Jim Crace - Genesis

Thank goodness for the fireworks and the midnight bells. 1/1/01. The first cascade of light exploded like a drum solo. Everybody’s chin went up. All the revelers, children to the core, let out a whoop a sigh a wow. Everybody smiled at once. That’s what we come to cities for.

Even Lix was animated now and happy in a complicated way. Whatever his personal turmoil, the turmoil of the old town was for the moment more insistent and exuberant. Being there amongst the crowd was more cheering than any Best View from a private balcony. No one bothered him. Nobody seemed to recognize his muffled face. Nobody asked for signatures. If anybody shook his hand, and many did, it was just the greeting of another wine-fueled celebrant who’d shake the devil’s hand and not care less. Goodwill to everyone for this New Year. A fine beginning. Not a curse. Lix would start the new millennium with an extra son. (An extra daughter, too.)

Then the oddest thing occurred, a piece of choreography, perfect and synchronous. Lix had dropped his chin an instant down from the fireworks just to check that his son George was seeming as happy as his father truly felt. But it was the cousin who turned her face to his and recognized that telltale birthmark on his cheek, and smiled the briefest, perfect smile again, as if she had expected him to be there, watching them. Perhaps this was the moment he truly fell in love with her, not in the lobby of the theater but underneath the cracking skies amongst the populace. Hers was a smile which promised that she’d let him stay undiscovered if that was what he wanted. She’d not embarrass him. She’d not say, “See who’s followed us.” It was a smile that blessed her face, that transformed her plainness into something more lasting than beauty.

And as he offered up a smile himself, secure that there would be no betrayal, he felt a pair of arms wrap around him from behind. A pair of stage-trained hands, with digging fingernails, a scent he recognized. A chest that couldn’t jiggle when it danced pressed against his back.

“I’ve caught you now,” she said. Here was an invitation for the second time that night to be An’s Devotee.

BOTH LIX AND AN understood at once that these were kisses for a lonely New Year’s Eve, a small gift for the coming century, and not the start of anything. So a visit home to her strange rooms or his high river-view apartment was not in the cards. This encounter would be short and desperate, a fireworks show. They’d not repeat themselves on other nights. They’d not refer to it before their next performance, when, no doubt, their kisses would once again be chaste onstage. The only wagging tongues would be the gossip columnists.

Once they had toured the trestle bars in Company Square and lowered inhibitions around the scorching braziers with shots of aquavit, they went back to the theater. Where else? They hammered on the Actors’ Gate, relieved to be a little drunk, until the night man came and tucked their proffered banknote in the pocket of his linen coat as routinely as somebody who must have done this very thing before, and, possibly, for An.

“I’m in my room if you want letting out,” he said. “You know your way about.”

Indeed, they knew their way about. They ran up to the Players’ Lounge, where there were chairs and couches, and some unfinished bottles of wine and piles of unlaundered costumes from that evening’s show. They pulled the curtains open so that the only light was coming from outside, from moon and stars and motorcars, and from the empty-office lights across the street.

“We have to do it in our clothes,” An said. She meant the costumes they wore each night, the clothes they acted in when they pretended love. “Let’s do it like we’d like to do it, in the play.”

“Onstage?”

She hadn’t thought of that herself. But, “Yes, onstage. In costume.”

They’d never truly kissed before, but now they truly kissed, onstage and in and out of character in their stage uniforms, with nothing but the borrowed light of corridors to break the darkness of the auditorium. Their tongues engaged. Alone at last — and ready to yield. An actor and an actress are most confident when they are not themselves and can inhabit places where the sound and light are trimmed and flattering, where there might always be applause, and where no matter what they do, no matter what their curses are, there’d be no price to pay, no consequences when the curtain falls, no child to bear and rear and feed forevermore, amen.

THERE WAS a message on his answering machine when Lix got home a little after one o’clock, already fearful of the big mistake he’d made that night, the big mistakes he’d made for forty years. The message was from Freda, not from An, as he had feared at first. She was being pleasant for a change, he thought. Her voice was light and genuine. He could hear her bangles shake. She wished him all the best for the millennium. She said how much she had responded to the play. And, by the way, oh yes, George was “prepared” to see his father on New Year’s Day, but he was shy and just a little angry and more than normally stressed by the prospect of making contact after all this time, as surely Lix could understand. So George would not go to the zoo with his two half brothers unaccompanied. He’d need a friendly face. So Freda’s cousin Mouetta had volunteered to “chaperone.”

“Good night, then, Comrade Felix Dern,” Freda said on the answering machine.

“It was a good night,” Lix replied out loud, standing at the window high above the loyal river while the tape played on through undeleted messages until it hit the high-pitched discord of a broken line.

6

SO NOW it is Mouetta’s turn. She’s had one hundred minutes in the city’s dampest cinema, hardly bothering to focus on the film, certainly not paying attention to the subtitles, to think about her pregnancy. She doesn’t much enjoy the cinema, to tell the truth. She’s only there for Lix. She’s been grateful for the darkness and the opportunity to rest. She’s waited for The End quite happily, but concentrated only on herself, her unexpected joy, her hands clasped in her lap where soon there’ll be no lap, she hopes. Her growing child will spill across her knees, expanding like warm dough. Her hands have formed and cupped the shape a hundred times. She’s let herself imagine it: she’ll never be alone, she’ll never be unloved.

It’s only in the last ten minutes of the film, and after the brief appearance of an actor colleague her husband says he met and shared a cognac with in Cannes twelve years ago, that finally he is relaxed enough to take her hand in his and rub her thumb with his. Her pregnant thumb, her hand that’s quick with child, does not respond to him. She’ll make him wait, like he has made her wait. Mouetta feels as if she has become untouchable, beyond her husband’s reach, but also untouchable in a grander sense, beyond mortality. A baby’s due in May.

It no longer bothers her that Lix has yet to speak. She understands his caginess. She’s used to it. She married it. Her husband’s feelings do not really matter anymore. His purpose has been served, she thinks. Biology has overtaken him. Now he can either be a swan and stay, or be a dog and run from this, his sixth and final child.

They are the last to leave the matinee. As usual, they’ve been the only ones to stay and watch the credits until the logo of the studio and the final bars of the sound track have given their permission to depart. Then Mouetta tucks her fingers under Lix’s arm — the married grip that’s far more comfortable than holding hands — and steers him into the street, past the box office manager who always loves to talk with him, past the taxi stand and the taxi touts. It has rained and stopped raining while they were in the cinema. The streets are glossy and greasy. The early evening air is washed and fresh. She wants to walk and build an appetite, Mouetta says.