtain call, when everybody else was hurrying off to start their celebrations for Millennium Eve.

George did not want to say, “The mirror.” He said, “His face rings bells. But no …” His shook his head.

“The Palm and Orchid,” his mother said. “When you were a kid. You saw him there. Do you remember it? I wouldn’t let you finish your cake.”

He shook his head again.

“Well, then, so now you know,” she said. “Your father is revealed. Exposed! You even look like him a bit. I’d never thought of it before. Don’t be like him, that’s all I ask.”

Mouetta raised her eyebrows, shook her head. She seemed, as usual, slightly shocked, and disapproving of Freda’s modern motherhood. Jealousy, Freda always thought. Her cousin hadn’t got a lover or a son. “Well, we have an hour or so before the fireworks,” she continued. “What shall we do? You want to eat? Go to a bar?” More shaking heads. “Or do you want to wait and say hello to the star?” No nods. Not quite. Freda was only teasing, anyway. She knew that meeting his father, offstage, was inescapably what George would want to do.

We must consider Freda’s smile, and judge if it was cruel or only happy for her son. To tell the truth, she didn’t know the answer herself. She only knew that she could not contain the smile. It took possession of her face and would not shift, although she tried to shift it. She was less handsome when she smiled. Partly she was glad to have Lix off her conscience, finally. Partly she was excited by the date and by the promise of a long, amusing night. Also she could not dismiss the compelling prospect of Lix’s face when they ensnared him in the theater lobby and finally he understood that this young man who’d seen his bloodless play was blood itself. She wasn’t truly cruel or vengeful, just certain of herself and unafraid. Whatever her more tender cousin Mouetta may believe, Freda always wanted what was best for George, despite herself. She loved dramatic times. She thought they made the world a grander place. That’s why she smiled and smiled. “I’ve come to introduce you to your son,” she’d say. He’d never dare reply, “The child is yours, not mine. Your pregnancy. Your body. Your responsibility. Your private life. Your kid!”

So this was how Lix met his second wife.

AFTER WARD, Lix did not have the nerve or even the desire to go to Anita Julius’s dressing room, where, surely, she’d be waiting for him, if what she’d done onstage meant anything, if that warm tongue had been an honest messenger. He was shaking badly, for a start, and feeling old. He was the father of a fully grown man. How could he concentrate on casual sex when every chamber of his head was crowded with sons?

Nor had he the heart to go back to the too-neat bachelor apartment on the embankment as he had originally intended. For true Millennium Eve, he’d planned to sit out on the enclosed balcony, with a glass of good red wine and something comforting on the stereo, and watch the fireworks. On his own. For Lix was not a man with many friends. He might not have a glamorous life offstage but at least he had the best view in town that money could rent, directly across the river to Navigation Island and then beyond into the proliferating towers of the campuses. He had to count himself as blessed, that whatever might be wrong with his first years of middle age, his isolation and his longing, he was living exactly where he wanted to, had always wanted to. Not Beyond, where everything was new and compromised, but in the city’s ancient heart of squares and stone, and narrow streets and balconies.

On sunny days, with his binoculars, he could watch the couples walking on the island amongst the tarbonies and candy trees, the tantalizing world of hand-in-hand; the cyclists, the picnickers, the teenagers in noisy groups around the lido. Scenes out of Seurat and Renoir. Even on busy days the only traffic he could see was on the bridges heading to or fleeing from the eastern side. At night, when all the bars were closed and all the lights were off, he could lie in bed and listen to the scheming of the wind and the sleepless shifting of the river, a lonely sound that sometimes made him glad to be alone.

His encounter in the theater lobby had shocked and shaken him. Of course it had. Shame and embarrassment had been delivered publicly and unexpectedly. It didn’t help to tell himself that he had merely been a victim of one of Freda’s vengeful schemes. As he’d expect from her, the whole ambush had been meanly staged, he thought, and damaging for everyone involved, except, of course, for the Lovely Neck herself.

Lix had played this scene one time before, for film, in a policier, The Reckoning . He’d been a politician, newly elected and, of course, corrupt. It’s still available on video. In the final scene, he comes out of his offices, surrounded by a clamor of supporters. He shakes a hundred hands. He issues platitudes and thanks, and smiles his practiced smile toward the ranks of cameramen, so many more than he had ever dreamed of. Out of the corner of his eye, while he is being loud and false with everyone, he spots his peasant father, and the police inspector. Behind them, waiting on the far side of his limousine, is the widow of the brother he has cheated. The cameramen move in. The screen goes white with flash. Then the sound track becomes silent. Regrets are deafening. All you can see, as the credits start to roll, are his admirers, clamoring.

It appeared to him, this night of the millennium, that he had strayed into a mocking version of that bad film — except this time the formula was not the Unmasking of the False Prophet but the cliché of the Lost Child. Once he’d shed his costume and removed his paint, Lix had, as usual and despite the lure of An, come down into the lobby of the theater to meet his more clinging admirers. It’s duty, he always told himself, not vanity.

So it was duty that made him pause on the bottom stair and patronize the gathered crowd of twenty or so with his best beam so that anyone with cameras could get a decent shot and anybody wanting autographs could form a line. Quite soon, out of the corner of his actor’s eye, he would spot the tall young man, blond-haired but unmistakably a Dern, a perfect specimen that any mother, any father, should be proud to have, a young man not quite knowing how to shake his fear off with a smile.

However, it wasn’t George whom Lix noticed first, or even Freda, though heaven knows Freda was immensely noticeable that night. She’d pulled out all the stops for this encounter. She’d piled her hair with careful randomness, as unignorable as a wedding cake. God help the man who’d sat behind her in the theater, though he might be glad to miss the play but have the opportunity, instead, to study Freda’s nape and neck, her swinging silver earrings, the tender intersection of her hair and skin, the golden zipper slide peeking from the collar of her fine black dress.

No, it was Mouetta whom Lix first noticed, an unembarrassed woman, not too young, her raincoat collar up, simply standing by the farthest exit door and staring at him blatantly as one might stare at the photo on a playbill or a film poster. She was clearly not the usual shy but awestruck fan. He’d always say he fell in love with her at once. But he felt next to nothing at the time, except uneasiness. He took the woman’s stare as evidence of something that he’d learned to run away from: the colonizing attentions of a stranger who — wrongly — thought that actors were as interesting in themselves as they seemed onstage, the sort who would never settle for a signature and a handshake or a photograph but wanted to be taken home and wanted to be listened to and loved, the sort who never joined the noisy line but waited at the exit door to join him as he fled the theater. He’d steer well clear of her, he thought, until she smiled at him, returned his stagy beam with something much more genuine. And he was lost. And so were any plans he might have had for meeting up with An.