Jim Crace - Genesis

He’d understand later that the smile was only meant to offer a little sympathy. Mouetta knew her lovely cousin’s ways. She knew that Freda had been selfish with the boy, and secretive. She knew that Lix would be appalled, discomfited, by what was planned for him. Most of all she smiled because she loved her second cousin George as if he were a younger brother and she wanted this first encounter with his father to be memorable. A pleasant memory. Her smile for Lix could only help to pave the way.

Lix stayed on the bottom step and stopped to do his duty. He thanked his fans, signed the last few programs and a couple of CDs, made his final practiced quips, turned up his collar too, like her, the woman at the door, and glanced again across the room to take a second look at that nice smile. He wouldn’t mind it, actually, if the woman fell in beside him in the street, if she came back to share his good red wine, his balcony, his fireworks view, his life. He’d be better off with her, surely, than with the waiting tongue upstairs. So many opportunities.

Finally he spotted Freda standing at the woman’s side, clearly not a fan of his, not wanting autographs or photographs, but smiling too in his direction and nodding her hellos. And then the young man he knew at once to be his son. Real life, at last: the curtain down; the clamor and the silence and the flash. “You’ve dined, old man — and now it’s time to face the waiter and the bill.”

THAT FRIENDLESS DRINK he’d planned on his veranda, with his privileged outlook over the island and his prime view of the fireworks, was not now, Lix realized at once, the wisest way to pass the first few moments of the new, true, mathematical millennium. He was too excited, overwhelmed, and horrified to be alone. He had intended to be calm and almost sober, and waiting by the phone at midnight, ready for the dutiful calls from Alicja and the boys.

There was no afternoon performance of The Devotee on New Year’s Day and he’d arranged for the children to make their weekly visit. He had the perfect set of treats for them. At ten and eight, Lech and Karol were the age when days out with their father at the zoo with its newly opened river aquarium and its camel rides were still appealing, despite the cold, especially if they were accompanied, as he had promised on this occasion, by a vedette ride upstream to the Mechanical Fair and permission, if they passed the height test, to ride the watercoaster, the Yankee Tidal Wave.

He wondered now if it had been a rash mistake to ask this stranger, George, to join them on the trip. “Meet your brothers,” he had said, a foolish suggestion, and many years too late. By now he should be taking George to brothels, not to zoos and amusement parks. The moment had been panicky. Freda could not have staged the meeting to be more disconcerting: the fans, the lobby, the postperformance frenzy, the bustle of the exit doors, the terror that she knew the very sight of her would visit on her ancient lover.

Why had she not just brought the boy up to his dressing room? Why hadn’t she just phoned to say that George, to her dismay, had reached the age when identifying his father was essential? Why, indeed, had she brought the boy to see him act in this dimwitted and untesting comedy, out of all the plays he’d been in? Revenge was not her only motivation, surely. She wanted rather to embarrass him as much as possible, to make him seem at once as weak and feeble as she would already have described him. “He’ll try to bluff it out,” she would have said. “He’ll do some actor stuff. He’ll carry on as if meeting a magnificent son like you was something that he’d performed a hundred times. To mad applause, of course. Your blood father only does it for applause.”

So Lix’s “Come to the zoo!” had been a comically ill-judged suggestion. Lix had seen the smirking triumph on Freda’s face. He’d also seen the look of hope and panic in the young man’s eyes, and had tried to claw the offer back.

“Perhaps. We’ll let you know. We’ll phone,” Freda had said, evidently unable to control her smile. We’ll let you know. We’ll phone. The we was wounding, as she must have known, as she must have intended.

Lix should, of course, have been more spontaneous. A hug, perhaps. A firm handshake. Some tears. Or an apology. But there was still audience about. A couple of persistent girls with unsigned programs were waiting in the theater lobby, within hearing distance of anything their hero said. He had to be controlled, he had to be wary, at least until he could escape into the street, his collar up against the weather and the fans, when there would be an opportunity to try again, to ask this George to join him in a bar, perhaps, to be more passionate and brave, to sob and kiss and laugh with fearful joy. At once.

By the time he’d reached the street and had dispatched the two impatient girls with his worst of signatures and shaken one or two more hands, George and his mother and his mother’s cousin whose name he did not catch, their duty done, were already walking off, down one of the crowded Hives toward the riverfront. Were almost out of sight, in fact. Were almost lost to him.

Lix followed them, of course. He needed time to think, and time to study this new son. If he hung on to them but kept his distance, then he could decide a further strategy, and one that left him looking wise and fine instead of stumbling and foolish. He could go up at any time while they were in the street and say … well, say whatever he’d rehearsed while he was dogging them, say something that would wipe away the wasted eighteen years, quickly find that fine line that scriptwriters might take a week to perfect. Oh, yes, he was ashamed. How had he let the moment pass those many years ago? He should have said, “Your pregnancy. Your body, yes. Your private life. But this is not your private kid! I have responsibilities, and needs.”

How had he also let that second moment pass, when he had first encountered George, his mouth made clownlike by the castor sugar of his unfinished cake, as Freda fled the Palm & Orchid, their son in tow? Some restitution had to happen in the next few minutes. Lix could not squander this last chance.

The city was not on his side, not on the side of courage and fine lines. The old millennium had only twenty minutes left to run, and everybody was anxious to reach the embankment sidewalk for the light and fireworks display. Revelers, dressed both for warmth and for ostentation, a comic combination, shared cannabis and wine with strangers. Whole families were holding hands in comfort chains lest anyone got swept away by the crowds. Old couples from the neighborhood, decked out in their best suits, last used for funerals, did their best despite their bones to be young and contemporary, yet had not dared to venture outside into these unruly streets without their good-luck pebbles in their pockets to frighten off misfortune. Perhaps the foreign math curmudgeons had been sensible to stay away from crowds. The multitude was hazardous. The Hives were one-way streets of pedestrians, too crowded for Lix to catch up with anyone. He simply had to fix his eye on Freda’s unmistakable hair and follow from a distance, separated from his son by a shuffling and unnegotiable throng.

He did not entirely lose sight of George and Freda and the cousin. He lost sight of his resolve. He found a place where he could stand on the embankment steps and watch the three of them from behind. At first, of course, he stared and stared at George’s hair and ears, waiting for the boy to turn his face and offer him a profile. Then, inevitably, he turned his attentions to Freda, seeing how she’d aged — not much — and whether being forty suited her. It did. She’d broadened slightly, and her hair was peppery. Otherwise she was still young and eye-catching, still dangerous, of course, but sexier than he remembered her. If he hadn’t made her pregnant, was it possible that they would still be together, he wondered. Fertility’s a curse. He could imagine taking off her clothes and lying underneath her on a bed while she pressed down onto his wrists and made him do as he was told.